LL1: The Unfinished Business of Liberty

“The Unfinished Business of Liberty”

Edited by Shawn P. Wilbur

“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.”

[Download PDF]

~ by sovietonion on April 4, 2009.