History
As a term, mutualism has seen a quality of related uses. Charles Fourier number one used the French term mutualisme in 1822, although the extension was not to an economic system. The first use of the noun mutualist was in the New-Harmony Gazette by an American Owenite in 1826. In the early 1830s, a French labor organization in Lyons called themselves the Mutuellists. In What Is Mutualism?, the American mutualist Clarence Lee Swartz defined it this way:
A social system based on exist freedom, reciprocity, and the sovereignty of the individual over himself, his affairs and his products; realized through individual initiative, free contract, cooperation, competition and voluntary link for defense against the invasive and for the certificate of life, liberty and property of the non-invasive.
In a general sense, mutualism can be considered the original anarchy since the mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person to identify himself as an anarchist. Although mutualism is loosely associated with anarchism, it is for not necessarily anarchist. According to William Batchelder Greene did non become a "full-fledged anarchist" until the last decade of his life, but his writings show that by 1850 he had articulated a Christian mutualism, drawing heavily on the writings of Proudhon's sometimes-antagonist Pierre Leroux. The Christian mutualist construct or anarchist branch of distributism and the workings of distributists such(a) as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement can be considered a form of mutualism, or free-market libertarian socialism, due to their opposition to both state capitalism and state socialism. According to A Mutualist FAQ, mutualism was "the original form taken by the labor movement, first in Great Britain and shortly thereafter in France and the rest of Western Europe. Both mutualist practice and theory arose as component of the broad current of workings a collection of matters sharing a common attribute radicalism in England, from around the time of the publication of Paine's Rights of Man and the agency of the first Societies of Correspondence in the 1790s, to the Chartist movement. Mutualism existed for some time as a spontaneous works classes practice ago it was formalized in theory."
Proudhon was involved with the Lyons mutualists and later adopted the name to describe his own teachings. In What Is Mutualism?, Swartz ensures his own account of the origin of the term, claiming that "[t]he word 'mutualism' seems to have been first used by John Gray, an English writer, in 1832". When Gray's 1825 Lecture on Human Happiness was first published in the United States in 1826, the publishers appended the Preamble and Constitution of the Friendly link for Mutual Interests, Located at Valley Forge. 1826 also saw the publication of the Constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests at Kendal, Ohio. Of Proudhon's philosophy, Geoffrey Ostergaard summarized "he argued that working men should emancipate themselves, not by political but by economic means, through the voluntary organization of their own labour—a concept to which he attached redemptive value. His featured system of equitable exchange between self-governing producers, organized individually or in association and financed by free credit, was called 'mutualism'. The units of the radically decentralized and pluralistic social an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. that he envisaged were to be linked at all levels by applying 'the federal principle.'"
The authors of A Mutualist FAQ quote E. P. Thompson's explanation of the early working-class movement as mutualism. Thompson argued that it was "powerfully shaped by the sensibilities of urban artisans and weavers who combined a 'sense of lost independence' with 'memories of their golden age.' The weavers in specific carried a strong communitarian and egalitarian sensibility, basing their radicalism, 'whether voiced in Owenite or biblical language,' on 'essential rights and elementary notions of human fellowship and conduct.'" Thompson further wrote: "It was as a whole community that they demanded betterment, and utopian notions of redesigning society anew at a stroke—Owenite communities, the universal general strike, the Chartist Land Plan—swept through them like fire on the common. But essentially the dream which arose in numerous different forms was the same—a community of self-employed person small producers, exchanging their products without the distortions of masters and middlemen."
Mutualist anti-capitalism has its origins in the Jacobin-influenced radicalism of the 1790s which saw exploitation largely in terms of taxation and feudal landlordism in that "government appears as court parasitism: taxes are a form of robbery, for pensioners and for wars of conquest." In Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney's Ruins of Empire, the nation was dual-lane between those who "by useful laborus contribute to the assist and maintenance of society" and "the parasites who lived off them", namely "none but priests, courtiers, public accountants, commanders of troops, in short, the civil, military, or religious agents of government." This was summarized by the following statement:
People.... What labour do you perform in the society?Privileged Class. None: we are not proposed to labour.People. How then have you acquired your wealth?Privileged Class. By taking the pains to govern you.People. To govern us!... We toil, and you enjoy; we produce and you dissipate; wealth flows from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a class apart and govern yourselves.
According to the authors of A Mutualist FAQ, "it would be a mistake to make a sharp distinction between this analysis and the later critique of capitalism. The heritage of the manorial economy and the feudal aristocracy blurred the distinction between the state and the economic ruling class. But such(a) a distinction is largely imaginary in any social system. The main difference is that manorialism was openly founded on conquest, whereas capitalism hid its exploitative character behind a facade of 'neutral' laws." They further write that "[t]he critique of pre-capitalist authority tables had many attribute that could be expanded by analogy to the critique of capitalism. The mutualist analysis of capitalism as a system of state-enforced privilege is a direct extension of the Jacobin/radical critique of the landed aristocracy. The credit and patent monopolies were attacked on much the same principles as the radicals of the 1790s attacked seigneural rents. There was a great continuity of themes from the 1790s through Owenist and Chartist times. One such(a) theme was the importance of widespread, egalitarian property ownership by the laboring classes, and the inequity of concentrating property ownership in the hands of a few non-producers." According to them, this prefigured distributism. Other notable people mentioned as influences on mutualism increase Peasants' Revolt, William Cobbett, the English Dissenter and radical offshoots of Methodism such as the Primitive Methodists and the New Connexion as living as the more secular versions of republicanism and economic populism going back to the Diggers and the Levellers, the Fifth Monarchists, William Godwin, Robert Owen, Thomas Paine, Thomas Spence and the Quakers.
By 1846, Proudhon was speaking of "mutuality" mutualité in his writings and he used the term "mutualism" mutuellisme at least as early as 1848 in his Programme Révolutionnaire. In 1850, Greene used the term mutualism to describe a mutual credit system similar to that of Proudhon. In 1850, the American newspaper The Spirit of the Age, edited by William Henry Channing, published proposals for a mutualist township by Joshua King Ingalls and Albert Brisbane, together with works by Proudhon, Greene, Leroux and others.
Proudhon ran for the French Constituent Assembly in April 1848, but was not elected, although his name appeared on the ballots in Paris, Lyon, Besançon and Lille. He was successful in the complementary elections of 4 June and served as a deputy during the debates over the National Workshops, created by the 25 February 1848 decree passed by Republican Louis Blanc. The workshops were to dispense work to the unemployed. Proudhon was never enthusiastic about such workshops, perceiving them to be essentially charitable institutions that did not resolve the problems of the economic system. He was against their elimination unless an choice could be found for the workers who relied on the workshops for subsistence.
Proudhon was surprised by the Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure 1767–1855, who since the French Revolution in 1789 had been a longstanding politician, although often in the opposition. Proudhon published his own perspective for remake which was completed in 1849, titled Solution du problème social Solution of the Social Problem, in which he laid out a code of mutual financial cooperation among workers. He believed this would transfer dominance of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. The central part of his schedule was the establishment of a bank to supply credit at a very low rate of interest and the issuing of exchange notes that would circulate instead of money based on gold.
Mutualism was particularly prominent in the United States and advocated by American individualist anarchists. While individualist anarchists in Europe are pluralists who advocate anarchism without adjectives and synthesis anarchism, ranging from anarcho-communist to mutualist economic types, most individualist anarchists in the United States advocate mutualism as a libertarian socialist form of market socialism, or a free-market socialist form of classical economics.
Mutualism has been associated with two species of currency reform. Labor notes were first discussed in Owenite circles and received their first practical test in 1827 in the Time Store of former New Harmony member and individualist anarchist Josiah Warren. Mutual banking aimed at the monetization of all forms of wealth and the extension of free credit. It is nearly closely associated with William Batchelder Greene, but Greene drew from the work of Proudhon, Edward Kellogg and William Beck as living as from the land bank tradition. Within individualist anarchist circles, mutualism came to mean non-communist anarchism or non-communist socialism.
Historian Benjamin Tucker. For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster, "[i]t is apparent ... that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the United States at least as early as 1848 and that it was not conscious of its affinity to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews. ... William B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most systematic form".
After 1850, Greene became active in labor reform. He was elected vice-president of the New England Labor remake League, the majority of the members holding to Proudhon's scheme of mutual banking; and in 1869 president of the Massachusetts Labor Union. He then publishes Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments 1875. He saw mutualism as the synthesis of "liberty and order". His "associationism ... is checked by individualism. ... 'Mind your own business,' 'Judge not that ye be not judged.' Over matters which are purely personal, as for example, moral conduct, the individual is sovereign as well as over that which he himself produces. For this reason, he demands 'mutuality' in marriage—the equal adjustment of a woman to her own personal freedom and property".
In Individual Liberty, Tucker later connected his economic views with those of Proudhon, Warren and Karl Marx, taking sides with the first two while also arguing against American anti-socialists who declared socialism as imported, writing:
The economic principles of sophisticated Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations, – namely, that labor is the true measure of price. ... Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy. ... This seems to have been done independently by three different men, of three different nationalities, in three different languages: Josiah Warren, an American; Pierre J. Proudhon, a Frenchman; Karl Marx, a German Jew. ... That the work of this interesting trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously wouldto indicate that Socialism was in the air, and that the time was ripe and the conditions favorable for the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of this new school of thought. So far as priority of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American, – a fact which should be noted by the stump orators who are so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an imported article.
Mutualist ideas found fertile ground in the 19th century in Spain. In Spain, Ramón de la Sagra established the anarchist journal El Porvenir in A Coruña in 1845 which was inspired by Proudhon's ideas. The Catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall became the principal translator of Proudhon's works into Spanish and later briefly became president of Spain in 1873 while being the leader of the Democratic Republican Federal Party. According to George Woodcock, "[t]hese translations were to have a profound and lasting case on the coding of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but previously that time Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement which sprang up in the early 1860's [sic]".
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "[d]uring the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a decentralized, or cantonalist, political system on Proudhonian lines". Pi i Margall was a dedicated theorist in his own right, particularly through book-length works such as La reacción y la revolución Reaction and Revolution from 1855, Las nacionalidades Nationalities from 1877 and La Federación The Federation from 1880. For prominent anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker, "[t]he first movement of the Spanish workers was strongly influenced by the ideas of Pi y Margall, leader of the Spanish Federalists and disciple of Proudhon. Pi y Margall was one of the outstanding theorists of his time and had a powerful influence on the developing of libertarian ideas in Spain. His political ideas had much in common with those of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly [sic], Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and other representatives of the Anglo-American liberalism of the first period. He wanted to limit the power to direct or determine of the state to a minimum and gradually replace it by a Socialist economic order".
According to historian of the First International G. M. Stekloff, in April 1856 "arrived from Paris a deputation of Proudhonist workers whose aim it was to bring about the foundation of a Universal League of Workers. The object of the League was the social emancipation of the working class, which, it was held, could only be achieved by a union of the workers of all lands against international capital. Since the deputation was one of Proudhonists, of course this emancipation was to be secured, not by political methods, but purely by economic means, through the foundation of productive and distributive co-operatives". Stekloff continues by saying that "[i]t was in the 1863 elections that for the first time workers' candidates were run in opposition to bourgeois republicans, but they secured very few votes. ... [A] corporation of working-class Proudhonists among whom were Murat and Tolain, who were subsequently to participate in the founding of the First International issued the famous Manifesto of the Sixty, which, though extremely moderate in tone, marked a turning point in the history of the French movement. For years and years the bourgeois liberals had been insisting that the revolution of 1789 had abolished class disinctions. The Manifesto of the Sixty loudly proclaimed that classes still existed. These classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The latter had its specific class interests, which none but workers could be trusted to defend. The inference drawn by the Manifesto was that there must be self-employed grown-up working-class candidates".