Contr’un

Contr'un

Practical support for microenterprise

August 24, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been featuring the 500 Friends of Reading Frenzy! Kickstarter project in the sidebar here since it was launched. It’s now in its last week for funding, and 75% on its way to a goal of $5000. Reading Frenzy is a remarkable operation: a tiny shop which has been able to smooth the road for a lot of tiny projects, in an economic environment that tends to squeeze out human-scaled, low-overhead enterprises. There’s something fundamentally upside-down about a system that selects against lean operations and personal commitment. We should fight the tendency, particularly since the resources required to launch and […]
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Trajectories: Proudhon and Property

August 17, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been working on bookbinding and papermaking as much as property theory lately, trying to put together the first two issues of “The Wing: A Journal of Attractive Industry” (a very nuts-and-bolts, often how-to zine on environmentally responsible, craft-based micro-enterprise.) But I’ve also been working on the revision of Tucker’s What is Property? translation, and grappling with some issues raised by that and the research for the “Property is Impossible” posts, and that’s sent me back through the last two years’ worth of work on the property question, which really all grew out of the first Proudhon seminar.  I compiled […]
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Responses to Anarchism: the Rhyme of Ravachol Needham

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[From P. R. Bennett, Ducdame; a book of verses. 1912.] The Anarchist [A critic in the New Age suggests that modern thought can submit no longer to the tyranny of rhyme and metre.] Ravachol Needham was a man of letters, Who refused to submit to the wretched fetters That sought by rules of rhyme and scansion To prevent his soaring soul’s expansion. He had languished long on a dismal sonnet And wasted his eagle spirit on it, Till the poor old bird had been imprisoned So long that it grew depressed and wizened, Drooped its feathers and nearly moulted, Could […]
Anarchism

Max Nettlau, Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

August 10, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH By Max Nettlau. ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits […]
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E. Armand, “The Gulf”

August 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This short piece by E. Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand’s thought. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] THE GULF All the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say that the individual is a “product of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which […]
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For the well-adorned radical…

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
There are several bookfairs coming up, and while books and pamphlets are cool and all, it’s a well-known fact that the business really runs on buttons, stickers and t-shirts. As an ever-so-slight bucking of the trend, to repurpose a class of items I manage to collect in some quantity, and to fit the Corvus Editions aesthetic a bit better, I’ve opted to start the trinket-ing with a line of carefully antiqued bottle-cap pendants (which ordinarily keep craft fairs running). You can check out the first fifteen designs at the Corvus store.
Anarchism

“Come, a glass to our captain—the destined destroyer of civilization!”

July 22, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
While searching for hollow earth narratives (a curiously political genre, as it happens), I came across Hartmann the Anarchist, an 1893 science fiction/adventure novel, by Edward Douglas Fawcett (the brother of the “Lost City of Z” explorer.) Fawcett also wrote Swallowed by an Earthquake, which I haven’t tracked down, but Hartmann is a lot of fun. It’s an anti-anarchist novel, but don’t let that worry you too much. The plot is a tragedy, with a more-or-less byronic hero, whose motivation could be straight out of Emma Goldman’s “The Psychology of Political Violence.” The narrator is an “evolutionary” socialist, and the […]
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Take me to the river…

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Let’s say we gather the usual suspects, down by the river, in the State of Nature, or thereabouts, for a bit of property theory and a few “good draughts.” John Locke says everybody can appropriate some river-water, as long as what they make their own “property” leaves “a whole river of the same water.” Now, Locke has a reputation for saying things like “my labor” when maybe he means the labor of someone else, so there’s some hesitation, but it seems like a pretty good deal, assuming it’s possible. Now, in literal terms, it seems impossible: a quantity of water, X, minus some non-zero “good draught,” G, is unlikely to = X.  But, out in the State of Nature, talking about individual-scale “draughts” and a naturally resilient river-system, perhaps it is at least as good as possible.

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Contr'un

Joseph Déjacque and “The Circulus in Universality”

July 18, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
It’s long, and the translation is still a little rough, but I would encourage folks to take the time to read Joseph Déjacque’s The Circulus in Universality and to look at the other texts by him: “To the Ci-Devant Dynastics,” Down with the Bosses!,  “The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities,” and the excerpt from The Humanisphere published as “Authority and Idleness.” Once you have some sense of the terrain, you may also want to take a look at the in-progress translation of The Humanisphere that Jesse Cohn has posted. Déjacque is another of those figures who deserves to be more than […]
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The Circulus in Universality

July 12, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
 The Circulus in Universality (1858) [revised translation available] Joseph Déjacque I The circulus in universality is the destruction of every religion, of all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul, which is to say a mutable thing and an immutable one, which implies contradiction—movement excluding immobility and vice versa—but must be, quite to the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and always-mobile substance, which implies perfectibility. It is by eternal and infinite […]