By Cake Boy

In the last ten years, we saw a return of the mutualist movement under the control of C4SS.

The aim of the mutualists was to build a new society in the shell of the old.

They propagated homesteading, squatting, and radical free markets, what they called ‘freed markets.’

The mutualist movement was/is also as woke as the anarcho-communist movement and the leftist movements we know today. So, it has very detailed opinions about all kinds of cultural issues. This movement mixes 19th-century Proudhonian politics with Frankfurt School Marxism.

Modern mutualism succeeds, and it fails at the same time.

The academic work of the modern mutualist intellectuals was very strong. It was on the level of Marx, Mises, and Rothbard. It really uplifted the intellectual basis for anarchism. It also succeeded in its critiques of the libertarian movement, which was then already becoming more like a neoliberal interest group.

On the other hand, modern mutualism was never able to create an actual political movement. A movement like, for example, the Trump or Bernie Sanders movement. Or even the Ron Paul movement. It stayed small and niche. Consisting of woke Antifa nerds, trans activists, and some alienated libertarian professors. Meanwhile, their tactics were very aggressive, throwing everyone who critiqued them out. Insulting people. I even heard they doxed someone they saw as ‘a fascist’ (which can be everyone when you use their definition of the word).

So, we see that the intellectual skills of the C4SS people are very strong, but their social skills are weak. In a way, they behave like extremely intelligent children. I have seen this more among academics in my lifetime.

Here, we see that academic knowledge is not enough. Trump has no academic knowledge; he only watches Disney movies, and still, he succeeds. Politics is also about being able to connect with people and mobilizing the masses. If you can’t do this, you will never mean something in the real world. It’s vulgar, but it’s just something we have to keep in the back of our heads.

If anarchism wants to be something, if it wants to be a political movement, it needs to have the social intelligence to translate academic knowledge into the language of the common people. The problem is that a lot of hyper-intelligent anarchists do not have strong social/emotional intelligence. So, their work gets lost in translation.

If an anarchist movement wants to succeed, it should have intellectually gifted people on one side and socially intelligent people on the other. When I read Benjamin Tucker’s works, I could tell he had both strong rational and social intelligence. I think this was the reason he could create an actual movement.

Culturally speaking, mutualism has a problem. Mutualists support both squatting and free markets. The problem is that current leftist squatters don’t believe in free markets, money, bitcoins, etc., while free market libertarians are against squatting.

Mutualists talk about this dual power strategy, but where do we see these community land trusts and credit unions they said they would make? They made nothing. They only made a lot of pity squabbles for no reason.

Libertarians at least created their Liberland, Anarchopulco, and agorist infrastructures. With mutualists, all of this stayed in theory because nobody wanted to be part of the mutualist subculture.

Mutualism was too libertarian for the left and too left for the libertarian movement. They scared the left away with their knowledge of economics and their support for free markets, and they scared the libertarians away with dogmatic woke culture and anti-capitalist rhetoric,

We should also not forget that mutualism was a typical 19th-century movement based on the circumstances of the time. It spoke of usufruct because there was still a lot of land people could homestead. It talked about the labor theory of value because people didn’t believe in the subjective theory of value yet. It called itself socialist because socialism meant something different back then.

When I read the works of Carson, it frustrated me that I couldn’t really explain it to people. In this country, the political debate is between the woke/green left and the conservative neoliberals. Libertarians play a small part in these dynamics. But nobody has ever heard of ‘mutualism’. So, you read the mutualist works and understand them, but you can’t do anything with them because there is no movement to join. This is a shame because Carson’s work has all kinds of insights that people should know.

Modern mutualism is a think tank and an underground academy for now. Many philosophy and economics students read the C4SS work as a sort of ‘guilty pleasure.’ But I think mutualism will never be a serious movement again.

In a way, the modern mutualist text could be seen as ‘the occult’. Because it’s hidden, it’s underground, people don’t know about it, and it will give you a lot of knowledge if you study it. But it will never be out in the open

Mutualism in the past inspired Henry George. Geoism (the political school made by Henry George) is something that could have some meaning for modern times because it is made for densely populated industrial societies. Societies like the ones we have now. I think the geoism movement could become a movement of political significance in the future. But I could be wrong, of course. If they had succeeded, we would have a sort of neo-Proudhonian movement out there, but it would have been watered down. A mutualism light.