Contr’un

Contr'un

2014-2015

December 28, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
2014 has been a fascinating, productive year. I got an early jump on translation projects in late 2013 and kept up a fairly blistering pace through March, establishing to my own satisfaction that, if necessary, upwards of a million words of translation is possible in a year, without entirely devouring the rest of my life. And I completed a stack of working translations: Proudhon’s Theory of Property, Déjacque’s Humanisphere, Jean Grave’s Adventures of Nono, Charles Malato’s New Caledonian Tales, Flora Tristan’s The Emancipation of Woman, most of Ravachol’s writings, and lots of other interesting odds and ends, including most of […]
Anarchy in all its senses

Anarchy, Understood in All its Senses—II

December 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Continued from Part I.] “The first term of the series being thus Absolutism, the final, fateful term is Anarchy, understood in all the senses.”–Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution   In 1840, Proudhon declared that he was an anarchist, and he gave the beginnings of a description of the anarchy that he proposed:   Anarchy, the absence of a master or sovereign, such is the form of government that we approach every day, which the deep-rooted habit of taking the man for rule and his will for law makes us regard as the height of disorder and the expression […]
Contr'un

Reading “The Third Social Form” — I

August 12, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] We have a lot of issues on our plate, but for now let’s stick to the reading of the passage from What is Property? The first thing that strikes me, looking again at this section, is just how rich this early text is with indications and anticipations of Proudhon’s later work. Then I’m struck by how opaque some of those bits can be, given the state of his development in 1840. I would have to work back through the rest of the text to see just how much of this set […]
Contr'un

Another look at Proudhon (and an invitation to experiment)

August 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It is a well-known fact of anarchist history (a term that we’ll be giving some special attention in the coming months) that even the founding figures of the anarchist tradition did not often identify themselves as anarchists until sometime fairly late in the 19th century. Over the weekend, I had a chance to spend some time examining just when, and under what circumstances, that self-identification became more common. There seems to have been a fairly serious shift in the 1870s and 1880s, with a fairly rapid convergence of anti-authoritarians of various […]
Contr'un

In Search of the Justicier

July 18, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I don’t want to wait to work through the details of Proudhon’s analysis before moving forward with the neo-Proudhonian analysis I’ve been developing. At the moment, in fact, I think that the two projects can diverge usefully: There are a lot of important sociological and economic tools to be uncovered, brushed off and modified for present use, tucked away in the works of Proudhon, and there will come a moment—fairly soon, I hope—when we’ll need all of those tools assembled and in working order. At the same time, there are some very basic elements that we have already recovered, which […]
Contr'un

Note on the intitiation into justice

July 15, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
“It is through marriage that man learns, from nature itself, to sense himself as double.” A point that I probably haven’t explored sufficiently, in the course of working through Proudhon’s thoughts on the family, is the extent to which his concept of marriage appears to be not just distanced from sexual and reproductive concerns, but perhaps transformed in a way that makes those concerns almost inessential. His emphasis on chastity was certainly in part a reflection of his own predilections, but those tastes were shared rather widely in his context and were not uncommon among the radical women with whom […]
Contr'un

Un Etat, c’est moi

July 6, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] The manuscript of Proudhon’s Pologne keeps slowly giving up its secrets, and some of them are perfectly designed to blow 21st century anarchist minds. Reexamining The Theory of Property as Chapter VII of Pologne has meant that one of the things I have become most interested in is the reason why a “guarantism” involving individual property seems to be called for by the social and political evolution described in the first six chapters. That has meant reuniting the two manuscripts on the Besançon site, as much as is possible, and looking particularly closely for whatever […]
Contr'un

The Capitalist, the Prince, the Père de famille, and the alternative

June 23, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
It is common to debate whether anarchists attach too much importance to the struggle against capitalism vs. the struggle against statism, or to either or both of those vs. the struggle against patriarchy and other forms of oppression. But how much difference is there really between the various struggles? Without downplaying various real differences, I want to suggest that the oppressions involved at least share a dynamic familiar to students of Proudhon’s work, with the result that a commitment to some very basic aspects of Proudhon’s anarchism ought to simultaneously set us against capitalism, statism, and the patriarchy (to start […]
Contr'un

Avengers who never assemble

June 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related text: “My Testament, or Society of Avengers” (FR/EN, partial translation) [click image] “By what sign shall we recognize that an individual who has been struck has been struck by the society of avengers? If the victim is notorious depraved, or corrupt, or criminal, or villainous; if they are an enemy of the people; if their political importance  corresponds to their criminality; if a sign is left on the corpse; if they are not stripped or robbed; if no author of the murder can be assumed from self-interest, rivalry, etc.” A notorious enemy of society is struck down and a […]
Contr'un

What if?

June 9, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Great Atercratic Revolution [tag feed] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] If we’re doing really radical history, it’s hard not to engage in some “What is”? Much of the attraction of knowing the details of the radical movements of the past is the possibility that we’ll find tools and lessons useful in the present and future. And we can’t very well limit ourselves to examining the successes of the past, since without a little of that “if at first you don’t succeed…” spirit, there wouldn’t seem to be much point in trying to be radical […]