Month: January 2011

Contr'un

The heart of Proudhon’s thought

January 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] A slightly belated “Happy 202nd Birthday!” to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It looks like the AK Press anthology will be out in February, and I have hopes of having the second issue of The Mutualist, “Owning Up,” and Proudhon’s Third Memoir on Property finished up by the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. I wish I thought that all those releases were likely to advance the debate about mutualism much beyond its current state—but I’m seriously concerned that more translations means more material to take out of context, and an intensification of the tug-of-war over Proudhon’s place in the […]
anarchist mutualism

On occupancy and use

January 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] [This piece first appeared at the Forums of the Libertarian Left, in a thread on “Occupancy and Use.” It seems to add enough to the current series on mutualist land tenure to repost here. The thread began with some very basic questions about how occupancy and use land tenure would play out, and how to respond to the common silliness about people out shopping losing their homes to mutualists, etc.] With any of the basic principles of “property,” you’re going to have to eventually confront a bunch of messy details before you’ve got the “anarchic common law” that could […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon clears things up

January 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] Proudhon was fond of scandal and provocation—and it got him, and his friends, into hot water. In his System of Economic Contradictions, he wrapped his already provocative thesis about the evolution of institutions around a scandalous narrative about “the hypothesis of God.” Proudhon was fascinated with Christianity, and wrote about it from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of tones, but he is probably best remembered for writings like his “Hymn to Satan” and the final chapter of the first volumes of the Economic Contradictions, where he worked himself up to a sort of declaration of war […]
Contr'un

A note on Bastiat and “double inequality”

January 14, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Sheldon Richman recently posted an interesting piece on “The Importance of Subjectivism in Economics: The double inequality of value,” over at The Freeman. In it, while praising Bastiat, he wants to supplement Bastiat’s account of the benefits of a market economy with “the subjectivist Austrian insight that individuals gain from trade per se.” For an exchange to take place, the two parties must assess the items traded differently, with each party valuing what he is to receive more than what he is to give up. If that condition did not hold, no exchange would occur. There must be what Murray […]
Contr'un

Responses on mutualist property theory: Self-ownership

January 12, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Given the amount that I’ve already written about mutualist property theory, both historically and in the context of “the gift economy of property,” and the specific context of the C4SS symposium, there wasn’t much chance that my post on mutualist land theory was going to be a summary of my own theory. Instead, it was really a series of reasons why I couldn’t just engage the question in terms of abandonment, with some gestures back at the theory I’ve been building. That sort of thing never quite cuts it in the blogosphere, as the comments make clear. I sympathize with […]
Contr'un

Elements of appropriation

January 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I broke down various meanings and aspects of property awhile back. Since some of what I wrote in the last post depends on an understanding of appropriation that I haven’t made explicit in some time, maybe a sort of summary is in order. In order to have an adequate theory of appropriation—in traditional, more-or-less Lockean terms—we need—one way or another—to provide ourselves with at least: An understanding of the subject of appropriation (“individual,” “collective,” irreducibly individual-collective, etc.; A theory of the nature of that subject’s relation to itself as “self-ownership,” “self-enjoyment,” etc.; A theory of nature (active or passive? productive? […]
Contr'un

Thoughts on mutualist land theory

January 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] There’s a call at the Center for a Stateless Society for responses to a document on “Land Tenure and Anarchic Common Law,” which “which synthesizes remarks by Kevin Carson, Brad Spangler, and Gary Chartier.” The basic argument is that “occupancy and use” and “Lockean” (non-proviso neo-lockean) theories differ primarily over the question of abandonment of “justly acquired” property. The assumption is that the theories are in something like agreement on “just acquisition” because both employ a homesteading mechanism. It’s the sort of thing that first makes me want to say: “Property is theft!” I’ve been […]
Contr'un

Turning a new page…

January 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contr’un Revisited: If we were being precise, the “Contr’un Revisited” phase would start here, with the name change at the beginning of 2011. But, just as some posts are being imported that were not originally posted on this blog and some posts that were posted here are now migrating to other collections, all of the theoretical writing from the earlier period is explicitly becoming what it, in fact, eventually became: part of the Contr’un project. This blog has gone through two previous phases, under two other names: The first was exploratory, a series of rambles “In the Libertarian Labyrinth,” with […]