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 Leroux that I’m translating now, which puts his triadic socialism in dialogue with De la Boetie’s “Contr’un” (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.) I expect the issues to follow that will be: 4 – “What is Property? A neo-Proudhonian Approximation;” 5 – “The General Idea of Revolution,” with material on Proudhon and Bellegarrigue,” and 6 – “Simplism and the Composite Order,” tackling the Fourierist contribution to both historical mutualism and the “new approximation.” And I expect I’ll be pretty close to a monthly schedule soon, but translation and new research may throw us new curves. Issue 2 is, however, about 2/3 completed, and will be one of my primary tasks for the next week or so (along with one last chunk of Proudhon for Iain’s AK anthology.)
individualism
LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900
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 […]
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What I did on my anarchist vacation
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 […]
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LeftLiberty #1 – (revised) – call for submissions
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 […]