Lysander Spooner was an American political philosopher and mutualist anarchist who advocated concepts integral to the ideology of mutualism, such as mutual credit and mutual banking.
Here, in this video, I go over the individualist anarchist's proposal of how workers may break free from the chains of wage labour imposed upon them by capitalists, through working with credit unions, where workers can take out loans with extremely low rates of interest, in order to afford the capital they need to be self-managed.
Like Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner was a leading theorist of libertarian socialism within his time across the United States, one of the earliest anarchists since the pre-colonial era. His support of free markets - his criticism of taxation, in particular - often have him misunderstood as a supporter of industrial servitude. However, he was never in favour of bourgeois authority and despotism. From beginning to end, Lysander Spooner was one of the greatest friends, and allies, of the working class, his writings have greatly influenced the labour movement and free market anarchists everywhere.
A member of the socialist First International, most of his literary work consists of advancing the theory of legal naturalism (also known as natural law), and opposing state control of life in all spheres it decides to force itself upon. An anti-capitalist and anti-statist, Spooner would be ashamed at the abysmally low rates of self-employment throughout contemporary America. He, out of all people, would recognise the American "dream" as what it truly is: the American nightmare.
Citations:
Percentage of people, by surveyed country, who'd prefer to be self-employed
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~blnchflr/p...
American self-employment in 1860 | American Homicide (Randolph Roth). Page 303.
The Sociology of Work: Continuity and Change in Paid and Unpaid Work (Stephen Edgell and Edward Granter). Type "wright 1997 self-employment" for search results.
Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People, Volume 1 (David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, and John B). Page 613 for self-employment rates throughout the years.
Class Counts: Student Edition (Erik Olin Wright). Pages 68-69 for self-employment.
Agricultural labour enrolment in US history
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s13524-015-...
United States Average Hourly Wages
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-s...
United States Nonfarm Labour Productivity
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-s...
For the biggest group of American workers, wages aren’t just flat. They’re falling.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...
United States Wages and Salaries Growth
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-s...
Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickw...
United States Inflation Rate
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-s...
List of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Brazil Real Average Monthly Income
https://tradingeconomics.com/brazil/w...
Brazil: Productivity
https://tradingeconomics.com/brazil/p...
A Letter to Grover Cleveland (Lysander Spooner)
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sp...
Natural Law; or the Science of Justice (Lysander Spooner)
Books:
Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure (Lysander Spooner).
Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist (Steve J. Shone)
Let's Abolish Government (Lysander Spooner)
Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (James J. Martin)
The Lysander Spooner Reader (George H. Smith )
