皮埃尔-约瑟夫·蒲鲁东曾参与里昂互助派的活动，后来使用这个组织的名字来描述他自己的观点[24]。而在《什么是互助论？》中，克拉伦斯·李·斯瓦尔兹（英语：Clarence Lee Swartz）认为，“互助论一词最早应当是被英国作家约翰·格雷在1832年使用”[25]。蒲鲁东反对保护资本家、银行和土地利益的政府特权，也反对财产的积累或获得，以及导致财产积累的任何形式的胁迫，他认为这些阻碍了竞争，使财富掌握在少数人手中。
为检验其理论，沃伦建立了一个名为辛辛那提时间商店（英语：Cincinnati Time Store）的实验性、“以工换工”的商店。该所商店前后存在了接近三年，后来被沃伦自行关停以支持他的其他几个实验性互助主义项目。沃伦曾称史蒂芬·皮尔·安德鲁斯在1852年出版的《社会的科学》一书清晰完整地阐述了他的理论[29]。
到19世纪80年代初，大多数欧洲无政府主义运动都采取了无政府共产主义的立场，主张废除雇佣劳动并按需分配。具有讽刺意味的是，“集体主义”的标签后来更多地与马克思主义中的国家社会主义者联系在一起，他们主张在向全面共产主义过渡期间保留某种工资制度。无政府共产主义者彼得·阿列克谢耶维奇·克鲁泡特金在他的文章《集产主义的工钱制度》和书籍《面包与自由》中对国家社会主义者进行了抨击。卡菲罗在他1880年的著作《安那其与共产主义》中进一步解释道，劳动产品的私有化将导致资本的不平等积累（英语：accumulation of capital），从而导致社会阶级及其对立的重新出现；进而导致国家的复活：“如果我们容许私人占有劳动产品，我们就将被迫保留货币，使财富或多或少地按照个人的功绩而非个人的需要积累”[31]。
互助论是一种无政府主义思想（英语：anarchist school of thought），其理论基础可以追溯至皮埃尔-约瑟夫·蒲鲁东：他在其著作中设想了一种新的社会。在这种新社会里，每个人以个人或集体的形式拥有一种生产资料，自由市场上的贸易以劳动为计量单位[44]。蒲鲁东还设想了一种互助信贷银行，这种银行以最低的利率向生产者提供贷款，利率仅够支付额外的管理成本[45]。互助论以劳动价值理论为基础，认为当劳动或其产品被出售时，它应该能交换到体现“生产非常相似且有同等效用的物品所需的劳动量”的商品或服务[46]。
在《什么是互助论》一书中，克拉伦斯·李·斯瓦尔兹（英语：Clarence Lee Swartz）认为，“互助论一词最早应当是被英国作家约翰·格雷在1832年使用”[25]。约翰·格雷的《人类幸福讲座》于1826年在美国首次出版时，出版商在书的最后附上了互利友好协会的序言和章程。
1846年，蒲鲁东在作品中提到了“互助性”一词，并在1848年的《革命者纲领》中使用了“mutuellisme”一词。1850年，威廉·葛林使用了“mutualism”一词指代与蒲鲁东主张类似的互助信贷系统。同样在1850年，美国报纸《时代精神》刊登了约书亚·金·英格尔斯（英语：Joshua K. Ingalls）[55]和阿尔伯特·布里斯班（英语：Albert Brisbane）[56]二人关于建立“互助镇”的提案，以及蒲鲁东[57]、葛林、皮埃尔·勒鲁（英语：Pierre Leroux）等人的一批文章。
互助论者认为，应由人民通过建立自由信贷系统产生自由银行制度（英语：free banking）。他们认为现在的银行就如资本家垄断土地一般垄断了货币。《互助主义政治经济学研究（英语：Studies in Mutualist Political Economy）》的作者、当代互助论者凯文·卡森（英语：Kevin Carson）[59]认为，资本主义[3]建立在“与封建制度一样大规模的抢劫行为”，并认为资本主义不可能在没有国家的情况下存在[60]，他还认为：“正是国家的干预使得资本主义逐渐脱离了自由市场”。罗伯特·格拉汉姆则注意到，“蒲鲁东的市场社会主义与他的产业民主和工人自我管理的概念有着不可分割的联系”[61]。K·史蒂文·文森特在他的分析中指出：“蒲鲁东一直主张将经济的控制和指导权还给工人”、“强大的工人协会[……]将使工人能够通过选举共同决定企业每天如何运作”[62]。
Meltzer, Albert (2000). Anarchism: Arguments For and Against. AK Press. p. 50. "The philosophy of "anarcho-capitalism" dreamed up by the "libertarian" New Right, has nothing to do with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement proper."
Crowder, George (1991). Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin [《古典无政府主义：戈德温、普鲁东、巴枯宁与克鲁泡特金的政治思想》]. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 85–86. ISBN9780198277446. "The ownership [anarchists oppose] is basically that which is unearned [...] including such things as interest on loans and income from rent. This is contrasted with ownership rights in those goods either produced by the work of the owner or necessary for that work, for example his dwelling-house, land and tools. Proudhon initially refers to legitimate rights of ownership of these goods as 'possession,' and although in his latter work he calls this 'property,' the conceptual distinction remains the same. [[无政府主义者所反对的]私人财产基本上是指不劳而获的私人财产[……]，比如贷款利息和租金收入。这与那些由所有者的工作产生的或该工作所必需的物品的所有权不同，比如一个人的住宅、土地和工具。蒲鲁东最初把对这些物品的合法所有权称为“占有”，虽然在他后来的作品中，他把这种权利也称为“所有权”，但概念上的差异仍然存在。]"
Hargreaves, David H. London (2019). Beyond Schooling: An Anarchist Challenge [《超越学派：无政府主义的挑战》]. London: Routledge. pp. 90–91. ISBN9780429582363. "Ironically, Proudhon did not mean literally what he said. His boldness of expression was intended for emphasis, and by 'property' he wished to be understood what he later called 'the sum of its abuses'. He was denouncing the property of the man who uses it to exploit the labour of others without any effort on his own part, property distinguished by interest and rent, by the impositions of the non-producer on the producer. Towards property regarded as 'possession' the right of a man to control his dwelling and the land and tools he needs to live, Proudhon had no hostility; indeed, he regarded it as the cornerstone of liberty, and his main criticism of the communists was that they wished to destroy it. [具有讽刺意味的是，蒲鲁东所说的所有权并不是字面上的意思。这种表达只是为了强调，而他其实希望通过“所有权”一词来让人们理解他后来所说的“流弊的总和”。他所谴责的是那些利用财产剥削他人劳动、而自己却不付出任何努力的人的财产，这些财产往往以利息和租金的形式体现，以非生产者对生产者的强占为特征。对于被视为“占有”的财产，即一个人控制他的住所、土地和生活所需工具的权利，蒲鲁东并不反对；而事实上恰恰相反，他把它视为自由的基石，他对共产主义者的主要批评也基于此。]"
McKay, Iain (2008). An Anarchist FAQ. I. "Why do anarchists oppose the current system?" "Why are anarchists against private property?" Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press. ISBN978-1902593906.
Brooks, Frank H. The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881–1908) [个人无政府主义者：自由文集（1881年–1908年）]. Transaction Publishers. 1994: xi. ISBN 1-56000-132-1.
Kahn, Joseph. Anarchism, the Creed That Won't Stay Dead; The Spread of World Capitalism Resurrects a Long-Dormant Movement. The New York Times. 2000, (5 August).Colin Moynihan. Book Fair Unites Anarchists. In Spirit, Anyway. New York Times. 2007, (16 April).
Guerin, Daniel (1970). Anarchism: From Theory to Practice （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. New York: Monthly Review Press. "The anarchists were unanimous in subjecting authoritarian socialism to a barrage of severe criticism. At the time when they made violent and satirical attacks these were not entirely well founded, for those to whom they were addressed were either primitive or "vulgar" communists, whose thought had not yet been fertilized by Marxist humanism, or else, in the case of Marx and Engels themselves, were not as set on authority and state control as the anarchists made out [无政府主义者对威权社会主义进行了猛烈的抨击。不过他们的暴力和讽刺性抨击并不都完全有根据，因为这些抨击的对象大多是原始或“庸俗”的共产主义者，他们的思想还未受到马克思主义人文主义的熏陶，不然，就马克思和恩格斯本人而言，他们并不像无政府主义者所说的那样期望权威和国家控制社会。]".
"In fact, few anarchists would accept the 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp since they do not share a concern for economic equality and social justice, Their self-interested, calculating market men would be incapable of practising voluntary co-operation and mutual aid. Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the State, might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists. [事实上，很少有无政府主义者会接受“无政府资本主义者”被视为无政府主义阵营，因为认为他们并不关心经济平等和社会正义，他们的自利的、精打细算的市场人员必然无法实行自愿合作和互助。因此，无政府资本主义者，即使他们确实反对国家，可能最好被称为右翼自由意志主义者，而不是无政府主义者。]" Peter Marshall. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Harper Perennial. London. 2008. p. 565
"'Libertarian' and 'libertarianism' are frequently employed by anarchists as synonyms for 'anarchist' and 'anarchism', largely as an attempt to distance themselves from the negative connotations of 'anarchy' and its derivatives. The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition." Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward by David Goodway. Liverpool University Press. Liverpool. 2006
"el capitalismo es sólo el efecto del gobierno; desaparecido el gobierno, el capitalismo cae de su pedestal vertiginosamente...Lo que llamamos capitalismo no es otra cosa que el producto del Estado, dentro del cual lo único que se cultiva es la ganancia, bien o mal habida. Luchar, pues, contra el capitalismo es tarea inútil, porque sea Capitalismo de Estado o Capitalismo de Empresa, mientras el Gobierno exista, existirá el capital que explota. La lucha, pero de conciencias, es contra el Estado." Anarquismo by Miguel Giménez Igualada （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
"A watch has a cost and a value. The COST consists of the amount of labor bestowed on the mineral or natural wealth, in converting it into metals…". Warren, Josiah. Equitable Commerce
Déjacque criticized French mutualist anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon as far as "the Proudhonist version of Ricardian socialism, centred on the reward of labour power and the problem of exchange value. In his polemic with Proudhon on women's emancipation, Déjacque urged Proudhon to push on 'as far as the abolition of the contract, the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but of property and authority in all their forms,' and refuted the commercial and wages logic of the demand for a 'fair reward' for 'labour' (labour power). Déjacque asked: 'Am I thus... right to want, as with the system of contracts, to measure out to each – according to their accidental capacity to produce – what they are entitled to?' The answer given by Déjacque to this question is unambiguous: 'it is not the product of his or her labour that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature.' [...] For Déjacque, on the other hand, the communal state of affairs – the phalanstery 'without any hierarchy, without any authority' except that of the 'statistics book' – corresponded to 'natural exchange,' i.e. to the 'unlimited freedom of all production and consumption; the abolition of any sign of agricultural, individual, artistic or scientific property; the destruction of any individual holding of the products of work; the demonarchisation and the demonetarisation of manual and intellectual capital as well as capital in instruments, commerce and buildings."Alain Pengam. "Anarchist-Communism" （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
Kropotkin, Peter. The Wages System. 1920. Also available: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆） quote: "Such, in a few words, is the organization which the Collectivists desire ... their principles are: collective property in the instruments of labor and remuneration of each worker according to the time spent in productive toil, taking into account the productiveness of his work."
Hymans, E., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, pp. 190–91, Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 110, 112
Fourier, Charles, Traité (1822), cited in Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., "The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary", Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Jun., 1948), 259–302.
New-Harmony Gazette, I, 301–02 (14 June 1826) cited in Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., "The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary", Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Jun., 1948), 259–302.
"The revolution abolishes private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and with it goes capitalistic business. Personal possession remains only in the things you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch factory belongs to the people."[1] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆） Alexander Berkman. "What Is Communist Anarchism?"
Makhno, Mett, Arshinov, Valevski, Linski (Dielo Trouda). "The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists". 1926. Constructive Section: available here （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）.
Post-left anarcho-communist Bob Black after analysing insurrectionary anarcho-communist Luigi Galleani's view on anarcho-communism went as far as saying that "communism is the final fulfillment of individualism...The apparent contradiction between individualism and communism rests on a misunderstanding of both...Subjectivity is also objective: the individual really is subjective. It is nonsense to speak of "emphatically prioritizing the social over the individual,"...You may as well speak of prioritizing the chicken over the egg. Anarchy is a "method of individualization." It aims to combine the greatest individual development with the greatest communal unity."Bob Black. Nightmares of Reason. （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
"Modern Communists are more individualistic than Stirner. To them, not merely religion, morality, family and State are spooks, but property also is no more than a spook, in whose name the individual is enslaved – and how enslaved!...Communism thus creates a basis for the liberty and Eigenheit of the individual. I am a Communist because I am an Individualist. Fully as heartily the Communists concur with Stirner when he puts the word take in place of demand – that leads to the dissolution of property, to expropriation. Individualism and Communism go hand in hand."[2] （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）Max Baginski. "Stirner: The Ego and His Own" on Mother Earth. Vol. 2. No. 3 MAY, 1907
"Communism is the one which guarantees the greatest amount of individual liberty – provided that the idea that begets the community be Liberty, Anarchy...Communism guarantees economic freedom better than any other form of association, because it can guarantee wellbeing, even luxury, in return for a few hours of work instead of a day's work." "Communism and Anarchy" （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆） by Peter Kropotkin
"I see the dichotomies made between individualism and communism, individual revolt and class struggle, the struggle against human exploitation and the exploitation of nature as false dichotomies and feel that those who accept them are impoverishing their own critique and struggle.""MY PERSPECTIVES" by Willful Disobedience Vol. 2, No. 12互联网档案馆的存档，存档日期2011-07-16.
"This process of education and class organization, more than any single factor in Spain, produced the collectives. And to the degree that the CNT-FAI (for the two organizations became fatally coupled after July 1936) exercised the major influence in an area, the collectives proved to be generally more durable, communist and resistant to Stalinist counterrevolution than other republican-held areas of Spain." Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936 （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）
Carson, Kevin (19 June 2009). "Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated" （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. Center for a Stateless Society. "But there has always been a market-oriented strand of libertarian socialism that emphasizes voluntary cooperation between producers. And markets, properly understood, have always been about cooperation. As a commenter at Reason magazine's Hit&Run blog, remarking on Jesse Walker's link to the Kelly article, put it: "every trade is a cooperative act." In fact, it's a fairly common observation among market anarchists that genuinely free markets have the most legitimate claim to the label "socialism."
Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. "It introduces an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian socialism and market anarchism."
Gerald F. Gaus, Chandran Kukathas. 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. Sage Publications. pp. 118–119. Source refers to Friedman's philosophy as "market anarchism."
Editor's note in "Taxation: Voluntary or Compulsory". Formulations. Free Nation Foundation. Summer 1995 Taxation: Voluntary or Compulsory?. [15 March 2008]. （原始内容存档于28 December 2010）.
G. P. Maximoff, Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism （页面存档备份，存于互联网档案馆）. (extract from his Constructive Anarchism, published in English in 1952; this section is not included in the only edition of the work now in print.) (Sydney: Monty Miller Press, 1985).
Vivir la utopía – Living Utopia[4]互联网档案馆的存档，存档日期2010-09-14. by Juan Gamero 1997. (About Anarchism in Spain and the Collectives in the Spanish Revolution).
