” Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists.  Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself.  We are not opposed to money or exchange.  We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use.  We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid.  The “market,” in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept.  What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

     Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers’ cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers’ cooperatives.  To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker’s natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

     Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom “petty bourgeois” is a swear word.  But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.  Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them.  They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system.  But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.”

 From Kevin Carson at  Mutualist.org

Comment:

I find a lot of Kevin’s work and thinking useful, but I should point out I’m not a mutualist myself. I don’t subscribe either to the Marxist labor theory of value, nor the Rothbardian subjective theory.  They’re both incomplete.  But my thoughts aren’t fully worked out yet in those areas…