From a Reddit thread on Mutualism v. Communism: This is a vs. that Im not all that interested in, since I think that a lot of the lessons that mutualists need to learn in the next stage of our re-emergence are lessons about the collective side of things. But I obviously also have a horse in the race. The key thing is that while I think there are very interesting possibilities in the individualist anarchism of folks like Benjamin R. Tucker and Kevin Carson, I dont really know that it is useful to call that approach mutualism. The really distinct mutualist form of anarchism was the one that was beginning to emerge among the Parisian workers in the 1860s and then was pushed aside, in the context of some important practical debates and some less important ideological squabbles, in the period of the First International. Had there been a logical successor to Proudhon among the mutualists (with the knowledge of a Langlois or Chaudey, but the experience of a Tolain or Varlin) there would undoubtedly still have a been a struggle with the faction around Marx and various other old adversaries, but it is considerably less likely that the anarchist side of the International would have split decisively over something like the future of farming practices. There were a number of important early anarchist figures who either died or wandered off to parts unknown in the years just prior to the founding of the International, some of whom had been involved in various predecessor organizations. We treat the outcomes of the First International as more or less inevitable, but a few years difference might have made both mutualism and communism considerably more interesting anarchist tendencies in the International. With mutualism essentially back from a long winters nap, having existed a continuous, but faint series of memories and echoes, there doesnt seem to be any reason to settle for any of the diluted versions, from Tolain through the most recent attempt to harness Proudhon to whatever finds a passage they like in the Collected Works. His manuscripts are now virtually all accessible online, and translation is progressing steadily. What has emerged already in the English-speaking world is an understanding of mutualism as rather different than the individualist anarchists. French syndicalists discovered that Proudhon in the middle of the 20th century, but weve been just as slow to discover the Proudhon-friendly syndicalists as we have been Proudhons own mature writings. Anyway, better late than never. Reading the mature works, and the manuscripts, pretty quickly demonstrates what perhaps we should have seen in the long-translated works. There is a really substantial body of anarchist social theory, which might in fact be unmatched, which we have largely ignored to focus on slogans, antagonistic readings and a few obvious missteps. There have been some unfortunate errors in translation (anarchy, for example being mistranslated in many places in General Idea of the Revolution, obscuring an important part of the argument there) but mostly there has just been neglect, based in some notion that Proudhons work was defeated in theoretical battle. But the battles never really took place, and the anarchist literature is littered with bizarre mischaracterizations. Kropotkin was particularly aggressive in attempting to bury Proudhon, in part to justify the anti-authoritarian communist use of the term anarchist, which they rejected until the early 1880s. At this point, the key vs. that needs to be addressed is between a collection of stories about mutualism, told by various non-mutualist or at best semi-mutualist factions, and the content of a large and useful body of work that is best described either as mutualist or simply by its original label: anarchist. If we can stop fighting figments of old ideological struggles, then we can figure out to what extent Proudhons social science differs from that of Marx, and determine on a clearer basis which approaches, or portions of approaches, lead toward an anarchistic society in which neither individual nor collective concerns (provided those can really be separated) are neglected.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 21:37:22 +0000
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