Year: 2014

Contr'un

A Million Words: Day 115

March 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
As expected, this has been a slightly more distracted month. I managed to get sick for a week, and had to burn a couple of my allocated “sick/vacation days,” and then made up most of the lost time with a couple of unusually easy bits of translation. I’m nearing the halfway mark in the main text of Fribourg’s history of the International, and have probably a third of the supplementary documents and endnotes completed. I’m also making pretty good headway through Jenny P. d’Héricourt’s Woman Affranchised. I finished a draft translation of all the material for the collection of Fourier’s […]
Bakunin Library

Letter to Zamfir Arbore, September 1873

March 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Letter to Zamfir Arbore (Zamfir Ralli), September 1873, Locarno, Switzerland.] My friend Ralli, So you are already informed about the Congress of Geneva, the decision has been taken to remove the General Council. Three propositions have been made, all three by people who do not understand very well what is necessary for us, anarchists; some propose to organize, by replacing the suppressed General Council, [with] a common central commission, others want three commissions, and a third group proposes to delegate the powers to one of the federations for the general administration of the international. It has occurred to none of […]
drama

Claude Pelletier, Preface to “The Revolutionary Socialist Heretics of the 15th Century”

March 20, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Claude Pelletier was in exile in the United States in 1867, when he wrote The Revolutionary Socialist Heretics of the 15th Century, a five-act play that transplanted the concerns of the French revolution of 1848, and the thought of some familiar figures, onto the events of the Hussite rebellion. Here is his explanation of the work, which I will probably translate in full at some point: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] PREFACE As the 19th century is called to resolve the problem of the proletariat by putting into practice the ideas of the modern Revolutionaries […]
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 […]