Month: June 2008

Uncategorized

Infoshop / bookstore economics

June 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Let me put on one of my other hats for a second: Well, it didn’t take long for me to get involved with a bookstore in Portland. I seem to be well on my way to joining the collective at Laughing Horse Books, a radical bookstore with an ideologically diverse inventory and staff. Like pretty much all independent bookstores, Laughing Horse is trying to figure out how to adapt to present conditions, keep the wolves at bay, be useful in a perplexing political climate, etc. After visiting my first collective meeting, I found myself right back in the mode I […]
individualism

LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900

June 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The historical material in LeftLiberty #1 will be drawn primarily from the individualism/socialism debate of the mid-19th century, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that, if we take our cues from any much later iteration of the debate, we find ourselves faced with the sort of simple opposition of entrenched positions that I suspect many of us would like to get past. However, in the interest of completeness, I offer what is perhaps the exemplary “exchange” of the Talking Past One Another Era: Ernest Belfort Bax, sometime collaborator of William Morris, vs. Henry Wilson, of the […]
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Mutualschool Open Classroom Event #1

June 8, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Mark your calendars: July 1-14, mutualschool.org will be hosting its first educational event, a close look at the first memoir of Proudhon’s What Is Property? I’m preparing an annotated wiki version of the texts, a series of notes and “lectures” on various aspects of the text, and some short translations from related works. Proudhon’s first work on property was not his final word on the matter, and it was written at a time when he was still developing his understanding of the issues involved. There are, I think, some pretty serious problems with the text. It is, nonetheless, and deservedly […]
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Countdown to Relaunch!

June 6, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Well, I reached the Pacific Northwest yesterday, patched things up with the cats (who flew out five days ago) and am waiting for my library and computers to arrive. I had a chance to putter away at some translation of Bellegarigue’s second issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Order on the train. I dragged the paper files for LeftLiberty with me in an old salesman’s specimen case that serves as a mobile file cabinet, so I can get back to work on that today. I’ve been rearranging a lot of projects, trimming some obsolete stuff, incorporating old efforts into new […]