Working Translations

collectivism

Summary of Social Economy – I

May 19, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Here’s the first section of a text introducing the ideas of Jean-Guillaume-César-Alexandre-Hippolyte baron de Colins, the chief theorist of “rational socialism,” also known as “collectivism.” Although Colins and his school are now largely forgotten, they were an important influence in the period of the First International. Indeed, in the early debates between mutualism and collectivism, the influence of Colins’ collectivism was probably as significant as that of Marx. This first section is largely biographical. Summary of Social Economy According to the Ideas of Colins  Agathon de Potter I composed, a long time ago, an extremely brief summary of the social […]
Working Translations

To the Point! To Action!! (4 of 4)

May 9, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Part 1] – [Part 2] – [Part 3] XIX With governmental control, such as was held by fallen administrations and as we have preserved until the present time, we can boldly address a challenge to anyone who would seriously accept public functions, and thus diminish the personnel of two formidable armies that weigh on the liberties and the fortunes of France: the army of the offices and that of the barracks. We can challenge them, consequently, not to proclaim liberty—if they do that, I will laugh—but to put that liberty into action, and lead them to be something other than […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon on Force and Rights (War and Peace)

March 31, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
These extracts from Proudhon’s War and Peace will appear in The Mutualist #1 (which will itself appear in the next couple of days.) It’s useful to recall that Proudhon treated “justice” almost entirely as a matter of the balance of forces, and acknowledged that there would be “degrees” of justice, just as there are of liberty, or of the strength and present expression of all human faculties. As early as What is Property?, Proudhon gave a historical account of the development of justice in its earliest stages: balance of strength, followed by balance of strength and guile. His scattered treatments […]
Utopian and Scientific

Pierre Leroux, “Individualism and Socialism” (1834)

February 4, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
At times, even the most resolute hearts, those most firmly fixed on the sacred belief of progress, come to lose courage and to feel full of disgust at the present. In the 16th century, when one murdered in our civil wars, it was in the name of God and with a crucifix in the hand; it was a question of the most sacred things, of things which, when once they have procured our conviction and our faith so legitimately dominate our nature that it has nothing to do but obey, and even its most beautiful appanage disappears thus voluntarily before the divine will. In the name of what principle does one today send off, by telegraph, pitiless orders, and transform proletarian soldiers into the executioners of their own class? Why has our epoch seen cruelties which recall St. Bartholemew? Why have men been fanaticized to the point of making them coldly slaughter the elderly, women, and children? Why has the Seine rolled with murders which recalls the arquebuscades of window of the Louvre? It is not in the name of God and eternal salvation that it is done. It is in the name of material interests.

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Working Translations

Errico Malatesta, “A Little Theory” (1892)

May 29, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] Revolt rumbles everywhere. Here it is the expression of an idea, and there the result of a need; most often it is the consequence of the intertwining of needs and ideas which mutually generate and reinforce each other. It fastens itself to the causes of evil or strikes close by, it is conscious or instinctive, it is humane or brutal, generous or narrowly selfish, but it always grows and extends itself. It is history which advances: it is useless to take time to complain about the routes that it chooses, since these routes have been marked out by all […]
Proudhon Library

Proudhon’s projects

December 17, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”]   [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] During his lifetime Proudhon was frequently accused of being primarily a critic, a destroyer, and within anarchist circles it is largely his destructive critique of property rights that we remember. In some ways, this is a curious turn of events, since so much of his work was devoted to constructing his People’s Bank, his theory of Progress, his evolving theory of property, etc. When his Œuvres Complètes was assembled in the late 1860s, apparently the editors felt the need to combat that perception, and their advertisement for the series […]
Proudhon Library

Another bit on “socialism,” from Proudhon’s “The Federative Principle”

November 5, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
Just another of those interesting definitions of “socialism,” from the mid-19th century. I first encountered this particular passage in Proudhon’s posthumously published study of Napoleon III, but is originally from the still-untranslated second part of The Federative Principle. “Qui dit socialisme, dans le bon et vrai sens du mot, dit naturellement liberté du commerce et de l’industrie, mutualité de l’assurance, réciprocité du crédit, peréquation de l’impôt, équilibre et sécurité des fortunes, participation de l’ouvrier aux chances des entreprises, inviolabilité de la famille dans la transmission héréditaire.” “Whoever says socialism, in the good and true sense of the word, says naturally […]
translations

More Proudhon on the origin of property

October 27, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last] Here’s another little bit from “Justice,” which immediately follows the last passages linked. In it, Proudhon explains how, in the very early phases of the “shock of ideas,” property emerged as a social convention precisely because human beings had not yet learned to question their own absolutism. Elsewhere, however, he makes it clear that our “absolutism” is not simply something we need to “get over” or grow out of, but an important enabling component in ethical evolution. This is part of the revision of the material Rafael posted, once Proudhon had decided that the antinomies did not resolve themselves. […]