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Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up
A profound look at the crisis of work and the collapse of the safety net, and a vision for a better way forward, rooted in America’s cooperative spirit, from the founder of the Freelancers Union
“Read this essential book to see how we can and must build the future.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin
It’s not capitalism and it’s not socialism. It’s the future.
The twentieth century changed every facet of life for American how much they could expect to earn and what they had the right to demand. But by 2027, a majority of Americans—from low-wage service workers to white-collar professionals—won’t be traditional employees. Benefits like paid sick leave, pensions, 401(k)s, disability insurance, and health care will be nearly extinct. To meet the needs of this new generation of workers, the government has done almost nothing.
In this book, labor lawyer, former chair of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, and MacArthur “genius” Sara Horowitz brings us a solution to the current crisis of work that’s rooted in the best of American traditions, which she calls mutualism . Horowitz shows how the future of our economic safety net rests on this approach and demonstrates how mutualist organizations have helped us solve common problems in the past and are now quietly driving rural and urban economies alike all over the world, inspired not by for-profit corporations but by labor unions and trade associations, religious organizations and mutual aid societies, and vital social movements from women’s suffrage to civil rights.
Mutualism is for anyone who feels that the system is not working for them, and is looking for a new way to build collaboratively, create the new American social contract, and prosper in the twenty-first century.
“Read this essential book to see how we can and must build the future.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin
It’s not capitalism and it’s not socialism. It’s the future.
The twentieth century changed every facet of life for American how much they could expect to earn and what they had the right to demand. But by 2027, a majority of Americans—from low-wage service workers to white-collar professionals—won’t be traditional employees. Benefits like paid sick leave, pensions, 401(k)s, disability insurance, and health care will be nearly extinct. To meet the needs of this new generation of workers, the government has done almost nothing.
In this book, labor lawyer, former chair of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, and MacArthur “genius” Sara Horowitz brings us a solution to the current crisis of work that’s rooted in the best of American traditions, which she calls mutualism . Horowitz shows how the future of our economic safety net rests on this approach and demonstrates how mutualist organizations have helped us solve common problems in the past and are now quietly driving rural and urban economies alike all over the world, inspired not by for-profit corporations but by labor unions and trade associations, religious organizations and mutual aid societies, and vital social movements from women’s suffrage to civil rights.
Mutualism is for anyone who feels that the system is not working for them, and is looking for a new way to build collaboratively, create the new American social contract, and prosper in the twenty-first century.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published February 16, 2021
30 people are currently reading
578 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
December 26, 2022
If this book was a retelling of the history of the labor movement in the United States, it would be a pretty good book. If this book was a memoir about Horowitz’s experience in organizing her freelancers union, it would be a pretty good book. But Horowitz tries to stretch this “ideology” into something it falls absolutely short of.
There are a lot of good point being made in this book, the importance of community, the importance of unions in the American economic system, and most importantly the importance of working socially to produce government changes.
But it’s Horowitz’s super fast and loose definition of mutualist organizations- in which she includes only organisations with hierarchical structures that actively make money/participate in the formal economy- that outweigh all of these positive points. She actively ignores/discredits the hundreds if nothing thousands of mutual aid organizations that exist/have existed sustainably while organizing based on consensus and refusal of all capitalist models. At the end of the day, this books main thesis seemed to be that we can solve the natural problems of capitalism by just scaling down capitalism to community level (and then scaling it back up?).
Overall do I think the world Horowitz dreams of is better than our current reality? Yes absolutely. Is it a world I would want to live in if I had my pick? No absolutely not. The last point I’ll make… how how how in the modern economy we’re living in could you seriously try to make the argument that fighting for union based health insurance as the ultimate outcome is better than a universal system that has no user cost…?!
There are a lot of good point being made in this book, the importance of community, the importance of unions in the American economic system, and most importantly the importance of working socially to produce government changes.
But it’s Horowitz’s super fast and loose definition of mutualist organizations- in which she includes only organisations with hierarchical structures that actively make money/participate in the formal economy- that outweigh all of these positive points. She actively ignores/discredits the hundreds if nothing thousands of mutual aid organizations that exist/have existed sustainably while organizing based on consensus and refusal of all capitalist models. At the end of the day, this books main thesis seemed to be that we can solve the natural problems of capitalism by just scaling down capitalism to community level (and then scaling it back up?).
Overall do I think the world Horowitz dreams of is better than our current reality? Yes absolutely. Is it a world I would want to live in if I had my pick? No absolutely not. The last point I’ll make… how how how in the modern economy we’re living in could you seriously try to make the argument that fighting for union based health insurance as the ultimate outcome is better than a universal system that has no user cost…?!
March 6, 2021
Mutualism is a concept that, tragically, so few people know about today. As the author, Sara Horowitz, explains, mutualism is the space that has disappeared thanks to big-government-is-always-the-solution progressives and money-money-only-money conservatives: a mutually reinforcing, pro-the-people fabric woven by benign capitalists with the intent of improving communities through sustainable and ethical growth.
I found the book a really insightful critique of progressivism, though that critique was neither from left nor right — curiously, the political spectrum has kind of forgotten about the labor movement and organic communities altogether. Hopefully this book and Horowitz’s work can help change that.
Mutualism is a crucial leg of the nation’s economy that has been hollowed out and rotten in the last half century. In other areas of the world, Horowitz showed us mutualism flourishing with beautiful results: her sections on Basque Country in Spain and Emilia-Romagna in Italy were some of my favorites in the book. If we could try to revitalize mutualist communities in America and import best practices from elsewhere, we could start to heal the long-term health of our economy and the fabric of our communities.
I am very glad I read this book and want to explore mutualism at greater length in the future. However, some sections of this book were quite repetitive and in fact, the book would have been much better if it were 50-100 pages shorter; almost a manifesto or pamphlet rather than a proper book.
Highly recommend for all the aspiring community builders out there! This book is chock full of insight and hope.
I found the book a really insightful critique of progressivism, though that critique was neither from left nor right — curiously, the political spectrum has kind of forgotten about the labor movement and organic communities altogether. Hopefully this book and Horowitz’s work can help change that.
Mutualism is a crucial leg of the nation’s economy that has been hollowed out and rotten in the last half century. In other areas of the world, Horowitz showed us mutualism flourishing with beautiful results: her sections on Basque Country in Spain and Emilia-Romagna in Italy were some of my favorites in the book. If we could try to revitalize mutualist communities in America and import best practices from elsewhere, we could start to heal the long-term health of our economy and the fabric of our communities.
I am very glad I read this book and want to explore mutualism at greater length in the future. However, some sections of this book were quite repetitive and in fact, the book would have been much better if it were 50-100 pages shorter; almost a manifesto or pamphlet rather than a proper book.
Highly recommend for all the aspiring community builders out there! This book is chock full of insight and hope.
May 20, 2021
This book is a fine--though at times somewhat repetitive and also somewhat random--smash-up of memoir, how-to book, and socio-economic critique. That last part is probably the weakest part, but even that isn't bad, just lacking. Sara Horowitz's life experiences, as the descendant of pioneering union organizers in the United States, and as someone who has had decades of experience with dealing with changes in the workplace and the challenges to organizing today, give her plenty of perspective on what what she thinks "mutualist ecosystems," as she puts it, involve. Her vision is of multiple locally and regionally organized social resources, built by and run by the people who make use of them, employing experts (or educating their own) as necessary, all re-enforcing and supporting one another, and thereby not being dependent upon either the state or upon the philanthropy of the rich. Her stories about figuring out how to establish revenue streams, identify and push for legal recognition, and handle internal dynamics, all so that mutualist banks, insurance companies, hospitals, parks, etc., can actually be sustained over time, are really quite fascinating.
On the other hand, her insistence that there is nothing "socialist" about mutualism is annoying, as it simply shows her lack of critical engagement with the literature on anarchism, or even just with much of radical history she draws upon (she has a whole chapter on Bayard Rustin, and aligns him completely with her version of mutualism, leaving democratic socialism out of it entirely. From multiple side comments throughout the book, it's clear that her own education in organizing has resulted in several bridges which she may have once been willing to traverse to the Democratic party and liberal activists having been burned (she was furious at how the compromises necessary for the passage of the Affordable Care Act ended in making things worse for the temp and contract workers she'd been able to organize), so I suspect part of her rather stereotypical attacks on a Democratic party which came to focus on welfare for the poor as opposed to empowerment for all workers is the result of her own specific history. But none of the takes away from the thoughtful ideas she presents, and the smart advice she offers.
On the other hand, her insistence that there is nothing "socialist" about mutualism is annoying, as it simply shows her lack of critical engagement with the literature on anarchism, or even just with much of radical history she draws upon (she has a whole chapter on Bayard Rustin, and aligns him completely with her version of mutualism, leaving democratic socialism out of it entirely. From multiple side comments throughout the book, it's clear that her own education in organizing has resulted in several bridges which she may have once been willing to traverse to the Democratic party and liberal activists having been burned (she was furious at how the compromises necessary for the passage of the Affordable Care Act ended in making things worse for the temp and contract workers she'd been able to organize), so I suspect part of her rather stereotypical attacks on a Democratic party which came to focus on welfare for the poor as opposed to empowerment for all workers is the result of her own specific history. But none of the takes away from the thoughtful ideas she presents, and the smart advice she offers.
March 16, 2021
Stories of communities of workers abandoned by government and employers alike self-organizing their own safety nets and interdependent support ecosystems. Forget about expecting the government to solve the problems of precarity, Horowitz says, and instead just solve the problems locally. Worker cooperatives are the vision here
Explicitly embraces of Proudhonian anarchism and rejecting government-led solutions as exemplars of the failed Marxism of the 20th century. Assumes that neither government nor capitalist employers are redeemable. Basically accepts the ‘public interest theory’ calumny that government should be assumed to fail agent-principal problems unless proven otherwise.
So what does Horowitz’s consider the role of government? “To define the mutualist sector [and] help the mutualist sector grow.” (181) How? By providing legal frameworks that recognize and support mutualism and also by furnishing seed capital for cooperative enterprises. Economic development and sovereign wealth funds could focus on cooperative rather than privately owned small businesses.
In sum, this is a book that one might best describe as pushing for a “left neoliberalism.”
Explicitly embraces of Proudhonian anarchism and rejecting government-led solutions as exemplars of the failed Marxism of the 20th century. Assumes that neither government nor capitalist employers are redeemable. Basically accepts the ‘public interest theory’ calumny that government should be assumed to fail agent-principal problems unless proven otherwise.
So what does Horowitz’s consider the role of government? “To define the mutualist sector [and] help the mutualist sector grow.” (181) How? By providing legal frameworks that recognize and support mutualism and also by furnishing seed capital for cooperative enterprises. Economic development and sovereign wealth funds could focus on cooperative rather than privately owned small businesses.
In sum, this is a book that one might best describe as pushing for a “left neoliberalism.”
April 26, 2021
All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/.
TL;DR REVIEW:
Mutualism was a fascinating, approachable book made me think about the future and the safety net we can build for ourselves in a lot of new ways.
For you if: You’d like to learn about a possible middle ground between the way we’re leaving people behind and ditching capitalism completely.
FULL REVIEW
First of all, thank you to Random House for sending me a free copy of this book. I’m really glad that I read it.
When I heard about Mutualism, I was expecting a book all about mutual aid (which has exploded in the past year, thanks to the pandemic). But while it definitely does talk about mutual aid, there’s also a lot more to it. This book is also about the changing workforce (ie freelancing) and how labor laws and practices can foster a new kind of safety net (insurance, retirement, etc) for all workers.
In the early 20th century, Sara Horowitz’s family built one of the largest unions in the country. Later, she built the Freelancers Union, which today has 500,000 members. She brings that experience together with her labor relations and law degrees to envision a future where we build organizations that meet people’s needs over the long term, with patient, reliable income streams.
On the left, you hear two extremes: the government must provide EVERYTHING, or we must abolish capitalism completely. I found this look at mutualism — legally recognized, self-sufficient organizations that work with the economy rather than against it — as a possible middle-ground solution to be both refreshing and hopeful.
But it doesn’t feel like an economics lesson. It’s approachable and readable and personal. A lot of it really resonated with me, and I learned a ton.
TL;DR REVIEW:
Mutualism was a fascinating, approachable book made me think about the future and the safety net we can build for ourselves in a lot of new ways.
For you if: You’d like to learn about a possible middle ground between the way we’re leaving people behind and ditching capitalism completely.
FULL REVIEW
First of all, thank you to Random House for sending me a free copy of this book. I’m really glad that I read it.
When I heard about Mutualism, I was expecting a book all about mutual aid (which has exploded in the past year, thanks to the pandemic). But while it definitely does talk about mutual aid, there’s also a lot more to it. This book is also about the changing workforce (ie freelancing) and how labor laws and practices can foster a new kind of safety net (insurance, retirement, etc) for all workers.
In the early 20th century, Sara Horowitz’s family built one of the largest unions in the country. Later, she built the Freelancers Union, which today has 500,000 members. She brings that experience together with her labor relations and law degrees to envision a future where we build organizations that meet people’s needs over the long term, with patient, reliable income streams.
On the left, you hear two extremes: the government must provide EVERYTHING, or we must abolish capitalism completely. I found this look at mutualism — legally recognized, self-sufficient organizations that work with the economy rather than against it — as a possible middle-ground solution to be both refreshing and hopeful.
But it doesn’t feel like an economics lesson. It’s approachable and readable and personal. A lot of it really resonated with me, and I learned a ton.
January 13, 2023
seemed ultimately repetitive and offered little of what I was looking for which was actionable steps for the average community. very labor focused. would like to try and reread if I find the time, but did not keep my interest. skimmed through the remainder of the book, but DNF
Read
April 18, 2021DNF early on. This is important information, but I get easily scatterbrained by economics especially in audio form. Mainly leaving this review in case I ask myself later if I've read this before.
April 4, 2021
I've been reading this book among books that are harder to read, and which felt more compelling. Those books have big messages which hit hard. This book feels so gentle that I wasn't quite drawn in. It reads so easily that I would only turn to it after being exhausted by the other books.
Now that I'm finished reading Mutualism, I feel vaguely ashamed at myself for the way I fall into the trap of thinking that only books that are hard to read can change my mind or my life.
Here's what happened toward the end of my read: I started to let go of a lot of anger. Full disclosure: I personally know quite a few one percenters, and I don't hate them. I might sometimes get angry at them in my mind in private. Only once have I hurled "one-percenter" as an epithet. That was at someone who laughed at herself for never locking her doors. I wasn't angry. We were both joking, but I felt bad about it afterward. This is a person who has all the right thinking and does a lot more good for our local world than I could ever do.
I hate the system which allows such wealth to concentrate, and a lot of the time I seem to want to strike up arguments against any merit my friends sometimes seem to claim about how they got their money. Mostly, they agree with me that it was luck. Mostly.
My mind is not quite strong enough to hold onto ideology, but I do feel outrage when I read ideological tracts which channel my outrage by giving it some sort of object. This book does none of that. At first, that bothered me, because how could Sara Horowitz be so naive as to miss the evil of Google (as Google evolved under Big Boy Schmidt), and of tech more generally? How can she work alongside bankers?
I know tech, I work well in tech, but mostly I've come to see it as a wealth pump up and away from workers and from local. I tend to disparage the youthful startup lust for quick riches, based on some libertarian bullshit that the economy is never a zero-sum game. It just feels like it is when your neighborhood is crumbling around you and the other half is in your face all day, by the grace of ever present ever growing digital media.
But Horowitz reminds me to keep my focus local, and to keep my eye on who might be my partners in solving local problems. Problems at a local level know no ideology. A profitable local newspaper used to be a mutualist business. What happened? How did everyone get so nationalized in our outrage? We think we know who to hate (or sometimes to love) based on their profiles and their affiliations even though we don't know them at all.
I am also too familiar by friendships across my life, with Horowitz's background; Jewish labor activist. I still do wonder how she overcame her outrage, since it's hard for me to imagine it absent from her life. I kept looking for the easy hit of outrage here. Something to get my blood boiling. That would also fill me with cynical despair that anything ever can or will be done to make life better for working people.
I'm outraged by Google and Uber and Air BnB and Amazon and all the rest who become wealthy on the backs of the precariat. The gig workers and people who have to rent what they once owned to stay afloat. Undermining "real" commerce all the way. Contractors without benefit.
Horowitz seems not to be so bothered. I think that's because she's actually done the work of helping out gig workers, and has also found that some of the well-endowed were interested to help her out in that labor.
Having finished The WEIRDEST People in the World which did, in fact, answer one of the most compelling questions in my own life (why did the industrial and scientific revolutions not occur in China) and after reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing which provides a big picture statistical argument for optimism, I returned here.
It finally hit me, upon return, that this is the bigger book. The whole point here is that there is no room for outrage. We are (myself certainly included) now paralyzed by it. I and my Jewish labor activist friends are all outraged by Republicans and all the true believers in fundamentalist capitalism who seem all about arrogating power to the one percent. And they seem outraged at us; they call us socialists, as though that were a disparaging epithet.
Meanwhile, along comes Sara Horowitz with a much longer view of economic history, which merges with her very personal history as the offspring of a significant labor family. She mildly suggests that ideology can always cause local harm , no matter from which side it comes (Obamacare, almost as an overlooked footnote, destroyed the insurance business she ran for freelancers). And that local problems invite people together with varying ideologies who have a problem to solve.
I only wonder why she doesn't celebrate her Buffalo education in law. Are we that insignificant here in Buffalo? I think I must know which labor law firm hired her as a contractor. Perhaps she is protecting them from the irony of their practice. I was working the salt mines of network engineering at UB Law when she was going to law school. We may even have crossed paths.
Or did I quit that work before she got there? We were a productive bunch, but along came a manager who seemed to need to micromanage us out of any productivity. I've watched the salary for my old position plummet as tech has become commodified, and those who support it just a new class of worker to be exploited.
Well, sure, nobody boasts of Buffalo. Perhaps we are a mutualist backwater, despite our labor history. But hey, I don't wish to live where the one percenters wish to live. They get their wishes. I get real. I don't need no stinkin' megayacht or some mansion stopping up the places where the rest of us like to visit once in a while. I'm proud to call Buffalo home. Oooh. I sound angry.
What Horowitz writes about is very real, and very timely. I've called it the sequel to The Upswing. That book leaves one hopeful, but without any specific advice, except to suggest that we may be pending another Progressive era, which would include all the mutualist organizations (Putnam didn't call them that, but that's what they were) which accompanied that earlier era.
This book gets down to the nitty gritty of what must be done. Again, and very quietly, the author avoids using such terms as capitalism or labor or contractor as one-dimensional terms. There is a powerful ideology here, but it must be engendered more by the synagogue which she still attends than the schools she's attended. She's more interested in scale than in ultimate truth, and more interested in tracking to whom benefit accrues than in the economic structures which deliver them.
So, to keep on message here (which I clearly have trouble doing) life is always rough. Sometimes your fellow humans will create falsifiable ideologies to comfort themselves in their fantasy addictions. Sometimes they will believe crazy things, and even kick and scream that they are right. That seems to be built-in to humanity.
But as the cultural evolutionist Joseph Henrich explains to us in his WEIRD thesis, we didn't ever earn our advantages. We have no cultural "merit." We lucked into our modernity, our technology, our nuclear physics and our space-shots. The work - real human labor - is in making good from those gifts, and not to destroy the world by them.
After all, as wise people have always said, 'you can't take it with you.' And also for the record, and I may be alone in this, I don't and never have hated China, no matter how pissed I was when they decided to go all automobile on their people.
I'm happy when I travel to China. My friends there seem happy too. Sure they grumble about those in charge. Who doesn't? They just don't do it publicly. There's too much work to do. Too much life to live.
Now that I'm finished reading Mutualism, I feel vaguely ashamed at myself for the way I fall into the trap of thinking that only books that are hard to read can change my mind or my life.
Here's what happened toward the end of my read: I started to let go of a lot of anger. Full disclosure: I personally know quite a few one percenters, and I don't hate them. I might sometimes get angry at them in my mind in private. Only once have I hurled "one-percenter" as an epithet. That was at someone who laughed at herself for never locking her doors. I wasn't angry. We were both joking, but I felt bad about it afterward. This is a person who has all the right thinking and does a lot more good for our local world than I could ever do.
I hate the system which allows such wealth to concentrate, and a lot of the time I seem to want to strike up arguments against any merit my friends sometimes seem to claim about how they got their money. Mostly, they agree with me that it was luck. Mostly.
My mind is not quite strong enough to hold onto ideology, but I do feel outrage when I read ideological tracts which channel my outrage by giving it some sort of object. This book does none of that. At first, that bothered me, because how could Sara Horowitz be so naive as to miss the evil of Google (as Google evolved under Big Boy Schmidt), and of tech more generally? How can she work alongside bankers?
I know tech, I work well in tech, but mostly I've come to see it as a wealth pump up and away from workers and from local. I tend to disparage the youthful startup lust for quick riches, based on some libertarian bullshit that the economy is never a zero-sum game. It just feels like it is when your neighborhood is crumbling around you and the other half is in your face all day, by the grace of ever present ever growing digital media.
But Horowitz reminds me to keep my focus local, and to keep my eye on who might be my partners in solving local problems. Problems at a local level know no ideology. A profitable local newspaper used to be a mutualist business. What happened? How did everyone get so nationalized in our outrage? We think we know who to hate (or sometimes to love) based on their profiles and their affiliations even though we don't know them at all.
I am also too familiar by friendships across my life, with Horowitz's background; Jewish labor activist. I still do wonder how she overcame her outrage, since it's hard for me to imagine it absent from her life. I kept looking for the easy hit of outrage here. Something to get my blood boiling. That would also fill me with cynical despair that anything ever can or will be done to make life better for working people.
I'm outraged by Google and Uber and Air BnB and Amazon and all the rest who become wealthy on the backs of the precariat. The gig workers and people who have to rent what they once owned to stay afloat. Undermining "real" commerce all the way. Contractors without benefit.
Horowitz seems not to be so bothered. I think that's because she's actually done the work of helping out gig workers, and has also found that some of the well-endowed were interested to help her out in that labor.
Having finished The WEIRDEST People in the World which did, in fact, answer one of the most compelling questions in my own life (why did the industrial and scientific revolutions not occur in China) and after reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing which provides a big picture statistical argument for optimism, I returned here.
It finally hit me, upon return, that this is the bigger book. The whole point here is that there is no room for outrage. We are (myself certainly included) now paralyzed by it. I and my Jewish labor activist friends are all outraged by Republicans and all the true believers in fundamentalist capitalism who seem all about arrogating power to the one percent. And they seem outraged at us; they call us socialists, as though that were a disparaging epithet.
Meanwhile, along comes Sara Horowitz with a much longer view of economic history, which merges with her very personal history as the offspring of a significant labor family. She mildly suggests that ideology can always cause local harm , no matter from which side it comes (Obamacare, almost as an overlooked footnote, destroyed the insurance business she ran for freelancers). And that local problems invite people together with varying ideologies who have a problem to solve.
I only wonder why she doesn't celebrate her Buffalo education in law. Are we that insignificant here in Buffalo? I think I must know which labor law firm hired her as a contractor. Perhaps she is protecting them from the irony of their practice. I was working the salt mines of network engineering at UB Law when she was going to law school. We may even have crossed paths.
Or did I quit that work before she got there? We were a productive bunch, but along came a manager who seemed to need to micromanage us out of any productivity. I've watched the salary for my old position plummet as tech has become commodified, and those who support it just a new class of worker to be exploited.
Well, sure, nobody boasts of Buffalo. Perhaps we are a mutualist backwater, despite our labor history. But hey, I don't wish to live where the one percenters wish to live. They get their wishes. I get real. I don't need no stinkin' megayacht or some mansion stopping up the places where the rest of us like to visit once in a while. I'm proud to call Buffalo home. Oooh. I sound angry.
What Horowitz writes about is very real, and very timely. I've called it the sequel to The Upswing. That book leaves one hopeful, but without any specific advice, except to suggest that we may be pending another Progressive era, which would include all the mutualist organizations (Putnam didn't call them that, but that's what they were) which accompanied that earlier era.
This book gets down to the nitty gritty of what must be done. Again, and very quietly, the author avoids using such terms as capitalism or labor or contractor as one-dimensional terms. There is a powerful ideology here, but it must be engendered more by the synagogue which she still attends than the schools she's attended. She's more interested in scale than in ultimate truth, and more interested in tracking to whom benefit accrues than in the economic structures which deliver them.
So, to keep on message here (which I clearly have trouble doing) life is always rough. Sometimes your fellow humans will create falsifiable ideologies to comfort themselves in their fantasy addictions. Sometimes they will believe crazy things, and even kick and scream that they are right. That seems to be built-in to humanity.
But as the cultural evolutionist Joseph Henrich explains to us in his WEIRD thesis, we didn't ever earn our advantages. We have no cultural "merit." We lucked into our modernity, our technology, our nuclear physics and our space-shots. The work - real human labor - is in making good from those gifts, and not to destroy the world by them.
After all, as wise people have always said, 'you can't take it with you.' And also for the record, and I may be alone in this, I don't and never have hated China, no matter how pissed I was when they decided to go all automobile on their people.
I'm happy when I travel to China. My friends there seem happy too. Sure they grumble about those in charge. Who doesn't? They just don't do it publicly. There's too much work to do. Too much life to live.
July 25, 2021
I appreciated the history of labor and mutualist organizations, but that’s about all I appreciated about this book.
I was in no way convinced by the argument that mutualism (not socialism) is the answer to our problems. The author recognizes that neoliberal capitalism is a problem, but suggests using capitalism to fix capitalism, which makes no sense. Mutualism does mean that workers have control over profit—but I don’t understand why this is somehow better than giving workers the means of production themselves. The idea that we should stop criticizing capitalism and government seems plain defeatist to me. And her rhetoric of personal responsibility and resilience us plain neoliberal ideology. Ultimately, she seems to fundamentally misunderstand communism—in a true communist society, there would be no top-down or forceful revolution; the state would no longer need to exist after the transition occurred, and anyway it would be a more true embodiment of the people than in a capitalist society.
The examples she provided of mutualism did not convince me that it would be worth abandoning a socialist ideal for. We have gaping wealth inequality & deeply engrained racism, which can’t be fixed by local or special-interest groups. We need reparations, and that needs to happen at the government level. (Jeff Bezos won’t willingly give up his stolen profits.)
We also need global reparations, which leads me to another point—the author makes no mention of what this system might mean internationally. Capitalism has unevenly developed the globe, which calls for dramatic redistribution of wealth and resources. Her (brief) use of the kibbutz as a model embodies this failure to account for how wealth has accrued in the West as a direct result of racism and settler colonialism.
It’s a no for me.
I was in no way convinced by the argument that mutualism (not socialism) is the answer to our problems. The author recognizes that neoliberal capitalism is a problem, but suggests using capitalism to fix capitalism, which makes no sense. Mutualism does mean that workers have control over profit—but I don’t understand why this is somehow better than giving workers the means of production themselves. The idea that we should stop criticizing capitalism and government seems plain defeatist to me. And her rhetoric of personal responsibility and resilience us plain neoliberal ideology. Ultimately, she seems to fundamentally misunderstand communism—in a true communist society, there would be no top-down or forceful revolution; the state would no longer need to exist after the transition occurred, and anyway it would be a more true embodiment of the people than in a capitalist society.
The examples she provided of mutualism did not convince me that it would be worth abandoning a socialist ideal for. We have gaping wealth inequality & deeply engrained racism, which can’t be fixed by local or special-interest groups. We need reparations, and that needs to happen at the government level. (Jeff Bezos won’t willingly give up his stolen profits.)
We also need global reparations, which leads me to another point—the author makes no mention of what this system might mean internationally. Capitalism has unevenly developed the globe, which calls for dramatic redistribution of wealth and resources. Her (brief) use of the kibbutz as a model embodies this failure to account for how wealth has accrued in the West as a direct result of racism and settler colonialism.
It’s a no for me.
April 8, 2022
Easy to read but would like to reread to better understand aspects of US labor history/trends/methods that are new to me (confession: spent too many years learning about international case studies that I have a harder time understanding US dynamics). But this is a book that made me dream, ask what if, want to be courageous, see possibilities, wonder about the connections between domestic as well as international people movements, and muse on how powerful they can be - precisely because communities that are intune with the needs of their neighbors have vested interests that lead to timely mobilization, reinvestment, mutual accountability. It's also interesting to think of religious organizations as untapped (and often poorly mobilized) economic/political engine for labor rights and community empowerment. I just have more questions at this point, and more to learn (are govt protections of the mutual sector enough/have intended positive ripple effect? Or will it produce another set of issues?), and wanting to figure out how to get further involved in what's going on around me real-time.
June 6, 2021
Full disclosure. I know Sarah Horowitz, the author. She is an in-law of an in-law, and we have had Thanksgiving and Seders at her house over the years.
She's a labor lawyer, a Macarthur Genius, and the founder of Freelancer's Union. So if there's anything she knows about, it's people working with each other to improve their lives together. Specifically in the process known as mutualism.
This book is an examination of the ways people have worked together in the past, by forming money-making businesses owned cooperatively, and dedicated not to increasing shareholder value, but to providing health insurance, affordable housing, and education for its members.
These organizations worked well in the past, and the few places where they exist nowadays, they still work well. Horowitz's thesis is that in an ever more corporatized world, where certain political parties seem hell-bent on removing all government-based social safety nets, a future of mutualism is the only future that works for the average person
She's a labor lawyer, a Macarthur Genius, and the founder of Freelancer's Union. So if there's anything she knows about, it's people working with each other to improve their lives together. Specifically in the process known as mutualism.
This book is an examination of the ways people have worked together in the past, by forming money-making businesses owned cooperatively, and dedicated not to increasing shareholder value, but to providing health insurance, affordable housing, and education for its members.
These organizations worked well in the past, and the few places where they exist nowadays, they still work well. Horowitz's thesis is that in an ever more corporatized world, where certain political parties seem hell-bent on removing all government-based social safety nets, a future of mutualism is the only future that works for the average person
April 25, 2023
Fuck Taft-Hartley.
August 8, 2021
This made so much sense! Our industrial-era safety net was modeled after unions and cooperatives which have since fallen out of fashion. Horowitz argues that we need to revive these key institutions, both through community organizing and through public policy which supports their efforts.
Rather than adopting the black or white options of one-size-fits-all legislation or leaving individuals alone to fend for themselves, we should invest in the gray area where mutualist organizations lie. This middle space is able to take advantage of economies of scale while focusing on differentiated community needs, an approach often left out of the progressive push for overarching reform.
"There's no reason that proposals for nationalized healthcare can't coexist with mutualism, but mutualist organizations themselves — unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, faith communities — are uniquely positioned to be the delivery mechanism for that care."
Here, we have a practical guide to scaling up what we know works, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That said, given how extractive market forces inherently contradict this vision, I'm curious where the author would draw the line between changing the system from within and demanding a full overhaul. I'm unsure whether the changes she argues for — tax credits and patient capital markets — are truly feasible under our existing structures. I would have appreciated greater elaboration on how we would incentivize corporations to do the right thing over the profitable thing.
"We've been trained to be critics. Building begins by changing your orientation away from yourself, away from the critique of government or capitalism, and toward your neighbors regardless of their political stripe or class. Transform those critiques into action."
Without changing the flow of capital, these institutions have no ability to sustain themselves. Not unlike how a national health plan can coexist with mutualist organizations, critiques of capitalism can and should coexist with community organizing.
Aside from this gripe, this was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Horowitz makes excellent points about the power of labor, especially when internal divisions relating to class or occupation are discarded in favor of amplifying collective bargaining power. Her ideas will stick with me for some time.
Rather than adopting the black or white options of one-size-fits-all legislation or leaving individuals alone to fend for themselves, we should invest in the gray area where mutualist organizations lie. This middle space is able to take advantage of economies of scale while focusing on differentiated community needs, an approach often left out of the progressive push for overarching reform.
"There's no reason that proposals for nationalized healthcare can't coexist with mutualism, but mutualist organizations themselves — unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, faith communities — are uniquely positioned to be the delivery mechanism for that care."
Here, we have a practical guide to scaling up what we know works, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That said, given how extractive market forces inherently contradict this vision, I'm curious where the author would draw the line between changing the system from within and demanding a full overhaul. I'm unsure whether the changes she argues for — tax credits and patient capital markets — are truly feasible under our existing structures. I would have appreciated greater elaboration on how we would incentivize corporations to do the right thing over the profitable thing.
"We've been trained to be critics. Building begins by changing your orientation away from yourself, away from the critique of government or capitalism, and toward your neighbors regardless of their political stripe or class. Transform those critiques into action."
Without changing the flow of capital, these institutions have no ability to sustain themselves. Not unlike how a national health plan can coexist with mutualist organizations, critiques of capitalism can and should coexist with community organizing.
Aside from this gripe, this was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Horowitz makes excellent points about the power of labor, especially when internal divisions relating to class or occupation are discarded in favor of amplifying collective bargaining power. Her ideas will stick with me for some time.
February 20, 2021
A interesting and powerful call to come together for the good of the community.
We are better when we work together for the common good for those areas of life that we are most interested in. It is in gathering those that have a mutual interest together that we become a stronger voice for progress.
Using the work of unions the author outlines where they were able to make progress in being a common voice with a common cause that benefitted many. She also outlines where and why some of those very causes lost their voice as the culture they lived in changed.
This is also a challenge to stop waiting for someone else to take up your cause and do what it takes to make life better for you. No one speaks more effectively than those most impacted by the culture in which we live, work and play.
If we want to create change, rather than looking to government or someone else to create that change coming together in a mutual cause and struggling to develop a common voice is far more effective. That larger voice than is in a position to make change in the laws and culture.
I found the two weaknesses to be the criticism of capitalism while still making a call to want funding from the very organizations that are being criticized. The other is a better description of how to organize beyond getting together would have been helpful. I understood that starting by bringing common causes together to develop their own plans and voice is the premise of her writing but pointing to a basic outline of process would have been helpful.
Very much worth the read for those that are feeling the group they are a part of doesn't have a voice and needs inspiration to get the ball rolling.
The publisher provided me with a copy for review.
We are better when we work together for the common good for those areas of life that we are most interested in. It is in gathering those that have a mutual interest together that we become a stronger voice for progress.
Using the work of unions the author outlines where they were able to make progress in being a common voice with a common cause that benefitted many. She also outlines where and why some of those very causes lost their voice as the culture they lived in changed.
This is also a challenge to stop waiting for someone else to take up your cause and do what it takes to make life better for you. No one speaks more effectively than those most impacted by the culture in which we live, work and play.
If we want to create change, rather than looking to government or someone else to create that change coming together in a mutual cause and struggling to develop a common voice is far more effective. That larger voice than is in a position to make change in the laws and culture.
I found the two weaknesses to be the criticism of capitalism while still making a call to want funding from the very organizations that are being criticized. The other is a better description of how to organize beyond getting together would have been helpful. I understood that starting by bringing common causes together to develop their own plans and voice is the premise of her writing but pointing to a basic outline of process would have been helpful.
Very much worth the read for those that are feeling the group they are a part of doesn't have a voice and needs inspiration to get the ball rolling.
The publisher provided me with a copy for review.
November 3, 2025
This book was really interesting in presenting recent and older history of groups that banded together to help each other without force from government or pursuit of profit. It reminds me of my Christian youth when I’d hear arguments about whether the government or church should be the ones to care for the poor and the needy (and Horowitz mentions religious institutions as examples of Mutualism in practice today).
I like Horowitz ideas that people should help each other and create institutions that do that. However, and I guess this reveals my biases, 1) political institutions are groups of people gathering together to help and care for each other (though they haven’t done a great job of it throughout history) and 2) as a result, mutualism doesn’t necessarily need to avoid Socialism (indeed sometimes governments are the only ones with a big enough reach to organize care).
If Horowitz is pushing for Mutualism as a stopgap until we can get to a more organized government system I think that makes sense, but I’m not sure having all these individual institutions is an efficient way of getting the care she’s pushing toward.
But also what do I know.
I like Horowitz ideas that people should help each other and create institutions that do that. However, and I guess this reveals my biases, 1) political institutions are groups of people gathering together to help and care for each other (though they haven’t done a great job of it throughout history) and 2) as a result, mutualism doesn’t necessarily need to avoid Socialism (indeed sometimes governments are the only ones with a big enough reach to organize care).
If Horowitz is pushing for Mutualism as a stopgap until we can get to a more organized government system I think that makes sense, but I’m not sure having all these individual institutions is an efficient way of getting the care she’s pushing toward.
But also what do I know.
May 11, 2022
Extreme right wingers are more varied, sometimes it's about god, sometimes it's about freedom to shoot the burglar. With left wingers it's always the same - it's always unions. Whatever the book is about, the solution is unions. You know, the ones hiring gangsters and beating up strike breakers and forcing everyone to pay their dues or else. Those guys. Because the solution to exploitation by the employer is not legislation but a protection racket.
The book itself is biographical self-aggrandising drivel.
The author is very proud of starting some freelancer union, she repeats it more than a dozen times. Her union is special and it really listens to it's victims. It provides appropriate health cover for them, like acupuncture. She doesn't mention homeopathy but I'm sure there's cover for that too.
The book itself is biographical self-aggrandising drivel.
The author is very proud of starting some freelancer union, she repeats it more than a dozen times. Her union is special and it really listens to it's victims. It provides appropriate health cover for them, like acupuncture. She doesn't mention homeopathy but I'm sure there's cover for that too.
March 11, 2023
Key takeaways: there is a way to engage with capitalism that is sustainable, generational, and beneficial to the community; organizations and companies can be profitable without being profit-driven; we are all part of the larger workforce and tribalism of "white collar" vs "blue collar" has hurt everyone; unions are good in every job; imagining a better future is not naive and working for it is commendable; be nice to people and people might be nice back -- fight the loneliness epidemic. 5 star ideas, only gave it 3 stars b/c, like almost every nonfiction book I've ever read, it needed a better editor.
January 16, 2025
Hmmm. Interesting history of the garment trade unions in New York.
I read it because I wanted to read a proposal of capitalism optimizing for returning value to the workers vs the shareholders. But I feel like it wasn’t fleshed out at all. The only thing I remember is governments could play a role in incentivizing the growth of the mutualist economy through government policies of tax subsidies. But… that’s it?
Random but many examples of successful mutualism provided felt like it relied on benevolent dictatorships. Not sure if that just a product of giving superhero stories to make it fun or just that there wasn’t enough discussion of what made those cases sustainable.
I read it because I wanted to read a proposal of capitalism optimizing for returning value to the workers vs the shareholders. But I feel like it wasn’t fleshed out at all. The only thing I remember is governments could play a role in incentivizing the growth of the mutualist economy through government policies of tax subsidies. But… that’s it?
Random but many examples of successful mutualism provided felt like it relied on benevolent dictatorships. Not sure if that just a product of giving superhero stories to make it fun or just that there wasn’t enough discussion of what made those cases sustainable.
March 23, 2021
I am 100% on board with all of this (though I still can't find the courage to be a leader), and I loved the inclusion of Horowitz's own family history as union organizers. Unfortunately, I just found parts too dry, and I am still terrible at really understanding business and economics, so I found my mind wandering a lot. That said, I'm excited to continue to seek out more mutualist opportunities in my life.
November 23, 2021
Working myself to start a food coop in my town, this book was an inspiration. She is able to clearly explain the existence and fundamental need for the mutual aid groups that are thriving in our country. Unions, coops and churches. They give the power to the people through their structures and missions. I hope our country can find more ways to support their growth through supportive laws and government spending.
December 18, 2021
This was a boring read. It was extremely repetitive. I hoped that the author would provide some insider information about the economics and inner workings of mutualist organizations. This was not the case. Disappointing.
Read
June 8, 2021A book about labor unions, nothing more.
February 5, 2022
Informative, but somewhat too biographical
November 29, 2022
Really helped me shift my thinking in a way that felt like a key finally turning a lock, tumblers resetting. Interesting message. Realistic but not overly so, I would say.
March 22, 2023
I guess I need to build and foster a mutualist organization that has the best interests of the workers in mind now.
June 21, 2023
Mutualism by Sara Horowitz was good food for thought, even if I have minor qualms about some aspects of it. I certainly learned a lot about labor history and unions from this book.
January 24, 2024
The content isn’t bad I guess? But it got soooooo repetitive that I couldn’t wait for it to end.
October 13, 2025
important and evergreen read about what a mutualist organization and ecosystem looks like and how to build them. Perhaps more timely now than ever!
April 11, 2021
Horowitz writes about what some on twitter like to ignore, the work involved in making change and the broad coalition needed to gain a democratic majority to enact anything.
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