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“We are in one sense, a poverty-stricken people”

August 4, 2012
If you look at the sidebar of the blog, you will find that I have added a section for “Mutualist Classics.” Eventually, there should be a pretty good little library linked there—mutualists are not, as it turns out, an impoverished people when it comes to literature—but I want to start with a few texts that may be unfamiliar to many readers, but which strike me as particularly useful. The first two texts I’ve linked are short works of fiction by Sidney H. Morse. Morse is one of the figures who seems to appear everywhere in the story of mutualist and […]
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The Importance of Proudhon

August 3, 2012 anarchisms_w4l2ii
Anarchists can be touchy about any sort of authority, so we are frequently at pains to say that we are not followers of any particular leader or historical figure. That’s good. Among other things, the historical figures we’re most likely to follow were almost all pretty clear about how undesirable that would be. And there’s something a little disconcerting about anarchists when they do invest perhaps a bit too much of their identity in an identification with some one of those anarchist figure, whether historical or current.

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Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere…

July 28, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Things have been a little quiet on this blog, due in part to offline concerns, but I’ve been puttering away, and regular readers here may find material of interest among the newish posts to some of my other blogs. I’m particularly happy to have completed the translation of An Account of a Voyage from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole by way of the Center of the Earth, a 1721 French “imaginary voyage” involving a passage through the center of the earth. At Black and Red Feminist History: Jenny d’Hericourt, “Woman’s Rights in France” (1869)  La Femme, “Madame Jenny P. […]
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A couple of notes on “The Molyneux Problem”

July 8, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just so that it is not necessary to reconstruct this every time the question of the adequacy of Universally Preferable Behavior arises, I’ll just place these comments (originally from Reddit) here for the benefit of posterity: [To see the problems with the book] you might look at the beginning of the section “UPB: Five Proofs,” where he lays out the supposed logical proof from UPB. When he lays it out as a syllogism, the key proposition is that: “Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.” Now, that’s not the clearest of sentences, but here’s the […]
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The “FAQs”

July 7, 2012
One of the basic assumptions driving this blog is that we’re not really in a position for definitive answers to a lot of the most important, and most frequently asked questions about mutualism. We can say a lot of true things about a lot of mutualist tendencies, but MUTUALISM as such, has only had, or will have, the sort of unity that allows us to simply explain or define it at a few moments in the past and perhaps in some more orderly future—provided we can do the work now of getting a handle on the current, rather far-flung debate. […]
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Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide

July 6, 2012
For a look at the concerns of the Owenite current at the moment, in the 1820s, when some members were trying on the label “mutualist” and Josiah Warren was taking the steps that would lead him to individualist anarchism, I’ve assembled a collection of texts in the first volume of a Documentary History of Mutualism: Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide. In it: The letters of the “1826 Mutualist” are followed by Josiah Warren’s “The Motives for Communism,”—an account of his involvement with the Owenite movement,—a speech given at New Harmony by communist Paul Brown,—author of Twelve Months in New […]
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Notes on the origins of the term “mutualism” (1822-1850)

July 6, 2012
I contributed most of the following to Wikipedia, so we can just make use of it here to get started on a bit of basic mutualist history: Mutualism, as a term, has seen a variety of related uses. Charles Fourier first used the French term “mutualisme” in 1822, although the reference was not to an economic system. The first use of the noun “mutualist” was in the New-Harmony Gazette by an American Owenite in 1826. In the early 1830s, a labor organization in Lyons, France, called themselves the “Mutuellists.” Pierre Joseph Proudhon was involved with the Lyons mutualists and later […]
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Possible & Impossible Worlds

July 6, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
For those who enjoy early science fiction, imaginary voyages, and utopian narratives, I’m sharing some of my favorites at Possible and Impossible Worlds. I’ve been playing around with some non-political translation, including the 1721 “Account of a Voyage from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole by way of the Center of the Earth, with the description of that perilous Passage, and of the marvelous and astonishing things that were discovered beneath the Antarctic Pole” (which ought to be complete within the next week or so) and some work on a couple of incompletely translated Jules Verne novels. And I occasionally […]
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The Mutualism.info Dilemma

July 6, 2012
I’ve hardly started, and there are already some criticisms and concerns about what is is and isn’t going to get covered here. My hope is to eventually cover a wide range of historical, theoretical and practical questions—and, where appropriate, to deal with elements of the traditions both historically (to get us on a firm footing) and critically. It’s useful, for example, to know how William B. Greene adapted Proudhon’s proposals, and the colonial land bank model, to the needs of his audience in 19th century New England. But most of my readers are probably, like me, not in a position […]