Anarchist Law - Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid

The principle of mutual aid, originally identified by Peter Kropotkin as arising from natural law, is that since evolution occurs in groups - not individuals - it is evolutionarily advantageous for members of a community to assist each other. The anarchist approach to building power - and structuring power relationships - is derived from this evolutionary and biological imperative. In a nutshell the argument is that since individuals require the assistance of groups to self-actualize, individuals have a strong self-interest in the good of the community to which they belong. It follows that (freely associating) collectives of individuals working for mutual improvement and mutual goals must form the basis of any anarchist society, thus providing the sociological and economic imperative for the creation of social contracts capable of binding these self-selecting groups together.

In a pre-revolutionary situation, the principle of 'mutual aid' is the moral imperative that drives efforts by contemporary anarchists to provide material aid to victims of natural disasters; those that are homeless or poor, and others who have been left without access to food or clean drinking water, or other basic necessities.