When Pierre-Josef Proudhon first postulated his anarchism, it was predicated on a philosophy he labeled mutualism. Whether Proudhon, himself, knew it or not, this was nothing new. His mutualism philosophy was just a contemporary reification of the same philosophical current that inspired Socrates and the Gnostics in there time — and mutualism was already ancient, then. Mutualism was the first social philosophy of our nomad ancestors, and continues to be both the simplest and most equitable. It demands active cooperation and accepting personal responsibility of each individual but, in return, it promises total liberation for all.
Contemporary anarchists have fallen into a dangerous predicament of idolizing theory. This descent into passive dogmatic adherence is a gateway to failure, schism, and authoritarianism. Obviously this is nobody’s desire, so we must look beyond changing the ideological theory that society is organized under. The shortcomings of theory are evident in their failure to accommodate both objective changes outside the scope of society and subjective changes within it. The solution is not to expand or change the theory, but to move beyond theory and praxis, entirely.
What we need is an active, flexible, and evolving approach to structuring society. We must move beyond proscribing a static social hypostate and begin prescribing a dynamic social philosophy — a pragmatic, accessible tool that everyone can apply in any situation, that is agnostic but not dismissive of subjectivity and which can provide a foundation for both global mutualism and local idealism in the inevitable post-state, post-capitalist future. This is the beginning of that chain — the proverbial root of the vine, so-to-speak, where the seed of mutualism has germinated and the first fruits are blossoming (to rehash a popular euphemism).