Month: April 2015

Bakunin Library

Benjamin R. Tucker on Bakunin (1881)

April 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Michael Bakounine.   As announced in our last number, we present on this page, for the first time in America, a faithful portrait of the founder of Nihilism,— the physical lineaments of an heroic reformer, of whom we are willing to hazard the judgment that coming history will yet place him in the very front ranks of the world’s great social saviours. The grand head and face speak for themselves regarding the immense energy, lofty character, and innate nobility of the man. We should have esteemed it among the chief honors of our life to have known him personally, and […]
Bakunin Library

God and the State (continuation)

April 10, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
GOD AND THE STATE ————– EXTRACTS FROM UNEDITED MANUSCRIPTS OF MICHAEL BAKUNIN. (TRANSLATED FOR “LIBERTY” BY “N.”)   [Liberty (UK) May, 1894] I. During the time of his staying in Marseilles in October 1870 until his departure from Locarno to the Jura in April 1871, Bakunin and wrote a long, though not finished, book, the first part of which was published in July 1871 as “L’Empire Knoutogermaique et la Révolution Sociale;” of the second part, “Sophismes historique de l’école des Communistes allemandes,” only a few pages were printed but not published: this part was rewritten at the end of 1872 […]
Contr'un

New Uncertainties and Opportunities

April 6, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Having identified our “Era of Anarchy,” and recognized some of the ways in which the anarchist history and tradition we have inherited have obscured and distorted that early era, we have to be careful not to simply replace the old distortions with new ones. The difficulty is that we are products, as well as inheritors, of that history and tradition, and the way in which we “are anarchists”—the range of possible meanings accessible to us for the phrase “I am an anarchist”—is inevitably shaped by that fact. None of us will ever repeat Proudhon’s experience of making that declaration for […]
Contr'un

The “Benthamite” anarchism and the origins of anarchist history

April 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is, perhaps, healing for some of our divisions to be found, a little farther down this road. But it is probably necessary, first, to take an unusually clear look at some of the wounds that that have served as foundations for our tradition. Wounds and foundations—wounds as foundations—that’s metaphor-mixing worthy of a Joseph Déjacque, but it also cuts directly to a fundamental problem with anarchist history and tradition: the extent to which organized anarchism and explicitly anarchist history both emerged as distinctly partisan affairs, both built upon and set against the an-archy of the earliest anarchists. “Them’s fightin’ words…,” […]
Contr'un

Our Lost Continent

April 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
The “lost continent” of anarchist history has been there all along, not so much lost but rather willfully ignored or dismissed, a blank spot on our map marked, not with some dire warning of the “Here be dragons” variety, but rather with the dismissive “Here be precursors.” The problem is that our attempts to simply sail around most of the period between 1840, when we can unquestionably say that there were anarchists, and 1880 or so, when we can point with equal confidence to the emergence of anarchism in one or more forms, tend to commit us to a history—and […]