Month: September 2013

One of the consequences of adopting this model of the encounter as a key tool is that we are confronted more directly with the ways in which Proudhon’s sociology complicates oppositions like that between individualism and socialism. On the level playing field we’re exploring, both individual human beings and all of the collective individualities enter the encounter as what I’ve been calling equal uniques, individuals, but on potentially very different scales. In the context of the analysis of Proudhon’s State-theory, I raised the practical difficulties of realizing this sort of encounter in practice between individuals of such different scales, and/or […]

One of the more difficult tactical questions in this new phase has been the question of vocabulary, of how to stock this “toolkit” that we’ve been assembling. I would love to keep the truly esoteric terminology to a minumum, but even jargon has its uses—chief among them the highlighting of concepts which are themselves more than a bit esoteric. I have a great deal of faith in readers’ abilities to negotiate complex discussion of property, capitalism, socialism, association, etc., without recourse to anything more than the sort of clarification one would expect in any careful study. But when it is […]

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: [Commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Six months ago, I announced, after a lot of soul-searching, that I was going to abandon “mutualism” as a description of my politics, and opted to scrap the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book and begin work on a book examining the lessons of Proudhon for the broader anarchist movement. I always knew that it was going to be easier said than done. If the “mutualist” label covers too much ground, and what passes for a “mutualist movement” is too heterodox to move forward together, pursuing a […]

Contr’un Revisited: This is, I suppose, a rather odd little piece, with its vague suggestions of a “comradeship with anarchism,” but it was something of a breakthrough for me at the time. I am undoubtedly more than overdue returning and picking up the dropped threads it contains. Long before I had adopted the apparatus of synthesis, I was interested in the ways that the natural, practical development of anarchism might lead to seemingly perverse outcomes. Although much of what I had to say about the “ungovernability” of anarchism related to our inability to contain it, consistently, in any of the […]

I would hope by now that the practical application of Proudhon’s theory of the State, or more precisely of the theory of society underlying it, would be clearer than perhaps they were when I first published the chapter. But it can’t hurt to clarify things.  Clarifying the history of anarchist anti-State thought is arguably useful, and probably even important, given the current struggles over the scope of anarchism’s critique. The sole focus on the State is a tool of entryists of various sorts, and while there is nothing in Proudhon’s development that suggests we should be any friendlier to any […]

We begin with these free absolutes, these uniques. According to the first, Proudhonian designation, we are dealing with individuals, groups organized according to an unfolding law of development, but with a consciousness of their nature and a capacity for self-reflection.