Year: 2015

Saint Ravachol

Ravachol, My Ideas on the Army

May 17, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
My Ideas on the Army. (l‘Insurgé, September 16, 1893) ____ Since some have criticized my disobedience of the law on recruitment, I will explain my conduct here. If I refused to bear arms, it is because according to my principles I do not recognize border. For me, there is no foreigner. All the nations are sisters and I reckon that their children should love one another a bit more than they have thus far, thanks to the universal propaganda spread to prevent them from it. Whether we are born under the beautiful skies of Italy, in the cold lands of […]
anarchism without adjectives

Max Nettlau, an early manuscript (1895)

May 17, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Whilst our conviction of the rightness of our anarchist opinions remains unaltered, we may at times feel disheartened at the comparatively small number of our active propagandists and it becomes every so much more important that no energy shall be lost and all action turned in the right direction. After all, on looking closer, we are more numerous than we may think; ours is not a superficial movement attracting the biggest crowd by pandering to the prejudices of people with a view to their exploitation—it is a movement of so high and noble aims that if can attract at […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, Untitled Fragment (c. 1933)

May 16, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] [IISH Ms. 2005—untitled fragment] By Max Nettlau The efforts of the greatest part of the human generations are always limited to their preservation by “the conquest of bread” and harvesting as [much as] possible the fruits of that struggle in improvements of their situation (pleasures, accumulations) and in power and guarantees of security and continuation. That permanent struggle,—like that of the animals that, in order to live, pick or hunt continually some [inert?] plants and weaker animals,—is aggravated among men by the thirst for the accumulation and the refinement of pleasures, culminating in wealth and power as a supreme […]
Working Translations

Max Nettlau, The three worlds we all live in

May 16, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1half] We all live in these three worlds: a world of friends and libertarian comrades; a world of unsociable authoritarian enemies, present and future rulers; and that great world of men who do not know one another, the suspicious, seeing only the hardness and cruelty of men and feigning indifference in order to protect themselves from torment. There is also the world of the past and the future, memories, dreams, hopes and the daily effort to contribute a bit. To set aside, finally, the unsocial, and thus sterile and purely parasitical, world of authority and to awaken, encourage, and inspire […]
anarchism without adjectives

Max Nettlau, The duty of radicals toward Soviet Russia (1924)

May 15, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] NETTLAU 1970—October 26, 1924 The duty of radicals, particularly libertarians, towards Soviet Russia and towards their own cause. I. A symposium on this subject would elicit very different opinions; mine would be a very negative one on the first part of the question and all my interest goes to the second part. My reasons are about these. During a century of active socialist life of every description unfortunately one important problem was not under serious discussion, namely, what will be done when after a collapse of the capitalist system several forms and shades of socialist thought were confronting each […]
anarchism without adjectives

Max Nettlau, Some criticism of some current anarchist beliefs (1901)

May 14, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] (Not for publication book for communication to friends and comrades.)   Some criticism of some current anarchist beliefs.   Max Nettlau   [These reflections, transcribed from a handwritten manuscript in the recently digitized Max Nettlau Papers at the IISH, are prefaced by the note “Not for publication but for communication to friends and comrades.” Nettlau wrote a number of similar texts in 1901 and 1902, including a more formally structured French manuscript of 191 pages. Transcription is in-progress. The pages included here are followed by quotations from anarchist authors, amounting to […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Anarchy, Panarchy and Peace — I

May 14, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Max Nettlau’s writings on anarchist strategy form an early entry in a well-established anarchist genre: “Writings about Why this ‘Anarchy’ Thing Hasn’t Caught on Like We Thought it Should.” They’re notable for a number of reasons, including Nettlau’s credentials as “the Herodotus of Anarchism” and the fact that they date from such an early period in anarchist history. If my sense of the chronology is correct, anarchism had been a widely used keyword for less than twenty years when “Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle” was published, and Nettlau published his “heresies” to an audience composed of many of […]
Bakunin Library

Max Nettlau, A Travesty of Bakunin (1929)

May 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
A TRAVESTY OF BAKUNIN* By. M. NETTLAU [Freedom Bulletin, 7 (May, 1929): 2.] Bakunin’s fair name, like everybody else’s, is dear to all of us, and it has been cleared by most careful research from all the Marxian and other aspersions shoveled upon it in fanatical party strife. It has now become his lot to be defined from another side, by the book of an Italian author, Riccardo Bacchelli, which has been translated into English. I have not seen this book, but from what I have heard from various sides it purports to deal with events, partially private, in Bakunin’s […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, A discussion with an old comrade (c. 1936)

May 8, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] A discussion with an old comrade. Ms. 1984 Max Nettlau (c. 1936) Analyzing the general situation, I believe to find at the bottom of all conflicts animosity and collisions between human strata of different levels of intellectual and ethical development. The progressive elements at all times had the greatest difficulty to merge above the dead level of thoughtless routine and usually violently and cruelly enforced stabilization or stagnation. They succeeded from time to time and materially mankind moved from the cave dwellings to the modern cities, but such progress was always obstructed by the intellectual and ethical cave dwellers […]
anarchism without adjectives

Ricardo Mella, Free Cooperation and Communities (1900)

May 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] FREE COOPERATION AND COMMUNITIES BY RICARDO MELLA (Temps Nouveaux, Literary Supplement, October, 1900) I mean by “free cooperation” the voluntary contribution of an indeterminate number of individuals to a common end, through a system of community, every social arrangement resting on common property in things. Each time that I use the expression “systems of community,” it will be to designate some or all of the plans for community that are preconceived or, what amount to the same thing, determined a priori. Among us anarchists, there are communists, collectivists and anarchists without any qualifying term. Under […]