Blog

Contr'un

A peek at the future…

April 5, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is looking more and more like the new site will combine my various archives, and be much more library-like. There is probably a blog in the future, but it may take some time to materialize. So there will undoubtedly be some wrap-up, reflection and bridging-to-the-future stuff here for a while yet. Some low-traffic wiki and blog projects like the Proudhon Library and Splendors of the Combined Order will be disappearing fairly quickly, and the archives ending up at the new Libertarian Labyrinth site, where I can use them to work through some questions about site design, cataloging, metadata, etc. […]
Contr'un

The ANARCHISMS Project

April 2, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Among the bridges from “Two-Gun Mutualism” to the broader project I’m taking on, one of the most important is probably the ANARCHISMS Project that I launched last month. The new research and writing program takes off from my always-increasing sense of anarchism’s ungovernability, part of which is displayed in the enormous number of ways in which it has, and continues to be, summarized and advance. The real diversity of anarchist positions is hardly reducible to the sort of short-list of tendencies we tend to rely on, and our reliance on that short-list arguably stifles a considerable amount of past, present, […]
Contr'un

Beyond Mutualism

April 1, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I see this post is being used as ammo in a particularly trolly attack on anarchism. Those arriving here thinking that “mutualism has been abandoned” might be interested in my tentative return to the label. But simply reading what has actually come “beyond mutualism,” in this post and those that have followed it, should wipe out any notion that anything beyond a particular label was ever abandoned.] It’s really not an April Fool’s joke: I’m preparing to leave “mutualism” behind as the way I describe my politics. It’s a reinvention that I have been contemplating for a long time, but […]
Contr'un

Closing a chapter

April 1, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been doing a lot of wrestling for some time now with my place in the universe of anarchism, and contemplating the best way to perhaps get a useful hearing for the insights of my last decade or so of thought and research. While much remains unclear, the one thing that seems clearest to me at this point is that my reluctant role as mutualist movement-builder is almost certainly a misapplication of the talents I possess, and that the specifically mutualist context probably detracts from what are arguably broader insights about anarchist theory and history. So while I may yet […]
Contr'un

Book fair report

March 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I spent about a week in California this month, to attend the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, do a bit of research at UC Berkeley, see friends and plot some publishing projects. It will probably be a few more weeks before I entirely process the experience, which was, shall we say, fraught in a variety of ways, even by anarchist standards. The change of venue from one owned by the government to one owned by a porn company created a new set of conflicts, and also fed fuel to the conflicts which always surround the event, where communism and […]
Working Translations

Paschal Grousset, Speech pronounced at the grave of Verdure (1873)

March 23, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Speech pronounced by Paschal Grousset at the grave of Verdure My friends, an awful bit of news came yesterday to strike us with astonishment and sadness. A man that we loved, that we esteemed, that we venerated like a father, had unexpectedly succumbed to the attacks of a sudden illness. Just a few days ago, we greeted him with a friendly word when we met him along this shore that he frequented, calm and smiling in the midst of misfortune, with every appearance of strength and health. Today, we pay our last respects to his corpse: [Augustin] Verdure will […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Introducing “ANARCHISMS” + new issues of “La Frondeuse”

March 10, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m launching a new series of pamphlets collecting introductory summaries and personal statements attempting to define anarchism in the most basic terms. In the ANARCHISMS series, the texts will be collected with very little attention to tendency, beyond trying to mix things up in each issue, and without editorial comment. I am often asked for entry-level texts, and it’s difficult to find material which does not come with some critical apparatus already attached. There are plenty of occasions where context and various kinds of helps are indispensable, but there is also a time for letting individual statements speak for themselves. […]
Bakunin Library

James Guillaume, “Proudhon: Communist” (1911)

February 26, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
This essay by James Guillaume is probably more historically significant than it is convincing, focusing as it does on one very early bit of Proudhon’s writing, but it is certainly an interesting interpretation. Proudhon: Communist At the basis of Proudhon’s economic theory we find two essential ideas, that of value and that of exchange. These two ideas are only of interest in the regime of individual property. in a communist society, in fact, one does not produce in order to sell, but to consume; the question of the exchange value of objects for consumption is thus no longer posed, as […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on the State in 1861

February 18, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
You might expect that Proudhon’s theory of the state would be most succinctly expressed in one of his essays on the subject of the state, like “Resistance to the Revolution” of the “Small Political Catechism.” There are certainly key elements of the theory there, and more in The Theory of Property, but the clearest explanation appears to be tucked away in Proudhon’s book on taxation. These are the relevant passages, and it is truly striking stuff: from The Theory of Taxation (1861) Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right. Modern right, by introducing itself in the place […]