LeftLiberty Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Contr'un

Special “LeftLiberty+” Issue of “The Mutualist”

July 22, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m both streamlining the Corvus Editions catalog a bit for upcoming bookfairs and trying to assemble a more focused body of materials to serve as a background for the next couple of issues of The Mutualist. With those goals in mind, I’ve combined the most useful bits of my own writing from the two issues of LeftLiberty with the blog posts I reference, or expect to reference, most often, as a special issue of The Mutualist. The contents are: Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations Mutualist Musings on Property (including “The Gift Economy of Property, etc.) Note A (by Charles Fourier) […]

Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #4 – LeftLiberty #2

August 8, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

I spent our week of record heat digging around in various archives, when I would much rather have been concentrating on writing, as well as getting a few things ready for my weekend of tabling. And then I’ve spent the last week playing catch-up on the writing and attempting to process the lessons of the weekend. In the end, it’s made for a very productive few days, as all of that came together. Even after splitting the issue, LeftLiberty #2 will be at least twenty pages longer than the first issue, and it should also be far superior in almost […]

LeftLiberty – Best-laid plans, hopefully improved

August 3, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Just a heads-up for those waiting for LeftLiberty 2. With the launch of Corvus, some unexpected breakthroughs in the “new approximation” writing, and the little shifts in my emphases and affiliations, the issue started to balloon well beyond the capacity of my zine stapler, so it has now officially split into two issues: 2 – “The Gift Economy of Property,” which will pull together and revise the blog and forum posts that have been the basis for the “new approximation,” and 3 – “A Doctrine of Life and Humanity,” which can expand a little to address some new material from […]

mutualism

Introducing, at long last! LeftLiberty and the New Proudhon Library!

April 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

I took versions of LeftLiberty 1 and the new translation of The Philosophy of Progress to the San Francisco Bay Area Bookfair, but there wasn’t time to put together covers and do the web support for distribution. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be updating the leftliberty.org site, launching Corvus Distribution, revising all of my current pamphlets, and making sure things are listed at Invisible Molotov. But sufficient unto the day its little list of milestones, and today I’m very pleased to announce that, at long last, both LeftLiberty and the New Proudhon Library are realities, with first entries […]

Uncategorized

What I did on my anarchist vacation

April 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and I have few excuses to offer for not having posted a report on the trip until now. The primary one is, of course, that my participant-observation of the collapse of big-box retail (if it was a job, I would be making a living, right?) has pretty well absorbed my time and energy in the interim. But I’ve also been taking a little vacation from some of my usual activities, and trying to absorb the experience a bit. The trip was a […]

LeftLiberty #1 – (revised) – call for submissions

January 30, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

It was a good day for a variety of reasons. I got a chance to hike around Mt. Tabor, the extinct volcano that sits in the middle of Portland’s eastside, wandering around the top as the fog burned off over the city. And I completed, except for a few thorny passages here and there, a draft of my translation of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Progress. I actually tapped in the last couple of pages on my Nokia tablet while riding into town. I’m excited about the translation for a number of reasons. Although there have been a couple of important partial […]

LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900

June 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

The historical material in LeftLiberty #1 will be drawn primarily from the individualism/socialism debate of the mid-19th century, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that, if we take our cues from any much later iteration of the debate, we find ourselves faced with the sort of simple opposition of entrenched positions that I suspect many of us would like to get past. However, in the interest of completeness, I offer what is perhaps the exemplary “exchange” of the Talking Past One Another Era: Ernest Belfort Bax, sometime collaborator of William Morris, vs. Henry Wilson, of the […]

A new rogue for the gallery

May 2, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

The search for material for LeftLiberty has taken me in some interesting directions. Every time I think I have a pretty good idea of the range of “socialist” positions out there, I run across some new figure who turns out to be significant, even if largely forgotten. In the mid-19th century, of course, there are a lot fewer socialists out there than there were at the end of that century, and it has been in the course of exploring the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I have found some of the greatest surprises, along with some difficult problems […]

LeftLiberty: Proudhon on individualism and socialism

April 9, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Bits of progress on LeftLiberty, including tweaks to the logo, the beginnings of a website and some responses to my call for contributions. I’ve been working to get the wiki archive working smoothly, with prettier urls and interwiki linking with the Distributive Passions site. The material for the “classics” section looks like it will include works by Proudhon, Leroux, Bastiat, Molinari, Tucker, and several others. In the early works, there is a lot of belligerent agreement that a simple opposition between “individualism” and “socialism” doesn’t quite get the work done. Here’s a bit of a letter from Proudhon: Paris, January […]

LeftLiberty 1-2: Individualism, Socialism, and Solidarity

April 4, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Starting in July, I’ll be producing a new journal/zine, called “LeftLiberty,” and dedicated to “the left-libertarian conversation in all its phases and ages.” It’s connected to the project of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, and focuses on clarifying what is really at stake in some of the messier debates in the broad anarchist movement. Issues will be arranged around key concepts with the first two issues addressing “Individualism, Socialism, and Solidarity.” I’m finishing up a translation of Pierre Leroux’s 1834 “Individualism and Socialism” for the first issue, which will also include a “miscellany” of early anarchist texts on individualism […]