Extrications Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

How does property become anarchist?

March 21, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

If we want a clear indication of the gulf between the possible (resultant) anarchism suggested by Proudhon’s mature work and the historical anarchism that emerged in the late 19th century, we probably don’t have to look beyond the almost universal suspicion that Proudhon’s final works themselves mark a retreat from the anarchist project — and the fact that the resultant anarchy that seems to occupy a central place in that work simply does not seem to register among our theoretical options.

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Anarchy: Historical, Abstract and Resultant

February 9, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

What follows is a look at three possible senses of anarchy related to Proudhon’s work, together with a sketch of their possible relations as developments from one another. The intention here is to simply present some basic definitions as a kind of hypothetical framework, which can then be tested against close readings of the relevant texts. Historical anarchy: In a society organized around the principle of authority, resistance appears as anarchy, whether it is the active resistance of those oppressed or simply the friction generated by the contradictions of an authority-based society. This is the sense that Proudhon most […]

Anarchy as a Beacon and as a Focus for Synthesis

January 8, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: A synthetic anarchism is bound to pose some problems, whether we think of anarchism as an ideology or as a set of experimental practices. Most of the difficulties surround the notion of anarchy. Whether we imagine that anarchy is the ideal or principle upon which an evolving ideology should focus with increasing clarity or whether we consider it a placeholder, the name for a discovery or experimental result that we have not yet encountered in any full sense, it remains a largely negative element. As such, anarchy certainly does not provide all the practical direction […]

Theories of Anarchist Development

December 30, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

Posts in the EXTRICATIONS series: The question we’re wrestling with remains this: How do we understand the anarchist past and how does that understanding influence our action in the present? This question is ultimately inseparable from questions about how our present understanding of the anarchist project influences our engagement with the anarchist past, but one thing at a time. One important aspect of our coming-to-terms with the anarchist past has to be our general understanding of how anarchism has developed. An adequate theory of anarchist development should probably be able to: account for the historical facts (and particularly, now, for […]

The Synthesist’s Consolation

November 25, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

Posts in the series: “L’homme se trompe parce qu’il apprend.”—P.J. Proudhon One of the catalysts for the post on “Coming to Terms with the Anarchist Past,” and the particular kind of clarification it represents, has been the work I’ve been doing for an encyclopedia entry on mutualism. It felt like a project I had been working towards for close to a quarter of a century. It has turned out to be one more in a series of theoretically simple projects that have run up against the significant and unexpected difficulties presented by that complicated succession—from anarchy to “modern anarchism”—that occurred […]

Coming to Terms with the Anarchist Past

November 17, 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”] As archives and projects converge, it seems like a good time to state or restate some the working hypotheses—or shall we say contentions—at the heart of this stage of exploration. It should be clear that the central problem I’ve been attempting to address is the role of historical knowledge in modern anarchist practice and I doubt anyone will be surprised if I suggest that we still have some work to do on that front. But let’s put it boldly: The use of history in the anarchist […]

Extrications: History, Tradition, Theory

August 7, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

The initial task in these Extrications is analytic: we want to pull things apart a bit, enough to see if we can’t isolate some terms and make some useful distinction. I want to set aside this notion of the anarchist milieu as our intentionally vague term for the thing that we are examining and pulling apart. Let’s just say for now that the milieu is the social space occupied by anarchism and anarchists—and hopefully, with a little care and luck, we’ll be able to say something a bit more definite before too long.

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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 […]