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Property? It’s just a phase… (Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon, 1840)

May 3, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

This response by Proudhon to the Academy of Besançon fills in a bit of the story told in the introduction to What is Property? I’ve been tracking down some of these bits and pieces in order to establish more of the context for that work, as we get ready to do a group reading of the text. This letter has at least one unintentionally funny bit, when Proudhon explains that this property stuff is just a passing interest. Besançon, August 3, 1840 TO THE MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY OF BESANÇON Gentlemen, I have learned through the confidences of some of […]

biography

Amilcare Cipriani, “A Woman” (1902)

April 27, 2014

A WOMAN Nature had been kind in bestowing her gifts on her; beauty, goodness, strength, will and energy, she possessed all these in the highest degree. She might have been happy, she chose instead to embrace and devote herself, to the “cause” which spreads fear amongst cowards and governments. Life had just commenced to smile on her, when the Italian war of Independence broke out. Three of her brothers took up arms to deliver their enslaved motherland. She had already been asked in marriage, but refused. “I cannot think of marriage,” said she, “while my brothers are risking their lives […]

Advice for Travelers on the Trail of the Anarchic Encounter

April 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I too have made a sort of transition from critical to constructive concerns, and when one of these half-mad, exploratory jaunts off into the wide-flung realms of intellectual history and theory gets to be a little overwhelming there is a sort of home port to return to. For a long time, the logical working conclusion after pretty much every step in my research was something like: “Okay, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that.” And it was on with the steady unraveling of received wisdom. Questions multiplied, existing explanations […]

Note on the disposition of products and the role of principles

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

“[I]f property is a truth, this can only be on one condition: that the principles of Immanent Justice, Individual Sovereignty and Federation are accepted.” (Theory of Property) I get very little feedback on the theoretical posts here, so it’s hard to know to what extent the implications of Proudhon’s federalist-mutualist-guarantist theory are obvious or, alternately, still pretty uncertain. I know that I frequently get to a point in my own thinking where, having laid out the demands on the application of the theory, I can’t get much past “THAT WOULD BE ANARCHY!” But in my calmer moments, it often […]

The Fundamental Laws of the Universe(!) and the Anarchism of Approximation

April 24, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

What would it take to flesh out the federative theory of property hinted at in the last post? What exactly does it mean to say that “property can be understood as an instance of federation”? We’re starting from a provocative reading of bits and pieces from Proudhon’s later works, and leaning hard, for the moment, on a portion of the title of The Theory of Property that didn’t make it out of the manuscript, and we’re going to have to go beyond anything explicitly laid out in Proudhon’s work. Still, I don’t think the extrapolation I’m about to make […]

Alexandre Ghé, “Open Letter to P. Kropotkin” (1916)

April 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Open Letter to P. Kropotkin ALEXANDRE GHÉ LAUSANNE 1916 Dear Master, After an entire series of public declarations in favor of the Triple and Quadruple Entente, which have produced consternation in the anarchist and internationalist milieus, there has recently appeared a new Manifesto, which the bourgeois press has hastened to describe as an “Anarchist Manifesto.” In that Manifesto, also signed by you, you follow the line of conduct that you have mapped out since the beginning of the war, inviting us to support the belligerent Entente. I will not dwell, for […]

Flora Tristan, Messiah and Pariah

April 16, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

“God will doubtless pardon you, for you know not what you do, but we will not listen to you, for you know not what you say!” I’ve just posted a fairly finished translation of Flora Tristan’s posthumous work, The Emancipation of Woman, or, The Testament of the Pariah. It’s a strange work, probably in part because it was finished by Alphonse Constant (better known as Eliphas Levi), at a time when Constant had moved on from the neo-Christianity of the Saint-Simonians, but had not yet embarked on his more famous career as an occultist. He writes in the text about […]

Characters

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Much of the attraction of the work I do does not come from the ideas—as fascinating and useful as they may be—but from the amazing gallery of rogues that I get to spend so much of my time with. And the more you work at the margins of the tradition, the stranger and more wonderful the characters get. But one of the more interesting things about the history of anarchism, as opposed to the more-or-less official accounts maintained by the modern movement, is the […]

The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

After wrestling a bit with how best to organize my dedicated anarchist history blog, Dispatches from the Revolution—Atercracy, I have settled on an unorthodox, but hopefully fun way of both wrestling with some of the technical difficulties and keeping the focus on good stories. Those interested in the historical tidbits should make follow developments over there.

Exploring perspectives, inventing accomplices

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It has taken some time to move from proposing this project to finding the means to really push it forward. I’ve spent the last year attempting to sort through the tools in my theoretical toolkit, to see what seems useful and what is just a drag to lug around, while I clarified for myself just what it would mean to do history according to the anarchist principles I’ve been deriving from Proudhon’s work. That’s been rewarding work, but one of the lessons has been […]