An Anarchist-Collectivist View of Collectivist Anarchism

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post a progress report. The first round of proposals brought a mixed sort of feedback, which led to another long round of research and strategizing. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback, even if it was of a sort I ultimately couldn’t accommodate.

I’ll have more complete details soon, but the good news is that we’ve settled on an initial set of 6 volumes: a general Bakunin Reader, The Knouto-Germanic Empire, the writings on Mazzini, two additional volumes of essays, and a collectivist anarchist reader, featuring a number of Bakunin’s allies. And we have left the door open to do more if it seems appropriate. The emphasis will be on published writings from Bakunin’s anarchist period, and the goal will be to take the writings gathered by James Guillaume and Max Nettlau as representative of the collectivist anarchist tradition, and to give them as first-rate a presentation in English as we can. It will be a different sort of collection than those published in French and German, but I am getting the sense from the feedback that I have received that it will fill an important gap in the English-language histories of anarchism.

I’ll be making adjustments to the volumes I had roughed out, and I expect we’ll really get started on the work of translation around the first of the year.