Month: July 2017

The Sex Question

Horace Traubel, “Free Speech in Philadelphia or Anywhere” (1909)

July 7, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Free Speech in Philadelphia or Anywhere.* I. I am glad that in speaking of Emma Goldman today you took high ground for free speech and shooed off the dogs of war. There’s no sense in trying to kill ideas with brickbats and guns. The policeman’s club is never an argument. It always vulgarly and brutally remains a policeman’s club. To suppress Emma Goldman is not an evidence of power but a confession of weakness. Imagine a whole nation put on edge by a little woman a few feet high who says a few things with which majorities do not agree! […]
The Sex Question

Emma Goldman, “Walt Whitman”

July 6, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The poet of Leaves of Grass is a true son of American soil and yet very un-American. So long as he sings the song of the wonders of nature, the beauties of the unlimited resources, old Walt feels part and parcel of the strength of Mother Earth, but our great poet becomes un-American when he arraigns the Puritanic interference which has paralyzed life to such an extent as to make it barren. In fact, Walt Whitman may be called the iconoclast of Puritanism. No other writer or poet in America has so thoroughly exposed the […]
Contr'un

Mutual Exchange on “Anarchy and Democracy”

July 2, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been participating in the C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on the topic of “Anarchy and Democracy,” along with a star-studded assembly of anarchists and libertarians from various tendencies. While this is technically the June exchange, it has actually been in progress since early April, with the most recent contribution appearing just a few days ago. As a result, some parts of the debate have had a long time to develop, while others have not, and the order of the contributions and the order of their publication are considerably different in some cases. In the interest of clarifying a few things that […]
Bakunin Library

Library Update — July 1, 2017

July 1, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Today is the anniversary of the death of Bakunin in 1876. It seems like as good an occasion as any to update folks on the progress of the library (particularly as I had really hoped to do an update back at the end of May, on the anniversary of his birth.) It’s been a comparatively quiet year for the project, with much of the work focused on how best to frame the new translations. Some of that task has involved working ahead, tackling material destined for later volumes, just to be as certain as possible that we’re on the right […]