The pet I’ll never forget: Gema, the mutual-aid dog

Over a century ago, the Russian anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) challenged Charles Darwin’s emphasis on the centrality of competition in the “struggle for existence,” which Darwin defined as natural selection. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin defies this Victorian biologist’s ideas, which gave rise to a social Darwinism that naturalized strife, individual gain, and common ruin. Famously, the Russian scientist argued instead that cooperation is equally, if not more, important than competition in “the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.”

In his study, Kropotkin writes that “[a]ssociation and mutual aid are the rule with mammals.” With regard to “the great tribe of the dogs,” he identifies it as “eminently sociable,” and praises canine collectivity in terms of hunting and self-defense. Indeed, this insight anticipates the “canine cooperation hypothesis,” which explains the close ties between dogs and humans as being based on pre-existing cooperation within wolf packs. In parallel, the sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, in Ministry for the Future (2021), asserts that “[w]e turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans.” Such a possibility emerged, on his account, because the canines taught early humans about friendship and cooperation, just as we domesticated them in turn.

In this sense, my experience with Gema, a boxer-lab mix adopted as a rescue puppy by my sister and mother, provides a tender affirmation of Kropotkin’s sense regarding the centrality of “Mutual Aid and Mutual Support” in our lives. Gema was a very sweet companion animal who provided a lot of love to our family and her fellow rescue dog, Rumi. She lived with my mom, who would graciously and surreptitiously bring her to stay with me at my apartment after especially hard days at work—even if this was against the rules. I vividly recall how, one afternoon, as I was visiting with and petting Gema, her happiness was testament to my mother’s spontaneous exclamation: “Life is so beautiful!”

Gema herself not only provided and needed mutual aid, but also, her care uncovered it. When my mom traveled for holiday, particularly to visit my sister, I would come take care of her and Rumi. Besides taking our daily (or twice-daily) walks, we would all cuddle together on the couch while I read some book or another. Once, when Gema was still quite young and energetic, at a time when my sister and I were away, my mom became ill and could not properly care for her. As a result, she asked my good friend Liz to take care of Gema temporarily, and Liz accepted her without hesitation—despite Gema’s mischievous and hyperactive nature then.

Overall, these are my two favorite memories of Gema: first, of the trip that she, my mom, Liz, her dog Lucy, and I took to Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July, 2017; and second, of the picnic that she, my mom, and I had in Griffith Park for my birthday in 2022. This beach trip, which celebrated independence and interdependence, was a lot of fun, as we humans and dogs spent hours swimming and playing in the waves. At Griffith Park (see image above), we hiked until we found a proper grove to eat our falafel, hummus, and tabbouleh in. Of course, as part of this idyll, we undoubtedly shared some of our food with Gema.

Even toward the end of her life, Gema continued to be an exceptionally loving dog. Strikingly, in February 2023, the same day of the book launch for my Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography, she was in especially high spirits. In the hours before the event, as I made final preparations, Gema was even closer to me than usual, making clear her joy through body language. It was almost like she knew about the book launch, and was proud of it! Plus, about ten days before she passed away, when I was house-sitting for my mom and caring for her and Rumi, I had a bit of a stomach ache in bed late at night. Having somehow sensed this using her canine faculties, she immediately offered her body heat to help. Despite her advanced age and widespread arthritis, Gema literally jumped to my side in the dark! My discomfort quickly subsided.

Ultimately, I feel very grateful for having had the chance to get to know and live with Gema. Her last days in the veterinary hospital were heartbreaking. Yet, even while she was there, struggling to survive, we connected both through touch, as through her lovely, blinking eyes. Now, I know that this mutual gaze—which likely has played an important role in canine-human co-evolution—activated oxytocin (the “love hormone”) in us both, despite the sad circumstances.

In this sense, I sympathize with Poppy Noor, who writes: “My dog taught me just how much love I have to give, and that’s a pretty spectacular thing.” I agree: dogs and humans cooperating and loving each other exemplifies mutual aid, a practice which, as Kropotkin describes, “grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life.” In this vein, I’m so thankful for Gema, my mutual-aid dog!

Counterpunch repost: “U.S. Wars and the Climate Crisis” by Rob Urie

“Capitalist ‘reformers’ and global warming skeptics both depend on limiting the scope of available evidence to eternally debatable climate ‘science.’ What isn’t debatable is the cumulative environmental impact of capitalist production more broadly considered. Illustrated above by the black dots are the oceanic ‘dead zones’ surrounding the older industrial capitalist nations. Simply put, industrial capitalism has used rivers, streams and oceans as industrial toilets in the same way it has used the atmosphere. Climate change is but one aspect of already existing environmental catastrophe. Given the integrated nature of the biosphere environmental resolution must likewise be integrated. Source: Scientific American.” (from Rob Urie, “Hank Paulson Does Global Warming,” Counterpunch, 30 June 2014)

Note: the following are selections from Rob Urie’s latest piece, “U.S. Wars and the Climate Crisis,” published on Counterpunch, 26 September 2014

“Such now is the place of the early twenty-first century U.S. with systemically generated polices accumulating toward self-inflicted Armageddon and threatening to take the rest of the world with it. In the same week that saw renewed war for oil in Iraq and Syria it was reported that the Obama administration is rebuilding the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. In this same week that saw the largest climate resolution demonstration in history a series of dim shills for empire, a/k/a ‘leaders,’ went before the United Nations to offer the statistics of misdirection, ten times more than, thirty percent less than, that in context confirm the truism that something times nothing is nothing […].

With his recent misdirection on renewed war against Iraq and Syria and climate crisis the precise question of whether or not U.S. President Barack Obama is the most cynical person who ever lived remains irrelevant. The social ontology that suggested difference, as well as the words of the man himself, back into his fact as President of American empire. His assertion that IS (Islamic State) and Khorasans represent a direct threat to Americans places it in the set of all direct threats to Americans that has around 300,000 thousand dying every year from preventable medical errors. Climate crisis poses greater risks than any Mr. Obama will ever factually address. And his duplicity in undermining climate ‘negotiations’ in 2010 and 2014 while publicly proclaiming support is now a matter of public record.

Remarkably, or perhaps not so much, the Western commenting class is content with technocratic discourse on military tactics and ‘sectarian’ divisions in Iraq and Syria playing into the diversion that U.S. and ‘coalition’ actions have ‘political,’ as opposed to economic, basis. This isn’t to dismiss political consequences, but they are borne of economic motivations — the unifying theme between wars in the Middle East and climate crisis is oil. The U.S. is bombing oil fields ‘held’ by IS in Syria under the rationale that oil is the ‘currency’ it is funding itself with. Oil, munitions and credit default swaps are the currency the U.S. funds itself with.

Matters that are ‘externally’ related like wars for economic resources and climate crisis risk confusing ‘the issues’ that respective ‘experts’ find unsatisfying in their combined dimension. But discursive silos make addressing joint causes of global catastrophe in imperial capitalism impossible. The true threat that IS poses is in exposing oil as the currency of empire. Oil ties to political power through its economic power and it ties to military power through its fact as fuel for the machinery of war. Climate chaos, along with a century or more of slaughter and destruction for oil, is the concentrated product of empire […].

[T]he oceanic dead zones that surround capitalist economies are their own fact and metaphor for the Western creation of land-based dead zones through wars of conquest and slaughter for economic resources. Petroleum-based agricultural run-off and the dumping of massive quantities of consumer and industrial garbage create these oceanic dead zones. The misdirection of lip-service paid to greenhouse gas emissions while ignoring the other detritus of consumer and industrial ‘culture’ is to reframe global catastrophe as technocratic wrangling over ‘parts per million’ when the problem is political economy of death and destruction. Source: National Geographic.

The American tendency of personalizing the political leads to permanent misdiagnosis of the genesis of Western political dysfunction. Attributing Barack Obama’s pro-war, pro-Wall Street, anti-environmental policies to the man himself is to get it backwards. These policies serve his constituency. This constituency — Wall Street, arms manufacturers and extractive industries, determine the policies. Mr. Obama has his job as President through his ability to keep his nominal constituency of liberals and progressives on board with policies of permanent war, use of state power to deliver ever more economic resources to the already wealthy and end-times environmental policies. So will the political mis-leadership that follows him no matter their political Party.

What President Barack Obama’s actual policies have demonstrated — drone murders, surveillance and repression, persistent economic chicanery in favor of the already wealthy, war wherever the U.S. can find it and undermining all efforts at environmental reconciliation, is that the political space he occupies, the moderate center, is the true radical fringe when viewed through the lens of the continued existence of a ‘world’ that includes the rest of us. Rebuilding the largest nuclear arsenal in the world in 2014 is insane. There exists no conceivable explanation — bluff, taunt, economic stimulus, etc. that could frame the decision as the product of anything but a radically deranged system run amok, a genocide-suicide machine running on auto-pilot […].

If / when it comes, resolution in any of these dimensions will be brought about through acts against the corporatist moderates in Washington, London and Brussels, against Wall Street, the arms manufacturers and the extractive industries. Until these are gotten out of the way there is no hope for resolution. Divestment will not be effective — there are infinite sources of funding for industries that can turn guaranteed profits and even for those that can’t. Fracking is a financing and trading scam — the actual gas taken out of the ground doesn’t even pay for itself in the aggregate. Cap-and-trade requires a developed infrastructure of regulations; inspectors and global coordination that will never come into being because the economic interests being ‘regulated’ are the same ones developing these policies […].

The governments of the West are currently pulling out all of the stops to frighten people into supporting yet another war for oil resources in the Middle East. The threat of ‘terrorism’ is a cynical diversion and nothing more. Thirteen years after the attacks of September 11, 2001relevant portions of the investigation report laying blame on Saudi Arabia for the attacks remain redacted. Terrorism in the Middle East is state sponsored misdirection. True terror is having children that you cannot feed because bankers destroyed the economy. True terror is having fracking companies destroy your farm’s water supply and having no alternate source. True terror is having global warming raise sea levels to bury the island where you and everyone you know live. True terror is having a U.S. ‘humanitarian intervention’ bomb your village / town / city / country into the Stone Age to make way for a new pipeline.

The American Empire is in the death throes of decline. The powers that be are increasingly desperate and this makes them increasingly dangerous. Fracking, nuclear weapons, bombing Afghan wedding parties and banker scams is all that this leadership knows how to do. Resolution within Western political economy is decades past possible. People can divert themselves with incremental reform but consider this: the ‘evolution, not revolution’ crowd now has about four decades of devolution to answer for. Nuclear weapons? In 2014? Really? Really?