MUTUALISM

A provocative call for a third path, somewhere between capitalism and socialism, for the workers of today.

The founder of the Freelance Union and former board chair of the New York Federal Reserve, Horowitz opens with an evocation of Charlie Chaplin’s harried assembly-line worker in Modern Times. However, the factory is not the arena of the modern labor struggle. Instead, it’s a workplace populated by “independent workers engaged in nontraditional employment relationships,” whether life coaches or editors or Lyft drivers. Within this decade, writes the author, half of the American workforce will be made up of these independent workers, who lack the social safety net that traditional workplaces and the government used to provide. The collapse of that net, she writes evenhandedly, is the result of hostility from the political right and neglect from a left that abandoned its labor base. Building on the union-building ideals of the early labor movements and French syndicalist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s notions of mutual aid, Horowitz proposes that if such a safety net is to be woven anew, it will have to be done by the workers themselves through building “mutualism” via organizations that “have a social purpose: to solve a social problem for a community,” but that at the same time have a well-formed business model and structures of governance that will outlast individual founders. The author’s grandmother, an immigrant labor rights activist, was vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union a century ago. That organization, Horowitz writes, founded health care clinics, built cooperative housing centers, organized credit unions, and accomplished many other projects that later fell into the hands of the state and, now nonexistent or in disrepair, have to be remade or “built from scratch.” Government has a role in supporting mutualist organizations through reforms in the tax code and other regulations, but the institutions themselves must be worker-built—and built to last.

Rules for radicals, with a solid vision of a self-directed future that labor activists will find promising.