Working Translations

Proudhon Library

New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice Of Revolutions

September 28, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
NEW PROPOSITIONS DEMONSTRATED IN THE PRACTICE OF REVOLUTIONS 1 — The interests established by society are mobile, subject to a constant and fundamentally unstable shifting. 2 — Fixity, permanence or perpetuity in the relations of interests is a chimera. 3 — That mobility of interests is the primary source of revolutions. 4 — An interest, however unjust it may be, can only be abolished on the condition of being replaced by another, which itself could appear every bit as unjust later. 5 — The human mind has a horror of the void; it does not accept pure negation, even if […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, “Does Socialism Truly Want to Be International?” (1920s)

September 13, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_1half] Does Socialism Truly Want to Be International? (MS 1951, Max Nettlau Papers, IISH) (no date, 1920s) This question would appear to be useless after a century of international socialist professions of faith, after the flowering of several Internationals and the struggles of sincere socialists of all shades against nationalism. But it appears to me that it needs to be raised again in some connections, among other that of natural wealth, raw material dependent on the local fertility of the soil and other raw materials so unequally distributed in the subsoil. To whom do these natural resources, whose local distribution […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Max Nettlau, The Struggle against the State (1908)

August 12, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] The Struggle against the State [Les Temps Nouveaux, 13 no. 51 (April 18, 1908) : 3-4.] ———– What follows is not a translation, but a free and somewhat expanded summary of an article [“Are there New Fields for Anarchist Activity?”] that I wrote for the revue Mother Earth of New-York (December 1907, pp. 433-444), and as I have been led to make some new digressions, the comrades who publish that revue are completely absolved of any literary responsibility for the present writing. I I have often asked myself why anarchist ideas, which appears so clear to us and add […]
Working Translations

Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, “Questions of Tactics” (1890)

August 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
QUESTIONS OF TACTICS ————– We have received the following letter from one of our comrades at El Productor of Barcelona. It seems good to reproduce it, for, aside from a few errors of judgment, it contains advice worth considering, and, in the response that we expect to make to our friends in Spain, if we manage to find and demonstrate the causes of the disorganization of the anarchists, the cause of the inconsistency of the groups and their inactivity, we could find there the remedy and some indications of the tactics to follow: Barcelona, August 7, 1890. Comrades of La […]
Bakunin Library

Ricardo Mella, “Collectivism” (1891)

August 2, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Collectivism Gone are the days when socialist sentimentality expected everything from the mother country and demanded everything of her. Gone are the days when the revolution was just a feeling, and declaimed comically against individualism face to face with the supreme power of the state or of society, its client. Gone are the days when socialism and revolution had no philosophy but that of the heart, no principle of right and justice but that of universal love. All these concepts, all these ideas are only among us as a remnant of what was never to be, as a residue pointing […]
Working Translations

Ricardo Mella, “Spain” (1897)

July 30, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
Spain. Time passes and, far from improving, the situation in Spain grows worse and worse. The colonial wars go badly and the hope of a swift pacification is abandoned. The exceptional state of Barcelona has not changed; the hundreds of wretches arbitrarily detained in the prisons and at Montjuich only await a bit of belated justice to set them free or else to consummate that legal crime that, taking the lives of some, will cast the others forever into the penal institutions that the mother country reserves for the best of her children. Today, as yesterday, some ignorant proletarians march […]
Saint Ravachol

A Handwritten Manuscript by Ravachol (1892)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
A HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT BY RAVACHOL Since his condemnation to death, Ravachol has written a great deal in prison. Here is a long handwritten text that we have been able to obtain, not without great difficulties. We have confided the reproduction of this interesting document to the house of Sédard in Lyon. It is written on two pages, and in it Ravachol explains his theories. [The manuscript combines bad spelling, horrible penmanship, rotten grammar and nonexistent punctuation. Decoding it has been a long process. But here is a rough translation.] Society can only be improved by a complete transformation of its […]
Saint Ravachol

The Voice of the Penal Colony (1893)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE VOICE OF THE PENAL COLONY While the populations panic and cheer the hangman tsar, while the bourgeois and the governmentals congratulate themselves on the success of their stratagems and observe that human stupidity is always so great, a protest must come, proud and energetic, to remind the bourgeois that there are still free men, even, and especially, in their prisons and their penal colonies. We must remind our leaders, who, in the joy of their triumph, lick the boots of the hangman of nihilists and whipper of women, that in the French penal colonies are also found those whose […]
Saint Ravachol

An Unexpected Interview (March 28, 1892)

July 11, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
AN UNEXPECTED INTERVIEW Conversation with the untraceable anarchist A reporter who has long followed the socialist and anarchist meetings came last night to tell us that, in a café near one of our great stations, he had encountered the elusive Ravachol, after whom all the bloodhounds of the prefecture of police have been sent. After we made inquiries about his identity, we thought we could welcome, at least on the grounds of curiosity, the details you are about to read: — There are many reasons why they won’t pinch Ravachol any time soon: first, that name is not his own; […]