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Inheriting Proudhon

February 15, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

2010 is likely to be a good year for mutualism. Last I heard, Crispin Sartwell’s Josiah Warren collection was on its way to the publisher. Kevin Carson’s third book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto, is available in rough form. It looks like I’ll get to do the traveling necessary to put together a first edition of my own Descriptive Bibliography of Equitable Commerce (though several months later than originally planned), and, barring any catastrophic changes in my currently precarious economic situation, the first issue of The Mutualist (successor to LeftLiberty) ought to be available in time for […]

A funny thing happened on the way… (1)

February 14, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

Nobody who knows me or my work will be surprised if I admit to working primarily on a large — and sometimes over-large — scale. There are obvious disadvantages to the approach: I have certainly not published as much as I might have, in any of the various fields where I’ve gained some expertise, and much of the writing I have done has been in the form of theoretical “feelers” and thought experiments scattered in a wide variety of forums. The more definitive statements that I have started have been slow to develop. The logistics of serious interdisciplinary study are […]

Pierre Leroux, “Individualism and Socialism” (1834)

February 4, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

At times, even the most resolute hearts, those most firmly fixed on the sacred belief of progress, come to lose courage and to feel full of disgust at the present. In the 16th century, when one murdered in our civil wars, it was in the name of God and with a crucifix in the hand; it was a question of the most sacred things, of things which, when once they have procured our conviction and our faith so legitimately dominate our nature that it has nothing to do but obey, and even its most beautiful appanage disappears thus voluntarily before the divine will. In the name of what principle does one today send off, by telegraph, pitiless orders, and transform proletarian soldiers into the executioners of their own class? Why has our epoch seen cruelties which recall St. Bartholemew? Why have men been fanaticized to the point of making them coldly slaughter the elderly, women, and children? Why has the Seine rolled with murders which recalls the arquebuscades of window of the Louvre? It is not in the name of God and eternal salvation that it is done. It is in the name of material interests.

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Fragments and Approximations – 2

January 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[from the Forums of the Libertarian Left] Actually, there is no problem determining costs without prices — assuming that you don’t insist on having your costs represented as prices. Now, it is not clear that one can compare kinds of costliness against one another in a non-market economy with the same apparent ease as we do in a market economy — but, again, there are good reasons to suspect that those cost comparisons are far from bulletproof. Imagine a biocentric society, which emphasized interconnectedness over individuality, as well as interconnectedness with “the environment” — an ecological communitarianism. It has its […]

Fragments and Approximations – 1

January 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[from the Forums of the Libertarian Left] From my perspective, the mutualist norm of reciprocity is more like a tool than a law. Even in the form of a “law of love,” it’s at most a conventional law — and conventions are just approximations, levers that may get the next work done. “Justice” is nothing more than a level, separate indeed from good consequences, but for different reasons, maybe, than Roderick suggests. By 1858, Proudhon had pretty clearly laid out a world in which we had the justice-level, and pretty much everything else was a hammer — and the ethical […]

Reality intervenes

December 4, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

My position as an aging, underemployed, uninsured part-time worker in a deskilled industry, in an economy where even the “jobless recovery” is in the hands of rather hapless politicians and stock-market gamblers, doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy for the sort of activism by public scholarship that I’ve been pursuing for some years. And I find myself with less and less in common with most of my anarchist and libertarian comrades. So if the work on mutualism is going to go forward, I have to find other methods and motivations. At this point, I’ll leave readers with this […]

Edualc Reitellep defines “Quarry”

October 9, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

New York, 1874: Claude Pelletier, who liked to sign his books backwards, was developing his system of Atercratie—anarchy by a name with none of the baggage of the original—in a series of French-language texts, drawing heavily on familiar figures like Proudhon and Pierre Leroux. His Socialist Soirees of New York lays out the basics of atercratie, but he also wrote a long play about the Hussites which included quite a bit of commentary on 19th century socialists. And he compiled one of the various socialist dictionaries which were produced in the period. The project of producing a political program by […]

Dyer Lum on Mutualism, and a note on Proudhon

October 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m working on gathering the pieces for a series of pamphlets documenting the mutualist tradition, and ran across this rather strange, but very interesting piece, by the frequently strange, but always interesting Dyer D. Lum. Tucker’s translation of the first volume of The System of Economical Contradictions was published in 1888, and Lum’s 1892 piece seems to be a fairly idiosyncratic commentary on it. [I admit that I have tended to treat the Contradictions as a sort of badly flawed middle-step between the initial critique of property in 1840 and the realization that “the antinomy does not resolve itself” in […]

James Guillaume on Federation

September 20, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the second issue of Solidarité, dated April 1871, James Guillaume contributed this piece on the federative principle, in the context of the Paris Commune. Note the use of Proudhon’s concept of “collective force.” I’m working on translating a series of texts on nationality and the federative principle, to go with forthcoming issues of LeftLiberty. _____ Federalism. The true character of the revolution that was accomplished at Paris commence has been outlined in so marked a fashion that you, even the minds most unfamiliar with political theories, can now perceive it clearly. The revolution of Paris is federalist. The Parisian […]

Thomas and Maria L. Varney—The Other “Equitable Commerce” of 1846

September 19, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0″] Maria L. Varney, “Equitable Commerce, or, Association without Combination,” Boston Investigator 15 no. 48 (April 8, 1846): 1. [editorial notice], Boston Investigator 15 no. 48 (April 8, 1846): 6. Maria L. Varney, “Equitable Commerce, or, Association without Combination,” [concluded] Boston Investigator 15 no. 49 (April 15, 1846): 1. G. W. Rollins, “Reply to Maria L. Varney,” Boston Investigator 15 no. 51 (April 29, 1846): 1. Thomas Varney, “Equitable Commerce, or, Association without Combination,” Boston Investigator 15 no. 52 (May 6, 1846): 1. W. Chase, “Association with Combination,” Boston Investigator 15 no. 8 (July 1, 1846): […]