Contr’un

Contr'un

L’Opinion des Femmes, 1848-1849

May 16, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
The letter from Jeanne Deroin to Proudhon that I just posted appeared in French in L’Opinion de Femmes, a radical feminist journal edited by Deroin and Désirée Gay. The entire run of the paper can be found at Gallica, tucked away in one of the volumes of Les Révolutions du XIXe Siècle. L’Opinion des Femmes is great stuff, with material by Deroin, Gay, Jean Macé, C. F. Chevé, and “Jeanne Marie” (probably Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard, aka Jenny d’Héricourt.) The beginnings of the feud between Deroin and Proudhon is documented. Expect to see a lot of translations from this paper over the […]
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Mutual aid opportunity

May 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
You’ll find a new ChipIn widget in the sidebar of the blog (or on ChipIn), to support Laughing Horse Books, one of Portland, Oregon’s few remaining independent bookstores, and a radical, collective-run bookstore/music venue/meeting space for 25 years now. All the little things that tend to snowball when a business gets behind have done so lately—and then some—and it seems very likely that the doors will be closing early this summer. Nothing is written in stone. The collective is in the midst of the hardest sorts of deliberations. But things are to the point where it’s not clear if all […]
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Two Chapters from “The Last Word of Socialism”

May 2, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve transcribed the two chapters translated from Charles-François Chevé’s Le Dernier Mot du Socialisme, par un catholique (1848), and published in The Spirit of the Age. They are “Capital and Interest” and “The Landlord and His Tenants: A Dialogue.” Chevé was an associate of Proudhon, and the author of the “Socialist Catechism” that I recently translated.
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Stirner’s Critics

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Hurry over to the Vagabond Theorist page and check out the full translation of “Stirner’s Critics,” Max Stirner’s reply to Szeliga, Hess and Feuerbach. There’s a lot of very valuable clarification in the essay. Bravo! for making the entire thing available.
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Responses to Proudhon

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
The critical response to Proudhon’s work during his lifetime was extensive. Much of it was also relatively uninteresting nay-saying and sectarian quibbling, but certainly not all of it. And I think that, in general, anarchists are really only aware of a few key responses, such as Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy and some of the feminist critiques, which have remained interesting because of subsequent debates. One of the things that the increase in digital archives has changed dramatically is the accessibility of many of the early responses to Proudhon. I’ve started working to dig out as much of this critical material […]
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Jules Allix, a most unusual Communard

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been spending a lot of time this month working on the “Black and Red Feminism” project, trying to expand the pilot pamphlet into something a little more broadly representative, for release as a small hardcover volume. That’s meant a lot of exploring, a few new figures of the “usual suspects” gallery here, and a little burst of new translations, like the Séverine story I just posted, and a Paule Mink story I hope to complete tomorrow. While I have not been looking as closely at the male feminists of the 1848 and Paris Commune periods, a few individuals have […]
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A Joshua King Ingalls update

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Last week, a colleague provided me with copies of Josiah Warren’s articles “To the Friends of the Social System,” which appeared in the Western Tiller, and that put me back into bibliographic mode, since the Warren/equitable commerce bibliography has been hovering somewhere just short of publishable for a long time now—and those essays filled a major hole in my research. I should be able to say more about the content of those articles, and the status of the bibliography, later in the week. But diving back into the Warren project naturally also means reopening my on again, off again work […]
communism

Down with the Communists! (by a communist)

April 25, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just for fun, here’s a short, entertaining dialogue by “utopian” communist Étienne Cabet (undated, but probably 1848-9.) DOWN WITH THE COMMUNISTS! A Bourgeois. — Yes, sir! Down with the Communists! An Icarian.— No, sir. You shouldn’t say “Down with the Communists!” The Bourgeois. — Down, down with the Communists! The Icarian. — But why do you want that so badly? The Bourgeois. — Because they are brigands!… The Icarian. — Really! If that was true, you would be right, and I would cry out with you… But why do you say that they are brigands ? The Bourgeois. — Because […]
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Bakunin on Proudhon and Marx

April 24, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
James Guillaume, in the “Biographical Notice” in his French edition of Bakunin’s Works, includes part of an 1870 manuscript written by Bakunin on the subject of Proudhon and Marx: Proudhon, despite all his efforts to shake off the traditions of classical idealism, nonetheless remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, inspired, as I told him two months before his death, sometimes by the Bible, sometimes by Roman law, and always a metaphysician to the fingertips. His great misfortune is that he never studied the natural sciences, and he never adopted its methods. He had some instincts of genius that made […]