Year: 2013

Contr'un

Beyond Mutualism

April 1, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I see this post is being used as ammo in a particularly trolly attack on anarchism. Those arriving here thinking that “mutualism has been abandoned” might be interested in my tentative return to the label. But simply reading what has actually come “beyond mutualism,” in this post and those that have followed it, should wipe out any notion that anything beyond a particular label was ever abandoned.] It’s really not an April Fool’s joke: I’m preparing to leave “mutualism” behind as the way I describe my politics. It’s a reinvention that I have been contemplating for a long time, but […]
Contr'un

Closing a chapter

April 1, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been doing a lot of wrestling for some time now with my place in the universe of anarchism, and contemplating the best way to perhaps get a useful hearing for the insights of my last decade or so of thought and research. While much remains unclear, the one thing that seems clearest to me at this point is that my reluctant role as mutualist movement-builder is almost certainly a misapplication of the talents I possess, and that the specifically mutualist context probably detracts from what are arguably broader insights about anarchist theory and history. So while I may yet […]
Contr'un

Book fair report

March 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I spent about a week in California this month, to attend the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, do a bit of research at UC Berkeley, see friends and plot some publishing projects. It will probably be a few more weeks before I entirely process the experience, which was, shall we say, fraught in a variety of ways, even by anarchist standards. The change of venue from one owned by the government to one owned by a porn company created a new set of conflicts, and also fed fuel to the conflicts which always surround the event, where communism and […]
Working Translations

Paschal Grousset, Speech pronounced at the grave of Verdure (1873)

March 23, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Speech pronounced by Paschal Grousset at the grave of Verdure My friends, an awful bit of news came yesterday to strike us with astonishment and sadness. A man that we loved, that we esteemed, that we venerated like a father, had unexpectedly succumbed to the attacks of a sudden illness. Just a few days ago, we greeted him with a friendly word when we met him along this shore that he frequented, calm and smiling in the midst of misfortune, with every appearance of strength and health. Today, we pay our last respects to his corpse: [Augustin] Verdure will […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Introducing “ANARCHISMS” + new issues of “La Frondeuse”

March 10, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m launching a new series of pamphlets collecting introductory summaries and personal statements attempting to define anarchism in the most basic terms. In the ANARCHISMS series, the texts will be collected with very little attention to tendency, beyond trying to mix things up in each issue, and without editorial comment. I am often asked for entry-level texts, and it’s difficult to find material which does not come with some critical apparatus already attached. There are plenty of occasions where context and various kinds of helps are indispensable, but there is also a time for letting individual statements speak for themselves. […]
Bakunin Library

James Guillaume, “Proudhon: Communist” (1911)

February 26, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
This essay by James Guillaume is probably more historically significant than it is convincing, focusing as it does on one very early bit of Proudhon’s writing, but it is certainly an interesting interpretation. Proudhon: Communist At the basis of Proudhon’s economic theory we find two essential ideas, that of value and that of exchange. These two ideas are only of interest in the regime of individual property. in a communist society, in fact, one does not produce in order to sell, but to consume; the question of the exchange value of objects for consumption is thus no longer posed, as […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on the State in 1861

February 18, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
You might expect that Proudhon’s theory of the state would be most succinctly expressed in one of his essays on the subject of the state, like “Resistance to the Revolution” of the “Small Political Catechism.” There are certainly key elements of the theory there, and more in The Theory of Property, but the clearest explanation appears to be tucked away in Proudhon’s book on taxation. These are the relevant passages, and it is truly striking stuff: from The Theory of Taxation (1861) Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right. Modern right, by introducing itself in the place […]
Contr'un

If I had to guess…

February 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
…what was the single most important reason for “statism” becoming as prominent an anarchist keyword as it became in the early 20th century, I would have to go with Marxism. The term emerged as part of Bakunin’s account of the struggles within the First International, and seems to have finally gained prominence in in anarchist circles the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. In the informal searching I’ve done in various digital archives the sudden increases in the use of the term line up very closely with the events.
Contr'un

Statism: It’s not just for dentists anymore…

February 12, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon’s treatment of “government” and “the state,” it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon’s thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like “Resistance to the Revolution,” as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind.

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