Year: 2014

Contr'un

Advice for Travelers on the Trail of the Anarchic Encounter

April 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I too have made a sort of transition from critical to constructive concerns, and when one of these half-mad, exploratory jaunts off into the wide-flung realms of intellectual history and theory gets to be a little overwhelming there is a sort of home port to return to. For a long time, the logical working conclusion after pretty much every step in my research was something like: “Okay, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that.” And it was on with the steady unraveling of received wisdom. Questions multiplied, existing explanations […]
Contr'un

Note on the disposition of products and the role of principles

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  “[I]f property is a truth, this can only be on one condition: that the principles of Immanent Justice, Individual Sovereignty and Federation are accepted.” (Theory of Property) I get very little feedback on the theoretical posts here, so it’s hard to know to what extent the implications of Proudhon’s federalist-mutualist-guarantist theory are obvious or, alternately, still pretty uncertain. I know that I frequently get to a point in my own thinking where, having laid out the demands on the application of the theory, I can’t get much past “THAT WOULD BE ANARCHY!” But in my calmer moments, it often […]
Contr'un

The Fundamental Laws of the Universe(!) and the Anarchism of Approximation

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  What would it take to flesh out the federative theory of property hinted at in the last post? What exactly does it mean to say that “property can be understood as an instance of federation”? We’re starting from a provocative reading of bits and pieces from Proudhon’s later works, and leaning hard, for the moment, on a portion of the title of The Theory of Property that didn’t make it out of the manuscript, and we’re going to have to go beyond anything explicitly laid out in Proudhon’s work. Still, I don’t think the extrapolation I’m about to make […]
Working Translations

Alexandre Ghé, “Open Letter to P. Kropotkin” (1916)

April 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Open Letter to P. Kropotkin ALEXANDRE GHÉ LAUSANNE 1916 Dear Master, After an entire series of public declarations in favor of the Triple and Quadruple Entente, which have produced consternation in the anarchist and internationalist milieus, there has recently appeared a new Manifesto, which the bourgeois press has hastened to describe as an “Anarchist Manifesto.” In that Manifesto, also signed by you, you follow the line of conduct that you have mapped out since the beginning of the war, inviting us to support the belligerent Entente. I will not dwell, for […]
Contr'un

Flora Tristan, Messiah and Pariah

April 16, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
“God will doubtless pardon you, for you know not what you do, but we will not listen to you, for you know not what you say!” I’ve just posted a fairly finished translation of Flora Tristan’s posthumous work, The Emancipation of Woman, or, The Testament of the Pariah. It’s a strange work, probably in part because it was finished by Alphonse Constant (better known as Eliphas Levi), at a time when Constant had moved on from the neo-Christianity of the Saint-Simonians, but had not yet embarked on his more famous career as an occultist. He writes in the text about […]
Contr'un

Characters

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Much of the attraction of the work I do does not come from the ideas—as fascinating and useful as they may be—but from the amazing gallery of rogues that I get to spend so much of my time with. And the more you work at the margins of the tradition, the stranger and more wonderful the characters get. But one of the more interesting things about the history of anarchism, as opposed to the more-or-less official accounts maintained by the modern movement, is the […]
Contr'un

The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
After wrestling a bit with how best to organize my dedicated anarchist history blog, Dispatches from the Revolution—Atercracy, I have settled on an unorthodox, but hopefully fun way of both wrestling with some of the technical difficulties and keeping the focus on good stories. Those interested in the historical tidbits should make follow developments over there.
Contr'un

Exploring perspectives, inventing accomplices

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It has taken some time to move from proposing this project to finding the means to really push it forward. I’ve spent the last year attempting to sort through the tools in my theoretical toolkit, to see what seems useful and what is just a drag to lug around, while I clarified for myself just what it would mean to do history according to the anarchist principles I’ve been deriving from Proudhon’s work. That’s been rewarding work, but one of the lessons has been […]
Working Translations

Speeches of Paschal Grousset and François Jourde on the Paris Commune (San Francisco, 1874)

April 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  SPEECHES OF THE CITIZENS PASCHAL GROUSSET AND FRANCOIS JOURDE EX-MEMBERS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE PRONOUNCED AT THE BANQUET OFFERED THEM BY SOME REPUBLICANS OF SAN FRANCISCO MAY 24, 1874 UNDER THE HONORARY PRESIDENCY OF CITIZEN BLANQUI INTRODUCTION Before the banquet offered to the ex-members of the Paris Commune was opened, citizen Mibielle first congratulated those present for the promptness that they had shown in responding to the appeal that had been made to them; he declared, besides, that he was very honored to direct the Banquet, but on the condition that the citizen Blanqui was declared honorary president. That […]
Proudhon Library

More on Proudhon’s “Theory of Property”

April 9, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I needed a change of pace for a couple of days, and went back to work on the still-daunting task of taking Proudhon’s The Theory of Property from the current draft translation to something well-contextualized and publishable. There’s a lot of work to do, including revisiting Proudhon’s earlier works on property, finishing work on the Appendix, translating more contextual material and consulting Proudhon’s manuscripts. Fortunately, more of the relevant manuscript material has become available, and I’ve been able to take some time away from other tasks to finish translating the “Disagreement Regarding the Posthumous Publication of Unpublished Works by P.-J. […]