Mutualism is both the precursor and a civil alternative to government.
Behind every government is a mutual arrangement, or are mutual arrangements, of the rulers taking place, which is, or are, responsible for their collective success. In Rome, it was the Cult of Mithra and other such fraternities. In America, it is Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, Oddfellows, Ku Klux Klan, B'nai B'rith, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Phi Beta Delta, Nations of Gods and Earths, etc. Fraternities, or mutualistic associations, such as these, have always had influence on the rulers of the nation. The United States was initiated by Freemasons in the Saint Andrews Lodge and their more exoteric presence, the Sons of Liberty. It would later be infiltrated by Rosicrucian, Jesuit, and Martinist influences.
But mutualism is also the source of anti-state sentiment and, indeed, anarchism, the belief that state and government are better dealt away with. It was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a mutualist, who was first to declare himself an anarchist as such. Proudhon did this upon the example established by the prior mutualists led by Pierre Charnier and the mutuals surrounding his Society of Mutual Duty, who had attempted to establish a syndicalist republic in the Canuts Rebellion, the first seriously organized workers’ revolt in modern times.
This being so, mutualism is both the proto-state potential that the state relies on to exist and the state's antithesis, but is not its actualization. That is, mutualism precedes and concludes the state, but cannot define a state. It cannot define a state because a state includes parties to whom it is not voluntarily subscribed and reciprocally benevolent toward. What is the state? A monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. As such, it can use legitimate violence and you cannot, and, by extension, it can do illegitimate violence and you cannot stop it with legitimate violence, lest it cease to be a state in losing its essence. While the state is a mutual institution for the rulers, and owes its power to the mutualism behind its being, its essence is not mutuality, but agonism (and antagonism). The state is characterized, then, by a conflict of interests, the absence of mutuality. Still, every state depends upon at least one center of mutual aid to exist, but finds also in mutual aid a source of competition.
While owing its being to mutuality, the state is the infringement of mutuality, the conflict resulting from the absence of mutuality, and must fall to mutuality. It should be clear that statism, then, is pathogenic. Mutualism is the ground state of society, an equilibrium at the best that can be achieved, the attempt to do better being an absurdity leading to harm through disbalance.
When one fraternity—one instance of mutualism— is behind the state, competition is minimized, but multiple organized factions in a state leads to a mutual exchange of blows only, to agonism. In such an arrangement, a republican or democratic state, those who govern are also governed, leading to the Rule of Law. But so long as that law represents the interests of usurers, it will be the Law of Usury, the second Golden Rule, "those with the gold make the rules."
It is theoretically possible for mutualism to supplant the state altogether. This would require the absence of usury, so as to allow an equilibrium to be established not only between the rich and powerful, but between all who are concerned. Such a condition would put all of humanity under the Rule of Law, that law being the True Law of Nature rather than the fallible and breakable, false law decreed by human beings serving as government within the state. Humans might continue to have their codes and statutes, but within the context of voluntary, consensual associations. All legitimate functions of the state can be performed by civil society in such a fashion.
States today, engaged in the Great Game and under the influence of synarchism, have taken efforts to maintain a balance of powers, such that the focus can be placed not on disputes with one another, but on maintaining control over their subservient populations. Likewise, agents of civil society can carry on in the efforts to maintain a sociable equilibrium. In fact, this effort has already been attempted, and was the cause of Marxism and international, synarchic globalism as a response. This effort was mutualist, international syndicalism, particularly in its early years, before Marx. After Marx and Bakunin's usurpation and polarization of the International, the mutualists' revolutionary core declined significantly, leaving behind a largely reformist, and so inconsequential, majority that continued for some time, and an increasingly polarized anarchist segment split between notions of individualism and collectivism.
But a revolutionary, anarchist current of mutualism remained, representing the original as it had evolved from out of the earlier libertarian socialists. The revolutionary mutualists had previously agreed on two fundamental things. Individuals must be free insofar as their freedoms do not contradict ("equal freedom"), and all should have common access to the Earth. As Proudon had made clear, the rights belonging to the factor of labor were individual, while the right to the Earth was collective (common). Between these, all else was subject to individual scrutiny and subject to contractual agreement. On these fundamentals, anarchists of all stripes, and not just the remaining mutualists, could agree. Such contracts took the form of unions, cooperatives, mutuals, reciprocals, and other member-governed and self-managed associations, including even some attempts at voluntary communes.
For thousands of years the ruling class has collaborated in their plunder, and synarchism would see that plunder put to concerted use, with attempts to buy off and persuade the revolutionaries through domestic and industrial technologies, mass propaganda, sponsored arts, useful idiocy in education, media manipulation, passive entertainment, plastic Chinese garbage, social programs and welfare, initiations into secret rites and elite fraternities, and more. The mutualist movement faced international suppression, namestealing, coordinated misdirection, co-optation, and more. But its auxillaries continued on in the form of elite fraternities and clubs, such as those named, engaging one another through the state and agreeing in their class interests primarily on who the shared enemy is: the anarchist mutualist.
There are many hollowed-out relics and namestolen frauds of economic mutualism, such as the majority of today’s mutuals, cooperatives, unions, etc., which have lost their class consciousness and revolutionary character in the case they have not been demutualized or shut down altogether. Labor leaders were co-opted by yellow, business unionism or as bureaucrats and managers according to the corruptibility, and "cooperatives" started operating upon the basis of boards of directors nominated by committees controlled by the boards, establishing interlocking boards of directors to the benefit of the emerging techno-managerial class.
The ruling class collectively invested their fortunes and plunders in this concerted effort of corruption, and for some time it has worked. The neoliberal era represents a time when the money is running out, however (leading to impossible attempts at investment and plunder), and so the social programs-- such as social security, a co-optation of mutual insurance-- have been or are being cut. Political realists warn of the realities of states losing power to non-state forces. Is the past history enough to condemn anarchist mutualism, or might we try again? With the benevolent aspects of state-socialism in remission, might libertarian socialism once more establish itself as a competing interest of civil society against the encroachments of the state?