AHC: Mutualist China

Sun Yat Sen comes to power and makes a few positive muses about mutualism just like he commented about anarchism, socialism, and nationalism. Some returning students from Europe or North America quickly (through backroom deals) rise through the Republic of China bureaucracy and set up some credit unions, and draft a constitution based on "applying Great Harmony" on earth, or something similar.

Yet within a few years Yuan Shikai or another warlord attempts to seize power and soon all the mutualist experiments which had not already succumbed to corruption and infighting flounder. Mutualism, when it ever existed, only affected a fraction of the population and was barely noticed by the vast majority of peasants, who merely saw it as another "ism" which emerged during that period.
 

Tsao

Banned
Sun Yat Sen comes to power and makes a few positive muses about mutualism just like he commented about anarchism, socialism, and nationalism. Some returning students from Europe or North America quickly (through backroom deals) rise through the Republic of China bureaucracy and set up some credit unions, and draft a constitution based on "applying Great Harmony" on earth, or something similar.

Yet within a few years Yuan Shikai or another warlord attempts to seize power and soon all the mutualist experiments which had not already succumbed to corruption and infighting flounder. Mutualism, when it ever existed, only affected a fraction of the population and was barely noticed by the vast majority of peasants, who merely saw it as another "ism" which emerged during that period.


So any long-term Mutualist state is not sustainable?
 
So any long-term Mutualist state is not sustainable?

Unless you do away with human greed, it will be difficult for a state based on utopian ideals to persist. Especially when it's tried in a country which had been either in civil war or on the brink of it for over 50 years.
 
Well, it's most associated with anarchism, although I suppose you could try to fit the economic philosophy to some kind of radical socialist classical liberal limited state.

In general, you might get mutualism from syndicalism, especially syndicalism adapted to more decentralized economies, or you might get mutualism from land reform.

If, in Russia, the Left Social Revolutionaries were more organized, they might have been the dominant force after the October 1917 and/or July 1918 uprisings. In this case, it's hard to see Marxism-Leninism becoming the dominant left-wing-revolutionary philosophy, or subverting/suppressing opposing revolutionary groups. It's possible that, in China, non-Marxist socialist movements would have been the main opposition to the Guomandang. But it's hard to be sure which ones or how they would develop.
 
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