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Max Nettlau, Untitled Fragment (c. 1933)

May 16, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] [IISH Ms. 2005—untitled fragment] By Max Nettlau The efforts of the greatest part of the human generations are always limited to their preservation by “the conquest of bread” and harvesting as [much as] possible the fruits of that struggle in improvements of their situation (pleasures, accumulations) and in power and guarantees of security and continuation. That permanent struggle,—like that of the animals that, in order to live, pick or hunt continually some [inert?] plants and weaker animals,—is aggravated among men by the thirst for the accumulation and the refinement of pleasures, culminating in wealth and power as a supreme […]

Max Nettlau, The three worlds we all live in

May 16, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1half] We all live in these three worlds: a world of friends and libertarian comrades; a world of unsociable authoritarian enemies, present and future rulers; and that great world of men who do not know one another, the suspicious, seeing only the hardness and cruelty of men and feigning indifference in order to protect themselves from torment. There is also the world of the past and the future, memories, dreams, hopes and the daily effort to contribute a bit. To set aside, finally, the unsocial, and thus sterile and purely parasitical, world of authority and to awaken, encourage, and inspire […]

Max Nettlau, The duty of radicals toward Soviet Russia (1924)

May 15, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] NETTLAU 1970—October 26, 1924 The duty of radicals, particularly libertarians, towards Soviet Russia and towards their own cause. I. A symposium on this subject would elicit very different opinions; mine would be a very negative one on the first part of the question and all my interest goes to the second part. My reasons are about these. During a century of active socialist life of every description unfortunately one important problem was not under serious discussion, namely, what will be done when after a collapse of the capitalist system several forms and shades of socialist thought were confronting each […]

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[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] (Not for publication book for communication to friends and comrades.)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 […]