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!
Uncategorized
Might Makes Right (a bad book is good to find…)
Ragnar Redbeard’s infamous work, “Might is Right,” aka “The Survival of the Fittest, or the Philosophy of Power” (1896), has shown up at Archive.org. Those inclined to hate egoism should cherish this work, which has few—arguably none—of the pesky redeeming features so common in works by Stirner, Badcock, Walker, etc.
Uncategorized
I need a technical assist
I’ve been pushing ahead with plans to equip one of my wikis for a group transcription/translation of Proudhon’s collected works. The tools developed at Wikisource are in many ways pretty slick, and it looks like they will be adaptable to all the needs of the project. My only problem is that they use the djvu format, and I am living in an all-Macintosh house at the moment. If there’s anyone out there who has the capability to do some pdf-to-djvu conversion for me, I can do the rest of the work to get the OCR work done and the raw […]
Anarchism
New Anarchist Platformist archive
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 […]