Month: August 2010

The Sex Question

A socialist-feminist document from 1849

August 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] FRATERNAL ASSOCIATION OF THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS OF BOTH SEXES FOR THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN 1849 —————- DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES In the name of God and the solidarity which links all the member of the great human family; We affirm that women have the same right as men to liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty, for woman as for man, is the right and the power to develop and exercise freely and harmoniously all his physical, intellectual and moral faculties, without any limit but respect for the rights of each. All liberties are solidary; one cannot undermine any […]
Anarchism

New Anarchist Platformist archive

August 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches represented here, there are important issues being wrestled with in all of this stuff, and the more practical issues are not unlike those that any anarchist society will face as it attempts to give itself a working shape. I’m ultimately unsympathetic to the solutions offered by platformism, but value the […]
Contr'un

Practical support for microenterprise

August 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been featuring the 500 Friends of Reading Frenzy! Kickstarter project in the sidebar here since it was launched. It’s now in its last week for funding, and 75% on its way to a goal of $5000. Reading Frenzy is a remarkable operation: a tiny shop which has been able to smooth the road for a lot of tiny projects, in an economic environment that tends to squeeze out human-scaled, low-overhead enterprises. There’s something fundamentally upside-down about a system that selects against lean operations and personal commitment. We should fight the tendency, particularly since the resources required to launch and […]
Contr'un

Trajectories: Proudhon and Property

August 17, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been working on bookbinding and papermaking as much as property theory lately, trying to put together the first two issues of “The Wing: A Journal of Attractive Industry” (a very nuts-and-bolts, often how-to zine on environmentally responsible, craft-based micro-enterprise.) But I’ve also been working on the revision of Tucker’s What is Property? translation, and grappling with some issues raised by that and the research for the “Property is Impossible” posts, and that’s sent me back through the last two years’ worth of work on the property question, which really all grew out of the first Proudhon seminar.  I compiled […]
Contr'un

Responses to Anarchism: the Rhyme of Ravachol Needham

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[From P. R. Bennett, Ducdame; a book of verses. 1912.] The Anarchist [A critic in the New Age suggests that modern thought can submit no longer to the tyranny of rhyme and metre.] Ravachol Needham was a man of letters, Who refused to submit to the wretched fetters That sought by rules of rhyme and scansion To prevent his soaring soul’s expansion. He had languished long on a dismal sonnet And wasted his eagle spirit on it, Till the poor old bird had been imprisoned So long that it grew depressed and wizened, Drooped its feathers and nearly moulted, Could […]
Anarchism

Max Nettlau, Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH By Max Nettlau. ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits […]
Contr'un

E. Armand, “The Gulf”

August 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This short piece by E. Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand’s thought. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE GULF All the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say that the individual is a “product of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which […]
Contr'un

For the well-adorned radical…

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
There are several bookfairs coming up, and while books and pamphlets are cool and all, it’s a well-known fact that the business really runs on buttons, stickers and t-shirts. As an ever-so-slight bucking of the trend, to repurpose a class of items I manage to collect in some quantity, and to fit the Corvus Editions aesthetic a bit better, I’ve opted to start the trinket-ing with a line of carefully antiqued bottle-cap pendants (which ordinarily keep craft fairs running). You can check out the first fifteen designs at the Corvus store.
egoist anarchism

W. Curtis Swabey, “The Ethics of Stirner” (1912)

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
When I first encounter the French version of this text, I was aware that I might be translating a translation, but the article was interesting enough to make the work worth the bit of time it took—and it was quite a while before I finally tracked down the original English version. Now that I have the original text, it’s interesting to see to what extent the sense of the work survived the double-translation, so I have simply added the original to the post containing my translation. [ezcol_1half] The Ethics of Stirner To all who have been fortunate enough to read […]
anarchist individualism

E. Armand, “Our Rule of Ideological Conduct” (1922)

August 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Notre ligne de conduite idéologique Dans tous les lieux, les individualistes de notre tendance veulent instaurer — dès maintenant et dans tous les temps — un milieu humain fondé sur le fait individuel et dans lequel, sans contrôle, intervention, immixtion quelconque de l’Etat, tous les individus puissent, soit isolés, soit associés, régler leurs affaires entre eux, au moyen de libres pactes, résiliables après préavis et cela pour n’importe quelle activité, que l’association soit l’œuvre d’une personnalité ou d’un collectivité. Leurs associations volontaires sont des unions de camarades, basées sur l’exercice de la réciprocité ou « égale liberté ». Les individualistes […]