Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches represented here, there are important issues being wrestled with in all of this stuff, and the more practical issues are not unlike those that any anarchist society will face as it attempts to give itself a working shape. I’m ultimately unsympathetic to the solutions offered by platformism, but value the debates. Take a look.
Contr'un
“The Spirit of the Age” at Google Books!
It’s a very, very good day for those interested in the earliest manifestations of mutualism in the United States. William Henry Channing’s The Spirit of the Age (1849-1850) is now available, in its entirety, with minimal scanning defects, from Google Books. I had previously had the chance to read through an original bound volume, and transcribe some contributions. Now I can finally sit down to read through the entire run. 150 or so pages in, my sense of the importance of this early journal just keeps increasing. Go check it out!
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Google Books is hiding things again
More stupid search engine tricks. Back in May, I noted some peculiarities of Google Books’ search engines. If you follow the links from that original post, you will notice some new peculiarities, including the disappearance of the 1849 Amos E. senter edition of Equitable Commerce from the results for: inauthor:josiah inauthor:warren. That important edition is still available from Google Books; you can follow the link above to see what Equitable Commerce looked like before Stephen Pearl Andrews edited it. But it, and one other listing, no longer show up in a general search for Warren’s work. There are still five […]
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Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!
It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]