mutualism

mutualism

“The Mutualist” (1826)

August 11, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] What Mutualism Was: An Incomplete History of Mutualist Tendencies What Mutualism Was: Coming to Terms with Our Past ⁂ The Mutualist—at once the name of the tract and its author—appeared in five installments, starting in the summer of 1826. The first 24 Remarks are practical in nature and, while the author is definitely critical of the New Harmony settlement and elements, they are presented in a much more conciliatory tone than those written some months later, after criticism of the first three installments had been published in the Gazette. The later Remarks focus on the […]
Anarchist Beginnings

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Third Form of Society” (1840)

September 2, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?] 3. Determination of the third social form. Conclusion Therefore, no government, no public economy, no administration is possible with property for a basis. Community seeks equality and law. Property, born of the autonomy of reason and the feeling of individual worth, wants, above all things, independence and proportionality. But community, taking uniformity for law, and leveling for equality, becomes tyrannical and unjust. Property, through its despotism and its invasions, soon shows itself oppressive and unsociable. What property and community seek is good; what both produce is bad. And why? Because both are exclusive, and […]
Bakunin Library

César De Paepe, “To the Anti-Collectivists” (1868)

February 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  COLLECTIVIST POLEMIC [1] I. — TO THE ANTI-COLLECTIVISTS. [aka THE LEGITIMACY OF THE SOCIALIZATION OF PROPERTY] Thanks to a dialectics put in the service of a method more often metaphysical than scientific (which it is necessary to avoid confusing with the historical and objective method of Karl Marx), Proudhon has discovered in the social world some laws that observation confirms more from day to day; it is, however, incontestable that hypothesis still plays an infinitely more considerable role in the works of that thinker and that often he has concluded a priori or from insufficient observations: witness the conclusions […]
Contr'un

From the neo-Proudhonian blogosphere

September 23, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Over at Mutualism and Solutions to the Social Problem, Derek has posted a new essay: “A Letter to Communists and Capitalists of the Libertarian Form.” And David at Blazing Truth has posted a “New Mutualist Manifesto.” Both are ambitious attempts to pull together diverse elements from the mutualist tradition and contemporary theory. Give them a look.
Contr'un

Militant and Industrial Societies, according to Dyer Lum

April 16, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
A notion that I’ll be making use of in the next installment of “Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule” is Herbert Spencer’s division of societies into “militant” and “industrial” types, introduced into the literature of mutualism (as far as I can see so far, at least) in Dyer D. Lum’s The Economics of Anarchy. Lum’s work is a very interesting attempt at an overview of anarchist economics, well worth the time it takes to read the whole thing. Roderick Long has a nicely annotated version of the text online, and I’m proofing a pamphlet edition for Corvus. I suspect that […]
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 […]
mutualism

Reality intervenes

December 4, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
My position as an aging, underemployed, uninsured part-time worker in a deskilled industry, in an economy where even the “jobless recovery” is in the hands of rather hapless politicians and stock-market gamblers, doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy for the sort of activism by public scholarship that I’ve been pursuing for some years. And I find myself with less and less in common with most of my anarchist and libertarian comrades. So if the work on mutualism is going to go forward, I have to find other methods and motivations. At this point, I’ll leave readers with this […]