I am a Mutualist?

Unfortunately like with every other left wing egalitarian political movement, anarchy has been divided into branches. I put the emphasis on division because that is exactly what has happened; we have become so focused in the detail of how to get the complex workings of society “right” we have lost vision of the general picture of moving into a more equal society. So I am asked from time to time by other anarchists which branch of anarchy I subscribe to, my usual answer to this is mutualism. There are actually very few significant differences between different branches of anarchism...

Mutualism works on the theory that no one individual can own any more property that they themselves can work. As soon as they require another person to work with them in a business that business must become a mutual. So any of the profits are equally divided depending on how much work is put in. Essentially mutualism envisages a world in which resides no CEOs, no bosses and no governments. Mutualism still uses a supply and demand model and appeals to many anarchists because of its true free market ideas. At the moment free market ideas have got a bad reputation because they are synonymous with neo liberal/conservative policies of privatisation and it has become associated with images of Rupert Murdoch. However we are not in a free market at all. When a “free market” becomes dominated by one or two companies who own everything there is no freedom, gone are the days when it is easy for the local entrepreneur to start up a successful business.  That is why everything the usual “free marketers” the conservatives of the world say make me sick, because they are hypocrites. They want to shrink the size of government and award more liberties only when it suits them, exemplified by the anti-abortion, anti-legalization of drugs agenda of the Republican Party in the US.

Supply and demand. What happens when the demanders can’t afford to pay? Any society that is driven by supply and demand (not just capitalism) is made up of benefactors, your status as a benefactor is made by your capability to donate money to a charity or to donate money back into society without the gain of any material goods, so for example donating money to a hospital to a school. If all the benefactors give as much money as they can to charities then generally the healthier the society. The work that charities do is often an unseen great value to society but because the people or objects at the receiving end of the charity are deemed as not usually money making, the actual work that is carried out by the charities is often seen as – in terms of making money – valueless. So what happens when these benefactors hoard all the wealth for themselves and refuse to give any back? Well we get vast inequality as we are experiencing at the moment. Of course charities or donations are not the only way to give back to society. There is also just general shopping and involvement in society, which the more wealth gets centralized the less money will be going in to high street shops and the like because there are less people with greater amounts of wealth. Obviously two people don’t need as many clothes, as much food as 200 people with the same amount of wealth no matter how much they consume. A supply and demand economy will only work if everyone has the same sort of buying power, and that can only happen in a world without bosses hoarding more money from the company they own than the workers. In short, supply and demand will make everything about money.

The life of a charity is at the best of times fraught and at the worst of times damaging. In effect the concept of charities are pretty bad, even the fact that they are called charities is making people who work for them feel as though they are leaching off society, would it not be better than rather a charity have to fight for funding for a particular project, for the people to have the money already and do the charitable work off their own backs and still have money to support themselves?

All of the points mentioned above is where my thinking has taken me to preferring the anarcho-communist idea that society should provide for everyone regardless of their contribution to that society

 “All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth... All is for all!” – Peter Kropotkin.

 For who in society should judge what contribution is deemed fit to reap the benefits of society? Is that not exactly the type of authority we seek to escape? Furthermore if every person got paid a basic amount (I shall come back to this point later) enough to live off then they would truly have the freedom to do whatever they want, within reason. Critics of this system have said that this promotes laziness but I strongly disagree, apart from the old rhetoric that humans have an undying need to do things with their life, they will also be able to do things that they want and not what is dictated of them by markets. For example is looking after orphans useful to society? Yes. Then why should people be stopped from doing that just because there is no one to fund the project. And anyway if a few people (because under the system of everyone receiving a basic income “lazy” people would in no way be the majority) do become “lazy” then should we not just pity the fact they are doing nothing with their lives rather than use some false motivational system of punishment to try and get them to work?

Before any society can develop in anyway the people who make up that society need to develop. The society is only as peaceful and equal/ destructive and violent as the people within that society, so if – like at the moment – people are stressed constantly, over worked, angry in general then can we expect the same of that society. The anarchist communist idea I described above would enable people to help themselves. I described an idea above saying that every person should get paid a basic amount, how this is done depends completely upon in what sort of society you are in. If you are in a society similar to which people are in nowadays that relies on the exchange of money for goods then yes a basic amount should be paid out, however this would be hard to administer and to carry out as this raises the question of who should be in charge of paying out the money. However if you are in a goods society then that individual should just be given enough food, enough clothes and access to societal based things, e.g. libraries, museums etc. for the individual to live in personal comfort.

There are two mains ways of deciding how the people get this basic wage. The first, my least favourite of the ways, is to set up a community council similar to federalist structures (I shall talk about this in a later post) which would centralize the wealth in some way specific to the community. You may question the point of getting rid of a government run council in the first place; however their only task would be to administer this distribution of wealth and the council would be operated by direct democracy. The second is my more preferred decentralized access to wealth. Essentially let the people administer the wealth for themselves. This would be hard to keep a count of in a monetary based society, but in a goods society the people would just go and take whatever they wanted. Both of the systems have their flaws and the latter idea partly relies on faith in people not to be greedy, however I don’t think greed would be as big a factor as some people would like to assume.

I also believe in a constitution to protect people’s liberties. This is not to say I am a minarchist, rather that I believe a set of rules should be written up for each individual to follow to make sure they don’t end up economically enslaved or loose liberties as can often happen when one doesn’t pay attention to their liberties. These laws shall be enforced by no one other than the individuals themselves and the only reason for writing them up is to make sure no one forgets them over time. I have thought of just a few rules for the moment (but feel free to suggest more ideas): No one shall be allowed to be employed to fight for you or protect you (this is how private armies are formed). It shall be illegal for any individual to own more land (property) than they personally can work.

So in reality I am more than a mutualist, I fuse points from nearly every strand of anarchism while adding a few ideas of my own, but in reality no one is a "true" anything anyway, no one will have the exact same ideas as the starter of that movement. Saying I am a mutualist is just easier than saying all of that when ever someone asks me what type of anarchist I am.