Communal mutualism: Relationality from a polytopian perspective

Metaphorically akin to the spacetime grid in the physical world (Einstein, 1920), the social world also consists of networks of social relationships that are temporary embedded. Such processes of networking of mutual relationships are referred to in the paper as “communal mutualism,” borrowing a term from both evolutionary biology and continental European libertarian philosophy. The usual discussions of horizontal mutualist networks (Proudhon, 1840, 1863; Graeber, 2011), alternatives to traditional hierarchical structures, however, generally presume a large degree of mutual trust within localities, which in turn requires certain familiarity and stability of relationships. To account for this possibly static tendency in mutualist theories, the paper suggests augmenting traditional mutualist approaches with a consideration of polytopian philosophy (Stanisevski, 2015), an amalgamation termed in the paper as “polytopian relationality,” that conceives of communal mutualism as a temporal process of mutual co-creation inclusive of diverse potentialities in the social spacetime. This emphasis on the temporality of mutual co-creation of social networks methodologically directs the policy analysis to considerations not of static “positions,” but of dynamic “events” that are constantly in processes of interactive transmutations, which dynamism is accelerated in more heterogeneous constellations of social relationships.