Blog

Contr'un

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, […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Contr'un

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 […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on Force and Rights (War and Peace)

March 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
These extracts from Proudhon’s War and Peace will appear in The Mutualist #1 (which will itself appear in the next couple of days.) It’s useful to recall that Proudhon treated “justice” almost entirely as a matter of the balance of forces, and acknowledged that there would be “degrees” of justice, just as there are of liberty, or of the strength and present expression of all human faculties. As early as What is Property?, Proudhon gave a historical account of the development of justice in its earliest stages: balance of strength, followed by balance of strength and guile. His scattered treatments […]
Contr'un

A Note on “Another note on the term ‘private property’”

March 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I posted this reply to Brad Spangler’s “Another note on the term ‘private property.’” I think it’s worth posting here, since it sums up my own present approach to the question of what makes a useful and theoretically “elegant” theory of property: I’m constantly uncertain why modern Lockeans support Locke’s analysis. It seems to me that the strength of the model is that it gives us a clear mechanism for appropriation (labor mixing), a rationale for that appropriation (extension of the self), and a rule for avoiding the monopolization of property (the provisos.) That’s pretty elegant. Add an active, “unmixing” […]