A.1.4. WHAT HAPPENED TO MUTUALISM?

The first reason for the eclipse of mutualism was that, as a form of working class struggle, it faced attitudes from the state ranging from grudging acceptance to outright hostility. On a broader level, the hostility of the state can be explained by its historical origins. In this passage from Mutual Aid, Kropotkin was originally describing the rise of the absolute state in the early modern period, and its suppression of the communal bodies like guilds, folkmotes, etc. But it also describes the attitude of the state in 19th century Europe quite well.

It was taught in the Universities and from the pulpit that the institutions in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organized State; that the State alone could represent the bonds of union between its subjects; that federalism and "particularism" were the enemies of progress, and the State was the only proper initiator of further development. [226]

From the beginning, the British state attempted to define, regulate, limit and contain mutualist organizations, and to confine them to non-threatening activities. But because the central purpose of mutualism was to increase the independence and self-sufficiency of workers, there was no room for compromise on this basis.

The first attempt by Parliament to regulate the friendly societies, according to Bob James ("Mutuality") was the Rose Act of 1793, which defined the friendly society as

It required societies to register their Rules and office bearers. The reason the state chose the year 1793 to recognize and regulate friendly societies for the first time, was that the ideological influence of the French Revolution was reaching the common people of England at the same time that "hardship and anger" were being brought on by the industrial revolution. A real danger existed that mutual aid organizations might engage in labor combinations or political subversion.

For the government at that time, a "bad worker" combination was one which had affiliated branches connected to a head office, in other words had a federal structure and a Grand Lodge. A "bad worker" combination was also one which used its members' contributions to maintain workers who were out of work. Mutual aid was OK as long as it didn't mean that there were networks passing people or information from one lodge to another... and as long as it didn't mean that workers could refuse wages and conditions set by employers by existing on benefits. Of course, at that time those two elements... were essential parts of any decent "mutual". Neither of them appear in the "official" definition. So, defining what constituted a "friendly society" and thereby establishing a benchmark for what was "good" allowed the government to separate out the others, the "bad" combinations that could then be targeted. Because it was infringement of trade which was the real target, this was made a defining characteristic of the "bad" group, now called "trade unions".

The danger was not only economic, but also political. At a time when a fraction of a percent of the British population had the franchise and the lower classes were being contaminated by the influence of radical ideas, friendly societies with secret memberships and oaths were a genuine danger to the regime. The requirement to register friendly societies was a way of identifying those with republican tendencies. The Corresponding Societies Act of 1797, which forbade the administering of oaths by societies, further undercut their internal solidarity and mutual confidence. [Gray, "A Brief History of Friendly Societies"]

The self-help was also weakened from within by opportunism. According to Tim Evans,

certain professional, private, for-profit, "corporativist" interests found advantage in the idea of getting into bed with big government and in undermining the self-help movement. On this point I strongly recommend David Green's expose of the lobbying that went on behind the scenes during the construction of the 1911 National Insurance Act. [Socialism Without the State]

The hostility of the capitalist class and the authoritarian state was succeeded by the hostility of the paternalistic Welfare State. From the mid-Nineteenth Century on, political and economic life were rapidly brought under the control of centralized bureaucracies. The state, society and economy were revolutionized by the professionalization of every aspect of life. The "New Class" of managers and technicians, who controlled the new centralized bureaucratic machinery of corporation and state, saw self-organization by ordinary people as a threat to their own power. Orwell, behind the persona of Immanuel Goldstein, described the class in this way:

The proper order of things under the new order was for ordinary people to be administered, as human raw material, by "experts" and "professionals."

The will to power of this New Class was embodied in Great Britain by the Fabian movement, especially Sidney and Beatrice Webb and H. G. Wells. Its American counterpart was "Progressivism." In the Fabian/Progressive scheme of things, the lower classes ceased to be the subject of action and instead became the object. The working class--which we have seen above to be so capable of doing things for itself--became the people things were done to.

Thanks largely to the Fabian and Progressive movements, the leadership of the mainstream left turned increasingly to statism, and joined its fortune to the New Class elite that dominated the state welfare, regulatory and planning bureaucracies. To the extent that self-organized bodies continued to exist, it was only at the sufferance and with the regulatory oversight of the state. For example, the Insurance Act of 1911 in Great Britain allowed the state to "exercise a definite control" over friendly societies, rendering purely voluntary efforts "a thing of the past." [Robinson, The Spirit of Association 1] Colin Ward, in Talking Houses, put it this way: "It was those clever Fabians and academic Marxists who ridiculed out of existence the values by which ordinary citizens govern their own lives in favour of bureaucratic paternalising, leaving those values around to be picked up by their [right wing] political opponents." [quoted in Anarchist FAQ J.5]

It was a case of replacing one form of class rule with another. Both the old-style capitalists and the new paternalistic social engineers saw the independence and self-sovereignty of the average person as a threat. Indeed, it was not entirely a replacement--regardless of Arthur Schlesinger's official goo-goo mythology of the "progressive" regulatory and welfare state as a "countervailing power" to big business. In fact, the managerial and professional classes in the Progressive and Fabian movements were more than willing to establish a modus vivendi with corporate capitalism.

At the same time, the Fabians and Progressives were useful idiots, serving corporate interests by rationalizing and stabilizing capitalism. The central force behind the growth of the twentieth century positive state has been the political power of big business. The welfare state was pioneered, after all, by that notorious bleeding-heart liberal, Otto von Bismarck. Friedrich Engels predicted the mixed economy in Anti-Duehring

Weinstein, Kolko. Virtually every aspect of the regulatory state came about because it was promoted by big business.

The central theme of the New Class ideology, as Joel Spring put it, was that "the good society meant the efficiently organized society that was producing the maximum amount of goods," and that the most efficient social institutions for this purpose were "[l]arge organizational units and centralized government." The ordinary person was "viewed as a raw material whose worth was determined by his contribution to the system." [Education and the Rise of the Corporate State xiii] In every aspect of life, New Class dominance alienated the average person from his own common sense. As Barton Bledstein described it, "The citizen became a client whose obligation was to trust the professional. Legitimate authority now resided in places like the courtroom, the classroom, and the hospital..." [The Culture of Professionalism, quoted in Boyte]

The earliest New Class bastion was the "public" school movement.

Although neoconservatives like to identify the New Class primarily with the welfare state, it's hegemony extends far more broadly.

In industry, New Class dominance took the form of Taylorism, or scientific management. Organized labor

In local government, the New Class agenda has been to replace political debate with the consensus of "experts," and to "take politics out of government" by professionalizing the decision-making process.

Here is how Colin Ward described the eclipse of mutualist self-organization under the hegemony of the New Class ("The Path Not Taken"):

In Social Policy: An Anarchist Response, Ward called the 19th century working class tradition of self-help the "welfare road we failed to take." (quoted in Anarchist FAQ J.5) The arrogance of New Class statists in abandoning this road was monumental. As Tim Evans put it,

...it is quite shocking to think of the highly successful carpet of institutions created in British 19th century civil society, the churches, the cooperatives, the friendly societies and the power and benefit they brought directly to millions of individuals and then to listen--a mere forty or fifty years later--to Douglas Jay, the middle class Fabian who as a Minister in the Attlee Government asserted, as if it was self-evident, that: "...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves." [Socialism Without the State]