Echoes and Fragments

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

Echoes and Fragments: Edward Carpenter’s progressive philosophy

April 8, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
With the most unappealing of the nominally “progressive” schools in the limelight, it’s sometimes hard to recall any of the others, but, of course, mutualism, as the “anarchism of approximations,” is another claimant to the label (and there has been some overlap of the traditions in figures like Golden Rule Jones.) I’ve been arguing that the original mutualist project of “synthesizing” or “harmonizing” individualism and socialism was replaced by a wide spectrum of less comprehensive approaches, all of which addressed some part of the larger project, and which therefore have something to say to anyone attempting to take up that […]