Month: July 2011

Contr'un

Special “LeftLiberty+” Issue of “The Mutualist”

July 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m both streamlining the Corvus Editions catalog a bit for upcoming bookfairs and trying to assemble a more focused body of materials to serve as a background for the next couple of issues of The Mutualist. With those goals in mind, I’ve combined the most useful bits of my own writing from the two issues of LeftLiberty with the blog posts I reference, or expect to reference, most often, as a special issue of The Mutualist. The contents are: Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations  Mutualist Musings on Property (including “The Gift Economy of Property, etc.)  Note A (by Charles Fourier)  […]
Contr'un

Early uses of the term “capitalisme” in French

July 19, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
The accounts of the early uses of the term “capitalism” have not kept up at all with the sources now available for research. For example, on Wikipedia we find: According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854 in The Newcomes, where he meant “having ownership of capital.” Also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the term private capitalism in 1863. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph […]
From the Archives

L. S. Bevington, “The Last Gasp of Propertyism”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] It’s not much fun to be in a debate where the participants consistently talk past one another, but it can be fairly instructive to observe them. The debate in Tochatti’s Liberty is potentially instructive, while it certainly is not anything like a model for real meetings of minds. To recap: the communists of Liberty published the final section of Proudhon’s Theory of Property, together with a provocative argument that Proudhon’s stated personal preference for “Slavonic or Communal possession of land” somehow put “so-called Proudhonians” at odds with […]
Contr'un

“I hope to do some work for the Labor Cause…”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] One of the bits of Liberty‘s prehistory that undoubtedly needs to be better documented is Tucker’s entry into the anarchist movement. I recently purchased microfilm of The Word, Ezra Heywood’s paper, and just ran across this in the Nov. 1872 issue: B. R. Tucker, New Bedford, Mass. ‘I hope to do some work for the Labor Cause but first wish to study the question that I may thoroughly understand it. For this reason I send for your publications. I wish you would hold a Convention in New Bedford. The conservatives here […]
Contr'un

Exploring intellectual history with Benjamin R. Tucker

July 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] There is probably no figure in the history of anarchism about whom I am as, well, “passionately ambivalent” as Benjamin R. Tucker. He was the great popularizer of Proudhon, Greene and Warren, and an important partisan of Stirner, but also, in each case, something of a bowdlerizer. The plumb-line approach was worlds away from Proudhon’s notion of truth-in-relations, and his wholly “negative” understanding of anarchism ultimately at odds, to some degree at least, with the projects of all of his mutualist predecessors. He was the prototype for every left-libertarian who has trouble […]
Contr'un

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]
Contr'un

Ezra Heywood to “The Revolution,”

July 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
This letter from Ezra H. Heywood is the first fruits of several days spent researching in Eugene, OR and Berkeley, CA, over the last couple of months. When I discovered that both André Léo and Jenny d’Héricourt had corresponded with the American women’s rights papers The Revolution and The Agitator, and that both papers had published partial translations of André Léo’s La femme et les mœurs, it became obvious that I needed to track those papers down. I was already familiar with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury’s paper, The Revolution, which contained contributions by Ezra Heywood, Josiah Warren, C. […]