Contr'un Revisited Archives - Page 2 of 5 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

How does property become capitalist?

August 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Contrun Revisited: One of the tasks of this phase of work on Contr’un, and one of the purposes of the Contr’un Revisited project, is to find the dangling threads, of which there have been many, that could not be properly finished off at the time and see what can be done to accomplish that work of finishing. This is one of those posts that was really designed in large part as a provocation to myself, with the unspoken question being: How does property become something other than capitalist? I’m finally taking up my own challenge, in a post dealing with […]

Are Hotels Immoral?

October 27, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been trying to collect my contributions to various discussion threads, where the off-the-cuff stuff seems to advance the conversation, and I’m presenting them in the form of one-sided conversations, with just enough of the contributions of others to give context. Here’s a bit from Reddit, on the question of occupancy and use property norms: Q. Are Hotels Immoral? A. No. If someone is actively maintaining a hotel, then they are obviously occupying and using it. A large hotel is likely to be a collectively owned affair, like most large enterprises under usufructory ownership. A. Can that somebody hire people […]

The Mutualist’s Dilemma

July 4, 2012 anarchisms_w4l2ii

Contr’un Revisited: This post originally appeared as the introduction to the Mutualism.info site. As the text suggests, that project was an attempt to focus on what could be said about mutualism in general, while other blogs pursued lines of inquiry that were different and generally more partisan. Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule, the blog that would become Contr’un, was the most important of those other blogs. There, I was in the midst of a very serious encounter with property theory and just beginning a more serious engagement with Proudhon’s work. The logic of spinning off an introductory blog, as […]

The Larger Antinomy

April 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisted: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I. “When Jesus Christ, explaining to the people the different articles of the Decalogue, taught them that polygamy had been permitted to the ancients because of the rudeness of their intelligence, but that it had not been thus in the beginning; that a bad desire is equal to a fornication consummated; that insult and affront are as reprehensible as murder and blows; that he is a parricide who says to his poor father: “This morning I have prayed to God for you; that will benefit […]

The Gift Economy of Property (2.0)

April 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

Contr’un Revisited: Related: The Gift Economy of Property Trajectories: Proudhon and Property The Larger Antinomy The Gift Economy of Property I. Thesis An adequate, non-simplist, mutualist theory of what is proper to individual human beings, seeking to do justice to the range of things we denominate by the word “property,” will have to account for the nearly unbridgeable separateness that we experience in consciousness, as well as the inextricable interconnection which is our material reality. It will have to, in essence, respond to Max Stirner and Pierre Leroux (or any number of other advocates of a roughly ecological universal circulus.) […]

“What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us”

January 2, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third][ezcol_2third_end] I was asked to clarify Proudhon’s position on property, by someone reading the AK Press anthology, Property is Theft! I had been under the impression that, although Iain McKay’s introductory material consistently claims that Proudhon did not “change his mind” about property, the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property was included—and there is nothing ambiguous about that material. Unfortunately, besides placing the material from The Theory of Property in an Appendix, and suggesting that Proudhon had considered it of less importance than The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, which he was […]

Varieties of “theft” and “property”

December 27, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0″] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It’s generally nice to avoid taking complex problems and making them even more complex—but not always. There may be some real advances in clarity to be gained from incorporating our new questions about “theft” into the larger puzzle regarding Proudhon and “property.” But we’re going to have to proceed cautiously. Let’s begin with a sort of catalog of the concepts that may or may not be in play, as we try to unpack Proudhon’s infamous phrase, “property is theft,” in the contents of his remarks […]

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]

Proudhon’s critics

June 1, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on assembling—and in some cases, translating—responses to Proudhon’s work, with particular emphasis on those responses that really help to contextualize and illuminate that work. In some cases that means tackling head-on some of the thorniest problems posed by Proudhon’s method, the sheer bulk of his output, and, of course, his various failures as a consistent libertarian. The trajectories of my various Proudhon-related projects seem fairly obvious—to me at least. The thing I started with “The Gift Economy of Property” isn’t […]

The heart of Proudhon’s thought

January 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] A slightly belated “Happy 202nd Birthday!” to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It looks like the AK Press anthology will be out in February, and I have hopes of having the second issue of The Mutualist, “Owning Up,” and Proudhon’s Third Memoir on Property finished up by the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. I wish I thought that all those releases were likely to advance the debate about mutualism much beyond its current state—but I’m seriously concerned that more translations means more material to take out of context, and an intensification of the tug-of-war over Proudhon’s place in the […]