Contr’un

Contr'un

Paul Adam’s “Eulogy for Ravachol”

February 22, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
EULOGY FOR RAVACHOL Paul Adam In these times, miracles and saints seem set to disappear. We can easily believe that the souls of contemporaries lack the spirit of sacrifice. The martyrs of this century have always been obscure citizens, maddened by the din of political words, and then gunned down without mercy, in 1830, 1848, and 1871, for the benefit of certain parliamentary situations arranged by a few violent and shifty advocates. And it would even be imprudent to claim that no wish of individual interest committed these unfortunate combatants themselves to seek some electoral profit, arms in hand. The […]
Contr'un

Inheriting Proudhon

February 15, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
2010 is likely to be a good year for mutualism. Last I heard, Crispin Sartwell’s Josiah Warren collection was on its way to the publisher. Kevin Carson’s third book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto, is available in rough form. It looks like I’ll get to do the traveling necessary to put together a first edition of my own Descriptive Bibliography of Equitable Commerce (though several months later than originally planned), and, barring any catastrophic changes in my currently precarious economic situation, the first issue of The Mutualist (successor to LeftLiberty) ought to be available in time for […]
Anarchism

A funny thing happened on the way… (1)

February 14, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Nobody who knows me or my work will be surprised if I admit to working primarily on a large — and sometimes over-large — scale. There are obvious disadvantages to the approach: I have certainly not published as much as I might have, in any of the various fields where I’ve gained some expertise, and much of the writing I have done has been in the form of theoretical “feelers” and thought experiments scattered in a wide variety of forums. The more definitive statements that I have started have been slow to develop. The logistics of serious interdisciplinary study are […]
Contr'un

Fragments and Approximations – 2

January 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[from the Forums of the Libertarian Left] Actually, there is no problem determining costs without prices — assuming that you don’t insist on having your costs represented as prices. Now, it is not clear that one can compare kinds of costliness against one another in a non-market economy with the same apparent ease as we do in a market economy — but, again, there are good reasons to suspect that those cost comparisons are far from bulletproof. Imagine a biocentric society, which emphasized interconnectedness over individuality, as well as interconnectedness with “the environment” — an ecological communitarianism. It has its […]
Contr'un

Fragments and Approximations – 1

January 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[from the Forums of the Libertarian Left] From my perspective, the mutualist norm of reciprocity is more like a tool than a law. Even in the form of a “law of love,” it’s at most a conventional law — and conventions are just approximations, levers that may get the next work done. “Justice” is nothing more than a level, separate indeed from good consequences, but for different reasons, maybe, than Roderick suggests. By 1858, Proudhon had pretty clearly laid out a world in which we had the justice-level, and pretty much everything else was a hammer — and the ethical […]
anarchist mutualism

French mutualism beyond Proudhon

May 8, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] There’s been an interesting, if not terribly productive, discussion on Wikipedia, regarding the scope of the entry on Individualist Anarchism. It has been charged, with some justice, that the article overemphasizes Anglophone market anarchism, and virtually ignores a number of other currents that might be included with equal reason and justice. That’s one way of thinking about the problem. I’m inclined to beat my usual drum, and suggest that this is another of those cases where Wikipedia simply has no way to resolve what should be in article when essentially all […]
Contr'un

“the fecund source of all our aberrations and misfortunes”

February 13, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
In a recent thread on the Forums of the Libertarian Left, I expressed my frustration with the extent to which left-libertarianism threatens to become yet another of the anarchist/libertarian flavors-of-the-month, largely reduced to defending a poorly defined territory against equally ill-defined invaders, at a time when we probably have more than enough on our plate just trying to work out what, in practical terms, our alliance really means. While the full post, and its context, may or may not be of general interest, I think this passage from Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress is: Did Christianity exist in Jesus? I do […]
Contr'un

Colins’ painful punctuation

December 31, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Warning: Off-topic chatter about the process of translation. Jean Guillaume Cesar Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins was the chief theorist of Rational Socialism, and a frequent critic and intellectual rival of Proudhon. Indeed, Colins’ crew were pitting the two figures against each other long after both had died. I’m planning on finishing up a translation of Adolphe Hugentobler’s Dialogue of Dead Men sometime in 2009. Colins wrote a three-volume work, Justice in Science, apart from the Revolution and the Church, which begins with a 600-page attempted refutation of most of Proudhon’s main theses in Justice in the Revolution and the […]
Contr'un

War: What’s it good for?

December 30, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
It turns out that Proudhon’s answer to the musical question is rather interesting, and challenging. His two-volume War and Peace represents an further exploration of some of the ideas he had developed in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. The turning point in Proudhon’s philosophy came in the 1850s, between the Philosophy of Progress and Justice, when he realized that, as he later put it, “the antinomy does not resolve itself.” The immediate consequence of this realization was a move from the emphasis on synthesis, which had dominated his work from the last sections of What is Property? […]
Contr'un

…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 […]