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Is that a scepter in your invisible hand?

September 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Contr’un Revisited: This is, I suppose, a rather odd little piece, with its vague suggestions of a “comradeship with anarchism,” but it was something of a breakthrough for me at the time. I am undoubtedly more than overdue returning and picking up the dropped threads it contains. Long before I had adopted the apparatus of synthesis, I was interested in the ways that the natural, practical development of anarchism might lead to seemingly perverse outcomes. Although much of what I had to say about the “ungovernability” of anarchism related to our inability to contain it, consistently, in any of the […]

Encounters and Transactions

September 9, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I expect that for many of the readers of this blog, the most significant of the dangling questions is the one opened in the post on “Anarchy, understood in all its senses.” I’m surprised that there has not been more comment on the main points in that post, which demonstrates that for Proudhon, in one of the works that social anarchists have generally championed, the anarchy of the laissez faire market and the anti-authoritarian anarchy of the anarchists were in some senses so closely connected that Proudhon was indifferent to which meaning was applied to the word “anarchy,” and that […]

A note on “external constitution”

September 9, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I would hope by now that the practical application of Proudhon’s theory of the State, or more precisely of the theory of society underlying it, would be clearer than perhaps they were when I first published the chapter. But it can’t hurt to clarify things. Clarifying the history of anarchist anti-State thought is arguably useful, and probably even important, given the current struggles over the scope of anarchism’s critique. The sole focus on the State is a tool of entryists of various sorts, and while there is nothing in Proudhon’s development that suggests we should be any friendlier to any […]

The Anatomy of the Encounter

September 7, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

We begin with these free absolutes, these uniques. According to the first, Proudhonian designation, we are dealing with individuals, groups organized according to an unfolding law of development, but with a consciousness of their nature and a capacity for self-reflection.

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The Anarchic Encounter: Economic and/or Erotic?

August 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: “Summary Notions” (August 28, 2013) “The Anatomy of the Encounter” (September 7, 2013) Contr’un #3 [pdf] It seemed appropriate to break off the previous post mid-encounter, if you will, in order to highlight even more emphatically the fundamentally fecund nature of the interactions I’ve been describing. The sort of anarchy that I have been starting to describe is not just without rulers, without any legitimate hierarchy, whether governmental or invested in other institutions, but largely without rules as well. It is not without history, if by that we mean an accumulation of experience and experiment, on the basis […]

Summary notions

August 28, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

With the first two issues of the Contr’un zine now available, I feel like perhaps I’ve reached the end of a necessary, but awkward transitional phase. Before moving forward, let me underline and elaborate on a few propositions or realizations that I consider key: Anarchism is ungovernable, and anarchists should probably learn to embrace that fact. It doesn’t imply any sort of compromise. On the contrary, it sets the bar for all of our theories, practices, and the no-doubt necessary squabbles over boundaries very high. It ought to discourage dogmatism and complacency. Not every aspiring anarchist need concern themselves […]

Olga Liubatovitch and other women from the Russian nihilist movement

August 23, 2013

As a companion to the Frondeuse series, I’ve assembled a collection featuring Stepniak’s “A Female Nihilist,” an account of the life of Olga Liubatovitch, together with a selection of poems and popular journalism relating to other women involved in the struggles against the Czars and their government. The popular accounts naturally made the most of the apparent contrasts between the beauty and education of those women, and the violence of their acts.

Contr'un

Contr’un: the zine, etc.

August 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’m happy to announce that the first two issues of the Contr’un zine are now available in pdf form, and that the paper form will be making its debut at the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair. Issue 1, “Toward an Ungovernable Anarchism,” collects all of the transitional posts from this blog, starting with the second essay on “the ungovernability of anarchism,” and Issue 2, “Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” includes the title essay, the “Notes,” my translation of “The Feuding Brothers” and some short translations from Proudhon’s work. I think some things will may have been hard to grasp or put together […]

How does property become capitalist?

August 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

Contrun Revisited: One of the tasks of this phase of work on Contr’un, and one of the purposes of the Contr’un Revisited project, is to find the dangling threads, of which there have been many, that could not be properly finished off at the time and see what can be done to accomplish that work of finishing. This is one of those posts that was really designed in large part as a provocation to myself, with the unspoken question being: How does property become something other than capitalist? I’m finally taking up my own challenge, in a post dealing with […]

A Proudhonian summary from the manuscript writings

July 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

The project of working through Proudhon’s works, keyword by keyword, has been rewarding for a variety of reasons. It’s been nearly impossible to get a clear sense of the larger patterns in Proudhon’s use of those keywords without that kind of survey, but the work has also unearthed some important explanations and summaries in unexpected places. The section of the State in The Theory of Taxation is certainly one of the most interesting, but in searching for the surprisingly scarce references to anarchy, I ran across some very interesting material in Napoleon III, a collection of manuscript writings published […]