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Closing a chapter

April 1, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been doing a lot of wrestling for some time now with my place in the universe of anarchism, and contemplating the best way to perhaps get a useful hearing for the insights of my last decade or so of thought and research. While much remains unclear, the one thing that seems clearest to me at this point is that my reluctant role as mutualist movement-builder is almost certainly a misapplication of the talents I possess, and that the specifically mutualist context probably detracts from what are arguably broader insights about anarchist theory and history. So while I may yet […]
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Book fair report

March 29, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I spent about a week in California this month, to attend the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, do a bit of research at UC Berkeley, see friends and plot some publishing projects. It will probably be a few more weeks before I entirely process the experience, which was, shall we say, fraught in a variety of ways, even by anarchist standards. The change of venue from one owned by the government to one owned by a porn company created a new set of conflicts, and also fed fuel to the conflicts which always surround the event, where communism and […]
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If I had to guess…

February 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
…what was the single most important reason for “statism” becoming as prominent an anarchist keyword as it became in the early 20th century, I would have to go with Marxism. The term emerged as part of Bakunin’s account of the struggles within the First International, and seems to have finally gained prominence in in anarchist circles the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. In the informal searching I’ve done in various digital archives the sudden increases in the use of the term line up very closely with the events.
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Statism: It’s not just for dentists anymore…

February 12, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon’s treatment of “government” and “the state,” it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon’s thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like “Resistance to the Revolution,” as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind.

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A Notice and an Invitation

February 10, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m finishing up my layman’s introduction to Proudhon’s theory of the state, for a book to be published in German, and it has been very interesting, demanding work. It has reconfirmed for me the fascinating depths of Proudhon’s work, and the extent to which I’ve still really only begun to sound the most profound of them. It’s a pleasant sort of hard work, but I admit I won’t be sorry when I can put this part of it away. I suspect I will feel much the same about rest of the work for the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book. It will […]
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Collective force and the problem of authority

February 4, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
God, philosophy says finally, is, from the ontological point of view, a conception of the human mind, the reality of which it is impossible to deny or affirm authentically;—from the point of view of humanity, a fantastic representation of the human soul raised to the infinite. — Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church In Proudhon’s writings we encounter the notion that what lies behind the most durable examples of authority—chief among them the famous pair, God and the State—is, in fact, collective force. It is our own force, the force of society or humanity, to which we […]
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Anarchy is order! (Wait! What?)

January 28, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have often seen the phrase “anarchy is order” attributed to Proudhon—and to Bakunin, and Bellarrigue, and Elisee Reclus, and a French singer-songwriter named Leo Ferre. Often the phrase is actually Bellegarrigue’s (“Anarchy is order; government is civil war”) or the phrase “Anarchy is order without power,” cited as appearing in the Confessions of a Revolutionary. That latter phrase does not seem to appear in that book (and I’ve searched pretty carefully) and it doesn’t really sound all that much like Proudhon. There are a number of places where he talked about the relationship between anarchy and order, and lots […]
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Notes on the Notes: “They’ve a temper, some of them…”

January 25, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Talking about the “Notes,” there really does seem to be a certain amount of fear that if we don’t couch our anarchism in a specific language of “anti-statism” we may somehow slide into the embrace of something we ought to oppose. Now, any set of terms or concepts can almost certainly lead us astray, if we let the terms do the leading, and not our principles. That, of course, includes those honored by time and tradition, if they have become fixed ideas. Recall that Proudhon’s assault on “property” began with a pre-Stirner warning about such things—and then recall Stirner. And […]
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Notes on the Notes: Another thought on the relation between states and conflict

January 25, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
One of the common responses to my recent writing about Proudhon’s theory of “the state” has revolved around the opposition of his definitions of “state” with the “territorial monopoly on force” stuff that is so common in our circles. I think the action is elsewhere. It doesn’t look like any of the socialists in the 1849 debate were very concerned with “monopoly on force.” When Proudhon complains that “the state is external constitution of the social power,” he’s probably just agreeing with Louis Blanc (and possibly Pierre Leroux as well) about the definition of the “state,” and differing on whether […]