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Black and Red Feminism

Paule Mink, “Broken Arm” (1895)

April 29, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Picked up in the street, one morning, between a pile of rubbish and some rubble from demolition, abandoned like a small cat someone wants to be rid of, he was carried to the alms-house, and then placed among some farmers who raised him, giving him bread, in exchange, when he got to be a little bigger, for a labor that was very hard for a child, but who never had for him either affection or caresses.

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Stirner’s Critics

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Hurry over to the Vagabond Theorist page and check out the full translation of “Stirner’s Critics,” Max Stirner’s reply to Szeliga, Hess and Feuerbach. There’s a lot of very valuable clarification in the essay. Bravo! for making the entire thing available.
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Responses to Proudhon

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
The critical response to Proudhon’s work during his lifetime was extensive. Much of it was also relatively uninteresting nay-saying and sectarian quibbling, but certainly not all of it. And I think that, in general, anarchists are really only aware of a few key responses, such as Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy and some of the feminist critiques, which have remained interesting because of subsequent debates. One of the things that the increase in digital archives has changed dramatically is the accessibility of many of the early responses to Proudhon. I’ve started working to dig out as much of this critical material […]
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Jules Allix, a most unusual Communard

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been spending a lot of time this month working on the “Black and Red Feminism” project, trying to expand the pilot pamphlet into something a little more broadly representative, for release as a small hardcover volume. That’s meant a lot of exploring, a few new figures of the “usual suspects” gallery here, and a little burst of new translations, like the Séverine story I just posted, and a Paule Mink story I hope to complete tomorrow. While I have not been looking as closely at the male feminists of the 1848 and Paris Commune periods, a few individuals have […]
Black and Red Feminism

Séverine, Liberty—Equality—Fraternity

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
from NOTES OF A TROUBLE-MAKER Séverine (Caroline Rémy de Guebhard) ____ LIBERTY — EQUALITY — FRATERNITY Liberty? That night, on the asphalt beach that dominates the view from my window, some human wreckage, a father, mother, and two babies, had washed up on a bench. From the heights where, much despite myself, I glide, one could distinguish nothing but a pile of gray flesh and soiled rags, from which emerged, here and there, an arm, a leg, with a movement slow and painful as a crushed crab’s leg They slept, clutching one another, huddled in one pile, from habit, as […]
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A Joshua King Ingalls update

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Last week, a colleague provided me with copies of Josiah Warren’s articles “To the Friends of the Social System,” which appeared in the Western Tiller, and that put me back into bibliographic mode, since the Warren/equitable commerce bibliography has been hovering somewhere just short of publishable for a long time now—and those essays filled a major hole in my research. I should be able to say more about the content of those articles, and the status of the bibliography, later in the week. But diving back into the Warren project naturally also means reopening my on again, off again work […]
communism

Down with the Communists! (by a communist)

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just for fun, here’s a short, entertaining dialogue by “utopian” communist Étienne Cabet (undated, but probably 1848-9.) DOWN WITH THE COMMUNISTS! A Bourgeois. — Yes, sir! Down with the Communists! An Icarian.— No, sir. You shouldn’t say “Down with the Communists!” The Bourgeois. — Down, down with the Communists! The Icarian. — But why do you want that so badly? The Bourgeois. — Because they are brigands!… The Icarian. — Really! If that was true, you would be right, and I would cry out with you… But why do you say that they are brigands ? The Bourgeois. — Because […]
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Bakunin on Proudhon and Marx

April 24, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
James Guillaume, in the “Biographical Notice” in his French edition of Bakunin’s Works, includes part of an 1870 manuscript written by Bakunin on the subject of Proudhon and Marx: Proudhon, despite all his efforts to shake off the traditions of classical idealism, nonetheless remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, inspired, as I told him two months before his death, sometimes by the Bible, sometimes by Roman law, and always a metaphysician to the fingertips. His great misfortune is that he never studied the natural sciences, and he never adopted its methods. He had some instincts of genius that made […]
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Proudhon to Jeanne Deroin

April 20, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[A letter, apparently not included in the Correspondence, from Proudhon to Jeanne Deroin. The date is uncertain. Working translation; all the usual cautions apply.] Paris, August 4 [1848?]. Madame. You have understood me perfectly: what I pursue under the name of the abolition of usury and of property, is the restoration of the family, it is the advent of the man-king, and of the woman-queen. Until this great reform is accomplished, men and women will not love one another: cupidity will infect their union, and behind cupidity comes brutality of the senses. Libertinism replaces love, and murder, finally, takes its […]