Contr'un
Beyond Mutualism
[I see this post is being used as ammo in a particularly trolly attack on anarchism. Those arriving here thinking that “mutualism has been abandoned” might be interested in my tentative return to the label. […]
Year: 2013
Contr'un
Closing a chapter
I’ve been doing a lot of wrestling for some time now with my place in the universe of anarchism, and contemplating the best way to perhaps get a useful hearing for the insights of my […]
Contr'un
Book fair report
I spent about a week in California this month, to attend the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, do a bit of research at UC Berkeley, see friends and plot some publishing projects. It will […]
Working Translations
Paschal Grousset, Speech pronounced at the grave of Verdure (1873)
Speech pronounced by Paschal Grousset at the grave of Verdure My friends, an awful bit of news came yesterday to strike us with astonishment and sadness. A man that we loved, that we esteemed, […]
Anarchist Beginnings
Introducing “ANARCHISMS” + new issues of “La Frondeuse”
I’m launching a new series of pamphlets collecting introductory summaries and personal statements attempting to define anarchism in the most basic terms. In the ANARCHISMS series, the texts will be collected with very little attention […]
Bakunin Library
James Guillaume, “Proudhon: Communist” (1911)
This essay by James Guillaume is probably more historically significant than it is convincing, focusing as it does on one very early bit of Proudhon’s writing, but it is certainly an interesting interpretation. Proudhon: Communist […]
Contr'un
The Stammering Century
My review of Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century is now online at the Reason site. Check it out!
Proudhon Library
Proudhon on the State in 1861
You might expect that Proudhon’s theory of the state would be most succinctly expressed in one of his essays on the subject of the state, like “Resistance to the Revolution” of the “Small Political Catechism.” […]
Contr'un
If I had to guess…
…what was the single most important reason for “statism” becoming as prominent an anarchist keyword as it became in the early 20th century, I would have to go with Marxism. The term emerged as part […]
Contr'un
Statism: It’s not just for dentists anymore…
The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon’s treatment of “government” and “the state,” it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon’s thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like “Resistance to the Revolution,” as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind. […]