Contr’un

Contr'un

Anarchy and Anarchism, Insides and Outsides

October 7, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
  “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

Toward a General Theory of Archy

October 3, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
   A lot of my frustrations with the anarchist milieu have less to do with the sorts of internal problems we face, which seem to me to be logical manifestations of the larger social environment, and more to do with the fact that, even if we had the will to address the various things that hold us back, we might not have enough shared theory and vocabulary to get the job done. But, as I have said, my feelings of alienation have been parallel to, and undoubtedly also arise from, a very strong sense of having finally plumbed a lot […]
Contr'un

Propositions for Discussion: The Scope of Anarchy

October 2, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Here is a rough outline for the second section of the “Propositions:] The Scope of Anarchy To claim that anarchy is sufficient as an anarchist goal or ideal is not, of course, to claim that it is in some way all-sufficient. Most of our arguments about the definition of anarchy turn out to be, on closer inspection, arguments about its proper scope of application—and there are questions still to be answered. On the one hand, we have defenders of various archic systems—capitalism, nationalism, racial and gender-based hierarchies—attempting to identify their systems with anarchy, on the basis that the proper scope […]
Contr'un

Propositions for Discussion (on Anarchy and Anarchism) — I

September 7, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Anarchy is a simple, accessible notion, sufficient to provide the necessary glue for a real anarchist current or movement. I’ve been struck by the number of times recently that I have encountered the argument that a really thoroughgoing idea of anarchy was an impediment, and perhaps the great impediment, to the anarchist movement. It seems obvious that attempting to do justice to the notion of anarchy could be an impediment to any number of other kinds of products or movements, but it is hard for me to wrap my head around the notion that anarchism—as an ideology, movement, individual aspiration […]
Contr'un

The Bottom Line

September 5, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Yesterday, I was foolhardy enough to post a sort of love/breakup letter to “the anarchist movement.” By this morning, what I had intended as a very personal gesture was just another bit of anarchist news, subject to the usual anarchist scorn, but not, it seems, worthy of any personal response. I know. I know: Don’t read the comments… But, honestly, the thing that makes comments so consistently unreadable is the thing that makes the things I wanted to say so damn nearly unspeakable. Anyway, since the whole thing feels like an embarrassing falling-out with an imaginary friend, I will try […]
Contr'un

Instead of a “Dear John” Letter

September 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[I have wrestled more than a bit with the question of whether this is a clear and useful intervention. I am still not certain. The first responses were so petty and inane that I decided, for a day or so, that I didn’t much care and simply replaced this with the “Bottom Line” post. The problem is that I can’t really sustain the indifference, in part as a matter of temperament and in part because I am, for better or worse, a full-time worker in the realm of anarchy. So there is a great deal of more sober clarification that […]
Blazing Star Library

The Mutual Banking Writings of William Batchelder Greene

August 30, 2015
The important works are: Equality. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1849. [published anonymously] [74 pages] Mutual Banking. West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke, 1850. [95 pages] The Radical Deficiency Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Mutual Currency. Boston: B. H. Greene, 1857. [239 pages] Mutual Banking, Showing The Radical Deficiencies Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Free Currency. Worcester, Mass.: New England Labor Reform League, 1870. [52 Pages] Mutual Banking. Modern Publishers, Indore City, India, 1946 plus a couple of short sections in Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments (Boston: Lee […]
Contr'un

All Actors Are Collective Actors: The Unity-Collectivity

August 29, 2015 anarchisms_w4l2ii
Links: Proudhon’s Social Science [project page] Every individual is a group. There are a small number of key concepts in Proudhon’s work, without which it is almost impossible to understand. The notion of the collective actor, or unity-collectivity, and that of the collective force with which it is imbued may top the list in terms of importance. Virtually everything else depends on this basic insight into the nature of unity. The logical contender for top spot would be the philosophy of progress, but it turns out that Proudhon really saw the two analyses as intertwined. While much of Proudhon’s 1853 […]
Contr'un

Property and Theft: Proudhon’s Theory of Exploitation

August 18, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Part of the task here will be to explain the basics of Proudhon’s social science, the body of work that shows how his basic commitment to anti-authoritarianism and non-governmentalism played out (or didn’t, but could have played out) in a variety of contexts. The goal is to show how most of the principles he developed depend on a fairly small number of observations or assumptions, so that readers can not only make better sense of Proudhon’s work, but also acquire a toolkit that can be applied in new contexts. In the process, we’ll hopefully also debunk some familiar misreadings […]