Mutual Aid. Pablo Servigne

of course, on what we mean by sociology. And also by biology, and by economic science, philosophy, and so on. As the reader will soon realize, by bringing to light ‘another law of the jungle’, not the struggle for life or the law of the strongest, but (in addition to, or more powerful than, these phenomena) the law of cooperation and mutual aid, Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle are transgressing many of the established boundaries between scientific disciplines – boundaries that all too often bristle with barricades and barbed wire. And they are paving the way for general, synthesizing ideas that had prematurely been deemed impossible, even undesirable. Their ambition is great. It involves nothing less than understanding how human beings cooperate in the same way as other living organisms. On this subject, write our authors in the notes to the Introduction, ‘For years, the results, assumptions and theories of each discipline remained contradictory. No overall picture emerged. There were too many gaps between the disciplines, and each continued its work while ignoring the others. It is only very recently that tremendous progress has made it possible to propose a comprehensive structure for this “other law of the jungle”.’

It is this ‘tremendous progress’ that they are sharing with us. Before attempting to specify in a few words how this progress matters to us, I would like to underline the fluidity and pedagogical mastery with which our authors convey us into an infinitely complex universe that they make easily accessible. Among many other examples, one might mention the passage where they explain the formation of a coral reef in terms of a recipe (see below, pp. 147–8). For those, like me, who are not particularly passionate about viruses, bacteria, archaea, cyanobacteria or other dinoflagellate bacteria, we could sum it all up with these beautiful words from Victor Hugo, quoted as an epigraph to this book: ‘Nothing is solitary, everything is solidary.’ From viruses and bacteria to the largest and most complex human societies, Mutual Aid – whose title is borrowed from the anarchist prince Kropotkin and pays homage to him – describes, on every interrelated level of life, all possible interweavings of struggle and rivalry, on the one hand, and of cooperation, mutual aid and reciprocity (direct, indirect or reinforced), on the other, whether between organisms of the same species or of different species. Depending on whether it is cooperation or struggle that predominates, we get one of the following six forms of relationship: symbiosis (or mutualism), coexistence, commensalism, amensalism, predation (parasitism) or competition. From this vast synthesis, the essential lesson that emerges, unlike that of all more simplistic Darwinisms (which Darwin himself did not share), is that in terms of evolution the key to success is not the struggle for life, but rather mutual aid.

      Or, to put it more precisely, in the words of two theoretical biologists of evolution, David S. and Edward O. Wilson (oh yes! Edward Wilson, the inventor of sociobiology, who, as we shall see, has radically reversed his initial position, to the dismay of his followers and disciples): ‘Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.’¹ And, in the order of living beings, from bacterial societies to human societies, cooperation is hierarchically superior to competition.

This discovery, here meticulously argued and documented, constitutes an essential contribution, one that is simultaneously theoretical, ethical and political, as these levels are always closely intertwined. Where have we got to, actually? In the social sciences – in economics, of course, but also in sociology and in moral and political philosophy – the dogma that has dominated since the 1970s and 1980s is that, in social life, everything (actions, norms, institutions, beliefs, etc.) is explained by the interplay of conflicting interests, conscious or unconscious. This is the same belief that has dominated in biology – in sociobiology in its earliest guise, and in the theory of the selfish gene. This is what I call the axiomatics of interest, or utilitarianism.²

      This hegemonic belief lies at the heart of neoliberalism. It was established even before rentier and speculative capitalism began to triumph on a planetary scale, and it has allowed this capitalism to flourish. In fact, the two things are inseparable. If we are to affirm that the only effective and therefore desirable mode of cooperation between humans is the market, we have to convince ourselves and as many other people as possible that we are nothing more than Homo œconomicus, ‘mutually disinterested’, as the star philosopher of the late twentieth century, John Rawls, put it.³ It then becomes easy to take the next step: if the only thing that drives us is our personal interest, and if the first or ultimate form of this self-interest is the lure of monetary gain, everyone is free to try to enrich themselves by all possible means, as fast as possible. There must be no more barriers to check the continued expansion of financial speculation, even at the risk of an inexorable rise in corruption and even crime.

After the work of Matthieu Ricard and Jacques Lecomte, which had opened a first breach in this dogma, Mutual Aid comes at just the right time to help us deconstruct this hegemonic belief. In the field of social sciences, there were only a few of us, in MAUSS,⁴ who opposed it over the past thirty years or so, and pleaded for a general social science not based on the utilitarian axiomatics of interest but on the discovery of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his famous work The Gift:⁵ the discovery that, at the heart of the social relationship, we do not find markets, contracts or exchange, but what he calls the triple obligation to give, to receive and to give back – or, if you prefer, the law of reciprocity. What a breakthrough it is to discover with Servigne and Chapelle that, mutatis mutandis, this law does not only concern the human world, but all living beings! Everything they tell us fits perfectly into the ‘gift paradigm’ that has gradually been developed within the framework of La Revue du MAUSS.

      It is not difficult to deduce the ethical and political implications of this. Nothing is more urgent now than to fight excess, hubris, the thirst for omnipotence fuelled by neoliberalism that is leading humankind to its demise. So far, one of the main reasons for our inability to emerge from planetary neoliberalism has been a certain lack of theoretical resources. But it is also the lack of a political philosophy in the broad sense, one that would allow us to transcend the great ideologies of modernity: liberalism, socialism, anarchism and communism. It is this doctrine that is being developed by those world-famous authors who recognize themselves under the banner of convivialism.⁶ Servigne (who is one of these authors) and Chapelle have made a decisive contribution to this. A great example of mutual aid.

      Alain Caillé

      Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Paris

      Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, editor of the Revue du MAUSS and founder of the convivialist movement

Notes

      1 1. D. S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, ‘Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 2007, pp. 327–48 (p. 345).

      2 2. This is the matrix of economism: that is, the belief that only economics matters. Since the 2000s, in social science, the fashion has swung towards a general deconstructionism. This involves showing that all existing norms and institutions have been constructed historically, and are thus not in the least natural, but arbitrary. Hence it is tempting to conclude that we could, or even should, deconstruct them. It would not be difficult to prove that this theoretical posture represents the ultimate avatar of a general economism.

      3 3. In A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Rawls did indeed write ‘mutually disinterested’, but this is not the same as ‘interested only in themselves’; the French translation cited by Caillé reads ‘mutuellement indifférents’, which has a slightly more selfish feel, explaining why Rawls is here being seen as more of a neoliberal than he actually was. (Translator’s note.)

      4 4. For MAUSS, see below, Introduction, p. 6 and n. 3. See also www.revuedumauss.com and www.journaldumauss.net.

      5 5. M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison (London: Routledge, 1990).

      6 6. The Convivialist Manifesto (www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/global-dialogues/convivialist-manifesto-a-declaration-of-interdependence),