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Propositions for Discussion (on Anarchy and Anarchism) — I

September 7, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Anarchy is a simple, accessible notion, sufficient to provide the necessary glue for a real anarchist current or movement. I’ve been struck by the number of times recently that I have encountered the argument that a really thoroughgoing idea of anarchy was an impediment, and perhaps the great impediment, to the anarchist movement. It seems obvious that attempting to do justice to the notion of anarchy could be an impediment to any number of other kinds of products or movements, but it is hard for me to wrap my head around the notion that anarchism—as an ideology, movement, individual aspiration […]

The Bottom Line

September 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Yesterday, I was foolhardy enough to post a sort of love/breakup letter to “the anarchist movement.” By this morning, what I had intended as a very personal gesture was just another bit of anarchist news, subject to the usual anarchist scorn, but not, it seems, worthy of any personal response. I know. I know: Don’t read the comments… But, honestly, the thing that makes comments so consistently unreadable is the thing that makes the things I wanted to say so damn nearly unspeakable. Anyway, since the whole thing feels like an embarrassing falling-out with an imaginary friend, I will try […]

Instead of a “Dear John” Letter

September 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[I have wrestled more than a bit with the question of whether this is a clear and useful intervention. I am still not certain. The first responses were so petty and inane that I decided, for a day or so, that I didn’t much care and simply replaced this with the “Bottom Line” post. The problem is that I can’t really sustain the indifference, in part as a matter of temperament and in part because I am, for better or worse, a full-time worker in the realm of anarchy. So there is a great deal of more sober clarification that […]

Equality and Justice

September 2, 2015

Let’s take a little extra time to emphasize the flatness of Proudhon’s system. Unity-collectivities at different scales overlap, but their relationships remain horizontal. The anarchistic “State” is, Proudhon tells us, “a kind of citizen” and the principle of political equality applies to all the citizens, no matter their kind. And the collective is a kind of individual almost everywhere we look in Proudhon’s work, and equality extends across widely different scales and between individuals of radically different makeup. The recognition of equality becomes the foundation for justice—and Proudhon’s individualities at various scale crowd the world with potential equals, whose interests […]

The Mutual Banking Writings of William Batchelder Greene

August 30, 2015

The important works are: Equality. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1849. [published anonymously] [74 pages] Mutual Banking. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1850. [95 pages] The Radical Deficiency Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Mutual Currency. Boston: B. H. Greene, 1857. [239 pages] Mutual Banking, Showing The Radical Deficiencies Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Free Currency. Worcester, Mass.: New England Labor Reform League, 1870. [52 Pages] Mutual Banking. Modern Publishers, Indore City, India, 1946 plus a couple of short sections in Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments (Boston: Lee […]

What Mutualism Was: An Incomplete History of Mutualist Tendencies

August 29, 2015 anarchisms_w4l2ii

It has been well over a decade since I started piecing together the pieces of mutualist history. At the time, the work had a curious urgency, as the handful of us who had gravitated to the “mutualist” label had a lot of ground to cover in order to really understand just what we had implicated ourselves in. The specific project of sketching all that early history is one in which I have invested less energy as the years went on, but I’ve never stopped documenting the bits of history that I have found. The links here will form an evolving […]

All Actors Are Collective Actors: The Unity-Collectivity

August 29, 2015 anarchisms_w4l2ii

Links: Proudhon’s Social Science [project page] Every individual is a group. There are a small number of key concepts in Proudhon’s work, without which it is almost impossible to understand. The notion of the collective actor, or unity-collectivity, and that of the collective force with which it is imbued may top the list in terms of importance. Virtually everything else depends on this basic insight into the nature of unity. The logical contender for top spot would be the philosophy of progress, but it turns out that Proudhon really saw the two analyses as intertwined. While much of Proudhon’s 1853 […]

Property and Theft: Proudhon’s Theory of Exploitation

August 18, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Part of the task here will be to explain the basics of Proudhon’s social science, the body of work that shows how his basic commitment to anti-authoritarianism and non-governmentalism played out (or didn’t, but could have played out) in a variety of contexts. The goal is to show how most of the principles he developed depend on a fairly small number of observations or assumptions, so that readers can not only make better sense of Proudhon’s work, but also acquire a toolkit that can be applied in new contexts. In the process, we’ll hopefully also debunk some familiar misreadings […]

Back to Basics (now that we may know a few of them)

August 16, 2015

Welcome to the new Mutualism.info, the last of my old Blogger sites to be integrated into the new Libertarian Labyrinth. It’s been just over a decade since I launched the blog In the Libertarian Labyrinth, which was not my first blog, but was the first dedicated primarily to anarchist history and theory. The site has had a number of other names along the way (Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth, Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule and Contr’un) and has migrated once, but the overall project has developed steadily, if sometimes in directions that couldn’t have been predicted ten years ago. […]

A note on anarchist economics

August 16, 2015

Modern production takes the strictly individual productive capacities of individuals and multiplies them in a variety of ways. Organization and association in industry, social and technological infrastructure, progress in science, and various other factors all contribute to what Proudhon called the “collective force” in production, and he explained capitalist exploitation as a kind of “accounting error,” where there are three sorts of human inputs in production (individual workers as individuals, individual capitalists as individuals, who may or may not actively contribute, and all the individuals as collectivities), but only two of the three are compensated (with what may often be […]