'Undoing Darwin' by Dick Frost

I HAVE written “Ten thousand years of Tyranny” to examine beliefs about evolution which are leading humanity to disaster. My aim was to show why the future of humanity depends on anarchism; this meant confronting Darwin's theory of evolution and that led me to speculate on the origins of civilisation and sin, the myth of scarcity, social power and much more.

My arguments depend on a claim that the world is rich in resources due to the energy arriving every day from the sun, which is far greater than all earth's creatures need, plus the fact that all species adapt to live together in their chosen environments. Scarcity is a myth; affluence is normal.

Because resources are not scarce life is not constant struggle; it is rather constrained and/or ritual conflict as individuals play out their evolved patterns of behaviour according to their species nature within the limits which eco-systems and the world as a whole impose on them.

Individuals do not live at the extreme. Each seeks to survive and reproduce as much as it can but through systemic interactions they evolve viable compromises at levels below their capacity: each gets the best it can. Behaviour, including conflict, is finely ritualised, exemplified by the swallows which fly to South Africa every year and return to the barn in which they were born.

Eco-systems are self-regulating wholes which produce balance and stability out of the complex interactions of their components. Systems stability ensures reliable behaviour and controlled populations: nothing could evolve or survive if everything around were in a state of flux.

Nature is not red in tooth and claw. Individuals evolve to live within the opportunities and limits of their environments according to their species nature; they adapt to and are adapted by what they need. They take what they must have: if they are sheep , then grass; if lions, then gazelles. None kills for fun; they kill for food or to defend themselves, a territory or their group. Hunting is often brutal and the prey, cuddly. Some ways of life look dreadful to human beings in soft-hearted mode but it is evolved behaviour; it's never personal.

The dense interactivity of individual behaviour in eco-systems inhibits change. It often seems to me that the eco-system is the key determinant of both stability and change: communalism,rather than the individualism of the selfish gene, shapes evolution.

Evolution is driven by random genetic mutation and environmental pressure to which individuals respond. Genetic variation is constant but mostly harmful and quickly rejected. Viable variations lie dormant until environmental change makes them useful; then they are “naturally selected”. Most evolutionary change outside crises is gradual and minor but can make a huge difference over the millennia; in any case each step has to be minimally disruptive in order to be acceptable to an eco-system. A dramatic event such as a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, an asteroid hit, climatic disruption etc. will destroy eco-systems and many species; then niches open for major selection and speciation.

Free from the (imagined) risks arising from (imagined) scarcity, life is a confusion of individuals each capable of variation. Variations which survive and prosper are not “fittest”: they are fit enough. They seldom struggle but survive because they fit a changed environment and universal affluence ensures them the energy they need.

Affluence makes possible the amazing variety of life and explains the profusion of behaviour and characteristics which are far from “fit” and do not help a a species to survive: the panda's diet is clearly a problem; as are the extravagant plumage of birds of paradise, the obsessive fighting of males for a mate; the bower bird's gardening, the wren's excessive nest building, the puffer fish's sand sculpture.

Affluence is the dominant factor in evolution; in h sapiens culture is also important. H sapiens is a culturally variable social species with the freedom to modify its way of life. It developed cultures by evolution and in response to the different environments into which groups moved, confronting new climates, food resources,natural conditions, hostile animals etc.

Like all social animals it evolved behaviours essential to the integrity of groups - the social virtues. All social animals are peaceful and egalitarian within their groups. Living in affluence, they do not need economic hierarchy. H sapiens was “the first affluent society” according to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins because everything it needed was freely available in its environments – but that is the same with all social animals – probably all life.

Individuals were benign and “good” in the sense of behaving in ways which sustained the group, family or clan. The forms culture took satisfied the social virtues: conformity, tolerance of hierarchy, mutual aid and hostility to “the other”. H sapiens did not know sin.

This “state of nature” and freedom in affluence lasted for more than a million years (including h erectus)and ended in the Neolithic revolution (after c11,000BCE} when chiefs or some form of elite power destroyed community cohesion and imposed oppressive exploitation on, eventually, the whole world.

Elite power arose from some conjunction of wealth, population pressure,climate change, resource depletion, war, mental instability and chance and the sad fact that the social virtues function as well in oppressive as in free societies. We are genetically programmed to conform to the mores of the group we are born into. Elite power is a mutation which throws off the normal limits of the species and uses the strength and ability of millions to ludicrous ends.

The outcome is the tyranny of civilisation, all its wonders built on ten thousand years of blood, sweat, toil and the tears of the masses. All civilised societies are controlled by elite power; all property,abuse,exploitation and war are manifestations of power. Sin is inevitable.

The book tries to show that anarchism is the genetic social organisation of h sapiens and makes the case for a return to small,voluntary, egalitarian groups enjoying the affluence of the commons.

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BRING BACK KROPOTKIN!

by Christopher Draper

MANCHESTER’s People’s History Museum aims to depict all political strands that comprise Britain’s rich labour tradition but one aspect is notably absent. There’s more to politics than voting and the anti-Parliamentary ideas and artifacts of the hugely influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) have been exiled to the museum’s storeroom. 

When the institution opened in London in 1975 Kropotkin’s desk and chair were prominently displayed and visitors learnt from attached brass plaques that they’d previously belonged to radical campaigner Richard Cobden but when the collection moved to Manchester these exhibits were curiously removed.  Curiously because Cobden is strongly associated with Manchester, where he founded the 'Anti Corn Law League', was MP for Stockport then for Rochdale, lived for years at nearby 19, Quay Street, has a statue erected to his memory in St Anne’s Square and a bust on view in the Town Hall.  As activists have successfully campaigned for blue plaques memorialising Kropotkin’s former homes in Bromley and Brighton, so now with the approaching centenary of his death on 8th, February 1921, what better time to restore these key exhibits to public view?

                                  WHOSE HERITAGE?

'HERITAGE' in Britain generally promotes a ruling class perspective with stately homes, art galleries and statues of the “Great and Good” predominant.  Since the 1893 foundation of the Independent Labour Party Britain’s official labour movement directed most its time, money and energy into getting Labour governments elected and few resources were spared for independent working class education and preserving, recording and presenting the artifacts and history of workers’ struggles.

To secure adequate resources the Manchester museum treads a perilous path between faithfully recording campaigns for freedom and equality whilst not upsetting establishment sources of funding. From its roots in the labour movement the museum has over the years moved into the heritage industry, successfully widening its popular appeal and funding-base but along the way it’s quietly succumbed to 'ideological cleansing', gently edging anarchism out of the picture in order to
represent Parliamentary power as the ultimate goal of past struggles. 

There’s no denying that Parliamentary politics dominate the labour movement but revolutionary ideas and movements were and remain a vital thread in the tapestry.  There’s more to labour history than campaigns for the franchise and it’s essential that displays also reflect the continuing battle for ideas within the movement.  With the Cobden connection and the fast approaching centenary (Feb 2021), it’s time Kropotkin’s artifacts along with an explanation of anarchism’s political significance were restored to the museum’s public galleries.

                Slippery Slope from Limehouse to Manchester

THE collection was begun in the 1960’s by enthusiastic members of the 'Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society' who eventually secured exhibition space at Limehouse Town Hall.  The museum’s moving spirit and founding curator was Harold Fry who’d started work in a brush factory at the tender age of eleven before campaigning for years to persuade the Labour movement to value its own history, 'because it is not yet history conscious.  The movement must know where it has been to know where it is going… we want to educate the public, to balance the history of the ruling classes, which they are taught, with the people’s history'.

On 19th Monday 1975 Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opened the 'National Museum of Labour History', accompanied by Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Hugh Scanlon and Clive Jenkins, and in an ominous gesture of vacuous popularism donated his pipe for exhibition, 'but not the famous clogs in which he is said in some speeches to have trudged as a ragged urchin to Milnsbridge Council School' (Clement Attlee’s pipe is on reverent display in the current museum). 

The museum remained in Limehouse until 1985 when it was promised a new, larger home at the
redundant Mile End Baths. In the course of conversion it was discovered that the baths was contaminated with asbestos and on so the collection was packed away and remained in storage until a funding offer was made by Greater Manchester authorities.  A new trust was formed and in 1990 the collection went on display again, initially occupying part of the old 'Manchester Mechanics Institute' in Princess Street, in 1868 the first meeting place of the Trade Union Congress. In 1994 the collection moved into its present home in a beautifully restored hydraulic pumping station on the banks of Manchester’s river Irwell.

Still officially registered as the 'National Museum of Labour History' on moving north the institution re-opened under the new, establishment-friendly title of the 'People’s History Museum'.  In an apparently continuing quest for ever greater de-politicisation and vacuity, the collection now bills itself as the 'National Museum of Democracy'.  If this trend continues perhaps Clement Attlee’s pipe will soon be confined to storage lest it be viewed as an incitement to revolution!

                                      The Anarchist Prince

IRONICALLY, throughout the three decades Kropotkin lived in England he was welcomed rather than feared by 'civilised society'.  As an internationally respected geographer and scientist as well as an acknowledged, if alienated, member of Russia’s aristocracy his ideas and activities were even sympathetically reported by the London Times.  'Mutual Aid', Kropotkin’s classic rejoinder to T. H. Huxley’s interpretation of the social consequences of Darwinism will forever serve as eloquent testimony to the cooperative impulse that underlies anarchism and indeed all progressive politics.
Sadly for Kropotkin’s last years in England he alienated former anarchist comrades by supporting the war against Germany but retained friendships with local members of the Brighton labour movement. When he departed for Russia in 1917 he took with him seventy tea chests of books and papers but presented his desk to Brighton Trades Council (who subsequently donated it to the museum). 

This episode in itself  offers any museum worth its salt an ideal opportunity to pose important questions of political loyalty to interested visitors.  Finally returning to Russia on 12th June 1917 Kropotkin’s support for the revolution but opposition to the Bolsheviks might similarly raise critical questions in the mind of anyone viewing Kropotkin exhibits, and reading interpretive boards about his life.  
       
                        - 'Labour History Museum'  –  
             - Lively Debating Chamber or Necropolis? -

Despite my reservations about the some of the innovations, the museum’s administrators have worked wonders keeping the collection together, conserving the artefacts, providing imaginative attractive displays and continuing to offer free admission.   Everyone involved deserves to be heartily congratulated.  This year (2019) the “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair” returned to the museum increasing the impetus to restore anarchist content to the galleries.  'People’s History' isn’t a
lost world of clog dancing,  Hovis adverts and chimney sweeps, it should stimulate political questions about the past, present and future.  It is a vital debate that recognises Parliament may be a political preoccupation for many but it’s not the realisation of labour’s 'New Jerusalem'.  The return to public view of Kropotkin’s furniture won’t change the world or frighten the horses but it might stimulate debate and attract the interest of a younger generation turned off by traditional politics. 

Why not visit the museum yourself, hand in a card (or email - Katy.Ashton@phm.org.uk) requesting the return of Kropotkin’s desk before the 8th, February 2021 centenary of his death?  Refusing to vote isn’t anarchy in action if you do nothing to promote positive alternatives - Stand up for Kropotkin’s chair!

                                                                                                       Christopher Draper (Dec 2019)

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