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Anarchist History: No End of Beginnings

July 21, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
After a couple of decades in the wilderness of history, in search of the elusive headwaters of the anarchist tradition, you stop beside some particularly active mountain spring and think that, while no serious seeker would every claim a single source for that tradition, you’ve probably been in the right neighborhood for some time now. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about the return trip.

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Anarchist History: Streamside Reflections and Preparations for the Journey

June 11, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “Neo-Proudhonian Anarchism (A Step toward Synthesis)” (April 19, 2018) “Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1840–1934” (May, 2019) I expect that anyone who has made the experiment—on any scale, really—can attest that it is often much easier to venture out into the wilderness than it is to find our way home again. There is undoubtedly a lesson here for historians of what we call “the anarchist tradition,” and particularly for those of us whose researches have taken us deep into the […]
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Anarchist History: Maps and Overland Guides

June 8, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1840–1934” (May, 2019) However cautious I might be about some common metaphors, I have to acknowledge that I have shown much less restraint in talking about mapping and in treating the terrain of anarchist history just a bit literally from time to time. The Libertarian Labyrinth name referred very explicitly to the experience of finding myself dropped—really of dropping myself—into the midst of a history, specifically that of the early anarchists in the United States, […]
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Anarchist History: The Metaphor of the Main Stream

June 6, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
As tools for historical and cultural understanding, metaphors are obviously in the “use with great care” category and, as often as not, reveal more about our interpretive preconceptions than they do about the material we seek to interpret. But sometimes that’s just what is called for, as what needs to be more closely examined is at least as much the lens through which we are looking as it is the object of our scrutiny.

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Reading “What is Property? — The Third Social Form

May 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Back in 2014, in the midst of some very general questioning of how we tell anarchist history, I retranslated some of the final sections of Proudhon’s What is Property? and started a close reading of the material. It was two years before I got a chance to fully complete the translation and it’s only really now, in the context of a group reading of the work on Reddit, that I’m getting a chance to return to the close reading. The largest distraction, of course, has been that more general questioning, which has borne fruit quite […]
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“Labor destroys Property” (Notes on “What is Property?”)

February 11, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] This is another bit extracted from a social media exchange elsewhere, dealing with the progression of Proudhon’s argument against both property in materials and property in product in “What is Property?” Even if it is a bit out-of-context, it should help emphasize how important getting through all of Chapter III is to understanding Proudhon’s point. And once you’ve done that, you can start your collection of weird conclusions drawn by people who didn’t get all the way through. [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I don’t think it’s unreasonable, particularly when dealing with a book that […]
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Joseph Déjacque or Imre Madách?

February 3, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
The internet is often much better at creating and perpetuating mistakes than it is at correcting them. An exemplary case is the confusion that has grown around the question of whether or not a portrait existed of Joseph Déjacque. For a long time, it appeared that Déjacque was among those important early anarchist figures for whom we could not put a face to the name. And then a portrait appeared on Wikimedia Commons—and what a portrait! Perhaps we should have know that mustache was simply too good to be true.

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Notes on Mutualism and the Problem(?) of Exchange

January 18, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is a criticism that mutualists frequently hear from communists—and we might say it dates back to the 1850s and Joseph Déjacque—that mutualism makes no fundamental break with capitalism because, among the various economic arrangements open to mutualists, we find some that involve some kind of exchange. In a social media discussion this week, the accusation took the form of a claim that “still inherently capitalist.” When it became clear that the would-be critic didn’t know much about any of the varieties of mutualism, the further claim was made that there was, in fact, no need to know anything about […]
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Anarchist History: A Mutualist’s-Eye-View

January 1, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
My understanding of anarchist history is clearly—and quite consciously—the product of certain trajectories through the field of anarchist studies and through the sectarian landscape of the anarchist milieus. It is perhaps important to underline this fact, particular as it is such a central point of my analysis that the dominant narratives regarding anarchist history have a similar character—and that “anarchist history” might, through relatively small changes in the times and places where it was told, have looked very different and perhaps gone by different names.

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Anarchism as a Fundamentally Unfinished Project

December 16, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
My argument about the anarchist tradition, in its most modest form, is that there is nothing about the history of variously “anarchist” ideas—particularly when the tale begins in 1840 or before—that precludes a real, future convergence toward an anarchism that both focuses on anarchy (in its strongest senses) and provides a vehicle for the sort of social reforms that have most often been promoted in the name of “anarchism.”

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