Month: August 2013

Contr'un

The Anarchic Encounter: Economic and/or Erotic?

August 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related links: “Summary Notions” (August 28, 2013) “The Anatomy of the Encounter” (September 7, 2013) Contr’un #3 [pdf] It seemed appropriate to break off the previous post mid-encounter, if you will, in order to highlight even more emphatically the fundamentally fecund nature of the interactions I’ve been describing. The sort of anarchy that I have been starting to describe is not just without rulers, without any legitimate hierarchy, whether governmental or invested in other institutions, but largely without rules as well. It is not without history, if by that we mean an accumulation of experience and experiment, on the basis […]
Contr'un

Summary notions

August 28, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  With the first two issues of the Contr’un zine now available, I feel like perhaps I’ve reached the end of a necessary, but awkward transitional phase. Before moving forward, let me underline and elaborate on a few propositions or realizations that I consider key: Anarchism is ungovernable, and anarchists should probably learn to embrace that fact. It doesn’t imply any sort of compromise. On the contrary, it sets the bar for all of our theories, practices, and the no-doubt necessary squabbles over boundaries very high. It ought to discourage dogmatism and complacency. Not every aspiring anarchist need concern themselves […]
biography

Olga Liubatovitch and other women from the Russian nihilist movement

August 23, 2013
As a companion to the Frondeuse series, I’ve assembled a collection featuring Stepniak’s “A Female Nihilist,” an account of the life of Olga Liubatovitch, together with a selection of poems and popular journalism relating to other women involved in the struggles against the Czars and their government. The popular accounts naturally made the most of the apparent contrasts between the beauty and education of those women, and the violence of their acts.
Contr'un

Contr’un: the zine, etc.

August 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m happy to announce that the first two issues of the Contr’un zine are now available in pdf form, and that the paper form will be making its debut at the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair. Issue 1, “Toward an Ungovernable Anarchism,” collects all of the transitional posts from this blog, starting with the second essay on “the ungovernability of anarchism,” and Issue 2, “Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” includes the title essay, the “Notes,” my translation of “The Feuding Brothers” and some short translations from Proudhon’s work. I think some things will may have been hard to grasp or put together […]
Contr'un

How does property become capitalist?

August 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Contrun Revisited: One of the tasks of this phase of work on Contr’un, and one of the purposes of the Contr’un Revisited project, is to find the dangling threads, of which there have been many, that could not be properly finished off at the time and see what can be done to accomplish that work of finishing. This is one of those posts that was really designed in large part as a provocation to myself, with the unspoken question being: How does property become something other than capitalist? I’m finally taking up my own challenge, in a post dealing with […]