Bomb#20
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People take inspiration where they find it, logic be damned; and Proudhon contradicted himself like the Bible that slavers and abolitionists were equally historically influenced by. If you and Stallman were inspired by Proudhon's pro-liberty arguments while others were inspired by his arguments for banning economic arrangements not to his taste, well, hey, socialism was a massive historical influence on the labor union movement even though when they get control of a country real live socialists invariably prohibit independent labor unions. Such is the human condition.
The thing to keep in mind, though, is that mutualism of the sort you're praising can only exist as a niche element -- most production cannot be sustained that way. "Good theory, wrong species." We've already seen what happens when activists try to make that the dominant means of organizing production -- in1930s revolutionary Spain.
They may not notice as long as it's all theory and advocacy, but when they get their way, it turns out there are actually two completely different kinds of people whom the anarcho-communist business model appeals to. Some people like worker co-ops because workers running a business themselves and sharing the profits and choosing policies and managers democratically is gut-level appealing to them. But there are other people who like worker co-ops because in their guts they hate capitalism, inequality, and the profit motive. If an anarchist movement becomes dominant in a society, the cooperation between these two factions will inevitably break down in the face of this underlying conflict of interest. When you hand control of a business over to its workers, they become proprietors. It makes those workers start to think like capitalists. Some such businesses prosper and their workers become affluent, while other such businesses languish and their workers become poorer than back when they were working for owners and owner-appointed bosses. And the newly empowered worker-owners raise their own wages and improve their own working conditions to the point where their business no longer shows a profit that can be taxed to support needy non-employees. The workplace-democracy-anarchists are all "Yeah, and?"; but the equality-anarchists find the new situation intolerable. The former shared common goal of giving power to the workers now founders over the entirely foreseeable question: "Which workers?". And when that alliance of convenience breaks down and a power struggle ensues, the equality-anarchists win. They're more numerous and they're more ruthless. The workers at a business will no longer be allowed to elect their own bosses. The bosses will instead be appointed by "the workers collectively". I.e., by all the workers in the society rather than by just the workers at the business. I.e., by the self-appointed representatives of all the workers in the society. I.e., by the leadership of the equality wing of the Anarchist Party.
So if you like voluntary mutualism as a means of organizing production, you need to maintain the sort of society that's able to preserve voluntary mutualism: a capitalist society.
