Two-Gun Mutualism

Contr'un

In Search of the Justicier

July 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I don’t want to wait to work through the details of Proudhon’s analysis before moving forward with the neo-Proudhonian analysis I’ve been developing. At the moment, in fact, I think that the two projects can diverge usefully: There are a lot of important sociological and economic tools to be uncovered, brushed off and modified for present use, tucked away in the works of Proudhon, and there will come a moment—fairly soon, I hope—when we’ll need all of those tools assembled and in working order. At the same time, there are some very basic elements that we have already recovered, which […]
Contr'un

Two-Gun Mutualism Rearmed extended outline

December 10, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I’ve sent this extended outline for the Two-Gun Mutualism book to a number of friends and colleagues for comment, and have been debating whether or not it made sense to post it here at this point. I certainly welcome any feedback on the project, but I’m also inclined to think that the extended outline amounts to as good a summary of my overall project as I am likely to be able to produce, so here it is, offered with the hope that it may serve as a help in navigating the rest of the material on the blog. The section […]
Contr'un

Property and the Essence of Mutualism

November 5, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] “My principle, which will appear astonishing to you, citizens, my principle is yours; it is property itself.”—P.-J. Proudhon In my writings on mutualist property theory, I have been attempting to supplement a somewhat strange lacuna in Proudhon’s theory, his failure—in at least one important sense—to ever really directly answer the question posed in his first major work, What is Property? In order to do that, I’ve been drawing on the work of Max Stirner, which, despite Stirner’s sense that he was opposing Proudhon’s position, seems to primarily address “property” in precisely the senses that Proudhon didn’t even make much […]
Contr'un

Turning a new page…

January 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contr’un Revisited: If we were being precise, the “Contr’un Revisited” phase would start here, with the name change at the beginning of 2011. But, just as some posts are being imported that were not originally posted on this blog and some posts that were posted here are now migrating to other collections, all of the theoretical writing from the earlier period is explicitly becoming what it, in fact, eventually became: part of the Contr’un project. This blog has gone through two previous phases, under two other names: The first was exploratory, a series of rambles “In the Libertarian Labyrinth,” with […]
Contr'un

Trajectories: Proudhon and Property

August 17, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been working on bookbinding and papermaking as much as property theory lately, trying to put together the first two issues of “The Wing: A Journal of Attractive Industry” (a very nuts-and-bolts, often how-to zine on environmentally responsible, craft-based micro-enterprise.) But I’ve also been working on the revision of Tucker’s What is Property? translation, and grappling with some issues raised by that and the research for the “Property is Impossible” posts, and that’s sent me back through the last two years’ worth of work on the property question, which really all grew out of the first Proudhon seminar.  I compiled […]
Anarchism

Max Nettlau, Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH By Max Nettlau. ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits […]
Anarchism

Responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster

June 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Kevin Carson has a new piece up at the Center for a Stateless Society, In a Truly Free Market, BP Would Be Toast, which argues that without federal regulation limiting liability BP would not only be facing liabilities that “stack up pretty tall against BP’s total equity,” but also that in a genuinely free market the demands of insurers would force companies like BP to take adequate precautions. Kevin is absolutely right in saying that the Gulf spill is not the product of an “unregulated market.” It’s one of the great wonders of the modern world that, with news of […]
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

The Mutualist #1 – Intro

April 1, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m putting the finishing touches on issue #1 of The Mutualist, and will start shipping orders over the next couple of days. Here is the introduction to that issue: Out of the Labyrinth This first issue of THE MUTUALIST continues the work begun in the two issues of LEFTLIBERTY, but with significant difference in context and approach. The earlier works were part of a tentative, exploratory phase of my work, a kind of preliminary mapping of the “Libertarian Labyrinth,” where the focus was really on establishing the radical diversity of our anarchist/libertarian heritage. There is certainly much, much more exploring […]