mutual banking

Contr'un

Practical explorations of mutual currency and credit

October 24, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s always been a bit of a struggle striking a balance between elaborating general theory — which in the case of anarchist mutualism has often meant tracking down and/or translating the relevant works before commentary could even begin — and exploring the historical applications — which are more widely known, but often rather historical. As I’ve been working again a bit on the Contr’un collections, I’ve been reliving periods where there was a great deal more interest in the details of the various mutual banking schemes or the various applications of equitable commerce. At the same time, I have found […]
The Sex Question

Jeanne Deroin, “Letter to the Associations on the Organization of Credit” (1851)

December 15, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] The radical literature that any of us are actually familiar with always seems to be just a drop in the bucket. There are masses of largely ephemeral publications in every language, and all of the advances in digital archiving have only really begun to make any sort of dent in the work to be done. We can’t ignore all that ephemera, unless we’re content with a sort of abstract, top-down understanding of our traditions. After all, for every Proudhon, there were a dozen Greenes and Langlois, and for every one of them there were dozens of Junquas and Blackers, […]
Corvus Distribution

Corvine Call #1 Origins and Blazing Stars

July 2, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
“Waiting for a moment until another shellbark dropped, a blue-jay perched upon a bare twig and sang after its fashion. It was a short series of discordant notes; collectively, a harsh, rattling, corvine call, and yet it blended well with the gnarly branches and shaggy bark. Coarse, but honest to the core. There was nothing for mere appearance’s sake, such as gluts you in modern assemblages of men. The blue-jay is a bird murderer, but he does not care a whit who knows it. There is no stabbing in the back about him, and now that the spared nestlings of […]
Anarchism

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]
mutualism

1919 Mutual Banking online

October 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Henry Cohen published a number of editions of William Batchelder Greene’s Mutual Banking in the 20th century. The pieces of that particular bibliographic puzzle have been hard to assemble. Thanks to archive.org, we have at least one more piece: a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition by The Reform League of Denver, Colo. It’s available in a number of formats. Cohen’s editions closely follow the 1870 edition, with notes and an introduction by Cohen.
Uncategorized

Reading around / Dyer D. Lum’s Alarm

July 9, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been reading pretty broadly lately, pulling together articles related to the Liberty archive project and Utopia, OH, the Josiah Warren anthology. That’s taken me into the pages of The Egoist, where Benjamin Tucker, Bolton Hall, and Stephen Byington shared pages with the likes of Ezra Pound, and fairly familiar debates about the nature of egoism and anarchism appeared alongside early reviews of Italian Futurism. It’s also taken me into the pages of Max Nettlau’s 1897 Bibliographie de l’Anarchie, which I had never tackled before, and which has been full of pleasant surprises. A steady regimen of Proudhon translation has […]
Anarchism

John Adams, mutual bank advocate

April 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
With two other researchers now working on Josiah Warren, I’ve been trying (as regular readers will know) to get notes together and sources archived. It’s rather wonderful, I must say, to be working in a field so wide open that it’s a relief to find that someone else can make use of your research. One less book to write. My notes on The Boston Investigator turned out to be a little less complete than I had hoped, so I’ve been taking another look at those microfilm reels—no hardship since each pass through a literature as rich as this tends to […]
Anarchism

An early mutual banking proposal

April 8, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m wrapping up my first exploration of The Spirit of the Age (a little more rapidly than I had hoped, thanks to an Interlibrary Loan mix-up), and am already planning a road trip to scan more of this really important mutualist paper. My lengthy side-trip, from the William B. Greene research through the work of Joshua King Ingalls and ultimately to The Spirit of the Age, has paid an unexpected dividend (if, in this context, I can safely speak about the paying of dividends)—a discussion of Mutual Banking in the 1850 volume which casts Greene’s work in a somewhat different […]
Anarchism

Co-operation – Alfred B. Westrup

March 6, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Alfred B. Westrup, “Co-operation,” Twentieth Century, November 3, 1892, 8-9.—This is a very interesting short piece by Westrup, showing a slightly different side of his individualist anarchism than in many of his writings, where the Mutual Bank Propaganda was his primary concern.] CO-OPERATION. BY ALFRED B. WESTRUP. Much has been written on this subject, and many are the efforts put forward to establish “cooperation” of one kind or another, but so far as there is any hope of settling the economic question, none of the experiments now being carried on can possibly accomplish it. The one essential principle upon which […]