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The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution

April 13, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
After wrestling a bit with how best to organize my dedicated anarchist history blog, Dispatches from the Revolution—Atercracy, I have settled on an unorthodox, but hopefully fun way of both wrestling with some of the technical difficulties and keeping the focus on good stories. Those interested in the historical tidbits should make follow developments over there.
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Exploring perspectives, inventing accomplices

April 13, 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”] It has taken some time to move from proposing this project to finding the means to really push it forward. I’ve spent the last year attempting to sort through the tools in my theoretical toolkit, to see what seems useful and what is just a drag to lug around, while I clarified for myself just what it would mean to do history according to the anarchist principles I’ve been deriving from Proudhon’s work. That’s been rewarding work, but one of the lessons has been […]
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Pruning the Rhizome (review of “Disruptive Elements”)

April 8, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism Ardent Press, 2014 available from Little Black Cart —— a review —— “Tant pis pour ceux qui souffrent et n’osent pas prêcher l’extermination et l’incendie!” Most history worth bothering with shakes things up. This is particularly true of radical history, and of that branch of radical history that involves rediscovering and re-presenting primary works from various radical currents. Sometimes, the shake-ups are comparatively pleasant, and we find, unexpectedly, that we have inherited marvelous gems, glimpses into the personalities and practices of those who came before us. Sometimes, they seem more like attacks, […]
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More anarchist archives online

April 5, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
The International Institute of Social History has digitized several more of their important collections, as part of a large-scale digitization project. The collections include Max Nettlau’s papers, the Bakunin collection, the Louise Michel collection, the Alexander Berkman papers, the Fédération Jurassienne Archives, the Lucien Descaves papers, the Gustave Landauer papers, and several others. Many of the downloadable files are manuscript pages, varying dramatically in legibility, but there are also files of collected pamphlets, periodical issues, fliers, etc. So far, I’ve run across some issues of Josiah Warren’s Periodical Letter, a good scan of J. Wm. Lloyd’s “Anarchists’ March,” the published […]
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Proudhon on the Criterion of Certainty (1841-1858)

April 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve pulled together some rough translations from Proudhon’s The Creation of Order in Humanity with existing translations from the Second Memoir on Property and Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. Together with The Philosophy of Progress, the collected texts cover some of the major stages in Proudhon’s treatment of the question of “the criterion of certainty.” I remember really being puzzled, the first time I read the book on Progress, about the extent to which this summary of Proudhon’s thought was focused on the question of certainty, and it has taken a long time, even after discovering his […]
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Return of the Proudhon Seminar

March 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Starting in May, one of the projects I’ll be working on is the evaluation, revision and/or annotation of the existing translations of Proudhon’s works, starting with Tucker’s translations of the first two memoirs on property. As part of the process, I’ve proposed a group reading of the material. When we read What is Property? five years ago, in the original “Proudhon Seminar,” our shared understanding of Proudhon’s work was, I think, very different than it is now. I’ve recently come back to the work in a couple of different contexts and been amazed at how different it looks to me. […]
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A Million Words: Day 115

March 26, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
As expected, this has been a slightly more distracted month. I managed to get sick for a week, and had to burn a couple of my allocated “sick/vacation days,” and then made up most of the lost time with a couple of unusually easy bits of translation. I’m nearing the halfway mark in the main text of Fribourg’s history of the International, and have probably a third of the supplementary documents and endnotes completed. I’m also making pretty good headway through Jenny P. d’Héricourt’s Woman Affranchised. I finished a draft translation of all the material for the collection of Fourier’s […]
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Mapping Mutualism

March 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] As I’ve mentioned, several of my projects have been intersecting recently, and I’ve been feeling better able to start mapping out the various currents and traditions that we would have to account for in any really adequate history of mutualism. Let’s just get some of those elements laid out so we can refer back to them: Proudhon’s own writings. We are fortunate to have a great deal of Proudhon’s work now available online, including quite a number of the manuscripts. There are a number of articles that remain uncollected and there are some omissions in the Mélanges […]
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A Million Words (Day 93)

March 2, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
I passed the 250,000-word mark night before last. February was the month to wrap up the Bakunin Reader translation as much as possible, so I can turn to the introduction and annotations. That work is pretty well done, and I got a headstart on the Collectivist Reader, which is going to involve a lot of archival digging before I’m through. Check out the Bakunin Library blog for a lot of recent material, including a couple of letters by Bakunin regarding Proudhon. That work got me wondering what it would take to assemble a Mutualist Reader, which still looks like a […]
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There and Back Again

February 28, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Kicking free from the mutualist label in March and April of last year was part of an attempt to achieve two fairly specific outcomes: to clarify my own thinking about the core concepts of anarchy and anarchism; and to attempt to confront some methodological questions, particularly some key questions relating to anarchist historiography, which seemed to be eluding me. I can certainly recommend the exercise of jettisoning one’s keywords as at least a potential means of focusing on ideas instead of words—not always such an easy task in our label-centric, more-or-less fundamentalist culture. And I hope that the emerging theory […]