Mutualism

Is about:
Revolting without violence.

Restructuring from the bottom up

Promotion of ideas outside established frameworks.

Creating a new and vibrant artisan class

Taking the economy back from the money vacs, supermart,supercar and superbank.

All the troubles in the world can be traced to the escalation of the gap between rich and poor.

Is that true? Yes, to an extent. We tend to think of rich and poor as more or less money. However I would rather be financially poor than culturally poor. And as we see all t0o often the world is full of people who have a lot of money but no sense of the aesthetic. If you don't know what to buy there's no point having money.

Thr reverse situation is interesting. I know women who dress with great 'class'. They look at a rack of second-hand clothes and they 'see' what has value for them. This is a very rare gift nowdays. Most women buy what they are 'told' to buy. That is, what is displayed in advertising images; whether that be the soap opera, the magazine or the poster. In fact the most potent of advertising is often the price tag. It must be the best because it is the most expensive.

Fashion...we look back at fashion, Elizabethan, Tudor, Victorian and we can see that styles existed for years, even centuries. Guess what, fashion no longer exists, it hasn't for decades. A look at the worlds catwalks shows wildly disparate designs from people who's only commonality is their eccentricity. And yet there are still 'fashion mags' kids, especially, are still conned into buying what is 'in'. But all that matters is that it looks good.

That's it for clothing, what I am on about here is quality of life being a completely different thing from quantity of money. The happiness project, (www.happiness.co.uk) tells us that the happiest people on this planet are Eritreans. Eritrea is of course one of the (if not 'the') poorest nations on earth. But it is not their poverty that makes them happy it is their culture. Thry have a culture based on looking out for each other mutualaid.

When Charles Darwin wrote 'Origin of the species' another man was extremely well known in London society who's name has now slipped away from the pages of history. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who had turned his back on all the wealth his position afforded him, to take on the task of producing a fair and egalitarean society as the leading anarchist theoretician of his time. His polemic work Mutual Aid, very well recieved amongst the intellectuals of the day, suggested that although Darwin was right about his evolutionary theory he was wrong to ascribe 'survival of the fittest' as the mechanism of evolution.
'My own observations' he said 'lead me to the conclusion that 'Mutual Aid' within and between species is as much an engine of evolution as 'Survival of the fittest'.

Kropotkin's work was suppressed because it did not suit the capitalist project, which committed itself to a policy of 'social Darwinism' that lead directly and inevitably to the third reich; and beyond to the present day.