Saturday, July 7, 2012

The "FAQs"






Friday, July 6, 2012

Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide

For a look at the concerns of the Owenite current at the moment, in the 1820s, when some members were trying on the label "mutualist" and Josiah Warren was taking the steps that would lead him to individualist anarchism, I've assembled a collection of texts in the first volume of a Documentary History of Mutualism: Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide. In it: 

Notes on the origins of the term "mutualism" (1822-1850)

I contributed most of the following to Wikipedia, so we can just make use of it here to get started on a bit of basic mutualist history:
Mutualism, as a term, has seen a variety of related uses. Charles Fourier first used the French term "mutualisme" in 1822, although the reference 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 labor organization in Lyons, France, called themselves the "Mutuellists."
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was involved with the Lyons mutualists and later adopted the name to describe his own teachings. In What Is Mutualism? Clarence Lee Swartz gives 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 John 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 Association 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.
By 1846, Pierre Joseph Proudhon was speaking of "mutualité" in his writings, and he used the term "mutuellisme," at least as early as 1848, in his "Programme Révolutionnaire." William B. Greene, in 1850, 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, William B. Greene, Pierre Leroux, and others.
What the rules of play at Wikipedia didn't allow me to say, except on the Talk page, was that the oft-repeated account of John Gray using the term is probably incorrect. Let me include the full note, just to indicate some of the difficulties and possible pitfalls involved in tracking this sort of information down.
Swartz' reference to John Gray in What Is Mutualism? is puzzling. He says mutualism "seems to have been first used by John Gray, an English writer, in 1832," but does not name the work. The only book or pamphlet from 1832 is Production the cause of demand being a brief analysis of a work entitled "The social system, a treatise on the principle of exchange, by John Gray : with a short illustration of the principles of equitable labour exchange," which probably isn't by Gray at all, although it relies on long passages from The Social System. It appears to have been assembled by "an Association for the Dissemination of the Knowledge of the Principles of Equitable Labour Exchange." (More than one of the pamphlets listed in OCLC under Gray's name is actually a response to Gray.) In any event, it does not appear to have been the book in which the word mutualism was used, and it seems a strange title to cite in preference to the 1831 book from which it was drawn. Looking for the source of Swartz' reference, the logical choice is Max Nettlau's "Anarchism in England Fifty Years Ago," which contains the line: "The mutualism of John Gray (1832, 1842, 1848) is logical, but dry, uninspiring, and anything but revolutionary." Note the dates. Nettlau skips the influencial Lecture on Human Happiness, and references, if only by date, An efficient remedy for the distress of nations (1842), Lectures on the nature and use of money (1848), and probably The Social System, but missing the date by one year. If Swartz (who, as a contributor to Liberty in the same years, certainly would have had access to Tucker's reprint of the Nettlau essay) simply relied on Nettlau as a source, it is understable how he might have written that mutualism "seems" to have been used in 1832.
In any event, setting aside the use by Fourier, we have two early traditions that used words like "mutualism"—the Owenites from England, starting in the 1820s, and the French workers in Lyon in the 1830s. The first tradition influenced Josiah Warren, who never called himself a mutualist, but became one of the chief influences on those who used the term in the late 19th century. The second directly influenced Proudhon, who adopted the term to describe his anarchism.

Prior to the period when Benjamin R. Tucker and his circle brought the influences of Warren's equitable commerce and the explicit mutualism of Proudhon and Greene together in his own individualist anarchism, there would have been no particular reason to think of the two currents as one.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Dilemma

I've hardly started, and there are already some criticisms and concerns about what is is and isn't going to get covered here. My hope is to eventually cover a wide range of historical, theoretical and practical questions—and, where appropriate, to deal with elements of the traditions both historically (to get us on a firm footing) and critically. It's useful, for example, to know how William B. Greene adapted Proudhon's proposals, and the colonial land bank model, to the needs of his audience in 19th century New England. But most of my readers are probably, like me, not in a position to make much use of a mutual banking association—at least this side of The Revolution. It's useful to understand the various things that Proudhon meant when he talked about "property" and "possession," but mostly so that we can work intelligently toward models of resource distribution and use that don't lag far behind present day pressures, ecological science, etc. It's interesting, and frequently fun, to learn a bit about the various people who assumed the label and tested out the ideas of mutualism long before we came along. And then there are a lot of very pressing questions about how some basic mutualist principles might apply to present and future conditions. All of those need to be addressed.

But we are in the midst of a wide-ranging network of conversations and conflicts right now, with a rather protean "mutualism" at their center. And because of the difficulties of coming to specific grips with the mutualism suspended between a half-unknown past and an obscure future, it is perhaps becoming more protean, rather than less.

So, what will get addressed here will undoubtedly be a sort of triage list of particularly embattled bits of mutualist history and theory. In some cases, it is possible to simply supply answers to historical questions. In others, it will at least be possible to clarify options and conflicts. And where things seem to be just a mess, well, it will probably useful to say so.

Even that much is a rather daunting task, but I'm driven by a strong sense that there is in "classical" mutualism a really powerful body of theory, with potential for fairly immediate practical application in the present—if some fraction of us are able and willing to distill the good stuff from the tradition.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Golden Rule as a practical guide

I have been using the following paragraph on the Two-Gun Mutualism blog for some time now:
Mutualism is not a specific social, political or economic system. Mutualism as such is simply the assertion that every meaningfully social relation will have the form, at base, of an anarchic encounter between unique individuals—free absolutes—no matter what layers of convention we pile on it. To the extent that our conventions, institutions and norms respect that basic premise, we can call them “mutualist.” To the extent that we commit ourselves to viewing our relations through this lens, and exert ourselves in the extension of mutualistic freedom, we can call ourselves “mutualists.”
Unsurprisingly, I suppose, it has proved a bit dense for many readers not already familiar with the sort of analysis I've been doing there. But let's unpack it a bit. 

I understand mutualism—at its core, and apart from the character of our particular present approximations—as an ethical philosophy. We have mutuality or reciprocity—the Golden Rule, more or less—and then we have a series of applications of that principle. 

Now, there are a lot of interpretations of the Golden Rule—"do unto others as you would have others do unto you"—which hardly limp out of the starting gate before it's clear they won't be much use in application. Naturally, those are not the formulations I'm talking about. I don't want you to treat me as if I was you, simply imposing your preferences on me, any more than you want me to treat you as if you were me. To do so would simply be to deny the individuality of the other. Nor do either of us ultimately want to establish a principle which denies our own individuality—do unto others as they want you to do—in the expectation that we'll be on the receiving end of this principled self-denial at some point. In either case, our individuality is sacrificed in half of our relationship with the other. 

But if we treat one another as individualsunique individuals, with all of the emphasis that a Max Stirner might give to that term—then there is no question of sacrifice. The rule is a bit harder to apply, but nobody said this anarchy thing was going to be easy.

As we apply that standard, we want institutions that respect our uniqueness, and if we want to claim the name of "mutualist" as a sort of political identity, then we need to make sure we are walking the walk.

The Mutualist's Dilemma


To call ourselves "mutualists" in the early 21st century is to take our place in a tradition which reaches back into the mid-19th century, the roots of which are the roots of the anarchist tradition, but the anarchist tradition has been rather ambivalent and forgetful about its roots, so rather than grounding the modern mutualist somewhere near the heart of the anarchist project, I think many of us feel we've climbed out onto a rather slender limb.

The first, exemplified by Kevin Carson's work, is reconstructive, a fairly conscious attempt to stitch back together a number of the narrower tendencies which have formed as anarchism developed. It has naturally become a focus for "big tent" coalitions like the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Because the historical mutualism which Carson most closely identifies may be best understood as the economic component of Benjamin R. Tucker's individualist anarchism, with its plumb-line focus on removing key monopolies, this mutualist tendency has emerged as a "free-market anti-capitalism." 
The second tendency looks back to the earliest elements of the mutualist tradition, drawing on the extensive and largely neglected work of Proudhon, but also on influences (from Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, etc) which Proudhon did not fully integrate into his work, and on the work of a variety of writers from those early days of anarchism. It combines a sort of archaeological process of rediscovering mutualism's roots with attempts to refine, complete and update its early forms. My own "two-gun mutualism" is an example of this explicitly neo-Proudhonian mutualism.


