In the Libertarian Labyrinth

In which I expose my nationalistic side...

2008-07-17T02:01:00.000-07:00

Nobody's perfect, I suppose. There is, after all, one nation to which I will confess allegiance.

I really, really want this embroidered on a ballcap. . .

What Is Property? Ch. 2 notes, part 1

2008-07-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

These are notes from the ongoing Proudhon seminar. Page numbers refer to the Benjamin R. Tucker translation of What Is Property?

Chapter II covers "PROPERTY CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL RIGHT.—OCCUPATION AND CIVIL LAW AS EFFICIENT BASES OF PROPERTY. DEFINITIONS." Proudhon announced in the first chapter that: "The first of these chapters [Ch. 2] will prove that the right of occupation OBSTRUCTS property; the second [Ch. 3] that the right of labor DESTROYS it." So we know pretty much what to expect.

p. 42: Property is defined as "the right to use and abuse one's own within the limits of the law — jus utendi et abutendi re suâ, quatenus juris ratio patitur." This is going to be Proudhon's definition of simple property throughout his writings. There are those who claim that Proudhon meant something different in the early and late works, but he doesn't leave us much room for doubt. Here's the passage from Theory of Property:

"There is only one thing new for us in our thesis: it is that that same property, the contradictory and abusive principle of which has raised our disapproval, we today accept entirely, along with its equally contradictory qualification: Dominium est just utendi et abutendi re suâ, quatenus juris ratio patur. We have understood finally that the opposition of two absolutes—one of which, alone, would be unpardonably reprehensive, and both of which, together, would be rejected, if they worked separately—is the very cornerstone of social econony and public right: but it falls to us to govern it and to make it act according to the laws of logic." (p. 242-3)

p. 43: Proudhon claims that the limitation of the absolute right by "the limits of the law" is not so much a limitation on the institution as an internal safeguard. What would seem to limit the abolute nature of the right actually, he argues, confirms it and preserves it. This is one of those spots where I'm not entirely certain that I follow Proudhon's logic, or that I agree with it, to the extent that I do follow it. However, you may have noticed that the formula, quoted above, from Theory of Property, pretty closely mirrors the material from What Is Property? What Proudhon comes to embrace is "absolute domain" (and perhaps we should read this "absolute" in the light of his later philosophical discussions, taking it as meaning "tending to absolutism," or something of the same sort, but a little stronger, perhaps "of an absolutist character") limited by the "laws of logic," under conditions of approximate equality of property. If the law in question is logic, and the immanent organizing principle of more-or-less equally distributed property, then we can see, once again, how Proudhon turns his critique into a formula for a free society.

On the same page, we get the important discussion of the "two kinds of property:" domain and possession. Proudhon confuses the issue a bit by then calling one kind of property, domain, by the name of "property," but it's not hard to follow what he means. The division of property and possession along a right/fact divide is a little more complicate, since he will insist later, as we've seen that possession is a matter of right. Inverting the character of the terms in this way is, of course, what I'm doing in my own system, largely inspired by Proudhon, but I don't see Proudhon making the move himself. This is a question I'll try to keep tabs on.

One things seems clear to me: some sort of transformation of "possession" in/into the realm of right seems necessary. Proudhon's examples of possessors are in some cases individuals in rather precarious positions: tenants, for example. Later, in "Theory of Property," Proudhon claimed that: "It is a fact of universal history that land has been no more unequally divided than in places where the system of possession alone has predominated, or where fief has supplanted allodial property; similarly, the states where the most liberty and equality is found are those where property reigns." (p. 142)

"Possession" has be a kind of (potentially under-theorized) left-anarchist ideal. We know the direction that Proudhon went, but I'm also very interested in the possibility that there was another possible road. Those who know the early collectivist tradition better then I do might be able to help.

p. 44: "Those who do not possess today are proprietors by the same title as those who do possess." But the answer is not to generalize property, but to "demand, in the name of general security, its entire abolition." OK. There are a handful of pages where I tend to feel somewhat lost, every time I read through the book. This basic claim, together with the related business about "jus in re" and "jus ad rem," seem to be oddly put together. I can't tell if the writing is unclear or unfortunate (since "those who do possess" have no title, or if they do, it does not seem to be of the same sort as those who have title, but do not possess), or whether I'm just not getting something.

p. 44-5: One of these things is not like the others. It seems to me that this particular argument depends a bit on pushing the definition of "property" in a different direction than some of the others. Given that, however, what Proudhon does with the question of the similarity "property" to "liberty," "equality," and "security" is quite interesting. His treatment of proportional taxes (p. 47) seems to have been his first attempt to think through the justice of taxation, a subject he returned to several times before writing his "Théorie de l'impôt" ("Theory of Taxation," 1861.)

p. 48: Government is a company, but not an insurance company. It should come as no real surprise that when Proudhon worked out what he thought anarchistic "government" should be, it was mostly a big insurance company.

p. 49. "No one is obliged to do more than comply with this injunction: In the exercise of your own rights do not encroach upon the rights of another; an injunction which is the exact definition of liberty."

p. 52: Proudhon sums up his comparison of rights:

"To sum up: liberty is an absolute right, because it is to man what impenetrability is to matter, -- a sine qua non of existence; equality is an absolute right, because without equality there is no society; security is an absolute right, because in the eyes of every man his own liberty and life are as precious as another's. These three rights are absolute; that is, susceptible of neither increase nor diminution; because in society each associate receives as much as he gives, -- liberty for liberty, equality for equality, security for security, body for body, soul for soul, in life and in death."

He is obviously not using "absolute" only in the sense that I have suggested, but we know something has changed in the terms of the argument, since the point is now precisely that property is not an "absolute right."

"But property, in its derivative sense, and by the definitions of law, is a right outside of society; for it is clear that, if the wealth of each was social wealth, the conditions would be equal for all, and it would be a contradiction to say: Property is a man's right to dispose at will of social property. Then if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social, but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property."

Proudhon seems to be a bit ahead of himself with the argument about "social property." I think he gets there later, and that the argument is fairly strong, but there are some issues here about the construction of the argument.

The material of pages 52-3 about the elusive origins of property is stronger, I think. It's still very hard to find consistent theories of property, coherently addressing both origins and applications. Proudhon, of course, will address the arguments from occupation and from labor for the rest of the chapter. And I'll try to write that stuff up tomorrow.

Small-scale methanol gassifier project

2008-07-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

I met one of the participants in the Biomass to Methanol project last week, while I was working at Laughing Horse Books. The project is associated with the Windward Ecovillage, in Washington state. This is a biofuel project at the DIY level, with an open source sensibility. Take a look, and support the project if you can.

What Is Property? Chapter One notes

2008-07-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

I don't think there is anything in the first chapter that is terribly difficult, but there's a lot that is interesting.

p. 12: Proudhon claims that property is "an effect without a cause:" none of the justifications given for it hold up. He imagines the objection being aimed at his contradiction of widely-held received wisdom on the subject, and at his *uniting of contraries*.

p.13: "The work of our race is to build the temple of science," "truth reveals itself to all," and "you will find here a series of experiments upon justice and right." Proudhon's social science is fairly consistently envisioned as a way of life, rather than a job for specialists. His emphasis on experiment and observation is also consistent throughout his work. "I build no system," he says on the next page, and in later works he elaborates how the collective reason, another instance of collective force, grows out of individual experience/experiment (Fr. experience). (I'm in the midst of skimming the volumes of "Justice in the Revolution and in the Church," and it's tremendous stuff. Very exciting.)

p. 15: Proudhon downplays his originality, his is "an idea that permeates all minds," which "all men believe." One is reminded of the situationists: "Our ideas are in everyone's heads." Bellegarrigue made similar claims about the general understanding of some rather startling, revolutionary ideas; they are, as in Proudhon, ideas about the balance of forces, interests and tendencies.

p. 17: Proudhon rather nicely describes the problem of fixed ideas.

p. 18-19: Proudhon would return, in "The Theory of Property," to the discussion of confused use of terminology. I'm not quite sure he gets out of "What is Property?" without a confusion or two of his own, but he certainly took some care to clarify what he meant by "property."

p. 24-25: "Man is at war with himself," but the problem is not original sin, it is ignorance. "Man errs because he learns." The clash of ideas, or of the antinomic aspects of ideas, whether within an individual's mind or within society, are what leads to progress in ideas. Error and failure enoble men, at least as long as they are able to move on.

p. 25: "The object of our investigations is the law, the determination of the social principle." Proudhon speaks quite a bit about "law" in this work, and sometimes it is a bit hard to tell exactly what he means. Elsewhere, he claimed that Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" had marked a revolutionary change in the very meaning of "law."

"Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws."

The immanent principles that govern the relations between the elements of groups, or of individuals understood as ordered groups, is another of the consistent concerns of the later works. We should probably consider this in reading "What is Property?"

p. 26-27: The ideas of justice and law inform the institutions of the period. But those ideas are formed by people, and they can be "ill-defined." We have to be concerned about this defect at all times. In "Justice," Proudhon declares it something of an article of faith, and prerequisite of progress, that it is never "the best of all possible worlds."

p. 33: "with the most perfect democracy, we cannot be free." I'm not sure that the US was ever "the most perfect democracy," but the exploration of the transformation of sovereignty in the "democratic revolution" is interesting. The question is one which has been recently picked up by Giorgio Agamben, in "Homo Sacer" and "State of Exception," which are both pretty challenging reading, but of potential interest to anarchists.

p. 37: These seem to be the key passages in Ch. 1:

"These, then, are the three fundamental principles of modern society, established one after another by the movements of 1789 and 1830: 1. SOVEREIGNTY OF THE HUMAN WILL; in short, DESPOTISM. 2. INEQUALITY OF WEALTH AND RANK. 3. PROPERTY — above JUSTICE, always invoked as the guardian angel of sovereigns, nobles, and proprietors; JUSTICE, the general, primitive, categorical law of all society.

"We must ascertain whether the ideas of DESPOTISM, CIVIL INEQUALITY and PROPERTY, are in harmony with the primitive notion of JUSTICE, and necessarily follow from it,—assuming various forms according to the condition, position, and relation of persons; or whether they are not rather the illegitimate result of a confusion of different things, a fatal association of ideas. And since justice deals especially with the questions of government, the condition of persons, and the possession of things, we must ascertain under what conditions, judging by universal opinion and the progress of the human mind, government is just, the condition of citizens is just, and the possession of things is just; then, striking out every thing which fails to meet these conditions, the result will at once tell us what legitimate government is, what the legitimate condition of citizens is, and what the legitimate possession of things is; and finally, as the last result of the analysis, what JUSTICE is."

Justice is obviously not just a "primitive notion" that has been confused. There are questions to be answered. Proudhon already has some of his progressive theory, where each era much recreate its own key ideas, according to present needs and conditions. I would be tempted to say that "justice" is the idea of most of Proudhon's revolutions, though it appears in the midst of different clusters of related ideas.

38: "Is the authority of man over man just?" "Everybody answers, 'No; the authority of man is only the authority of the law; which ought to be justice and truth.'" Apparently, "everybody" is a bit of an anarchist. Again, we see Proudhon's faith that something like "common sense" is essentially capable of revolutionary thought.

41: The final passages on equality are fairly remarkable. They're filled with a kind of radical faith, which we see in many of the writings of the 1840s. Pierre Leroux and Anselme Bellegarrigue both express this, while describing the real mess that everyone is in. There is a "darkest before the dawn" character to this pre-1848 radicalism that is interesting:

"A defender of equality, I shall speak without bitterness and without anger; with the independence becoming a philosopher, with the courage and firmness of a free man. May I, in this momentous struggle, carry into all hearts the light with which I am filled; and show, by the success of my argument, that equality failed to conquer by the sword only that it might conquer by the pen!"

I hope these notes are useful.

-shawn

"What Is Property?" vs "Theory of Property"?

2008-07-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

From the Proudhon-seminar list:

I took a trip into Portland today, to check in at the radical bookstore where I'm volunteering and to look over some untranslated material in a fresh setting. It always seems to clear my head even just to get out on the light-rail and work a bit. And I can be sure of having a cat-free lap, which is not the case in my office at home. As I mentioned, I've been working on the "Summary of my earlier works on property," from Proudhon's posthumously-published "The Theory of Property." In that chapter, Proudhon makes some criticisms of his own of "What Is Property?" which we'll eventually have to look at, and gives a lengthy (51 page) account of the development of his thought. As I mentioned to Erik, the majority of the later works are not translated, so it's very hard to deal very directly with that development in this sort of setting.

But the development of Proudhon's theory always haunts any discussion of it in circles as ideologically diverse as the audience for this seminar. It would be nice if we could clarify the nature of the development and lay that particular ghost for a bit.

And maybe we can. Rafael has already remarked on Proudhon's "Hegelian formula," which leads him to think of liberty as the "synthesis of communism and property." On pages 258-9, Proudhon writes:

"Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS. When we have discovered the third term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution. Now, this synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the antithesis. Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to sociability. The union of the two remainders will give us the true form of human association."

He then goes on to say that:

"The objects of communism and property are good--their results are bad. And why? Because both are exclusive, and each disregards two elements of society. Communism rejects independence and proportionality; property does not satisfy equality and law."

The "hostile feature" of both opposing principles is their partiality. If all four elements are embraced, then we have liberty. "Synthesis," in this case, is an entire remaking of the two antinomic principles. The result is anarchistic because it doesn't require or leave room for "governmentalism," which Proudhon has associated with "communism" (more or less.)

Now, the transformation of Proudhon's thought involved a series of insights and developments. For our purposes, though, the important one is probably the one we see in the "Toast to the Revolution," where Proudhon suggests that individual and collective concerns can't simply be alloyed, that they are not simply opposed, and that a thoroughgoing individualization of interests and pursuits is the road to a legitimate form of non-state centralization.

Leap forward to the formula of "The Theory of Property," where Proudhon embraces simple property, despite its absolutist, egoistic, despotic tendencies (with limitations of term based on occupancy and use). Is this a major change from the position of 1840?

I want to suggest that it is not. We have essentially the same terms, a centralizing tendency and an individual absolutism. The only thing that has really changed is Proudhon's understanding of the "systems of contradictions." In "Justice in the Revolution and in the Church," he came to a realization about "dialectics:"

"L'ANTINOMIE NE SE RÉSOUT PAS : là est le vice fondamental de toute la philosophie hégélienne. Les deux termes dont elle se compose se BALANCENT, soit entre eux, soit avec d'autres termes antinomiques"

That is, "The antinomy does not resolve itself." It is not resolved. "The two terms of which it is composed are balanced, either by one another, or by other antinomic terms."

If Proudhon had approached the question in this way in 1840, wouldn't the logical formula for the "third form of society" be the balance or equilibrium, the counterpoise of property and communism? In 1840 we already have the acknowledgment that "the objects of communism and property are good." Isn't this essentially the acknowledgment that either might be justified according to its "aims"?

It seems to me that very little, other than Proudhon's opinion about whether or not "the antinomy resolves itself," actually changes. And that leaves us with roughly three responses: 1) to prefer the approach of 1840; 2) to prefer the approach of the 1860s; or 3) to feel that the terms are essentially ill-conceived.

Maybe that lays the ghost a bit.

Proudhon's "last word"

2008-07-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

I've engaged in what I hope is a helpful reversal here—the reversal of a reversal, actually. In Chapter One of What Is Property? Proudhon wrote, "I think best to place the last thought of my book first," and declared himself within his rights. I, on the other hand, have gone to some trouble to push that "last thought" back a bit. My reasons are simple: the phrase "property is robbery" is the one thing we all "know" about the work, and it is something of a distraction, particularly as there are some difficulties in knowing what it means in the original context. It's for your own good, everybody. Trust me. Whatever use you want to put Proudhon's property to, it's the arguments that make it a useful or useless tool (or set of tools).

Anyway, to complete our last-shall-be-first introduction, we need to look at the rest of the section on "The Determination of the third form of Society," which deals primarily with the nature of "liberty," and contains the suggestion that that liberty will be composed of "the synthesis of communism and property." We'll come back to all of this at the end of the seminar, but let's get an overview: Proudhon starts his book with a startling, potentially paradoxical statement, which he claims everyone, if they only thought about it, already believes. He then spends some time talking about method, and "the idea of a revolution." The Revolution has an idea, or a series of ideas appropriate to the particular stage of development. If, on the one hand, "the idea that we form of justice and right were ill-defined, if it were imperfect or even false, it is clear that all our legislative applications would be wrong, our institutions vicious, our politics erroneous: consequently there would be disorder and social chaos." [p. 27] On the other, such imperfect ideas tend to crumble naturally, and Proudhon senses a new idea, "an idea which permeates all minds, which to-morrow will be proclaimed by another if I fail to announce it to-day."

So what, if you'll pardon me, is the Big Idea? It looks like "property" is a good contender for the role of Old, Imperfect Idea. "Robbery" is the last word on "property," but, interestingly enough, it isn't Proudhon's last word, no matter what he says at the beginning.

The passages where Proudhon most directly addresses the claim that "property is robbery" are on pages 262-271. In them, he lays out fifteen ways in which "we rob," all of them part of an exposition of how property "violates equity by the rights of exclusion and increase." (Read them now or later, according to your taste.) He has, of course, already done a number on the concept of property, disqualifying its various justifications, showing that occupation and labor work against it, that it works against itself, etc. That's the theoretical heart of the book, and occupies most of it. It is not, of course, the part that most of us have read, or read carefully. It is not the part that is most frequently quoted.

Bear with me. After dealing with "robbery," Proudhon still has some analysis of property to do: "The second effect of property is despotism." This leads him to ask about the nature of "legitimate authority," which leads him to one of anarchism's "greatest hits."

What is to be the form of government in the future? I hear some of my younger readers reply: "Why, how can you ask such a question?

You are a republican." "A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs--no matter under what form of government--may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans."--

"Well! you are a democrat?"--"No."--"What! you would have a monarchy."--"No."--"A constitutionalist?"--"God forbid!"--"You are then an aristocrat?"--"Not at all."--"You want a mixed government?"--"Still less."--"What are you, then?"--"I am an anarchist."

"Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the government."--"By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me."

Proudhon espouses anarchism as "government" here, the right kind, as opposed to the "government of caprice, the reign of libidinous pleasure," which he says property engenders. Thus, it is natural for him to show that property and government (of a "legitimate" sort) are opposed. It comes across as one of those odd anticipations of his later thought which dot his early works. Eventually, self-government among "free absolutes" will ally itself with precisely the despotic property "vanquished" in What Is Property? But that's another tale. . . probably.

We're past the "last word," and on to "anarchy," in a kind of final footnote on property. But anarchy doesn't seem to be the "idea of the Revolution" either. And where have we ended up? Well, about where you thought I was going to start several paragraphs back (probably because I thought I was going to start there), at the beginning of the section on "The Determination of the third form of Society.—Conclusion." And, there, as it turns out, the real last words are "liberty and equality!"

Determination of the third form of Society. Conclusion

Then, no government, no public economy, no administration, is possible, which is based upon property.

Communism seeks EQUALITY and LAW. Property, born of the sovereignty of the reason, and the sense of personal merit, wishes above all things INDEPENDENCE and PROPORTIONALITY.

But communism, mistaking uniformity for law, and levelism for equality, becomes tyrannical and unjust. Property, by its despotism and encroachments, soon proves itself oppressive and anti-social.

The objects of communism and property are good--their results are bad. And why? Because both are exclusive, and each disregards two elements of society. Communism rejects independence and proportionality; property does not satisfy equality and law.

Now, if we imagine a society based upon these four principles,-- equality, law, independence, and proportionality,--we find:--

1. That EQUALITY, consisting only in EQUALITY OF CONDITIONS, that is, OF MEANS, and not in EQUALITY OF COMFORT,-- which it is the business of the laborers to achieve for themselves, when provided with equal means,--in no way violates justice and equite.

2. That LAW, resulting from the knowledge of facts, and consequently based upon necessity itself, never clashes with independence.

3. That individual INDEPENDENCE, or the autonomy of the private reason, originating in the difference in talents and capacities, can exist without danger within the limits of the law.

4. That PROPORTIONALITY, being admitted only in the sphere of intelligence and sentiment, and not as regards material objects, may be observed without violating justice or social equality.

This third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property, we will call LIBERTY. [1]

In determining the nature of liberty, we do not unite communism and property indiscriminately; such a process would be absurd eclecticism. We search by analysis for those elements in each which are true, and in harmony with the laws of Nature and society, disregarding the rest altogether; and the result gives us an adequate expression of the natural form of human society,-- in one word, liberty.

Liberty is equality, because liberty exists only in society; and in the absence of equality there is no society.

Liberty is anarchy, because it does not admit the government of the will, but only the authority of the law; that is, of necessity.

Liberty is infinite variety, because it respects all wills within the limits of the law.

Liberty is proportionality, because it allows the utmost latitude to the ambition for merit, and the emulation of glory.

We can now say, in the words of M. Cousin: "Our principle is true; it is good, it is social; let us not fear to push it to its ultimate."

Man's social nature becoming JUSTICE through reflection, EQUITE through the classification of capacities, and having LIBERTY for its formula, is the true basis of morality,--the principle and regulator of all our actions. This is the universal motor, which philosophy is searching for, which religion strengthens, which egotism supplants, and whose place pure reason never can fill. DUTY and RIGHT are born of NEED, which, when considered in connection with others, is a RIGHT, and when considered in connection with ourselves, a DUTY.

We need to eat and sleep. It is our right to procure those things which are necessary to rest and nourishment. It is our duty to use them when Nature requires it.

We need to labor in order to live. To do so is both our right and our duty.

We need to love our wives and children. It is our duty to protect and support them. It is our right to be loved in preference to all others. Conjugal fidelity is justice. Adultery is high treason against society.

We need to exchange our products for other products. It is our right that this exchange should be one of equivalents; and since we consume before we produce, it would be our duty, if we could control the matter, to see to it that our last product shall follow our last consumption. Suicide is fraudulent bankruptcy.

We need to live our lives according to the dictates of our reason. It is our right to maintain our freedom. It is our duty to respect that of others.

We need to be appreciated by our fellows. It is our duty to deserve their praise. It is our right to be judged by our works.

Liberty is not opposed to the rights of succession and bequest. It contents itself with preventing violations of equality. "Choose," it tells us, "between two legacies, but do not take them both." All our legislation concerning transmissions, entailments, adoptions, and, if I may venture to use such a word, COADJUTORERIES, requires remodelling.

Liberty favors emulation, instead of destroying it. In social equality, emulation consists in accomplishing under like conditions; it is its own reward. No one suffers by the victory.

Liberty applauds self-sacrifice, and honors it with its votes, but it can dispense with it. Justice alone suffices to maintain the social equilibrium. Self-sacrifice is an act of supererogation. Happy, however, the man who can say, "I sacrifice myself." [2]

Liberty is essentially an organizing force. To insure equality between men and peace among nations, agriculture and industry, and the centres of education, business, and storage, must be distributed according to the climate and the geographical position of the country, the nature of the products, the character and natural talents of the inhabitants, &c., in proportions so just, so wise, so harmonious, that in no place shall there ever be either an excess or a lack of population, consumption, and products. There commences the science of public and private right, the true political economy. It is for the writers on jurisprudence, henceforth unembarrassed by the false principle of property, to describe the new laws, and bring peace upon earth. Knowledge and genius they do not lack; the foundation is now laid for them. [3]

[1] libertas, librare, libratio, libra,--liberty, to liberate, libration, balance (pound),--words which have a common derivation. Liberty is the balance of rights and duties. To make a man free is to balance him with others,--that is, to put him or their level.

[2] In a monthly publication, the first number of which has just appeared under the name of "L'Egalitaire," self-sacrifice is laid down as a principle of equality. This is a confusion of ideas. Self-sacrifice, taken alone, is the last degree of inequality. To seek equality in self-sacrifice is to confess that equality is against nature. Equality must be based upon justice, upon strict right, upon the principles invoked by the proprietor himself; otherwise it will never exist. Self-sacrifice is superior to justice; but it cannot be imposed as law, because it is of such a nature as to admit of no reward. It is, indeed, desirable that everybody shall recognize the necessity of self-sacrifice, and the idea of "L'Egalitaire" is an excellent example. Unfortunately, it can have no effect. What would you reply, indeed, to a man who should say to you, "I do not want to sacrifice myself"? Is he to be compelled to do so? When self- sacrifice is forced, it becomes oppression, slavery, the exploitation of man by man. Thus have the proletaires sacrificed themselves to property.

[3] The disciples of Fourier have long seemed to me the most advanced of all modern socialists, and almost the only ones worthy of the name. If they had understood the nature of their task, spoken to the people, awakened their sympathies, and kept silence when they did not understand; if they had made less extravagant pretensions, and had shown more respect for public intelligence,--perhaps the reform would now, thanks to them, be in progress. But why are these earnest reformers continually bowing to power and wealth,--that is, to all that is anti- reformatory? How, in a thinking age, can they fail to see that the world must be converted by DEMONSTRATION, not by myths and allegories? Why do they, the deadly enemies of civilization, borrow from it, nevertheless, its most pernicious fruits,-- property, inequality of fortune and rank, gluttony, concubinage, prostitution, what do I know? theurgy, magic, and sorcery? Why these endless denunciations of morality, metaphysics, and psychology, when the abuse of these sciences, which they do not understand, constitutes their whole system? Why this mania for deifying a man whose principal merit consisted in talking nonsense about things whose names, even, he did not know, in the strongest language ever put upon paper? Whoever admits the infallibility of a man becomes thereby incapable of instructing others. Whoever denies his own reason will soon proscribe free thought. The phalansterians would not fail to do it if they had the power. Let them condescend to reason, let them proceed systematically, let them give us demonstrations instead of revelations, and we will listen willingly. Then let them organize manufactures, agriculture, and commerce; let them make labor attractive, and the most humble functions honorable, and our praise shall be theirs. Above all, let them throw off that Illuminism which gives them the appearance of impostors or dupes, rather than believers and apostles.

I'll pick up from there in the next post.

Proudhon seminar: Onward!

2008-07-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

[Links to the main discussion list and project page are now in the sidebar. Please join the list if you want to take advantage of the discussion. -shawn]

Plan of Attack

As I said, I would like to start my discussion of the material with Chapter 5, Part II, Section 3. I intend to deal with that final section in two posts, taking them in reverse order:

1) Proudhon's ten point program (below)
2) The nature of "liberty"

I'll follow that with some discussion of Chapter One, Proudhon's discussion of method, probably on Thursday.

By that time, I hope to have done a little more work on the 1839 "Sunday" text, so we can get a little clearer idea of the philosophical framework Proudhon had already established. That may (or may not) give some clues about how to approach some of the problems Kevin and I have started kicking around.

One thing I can already say about Proudhon in 1840: "equality" was a real keyword for him.

Proudhon's Destination

In 1873 or so, Ezra Heywood asked William B. Greene, an early translator and acquaintance of Proudhon, to explain the "property is robbery" phrase. In the pages of "The Word," Greene provided a translation of the first three and last three pages of "What Is Property?," together with a brief sketch of Proudhon as he had known him and some interpretation of the nature of mutualist institutions. I want to follow Greene's lead to the extent of starting with those last three pages, which contain a sort of "ten point program" which Proudhon felt would follow directly from the abolition of "property."

Here's the text:

--------
I have accomplished my task; property is conquered, never again to arise. Wherever this work is read and discussed, there will be deposited the germ of death to property; there, sooner or later, privilege and servitude will disappear, and the despotism of will will give place to the reign of reason. What sophisms, indeed, what prejudices (however obstinate) can stand before the simplicity of the following propositions:--

I. Individual POSSESSION is the condition of social life; five thousand years of property demonstrate it. PROPERTY is the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth.

II. All having an equal right of occupancy, possession varies with the number of possessors; property cannot establish itself.

III. The effect of labor being the same for all, property is lost in the common prosperity.

IV. All human labor being the result of collective force, all property becomes, in consequence, collective and unitary. To speak more exactly, labor destroys property.

V. Every capacity for labor being, like every instrument of labor, an accumulated capital, and a collective property, inequality of wages and fortunes (on the ground of inequality of capacities) is, therefore, injustice and robbery.

VI. The necessary conditions of commerce are the liberty of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged. Now, value being expressed by the amount of time and outlay which each product costs, and liberty being inviolable, the wages of laborers (like their rights and duties) should be equal.

VII. Products are bought only by products. Now, the condition of all exchange being equivalence of products, profit is impossible and unjust. Observe this elementary principle of economy, and pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime, and hunger will disappear from our midst.

VIII. Men are associated by the physical and mathematical law of production, before they are voluntarily associated by choice. Therefore, equality of conditions is demanded by justice; that is, by strict social law: esteem, friendship, gratitude, admiration, all fall within the domain of EQUITABLE or PROPORTIONAL law only.

IX. Free association, liberty--whose sole function is to maintain equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges--is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society.

X. Politics is the science of liberty. The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy.

The old civilization has run its race; a new sun is rising, and will soon renew the face of the earth. Let the present generation perish, let the old prevaricators die in the desert! the holy earth shall not cover their bones. Young man, exasperated by the corruption of the age, and absorbed in your zeal for justice!--if your country is dear to you, and if you have the interests of humanity at heart, have the courage to espouse the cause of liberty! Cast off your old selfishness, and plunge into the rising flood of popular equality! There your regenerate soul will acquire new life and vigor; your enervated genius will recover unconquerable energy; and your heart, perhaps already withered, will be rejuvenated! Every thing will wear a different look to your illuminated vision; new sentiments will engender new ideas within you; religion, morality, poetry, art, language will appear before you in nobler and fairer forms; and thenceforth, sure of your faith, and thoughtfully enthusiastic, you will hail the dawn of universal regeneration!

And you, sad victims of an odious law!--you, whom a jesting world despoils and outrages!--you, whose labor has always been fruitless, and whose rest has been without hope,--take courage! your tears are numbered! The fathers have sown in affliction, the children shall reap in rejoicings!

O God of liberty! God of equality! Thou who didst place in my heart the sentiment of justice, before my reason could comprehend it, hear my ardent prayer! Thou hast dictated all that I have written; Thou hast shaped my thought; Thou hast directed my studies; Thou hast weaned my mind from curiosity and my heart from attachment, that I might publish Thy truth to the master and the slave. I have spoken with what force and talent Thou hast given me: it is Thine to finish the work. Thou knowest whether I seek my welfare or Thy glory, O God of liberty! Ah! perish my memory, and let humanity be free! Let me see from my obscurity the people at last instructed; let noble teachers enlighten them; let generous spirits guide them! Abridge, if possible, the time of our trial; stifle pride and avarice in equality; annihilate this love of glory which enslaves us; teach these poor children that in the bosom of liberty there are neither heroes nor great men! Inspire the powerful man, the rich man, him whose name my lips shall never pronounce in Thy presence, with a horror of his crimes; let him be the first to apply for admission to the redeemed society; let the promptness of his repentance be the ground of his forgiveness! Then, great and small, wise and foolish, rich and poor, will unite in an ineffable fraternity; and, singing in unison a new hymn, will rebuild Thy altar, O God of liberty and equality!
------

Much of this remained in Proudhon's program for his entire career. Perhaps at some point we can look a bit at "The Political Capacity of the Working Class" to see some of the survivals. Some particular concepts, like "society" and "the collective force," require careful handling. Proudhon's definitions are sometimes largely implicit. In "WIP?" the idea of "society," and what it implies (equality, of a sort, to begin with), is extremely important. The notion of "collective force," essentially that association in production yields more than the sum of individual productions, pretty quickly becomes, for Proudhon, the basis of a theory of "collective persons," "collective reason," etc., which has considerable explanatory power, but which also complicates the notion of "individuality" a great deal. For now, assume Proudhon's definitions are a bit idiosyncratic, and you'll be safer.

I expect we'll have occasion to wrestle particularly with:

* "the right of possession"
* equality of wages
* the nature of the "collective force"
* "association" and/as "law"

Proudhon seminar: Initial thoughts

2008-07-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

Proudhon's What Is Property? poses a variety of interpretive problems, not the least of which is that its careful series of examinations of the various justifications for simple, individual property are frequently overshadowed by the slogan, "Property is robbery!" That phrase remained important to Proudhon, even after he came to his own terms with property. "I do not come to retract," he said in May, 1848, "heaven forbid! I persist in regarding this provocative definition as the greatest truth of the century." However, in the same "Toast to the Revolution," he clarified the nature of the statement: "When I say, Property is theft! I do not propose a principle; I do nothing but express one conclusion." And he goes on to claim as his position: "Liberty then, nothing more, nothing less. Laissez faire, laissez passer, in the broadest and most literal sense; consequently property, as it rises legitimately from this freedom, is my principle."

Not only does the Proudhon of 1848 not claim "property is robbery" as a principle, he claims "property, as it rises legitimately from [liberty]" as principle. Of course, 1848 is on the far side of a kind of philosophical watershed. In the 1843 Creation of Order in Humanity and the 1846 System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon pursued theoretical and philosophical issues much more seriously than he had in 1840's What Is Property? Having dealt to his own satisfaction with a range of existing explanations of property, he was left to explain its persistence. Having begun to study history more seriously as well, he was also left to explain why property, which still seemed to him unjust, even despotic, at its core, seemed to be productive of individual liberty, at least when compared to possession. He wouldn't pull all these threads together until the 1860s, when he would propose his own justification for simple property, based on its ability to counterbalance the centralizing, state-like forces present in even an anarchist society. And it would take some time for him to explicitly develop and then discard Fourierist serialism, and various forms of dialectic, before proposing harmony and justice as the dynamic equalibrium of free forces, of "free absolutes" in society. But he was always, it seems, this close to that theory: even the 1839 Celebration of Sunday appeals to essentially this same model.

The point here is that What Is Property? should not be subordinated either to its best-known phrase, and its traditional interpretation, or to some isolated interpretation of the later works as "conservative turns" or simple celebrations of property. It is more than a sloganeering work, and it is a necessary step in the development of those later works. Propertarian and anti-propertarian anarchists alike would benefit from taking the time to treat its arguments, and the arguments it opposes, seriously, if only so they know what it is that the in/famous catchphrase meant to Proudhon. Mutualists, of course, have little excuse for not wrestling with Proudhon.

Still to come this evening: A plan of attack

Un commerce équitable est-il possible ?

2008-06-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

The new issue of the French-language Offensive bears the title "Un commerce sans capitalisme." It asks the question: "Et si le commerce et l’échange étaient indissociables de la création de véritables espaces de résistance ?" / "And if commerce and exchange were inseparable from the creation of real spaces of resistance?"

This one looks well worth tracking down. (Hat tip to the Research on Anarchism list.)

Proudhon: A biographical introduction

2008-06-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

The Tucker translation of What Is Property? is prefaced by a translation of J. A. Langlois' "P. J. Proudhon: His Life and Work," the biographical introduction to Proudhon's collected Correspondence. Tucker includes a disclaimer regarding Langlois' account, and it would be nice if we had the ability to easily judge Proudhon by his works, but with so much still to be translated, the careful use of commentary is necessary for most of us. Most of what Langlois wrote rings true to me, and the chronology provided is extremely useful. I recommend the account for all participants in the Proudhon seminar, and anyone else interested in understanding Proudhon's work.

What Is Property? seminar

2008-06-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

As announced, I'll be doing a close reading of Proudhon's first memoir from What Is Property? during the month of July, and I am inviting one and all to read along. I have set up a discussion list and wiki page on the anarchylist.org site. Please subscribe to the list if you are interested in participating in the main discussion. If you're not up to that kind of commitment, I will be posting material on this blog, and compiling a running list of seminar-related material on the wiki page.

My ambitions for the reading are fairly simple: I would like to provide an opportunity for individuals, anarchists of whatever school or non-anarchists, to read (or reread) this very important text, in a context where it is also possible to develop a reading of the material. Developing a reading—really coming to terms with the text—is a bit more complicated process than just going the distance through it. But if Proudhon's argument, that "property is theft," is to be more than just an empty slogan, it is necessary to engage with the complexities involved. There are all kinds of complicating issues: Proudhon's very specific definitions of "property" and "possession," potential inconsistencies in Proudhon's various treatments of the question of "property," subsequent developments in Proudhon's property theory, idiosyncratic or period-specific use of terms, etc. The text treats certain conventional libertarian approaches to property, such as "self-ownership," rather obliquely. In my running commentary on the work, I hope to clarify some issues, and highlight the difficulties with regard to others. I'll try to provide some context from other of Proudhon's writings, including some that remain untranslated.

Contrary to my original posting, I intend to spend the entire month of July dealing with the text, and will extend the seminar if it seems desirable. I'll begin slowly this week, with some general comments, and some discussion of the first chapter. The Tucker translation of the first memoir is a little less than 300 pages long, making the pace around ten pages per day. I'll try to give some guidance for the busy about which sections are must-reads.

I'll post links to some biographical material later this evening. Sign up for the discussion list if you're interested in reading along.

Infoshop / bookstore economics

2008-06-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Let me put on one of my other hats for a second:

Well, it didn't take long for me to get involved with a bookstore in Portland. I seem to be well on my way to joining the collective at Laughing Horse Books, a radical bookstore with an ideologically diverse inventory and staff. Like pretty much all independent bookstores, Laughing Horse is trying to figure out how to adapt to present conditions, keep the wolves at bay, be useful in a perplexing political climate, etc. After visiting my first collective meeting, I found myself right back in the mode I had been in for so many years at my own bookstore, calculating break-even points, prioritizing payments, etc.

Infoshops and independent bookstores are still extremely important, as centers of distribution of information, as meeting places, as art and music venues, as quasi-public space where free political discussion is not only allowed but encouraged. Volunteer collectives have the economic advantage of not paying wages, but, if you are considering attempting such a thing, there is one basic rule of the book business to consider:

At any given moment, if your sales are mostly books, mostly at the industry-standard 40% discount, you need to be making 2 1/2 times in gross sales what you pay out in fixed expenses (rent, insurance, utilities, regular advertising, etc.) That means that if you have $1000 in fixed expenses each month, you need to be making $2500 in order to simply stand still (pay bills, keep the lights on, replace inventory). In order to grow the business, increase inventory, capitalize any of your labor in equipment, or savings for a rainy day or slow spell, you have to make more. And unless you take some satisfaction in treating your own labor as pure expenditure, it makes sense to at least try to recoup something from it. It makes good sense to invest individual labor in group resources, as long as those using the resources are also contributing in one way or another to the collective effort, and as long as those resources are being cared for. Labors of love are fine, and the first goal is always simply to keep the operation going as long as it serves a useful function, but it is perhaps easier on the volunteers if they are explicitly planning to have their labor "compensated" by growth in the project.

All radical and independent projects that function in the business sector have to behave more or less like a business, at least as far as making sure the incoming and outgoing funds (and inputs of other sorts) balance out in a sustainable way. Beyond that, they have to be flexible, ready to reach out to like-minded businesses and organizations, able to counter, in one way or another, their disadvantages in the broad marketplace, and so on. Enthusiasm, expertise, openness, willingness to network with and advertise other projects: all of these things are increasingly absent from the parts of the business world that most consumers see on a regular basis. There is no reason that the corner infoshop can't serve the fuctions once served by a number of now-defunct small businesses, and expand its power to serve community needs in the process, with a little attention given to taking care of the bottom line and the work-satisfaction of collective members.

Gems

2008-06-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

We convened 40% of the newborn Pacific Northwest ALL for lunch on Sunday. Not quite a quorum, but the two of us had a good time. I can now vouch for the quality of the eats at the Red and Black Cafe. Good stuff. A lot of the discussion naturally revolved around what works were available that might be fodder for more pamphlets at Invisible Molotov. (Bookmark it now, if you haven't already.) Much of the rest revolved around similar questions. Get two market anarchist nerds together and. . .

In the course of the conversation it became clear that there are probably some things added in the flood of new archived material over the last couple of years (close to 35,000 original pages, in one form or another) that deserve another mention. Here's a few gems you might have missed:

Dyer D. Lum's run of The Alarm
The Rebel
Guyau's Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation and Sanction
An Anarchist (Conrad)
Hugo Bilgram, Involuntary Idleness
Joshua King Ingalls' Social Wealth

I'll be re-featuring more as I start cleaning up the wiki archive for the Grand Reopening.

LeftLiberty extra: Individualism vs. Socialism, c. 1900

2008-06-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

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 Liberty and Property Defense League. Bax, with Henry Quelch, published A New Catechism of Socialism in 1900; Wilson responded with his A Catechism of Individualism in 1902. If you're a regular in these circles, chances are that there will be very few real supprises for you. You know the drill. But I think these are valuable documents precisely as exemplars of the positions that left-libertarians, and all anarchists and libertarians interested in the possibilities of broad coalition, need to move beyond. I think part of that process is, perhaps, some final coming to terms with the polar positions. And the positions are pretty polar. From Wilson:

What do you understand by Individualism ?

It is the opposite of Socialism.

Why do you give this negative definition ?

Because Individualism is the natural system, and would never have got a distinctive name, or have had to search for its principles, and the reasons on which they are founded, but for the rise of the artificial system of Socialism.

Am I to understand, then, that Individualism is the earlier of the two systems ?

No. Modern Socialism is an attempt to give a scientific justification for a barbarous stage through which men passed in their upward struggle to their present happier state.

And so on. . . Bax and Quelch boil individualistic ethics down to "The devil take the hindmost," etc. This is the Wikipedia talk-page squabble as relatively high art, well worth the time it will take to read through.

Of course, the earlier debate, as I've begun to show, looked very different, and perhaps more useful, at least to those interested in left-libertarian alliance.

Coming up: in preparation for both LeftLiberty and the What Is Property? "open classroom event," some background on Proudhon's philosophy and on that "creepy" motto I stuck on the 'zine.

A minor treasure

2008-06-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness we don't all value the same things.

I made my first foray back into Portland on Wednesday, after about a decade's absence. William Gillis suggested a couple of stops, and I had a cup of coffee at the worker-owned Red and Black Cafe while I puttered away at translating some Bellegarrigue. I made the obligatory stop at Powell's as well, still the Imperial Death Star of the used book world, but still useful in its way. They had Flora Tristan's The Workers' Union on the shelf, which I had been itching to read, but they also had a translation of Victor Considerant's Principes du socialisme: manifeste de la démocratie au XIXe siècle, which I have counted among those important texts I probably should read, but probably wouldn't get around to. Principles of Socialism was a manifesto issued at the launch of Démocratie pacifique, the successor journal to La Phalange, the major Fourierist journal of the 1840s. It featured Considerant's rather tame version of Fourierism, free of the whimsy, and the sex, of Fourier's full thought, but still very interesting, and important, as part of the context for the work by Proudhon and Leroux which occupies so much of my time these days. Not my favorite stuff from the period, and chances are that it won't be yours. But thank heaven that somebody cared enough to translate it.

Considerant's manifesto is often cited as a potential source for the Manifesto of Marx and Engels. There are certainly some points of similarity, though Considerant considered himself in many ways a good conservative and opposed revolutionary socialism as "retrograde." There are some chuckles, or head-shakes, here: Considerant attacks the defenders of the current system, but defends the constitutional monarchy as appropriate to "peaceful democracy." He makes some allusions to the notion that "property is theft," always in the context of defending property, though not in a way that is likely to inspire any but the most uncritical of propertarians.

Joan Roelofs' translation appears to be quite good. I haven't done a lot of double-checking, but I also have had any of the usual alarm bells go off as I read the thing. The edition was published by Maisonneuve Press (ISBN 0944624472), and set me back about fifteen bucks. I consider it money well spent, and recommend the volume to anyone who really wants to understand the range of positions surrounding our anarchist and libertarian socialist founders.

And it's a book I will not have to translate, or feel guilty for neglecting.

Left-libertarians in the PNW?

2008-06-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Who else is out here on the NorthLeft Coast? Any mutualists, agorists, or others interested in organizing with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, situated in Portland, Seattle, Eugene, Corvallis, etc?

Get in touch! Let's get stuff rolling!

Mutualschool Open Classroom Event #1

2008-06-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars: July 1-14, mutualschool.org will be hosting its first educational event, a close look at the first memoir of Proudhon's What Is Property? I'm preparing an annotated wiki version of the texts, a series of notes and "lectures" on various aspects of the text, and some short translations from related works. Proudhon's first work on property was not his final word on the matter, and it was written at a time when he was still developing his understanding of the issues involved. There are, I think, some pretty serious problems with the text. It is, nonetheless, and deservedly so, considered one of great works of the anarchist tradition. It's basic claim—that "property is theft"—was one which Proudhon never abandoned, even as he came to embrace property "in its aims" in his later works.

Market anarchists or anti-propertarians—we will make no headway in dealing historically with the question of "property" (or "possession" or "occupancy and use," etc.) without coming to terms with Proudhon's original work.

The form of the event is largely open. I can provide a discussion list, but we already have discussion lists (anarchy-list, leftlibertarian2, etc), forums (leftlibertarian.org, infoshop.org, libertarian-labyrinth.org, etc), wikis, blogs, etc. While more traditional courses will probably require the use of mutualschool.org's Moodle "classrooms," these "open classroom" events are perhaps best tackled as an extension of the sorts of communication we are already engaged in, and may be organized rather differently. I'm open to suggestions, and will make the resources on my sites available to facilitate things. At minimum, I'll be setting up some wiki pages to track things, and to establish a basic path through the material, and we ought to be able to figure out a way to generate an RSS feed of material.

"Tutition" for these events will be purely voluntary. If you think that the organizing work merits compensation, then there will be opportunities to contribute to the cause. If other forums serve the project well, I would encourage contributions to support them. The formal courses, with set fees, will come in time, but these exploratory projects might as well explore our inclination and ability to create self-supporting institutions, as they explore our historical and theoretical legacy.

Spread the word. Leave a comment if you are interested in participating, or if you have suggestions. I would love to see a variety of perspectives involved in the discussion, though things will obviously work best if we all attempt to really understand the work before we critique it, or its alternatives, too much.

Countdown to Relaunch!

2008-06-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I reached the Pacific Northwest yesterday, patched things up with the cats (who flew out five days ago) and am waiting for my library and computers to arrive. I had a chance to putter away at some translation of Bellegarigue's second issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Order on the train. I dragged the paper files for LeftLiberty with me in an old salesman's specimen case that serves as a mobile file cabinet, so I can get back to work on that today.

I've been rearranging a lot of projects, trimming some obsolete stuff, incorporating old efforts into new ones, and working on networking the whole mess a whole lot more efficiently. My hope is to get the basic structure of everything in its new form prepared for launch/relaunch by July 4. That includes: the wiki versions of the Libertarian Labyrinth and The Distributive Passions, a portal site on Mutualism at mutualism.info, a site for the 20-year-old Anarchy-List (which is set for a relaunch of sorts of its own), the first issue of LeftLiberty and a portal in the Labyrinth archive for that, the first educational material associated with mutualschool.org, and a new project related to "civil defense" in the contemporary context.

If that sounds like a lot, well, it pretty obviously is. But my situation is this: for the last three years I have been living the simplest of lives, going without lots of things (car, insurance, heat in the winter last year, etc) just to keep working at the things that are important to me. That has meant I've been relentless on the research side, and a bit spotty on the writing and publishing side. Nobody is more aware than I am of the number of projects left unfinished, or transformed into something else. I have now placed myself in a position to "go to work" on liberty-related projects as if it was my job. And that's what I'll be doing, in a variety of ways. It's a matter of vocation for me (in a strong sense, that has more than just a little to do with my Christian upbringing). What I hope to explore is the extent to which it can also be made a career of the sort that requires fewer sacrifices. More about that anon. . .

A book, approximately

2008-05-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

I'm roughly two weeks away from my cross-country relocation, which explains my relative quiet online lately. I've been whittling away at 18 years worth of accumulated stuff and making as much use of the research resources here as I can before heading west, reading Proudhon and Leroux, working on texts for LeftLiberty, etc. I've also been doing a lot of talking with friends here about mutualism, following up on this Spring's informal seminar and a presentation I gave on mutualist institutions. The result has been a significant crystalization of my thoughts about mutualism, and the outline, finally, for a collection of writings on the subject.

The Anarchism of Approximations: the synthesis/manifesto, parts of which have been posted here;
Towards a History of Mutualism: a discussion of the issues to be resolved before any sort of definitive history of mutualism could be written, including an introduction to major figures and texts;
A Mutual Theory of Property: a look at property in Locke, Proudhon, Leroux and Ingalls, and a discussion of self-ownership, occupancy and use, possession vs. property, intellectual property, ecological concerns, etc., all in the context of the principle of mutuality;
Mutuality and Mystery: a discussion of the religious elements in William B. Greene's original Christian Mutualism, with some thoughts on how mutuality and religious mystery may be connected there, and how they both might connect with contemporary treatments of community in the works of writers like Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben;
Mutualist Institutions for the Here and Now; a very nuts-and-bolts discussion of what institutions (and it's probably not the mutual bank) mutualists could attempt to institute right now, with the actual resources at hand, and some discussion of existing left-libertarian projects (my own and others') in that context;
A review (overdue, no doubt) of Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, and some discussion of how I see Kevin's vision of mutualism and my own connecting.

This is the stuff that goes to the top of the to-do list, as soon as the cats and my bulkier possessions start on their way west. Much of it is already written, or outlined, so it may start to appear fairly quickly. Nothing, of course, is certain, given the rather complete upheaval of my life just around the corner, but I hope to have the majority of this circulating in some form by the end of 2008.

And then I stumbled upon...

2008-05-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like "Philosophical Pamphlets," or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines.

This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn't done it in a while and who knows...?), I ran across a volume called, you guessed it, Philosophical Pamphlets, which contained another digital copy of Henry Cohen's edition of William B. Greene's 1870 Mutual Banking. The full contents are these:

Mutual banking : showing radical deficiency of the present circulating medium ... / by William B. Greene. [1895?] (66 p.)
An appeal to the young / by Peter Kropotin. 1896. (27 p.)
Herbert Spencer's synthetic philosophy / by Benjamin F. Underwood. [n.d.] (85 p.)
Evolution and social reform ... / by Hugh O. Pentecost. 1890. (p. 302-318)
The scope and principles of the evolution philosophy / by Lewis G. Janes. 1889. (26 p.)
Ernst Haeckel / by Thaddeus B. Wakeman. [1890?] (p. 21-58)
The philosophy of evolution / by Starr Hoyt Nichols. 1889. (p. [343]-366)
Co-operation : its laws and principles. (The sun ; v.1, no.1) 1885. (28 p.)
Prohibition, or The relation of government to temperance. [n.d.] (28 p.)
The reorganization of business. [1885?] (28 p.)
The financial problem : its relation to labor reform and prosperity ... / by Alfred B. Westrup. 1886. (32 p.)

There's some good stuff here, not least The Financial Problem, which has been one of the last real holes in my collection of Westrup's work. Several of the others are publications of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, including the Pentecost piece, which is specifically titled "The Anarchistic Method," and originally appeared, if I remember correctly, in The Twentieth Century during Pentecost's tenure as editor. The library record actually attributed, or seemed to attribute the eighth pamphlet to Herbert Spencer, but when I looked at the title I realized that it was actually a scarce pamphlet by Charles T. Fowler. Fowler is one of the few figures generally associated with mutualism that I have note yet been able to read at all. As it turns out, the ninth and tenth works are also from Fowler's paper, The Sun. I will transcribe all of these to the Libertarian Labyrinth archive as soon as possible, but in the meantime, check them out at the Internet Archive.

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas weblog

2008-05-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

On the Research on Anarchism list, Robert Graham writes:

I've recently set up a weblog to provide additional commentary and selections to complement the published edition(s) of my anthology of anarchist writings, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Recent posts include the first English translation of anything by Ernest Coeurderoy, an excerpt from his Jours d'exil (Days of Exile), and a CNT-FAI pamphlet from December 1936, encouraging Spanish peasants to embrace libertarian communism and assuring them that such a thing could never be imposed upon them. I've also posted the Preface
and Table of Contents to Volume 1, From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), which was published by Black Rose Books in 2005, and tentative tables of contents for projected Volumes 2 and 3, Between Apopcalypse and Utopia (1939-1977) and The Anarchist Current (1974-2007), which I hope will come out soon.

I plan to post some additional previously unpublished selections that didn't make it into Volume 1, such as "On the Equal Ability of Humans," by Shen Shu (Liu Shipei), who published an anarchist review, Natural Justice, in Japan circa 1907 with his wife, He Zhen, whose piece on "Women's Liberation" was included in the published version of Volume 1, in Chapter 20, "Chinese Anarchism."

I also hope to include links to more complete versions of some of the selections, for example Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Proudhon's System of Economic Contradictions, for people interested in reading more from these authors.

The address is: http://robertgraham.wordpress.com. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Best regards,

Robert Graham

The site is very nice, and the first volume of the collection is quite useful.

William Potter's "Key of Wealth"

2008-05-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

One of the very earliest land bank/mutual bank documents is available online: The Key of Wealth: Or, A New Way for Improving of Trade, by William Potter (1650).

A new rogue for the gallery

2008-05-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

The search for material for LeftLiberty has taken me in some interesting directions. Every time I think I have a pretty good idea of the range of "socialist" positions out there, I run across some new figure who turns out to be significant, even if largely forgotten. In the mid-19th century, of course, there are a lot fewer socialists out there than there were at the end of that century, and it has been in the course of exploring the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I have found some of the greatest surprises, along with some difficult problems of interpretation. The intellectual genealogies get complicated: Ernest Lesigne, for example, had connections with the Comtean positivists, which adds another complicating dimension to his rather idiosyncratic version of socialism. And Comte is one of those factors that we've really hardly begun to deal with, despite his widespread influence, on a range of figures from Stephen Pearl Andrews to Kropotkin.

It was in the process of tracking down some contextual material on Lesigne that I encountered Eugenio Rignano, author of Un socialisme en harmonie avec la doctrine économique libérale (1904). That's A Socialism in Harmony with the Liberal Economic Doctrine, written by someone for whom "socialism" was a matter of "historical materialism" and the like. I've just started to read the work, but what I've read so far is very interesting, as Rignano attempts a fairly audacious synthesis of more-or-less marxian socialism and liberal property theory. Apparently, though, audacious synthesis was Rignano's thing: his other works seem to look for synthetic positions in biological debates of vitalism vs. mechanism, in the debates over the inheritance of acquired characteristics, etc. The biological and evolutionary material was of a sort regularly debated in radical circles, where "voluntaristic" forms of evolutionary theory managed to hold out much longer than they did in the surrounding culture. Rignano may shed some more direct light on the connections between the biological and sociological-political debates.

Perhaps a LeftLiberty issue or supplement down the road can tackle some of these scientific questions.

A Reminder: It would be great to hear from more regular readers of the blog on those definitional questions for LeftLiberty 1-2. You can enter responses directly into the wiki. (Registration is required to edit the page.) The more responses we get, the more useful the collections of texts can be, and the more efficiently I can direct my research in the older material.

Around the blogosphere

2008-04-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

Check out Exploring American Anarchism and Herzschlag, for good anarchist material from some folks I know "in real life." And shout-outs as well to agorists Royce Christian, of The Guerrilla Capitalist, and Niccolo Adami, of The Kingdom of God is Within You. Last but certainly not least, "Anarcho" finally has a blog.