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Max Nettlau, Some criticism of some current anarchist beliefs (1901)

May 14, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] (Not for publication book for communication to friends and comrades.) Some criticism of some current anarchist beliefs. Max Nettlau [These reflections, transcribed from a handwritten manuscript in the recently digitized Max Nettlau Papers at the IISH, are prefaced by the note “Not for publication but for communication to friends and comrades.” Nettlau wrote a number of similar texts in 1901 and 1902, including a more formally structured French manuscript of 191 pages. Transcription is in-progress. The pages included here are followed by quotations from anarchist authors, amounting to […]

Anarchy, Panarchy and Peace — I

May 14, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

Max Nettlau’s writings on anarchist strategy form an early entry in a well-established anarchist genre: “Writings about Why this ‘Anarchy’ Thing Hasn’t Caught on Like We Thought it Should.” They’re notable for a number of reasons, including Nettlau’s credentials as “the Herodotus of Anarchism” and the fact that they date from such an early period in anarchist history. If my sense of the chronology is correct, anarchism had been a widely used keyword for less than twenty years when “Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labor Struggle” was published, and Nettlau published his “heresies” to an audience composed of many of […]

Max Nettlau, A Travesty of Bakunin (1929)

May 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

A TRAVESTY OF BAKUNIN* By. M. NETTLAU [Freedom Bulletin, 7 (May, 1929): 2.] Bakunin’s fair name, like everybody else’s, is dear to all of us, and it has been cleared by most careful research from all the Marxian and other aspersions shoveled upon it in fanatical party strife. It has now become his lot to be defined from another side, by the book of an Italian author, Riccardo Bacchelli, which has been translated into English. I have not seen this book, but from what I have heard from various sides it purports to deal with events, partially private, in Bakunin’s […]

Max Nettlau, A discussion with an old comrade (c. 1936)

May 8, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] A discussion with an old comrade. Ms. 1984 Max Nettlau (c. 1936) Analyzing the general situation, I believe to find at the bottom of all conflicts animosity and collisions between human strata of different levels of intellectual and ethical development. The progressive elements at all times had the greatest difficulty to merge above the dead level of thoughtless routine and usually violently and cruelly enforced stabilization or stagnation. They succeeded from time to time and materially mankind moved from the cave dwellings to the modern cities, but such progress was always obstructed by the intellectual and ethical cave dwellers […]

Ricardo Mella, Free Cooperation and Communities (1900)

May 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] FREE COOPERATION AND COMMUNITIES BY RICARDO MELLA (Temps Nouveaux, Literary Supplement, October, 1900) I mean by “free cooperation” the voluntary contribution of an indeterminate number of individuals to a common end, through a system of community, every social arrangement resting on common property in things. Each time that I use the expression “systems of community,” it will be to designate some or all of the plans for community that are preconceived or, what amount to the same thing, determined a priori. Among us anarchists, there are communists, collectivists and anarchists without any qualifying term. Under […]

Paul Emile De Puydt, Panarchy (1860)

May 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

This translation of “Panarchy” appears courtesy of John Zube, whose note on the translation reads (in part): “This is the April 1998 version of the English translation (with corrections based on the original French text: November 2001—March 2004 and April 2005, GPdB—May 2006, MB). At first my wife and I produced a rough translation. Then Adrian Falk and, perhaps, his sister, put it into a better shape. It was then first reproduced in Peace Plans 4, with some comments by me and a draft of individual rights. Later, it was reproduced in Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Fall 1966 and […]

Max Nettlau, La Lutte contre l’Etat (1908)

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] La Lutte contre l’Etat [Les Temps Nouveaux, 13 no. 51 (18 avril 1908) : 3-4.] ———– Ce qui suit n’est pas une traduction, mais un résumé libre et en partie amplifié d’un article écrit par moi pour la revue Mother Earth de New-York (décembre 1907, pp. 433-444), et comme j’ai été amené à faire des digressions nouvelles, la responsabilité littéraire des camarades qui publient cette revue est complètement dégagée du présent écrit. I Je m’étais souvent demandé pourquoi les idées anarchistes qui nous paraissent si claires et qui ajoutent tant à la joie de vivre de ceux qui […]

Max Nettlau, Authority and Freedom (1929)

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

SIDEBAR Authority and Freedom in Their Ages-Old and World-Wide Struggle. [minimally edited; most spelling, punctuation, etc. is Nettlau’s] Many of us who know and feel the beauty of the anarchist ideal, are struck and at times disheartened when they see what a small place anarchism seems to hold in modern life and thought. It is indeed strange to see the disproportion of the numbers of those whom our always strenuous propaganda reaches directly and the many hundreds of million[s] on this globe who are under the sway of immensely developed means of determined, mostly forcible propaganda, by press, pulpit, politics […]

Max Nettlau, On the Divide (1932)

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] On the Divide: The Outgoing Authoritarian and the Incipient Libertarian Age [This is a transcription of an uncorrected, handwritten manuscript. It has been lightly edited to fix obvious, distracting spelling errors, but many grammatical errors remain and idiosyncrasies remain. An edited version is in progress.] The present troubled economic and political situation in all countries universalizes waves of discontent and often of despair, but exercises a differentiating influence upon populations of various countries, as their past history and the happenings since 1914 and 1918 have placed each of them in a different position, exposed them to differing influences and […]

Max Nettlau, Fragment (1902)

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] All my arguments are based on the fact that men are different from one another, so that the same thing cannot be known to the same degree by everyone. If we accept in theory that all the possibilities of development exist in a rudimentary state or develop in all of us, the practical life shows that these possibilities develop in a different manner for each of us. We do think nor wish to render men uniform — just as we do not think of leveling the mountains and the plains. We […]