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Working Translations

Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, “Questions of Tactics” (1890)

August 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
QUESTIONS OF TACTICS ————– We have received the following letter from one of our comrades at El Productor of Barcelona. It seems good to reproduce it, for, aside from a few errors of judgment, it contains advice worth considering, and, in the response that we expect to make to our friends in Spain, if we manage to find and demonstrate the causes of the disorganization of the anarchists, the cause of the inconsistency of the groups and their inactivity, we could find there the remedy and some indications of the tactics to follow: Barcelona, August 7, 1890. Comrades of La […]
Bakunin Library

Ricardo Mella, “Collectivism” (1891)

August 2, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Collectivism Gone are the days when socialist sentimentality expected everything from the mother country and demanded everything of her. Gone are the days when the revolution was just a feeling, and declaimed comically against individualism face to face with the supreme power of the state or of society, its client. Gone are the days when socialism and revolution had no philosophy but that of the heart, no principle of right and justice but that of universal love. All these concepts, all these ideas are only among us as a remnant of what was never to be, as a residue pointing […]
anarchism without adjectives

Dyer D. Lum, “Communal Anarchy” (1886)

August 1, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related links: Varieties of Anarchist Entente COMMUNAL ANARCHY A distinction has been sought between what has been termed “Mutualistic Anarchy” and communistic anarchy, but it is one we fail to recognize. Anarchy, or the total cessation of force government, is the fundamental principle upon which all our arguments are based. Communism is a question of administration in the future, and hence must be subordinate to and in accord with the principles of Anarchy and all of its logical deductions. Anarchy proclaims that sovereignty of the individual, the abrogation of all artificial inequalities, and the total cessation of coercion over a […]
Working Translations

Ricardo Mella, “Spain” (1897)

July 30, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Spain. Time passes and, far from improving, the situation in Spain grows worse and worse. The colonial wars go badly and the hope of a swift pacification is abandoned. The exceptional state of Barcelona has not changed; the hundreds of wretches arbitrarily detained in the prisons and at Montjuich only await a bit of belated justice to set them free or else to consummate that legal crime that, taking the lives of some, will cast the others forever into the penal institutions that the mother country reserves for the best of her children. Today, as yesterday, some ignorant proletarians march […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, “The Attempted Murder of Hugo Bettauer” (1925)

July 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] [The Max Nettlau Papers include correspondence from Benzion Liber, editor Rational Living (New York.) Among the letters is the English-language manuscript of an article written by Nettlau, which was returned by Liber. ]   April 10 [1925] Dear Dr. Nettlau and Comrade: I am sorry not to be able to use your latest and unexpected correspondence, as my magazine is suspended and as I do not know when it will reappear. I have tried to publish it in The Nation—had no time to ask your permission fearing the article would lose its actuality—but, although they found it interesting, they […]
Bakunin Library

The International Movement of the Workers (1869)

July 27, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[published in L’Egalité, May 22, 1869] GENEVA, May 21. The International Movement of the Workers. If, today, there is one fact that strikes the minds of the most recalcitrant conservatives, it is the always more general and always more imposing movement of the working masses, not only in Europe, but in America as well. The men of state and the politicians of all countries, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, are worried, and we have the proof of it in every speech they make; they do not pass up any occasion to express their sympathies—so deep and above all so sincere—for that […]
Saint Ravachol

Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb! (1894)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
PRICE ONE HALF-PENNY. Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb! FELLOW-WORKERS,— We feel it our duty, as English comrades, in the face of what has been said by the smug faced hirelings of the capitalist press concerning Vaillant, to say a few words about him and his actions before proceeding to his defence. Vaillant’s life, like the lives of even our own workpeople, may be summed up in a few words,—one of intense struggle and misery. He, like others, possessed the heritage of the “right of life,” with all its pleasures. These were denied! He protested! Will his co-sufferers blame him? Never; […]
Saint Ravachol

A Handwritten Manuscript by Ravachol (1892)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
A HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT BY RAVACHOL Since his condemnation to death, Ravachol has written a great deal in prison. Here is a long handwritten text that we have been able to obtain, not without great difficulties. We have confided the reproduction of this interesting document to the house of Sédard in Lyon. It is written on two pages, and in it Ravachol explains his theories. [The manuscript combines bad spelling, horrible penmanship, rotten grammar and nonexistent punctuation. Decoding it has been a long process. But here is a rough translation.] Society can only be improved by a complete transformation of its […]