Month: March 2014

Bakunin Library

Counter-Proposal on Resistance Funds (1869)

March 20, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[“Reaction to a report of the Central Section of Geneva of the I.W.A., adopted in a session of the Alliance on August 14, [1869].”] Counter-Proposal 1) There must be created in each section, corporation or society in the International Association a resistant fund [caisse de résistance]. 2) In order to form that fund, each corporative section or society, by a decision taken in the general assembly, modifiable by later assemblies, of the section or corporative society will impose [a contribution] on all its members, always conforming to the rate of their wages. 3) No shareholder, except in very serious cases […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin, Two Speeches to the Congress of the IWA at Basle (1869)

March 20, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Two Speeches to the Congress of the IWA at Basle [L’Egalité, September 18, October 1, 1869, Geneva] I. Between the collectivists who think that after having voted for collective property, it becomes useless to vote for the abolition of the right of inheritance, and the collectivists who, like us, think that it is useful and even necessary to vote for it, there is only a simple difference in point of view. They place themselves fully in the future, and taking collective property as their point of departure, find that there is no more place to speak of the right […]
Bakunin Library

On Cooperation (1869)

March 20, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  ON COOPERATION [L’Egalité, September 4, 1869; Guillaume’s note (Oeuvres, t.IV, p.210) suggests this article may be by Charles Perron. What should be the character and what will be the means of the economic agitation and of the laborers of the International, before that social revolution that alone could emancipate them in a complete and definitive manner? The experience of recent years indicates two ways, one negative, the other positive: the strike funds andcooperation. Under this general word cooperation, we mean all the known systems of consumptions of mutual credit or of credit to labor or production. In the application […]
Contr'un

Mapping Mutualism

March 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] As I’ve mentioned, several of my projects have been intersecting recently, and I’ve been feeling better able to start mapping out the various currents and traditions that we would have to account for in any really adequate history of mutualism. Let’s just get some of those elements laid out so we can refer back to them: Proudhon’s own writings. We are fortunate to have a great deal of Proudhon’s work now available online, including quite a number of the manuscripts. There are a number of articles that remain uncollected and there are some omissions in the Mélanges […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain” (1872)

March 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Marx, as a thinker, is on the right track. He has established as a principle that all the political, religious and legal evolutions in history are not causes, but effects of the economic evolutions. It is a great and productive thought, that he has not absolutely invented: it has been glimpsed, expressed in part, by many others than him; but finally, to him belongs the honor of having solidly established it and having posited it as the basis of his whole economic system. On the other hand, Proudhon understand and felt liberty beaucoup much better than him—Proudhon, when he did not engage in doctrine and metaphysics, had the true instinct of the revolutionary—he adored Satan and he proclaimed an-archy. It is quite possible that Marx could raise himself theoretically to an even more rational system of liberty than Proudhon—but he lacks Proudhon’s instinct.

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Proudhon Library

The criterion of certainty in 1841

March 9, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related texts: A funny thing happened on the way to “property is theft!” In the Second Memoir on property (1841), Proudhon explained the course of study that led him, somewhat indirectly, to his work on property: By taste as well as by discretion and lack of confidence in my powers, I was slowly pursuing some commonplace studies in philology, mingled with a little metaphysics, when I suddenly fell upon the greatest problem that ever has occupied philosophical minds: I mean the criterion of certainty. Those of my readers who are unacquainted with the philosophical terminology will be glad to be […]
Contr'un

A Million Words (Day 93)

March 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I passed the 250,000-word mark night before last. February was the month to wrap up the Bakunin Reader translation as much as possible, so I can turn to the introduction and annotations. That work is pretty well done, and I got a headstart on the Collectivist Reader, which is going to involve a lot of archival digging before I’m through. Check out the Bakunin Library blog for a lot of recent material, including a couple of letters by Bakunin regarding Proudhon. That work got me wondering what it would take to assemble a Mutualist Reader, which still looks like a […]
Proudhon Library

From the “Sixty” to the International

March 1, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  One of the tasks of this phase of the exploration here is to fill in some of the details about the period of transition, during which the anarchist movement began to take on collectivism in the realms of production and property as one of its key principles. Given all of the historical attention given to the First International, that might seem like a fairly simple project, but the truth is that the currents that it is necessary to trace on the mutualist/proudhonist side of things often just appear in the accounts of the International as the opposition to the […]