My position as an aging, underemployed, uninsured part-time worker in a deskilled industry, in an economy where even the “jobless recovery” is in the hands of rather hapless politicians and stock-market gamblers, doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy for the sort of activism by public scholarship that I’ve been pursuing for some years. And I find myself with less and less in common with most of my anarchist and libertarian comrades. So if the work on mutualism is going to go forward, I have to find other methods and motivations. At this point, I’ll leave readers with this little bit (from my FB page), which seems to me the practical kernel of the kind of mutualism I have been pursuing:
The Principle of MutualityIn every person to person encounter, either the actors recognize enough of themselves in one another to build a basic relation of mutuality (what Proudhon called “society” in his early works), which implies the reciprocal “gift” of a rough and ready equality, or they do without. This stuff stacks and scales up, and every failure to establish society is rot in the foundations of whatever we are trying to build.
