Contr'un Revisited
Contr’un Revisited
Contr'un
Contr’un Revisited
“Contr’un Revisited” is a collection of material from the “Contr’un” blog (and several other sources), annotated and intended as an introduction to the anarchist theory that has developed here over the last decade.
Contr'un
Occupancy-and-Use: Neo-Proudhonian Remarks
This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of an exchange on occupancy-and-use property. Those familiar with the rest of my work will recognize the proposal for “mutual extrication” as essentially a reintroduction, in different terms, of the “gift economy of property.” There is a great deal that could be said in response to Kevin Carson’s opening statement, from the “neo-Proudhonian” mutualist perspective, but I’ll try to keep things at least relatively short. Like Kevin, my introduction to the notion of occupancy-and-use land tenure was through the works of Benjamin R. Tucker and the Liberty […]
Contr'un
Anarchy and its Uses
Contr’un Revisited: What is anarchy good for? I will admit that I have been prone at times to think of anarchy as good for all purposes, at least as an antidote to the pervasive influence of authority. And there is undoubtedly something in that. But as I’ve delved deeper into the work on anarchist synthesis and into Max Nettlau’s critiques of generalizing anarchism, I’ve gained an increasing appreciation for the limits of anarchy as well. This is not exactly a new consideration for me, as you can see here, but if I was writing this post now, I expect that […]
Contr'un
The Stirner Question
[two_third padding=”0 0px 0 0px”] Each of the earliest pioneers of the anarchist tradition asked, I think, a question or three that still very much pertain to the problems of 21st-century life. They’re not always easy to extract or to drag into the present, and they’re not always flattering to us when applied to the culture of anarchism that has developed since the late 19th century. Working from the roots of the tradition has been a valuable experience, both in terms of focusing my analysis on key concepts and in terms of gaining tools with which to understand why the […]
Contr'un
Anarchy and Anarchism, Insides and Outsides
“Dad blame anything a man can’t quit.”—Roger Miller Make a more or less angry break with the anarchist milieu. Settle down to write a book about anarchism. It might all seem a bit bizarre if it wasn’t, for a certain sort of anarchist, pretty much inevitable. I know that there are people who move from the anarchist scene to other political scenes, who trade in the beautiful idea for other ideas. Honestly, though, I don’t understand them and don’t imagine I have much in common with them. For me, the encounter with anarchy was a sort of Rubicon—or perhaps […]
Contr'un
Moving forward with “The Theory of Property”
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] I’ve been spending some quality time with the manuscript of Proudhon’s The Theory of Property, now that it is available through the Ville de Besançon site, and it’s been a fascinating experience. Having spent a lot of time with the published version over the last few years, there were a lot of moments when I could look at a page and, once I had deciphered the handwriting, could immediately place the manuscript material in the published work. On my first pass through, the page where Proudhon proclaims that “Humanity proceeds by approximation” […]
Contr'un
Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)
Let’s get a little practice with all the tools we’ve been assembling. And, to do so, let’s stick, for the moment, with the question of property. It’s been one of my more or less explicit beliefs for a long time now that property theory may be transformed from a tool of capitalism into a tool useful to anarchists, simply by reexamining it very closely with a set of presuppositions informed by the insights of anarchism and ecological science. I’ve also been fairly emphatic that one of the reasons that this has not happened to any great extent, despite the […]
Contr'un
Encounters and Transactions
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 […]
Contr'un
The Anarchic Encounter: Economic and/or Erotic?
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 […]