A.1.6. MUTUALISM WAS THE EARLIEST FORM OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND WAS SOON SURPASSED BY DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, TRADE UNIONISM AND COMMUNISM. AREN'T YOU TRYING TO REVIVE SOMETHING WAY OUT OF DATE?

Later does not always mean better. Ideas can also go off on a dead end tangent. Certainly social democracy and communism "shoved aside" mutualism, but look at them now! About one billion people are members of mutual aid societies worldwide, yet radical socialist groups are tiny sects. In the end, who got surpassed? The trade unionist movement itself was originally mutualist. It was largely coextensive with the friendly societies, organized along the lines of lodges (a form of organization that survived as late as the Knights of Labor). The labor movement may have ceased to function as a form of working class self-organization, and come under the control of a labor bureaucracy; but does that really speak well of the labor bosses?

The problem is not that mutualism was demonstrated to be impractical, but that it was abandoned under the influence of the statist left as the main form of working class practice. To the extent it exists today, it is forced to work within the interstices of a system organized along either corporate capitalist or state socialist lines. The danger of being corrupted by association with Social Democracy, or with capitalism ("de-mutualization," "privatization") always exists.

Mutualism can be much more effective when it is the central principle of social organization of a society built from the ground up along libertarian lines, instead of only being tolerated as an ugly stepchild within an overall capitalist or state socialist society. For the true potential of mutualism as a form of social organization to be realized, it will have to become our primary means of organizing our own lives and relating to each other.