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Responses to Anarchism: the Rhyme of Ravachol Needham

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[From P. R. Bennett, Ducdame; a book of verses. 1912.] The Anarchist [A critic in the New Age suggests that modern thought can submit no longer to the tyranny of rhyme and metre.] Ravachol Needham was a man of letters, Who refused to submit to the wretched fetters That sought by rules of rhyme and scansion To prevent his soaring soul’s expansion. He had languished long on a dismal sonnet And wasted his eagle spirit on it, Till the poor old bird had been imprisoned So long that it grew depressed and wizened, Drooped its feathers and nearly moulted, Could […]

Anarchism

Max Nettlau, Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH By Max Nettlau. ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits […]

E. Armand, “The Gulf”

August 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This short piece by E. Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand’s thought. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE GULF All the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say that the individual is a “product of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which […]

Contr'un

For the well-adorned radical…

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are several bookfairs coming up, and while books and pamphlets are cool and all, it’s a well-known fact that the business really runs on buttons, stickers and t-shirts. As an ever-so-slight bucking of the trend, to repurpose a class of items I manage to collect in some quantity, and to fit the Corvus Editions aesthetic a bit better, I’ve opted to start the trinket-ing with a line of carefully antiqued bottle-cap pendants (which ordinarily keep craft fairs running). You can check out the first fifteen designs at the Corvus store.

W. Curtis Swabey, “The Ethics of Stirner” (1912)

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

When I first encounter the French version of this text, I was aware that I might be translating a translation, but the article was interesting enough to make the work worth the bit of time it took—and it was quite a while before I finally tracked down the original English version. Now that I have the original text, it’s interesting to see to what extent the sense of the work survived the double-translation, so I have simply added the original to the post containing my translation. [ezcol_1half] The Ethics of Stirner To all who have been fortunate enough to read […]

E. Armand, “Our Rule of Ideological Conduct” (1922)

August 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

Notre ligne de conduite idéologique Dans tous les lieux, les individualistes de notre tendance veulent instaurer — dès maintenant et dans tous les temps — un milieu humain fondé sur le fait individuel et dans lequel, sans contrôle, intervention, immixtion quelconque de l’Etat, tous les individus puissent, soit isolés, soit associés, régler leurs affaires entre eux, au moyen de libres pactes, résiliables après préavis et cela pour n’importe quelle activité, que l’association soit l’œuvre d’une personnalité ou d’un collectivité. Leurs associations volontaires sont des unions de camarades, basées sur l’exercice de la réciprocité ou « égale liberté ». Les individualistes […]

Corvine Call: Hartmann the Anarchist

August 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

As promised, I’ve put together an edition of E. Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist: handbound hardcovers, 4.25″ x 10.25″, printed on recycled farm-waste paper and covered in repurposed upholstery samples. Adding hardcover titles to the catalog has been a much-delayed milestone. (I still owe one friend a book ordered before there was a Corvus Editions.) But one of the things about microenterprises is that they impose their own pace. In a one-person show, sometimes the next logical step turns out to involve a cascade of complications, and there’s generally nobody to help pick up the slack. In this case, the […]

Anarchism

“Come, a glass to our captain—the destined destroyer of civilization!”

July 22, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

While searching for hollow earth narratives (a curiously political genre, as it happens), I came across Hartmann the Anarchist, an 1893 science fiction/adventure novel, by Edward Douglas Fawcett (the brother of the “Lost City of Z” explorer.) Fawcett also wrote Swallowed by an Earthquake, which I haven’t tracked down, but Hartmann is a lot of fun. It’s an anti-anarchist novel, but don’t let that worry you too much. The plot is a tragedy, with a more-or-less byronic hero, whose motivation could be straight out of Emma Goldman’s “The Psychology of Political Violence.” The narrator is an “evolutionary” socialist, and the […]

Take me to the river…

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s say we gather the usual suspects, down by the river, in the State of Nature, or thereabouts, for a bit of property theory and a few “good draughts.” John Locke says everybody can appropriate some river-water, as long as what they make their own “property” leaves “a whole river of the same water.” Now, Locke has a reputation for saying things like “my labor” when maybe he means the labor of someone else, so there’s some hesitation, but it seems like a pretty good deal, assuming it’s possible. Now, in literal terms, it seems impossible: a quantity of water, X, minus some non-zero “good draught,” G, is unlikely to = X. But, out in the State of Nature, talking about individual-scale “draughts” and a naturally resilient river-system, perhaps it is at least as good as possible.

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Joseph Déjacque and “The Circulus in Universality”

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s long, and the translation is still a little rough, but I would encourage folks to take the time to read Joseph Déjacque’s The Circulus in Universality and to look at the other texts by him: “To the Ci-Devant Dynastics,” Down with the Bosses!, “The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities,” and the excerpt from The Humanisphere published as “Authority and Idleness.” Once you have some sense of the terrain, you may also want to take a look at the in-progress translation of The Humanisphere that Jesse Cohn has posted. Déjacque is another of those figures who deserves to be more than […]