Blog

Anarchism

Questions on anarchism and ecology, roughly. . .

June 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Rough notes in response to this week’s Carnival of Anarchy: I had a rare chance to sit and talk with my father face to face a couple of weeks ago. He’s a retired civil servant, who in a career with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked on a range of environmental issues from game management to endangered species recovery. We were talking about the weakening of endangered species protection and about the environmental damage likely to be done in the Rio Grande Valley by the immigration “fence,” and he challenged me a bit about how anarchism of the […]
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embarking again

June 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
The lesson here is to take on projects well-adapted to the conditions under which you expect to labor. Now, if only I could get to a place where I could predict those conditions from month to month, or even semester to semester. I’ve been doing a lot of work on this project, reading, scanning and transcribing material from Liberty and from related sources. I haven’t been doing it in a particularly systematic way—until this last week. Some rethinking has obviously been in order, so here’s a new, delightfully doable plan for the start of a relaunch here. I have begun […]
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Liberty, Vol. 17, No. 1, April 1908

June 20, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
LIBERTY Proprietor: BENJ. R. TUCKER, 502 Sixth Ave., New York City Vol. XVII—No. 1 APRIL, 1908 Whole Number 403 ON PICKET DUTY Pride goeth before a fall. In the December number of Liberty I congratulated myself on having re-established my own composing-room. No later than January 10 this composing-room, together with the entire wholesale stock of my publications and nearly all my plates, was absolutely wiped out by fire. As I had deliberately refused to insure, because of the absurdly high rates now prevailing (the rate for the stock in my book-shop exceeds four per cent. a year), the loss […]
communism

Josiah Warren, The Motives for Communism—II

June 20, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Josiah Warren, “The Motives for Communism—How It Worked and What It Led To—Article II,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, IV, 15 (February 24, 1872), ?. THE MOTIVES FOR COMMUNISM—HOW IT WORKED AND WHAT IT LED TO. ARTICLE II. Some facts are more strange than fiction, more philosophical than philosophy, more romantic than romance and more conservative than conservatism. In my previous article I spoke of some of the motives for communism; and, certainly, no higher or more holy motive can possibly actuate human beings. We now come to the way it worked. We had assembled with a view of organizing a […]
communism

Josiah Warren, The Motives for Communism—I

June 20, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Josiah Warren, “The Motives for Communism—How It Worked and What It Led To,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, IV, 14 (February 17, 1872), 5. COMMUNISM Mesdames Editors: 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 […]
equitable commerce

Clarence L. Swartz on Warren and Bailie

June 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Josiah Warren and His Work. Josiah Warren, as Liberty’s readers know, was the original founder and teacher of Philosophical Anarchism in America. A scion of the Massachusetts puritan house of Warren, which numbers among its many distinguished members the revolutionary hero of Bunker Hill, Gen. Joseph Warren, Josiah, who was born in Boston toward the close of the eighteenth century, became one of the most noted social reformers of his time. As the exponent of the doctrine of Individual Sovereignty and Cost the Limit of Price, he blazed the path which Liberty, for twenty-five years, has followed as its […]
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More Lucifer, plus some Liberty

June 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Thanks to Jesse Walker at Reason Hit & Run and the folks at boing boing for making my rather off-hand announcement of the budding Lucifer the Light-Bearer archive something of a hit in the blogosphere. Apparently the interest is out there, so I’ve been adding to the archived issues as time allows: 52 down, and only 1057 issues to go! I’ve also begun an archive of Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty in pdf form, scanning from John Zube’s microfilm edition. Again, the quality is not perfect, and in some cases is not even particularly good, but hopefully I can put something […]
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on ALLiance

June 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
This stuff gets messy, pretty much right out of the gate. As if we expected anything else. There are plenty of sincere comrades of various persuasions, not to mention our share of out-and-out trolls, ready to point out the dangers, difficulties and obvious follies of an Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Any common language or agreement on more than very basic principles, upon which some more practical form of alliance might be solidly grounded, is strictly something to come. We’ve bet on a shared intuition that the obviousness of our folly is somewhat illusory. The leap of faith represented by […]
equitable commerce

John Pickering on “Equitable Commerce” (1847)

June 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
John Pickering, The working man’s political economy: founded upon the principle of immutable justice and the inalienable rights of man; designed for the promotor of national reform. Cincinnati : Stereotyped in Warren’s new patent method by Thomas Varney, 1847. CHAPTER XIX. “EQUITABLE COMMERCE.” A work bearing the above title, published by Josiah Warren, New Harmony, Indiana, has lately appeared before the public. The work professes to be, “A new development of principles for the harmonious adjustment and regulation of the pecuniary, intellectual and moral intercourse of mankind, proposed as elements of new society.” The author of this work, and myself, […]