Blog - Page 14 of 285 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

August 9, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

So much energy is wasted in debating anarchist labels that we imagine designate historical tendencies with clear programs, but mostly emerged from contexts where the rich diversity of anarchist ideas was reduced to forms appropriate for some earlier round of sectarian debate. Most of the keywords we fight over in anarchist circles are neither that sort of label not anti-concepts. They are the sort of obvious constructions (individualism, socialism, mutualism, capitalism, feminism, etc.) that you would to be contested in ideology-centered discourse.

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Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Popular Philosophy—Program (1860)

July 28, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

At the beginning of a new work, we should explain our title and our intentions.

Ever since humanity entered the period of civilization, for as long as anyone can recall, the people, said Paul Louis Courier, have prayed and paid.

They pray for their princes, for their magistrates, for their exploiters and their parasites;

They pray, like Jesus Christ, for their executioners;

They pray for the very ones who should, by rights, pray for them.

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Pierre Mualdes, “Etre anarchiste / To Be an Anarchist” (1924)

July 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

To be an anarchist is to be individualist, first of all. It is oneself that one is most keen to liberate, but as one’s total emancipation is intimately linked to that of one’s neighbors, one is communist by force of circumstance. No offense to the most affirmative anti-societarists: I also believe that man is an animal that instinct drives to live in society. A kind of human feeling is thus created that goes from the individual to the species, a feeling that the rabble of the rulers strives to channel to its own profit within the limits of a fatherland, but which has manifested even during the last butchery between “enemies” a feeling that knows no borders.

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Gustave d’Eichthal and Ismayl Urbain, “Letters on the Black Race and the White Race” (1839)

July 3, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Prosper Enfantin, “The Priest—Male and Female” (1831)

July 2, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Joseph Leguépin, “Une sourdine / A Muzzle” (1916)

June 20, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Joseph Leguépin, “Une sourdine,” Par delà la mêlée 1 no. 8 (25 mars 1916): 3. Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur

Enzo Martucci, “Beyond All Morality” (1947)

June 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

Anarchy is neither moralism nor educationism, but free and unprejudiced satisfaction of all natural needs and feelings, permanent in time, even if they manifest themselves, with diverse degrees of intensity, under varied conditions and at various moments.

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A Schematic Anarchism: Anarchism-in-General

June 10, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

For me, the last few years have involved a rather public renegotiation of my relationship with anarchism—and more specifically with the possibility of an anarchism-in-general that is not just a jumble of incommensurable theories with some superficial resemblances. I have most often presented that work as a matter of synthesis, with a very specific reference to Voline’s 1924 essay, “On Synthesis,” where he gives that notion—so often limited in anarchist discourse to debates about the organization of federations—a considerably more general significance.

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E. Armand, “La première impulsion / The First Impulse” (1916)

May 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

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;

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Tomás Ibáñez, “Pourquoi j’ai choisi l’anarchie / Why I Have Chosen Anarchy” (1962)

May 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

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.

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