democracy

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Revenge of the Return of Anarchy and Democracy (Revisited)

June 27, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur
The most recent issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review includes an article by Wayne Price, “Do Anarchists Support Democracy? The Opinions of Errico Malatesta,” in which he once again takes up the defense of “democracy” as at least consistent with anarchist principles. A brief discussion of the article on the North American Anarchist Studies Association list picked up threads from the 2017 C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on anarchy and democracy.

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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. […]
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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 – […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Note on Anarchism and the Rhetoric of Democracy

August 14, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
The battle over the relationship between anarchism and democracy rages on, without necessarily gaining much in clarity. It shouldn’t surprise us, really. The earliest explicit proponents of anarchy had to find a way to place anarchy among a range of otherwise governmentalist possibilities, so we have inherited constructions like “the best form of government is that which does not govern,” leaving us to figure out whether anarchy is the last form of government (“pure democracy”) or the first form of something else–or whether perhaps the choice is largely rhetorical. To be clear, I think the choice is more than rhetorical, […]