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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 […]

Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum

August 16, 2015

Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum Fragments from a Facebook forum [These remarks, written several years ago, was originally archived in a section of the Labyrinth that no longer exists, but since the question of UBI seems to have become much more common than when I initially made these comments, it seems worth re-archiving them here.] 1 Let me be more explicit: A certain minimum level of food, shelter, clothing and fun is going to be deemed “essential” by just about everyone, and at the subsistence-level there will probably even be some rough consensus on more or less what that consists […]

Max Nettlau, The Struggle against the State (1908)

August 12, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] The Struggle against the State [Les Temps Nouveaux, 13 no. 51 (April 18, 1908) : 3-4.] ———– What follows is not a translation, but a free and somewhat expanded summary of an article [“Are there New Fields for Anarchist Activity?”] that I wrote for the revue Mother Earth of New-York (December 1907, pp. 433-444), and as I have been led to make some new digressions, the comrades who publish that revue are completely absolved of any literary responsibility for the present writing. I I have often asked myself why anarchist ideas, which appears so clear to us and add […]

Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, “Questions of Tactics” (1890)

August 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

QUESTIONS OF TACTICS ————– We have received the following letter from one of our comrades at El Productor of Barcelona. It seems good to reproduce it, for, aside from a few errors of judgment, it contains advice worth considering, and, in the response that we expect to make to our friends in Spain, if we manage to find and demonstrate the causes of the disorganization of the anarchists, the cause of the inconsistency of the groups and their inactivity, we could find there the remedy and some indications of the tactics to follow: Barcelona, August 7, 1890. Comrades of La […]

Ricardo Mella, “Collectivism” (1891)

August 2, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Collectivism Gone are the days when socialist sentimentality expected everything from the mother country and demanded everything of her. Gone are the days when the revolution was just a feeling, and declaimed comically against individualism face to face with the supreme power of the state or of society, its client. Gone are the days when socialism and revolution had no philosophy but that of the heart, no principle of right and justice but that of universal love. All these concepts, all these ideas are only among us as a remnant of what was never to be, as a residue pointing […]

Dyer D. Lum, “Communal Anarchy” (1886)

August 1, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: Varieties of Anarchist Entente COMMUNAL ANARCHY A distinction has been sought between what has been termed “Mutualistic Anarchy” and communistic anarchy, but it is one we fail to recognize. Anarchy, or the total cessation of force government, is the fundamental principle upon which all our arguments are based. Communism is a question of administration in the future, and hence must be subordinate to and in accord with the principles of Anarchy and all of its logical deductions. Anarchy proclaims that sovereignty of the individual, the abrogation of all artificial inequalities, and the total cessation of coercion over a […]

Ricardo Mella, “Spain” (1897)

July 30, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Spain. Time passes and, far from improving, the situation in Spain grows worse and worse. The colonial wars go badly and the hope of a swift pacification is abandoned. The exceptional state of Barcelona has not changed; the hundreds of wretches arbitrarily detained in the prisons and at Montjuich only await a bit of belated justice to set them free or else to consummate that legal crime that, taking the lives of some, will cast the others forever into the penal institutions that the mother country reserves for the best of her children. Today, as yesterday, some ignorant proletarians march […]

Max Nettlau, “The Attempted Murder of Hugo Bettauer” (1925)

July 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] [The Max Nettlau Papers include correspondence from Benzion Liber, editor Rational Living (New York.) Among the letters is the English-language manuscript of an article written by Nettlau, which was returned by Liber. ] April 10 [1925] Dear Dr. Nettlau and Comrade: I am sorry not to be able to use your latest and unexpected correspondence, as my magazine is suspended and as I do not know when it will reappear. I have tried to publish it in The Nation—had no time to ask your permission fearing the article would lose its actuality—but, although they found it interesting, they […]