Year: 2008

Uncategorized

What’s your four-year plan?

October 3, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
If the mayan-calendar-apocalypse folks are right, plans for 2013 might be a bit pointless. But if the poles don’t shift on December 21, 2012, or it they do, but the Earth’s crust doesn’t crack, we really ought to be thinking about goals. High on my list would be not throwing another election-related welcoming gala for the police state, since the cost of these just keeps getting higher. It seems like it’s time for a Call for New Memes. Maybe we want to aim for our own sort of “pole shift.” Maybe we want to hitch a ride on the prophecy […]
Uncategorized

What ever happened to (the discourse on) Neoliberalism?

October 3, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Not so long ago, it seemed to me that it was generally accepted among most of my political allies that NAFTA-style “globalization,” and the financial and legislative chicanery that went along with it, were part of a very conscious tilting of the political-economic playing field, which we referred to as “neoliberalism.” The term is one which has had a range of uses, but we were probably most influenced at the time by the writings of Subcommandante Marcos of the EZLN and by “first world” commentaries at least partially inspired by those same writings. And, in that context, “neoliberalism” was very […]
Utopian and Scientific

William Henry Channing, “Call of the Present” (1843)

October 2, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
William Henry Channing, editor of The Present (1843-44) and The Spirit of the Age (1849-50), was well placed to gather together the radical threads of the early 1840s. The nephew of the prominent Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and a friend or acquaintance of figures like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, William Batchelder Greene, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Lane, Bronson Alcott, etc., he was in touch with much of what was bubbling up in the years prior to the 1848 revolutions. The works of Fourier, Swedenborg, Saint Simon and Proudhon all appeared in his publications, and he translated a number […]
Contr'un

The Gift Economy of Property

September 26, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contr’un Revisited: This may well be the best known of my anarchist writings, thanks to its inclusion in Markets Not Capitalism, where, I’m afraid, it is a bit of an anomaly. It is, I suppose, a fine enough example of the content here, rich in suggestive bits, if a little short on elaboration. At the same time, however, it is probably not a surprise that almost ten years after I first came up with the notion, the gift economy of property remains little more than a phrase. We’ve made some headway over the years in bringing various discourses into some […]
Uncategorized

from better mousetraps to lemonade seas (Blog recycling, part 2)

September 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In my post “Time to free ALL the political prisoners” I announced my intention to transform The Very Idea into a group blog for counter-institutional speculation and invention. I’ve got some redesigning to do to finish the “recycling,” but the new incarnation, retitled “from better mousetraps to lemonade seas” (the very idea, indeed!) is open for collaborative business, and I have established a discussion list as well. I’m hoping for practical results, but more than anything I am hoping to open a space for those, like me, who have more ideas than they can practically pursue, to document those things, […]
Uncategorized

Reinvent and Relaunch!

September 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
For a number of years, this blog has hosted my work on intellectual history outside the “libertarian labyinth,” work posted for my students and posts on material that is simply interesting, without being particularly relevant to current issues and struggles. The long silence here suggests how little I have focused on those concerns lately. In part that is because I have been very focused on recovering material from the anarchist and libertarian traditions, but it has also been in part a result of my broadened sense of how for that “labyrinth” really extends. The next time I treat the struggles […]
Corvus Editions

Blog recycling, Part 1

September 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
The old sister-site of this blog, From the Libertarian Library, has been pretty much forlorn and abandoned since I set up the wiki site for the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. But it has a new reason to be, as an announcement site for the new series of pamphlets that I am compiling from the Labyrinth. The series will consist of material relating to the Radical History Series at Laughing Horse Books, to the mutual school courses that will begin in 2009, and to various other projects. Pamphlets will be available in downloadable pdf format. There is some overlap of material with […]
Uncategorized

“The current unintelligent tampering…with the moral order of business”

September 21, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
In 1873, William Batchelder Greene was asked by Ezra Heywood to explain Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas on property. Greene sent along translations of the first three, and last three pages of What is Property? and a short, fascinating account of Proudhon and his ideas, based on Greene’s acquaintance with Proudhon during his years in Paris, roughly 1853-1861. It is clear from the account that Greene was most familiar with Proudhon’s earlier works. Some of Greene’s explanation is not consistent with the works from the 1860s, and some of it is consistent, as when Greene likens property to Satan, but in ways […]
Corvus Editions

Basic writings by Voltairine de Cleyre

September 20, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
While there is no shortage of editions of Voltairine de Cleyre’s writings, I’ve put together a collection which includes those I use most often, or recommend most often to others. The “basic writings” pamphlet includes “Anarchism and American Traditions,” “The Economic Tendency of Freethought,” and the two essays relating to individualism and communism. Invisible Molotov also has much of this material, in more confrontational packaging. Pick the package that fits your audience.
Corvus Editions

Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution” as a bilingual pamphlet

September 20, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
A new purpose for an old blog, the raison d’être of which had been largely eliminated by my migration of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive to the wiki site: a new series of downloadable pdf pamphlets from the archive. First up: Proudhon’s “Toast to the Revolution,” in an English-French bilingual edition. Please let me know if you have any trouble with these pamphlets. I’m also printing actual hard-copy pamphlets for local distribution, and will probably be issuing a few more elaborately produced items as fund-raisers for research materials.