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Date Posted: 13:13:29 01/12/00 Wed
Author: SwimmingUpstream
Subject: MUTUALISM -- Part 1

You’ve noticed it. A great longing has come over the world.

Grown dull-eyed under the whip of omnipresent Money we long for an idea that can put a twinkle back in our eyes.

We know what that idea is, intuitively. But we dare not speak of it. Alas, the whip has done more than make us dull, it has made us timid and diffident. We have grown paralyzingly circumspect about even discussing whether we can live at all without the cat-o-nine-tails urging us along.

But we must begin discussing it, right now. Changes in the conditions of human existence on the planet have made it a necessity that we do so, that we imagine and bring into existence a way of living in which the Money Idea has no sway.

The essence of the Money Idea is the assertion that it is legitimate in human affairs to demand something in return/exchange for something we offer to another.

There has always been lurking within that assertion an exploitative element -- namely, that the talented, the ingenious, the clever, the shrewd, could demand of the less talented, the less ingenious, the less clever, the less shrewd, more in exchange for their produce than they were willing to exchange for the lesser’s produce. However, so long as there were in the world freely available resources “enough and as good”, as John Locke expressed it, the exploitative element within the Money Idea did not produce unavoidable injurious privation.

But there is no longer “enough and as good’ in the world freely accessible by all. This is one of the changes in the conditions of human existence to which I referred earlier that, combined with the other changes, makes it necessary to liberate ourselves from the thrall of the Money Idea.

Another of the changes in the conditions of human association that has taken place is the increased use of technologies in production. The use of these technologies has made it possible for fewer and fewer persons to produce all the material necessaries required by the whole population. At present a relatively small fraction of the workforce produces (or is capable of producing) enough material necessaries for all of us. This high level of productivity can be a salutary development for human society, but at present it is not, it is instead socially destructive.

The reason high productivity is socially destructive at present is that the distribution of the material necessaries currently being produced is being accomplished primarily through the exchange of money. In other words, in order to acquire the material necessities of life most of us must MAKE MONEY. In order to make money most of us must go to work at some job or other. In this era of high productivity this means most of us must go to work at jobs that produce something for which there is no strong and constant natural desire or need. We hear constantly now of “new job creation” and “the creation of new markets”. New desires for new things must constantly be created in order for there to be jobs at which persons may work to MAKE MONEY with which they may then obtain the material necessaries of life. Capitalism’s Consumption Society is born.

Within the money system known as Capitalism, when there is not a constant or strong natural (or artificial) desire for the produce of these “created” jobs, these “created” jobs pay the laborer relatively little for his labor. (The skewing effects of Capitalism on the wages of the unpropertied are well known and need no explication here.) In consequence many laborers cannot afford to purchase all the material necessaries of life for themselves, let alone for those family members who are (or may one day be) under the umbrella of the laborer’s income. Thus, more and more persons must enter the rat race labor market if families are to be provided for by family members.

This socially destructive consequence of Capitalism’s Consumption Society has been felt for some time now. The dissolution of the family, afrighting even the staunchest defenders of Capitalism, has had a terrifying domino effect on many other aspects of society, and has been a prominent avenue through which government efforts on the part of society have been made. Unfortunately most of these government efforts have exacerbated the socially destructive effects of Capitalism’s Consumption Society.

The Provider State -- a marvelous example of managerial hubris -- is the almost ubiquitous form of government intervention in Capitalist countries and it is exemplary of the ways in which government intervention has exacerbated the social destructiveness of Capitalism’s Consumption Society.

The Provider State begins by cushioning the economic indecencies of the Consumption Society. But by absorbing the vital economic functions of parents, the Provider State has made a two-parent family less desirable in the eyes of many women and men. A valuable source of Valued Place in society -- the two-parent family -- is as a result unavailable to many men and women.

Worse, the Provider State has not stopped at absorbing from parents the vital function of providing food, clothing, and shelter, merely. It has absorbed from parents also much of their vital educative function, largely through the advent of obligatory government-controlled schooling for children. Deprived of its former economic and educative advantages, the family’s dissolution is not surprising.

Not content with absorbing the vital function of schooling children the Provider State has gone on and absorbed from labor unions some of their vital educative and labor-directing functions with respect to adults -- making it necessary, by virtue of professional and occupational licensing laws, that many adults obtain government-approved schooling before being allowed to labor at the task of their choice. The complications of the licensing processes have made it even more difficult for certain segments of the workforce to obtain jobs for which there is a high demand, further exacerbating the problem for many persons of supporting a family and finding Valued Place.

By absorbing most of the vital functions of family and guild the Provider State also drains from the neighborhood and the church much of their mutual aid functions. And having little of value with which to attract and retain the allegiance of persons, these institutions too slowly wither, leaving only the impersonal state as an institution to attract our allegiance.
Demoralized, alienated by the impersonalness of life within the Provider State, more and more persons are seeking the traditional refuges -- crime, addiction, and suicide. The rates of these pathologies are tens, in some cases hundreds, of times higher than they were a hundred years ago.

It is a grave error to suppose, however, that the ills that attend Capitalism’s Consumption Society and its handmaid the Provider State can be got rid of by doing away with Capitalism while retaining a Money System. To the contrary, implementing a money system in which all labor is valued equally in terms of money hastens the arrival of the grotesquerie in which practically all human labor is viewed as commerce/economic activity.

The reasons for this can be seen in both the Soviet and Chinese efforts. The source of the problem being the same in all cases: When one has one’s labor valued by others, and one receives in exchange for one’s labor an amount of necessaries that is determined in part by another’s labor, one feels entitled to a say about the way in which others are laboring to produce those necessaries and to a say about the way everybody is rewarded for laboring.

This sense of entitlement tends always to one result whenever it runs up against the problems inherent in pricing (allocating the costs of research and development, defaults on credit obligations, premature breakdown of machinery, persons who are doing two tasks at the same time, etc.), whenever it runs up against the problems of remunerating the incapacitated (the elderly, the person of low cognitive ability, the sick and injured, etc.), whenever it runs up against the varying and various material needs of persons, against the problems of financing government, and against all the other complexities of the production, distribution, and consumption of material goods and services. That result is the cry for the intervention and ultimate grasping of control of production, distribution, and consumption of material goods and services by the state -- a cry for Capitalism’s Provider State in a different guise with different managers all of whom possess every bit as much managerial hubris as Capitalism’s movers and shakers.

In the final analysis the trouble with the Marxist critique of Capitalism is simply that the critique is not thoroughgoing enough, obsessed with Capital, concentrating too much on the merely economic to the virtual exclusion of the social and the political. The problem that faces society is not greedy Capitalists, nor Capitalists as a class, nor is it Capitalism’s method of valuing labor. It is the Money Idea itself, an idea which engenders (because of the inordinate position the Money Idea gives to economics) a desire for “organizing” economically most of the everyday living that goes on in a society, a desire for “organizing” which engenders a managerial hubris and lust that is always and everywhere destructive of the personal, the local, the humane.

Mutualism is the shape of the world when the Money Idea no longer holds sway. It retains private property in many forms, affords the maximum personal liberty compatible with that same liberty being enjoyed by all, puts an end to Politics’ subservience to Economics, makes possible truly free enterprise, and cultivates more beauty and variety than is possible in any Money System.

The essence of Mutualism is this proposition: Given the conditions in which man now exists on the planet the idea that it is legitimate to exact a charge for access/use of property, or for labor, is no longer tenable socially, no longer humane.

This does not mean, however, that the idea of granting control of property to persons, individually or corporately, is no longer tenable. To the contrary such grants are necessary -- necessary to the existence of personal liberty, necessary to the existence of Valued Places in society, necessary to the individual’s ability to perform truly humanely productive work rather than rat race labor merely. I will take up the exact nature of these necessary grants later. But first it is important to establish the broader philsophical bases that support the central thesis of Mutualism.

Some definitions will be helpful:

CHARITY: That disposition of the heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellow men, and to do them good.

JUST: Employing the gentlest means, consuming only that which is either indispensable to one's good or is innocuous, protecting one's fellows out of affection not in hopes of exploitation...

TOLERANCE: To carry, as a burden, things which we dislike but which do us no true injury.

The wellspring of the above conception of JUST is this idea: One must harmonize one’s interests with all those other interests that affect one’s interests or are affected by one’s interests. Self-interest and altruism are not incompatible within the framework of this idea.

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