Year: 2020

Corvus Editions

“LeftLiberty” and “The Mutualist” (2009-2011)

April 3, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Corvus Editions project started with LeftLiberty: A Journal of Mutualist Anarchist Theory and History, a zine produced in the context of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, a “big tent” coalition of “market anarchists.” It lasted for two issues and received almost no attention. As my own trajectory started to diverge from that of the Alliance, the project was reinvented as The Mutualist: A Journal for Free Absolutes, with an explicitly “neo-Proudhonian” emphasis. The one issue published shows all the signs, I think, of a project being pursued to please no one but myself. Subsequent issues suffered from the difficulty that has always haunted my attempts at publication: I was uncovering new material at such a rate that my critical and interpretive writings were often “out of date” long before I could finish writing them. I eventually collected the best of LeftLiberty, together with some posts from my blog, in a special “0” issue of The Mutualist, which, from a historical standpoint, is interesting as an anticipation of the Contr’un zine series and as one of the first Corvus Editions to use what would become the “house style” in layout and typography. 

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Our Lost Continent

Our Lost Continent: Summaries and Rationales

April 1, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back Links: Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936 [project page] Preliminaries (2015-2018) Mappings: Notes for an Introduction (2017-2020) Part I: Our Lost Continent: On the Uses of the Anarchist Past A Dedication of Sorts Anarchist History: Lessons from the Outbound Journey On Anarchy and Anarchism: w/ Propositions for Discussion September 23, 2016 Anarchy and Its Uses Fundamental to everything I’ve been saying about anarchy and anarchism over the last couple of years is a sense that anarchy works as a useful guiding principle only when we take […]
Our Lost Continent

Our Lost Continent: Preliminaries (2015-2018)

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings: Notes for an Introduction Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism.   “Our Lost Continent” (April 4, 2015) 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 […]
Our Lost Continent

Mappings: Notes for an Introduction

March 30, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: Main page Preliminaries Mappings Summaries and Rationales Our Lost Continent and The Journey Back: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1837–1936, as They Happened, as They are Recorded in the Margins of More Familiar Histories and as They Might Have Happened, if Observed through Other Lenses, with Reflections on the Past and Future Development of Anarchism.   Extrications: History, Tradition, Theory (August 7, 2017) The initial task in these Extrications is analytic: we want to pull things apart a bit, enough to see if we can’t isolate some terms and make some useful distinctions. I want […]
Working Translations

Charles-Auguste Bontemps, “The Sustainability of Anarchism” (1967)

March 25, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
I am reminded that some libertarian communists or socialists, who claim to be revolutionaries in the politico-social sense of the term, have renounced or demand that those of their tendency renounce what they call the anarchist label. That anarchist label, from their perspective,  conceals a very questionable sort of anarchism. They are disturbed by it and disturb still more the propagation of a specifically anarchist philosophy.

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Featured articles

In Search of the Great Divide

March 19, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve decided to devote a section of the project, In Search of the Great Divide, to the pre-1840 period—and specifically to the question of how and when to start a general history of anarchism, addressing some of the alternatives in the beginning and taking the opportunity to look at how various other general histories have tackled the problem.

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Lewis Masquerier

Lewis Masquerier, “Politicology”

March 14, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
What is assembled here is two different sets of texts related to “a forthcoming work, entitled “Politicology;” a new development of Rights and Wrongs, &c., &c.,” announced in the land reform paper Young America in 1845 and then published as a 24-page separately numbered section in Sociology in 1877.

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Lewis Masquerier

Lewis Masquerier in “Working Man’s Advocate” and “Young America” (1844-1848)

March 12, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Links: Lewis Masquerier [main page] Sociology [Reconstructed] Bibliography: Lewis Masquerier, “Declaration of Independence, of the Producing from the Non-Producing Class,” Working Man’s Advocate 1 no. 27 (September 28, 1844): 4. L. Masquerier, “To Reformers, Tenants, Anti-Renters, Squatters, And Slaves,” Young America 2 no. 16, New Series (July 12, 1845): 1. L. Masquerier, “Monopoly Of Land The Great Evil,” Young America 2 no. 17, New Series (July 19, 1845): 2. L. Masquerier, “Eras of Civilization,” Young America 2 no. 24, New Series (September 6, 1845): 1. L. L. Masquerier, “Hired Labor Maintains All Society,” Young America 2 no. 27, New Series […]
Saint Ravachol

Georges Etiévant, “The Hare and the Hunter” (1897)

March 8, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
When one is found, among the little phalanx of those who carry themselves bravely, among those whom the idea of liberty has touched with its wing, who, thanks to individual circumstances, feels, at some moment, the sentiments of human dignity stir powerfully within them, rebelling against the cowardice imposed by society on the individual; when, rid of age-old prejudices arising from a contemptible education, which teach men to idolize strength and success, one of them rises up to threaten power and wealth; when, finally weary of being a tacit accomplice in injustices, he strikes at the head or at the belly of the social body; and when, separating from those who perform or support these iniquities, he haughtily hurls himself, like a bloody challenge, head-first at society, then the careless, spineless crowd, forced to think, bays stupidly.

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author miscellanies

Warren Edwin Brokaw

March 6, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Warren Edwin Brokaw, “The Only Unpardonable Sin,” The Pacific Monthly 15, no. 6 (June 1906): 763-767. Warren Edwin Brokaw, “Who Should Possess the Wealth of the World?,” The North American Review 214, no. 3 (September 1921): 431-432. “Write, Let Children Starve,” New York Times (December 22, 1908): 1. The Only Unpardonable Sin By Warren Edwin Brokaw LUTHER BURBANK is reported by W. S. Harwood, in “New Creations in Plant Life,” as saying that “ignorance is the only unpardonable sin.” The statement, as it stands, is too sweeping in its scope. Ignorance is that condition which results from ignoring, and there […]