Contr’un

Contr'un

Extrications

August 6, 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”] It’s been roughly 25 years since I first committed myself to the study of anarchist history and theory. And I can break that span down into three general periods: two decades during which I understood the work as a simple matter of “filling the gaps” in a traditional anarchist narrative that I had not yet come to seriously challenge, five years during which the tensions between anarchist history and anarchist tradition have posed all kinds of theoretical and practical problems, and, at this point, a few […]
Contr'un

Archive Adjustments

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[dropcap]Time[/dropcap] passes, and projects that were serving some useful purpose in the larger work no longer seem so vital. The various archives in the Libertarian Labyrinth are no exception to this rule. So, after one of my periodical reassessments, several archival projects are merging with others. As I have noted in the past, the Labyrinth has always been a bit like leaving my file cabinets open on the internet–a working archive, rather than a formal exhibit, with all of the problems and untidiness you might expect from such a project. But it has allowed me to share a large amount […]
Contr'un

Antinomies of Democracy

July 21, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
  [This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Antinomies of Democracy [Including responses to Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson and Wayne Price, 
with thoughts on a neo-Proudhonian recuperation of “democratic practices”] I thought I had pretty well had my say on the subject of democracy and anarchy, but comparing the material I’ve written to the contributions I’ve submitted, I see a couple of responses languishing among the drafts. I also find that the real impasse in my exchanges with Wayne Price leaves me considerably less than satisfied. […]
Contr'un

Anarchism without Anarchy

July 17, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third] [This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Anarchism without Anarchy [including a response to Wayne Price] The rampant dictatorial governments in Italy, Spain and Russia, which arouse such envy and longing among the more reactionary and timid parties across the world, are supplying dispossessed ‘democracy’ with a sort of new virginity. Thus we see the creatures of the old regimes, well-accustomed to the wicked art of politics, responsible for repression and massacres of working people, re-emerging – where they do not lack the courage – […]
Contr'un

Social, but Still Not Democratic

July 15, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] [This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Social, but Still Not Democratic As long as there has been something called “anarchism,” anarchists have been struggling to define it—and, as often as not, they have been in struggle against other self-identified anarchists. At this point in our history, this seems both hard to deny and pointless to regret. These are not battles that can be won “once and for all,” since the struggle over meaning is just essentially the […]
Contr'un

Embracing the Antinomies

July 15, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
  [This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Embracing the Antinomies [including a response to Gabriel Amadej] It should be clear that one of the key conflicts in these debates about anarchy and democracy is a struggle over the nature of anarchism. And it is probably safe to say that nearly all anarchists wrestle with the difficulties of defining that term. Part of the difficulty is that anarchism is simultaneously a kind of system and a matter of tradition. It is at once a political—or anti-political—ideology, […]
Contr'un

Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide

July 15, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide ———- Philosophical Considerations If we had the luxury of sticking to the philosophical terrain, the question of distinguishing anarchy and democracy would, it seems to me, pose very few problems. Certainly, it would be unlikely to pose the persistent, seemingly intractable problems that it does at present. Anarchy describes the absence of rule, while democracy describes rule by “the people,” and it seems fairly uncontroversial to maintain that the two concepts fall on […]
Contr'un

Occupancy-and-use: Response to Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder

July 14, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] [This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of an exchange on occupancy-and-use property.] At base, Kevin and I disagree about the possibility of, as I put it, “a truly anarchic space, outside the legal order and beyond the realm of permissions and prohibitions.” That’s a serious disagreement, since it amounts, for me, to a disagreement about the possibility of anarchy. If I was, as Kevin suggests, implicitly acknowledging any “set of rules” governing property, it would amount to a complete failure of my project. The point of giving familiar, more-or-less legal names to […]
Contr'un

Occupancy-and-Use: Neo-Proudhonian Remarks

July 14, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of an exchange on occupancy-and-use property. Those familiar with the rest of my work will recognize the proposal for “mutual extrication” as essentially a reintroduction, in different terms, of the “gift economy of property.”  There is a great deal that could be said in response to Kevin Carson’s opening statement, from the “neo-Proudhonian” mutualist perspective, but I’ll try to keep things at least relatively short. Like Kevin, my introduction to the notion of occupancy-and-use land tenure was through the works of Benjamin R. Tucker and the Liberty […]
Contr'un

Mutual Exchange on “Anarchy and Democracy”

July 2, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been participating in the C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on the topic of “Anarchy and Democracy,” along with a star-studded assembly of anarchists and libertarians from various tendencies. While this is technically the June exchange, it has actually been in progress since early April, with the most recent contribution appearing just a few days ago. As a result, some parts of the debate have had a long time to develop, while others have not, and the order of the contributions and the order of their publication are considerably different in some cases. In the interest of clarifying a few things that […]