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Anarchism

Plans and Prospects

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
As many of you know, I’ll be relocating from Ohio to Oregon sometime in the late spring/early summer of 2008. Teaching work has dried up out here, so it seems like time to move. I’ll be close to my parents and to a number of friends from Ohio who moved out there. Even if I stay poor, there will be mountains in the background, which is a big consolation for a guy who’s been living on an ancient lake bed for eighteen years. All of this has, of course, meant a little shuffling of priorities. I have access to resources […]
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The Honor of the Name, and the Confusion it Breeds

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Walking back into the debates at Infoshop.org has affected me in two primary ways. First, and foremost, it’s nice that a piece on mutualism was considered appropriate to the site. It’s a great site. If the other half of my reaction is heavy on annoyance, I’ll admit that I’ve had much less welcoming experiences over there. Nobody called me a “nazi” this time. And so many of the divisions are still largely semantic. I look forward to a day when we can all really argue over substantive stuff. That day might not be so far off, with all of the […]
anarchist mutualism

Responses to some objections

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: Honestly, some of this post has a real Twilight Zone feel to it for me. Consider it evidence of my brief Carsonian period. For me, it also marks an important tension in my own work. Obviously, there was a time when I was content speaking a political language that was very Tuckerite. I get a lot of guff these days for slighting poor old Benjamin R. Tucker, usually from people who have no idea how many hours I spent putting together the first online pdf set of Liberty. And I’ll grant that the various, seemingly endless struggles […]
equitable commerce

Josiah Warren, “The Motives for Communism” (1872-73)

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
How often have I said to myself, “Oh, for a paper of world-wide circulation, through which we could pour into the public lap the most important results of our lives’ experience! That others who come after us may avoid the thorny paths that have lacerated our feet—may profit by our errors and successes. I hope and believe that your is, or will be, such a paper: and in it I propose to furnish a series of articles, showing the practical workings of Communism and other reform experiments running through the forty-six years devoted to peaceful social revolution; and it will be seen that some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance and more conservative than conservatism.

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Anarchism

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]
anarchist mutualism

Mutualism, the Anarchism of Approximations, I

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
What is Mutualism? It is a question that even self-proclaimed mutualists may hesitate to answer. Since 1826, when the term mutualist first appeared in print, there have, in fact, been only a handful of attempts to present mutualism in systematic form. The most important of these, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865), has yet to be translated into English. The most accessible, Clarence L. Swartz’ What Is Mutualism? (1927), dates from a period when mutualism had, by most accounts, waned almost to insignificance as a political force.

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Featured articles

Masonic Tribute to William B. Greene

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 10px 0 10px”]   COL. WILLIAM B. GREENE, 33°. This Supreme Council and the Council of Deliberation for the Order in Massachusetts are called upon to deplore the death of their Ill. Bro. WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE, Sov. Gr. Inspector-General Honorary of the Thirty-third Degree of the Scottish Rite of this Jurisdiction. Col. Greene was made a Mason in Paris when a resident there, and after resuming his citizenship in this State, was advanced through the various Bodies of the Scottish Rite, taking his Thirty-second Degree in the Massachusetts Consistory Nov. 17, 1871; and […]
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Too much anarchism at Google Books?

November 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Curiouser and curiouser. While doing some research on early appearances of the word “anarchism,” prior to 1870, I ran across numerous hits on Google Books for very early texts, many of them in French. Now, given the proof-reading and quality control issues I’ve blogged about before, it wasn’t out of the question that perhaps I was seeing some early use of the French word anarchisme, together with some sloppy OCR work, in, for example, Charles Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique-agricole. But the search engine at Google Books informed me that the word anarchism appeared on thirty different pages in that […]
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An Early Libertarian Communist

November 7, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Paul Brown, whose Twelve Months in New Harmony I posted some time ago, was, from various indications, a friend of Josiah Warren. He was also the most articulate voice in favor of property-in-common that we have from the New Harmony community. He was the author of a number of books, on a range of subjects, as well as some uncollected writings, under the title “Gray Light,” which appeared in the New Harmony Gazette. I’m working on transcribing Gray Light, which is probably one of the five or six most interesting uncollected works I’ve run across in the last few years. […]