Month: July 2010

Anarchism

“Come, a glass to our captain—the destined destroyer of civilization!”

July 22, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
While searching for hollow earth narratives (a curiously political genre, as it happens), I came across Hartmann the Anarchist, an 1893 science fiction/adventure novel, by Edward Douglas Fawcett (the brother of the “Lost City of Z” explorer.) Fawcett also wrote Swallowed by an Earthquake, which I haven’t tracked down, but Hartmann is a lot of fun. It’s an anti-anarchist novel, but don’t let that worry you too much. The plot is a tragedy, with a more-or-less byronic hero, whose motivation could be straight out of Emma Goldman’s “The Psychology of Political Violence.” The narrator is an “evolutionary” socialist, and the […]
Contr'un

Take me to the river…

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Let’s say we gather the usual suspects, down by the river, in the State of Nature, or thereabouts, for a bit of property theory and a few “good draughts.” John Locke says everybody can appropriate some river-water, as long as what they make their own “property” leaves “a whole river of the same water.” Now, Locke has a reputation for saying things like “my labor” when maybe he means the labor of someone else, so there’s some hesitation, but it seems like a pretty good deal, assuming it’s possible. Now, in literal terms, it seems impossible: a quantity of water, X, minus some non-zero “good draught,” G, is unlikely to = X.  But, out in the State of Nature, talking about individual-scale “draughts” and a naturally resilient river-system, perhaps it is at least as good as possible.

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Contr'un

Joseph Déjacque and “The Circulus in Universality”

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s long, and the translation is still a little rough, but I would encourage folks to take the time to read Joseph Déjacque’s The Circulus in Universality and to look at the other texts by him: “To the Ci-Devant Dynastics,” Down with the Bosses!,  “The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities,” and the excerpt from The Humanisphere published as “Authority and Idleness.” Once you have some sense of the terrain, you may also want to take a look at the in-progress translation of The Humanisphere that Jesse Cohn has posted. Déjacque is another of those figures who deserves to be more than […]
Contr'un

The Circulus in Universality

July 12, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
 The Circulus in Universality (1858) [revised translation available] Joseph Déjacque I The circulus in universality is the destruction of every religion, of all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul, which is to say a mutable thing and an immutable one, which implies contradiction—movement excluding immobility and vice versa—but must be, quite to the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and always-mobile substance, which implies perfectibility. It is by eternal and infinite […]
Contr'un

Property is impossible?

July 4, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last] We’re getting closer to the river’s edge, but we’re not quite prepared to “take our draught” yet. It has always seemed to me that libertarian property theory is prone to leaping straight to property’s defense—the occasions for legitimate use of force—without lingering overlong on just what it is defending. The broader the discussion—and terms like “left-libertarian” and “market anarchist” attempt to cover pretty broad swathes of ideological territory—the more pronounced the problem. The left-libertarian theory of a “spectrum” of abandonment theories seems to me pretty sound, and useful, but I have my doubts […]