Comments Elsewhere

When I talk about unions, mutual aid associon, co-ops, or similar organizations, I think of them as a strategy for obtaining outcomes which are a negotiated compromise between the Reality of the Agora and the interests of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Well, O.K., I agree with you about that. I don’t think that it’s something special about unions, mutual aid associations, or co-ops: every freely-negotiated market transaction involves some means or another of trying to balance flesh-and-blood interests against the limitations of the social and natural world. These kind of grassroots organization are often the best way to do that, although they are not the only way. (There are lots of ways to accomplish that kind of thing through informal networks and relationships of love or solidarity, apart from formally organized institutions. On the other hand, sometimes there are also benefits to dealing with a situation impersonally. Etc.) In any case, I certainly think that unions, mutual aid associations, and co-ops are all vital institutions that are part of the process of discovering and negotiating humane outcomes in a free society.

I think Tucker agrees with you too. He was simply more interested in a different question — the question of ensuring the framework of freedom, without saying as much about the details of organization within the scope of that freedom (besides his singular interest in the technicalities of mutual banking and credit). Maybe he was wrong about that; I’m inclined to think that it made him miss some important points, but also freed him up to see some other important points.

Unions are supposed to be anticompetitive. That is the whole point. Co-ops are supposed to be an alternative to competition.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “competition,” doesn’t it, and who you take to be competing? Unions and co-ops are aimed at redirecting energy away from one form of competition (the scramble for artificially scarce access to capital and wages). Not necessarily to eradicate all forms of competition from society. I imagine there will still be chess tournaments in a free and equal society; or if there won’t be, it won’t be because unions have any special concern with the matter. More seriously, there may also be open processes of discovery for people to determine who can make the best use of scarce natural resources, which come to consensus, not by means of ensuring conformity before-the-fact, but rather by means of letting a lot of people have at it and see whose projects work out to be the best and most sustainable But that is all Tucker means by economic competition: the opening up of production and social relationships to wide-ranging experimentation. The point actually is not cooperation-within-competition; it’s competition as a means of reconciling interests, coming to social consensus through experimentation and open debate, ultimately competition within, and as a means to, discovery and cooperation.

Anarcho:

Tucker, unlike Proudhon, was not particularly interested in co-operatives ….

Depends on what you mean by “co-operatives,” I suppose. Tucker’s central economic proposal was the creation of a Mutual Bank, which was supposed to be a credit cooperative owned and operated by the people using it Tucker was sympathetic to, but generally not much interested in, the cooperative movement outside of the realm of banking, but to describe this as a difference between American and European mutualism would make sense only if Tucker were the only American mutualist, or if most American mutualists shared his views. But Tucker’s studied disinterest was in part a reaction against the earlier American mutualists (e.g. Warren), who could hardly talk about anything other than forming co-ops and intentional communities. Tucker’s views on the matter were also different from those of, e.g., Ingalls, Lum, Labadie, and not to mention contemporary American mutualists like Shawn, Kevin, et al.

And I should also note that Proudhon, unlike Tucker, recognised the negative effects of competition ….

Well, he also considered competition to be among “the principal forms of activity” of the “organization, which is as essential to society as it is incompatible with the present system.” Of course, he recognizes that it’s potentially dangerous. (For Proudhon, just about everything is potentially dangerous.) I don’t know if that’s all you meant to say, or if you meant to portray his view as more resolutely negative than just that. If the former, I agree; if the latter, I don’t.

… and argued for socio-economic institutions (such as the agro-industrial federation) to stop mutualism descending back into capitalism.

Seems to me that the Mutual Bank, and defense associations limiting themselves to occupancy-and-use rules for land tenure, are both pretty clearly intended as social institutions to prevent a free market economy from being captured by usury.

Proudhon was in favour of markets he was not into free markets and stated there was a need to regulate them by mutualist institutions, unlike Tucker.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. If the suggestion is that the kind of mutualist institutions Proudhon suggested would “regulate” markets in such a way as to make them something other than “free markets,” then it seems to me you’re using “free markets” in a peculiar way that has nothing to do with how either Tucker or contemporary market Anarchists use the term. Tucker talks all the time about the reorganization of credit and commerce; like Proudhon, he wanted to accomplish this through economic means rather than by means of laws — although the two differed on the sorts of economic means that needed to be employed. The notion is certainly not that if you remove the monopolies, the problems of usury will simply vanish of their own accord; it’s that the elimination of the monopolies will free people up to devise specific institutions that Tucker recommended as ways of dissolving usury. When he talks about a laissez-faire being the universal rule, he certainly does not mean a market which is free of unions, mutual aid associations, co-ops, or other mutualist institutions! He means a market free of government and legal coercion. Tucker is less emphatic than Proudhon is about what specific institutions he’d like to see take the leading role in such a society — he tends to suggest that whatever institutions take the lead, it will be the ones that best realize equity for workers. But given everything that he says about the organization of markets through mutual credit, it’s hard for me to figure out how he would be proposing markets that are simply “unregulated,” if “regulation” is now being used in a sense that may include not only political coercion but also consensual economic coordination of the kind Proudhon advocates.

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