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Proudhon seminar: Initial thoughts

July 2, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Proudhon’s What Is Property? poses a variety of interpretive problems, not the least of which is that its careful series of examinations of the various justifications for simple, individual property are frequently overshadowed by the slogan, “Property is robbery!” That phrase remained important to Proudhon, even after he came to his own terms with property. “I do not come to retract,” he said in May, 1848, “heaven forbid! I persist in regarding this provocative definition as the greatest truth of the century.” However, in the same “Toast to the Revolution,” he clarified the nature of the statement: “When I say, […]

Un commerce équitable est-il possible ?

July 1, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

The new issue of the French-language Offensive bears the title “Un commerce sans capitalisme.” It asks the question: “Et si le commerce et l’échange étaient indissociables de la création de véritables espaces de résistance ?” / “And if commerce and exchange were inseparable from the creation of real spaces of resistance?” This one looks well worth tracking down. (Hat tip to the Research on Anarchism list.)

J.-A. Langlois, “P.-J. Proudhon: His Life and His Works” (1875)

July 1, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Tucker translation of What Is Property? is prefaced by a translation of J. A. Langlois’ “P. J. Proudhon: His Life and Work,” the biographical introduction to Proudhon’s collected Correspondence. Tucker includes a disclaimer regarding Langlois’ account: In the French edition of Proudhon’s works, the above sketch of his life is prefixed to the first volume of his correspondence, but the translator prefers to insert it here as the best method of introducing the author to the American public. He would, however, caution readers against accepting the biographer’s interpretation of the author’s views as in any sense authoritative; advising them, […]

What Is Property? seminar

July 1, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

As announced, I’ll be doing a close reading of Proudhon’s first memoir from What Is Property? during the month of July, and I am inviting one and all to read along. I have set up a discussion list and wiki page on the anarchylist.org site. Please subscribe to the list if you are interested in participating in the main discussion. If you’re not up to that kind of commitment, I will be posting material on this blog, and compiling a running list of seminar-related material on the wiki page. My ambitions for the reading are fairly simple: I would like […]

Infoshop / bookstore economics

June 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let me put on one of my other hats for a second: Well, it didn’t take long for me to get involved with a bookstore in Portland. I seem to be well on my way to joining the collective at Laughing Horse Books, a radical bookstore with an ideologically diverse inventory and staff. Like pretty much all independent bookstores, Laughing Horse is trying to figure out how to adapt to present conditions, keep the wolves at bay, be useful in a perplexing political climate, etc. After visiting my first collective meeting, I found myself right back in the mode I […]

LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900

June 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

The historical material in LeftLiberty #1 will be drawn primarily from the individualism/socialism debate of the mid-19th century, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that, if we take our cues from any much later iteration of the debate, we find ourselves faced with the sort of simple opposition of entrenched positions that I suspect many of us would like to get past. However, in the interest of completeness, I offer what is perhaps the exemplary “exchange” of the Talking Past One Another Era: Ernest Belfort Bax, sometime collaborator of William Morris, vs. Henry Wilson, of the […]

Mutualschool Open Classroom Event #1

June 8, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Mark your calendars: July 1-14, mutualschool.org will be hosting its first educational event, a close look at the first memoir of Proudhon’s What Is Property? I’m preparing an annotated wiki version of the texts, a series of notes and “lectures” on various aspects of the text, and some short translations from related works. Proudhon’s first work on property was not his final word on the matter, and it was written at a time when he was still developing his understanding of the issues involved. There are, I think, some pretty serious problems with the text. It is, nonetheless, and deservedly […]

Countdown to Relaunch!

June 6, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Well, I reached the Pacific Northwest yesterday, patched things up with the cats (who flew out five days ago) and am waiting for my library and computers to arrive. I had a chance to putter away at some translation of Bellegarigue’s second issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Order on the train. I dragged the paper files for LeftLiberty with me in an old salesman’s specimen case that serves as a mobile file cabinet, so I can get back to work on that today. I’ve been rearranging a lot of projects, trimming some obsolete stuff, incorporating old efforts into new […]

A book, approximately

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m roughly two weeks away from my cross-country relocation, which explains my relative quiet online lately. I’ve been whittling away at 18 years worth of accumulated stuff and making as much use of the research resources here as I can before heading west, reading Proudhon and Leroux, working on texts for LeftLiberty, etc. I’ve also been doing a lot of talking with friends here about mutualism, following up on this Spring’s informal seminar and a presentation I gave on mutualist institutions. The result has been a significant crystalization of my thoughts about mutualism, and the outline, finally, for a collection […]

And then I stumbled upon…

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like “Philosophical Pamphlets,” or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines. This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn’t done it in […]