Mutualist History

[thelastindividual]

Can anyone give me some good historical examples of mutualism in practice? Or at least something that comes close?

[shawnpwilbur]

Insurance. The colonial land banks. Josiah Warren's various experiments. Proudhon's Bank of the People provides an interesting model, although the project was interrupted by his arrest. The thing to remember is that mutualism is really a general philosophy, so any instances of mutual institutions that allow people to route around "unearned increase" and carry their own costs qualify.

Check out the "Colonial Currency Reprints" (links at the bottom of the page), my post on "Digital Editions of Josiah Warren", and "Proudhon's Solution of the Social Problem" for source material.

[patrickhenry]

Can anyone give me some good historical examples of mutualism in practice? Or at least something that comes close?

Most co-ops and credit unions would be considered part of mutualism as carson points out.

A.1.3. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUTUALISM AND THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT?

There isn't much of a difference. Co-ops are a specific form of mutualism. Look at it this way, mutualism is a set of general principles and the co-ops are one of the practical forms that these principles have taken. Historically, the practical forms were developed by the working class before the general principles were propounded by political philosophers. The problem today is the loss of consciousness of cooperatives as the embodiment of a form of mutualist practice

[shawnpwilbur]

Can anyone give me some good historical examples of mutualism in practice? Or at least something that comes close?

Most co-ops and credit unions would be considered part of mutualism as carson points out.

Yeah. There were some interesting old debates between Warren and the cooperators, where Warren criticizes the low-level capitalism of the coops. The time store, which played no games with profits and dividends, is an example of a more "doctrinaire" mutualism, where the principle of carrying costs is observed at every step.

[patrickhenry]

The time store, which played no games with profits and dividends, is an example of a more "doctrinaire" mutualism, where the principle of carrying costs is observed at every step

I imagine this being the ideal we aspire to.

[Noleaders]

Mondragon seems pretty similar to what we have in mind.

The Mondragon worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Northern Spain provide one of the best examples of worker cooperatives in the world today. The first industrial cooperative of the movement was established in 1956 in the town of Mondragon. Today, it is a complex of around 100 industrial cooperatives with more than 20,000 members which includes the largest producers of consumer durables (stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines) in Spain and a broad of array of cooperatives producing computerized machine tools, electronic components, and other high technology products. The cooperatives grew out of a technical school started by a Basque priest, Father Jose Arizmendi. Today, the school is a Polytechnical College which awards engineering degrees.
The financial center of the Mondragon movement is the Caja Laboral Popular (CLP), the Bank of the People’s Labor. It is a cooperative bank with 180 branch offices in the Basque region of Spain. The worker cooperatives, instead of the individual depositors, are the members of the Caja Laboral Popular. The bank built up a unique Entrepreneurial Division with several hundred professionally trained mem¬bers. This division has in effect “socialized” the en¬tre¬preneurial process so that it works with workers to systematically set up new cooperatives (see Ellerman, 1984a). The division is now split off as a separate cooperative, Lan Kide Suztaketa or LKS.

I mean "The Bank of The People's Labour", thats pretty proudhonian.

This book is a good read, not specifically mutualist but very similar, has some good real world examples too.

[shawnpwilbur]

The time store, which played no games with profits and dividends, is an example of a more "doctrinaire" mutualism, where the principle of carrying costs is observed at every step

I imagine this being the ideal we aspire to.

I think this is a YMMV situation. I imagine mutualists eventually being a whole lot less anal retentive about such things, but perhaps a period of "doctrinaire" practice would be good for us.

I personally aspire to the approach you find in Sidney H. Morse's "Liberty and Wealth," which is the easygoing version of Warrenism. "It may be said in a general way...that we are believers in liberty, in justice, in equality, in fraternity, in peace, progress, and in a state of happiness here on earth for one and all. What we mean by all this defines itself as we go along. It is a practical, working belief..."

[Zazaban]

Mutualism sounds a lot like anarcho-communism, except with money.

[Noleaders]

Mutualism sounds a lot like anarcho-communism, except with money.

How do you mean?

[Zazaban]

Mutualism sounds a lot like anarcho-communism, except with money.

How do you mean?

Other than semantic differences, it seems like it has the exact same ideals and organization, expect for the addition of money and the changes that would entail. It's remarkably close.

[Noleaders]

Recently i came to a similar conclusion, that mutualism and communism are simply two wings to the same idea, and potentially the same society, essentially two sides to the same coin - anarchism.

How significant do you think the addition of money would be?

[Zazaban]

I'm not sure at this point, never really thought about it. I'll get back to you on that. I don't think it'll ultimately be a massive difference, I just find money unwieldy and potentially limiting, and don't think it's needed.

[shawnpwilbur]

Proudhon thought of "liberty" as the "synthesis of communism and property," and as he developed mutualism he kept working on a dialectic between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. Interestingly, he believed that complete laissez faire would lead naturally to communism (of a sort incapable of renewing itself) and it was this that led to his reluctant embrace of property. In some ways, it is the "efficiency" of that sort of communism that mutualism was designed to combat.

Personally, I think mutualism is very different from anarchist-communism, because however much it socializes its notion of the individual, it is still forced to put the essentially egoistic individual at center stage.

[Zazaban]

Maybe I view the two as more similar than most because I'm an egoist anarcho-communist, which means that it's anarcho-communism with the egoist individual in mind. So the difference is less. I suppose my views are more mutualism without money than most communists.

[Francois Tremblay]

Mutualism sounds a lot like anarcho-communism, except with money.

Basically, yea. I haven't really found any other major differences.