Mutualists

a name given to a number of petit bourgeois social-reformist tendencies in the first half of the 19th century.

The term was first used in Lyon, France, where a mutual assistance union of master weavers, the Association of Mutualists, was founded in 1828. The mutualists denied the necessity of class struggle and revolution and affirmed that the means of resolving the social question lay in the creation of societies of mutual assistance, such as producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives. The theory reached its highest development in the works of P. J. Proudhon. During the 1860’s, the term “mutualists” was applied to the right-wing Proudhonists who entered the French sections of the First International.