Month: December 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 […]