Working Translations
E. Armand, “La première impulsion / The First Impulse” (1916)
You reproach me for yielding too often to my first impulse — for treating as an adventure what is in reality only a banal event in my life; […]
Year: 2022
Anarchist Beginnings
Tomás Ibáñez, “Pourquoi j’ai choisi l’anarchie / Why I Have Chosen Anarchy” (1962)
If, among the wide range of ideas that have presented themselves to me, I have finally chosen the libertarian ideal, it is because, like every person on the planet, I am fundamentally egoistic. […]
Music
hors du troupeau — for all the brave pianos lost at sea
I made the mistake, somewhere along the way, of allowing myself to make a few of these audio collages where the seams were not so obvious and the results were — gasp — sort of genuinely pretty. […]
Featured articles
A Schematic Anarchism: Rethinking Anarchism Without Adjectives and Synthesis
The schematic anarchism introduced over the last few months is at once a comparatively adjectiveless anarchism and a tool for synthesis. It is, however, not an example of anarchism without adjectives or anarchist synthesis in their most familiar senses. Exploring the ways in which those ideas are transformed in the context of this new conceptual toolkit should help clarify the character and uses of the new apparatus. […]
Contr'un
A Schematic Anarchism (Introduction)
One way to get at what is constant in the widest senses of anarchy and anarchism is to begin with what is least contestable about the elements of those terms. Etymology is certainly no definitive source of meaning — and few things are more tiresome than the attempt to resolve ideological debates with dictionaries — but if we are going to take inspiration from the interpretive freedom extended by Proudhon to his readers, we don’t really have much but the words themselves as references. […]
Bakunin Library
Bakunin — Article for “Il popolo d’Italia” (1865)
A letter from Paris, published in your newspaper on September 2, contains a serious attack against a little paper by the name of Candide, written by young Parisians, whose publication was immediately interrupted by order of the imperial censor. Your correspondent, who does not seem to be an enthusiastic admirer of the illustrious exterminator of thought and freedom who reigns over France today, takes his side this time to the point of almost congratulating him on having avenged religion and public morals by suppressing a newspaper written by young people “uneducated or unexperienced, who, impelled by base culpable vanity, have dared to calmly affirm things that will sow eternal doubt in the minds of all decent people.” […]
Contr'un
New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works
One of the things that makes those later works so difficult for anarchists to understand and use is that, while they are the occasion for some of the most interesting developments of Proudhon’s anarchistic social science, they are, almost without exception, addressed to problems within clearly archic social systems. […]
Contr'un
A Schematic Anarchism (draft)
Conscious of the difficulties faced by students of anarchist ideas, whether newcomers or old hands, it seems useful to propose some means of exploring the field with confidence. There is no question, particularly in a short piece such as this, of providing a map of that vast, complex territory, but we can certainly identify a few landmarks and propose some tools with which individuals might do their own mapping. […]
From the Archives
Dyer D. Lum, “The Science of Social Relations” (1890)
By the law of the Three Stages, so elaborately set forth by Auguste Comte, we are told that every science, each branch of knowledge, passes through three different theoretical conditions; the theological, or mythical; the metaphysical, or speculative; and the positive or scientific. “Hence,” said Comte, “arises three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the other. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed, or definite, state; the second is merely a state of transition.” […]
equitable commerce
Josiah Warren, “The Soul of Things” (1869)
I first touched on the question of Josiah Warren’s interest in spiritualism back in 2011, adding his pseudonymous article on “the rappings” to the archive. Since then, I’ve encountered more confirmation of that interest, but, […]