LeftLiberty/01
From Libertarian Labyrinth
Issue One
Issue One of LeftLiberty, "The Unfinished Business of Liberty," premiered, together with the first release in the New Proudhon Library, The Philosophy of Progress, at the 2009 San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. It was released to the web, in a slightly more finished form, April 1, 2009.
Contents
- ALLigations
- The New Proudhon Library
- Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations, by Shawn P. Wilbur
- From the Libertarian Library
- "Communism—Capitalism—Socialism," by William B. Greene, 1849
- "The Blazing Star," by William B. Greene, 1871
- The Alliance of the Libertarian Left
- On ALLiance
ALLigations
It may be well to state at the outset that this journal will be edited to suit its editor, not its readers. He hopes that what suits him will suit them; but, if not, it will make no difference.—BENJAMIN R. TUCKER, 1881.
Welcome to the first issue of LEFTLIBERTY. It’s a pleasure, after over a year of work and planning, to be able to put a more-or-less finished product in front of the public. I say “more or less” for a variety of reasons, all of which relate to this issues theme of “unfinished business.” It turns out that Liberty (variously defined) has a lot of unfinished business, and that may be a situation we’re stuck with, or blessed with, depending on your perspective. LEFTLIBERTY will doubtless have at least its share.
LEFTLIBERTY is a magazine—half serious zine, half one-man journal—dedicated to the broad, deep current of anarchist thought which is sometimes called “left libertarian,” and particularly to the anarchist mutualist tradition which traces its roots back to figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Joshua King Ingalls and William Batchelder Greene. Mutualism is arguably the oldest form of explicitly anarchist thought, taking its name from Proudhon,—the “property is theft” and “I am an anarchist” guy,—but it is hardly the best-known. Fifteen years ago, when I began to study mutualism seriously, I faced two major obstacles: first, many of the texts associated with the tradition were difficult to access, even for someone in academic circles; indeed, many key texts remained untranslated; and, second, I quickly learned that many of the attitudes and unconscious prejudices that I had picked up in the course of becoming an anarchist in the first place were impediments to understanding mutualism, which, in contemporary terms, occupies a kind of complicated middle ground between the mainstream of “social anarchism” and the various forms of “market anarchism” and radical libertarianism.
In the intervening years, I have been active attempting to overcome the first of those obstacles, searching for scarce and hard-to-find material and making it available it in a series of online archives, such as the Libertarian Labyrinth, and organizing a collaborative translation project, Collective Reason. To address the second difficulty, it has been necessary to immerse myself in the literature, both to explore that portion of it that relates to mutualism and to revisit the writings of the communists and collectivists. I have been fortunate through those years to have had friends and colleagues working roughly the same territory,—among whom, Kevin Carson, Iain McKay, Roderick Long, Crispin Sartwell and the late Kenneth Gregg deserve special mention,—and to have played some role in the current revival in interest in mutualism. For me, the chief lesson of my “mutualist years” has been that the anarchist and libertarian traditions are much broader, and much stranger, than my early education had led me to believe, and that we are extremely fortunate in that regard. It is a lesson, however, that has been learned under conditions not always conducive to careful, open-minded study: changes in the academy, constant fluctuations in my own employment, sectarian struggle within the anarchist movement, etc.
To be a mutualist in the late 20th century was to be at best a sort of red-headed stepchild of the anarchist tradition, and to face charges of antiquarianism, deviation from well-established movement norms, even collaboration with the traditional enemies of the movement, capitalism and the state. As we celebrate Proudhon’s 200th birthday, however, things are a little bit different. If it is still nearly as common to be verbally assaulted by doctrinaire anarchist-communists or pro-capitalist libertarians, fueled by Wikipedia-level characterizations of mutualist doctrine, and if the general state of knowledge about most varieties of anarchist philosophy still hovers somewhere just above dismal, there seem to be a lot more self-identified mutualists out there these days, and, most recently, we’ve seen a number of those mutualist and mutualist-friendly “odd ducks” start to get organized, with the launch of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. LEFTLIBERTY aims to be an organ of that Alliance, one of its published voices, as well as a kind of internal prod to the membership to keep mining our tradition for the gems of libertarian wisdom produced long ago and then largely forgotten. Its chief inspiration is Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty, the longest-running and most influential periodical of the American individualist anarchist tradition, and Tucker’s earlier and lesser-known Radical Review.
Those are big shoes to attempt to fill. Tucker was a magnificent and often contradictory figure, at times the most careful student of the tradition and at others its most sectarian controversialist. I won’t try to match his irascibility, and I may not be able to match his brilliance, but I think I can presume, with the aid of historical hindsight, to pick up some dropped threads in Tucker’s work, but also in that of his influences, particularly Proudhon, Greene and Warren, as well as explore some aspects of those earlier figures that Tucker did not pursue.
Things start off with a new translation of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Progress,—bound separately for convenience,—the first of a series of new translations inspired by Tucker’s planned PROUDHON LIBRARY, as well as the text of Tucker’s original announcement and some notes to the text.
Next up is the first installment of my “Mutualism: The Anarchism of Approximations,” which will attempt a synthesis of the various traditions that have shared the name “mutualism.”
This issue’s selections from the Libertarian Labyrinth archive come from William Batchelder Greene, the early American mutualist who introduced Tucker to Proudhon’s writings. “The Blazing Star,” originally published in pamphlet form in 1871, was Greene’s attempt to address the issues of progress and human perfectibility than he found in the writings of Proudhon and Pierre Leroux. It is preceded by a short essay from his 1849 Equality, which illustrates how the synthetic approach to truth advanced by Proudhon in The Philosophy of Progress, might be applied to the competing political-economic doctrines of communism, capitalism and socialism.
The Distributive Passions is the title of a work of speculative fiction, based on my researches in radical history and particularly grounded in the works of Charles Fourier, who is one of the least-explored influences on the mutualist tradition. Beginning with the next issue, I’ll be including some sections from that work. For this issue, I’ve had to content myself with a bit of a prose teaser.
Finally, the issue ends with a section ON ALLIANCE, which introduces the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, and explores some of the issues surrounding the kind of broad cooperation between factions which is one of its goals. THE NEXT ISSUE will be entitled “A Doctrine of Life and Humanity,” and it will focus on the work of Pierre Leroux, one of Proudhon’s chief rivals in the years around 1849, but also an influence on both Proudhon and William B. Greene. Greene’s early work is as neglected by present-day anarchists as the late work of Proudhon, and, it seems to me, with as little justice. I’ll try to explore Proudhon’s notion of “collective beings” and “collective force” in the context of Leroux and Greene’s treatments of Humanity and the “doctrine of life.”
FUTURE ISSUES will be similarly constructed around key reprints or translations, and will appear as the necessary pieces can be assembled. Among the issues in the early stages of construction: “The General Idea of Revolution,” including the second issue of Bellegarrigue’s Anarchy, Journal of Order; “What is Intellectual Property?” featuring Proudhon’s Majorats Literaire; “The Science of Universology” and “Anarchist Church, Anarchist State, Anarchist Inquisition?” both collecting work by Stephen Pearl Andrews; and a collection of practical proposals for land banks, mutual banks and equitable stores.
IN EVERY ISSUE I will be attempting the synthesis of elements that may ultimately be too incompatible, too antinomic, to be brought into harmony or even balance. And I’ll be striking out into territory where there are very few guides, writing and compiling for an audience that may or may not truly be there. It goes without saying that, like Tucker, I will be compelled to pursue publication for my own reasons. Like him, of course, I hope that my work will find an audience which is interested, entertained, perhaps inspired, and I hope that the material here will be useful for that elusive Revolution which I still hope may be more than a sort of Sorelian myth. In any event, LEFTLIBERTY will be an occasion to continue labors I don’t seem to be able to set down. Perhaps that is enough.
– SHAWN.
Download link
- LeftLiberty 1 (pdf)
