mutualism.info Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Mutualism.info: An Index

December 14, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

These are the posts previously hosted at mutualism.info: William Batchelder Greene, Letter to Orestes Brownson (1849) Annie Field, from “Whittier: Notes Of His Life And Of His Friendships” (1897) William Batchelder Greene, “The Right of Suffrage” (1875) George Willis Cooke, “William Batchelder Greene” Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (excerpts) Thomas Wentworth Higginson on William Batchelder Greene James Freeman Clarke, Reminiscences of William B. Greene William Batchelder Greene Timeline & Miscellany Equality and Justice The Mutual Banking Writings of William Batchelder Greene What Mutualism Was: An Incomplete History of Mutualist Tendencies New Series: Proudhon’s Social Science […]

Back to Basics (now that we may know a few of them)

August 16, 2015

Welcome to the new Mutualism.info, the last of my old Blogger sites to be integrated into the new Libertarian Labyrinth. It’s been just over a decade since I launched the blog In the Libertarian Labyrinth, which was not my first blog, but was the first dedicated primarily to anarchist history and theory. The site has had a number of other names along the way (Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth, Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule and Contr’un) and has migrated once, but the overall project has developed steadily, if sometimes in directions that couldn’t have been predicted ten years ago. […]

A note on anarchist economics

August 16, 2015

Modern production takes the strictly individual productive capacities of individuals and multiplies them in a variety of ways. Organization and association in industry, social and technological infrastructure, progress in science, and various other factors all contribute to what Proudhon called the “collective force” in production, and he explained capitalist exploitation as a kind of “accounting error,” where there are three sorts of human inputs in production (individual workers as individuals, individual capitalists as individuals, who may or may not actively contribute, and all the individuals as collectivities), but only two of the three are compensated (with what may often be […]

Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum

August 16, 2015

Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum Fragments from a Facebook forum [These remarks, written several years ago, was originally archived in a section of the Labyrinth that no longer exists, but since the question of UBI seems to have become much more common than when I initially made these comments, it seems worth re-archiving them here.] 1 Let me be more explicit: A certain minimum level of food, shelter, clothing and fun is going to be deemed “essential” by just about everyone, and at the subsistence-level there will probably even be some rough consensus on more or less what that consists […]

The Character and Scope of the Mutualist Market

June 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

A Short History of Mutualism: Mutualism (The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism) Scattered Reflections on Mutualism as “Market Anarchism:” Mutualism and “Market Anarchism” (2012) Encounters and Transactions (2013) The Character and Scope of the Mutualist Market (2014) Embracing the Antinomies (2017) Notes on Mutualism and the Problem(?) of Exchange (2019) Note on Mutualism and the Market-Form (2020) Collective Force: Notes on Contribution and Disposition (2020) Historical Mutualist Texts and Proposals: What Mutualism Was (project outline) One of the traditional elements of mutualism that seems to endure is the attraction of what we lovingly call “money crankery.” I’m not sure that there […]

Contr'un

“We are in one sense, a poverty-stricken people”

August 4, 2012

If you look at the sidebar of the blog, you will find that I have added a section for “Mutualist Classics.” Eventually, there should be a pretty good little library linked there—mutualists are not, as it turns out, an impoverished people when it comes to literature—but I want to start with a few texts that may be unfamiliar to many readers, but which strike me as particularly useful. The first two texts I’ve linked are short works of fiction by Sidney H. Morse. Morse is one of the figures who seems to appear everywhere in the story of mutualist and […]

The Importance of Proudhon

August 3, 2012 anarchisms_w4l2ii

Anarchists can be touchy about any sort of authority, so we are frequently at pains to say that we are not followers of any particular leader or historical figure. That’s good. Among other things, the historical figures we’re most likely to follow were almost all pretty clear about how undesirable that would be. And there’s something a little disconcerting about anarchists when they do invest perhaps a bit too much of their identity in an identification with some one of those anarchist figure, whether historical or current.

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Mutualism and “Market Anarchism”

August 3, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s tackle a controversial question: Is mutualism a form of “market anarchism”? It’s a useful sort of question, even though the correct answer is probably “that depends….” Since mutualism has its roots in a world where the distinctions that make a label like “market anarchism” useful simply didn’t exist, distinctions which may themselves run counter to the “classical” mutualist project, it’s tempting to say “no.” But since we’re in the process of rediscovering and reimaging mutualism in a world where the question of “markets” is of real importance, we have to resist the temptation. For those mutualists who have […]

The “FAQs”

July 7, 2012

One of the basic assumptions driving this blog is that we’re not really in a position for definitive answers to a lot of the most important, and most frequently asked questions about mutualism. We can say a lot of true things about a lot of mutualist tendencies, but MUTUALISM as such, has only had, or will have, the sort of unity that allows us to simply explain or define it at a few moments in the past and perhaps in some more orderly future—provided we can do the work now of getting a handle on the current, rather far-flung debate. […]

Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide

July 6, 2012

For a look at the concerns of the Owenite current at the moment, in the 1820s, when some members were trying on the label “mutualist” and Josiah Warren was taking the steps that would lead him to individualist anarchism, I’ve assembled a collection of texts in the first volume of a Documentary History of Mutualism: Mutualism at the Owenite High Tide. In it: The letters of the “1826 Mutualist” are followed by Josiah Warren’s “The Motives for Communism,”—an account of his involvement with the Owenite movement,—a speech given at New Harmony by communist Paul Brown,—author of Twelve Months in New […]