Progress in archiving Liberty

Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches represented here, there are important issues being wrestled with in all of this stuff, and the more practical issues are not unlike those that any anarchist society will face as it attempts to give itself a working shape. I’m ultimately unsympathetic to the solutions offered by platformism, but value the […]

A thousand is a lot, when it is a thousand articles that have to be checked for complete citations, typos, and formatting, and assigned to enough categories and index pages to be findable. The work on cleaning up and standardizing the Libertarian Labyrinth archive has already been both a lot of work and a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, much of my accumulation of texts has been done at times when there was little leisure, or too much distraction, to take as much time with them as I would have liked. So while I’ve been doing a lot […]

The week was full of the right kinds of interruptions: A couple of research requests I had out bore fruit, and gave me plenty of productive distractions from the ongoing archive clean-up. Barry Pateman, of Kate Sharpley Library, hooked me up with a file of old card catalog data for Mother Earth, which I’ve started to transcribe and integrate into the archive. I got a chance to talk through some difficult points of the “Essence of Mutualism” article that I’ve been working on with a knowledgeable drinking buddy. And a couple more Benjamin Tucker-related sources turned out to be a […]