Year: 2014

Contr'un

2014-2015

December 28, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
2014 has been a fascinating, productive year. I got an early jump on translation projects in late 2013 and kept up a fairly blistering pace through March, establishing to my own satisfaction that, if necessary, upwards of a million words of translation is possible in a year, without entirely devouring the rest of my life. And I completed a stack of working translations: Proudhon’s Theory of Property, Déjacque’s Humanisphere, Jean Grave’s Adventures of Nono, Charles Malato’s New Caledonian Tales, Flora Tristan’s The Emancipation of Woman, most of Ravachol’s writings, and lots of other interesting odds and ends, including most of […]
Proudhon Library

The Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State (Sixth article)

December 22, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
(La Voix du Peuple, N 102. — 11 janvier 1850.)   Regarding Louis Blanc.—The Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State.    (Sixth article.)   The following objection has been addressed to me: Your theory is only a sophism. This so-called anarchic organization of credit and banks is only a delegation by the people renewed by the State, a little State alongside the State. So where, if you please, is the difference between the two systems? Why believe that the present state, which is already organized, should not add circulation and credit to its present responsibilities, and administer the […]
Anarchy in all its senses

Anarchy, Understood in All its Senses—II

December 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Continued from Part I.] “The first term of the series being thus Absolutism, the final, fateful term is Anarchy, understood in all the senses.”–Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution   In 1840, Proudhon declared that he was an anarchist, and he gave the beginnings of a description of the anarchy that he proposed:   Anarchy, the absence of a master or sovereign, such is the form of government that we approach every day, which the deep-rooted habit of taking the man for rule and his will for law makes us regard as the height of disorder and the expression […]
Proudhon Library

Principles of the Philosophy of Progress (IV and V)

November 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
IV.—OF COMPLEX COLLECTIVE ACTION. Everyone has read, in A. Smith, J.-B. Say, and others, the marvelous results of that force; but what few people have noticed, no doubt, is the technical inexactitude with which these two masters of the science explain its nature. They have not seen that what they call division of labor or separation of industries is only an application, in reverse, of the collective force, so that the same scientific demonstration suits them both. And because they have not seen it, not only have they been led to omit from their treatises the initial force, which is […]
Contr'un

Reading “The Third Social Form” — I

August 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] We have a lot of issues on our plate, but for now let’s stick to the reading of the passage from What is Property? The first thing that strikes me, looking again at this section, is just how rich this early text is with indications and anticipations of Proudhon’s later work. Then I’m struck by how opaque some of those bits can be, given the state of his development in 1840. I would have to work back through the rest of the text to see just how much of this set […]
Contr'un

Another look at Proudhon (and an invitation to experiment)

August 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It is a well-known fact of anarchist history (a term that we’ll be giving some special attention in the coming months) that even the founding figures of the anarchist tradition did not often identify themselves as anarchists until sometime fairly late in the 19th century. Over the weekend, I had a chance to spend some time examining just when, and under what circumstances, that self-identification became more common. There seems to have been a fairly serious shift in the 1870s and 1880s, with a fairly rapid convergence of anti-authoritarians of various […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin to Karl Marx, December 22, 1868

August 5, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
December 22, 1868. Geneva 123. Montbrillant. My old friend – Serno has shared with me the part of your letter that concerned me. You asked him if I continue to be your friend. – Yes, more than ever, dear Marx, because I understand better than ever how right you are in following, and in inviting us all to march on the wide road of economic revolution, and in denigrating those among us who would lose themselves on the paths of either national or exclusively political enterprises. I now do what you yourself commenced to do more than twenty years ago. […]
Proudhon Library

Principles of the Philosophy of Progress (II and III)

July 21, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
II.—THE FORCE IN THE SOCIAL BEING. 1.—There exists between men a tendency or attraction that pushes them to group and act, for their own great interest and the most complete development of their individuality, collectively and as a mass. What is the principle of that tendency? The same as that of the attraction between all beings: It is a property and a condition of their existence (p. 2); it is impossible to know more of it, and consequently senseless to ask more. Let us limit ourselves to reasoning from the point of view of the aim. The tendency in the […]
Proudhon Library

The Conditions of Existence (from “Economy”)

July 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Ms. 2867 contains a section on the “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress,” which focuses on the character of collective beings and collective reason. It opens with the following notes on the “conditions of existence:”] I.—THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE. Man is made up of parts called members or organs. What makes his reality is the animistic gathering of these organs in a whole that, as long as it lives, is called a person. In the same way, a society is made up of parts that are persons or aggregations of persons. What established the social reality is the intellectual consent […]
Contr'un

In Search of the Justicier

July 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I don’t want to wait to work through the details of Proudhon’s analysis before moving forward with the neo-Proudhonian analysis I’ve been developing. At the moment, in fact, I think that the two projects can diverge usefully: There are a lot of important sociological and economic tools to be uncovered, brushed off and modified for present use, tucked away in the works of Proudhon, and there will come a moment—fairly soon, I hope—when we’ll need all of those tools assembled and in working order. At the same time, there are some very basic elements that we have already recovered, which […]