Kropotkin was no crakcpot this was biologist Stephen Jay Gould in 1988, mostly on the basis that K. built on the work of Russian biologists in the arctic and the taiga where you don’t get much competitive darwinism on which anglosaxon scholars have been fixated, with conseguent social darwinism ideas being derived

I found it on Graeber’s intro to a new edition of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid

There I discovered Murray Bookchin, or maybe rediscovered? I had Post-scarcity Anarchism on some reading list, SF related, Bank’s Culture books I guess. What I did not know it is that he inspired the Rojava confedralism during the Syrian war.

From Gould: ” I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of thumb in judging arguments about nature that also have overt social implications (..) I see no evidence for Teilhard’s noosphere, for Capra’s California style of holism, for Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Gaia strikes me as a metaphor, not a mechanism. (Metaphors can be liberating and enlightening, but new scientific theories must supply new statements about causality. Gaia, to me, only seems to reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long achieved by classically reductionist arguments of biogeochemical cycling theory.)