one-sided conversations

Contr'un

Notes on Mutualism and the Problem(?) of Exchange

January 18, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is a criticism that mutualists frequently hear from communists—and we might say it dates back to the 1850s and Joseph Déjacque—that mutualism makes no fundamental break with capitalism because, among the various economic arrangements open to mutualists, we find some that involve some kind of exchange. In a social media discussion this week, the accusation took the form of a claim that “still inherently capitalist.” When it became clear that the would-be critic didn’t know much about any of the varieties of mutualism, the further claim was made that there was, in fact, no need to know anything about […]
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Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum

August 16, 2015
Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum Fragments from a Facebook forum [These remarks, written several years ago, was originally archived in a section of the Labyrinth that no longer exists, but since the question of UBI seems to have become much more common than when I initially made these comments, it seems worth re-archiving them here.] 1 Let me be more explicit: A certain minimum level of food, shelter, clothing and fun is going to be deemed “essential” by just about everyone, and at the subsistence-level there will probably even be some rough consensus on more or less what that consists […]
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Are Hotels Immoral?

October 27, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been trying to collect my contributions to various discussion threads, where the off-the-cuff stuff seems to advance the conversation, and I’m presenting them in the form of one-sided conversations, with just enough of the contributions of others to give context. Here’s a bit from Reddit, on the question of occupancy and use property norms: Q. Are Hotels Immoral? A. No. If someone is actively maintaining a hotel, then they are obviously occupying and using it. A large hotel is likely to be a collectively owned affair, like most large enterprises under usufructory ownership. A. Can that somebody hire people […]
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Notes on “the disposition of intellectual products”

July 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m always surprised by the lasting (and often false) impression that this bit of off-the-cuff theorizing has left in certain circles. But I’m also generally pleasantly surprised, when I am reminded of its existence that, despite being the product of a very different place in my theoretical development than I occupy at present, it’s fairly solid stuff. It was very specifically part of a series of attempts to determine just how far, and in what directions, fairly conventional property theory would stretch when applied in anarchistic contexts. So it has to be read as a series of speculations, aimed at […]
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Fragments and Approximations – 2

January 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[from the Forums of the Libertarian Left] Actually, there is no problem determining costs without prices — assuming that you don’t insist on having your costs represented as prices. Now, it is not clear that one can compare kinds of costliness against one another in a non-market economy with the same apparent ease as we do in a market economy — but, again, there are good reasons to suspect that those cost comparisons are far from bulletproof. Imagine a biocentric society, which emphasized interconnectedness over individuality, as well as interconnectedness with “the environment” — an ecological communitarianism. It has its […]