Scientific revolutions never stay locked inside the laboratory; they always end up shaping the cultural and political landscape of their time. The Copernican turn, for instance, introduced the concept of “revolution” into political language, while in the early 20th century, quantum physics was interpreted through spiritualist and anti-determinist lenses.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) was not immune to this tendency to manipulate science for ideological ends. Now universally accepted, natural selection explains how the environment filters adaptive traits gradually. However, in the late 19th century, Herbert Spencer and other ideologues distorted this concept to create “Social Darwinism.” Its premise was cruelly simple: society functions like a jungle; the strong prosper and the weak perish. This vision served as the ethical scaffolding to justify “savage” capitalism and imperialism as “natural” processes.
Against this distortion rose the figure of Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), a Prince of the Rurik dynasty, a geographer and naturalist who understood that the economy is not an immutable biological system, but a cultural construction. During his expeditions in the Siberian steppes, Kropotkin observed something that contradicted Spencer’s competitive narrative: under extreme conditions, the species that survive are not necessarily the most aggressive, but the most collaborative. In fact, modern biology has proven Kropotkin right.
In his seminal work, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” (1902), Kropotkin refuted the capitalist interpretation of evolution. He proposed that, alongside competition, there is an equally powerful driving mechanism: cooperation. From ants and bees to migratory birds and primitive human societies, evolutionary success has depended on reciprocal aid. For Kropotkin, solidarity was not a moral invention of religion or a whim of idealism, but a real biological factor.
This conviction led him to a triple historical challenge. First, he challenged the orthodoxy of his time by demonstrating that ethics and mutual aid have evolutionary roots. Second, his anarchist commitment pitted him against the authoritarian drift of the Russian Revolution. Although he initially welcomed the fall of Tsarism, Kropotkin soon clashed with Lenin. The letters and interviews between the aging scientist and the Bolshevik leader reveal an unbridgeable divide: Kropotkin advocated for a socialism based on cooperatives and free unions (from the bottom up), while Lenin imposed a party dictatorship and state capitalism (from the top down). Finally, although his commitment to cooperativism and the defense of workers’ rights brought Kropotkin close to Pope Leo XIII (and his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum), their differences regarding the role of the state, hierarchy, and private property set them apart.
Today, Kropotkin’s lesson takes on an unexpected relevance in Bolivia, where “mutual aid” already exists: not only in traditional forms such as the ayllus, cooperatives (in their original sense), and neighborhood councils, but even in the academic world. The successful “evolution” of the UMSA Atmospheric Physics Laboratory over the last 30 years is mainly due to “horizontal cooperation” with other international prestigious laboratories, for mutual benefit.
In short, it is not a matter of expecting everything from the State nor of plunging into the void of extreme individual competition, but rather of reclaiming cooperation in all spheres. Finding that balance, based on the evidence of our own cooperative nature, is perhaps the only way to avoid risky political adventures and build a true common good.