Year: 2011

Black and Red Feminism

Jeanne Deroin to Proudhon, January 1849

May 16, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Jeanne Deroin. “Lettre a M. Proudhon.” L’Opinion des Femmes. No. 1, Year 1. January 28, 1849.] Letter to Proudhon. Monsieur, I know that, preoccupied most especially with questions of political economy, you have not accepted all the consequences of the principles on which our social future rests. You are one of the most formidable adversaries of the principle of equality—a principle which does not allow unjust exclusion and privileges of sex. I know that you do not wish to recognize the right of women to civil and political equality. This right, which contain in it the abolition of all social […]
Contr'un

Mutual aid opportunity

May 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
You’ll find a new ChipIn widget in the sidebar of the blog (or on ChipIn), to support Laughing Horse Books, one of Portland, Oregon’s few remaining independent bookstores, and a radical, collective-run bookstore/music venue/meeting space for 25 years now. All the little things that tend to snowball when a business gets behind have done so lately—and then some—and it seems very likely that the doors will be closing early this summer. Nothing is written in stone. The collective is in the midst of the hardest sorts of deliberations. But things are to the point where it’s not clear if all […]
Contr'un

Two Chapters from “The Last Word of Socialism”

May 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve transcribed the two chapters translated from Charles-François Chevé’s Le Dernier Mot du Socialisme, par un catholique (1848), and published in The Spirit of the Age. They are “Capital and Interest” and “The Landlord and His Tenants: A Dialogue.” Chevé was an associate of Proudhon, and the author of the “Socialist Catechism” that I recently translated.
Black and Red Feminism

Paule Mink, “Broken Arm” (1895)

April 29, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Picked up in the street, one morning, between a pile of rubbish and some rubble from demolition, abandoned like a small cat someone wants to be rid of, he was carried to the alms-house, and then placed among some farmers who raised him, giving him bread, in exchange, when he got to be a little bigger, for a labor that was very hard for a child, but who never had for him either affection or caresses.

[…]

Contr'un

Stirner’s Critics

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Hurry over to the Vagabond Theorist page and check out the full translation of “Stirner’s Critics,” Max Stirner’s reply to Szeliga, Hess and Feuerbach. There’s a lot of very valuable clarification in the essay. Bravo! for making the entire thing available.
Contr'un

Responses to Proudhon

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
The critical response to Proudhon’s work during his lifetime was extensive. Much of it was also relatively uninteresting nay-saying and sectarian quibbling, but certainly not all of it. And I think that, in general, anarchists are really only aware of a few key responses, such as Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy and some of the feminist critiques, which have remained interesting because of subsequent debates. One of the things that the increase in digital archives has changed dramatically is the accessibility of many of the early responses to Proudhon. I’ve started working to dig out as much of this critical material […]
Contr'un

Jules Allix, a most unusual Communard

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been spending a lot of time this month working on the “Black and Red Feminism” project, trying to expand the pilot pamphlet into something a little more broadly representative, for release as a small hardcover volume. That’s meant a lot of exploring, a few new figures of the “usual suspects” gallery here, and a little burst of new translations, like the Séverine story I just posted, and a Paule Mink story I hope to complete tomorrow. While I have not been looking as closely at the male feminists of the 1848 and Paris Commune periods, a few individuals have […]
Black and Red Feminism

Séverine, Liberty—Equality—Fraternity

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
from NOTES OF A TROUBLE-MAKER Séverine (Caroline Rémy de Guebhard) ____ LIBERTY — EQUALITY — FRATERNITY Liberty? That night, on the asphalt beach that dominates the view from my window, some human wreckage, a father, mother, and two babies, had washed up on a bench. From the heights where, much despite myself, I glide, one could distinguish nothing but a pile of gray flesh and soiled rags, from which emerged, here and there, an arm, a leg, with a movement slow and painful as a crushed crab’s leg They slept, clutching one another, huddled in one pile, from habit, as […]
Contr'un

A Joshua King Ingalls update

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Last week, a colleague provided me with copies of Josiah Warren’s articles “To the Friends of the Social System,” which appeared in the Western Tiller, and that put me back into bibliographic mode, since the Warren/equitable commerce bibliography has been hovering somewhere just short of publishable for a long time now—and those essays filled a major hole in my research. I should be able to say more about the content of those articles, and the status of the bibliography, later in the week. But diving back into the Warren project naturally also means reopening my on again, off again work […]
communism

Down with the Communists! (by a communist)

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just for fun, here’s a short, entertaining dialogue by “utopian” communist Étienne Cabet (undated, but probably 1848-9.) DOWN WITH THE COMMUNISTS! A Bourgeois. — Yes, sir! Down with the Communists! An Icarian.— No, sir. You shouldn’t say “Down with the Communists!” The Bourgeois. — Down, down with the Communists! The Icarian. — But why do you want that so badly? The Bourgeois. — Because they are brigands!… The Icarian. — Really! If that was true, you would be right, and I would cry out with you… But why do you say that they are brigands ? The Bourgeois. — Because […]