Joshua King Ingalls

mutualism

Should labor be paid or not? part 1

September 20, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions recently on the issue of wages, as it was understood by the mutualists and their successors among the Liberty group. There seems to be a widespread sense, among social anarchists, but also among some who consider themselves of the mutualist-individualist school, that wages per se are a Bad Thing. Very few anarchists of any stripe would disagree that waged labor, under present conditions and under any conditions where large accumulations of capital, what we used to call “monopoly power,” and state-backed privilege exist, is unlikely to return to labor its fair share […]
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Two scarce J. K. Ingalls pamphlets

July 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Two of the hard-to-find pamphlets by Joshua King Ingalls have surfaced among the items digitized by the Labadie Collection staff. The Unrevealed Religion is listed in their index of titles, but the pamphlet scanned also includes Social Industry, the Sole Source of Increase, which was issued as an introduction to Ingalls’ columns in Fair Play. I had read The Unrevealed Religion, but had not attempted to transcribe the faint, brittle interlibrary loan copy I had access to. The faintness of the scans suggests the difficulties involved. But access to this electronic version means I can get that transcription done at […]
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Joshua King Ingalls on land reform and the single tax

May 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Joshua King Ingalls’ essay “Henry George Examined: Should Land Be Nationalized or Individualized?” is now available in the archive. This is the classic encounter between the mutualist land reform doctrine of Ingalls and George’s single-tax scheme. This version was taken from the supplement to Liberty, October 14, 1882, and differs slightly from the version incorporated in Ingalls’ Reminiscences.
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J. K. Ingalls, Woman’s Industrial Subjection

April 17, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Joshua King Ingalls was one of the most tireless of the radical writers of the second half of the 19th century, and one of those most interested in the “social problem” in all its aspects. Although land reform was his primary interest, he also addressed women’s rights in several of his writings. The four parts of “Woman’s Industrial Subjection” appeared in 1889 in The Woman’s Tribune, an important woman’s newspaper. They contain Ingalls’ attempt at a historical or anthopological account of the origins of women’s subjection to men, and an analysis of how this subjection paralleled the creation of modern […]
Anarchism

J. K. Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers”

April 2, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Joshua King Ingalls, “Address to Commonwealers,” The Twentieth Century, XIII, 2 (July 12, 1894), 11. ADDRESS TO COMMONWEALERS BY J. K. INGALLS. Hirelings who for gold have bled!Voters to polls by bosses led!Toilers, begging “work or bread,” Strike for Liberty!Now’s the day and now’s the hour!Cease to court the oppressors’ power!Who threaten, bribe, while they devour Your fruits of industry. Decline their deal the ballot boxTheir “leaden diet” cartridge box!Detective trick and brutal knocks! Brave thought against them try!In no “god of battles trust!”Give nor take what is not just!And only die, when die you must, As man for man […]
mutualism

Mutualist Townships: Albert Brisbane and J. K. Ingalls (1849–1850)

March 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
In early 1850, The Spirit of the Age featured two proposals for a “mutualist township.” One, by Joshua King Ingalls, was a practical follow-up to his “Method of Transition.” The other was by Albert Brisbane, the well-known popularizer of Charles Fourier. Brisbane was also an acquaintance of Proudhon, having visited him in prison in France. In this sense, Brisbane had the most direct connection to the French mutualist tradition of any of the American writers in 1850. Greene would eventually meet Proudhon, later in the 1850s. What follows is, in a sense, Brisbane’s mutualist resumé, including his account of his […]
Anarchism

J. K Ingalls’ Reminiscences, etc

March 24, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
With someplace friendly to put it, I’m starting to clean out my backlog of material. The second dump to From the Libertarian Library consists of material from the Boston Investigator by Lewis Masquerier and material from Joshua King Ingalls, including the first five chapter of his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform, with some of the annotations that I’ll be including in the in-progress print edition. UPDATE: All of Ingalls’ Reminiscences, except for the Appendix, which consists of a few later writings, is now available online. I think students of mutualism, and of radical […]
Anarchism

J. K. Ingalls – Relations, Existing and Natural

March 18, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Progress! I’ve been working on my scanning process, and have managed to nearly double my speed with a new approach to the OCR work. This should mean, in the long run, much better progress over on Travelling in Liberty, which constantly suffers from my desire to have the texts available when I comment on them. In the short run, it means something of a backlog of texts from The Twentieth Century, including a dozen or so by J. K. Ingalls. Check the Ingalls bibliography for updates and links. On the hand-transcription front, progress as well. Here is the fourth and […]
mutualism

Joshua King Ingalls, “Property and Its Rights”

March 11, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Here’s the third installment in J. K. Ingalls’ series on property and rights, from The Spirit of the Age. Notice that Ingalls had by this time already encountered Edward Kellogg’s work. He had, in fact, written a two-part review of Labor and Other Capital in the Univercoelum (which I’ll be travelling to track down in the next week or so). In his Reminiscences, Ingalls talks about arguing face to face with Kellogg about the latter’s belief that the power of increase through interest was an essential feature of money. This is obviously germane to the issue here, and Ingalls, like […]
mutualism

Joshua King Ingalls, “Man and His Rights”

March 10, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
This is the second installment of J. K. Ingalls’ series on the “natural rights of man.” In it, we find the general plan that unites the majority of Ingalls’ contributions to The Spirit of the Age. “When the subject of property, its rights, and the relation it sustains naturally to man, have been discussed, there may be an outline given of a translatory association, the aim of which shall be to unite the efforts of all friends of the race, who look with hope to the future, all friends of industrial reform, all oppressed producers, who feel the injustice of […]