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…or is there?

December 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Well, it appears that the class action suit against Google Books is being resolved, and Google feels free to make some texts available that it has been sitting on for years. Among those newly available files are an incomplete run of The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher (1848-49), one of the periodicals that merged to form The Spirit of the Age, an important part of the literature of mutualism. Joshua King Ingalls was among the contributors to The Univercoelum, and the available issues contain a number of previously hard-to-access articles, and information about several more. It’s certainly not every day that […]
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“there’s nothing wrong with competition”

December 14, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
When Roderick Long made mention of my recent post on bookselling, a bit of back-and-forth ensued in the comments on his post. The point was raised that, if the big box bookstores benefit from state intervention, so do their customers, who get cheap books. The problem is that I’m not sure that the big box stores actually deliver there. I asked: What evidence is there that a bookselling monoculture with lots of coupons and discount stickers prominently displayed actually represents lots of cheap choices for consumers? Mass-market bookselling is notoriously wasteful of resources (to the point of destroying gazillions of […]
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Sounds like nonsense

December 12, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is, it turns out, more than one “conflation conflict” that we need to deal with. Before we can even begin to wrestle with the relation of the current economic situation to various understandings of “capitalism” and/or a “free (or freed) market,” we apparently have to pick our way through a rhetorical minefield of widely used terms and phrases which “sound like” something no real anarchist or libertarian would (presumably) ever say. For right libertarians, the primary concern seems to be contamination by “Marxism,” which embodies, apparently, pretty much everything that is or could be wrong with the world. Now, […]
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Happy 150th, “libertaire”

December 11, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Over at the Anarchist FAQ blog, Iain has a post recognizing the sesquicentennial of the term libertaire, used in 1858 by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his journal, La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social. Déjacque is generally credited with the first use of the term “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist.” We’ve learned, as the digital archives grow, to be skeptical of first-use claims, but I’m happy to take a moment to recognize the importance of Déjacque’s contribution. His fascinating mix of anarchism, communism, egoism, and feminism, drawing on the thought of Fourier, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux and others, is […]
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Who benefits most economically from state centralization?

December 10, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] The conversation surrounding Roderick Long’s recent article at Cato Unbound, “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now,” has been pretty remarkable, starting with the fact that it began at Cato. There’s been some sloppy, even, shabby stuff along the way, including some weird speculative stuff about Kevin Carson’s work, and its ability to stand academic criticism. As a recovering academic, I would just like to remind folks that loose talk about whose father’s theory can whip whose theory is the stuff of Wikipedia talk pages and chat rooms: scholars have to bring it […]
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Proudhon measures Progress

December 3, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] Some of the reshuffling of my scholarly priorities has revolved around my decision to go back and finish a translation of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress, before tackling any more of Justice or going back to look at The General Idea of the Revolution. It was a work which scored low when I asked people what they would like to see in translation first, but it is one which seems particularly important to me at the moment, in part because it contains, in condensed and clear form, Proudhon’s own account of what ties his various […]
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Trajectories

November 23, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been shuffling real-world commitments, cutting back some projects, and preparing myself for what looks like a steady “speed-up” through the retail holiday season. (In retail, as elsewhere, increased worker productivity is supposed to make up for general decline, and “more with less” is the watchword for the season, meaning more promotions requiring more special effort, more contrived contests, more competition for hours, etc.) I left the radical bookstore collective I had been working with a week or so back, and have dodged a couple of other commitments in the meantime, while taking some time to figure out what’s worth […]
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What could justify property?

November 23, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Commentary coming soon.] The shift in Proudhon’s work, from critique of property to arguments in favor of it (despite and based on the critiques), is hard to work through, perhaps because Proudhon was himself a little uncomfortable with the whole affair. We know that, to some extent, the defense of property ran counter to his personal desires. Theory of Property, which seems to turn his earlier work on its head, ends with this passage: A small, rented house, a garden to use, largely suffices for me: my profession not being the cultivation of the soil, the vine, or the meadow, […]
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Unexpected dangers of the free market?

November 16, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] We know the standard anti-market concern, that even the truly free relations which mutualists and other market anarchists propose (free-market anti-capitalism, equitable commerce, etc…), will lead inevitably (through a fatal flaw in contract theory, or a fatal flaw in human nature, etc…) to (bad) “capitalism,” rule by the possessors of capital, and the state. Answers to the problem (if it is such) generally involve rejections of “contract” and/or “commerce” tout court, along with, of course, “property” conceived on any model that includes exclusive, individual ownership. There seem to be problems with these answers, whether […]