This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. We discuss here the discovery, the different understandings and their political meanings of the symbiosis phenomenon through times.

Under Carl von Linné and up until the 19th century, certain so-called lower animal species were still placed in a special category called “zoophytes” (etymologically, animal-plants). In his 1802 classification, Gottfried Treviranus distinguished two classes: the Zoophyta class, including corals, jellyfish, sea anemones, hydras, sea urchins and starfish; and the Phytozoa class for “plant-animals”, including fungi, lichens, moss, ferns and water plants, filamentous algae and fucus, and so on. Things gradually evolved in the 19th century. Christian Ehrenberg coined the word bacterium in 1838 [1], examined euglena, diatoms, radiolarians and identified corals. Henri Lacaze-Duthiers studied corals in Algeria and published a “natural history” of them in 1864 [2]. In 1865, Addison Verrill created the phylum of cnidarians (corals, anemones, jellyfish, etc). In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed the kingdom of protists to categorize unclassifiable species with both animal and plant characteristics.

The description of these species already hinted at animal-plant symbiotic relationships, but it was the study of the dual fungus-algae nature of lichen [3] that really opened up new perspectives and established the vocabulary [4]. Several biologists went on to describe lichen: Heinrich Anton de Bary from the University of Halle in Germany, the Swiss Simon Schwendener [5], and the Russians Andrei Famintsyn and Ósip Baranetsky, who in 1867 succeeded in cultivating algae outside the thallus, or body, of the lichen [6]. But the relationship was initially understood in terms of parasitism, notably for Schwendener, for whom the fungus was a parasite of the algae and the lichen association “a community between a master fungus and a colony of slave algae that the fungus holds in perpetual captivity, in order to provide it with food” [7]. The notion was challenged, however, by De Bary, Famintsyn and Baranetsky, as well as by the Belgian zoologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, who in 1875 referred to other interspecific relationships as “commensalism” and “mutualism”: “The commensal does not live at the expense of its host in the sense that this dependence would create an unfavorable situation for the host, a diminution of its life, but it depends on it all the same to keep itself alive.” [8] The commensal “is received at his neighbor’s table” [9].

In 1877, Karl Möbius published in Berlin Die Austern und die Austernwirtschaft (The oyster and its industry), in which he introduced the term “biocenosis” in order to “account for all species living in the same environment” [10]. That same year, Albert-Bernhardt Frank, another lichen specialist from the University of Leipzig, proposed the word “symbiotismus” to move away from analysis centered on parasitism, which carried an anthropocentric bias: “Wherever there is a common internal or external habitat between two separate species, we need a broader term; whatever role the two partners play, we still don’t take it into account. In any case, we will base our observation on them simply ‘living together’, and this is why we can recommend designating these cases under the term symbiotismus.” [11] Finally in 1878, following Franck and in a now-famous presentation, De Bary proposed the general word “symbiosis” to describe different organisms living together [12]. As epistemologist Olivier Perru points out, “in defining symbiosis, the aim is neither to privilege mutualism nor to emphasize antagonism. Furthermore, unity aims for a common economy, which does not necessarily mean mutual benefit” [13].

Consociation

It’s interesting to note that the use of the term symbiotic in the organization of social relations predates its use in the field of biology. Indeed, as Frédéric Lordon remarked in 2015 in his Imperium, Structures et affects des corps politiques [14], “symbiotic” appears as early as the 17th century in the work of jurist and political philosopher Johannes Althusius. As Lordon points out, Althusius is often mentioned as a precursor of confederalism or libertarian anarchism. In his Politica methodice digesta et exemplis sacris et profanis illustrata, published in 1603, this Calvinist trained in civil and ecclesiastical law in Basel considers that “before being subjects of any sovereign, individuals are ‘symbiotes’”. Lordon stresses that “it is the immanence of their common life that must be the starting point of all political thought,” referring us to works written a decade ago by Gaëlle Demelemestre, which helped disseminate Althusius’s thoughts in France [15]. In the first paragraph of his Politica, Althusius writes: “Politics is the art of establishing, cultivating and preserving among men the social life that must unite them. This is called symbiotics. The subject of politics is thus consociation [16], by intentional or tacit pact, by which symbionts reciprocally bind each other to the mutual communication of things that are useful and necessary for participating in social life. The objective of the symbiotic policy developed by mankind is sacred, just, appropriate and happy symbiosis, ensuring that nothing necessary or useful to life is missing.” [17]

Note that Althusius’s Politica methodice digesta was published 40 years before British philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive (On the Citizen), which introduces the notion of bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all), based on the age-old motto of homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man [18]. So it seems that it was Hobbes’s image of man as inherently violent in his natural state, an individualist with an insatiable desire for power, that endured right up to the 19th century. This image informed the poet Lord Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw” [19], as well as Herbert Spencer’s [20] and Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”. Hobbes repeatedly proclaimed that he was the first to establish – with Leviathan in particular – an authentic and scientifically founded doctrine of human affairs, the first to make a science of morality and politics. We prefer Althusius, who before Hobbes described the human being as a “civil animal ardently aspiring to association”. For Althusius, symbiosis (living together) implies more than mere common existence; it “indicates a quality of mutual sharing and communication” [21] without which society is not possible.

Stencil of Lynn Margulis. With her endosymiotic theory of evolution, Margulis opposed competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species.

From symbiosis to mutual aid

The expression “survival of the fittest” was first introduced by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology published in 1864, five years after Darwin’s Origin of Species. A rare best-selling author of his time, Spencer significantly contributed to developing a social Darwinism that paved the way for scientific racism. This reading of Darwinism had already been roundly mocked by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But in the late 1870s, when symbiosis theories were emerging, anarchist authors were keen to nurture a perspective of mutual aid between living beings to counter the conservative appropriation of Darwin’s theses. Such was the case of Elisée Reclus in Geneva, with his article “Evolution and Revolution” in Piotr Kropotkin’s journal Le Révolté in 1880, and of Emile Gautier with his pamphlet Social Darwinism [22], published in Paris the same year. For Gautier, the permanent “struggle for life” implied by the “law of natural selection” becomes less intense as social institutions develop. Mutual assistance and social solidarity are the motors of human progress, and constitute the true content of “social Darwinism”, much more than the struggle and victory of the “fittest”. In 1883, Gautier was sentenced to five years of prison alongside Kropotkin and others in the famous trial of the 66 anarchists in Lyon.

After being released from prison in 1886, Kropotkin went to Edinburgh to meet the biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes – a close associate of Reclus and specialized in marine animal-algae symbioses, Roscoff worms, anemones and sea hydras, which he had studied under Lacaze-Duthiers. Geddes believed that natural selection was not the primary force of evolution, the result of survival of the fittest, but rather a brake on evolutionary tendencies, the pruning tool that enabled a better development of the plant or organism; he considered cooperation to be more important for the evolution of all life forms and saw the Earth as a cooperative planet [23]. Geddes inspired Kropotkin to write “Mutual aid among animals”, the first in a series of articles originally published between 1890 and 1896 in the British periodical The Nineteenth Century, exploring the role of cooperation and mutual aid in the animal kingdom and in human...