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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 […]

Proudhon and the coup d’état of 1851

July 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon’s work come from double-checking those things that “everyone knows” about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying “anarchy is order” that I ran across the dubious translations in The General Idea of the Revolution, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of “anarchy” and “anarchism,” which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that […]

Pauline Roland and the women transported after the December 1851 coup d’etat

July 3, 2013

[I’ve been hoping to put together a collection of Pauline Roland’s writing, but I’ve had difficulties tracking down many of the more important essays. However, her letters from jail and her subsequent transportation to Africa, following Louis Napoleon’s coup, have proven to be a little easier to track down. While the martyrs of December 2 don’t feature very prominently in our own political histories, they were important figures in their own day, and Roland’s letters appeared in English in both the exile press and the feminist papers. Jeanne Deroin circulated a collection of Roland’s letters as part of an announcement […]

Anarchy, understood in all its senses

June 30, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

“The first term of the series being thus Absolutism, the final, fateful term is Anarchy, understood in all the senses.”–Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution In order to start to address the question posed in the last post, about what Proudhon meant when he said “I am an anarchist,” we need to grapple a bit with the thorny question of how consistently he used his various keywords. One of the traditional methods of dealing with the complexities of Proudhon’s arguments, including those terminological issues, has been to wave our hands and recall that he was a “man of contradictions,” […]