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on alliance

July 17, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

After weeks of increasingly bellicose agreement on the importance of truth, reason and LGBT rights to the left-libertarian movement, I’ve decided to withdraw my formal affiliations with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. The ALL was launched initially despite considerable diversity of basic assumptions about theory, strategy and tactics–a dangerous strategy, in many ways, but one which grew naturally, it seems to me, out of the network of friendships, political flirtations, and relations of philosophical hospitality that preceded the ALL, on SEK3 original left-libertarian list and in Tom Knapp’s Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left. The growth and success of the […]

Add it up

July 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

I was listening to a local, very mainstream news broadcast last night, and the report was that, while Oregon’s unemployment rate was 12.2%, well above the national average, the underemployment rate was something like 23%. Now, as far as I can ascertain, the actual jobless rate seems to run at least twice as high as the rate of those collecting benefits (a rate which, depending on who is citing it, may or may not include those on the “extended benefits” currently available.) And those total jobless estimates, which frequently run closer to three times the “unemployment rate,” don’t count those […]

Lose this skin…

July 14, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

As of this afternoon, I’ve struck the ALL flag, seceded and moved my yurt to more open left-libertarian territory. It won’t make a lick of difference to my friends and those with whom I am engaged in actual projects, but it feels necessary to me. My “document for discussion” on hospitality and the ALLiance can be taken as my thoughts on how small-a alliance might be conducted. I’ve actually been contemplating the change for some time, as a means of avoiding any sort of mis/representation issues, as my own theoretical work is likely to be increasingly controversial in some ALLiance […]

mutualism

JUSTICE: Law of Progress

July 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section XI. § XI. — Law of progress: Social destination. An objection is posed.—If the center or pivot of philosophy, namely Justice, is, like that of being, invariable and fixed, the system of things, which, in fact and in right, rests on that center, must also be defined in itself, and consequently fixed in its ensemble and tending to immutability. Leibnitz regarded this world as the best possible; he should have said, in virtue of the law of equilibrium that presides over it, that it is the […]

mutualism

JUSTICE: Conditions for a philosophical propaganda

July 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section X. § X. — Conditions for a philosophical propaganda. It is when religions pass away, when monarchies fail, when the politics of exploitation is reduced, in order to preserve itself, to proscribing the worker and the idea, and when the republic, everywhere on the agenda, seeks its formula; at the hour when the old convictions are dilapidated, when consciences are routed, when opinion is abandoned, when the multitude of egoisms shouts Every man for himself! that the moment arrives for an attempt at social restoration by […]

mutualism

JUSTICE – Supremacy of Justice

July 11, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section IX. § IX. — Supremacy of Justice. Philosophy defined; Its dualism established; Its levelling spirit and its democratic tendency demonstrated; The formation of ideas, perceptions and concepts explained; The criterium having been found, the goal indicated, the synthetic formula given, man’s purpose determined; One can say, in a sense, that philosophy is finished. It is finished, since it can present itself before the multitude and say to it: I am JUSTICE, Ego sum qui sum; it is I who shall draw you forth from misery and […]

mutualism

The Return of JUSTICE: The universal reason of things

July 11, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section VIII. § VIII. — Justice, the universal reason of things. — Science and conscience. The people, in their laborious existence, even more than the philosophers in their speculations, have need of a guide: they need, we have said, a guide for their reason, a rule for their conscience, a superior point of view from which they may embrace their knowledge and their destiny. All this they found in religion. God, the eternal Word, had created man from clay and had animated him with his breath; God […]

Taking Wing: Dead end streets

July 6, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Back in December of last year, in the midst of the “conflation” debates, I posted a couple of articles about the retail book industry: “Who benefits most economically from state centralization?” and “there’s nothing wrong with competition.” In them, I talked a bit about the relative merits of the “big-box” and “small-box” models of bookselling, and started to talk about two competing visions of how “competition” can be thought about as an economic good. It’s tempting to relate the two models of competition to Dyer Lum’s distinction between “militant” and “industrial” types: on the one hand, we have the centralists’ […]

Glitchfix

July 4, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Although nobody mentioned it, it looks like the pdf files for the Dyer Lum and Tchernychevsky booklets were not available yesterday. They should be accessible now, and I hope to have pdfs, in both pamphlet and 2-up form, up on the Corvus Shop server over the next couple of days. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #2 Liberty2.0 and Dyer D. Lum

July 3, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

The breadth of my interests is probably no surprise to anyone reading this blog, so nobody will be surprised that the archive I have accumulated is pretty diverse. But, given the really limited popularity of even the best-known of the figures that have been the special objects of my interest, it’s been a real question whether there was much point in pamphleting a lot of these folks. At the Portland Bookfair, I said a number of times that I would know I was on the right track if someone actually bought a copy of William Henry Channing’s “The Call of […]