Working Translations
Year: 2021
Featured articles
Margins and Problems: Enter the Anarchist
The 1840s opened with a bang, with Proudhon’s declaration: je suis anarchiste. When we’re examining the conditions of possibility for various possible anarchisms, the emergence of anarchist as a role or identity, a means of self-identification, is undoubtedly a moment that will be hard to top. We have seen the various contexts in which libertarian analyses had already emerged—and the degree to which they were emerging from analyses of the mechanisms of government and authority, whether it was a question of the deconstructive reading of someone like Thomas Skidmore or the alleged mental lapse of P. W. Grayson. Something anarchistic was apparently in the air, but it was a decisive step to give it a name—and what a name!—and also to claim that name as a position within the field of social systems. […]
poetry
Georgette Ryner
What have you come to do in the round-dance, in the eternal ronde of the living—tomorrow the danse macabre and ronde of the dead? What have you come to do then, pretty little children? […]
poetry
E. Armand, “En Route, Pionniers et Précurseurs ! / Onward, Pioneers and Precursors!” (1928)
We took up our staffs, girded our loins and off we went. A few of us, alone, by the first side road. […]
Featured articles
E. Armand, “L’Individualisme de la Joie / The Individualism of Joy” (1924)
A painful misadventure had just befallen me, to which I owe the addition of some new wrinkles. It was not the first time in my life that I have, as the saying goes, “left some flesh among the brambles.” But this time, I felt that I risked leaving more than my fleece or my blood: I risked leaving my love for the joy of living. And that is serious. It is the worst that can happen to us, to you or to me, to no longer feel love for the joy of living. It matters little if we lose our reputation or our money, or the esteem of those around us, or, in the worst case, our liberty (and that is still a terrible thing.) But there is no loss that can compare to those of the love of the joy of living. […]
Featured articles
Margins and Problems: Individualism and Socialism
The essay that follows originally appeared in 2010 and, for a time, lent its name, “Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule,” to what is now the “Contrun” blog. It is very much a creature of certain contexts specific to the reemergence of mutualism as an anarchist tendency—contexts that alternately freed and constrained my projects at the time. But it is also a pretty good introduction to Pierre Leroux and his influence on the anarchist tradition. […]
Featured articles
Working Translations
E. Armand, “En-dehorism” (1936)
« L’en dehorisme » Qu’est en résumé, ce qu’on appelle « l’endehorisme » — mot barbare s’il en fut — et que condense la ligne de conduite idéologique qu’on trouve sur la couverture de chacun […]
Working Translations
Léon Neveu, “je suis ce subversif / I am that subversive” (1936)
The being of good faith who discovers life / Must realize that if they are innocent, / Everything that is offered them is so demeaning, / That if they acceded to it, their faith would fade. […]
Featured articles
Margins and Problems: Disquisitions and Demands
This is obviously a narrow conception of anarchism, but also one that we will find, combined with other elements, in quite a number of the works he will examine moving forward. In 1840, for example, Proudhon will assure us that, thanks in part to his anarchistic analysis, “the despotism of the will will be succeeded by the reign of reason”—but it isn’t at all clear that the transition will be rapid or the road smooth. […]