Mutual Funds and Cooperatives: a Shared History

The evolution of capitalism, from the crises in the middle of the 1970's, re-launched liberal ideals under the obvious modernity of the Ayn Rand style “libertarian” precepts and the neoliberal, monetarist rules of the “Chicago boys”. This gives all of its legitimacy to wonder about the alternative forms of this totalitarian mainstream by considering mutual funds and cooperatives and their shared origin, “mutualism”. It is and remains one of the first movements of French solidarity the intricacy of ideas and founding ideals of which began in Antiquity to lead to a slow gestation to the 19^th century until the realities of this new millennium. Cooperatives and mutual funds aim at just one thing: getting people to realise that hasty judgement or simplification have no place in this original world of organisations of the social and solidarity economy, inasmuch as you can place this set of organisations like genuine “heterotopias” in the Foucauldian sense (Michel Foucault), in this economic and social universe of the 21^st century that is globally hostile to them.