Trajectories

I’ve been shuffling real-world commitments, cutting back some projects, and preparing myself for what looks like a steady “speed-up” through the retail holiday season. (In retail, as elsewhere, increased worker productivity is supposed to make up for general decline, and “more with less” is the watchword for the season, meaning more promotions requiring more special effort, more contrived contests, more competition for hours, etc.) I left the radical bookstore collective I had been working with a week or so back, and have dodged a couple of other commitments in the meantime, while taking some time to figure out what’s worth doing, here in the waning days of Babylon. It’s the first major reassessment I’ve made since the move west, and it’s been good.

For those of you (both of you?) waiting for LeftLiberty, you’ll have to wait a little longer, but it will be worth it. I had initially intended to just collect and translate texts “good to think with.” I have decided to adopt a more elaborate approach, with much more in the way of commentary. For the other two of you who have been waiting for my long-promised thoughts on property, you have probably already learned to appreciate the maxim “be careful what you wish for,” but I will be forging ahead gradually with my current exploration of the possible implications of mid-19th century radical property theories. I’m studiously not publishing any release dates for awhile, since who knows what will be the important issues in a few months, but I have been writing again, pretty steadily, on the Distributive Passions stories, and hope to have something to show there soon.

Some other proposed projects will sink, largely unmissed, like a stone. I think it’s important for us all to test the waters, regularly, but also not to kid ourselves about the urgency of anything that doesn’t seem bound to find its public.

Collective Reason, the translation site, is finding a public, and should be good fun.

Anyway, I aim to keep working away at the things which seem to keep left-libertarians partitioned off from our potential allies among the syndicalists and anarchist communists, as well as from our neighbors, and elaborating the Proudhonian basis of the broad, loose coalition I’m ultimately in favor of. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it all, but it should be fun to find out.