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Proudhon Library

New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice Of Revolutions

September 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
NEW PROPOSITIONS DEMONSTRATED IN THE PRACTICE OF REVOLUTIONS 1 — The interests established by society are mobile, subject to a constant and fundamentally unstable shifting. 2 — Fixity, permanence or perpetuity in the relations of interests is a chimera. 3 — That mobility of interests is the primary source of revolutions. 4 — An interest, however unjust it may be, can only be abolished on the condition of being replaced by another, which itself could appear every bit as unjust later. 5 — The human mind has a horror of the void; it does not accept pure negation, even if […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, “Does Socialism Truly Want to Be International?” (1920s)

September 13, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1half] Does Socialism Truly Want to Be International? (MS 1951, Max Nettlau Papers, IISH) (no date, 1920s) This question would appear to be useless after a century of international socialist professions of faith, after the flowering of several Internationals and the struggles of sincere socialists of all shades against nationalism. But it appears to me that it needs to be raised again in some connections, among other that of natural wealth, raw material dependent on the local fertility of the soil and other raw materials so unequally distributed in the subsoil. To whom do these natural resources, whose local distribution […]
Contr'un

Propositions for Discussion (on Anarchy and Anarchism) — I

September 7, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Anarchy is a simple, accessible notion, sufficient to provide the necessary glue for a real anarchist current or movement. I’ve been struck by the number of times recently that I have encountered the argument that a really thoroughgoing idea of anarchy was an impediment, and perhaps the great impediment, to the anarchist movement. It seems obvious that attempting to do justice to the notion of anarchy could be an impediment to any number of other kinds of products or movements, but it is hard for me to wrap my head around the notion that anarchism—as an ideology, movement, individual aspiration […]
Contr'un

The Bottom Line

September 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Yesterday, I was foolhardy enough to post a sort of love/breakup letter to “the anarchist movement.” By this morning, what I had intended as a very personal gesture was just another bit of anarchist news, subject to the usual anarchist scorn, but not, it seems, worthy of any personal response. I know. I know: Don’t read the comments… But, honestly, the thing that makes comments so consistently unreadable is the thing that makes the things I wanted to say so damn nearly unspeakable. Anyway, since the whole thing feels like an embarrassing falling-out with an imaginary friend, I will try […]
Contr'un

Instead of a “Dear John” Letter

September 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I have wrestled more than a bit with the question of whether this is a clear and useful intervention. I am still not certain. The first responses were so petty and inane that I decided, for a day or so, that I didn’t much care and simply replaced this with the “Bottom Line” post. The problem is that I can’t really sustain the indifference, in part as a matter of temperament and in part because I am, for better or worse, a full-time worker in the realm of anarchy. So there is a great deal of more sober clarification that […]
Proudhon Library

Equality and Justice

September 2, 2015
Let’s take a little extra time to emphasize the flatness of Proudhon’s system. Unity-collectivities at different scales overlap, but their relationships remain horizontal. The anarchistic “State” is, Proudhon tells us, “a kind of citizen” and the principle of political equality applies to all the citizens, no matter their kind. And the collective is a kind of individual almost everywhere we look in Proudhon’s work, and equality extends across widely different scales and between individuals of radically different makeup. The recognition of equality becomes the foundation for justice—and Proudhon’s individualities at various scale crowd the world with potential equals, whose interests […]
Blazing Star Library

The Mutual Banking Writings of William Batchelder Greene

August 30, 2015
The important works are: Equality. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1849. [published anonymously] [74 pages] Mutual Banking. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1850. [95 pages] The Radical Deficiency Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Mutual Currency. Boston: B. H. Greene, 1857. [239 pages] Mutual Banking, Showing The Radical Deficiencies Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Free Currency. Worcester, Mass.: New England Labor Reform League, 1870. [52 Pages] Mutual Banking. Modern Publishers, Indore City, India, 1946 plus a couple of short sections in Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments (Boston: Lee […]
anarchist mutualism

What Mutualism Was: An Incomplete History of Mutualist Tendencies

August 29, 2015 anarchisms_w4l2ii
It has been well over a decade since I started piecing together the pieces of mutualist history. At the time, the work had a curious urgency, as the handful of us who had gravitated to the “mutualist” label had a lot of ground to cover in order to really understand just what we had implicated ourselves in. The specific project of sketching all that early history is one in which I have invested less energy as the years went on, but I’ve never stopped documenting the bits of history that I have found. The links here will form an evolving […]
Contr'un

All Actors Are Collective Actors: The Unity-Collectivity

August 29, 2015 anarchisms_w4l2ii
Links: Proudhon’s Social Science [project page] Every individual is a group. There are a small number of key concepts in Proudhon’s work, without which it is almost impossible to understand. The notion of the collective actor, or unity-collectivity, and that of the collective force with which it is imbued may top the list in terms of importance. Virtually everything else depends on this basic insight into the nature of unity. The logical contender for top spot would be the philosophy of progress, but it turns out that Proudhon really saw the two analyses as intertwined. While much of Proudhon’s 1853 […]