Year: 2013

Contr'un

Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)

October 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Let’s get a little practice with all the tools we’ve been assembling. And, to do so, let’s stick, for the moment, with the question of property. It’s been one of my more or less explicit beliefs for a long time now that property theory may be transformed from a tool of capitalism into a tool useful to anarchists, simply by reexamining it very closely with a set of presuppositions informed by the insights of anarchism and ecological science. I’ve also been fairly emphatic that one of the reasons that this has not happened to any great extent, despite the […]
Utopian and Scientific

Fourier, “Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy”

October 7, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE NEW INDUSTRIAL WORLD CHAPTER XXVI. Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy. In the course of the preceding sections and the Preface, we have had occasion to jest about a thesis several times repeated and laughable at first glance; it is that (224) in the societary regime gluttony is a source of wisdom, insight, and social accord. I can give that strange thesis the most regular proofs. No passion has been more badly esteemed than gluttony. Can we presume that God considered as a vice the passion to which he […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on the “right to punish”

October 3, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Here is another section from the study on moral sanction, the concluding section of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.] II. — Does society have the right to punish? The philosophers struggle, and the problem is still unresolved. While the Church invokes divine right, the mandate received by it to cure souls, and, if necessary, to execute the bodies of those who disdain the law, the so-called rationalists allege, some legitimate defense, others the talion or vengeance, these the necessity of the example, those, who we could call semi-theologians, the mental hygiene and good of the culprits. Mr. […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon, Justice: Twelfth Study

October 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The final study in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church deals with the question of “moral sanction.” This section explains the identity, within Proudhon’s thought of the law, the legislator, and the sanction of the law, understood both as the guarantee of its authority (a notion we obviously have to use carefully in this context) and as the rewards or punishments associated with compliance or non-compliance. JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH TWELFTH STUDY ON MORAL SANCTION ____ FRAGMENTS Monsignor, I have come here to the end of this long labor. Accused as it has […]
Bakunin Library

Mikhail Bakunin, “The Principle of the State” (1871)

September 30, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  The Principle of the State [manuscript, 1871, Locarno, Switzerland] At base, conquest is not only the origin, it is also the crowning aim of all States, great or small, powerful or weak, despotic or liberal, monarchic, aristocratic, democratic, and even socialist, supposing that the ideal of the German socialists, that of a great communist State, is ever realized. That it has been the point of departure for all States, ancient and modern, can be doubted by no one, since each page of universal history proves it sufficiently. No one contests any longer that the large current States have conquest […]
Contr'un

The Third Gift

September 28, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
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 […]
Contr'un

Note on Contr’archy and Guarantism

September 22, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
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 […]
Contr'un

Mutualism Revisited

September 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[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

Is that a scepter in your invisible hand?

September 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
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 […]
Contr'un

Encounters and Transactions

September 9, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I expect that for many of the readers of this blog, the most significant of the dangling questions is the one opened in the post on “Anarchy, understood in all its senses.” I’m surprised that there has not been more comment on the main points in that post, which demonstrates that for Proudhon, in one of the works that social anarchists have generally championed, the anarchy of the laissez faire market and the anti-authoritarian anarchy of the anarchists were in some senses so closely connected that Proudhon was indifferent to which meaning was applied to the word “anarchy,” and that […]