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Proudhon on Property: Response

April 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Iain McKay has posted another update on What is Property?, the forthcoming Proudhon anthology.You’ll find links to excerpts from the Second Memoir on Property and from my translation of the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property, along with commentary by Iain. The commentary is valuable, whether or not you agree with the approach and conclusions. There is a lot to tackle, if we want to make sense of Proudhon’s lifetime of work, and the more serious attempts, from different perspectives, the better, from my point of view. Iain’s comments, and his nice plug for The Mutualist, suggest he shares […]
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Amant ou mari?

April 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Proudhon (in)famously wrote, in What is Property?: On distingue dans la propriété : 1° la propriété pure et simple, le droit dominal, seigneurial sur la chose, ou, comme l’on dit, la nue propriété ; 2° la possession. « La possession, dit Duranton, est une chose de fait, et non de droit. » Toullier : « La propriété est un droit, une faculté légale; la possession est un fait. » Le locataire, le fermier, le commandité, l’usufruitier, sont possesseurs ; le maître qui loue, qui prète à usage; l’héritier qui n’attend pour […]
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DIY Paper: Blending blue jeans, and other thorny details

April 17, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
There’s been quite a bit of interest in this project, so here’s an update: So far, so good. After just a couple of tries I’m getting sheets of paper attractive enough to start thinking about doing some binding with them. I’m doing simple “blender paper,” starting with fiber I know is acid- and lignin-free. Having built the mold by stretching window-screen over a cheap wooden frame, with a matching frame for a deckle, it’s really just a matter of blending bits of fiber-source down to the constituent fibers, mixing the mash with water in a tub, dipping out a sheet, […]
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Militant and Industrial Societies, according to Dyer Lum

April 16, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
A notion that I’ll be making use of in the next installment of “Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule” is Herbert Spencer’s division of societies into “militant” and “industrial” types, introduced into the literature of mutualism (as far as I can see so far, at least) in Dyer D. Lum’s The Economics of Anarchy. Lum’s work is a very interesting attempt at an overview of anarchist economics, well worth the time it takes to read the whole thing. Roderick Long has a nicely annotated version of the text online, and I’m proofing a pamphlet edition for Corvus. I suspect that […]
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Echoes and Fragments: Collective Egoism

April 14, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the elements of Proudhon’s social theory which sometimes strikes people as odd or objectionable is his emphasis on “collective force” and his insistence on the existence of collective beings or individuals. I’ve had some understandably skeptical responses to my claim that Proudhon’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of individualism—but encompassing individuals at every conceivable scale. That is, of course, a bit of a simplification—even a simplism—if we neglect to mention that, for Proudhon, individualism had a tendency to lead into socialism, and vice versa. Recall, for instance, that he expected an absolutely free and individualistic society, based on […]
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DIY: Paper

April 13, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
As part of the process of developing my workflow for Corvus, I’ve been trying to find the best way to handle the fairly considerable amount of scrap paper which is generated by the publishing process. Printing errors, test printings, failed experiments, unused corners and ends–all of this stuff piles up, and there is a lot more of it as I start to experiment with handbinding and with formats other than the 8.5×5.5 pamphlet. I’m fortunate to have very good recycling options here, so presumably nothing need go to waste. But an awful lot of what is piling up in the […]
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Taking Wing…Once Again

April 11, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s been an up-and-down ride for Corvus Editions, in its first, exploratory year. But a combination of my growing confidence in the general soundness of the project and my growing dissatisfaction with the options have finally pushed me to “quit the day job” at Borders, and give Corvus another year—this time as a full-time business. I know things have been rather quiet on that front, as I’ve been reinventing myself and the business in a variety of ways. But I’ve been working steadily at new pamphlets, attending book-fairs, finding new supplier and honing some new skills. I expect the full […]
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Echoes and Fragments: Edward Carpenter’s progressive philosophy

April 8, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
With the most unappealing of the nominally “progressive” schools in the limelight, it’s sometimes hard to recall any of the others, but, of course, mutualism, as the “anarchism of approximations,” is another claimant to the label (and there has been some overlap of the traditions in figures like Golden Rule Jones.) I’ve been arguing that the original mutualist project of “synthesizing” or “harmonizing” individualism and socialism was replaced by a wide spectrum of less comprehensive approaches, all of which addressed some part of the larger project, and which therefore have something to say to anyone attempting to take up that […]
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The Mutualist #1 – Intro

April 1, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m putting the finishing touches on issue #1 of The Mutualist, and will start shipping orders over the next couple of days. Here is the introduction to that issue: Out of the Labyrinth This first issue of THE MUTUALIST continues the work begun in the two issues of LEFTLIBERTY, but with significant difference in context and approach. The earlier works were part of a tentative, exploratory phase of my work, a kind of preliminary mapping of the “Libertarian Labyrinth,” where the focus was really on establishing the radical diversity of our anarchist/libertarian heritage. There is certainly much, much more exploring […]