Mutualism
An encounter-based, non-coercive political orientation grounded in free sharing of goods between peers without basis in centralized institutions. Distinguished from communism (state-planned economy enforcing hegemonic enclosure through implicit or explicit violence) and from ideological capitalism (which at its worst depends on state coercive intervention to fulfill missions of monopolization), mutualism is the extitutional form of cooperative behavior — a characteristic of any free social space, making it “universal enough among humans that to suppress or eradicate it totally is an ideological fallacy.”
Mutualism is proposed as a rich political orientation for Ethereum for three reasons:
- Operational rather than ideological: it finds spontaneous opportunities for association and alliance through free encounter in extitutional space, rather than endorsing universalizing legalistic or rights-based models of political change.
- Parallelist: pacifistic and mutually coherent with both social liberalism and libertarianism; associations, cooperatives, and unions can be established within diverse contexts and are robustly compatible with markets.
- Ontologically open: sidestepping the ontological content of rights-based or legalistic regimes, the consent-based free association mutualism endorses is an imaginative project that could include diverse minds from the greater-than-human world.
Mutualism as political orientation requires no ideological allegiance — it is a practical, empirical politics of encounter rather than a doctrine. It does not appeal to coercive centralized bodies to enforce or maintain cooperative behavior over and above competitive or rivalrous coordination markets.