Bevington-Seymour debate Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Henry Seymour, “The Whereabouts of Communist Logic” (1895)

March 18, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third] Debate on Proudhon and property: [/one_third][two_third_last] THE WHEREABOUTS OF COMMUNIST LOGIC. To the Editor of Liberty. Failing a superfluity of copy, I send you a line or two in conclusion upon L. S. B.’s extraordinary effusion in the June number, such as I have gathered the patience to pen, for I am in no mood to follow her unprofitable pastime of splitting hairs. I defined the word “right” for the purpose of this discussion, as an individual limitation to appropriation, such limitation being set by an equality of opportunity. I furthermore held that this constituted the sole case for […]

L. S. Bevington, “The Whereabouts of Property Ethics” (1895)

March 18, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third] Debate on Proudhon and property: [/one_third][two_third_last] THE WHEREABOUTS OF PROPERTY ETHICS By L. S. BEVINGTON. In Mr. Seymour’s useful rejoinder (see April No.) to my recent survey of his position, he charges me with “sophistry.” Which may pass: readers will judge. The present article concludes my share in this particular controversy, and before saying farewell to my courteous opponent, it may be well to draw our mutual readers’ attention to the valuable verbal concessions we free communists have obtained from him. The preliminary questions have been answered precisely in the fashion that was to be foreseen. They were awkward […]

Bevington and Seymour, “The Prejudice against Property” (1895)

March 13, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third] Debate on Proudhon and property: [/one_third][two_third_last] The Prejudice against Property. To the Editor of Liberty. The main objections to the property idea which stand out clearly in L. S. Bevington’s contribution in the last issue, are two. One is that “there exists no individual producer”; the other, that the ownership of the product of one’s labour is essentially “an instrument of rulership and power over the opportunities of others.” (1) It is patent to everyone that the “individual producer” of a commodity merely puts the finishing touch, so to speak, to a mass of labor performed by other hands. […]

L. S. Bevington, “The Last Gasp of Propertyism”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] It’s not much fun to be in a debate where the participants consistently talk past one another, but it can be fairly instructive to observe them. The debate in Tochatti’s Liberty is potentially instructive, while it certainly is not anything like a model for real meetings of minds. To recap: the communists of Liberty published the final section of Proudhon’s Theory of Property, together with a provocative argument that Proudhon’s stated personal preference for “Slavonic or Communal possession of land” somehow put “so-called Proudhonians” at odds with […]

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]