Contr’un

My 365 days are 20% gone, and last night I passed the 200,000-word mark. So far, so good. Here are a few updates on the project: Recently, along with finishing up Charles Malato’s New Caledonian stories, I’ve posted an 1848 work by Claude Pelletier, Solution of the Problem of Poverty, and, “The Young Girl and the Bird,” a short story by Victoire Léodile Béra (aka André Léo) written under the name Victor Léo for Pierre Leroux’s journal La Revue Sociale. I’ve also finished a rough translation of Flora Tristan’s The Emancipation of Woman and am nearly through revising it. Work […]

I’m through the first couple of days, and I expect the bulk of the action, in a marathon week-long “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit’s DebateAnarchism forum. So far, it has been a surprisingly civil and instructive experience, and certainly an interesting way of testing out my rapprochement with the “mutualist” label. Many of the questions haven’t strayed far from the common questions of coexistence—”can theory X be compatible with theory Y“—or those concerning the basic concepts and vocabulary that dominate the usual capitalist vs. anti-capitalist debates, but, as I had hoped, there have been a few opportunities to break […]

  Part of the project here has to be presenting a picture of Proudhon that is a more useful alternative to those we have inherited. I have been arguing that there is a Proudhon who is not the failed precursor we so often think of, but who is instead a pioneer who still remains in some very important ways out in from of us, waiting for us to catch up.  So what is the defining character of that Proudhon’s thought? I still can’t think of a more exemplary text for addressing that question than The Philosophy of Progress. In the […]

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”]   [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] As I mentioned in the last post, one of the results of turning my back on the “Two-Gun Mutualism” project, and focusing specifically on the anarchic “social system” of “the encounter,” has been to reawaken my interest in the abandoned TGM: Rearmed book project. Much of that interest comes, as I’ve said, from my continuing interest in that atercratic counter-history that I expect will be occupying a lot of my time in upcoming months. But there is another element of my original mutualist project which I have had a […]

This year’s million-word translation push has a couple of different motives behind it. At a basic level, it’s a way to make productive what looks like an otherwise disastrous year for me. Last year was a year of wrong guesses, zigs that probably should have been zags, and an increasingly isolation on most fronts. I’m having to rethink a lot of things, make even more of my very limited resources, and try to keep my chin up through the process. In the past, really bad years have meant that Liberty got scanned and much of the deep background research that […]

It’s been quiet here on the blog, which usually means I’ve been busy elsewhere. This time is no exception. The next phase of the work on Proudhon involves writing up some truly introductory material, which is always slow, meticulous work. The Corvus Editions project is at another awkward transitional point, unsurprisingly given the state of the book trade, so I’ve been trying to take a hard look at the viable options there. And I’ve also made a number of publishing commitments, which are taking big bites out of my work day. Mostly, though, 2014 looks like it’s shaping up to […]

I’ve started translating a short posthumous work by Flora Tristan, “The Emancipation of Woman,” published in 1846. I’m presenting the final chapter, which includes brief appraisals of a number of prominent socialists, including Proudhon. You’ll also find a comparatively glowing paragraph on one Simon Ganneau, a Saint-Simonian heretic known as the Mapah, who believed himself the androgyne incarnation of both the Mère and Père (Ma+Pa), messiah-figures sought by Saint-Simon’s followers. He founded a religion called Evadaisme, a name combining those of Eve and Adam. The whole work is quite interesting, combining influences from various early socialist schools with Tristan’s own […]

Here’s a bit from The Theory of Property (which I have been working on some again), which discusses the relationship between Proudhon’s famous proposal to the provisional government and his developing theory. My famous proposition of July 31, for a tax of one-third on income, one-sixth to profit the farmer or tenant, one-sixth to profit the nation, should not even be considered as an application of my principles. It was a question, let us not forget, of immediate solutions, from day to day. In the crisis which struck all the forms of production, agriculture, manufacturing industry, commerce, income [rente] remained, […]

I’ve set up a poll over on the Working Translations blog, with five possible book-length translation projects, and would love to have folks pick the one that’s seems most interesting. All are to some extent already in-progress. I don’t necessarily promise to follow the recommendations, or promise not to substitute some similar project for the ones listed, but as I start to press towards publication of the next set of longer works, it would be nice to know in what instances I have a little extra push behind me.