Contr’un

Contr'un

Anarchy as a Beacon and as a Focus for Synthesis

January 8, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: A synthetic anarchism is bound to pose some problems, whether we think of anarchism as an ideology or as a set of experimental practices. Most of the difficulties surround the notion of anarchy. Whether we imagine that anarchy is the ideal or principle upon which an evolving ideology should focus with increasing clarity or whether we consider it a placeholder, the name for a discovery or experimental result that we have not yet encountered in any full sense, it remains a largely negative element. As such, anarchy certainly does not provide all the practical direction […]
Contr'un

Theories of Anarchist Development

December 30, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: The question we’re wrestling with remains this: How do we understand the anarchist past and how does that understanding influence our action in the present? This question is ultimately inseparable from questions about how our present understanding of the anarchist project influences our engagement with the anarchist past, but one thing at a time. One important aspect of our coming-to-terms with the anarchist past has to be our general understanding of how anarchism has developed. An adequate theory of anarchist development should probably be able to: account for the historical facts (and particularly, now, for […]
Contr'un

Welcome to the CONTR’UN blog

December 17, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Basically, the Contr’un is the star of the show here, the Whitmanesque subject who contains multitudes and is not contained between hat and boots, who spills out over all the property lines we might draw, at the same time drawing the world in without attempting to claim exclusive domain.

[…]

Contr'un

The Synthesist’s Consolation

November 25, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Posts in the series: “L’homme se trompe parce qu’il apprend.”—P.J. Proudhon One of the catalysts for the post on “Coming to Terms with the Anarchist Past,” and the particular kind of clarification it represents, has been the work I’ve been doing for an encyclopedia entry on mutualism. It felt like a project I had been working towards for close to a quarter of a century. It has turned out to be one more in a series of theoretically simple projects that have run up against the significant and unexpected difficulties presented by that complicated succession—from anarchy to “modern anarchism”—that occurred […]
Contr'un

Coming to Terms with the Anarchist Past

November 17, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Posts in the series: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] As archives and projects converge, it seems like a good time to state or restate some the working hypotheses—or shall we say contentions—at the heart of this stage of exploration. It should be clear that the central problem I’ve been attempting to address is the role of historical knowledge in modern anarchist practice and I doubt anyone will be surprised if I suggest that we still have some work to do on that front. But let’s put it boldly: The use of history in the anarchist […]
Contr'un

Contr’un collections 6 & 7

September 8, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
Corvus Editions made an appearance at the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair last month, and among the new titles were two new collections from the Contr’un blog: Contr’un 6: “God and the State” and the Question of “Legitimate” Authority Contr’un 7: Anarchy and Democracy They are now available online.
Contr'un

Extrications: History, Tradition, Theory

August 7, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
The initial task in these Extrications is analytic: we want to pull things apart a bit, enough to see if we can’t isolate some terms and make some useful distinction. I want to set aside this notion of the anarchist milieu as our intentionally vague term for the thing that we are examining and pulling apart. Let’s just say for now that the milieu is the social space occupied by anarchism and anarchists—and hopefully, with a little care and luck, we’ll be able to say something a bit more definite before too long.

[…]