Year: 2009

Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #1 Origins and Blazing Stars

July 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
“Waiting for a moment until another shellbark dropped, a blue-jay perched upon a bare twig and sang after its fashion. It was a short series of discordant notes; collectively, a harsh, rattling, corvine call, and yet it blended well with the gnarly branches and shaggy bark. Coarse, but honest to the core. There was nothing for mere appearance’s sake, such as gluts you in modern assemblages of men. The blue-jay is a bird murderer, but he does not care a whit who knows it. There is no stabbing in the back about him, and now that the spared nestlings of […]
Corvus Distribution

Taking Wing: Corvus Editions

July 1, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ll be writing much, much more about the project as it develops, but Corvus Editions, the first element of Corvus Distribution, is now open for business on the web. The brand new online shop contains 30 pamphlet titles, including some very classic bits of mutualist and individualist anarchist literature. I have an ambitious program of transcription, translation and publication laid out, and I’ve cut back my corporate employment to give me the time and energy to pursue it. My silence here over the last month or so has been directly related to my desire not to launch the new business […]
Working Translations

Errico Malatesta, “A Little Theory” (1892)

May 29, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] Revolt rumbles everywhere. Here it is the expression of an idea, and there the result of a need; most often it is the consequence of the intertwining of needs and ideas which mutually generate and reinforce each other. It fastens itself to the causes of evil or strikes close by, it is conscious or instinctive, it is humane or brutal, generous or narrowly selfish, but it always grows and extends itself. It is history which advances: it is useless to take time to complain about the routes that it chooses, since these routes have been marked out by all […]
come-outerism

Decentralizing power?

May 29, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I sat down (again actually, after a first attempt on the LL forums was devoured by a feral wi-fi hotspot) to write up some of my responses to what seems to me the central strategic issue in l’Affaire Preston, the question of whether or not breaking up power leads to weakening it, and found that William Gillis has addressed a good deal of what needs to be said. The references to economies of scale is elegant, and ought to be enough to get anyone started on additional analysis. Arguably, we live in the grip of both micro- and macro-authoritarianisms at […]
anarchist mutualism

French mutualism beyond Proudhon

May 8, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] There’s been an interesting, if not terribly productive, discussion on Wikipedia, regarding the scope of the entry on Individualist Anarchism. It has been charged, with some justice, that the article overemphasizes Anglophone market anarchism, and virtually ignores a number of other currents that might be included with equal reason and justice. That’s one way of thinking about the problem. I’m inclined to beat my usual drum, and suggest that this is another of those cases where Wikipedia simply has no way to resolve what should be in article when essentially all […]
Uncategorized

Really small firm size

April 30, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
In a little less than a month, I’ll voluntarily end my employment at the big box bookstore where I’ve been working for the better part of a year, and strike off again into the realm of self-employment. The change has everything to do with the sorts of discussions we have been having about the merits and ultimate sustainability of the big-box model, and there will undoubtedly be occasions to talk here about the ways in which that model is already failing to provide either a pleasant shopping experience or a tolerable work environment. But that’s for another day. What the […]
equitable commerce

Digital editions of Josiah Warren, etc.

April 9, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I was recently asked to clarify my notes on Warren’s publications: Think of the sequence in this way: First, there were two editions of Equitable Commerce in the 1840s, composed by Warren alone. Second, there is a period in the 1850s when Warren collaborated with Stephen Pearl Andrews. Andrews substantially revised Equitable Commerce and published his Science of Society, based on Warren’s work. Warren also published a new work, Practical Details in Equitable Commerce. Third, in the 1860s, Warren published another new work, True Civilization an Immediate Necessity, and the Last Ground of Hope for Mankind (which become the second […]
mutualism

Introducing, at long last! LeftLiberty and the New Proudhon Library!

April 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I took versions of LeftLiberty 1 and the new translation of The Philosophy of Progress to the San Francisco Bay Area Bookfair, but there wasn’t time to put together covers and do the web support for distribution. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be updating the leftliberty.org site, launching Corvus Distribution, revising all of my current pamphlets, and making sure things are listed at Invisible Molotov. But sufficient unto the day its little list of milestones, and today I’m very pleased to announce that, at long last, both LeftLiberty and the New Proudhon Library are realities, with first entries […]
Uncategorized

What I did on my anarchist vacation

April 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and I have few excuses to offer for not having posted a report on the trip until now. The primary one is, of course, that my participant-observation of the collapse of big-box retail (if it was a job, I would be making a living, right?) has pretty well absorbed my time and energy in the interim. But I’ve also been taking a little vacation from some of my usual activities, and trying to absorb the experience a bit. The trip was a […]