Blog

Uncategorized

What I did on my anarchist vacation

April 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and I have few excuses to offer for not having posted a report on the trip until now. The primary one is, of course, that my participant-observation of the collapse of big-box retail (if it was a job, I would be making a living, right?) has pretty well absorbed my time and energy in the interim. But I’ve also been taking a little vacation from some of my usual activities, and trying to absorb the experience a bit. The trip was a […]
Uncategorized

A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, etc

February 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Iain McKay (An Anarchist FAQ) has proposed a Proudhon reader to AK Press, and they seem enthused enough to have posted something about it on their UK site. He has posted his tentative ideas about works to be included and organization for the volume at the Anarchist Writers blog site, including some of my notes about the relative importance of Proudhon’s works. There are important questions to be answered, in order to provide the most useful slice of a very large body of work. It would be useful to hear from a range of potential readers, so pass on any […]
Contr'un

“the fecund source of all our aberrations and misfortunes”

February 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
In a recent thread on the Forums of the Libertarian Left, I expressed my frustration with the extent to which left-libertarianism threatens to become yet another of the anarchist/libertarian flavors-of-the-month, largely reduced to defending a poorly defined territory against equally ill-defined invaders, at a time when we probably have more than enough on our plate just trying to work out what, in practical terms, our alliance really means. While the full post, and its context, may or may not be of general interest, I think this passage from Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress is: Did Christianity exist in Jesus? I do […]
Uncategorized

LeftLiberty #1 – (revised) – call for submissions

January 30, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
It was a good day for a variety of reasons. I got a chance to hike around Mt. Tabor, the extinct volcano that sits in the middle of Portland’s eastside, wandering around the top as the fog burned off over the city. And I completed, except for a few thorny passages here and there, a draft of my translation of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress. I actually tapped in the last couple of pages on my Nokia tablet while riding into town. I’m excited about the translation for a number of reasons. Although there have been a couple of important partial […]
Uncategorized

Deal or No Deal? – II

January 27, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m trying to feel my way around this moment in the politics of the US, which is supposed to be historic and charged with the potential for CHANGE, groping for something in the still-scattered flurry of symbolic and practical bits being tossed around as our “New Deal” that might actually respond to what seems to me a very serious, systemic crisis. My readers should know the punchline: All real change comes from the people themselves, acting together in mutual relations. But we probably satisfy ourselves with the punchline a bit too often, without exploring all the ways to get there. […]
Uncategorized

Deal or No Deal?

January 25, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
The media keep talking about Obama’s “New Deal” and/or “stimulus package” with lots of vague references to the past, and often even vaguer explanations of what those labels refer to in practical terms. So far, it looks like we’re in for a lot of tax-tinkering and a little infrastructure-building, wrapped up in a lot of hype and self-historification, employing references to all those past struggles and historical figures that America has decided to see in its new leader. All the talk of “job creation” seems to be wishful thinking, based on the logic of “stimulus.” As someone working in an […]
Uncategorized

Looking at the wrong depression, and finding the wrong solutions? – I

January 20, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
The question: If America needs specifically political heroes, and specifically political solutions in the present crisis, why, aside from our general lack of historical memory, are we looking to FDR and the New Deal as a model, rather than say, Potato Patch Pingree? “Who?” you ask. . . Before I answer, do me a favor: Set aside all the easy responses to the rather vague proposals of the Obama administration, and all the visceral responses to governmentalist bullshit which sometimes stop us from digging into problems, take a minute to read Kevin Carson’s most recent C4SS column, and then ask […]
Anarchism

Happy 200th, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon!

January 16, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon by tidying up my files of material relating to him, archiving some of my scattered translations at Collective Reason, and taking some time to gather my thoughts on Proudhon’s importance for the anarchist movements of the present and the future. I came to grapple with Proudhon’s work rather reluctantly, which seems to be the norm, among those of us who come to grapple with it at all. I deeply regret that reluctance, as there has probably never been another figure in the anarchist tradition who has pursued as […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: Principle of guarantee and rule of action

January 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section VII. § VII. Before passing on, will you allow me to make the observation that there is not an artisan who is not in a perfect state to understand what philosophy proposes, since there is not one who, in the exercise of his profession, does not make use of several means of justification, measure, evaluation and control? The worker has, to direct him in his labors, the yardstick, the scale, the square, the rule, the plumb, the level, the compass, standards, specimens, guides, a touchstone, etc. […]
mutualism

JUSTICE: Philosophy must be essentially practical

January 15, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, “Program,” section VI. § VI. — That philosophy must be essentially practical. We would be gravely mistaken if we imagined that philosophy, because it defined itself as the Search for the [22] reason of things, has no other end than to make us discover that reason, and that its object is exclusively speculative. Already, by showing that these conditions are those of common sense, its certainty the same for all, its highest conceptions of the same form and quality as its most elementary propositions, we have had occasion […]