Contr’un

Contr'un

“Young Russian Woman With an Infernal Machine in Handkerchief”

June 22, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
The newest addition to the Libertarian Labyrinth archive is The Beautiful Nihilist: Representations of Revolutionary Women. The project is to gather material from the popular press depicting radical and particularly militant women, in all its sensationalist and often exploitative glory. The articles and tales collected here document a familiar fascination with a political variety of femme fatale, often with a great deal of emphasis on the sexual desirability and social status of the women portrayed in presumably “unwomanly” acts of violence. At the same time, however, the tabloid presentation often allows important bits of history and biography to show through. […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy

April 25, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] If (in the passage from God and the State discussed in the last post) Bakunin has not simply changed the meaning of the word “authority” from one paragraph to the next, as he moves from his general critique to his consideration of “the authority of the bootmaker,” then we presumably have a case in which authority must indeed be rejected when considered in general, but cannot be spurned or simply pushed away (repoussé) in the messy realm of practice, where the limits of our knowledge and the limitations of our animality confront us on a regular basis. We find […]
Contr'un

Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy

April 20, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
If (in the passage from God and the State discussed in the last post) Bakunin has not simply changed the meaning of the word “authority” from one paragraph to the next, as he moves from his general critique to his consideration of “the authority of the bootmaker,” then we presumably have a case in which authority must indeed be rejected when considered in general, but cannot be spurned or simply pushed away (repoussé) in the messy realm of practice, where the limits of our knowledge and the limitations of our animality confront us on a regular basis. We find ourselves […]
Contr'un

The “authority” of the bootmaker

April 4, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve remarked elsewhere on the curious phenomenon of self-proclaimed anarchists who are much more comfortable with the language of governmentalism and authority than they are with the concept of anarchy. It is curious, but it is far from inexplicable. After all, some of the most famous pioneers of anarchist thought muddied those waters rather enthusiastically at times. Over the years, I have spent quite a bit of time working through Proudhon’s complicated engagements with property, the State, anarchy and other terms. There are potentially cautionary tales there regarding just about any strategy we might take with these complex and contested […]
Contr'un

Property, Individuality and Collective Force

January 28, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
  The events at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have occupied my thoughts since the armed occupation began, not least because I have close family connections to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the region—connections so close that I spent the first few years of my life on refuges very similar to the one at Malheur and have had a “front-row seat,” so to speak, throughout my life, where some of the thorniest debates about the federal lands are concerned. I’ve posted some of that material to the blog, and will probably post more. But the situation on the refuge […]
Contr'un

Notes on the Malheur refuge occupation

January 7, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I don’t do a lot of current events commentary here, but there are occasions where it seems both useful and necessary. What follows is notes drawn from my responses to the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, outside Burns, OR. They range from quips to more extended analysis and draw on my family connections to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, including a stint living on refuges much like Malheur in my extreme youth. I have tried not to rely on information that is not available elsewhere online. I’m posting the material because it has garnered interest on social […]
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2015-16

January 1, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ll admit a fairly deep ambivalence about 2015. On the one hand, it was supposed to be the year when I cleared my desk of a stack of book projects, while, in the end, only one of those projects got wrapped up. On the other hand, that project turned into something much more interesting than I had originally envisioned, and all the other delays really come from the same source—me getting my ideas in order and growing into my role as a historian and anthologist. I set myself a challenge last year, that none of the works would go to […]
Contr'un

Anarchism, Plain and Simple

December 22, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
  I’ll do a proper year-end round-up sometime soon and talk about a number of changes coming to the Libertarian Labyrinth, but I’ll start with some updates on publishing and translating projects. If things have been fairly quiet on the blog, it’s because virtually all my time and energy has been invested in attempting to finish up the manuscript of Anarchist Beginnings: Declarations and Professions of Faith, 1840-1920 (the book previously known as Anarchies and Anarchisms.) And that project has been a learning (and unlearning, and relearning) experience on a scale that I couldn’t have imagined when I started it, […]
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Proudhon on Land Value Taxation

December 2, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[This was written for the C4SS mutual exchange on occupancy-and-use land tenure and refers to the recently posted “General Summary” from The Theory of Taxation.] NOTE ON PROUDHON AND LAND VALUE TAXATION Those who have read all the contributions to this conversation so far might well marvel at how many different Proudhons had been invoked in its course. I think all of us are still in the blind man and the elephant stage with Proudhon, to some extent at least. His writings pose remarkable difficulties, beginning with the difficulty of even knowing what genre of writing we are dealing with […]
Contr'un

To “property” via “mutual extrication”

November 10, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve been taking part in a C4SS-sponsored discussion of occupancy-and-use property norms, “Occupancy and Use: Potential Applications and Possible Shortcomings,” which is now appearing on the Center’s website. The exchange opened with a piece by Kevin Carson, “Are We All Mutualists?,” which suggests that perhaps the answer is “yes.” A series of responses will be posted every other day, with my “Neo-Proudhonian Remarks” already posted under the title “Limiting Conditions and Local Desires.” For me, this first response was an opportunity to talk again about the development of Proudhon’s thoughts on property, but also to return to the question of […]