Constructing an Anarchism: An-Archy

Constructing an Anarchism: An-Archy

From Libertarian Labyrinth by Shawn P. Wilbur

The first order of business is to again thank everyone who has followed along—and particularly those who have taken the opportunity to comment. A special shout-out to the folks on the Anews Podcast, who took some time again last week to talk about “Constructing Anarchisms.” The responses—sometimes even the trollish ones—have helped make clear the various little course-corrections that seem necessary. There is necessarily a lot of the work on this project happening just-in-time (or, like today, just-past-time) and the kind of active engagement required on my end is a lot easier to maintain when there are signs of life elsewhere.

Among the course-corrections you’ll notice moving forward is a slight change in my list of building-block concepts. Mutualism and federation are out, replaced by individualism and guarantism. As will be clear when we get there, these are fairly small shifts in focus, but they represent clarifications for me, prompted in part by feedback received on the early material. 

On, then, to An-Archy, hyphenated in this way to underline the fact that there are really two concepts—anarchy and the archy it intends to do without—that will have to be addressed.

Two Working Definitions

As we turn to my construction-in-progress, I hope to provide two slightly different resources for those of you who intend to attempt your own construction later. I obviously need to provide some fairly straightforward definitions for the concepts I’ll be using, together with some indication of how they fit together to form a useful anarchism. But it is also important to underline the extent to which these specific conceptualizations are choices made within specific contexts—and then to explore the background of those choices with enough care to make others’ choices easier. Sometimes it will also be necessary to make more than one choice, provide more than one definition, while clarifying why that is a necessity. And, of course, explaining the twelve concepts on which I will focus will require addressing a range of other, related concepts.

Addressing An-Archy, perhaps we can begin with a very simple, structural definition and a general observation:

☞ As should already be clear, I think we have to treat anarchy as a still-emerging concept, in part because we are still coming to terms with the precise nature of the archy it seeks to eliminate. Perhaps that’s the way we should be thinking about all concepts of any importance. In The Theory of Property, Proudhon observed that “Humanity proceeds by approximations” (including, significantly, “the approximation of an-archy”) and I think we have to suspect that one of the ways that archy manifests itself is the form of approximations taken for something more finished and persistent. That’s a question we’ll undoubtedly have to return to at various points in our exploration. For now, let’s just emphasize that most of our “definitions” of concepts like anarchy will really be more like descriptions of some one of its aspects or applications.

☞ That said, we can point with a good deal of confidence at some of the more prominent aspects of the reigning archy: hierarchy, authority, governmentalism, oppression, exploitation, etc. In my model construction, I want to focus on questions of social relations and their structure, so let’s say that, in this context, anarchy entails horizontality, the complete absence of hierarchy. While I am prepared to recognize every sort of difference between individuals and groups of individuals, and to attempt to account for the practical consequences of those differences, it appears to me that every attempt to translate those differences into inequality (in the sense of social inequality, the persistent elevation of any individual or group above any others on the basis of their identities or social roles) is necessarily going to find itself at odds with the most basic sorts of anarchist critique.

This approach is narrow, in the sense that it is focused on particular structures of social relations, but also quite broad in other ways. The archy that it opposes is not simply capitalism, the state-form, patriarchy or any of the other specific specific hierarchy (all of which can be critiqued from a variety of perspectives), but instead the general pretense that every social body must have a “head,” that someone must always “lay down the law,” etc. It identifies a particular target, a particular archic way of looking at the world, but makes no particular claims about the reasons for the hegemony or ubiquity of the archy it opposes.

Compared to the conceptions of anarchy already introduced, it undoubtedly seems a bit tame. And it says something at once amusing and important about anarchist ideas that we might begin with an opposition to what is arguably the basic structure of the majority of our social institutions and still feel like maybe we’ve haven’t made a good start. But let’s see where this definition takes us and what it contributes to the specific project of a shareable, synthetic anarchism I have proposed, while we also explore larger contexts and other options.

A Historical Interlude

One way to contextualize specific conceptualizations is to compare them to those made in the past, which are not always the shining moments of clarity that we might imagine they were. When anarchism emerged as keyword, ideology and movement in the 1870s, for example, there was a considerable amount of baggage already associated with the term, as well as a considerable amount of not always accessible history accumulated in what was at that time still a largely undocumented anarchist past.

Our hyphenated an-archy threatens to drag us into a confrontation with the details of that emergence and perhaps we should just go with the flow. That form can perhaps be seen as a nod to Proudhon and the anar-chie of 1840, which as good an “authority” as Kropotkin assures us was not quite the anarchy of the collectivists or anarchist communists. In the essay “On Order,” he began by noting that “a party devoted to action, a party representing a new tendency, seldom has the opportunity of choosing a name for itself.” He discusses the beggars, sans-culottes and nihilists, who were all presumably named by their opponents, and then presents this rather remarkable origin story for anarchism:

It was the same with the anarchists. When a party emerged within the International which denied authority to the Association and also rebelled against authority in all its forms, this party at first called itself federalist, then anti-statist or anti-authoritarian. At that period they actually avoided using the name anarchist. The word an-archy (that is how it was written then) seemed to identify the party too closely with the Proudhonists, whose ideas about economic reform were at that time opposed by the International. But it is precisely because of this — to cause confusion — that its enemies decided to make use of the name; after all, it made it possible to say that the very name of the anarchist proved that their only ambition was to create disorder and chaos without caring about the result.

Forget the anarchists who actually seized the opportunity to call themselves “anarchists.” What Kropotkin will distinguish as “modern anarchism”—itself a curious characterization, as anarchism was at that time really a new label—was named by its enemies—the Marxist?—in order to “cause confusion.”

And the “modern” anarchist communists learned to live with it…

It’s a weird story, which seems to play ideological games with the historical facts—and, in the long run, it wasn’t a story even Kropotkin could stick to. Proudhon would reenter the story of anarchism in later tellings. And perhaps it was always “the Proudhonists” who were the target of Kropotkin’s comments, although they were not particular fond of the language of an-archy. Most likely, Kropotkin was just repeating bits of ideological hearsay. After all, by the time he became involved with the International in 1872, the “Proudhonists,” who had been instrumental in the founding of the organization and they rather swiftly purged from it, were really a distant memory.

There are indications, too, that Kropotkin had yet to really engage with Proudhon’s work directly. In 1883, Marie Le Compte (responsible for the less famous, but nearly simultaneous other English translation of “God and the State,” reported to Benjamin R. Tucker’s Liberty these details from Kropotkin about his activities in prison:

At 10 I read Proudhon half an hour, then take five minutes’ exercise by whirling my chair over my head, then read Proudhon. . . . . . At 2 the guard comes to say promenade in the court. I promenade half an hour, then write on my “Prisons of Siberia” for two hours (all I am ever able), then read Proudhon.

Chair-whirling Kropotkin is one of those images worth a side-trip, I think. More immediately worth our attention is the potential mix of confusion and uncertainty about that anarchist past that informed the formation of “modern anarchism.” Back in 1881, Kropotkin tells us that “the anarchist party quickly accepted the name it had been given” and then goes on to explain how the ideological conflicts were presumably dealt with by a return to the sources.

So the word [anarchist] returned to its basic, normal, common meaning, as expressed in 1816 by the English philosopher Bentham, in the following terms: “The philosopher who wished to reform a bad law”, he said, “does not preach an insurrection against it…. The character of the anarchist is quite different. He denies the existence of the law, he rejects its validity, he incites men to refuse to recognize it as law and to rise up against its execution”. The sense of the word has become wider today; the anarchist denies not just existing laws, but all established power, all authority; however its essence has remained the same: it rebels — and this is what it starts from — against power and authority in any form.

If, however, you were not expecting Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the Panopticon, as the source for the “basic, common meaning” of anarchy—particularly as the rest of the explanation sounds an awful lot like Proudhon—well, you’re not alone. And, if we didn’t know about all of that furious later reading of Proudhon (and chair-whirling), it would be hard, I think, to avoid noticing the similarities between the emergence of that explicit anarchism and certain all-too-familiar kinds of entryism. When I first read “On Order” in the context of my work on the language of anarchy, I could help but think of this spicy, but probably apocryphal bit from Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism:

There is a story that, when the Communist International was formed, a delegate objected to the name. Referring to all these groups he said: “But there are already communists.” Lenin answered: “Nobody ever heard of them, and when we get through with them nobody ever will.”

Placing Kropotkin in the villain’s role was even a kind of thought experiment I played out in a long-ago post on “the Benthamite anarchism and the origins of anarchist history.” Unsurprisingly, the idea of Bread Santa as the bad guy was too alien even for much outrage. Fair enough. We know the essay was not Kropotkin’s last or best attempt to engage with the anarchist past. We also know, I think, that it was not the last silly thing he said about the “Proudhonian” parts of that past. So what are the takeaways from this particular episode? Maybe these:

This anarchism thing never been easy.

We all have to start somewhere.

Sometimes even our best and brightest have been a bit off the mark, even in relation to the basics.

Again with the Etymology…

I don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy on etymological considerations. That’s the sort of thing that is all too prevalent in online discussions of anarchism. And we’ve already touched on some of the relevant details. But let’s review a few key bits and raise a couple of new questions.

We are pursuing anarchy as conceived through the broader of the proposed etymologies, as an-arche. The prefix an– is privative, which, according to the OED, means “consisting in or marked by the absence or loss of some quality or attribute that is normally present.” We recognize in arche a concept that, as Stephen Pearl Andrews put it, “curiously combines, in a subtle unity of meaning, the idea of origin or beginning, and hence of elementary principle, with that of government or rule.” Go in search of the other significant uses of arche and the combinations get curious indeed. So when you put the two together you should at least expect to do without an awful lot of things that you might otherwise expect to be present, with the absences being particularly noticeable among things that might pretend to be eternal, essential, certain or absolute.

We aren’t going to solve theoretical or ideological problems with even the best dictionary. But it’s probably worth noting that there is nothing about the word anarchy that precludes broad interpretations, sweeping denunciations, whether we’re talking about something like Proudhon’s anti-absolutism or the insurrectionary desire to “to finally come to daggers with life.” (And this might not be a bad time to recall that, for Proudhon, insurrection was a Plan B to which he clung for much of his life. See “My Testament, or Society of Avengers.”) Indeed, it is probably when interpreted most broadly, most sweepingly, that is is most shareable, even if it is not in that form that it will seem most appealing to some who might be invited to share.

The Anarchist Question

It’s never been easy. This is the horn that I would like to stop blowing about now, but if folks have spent time with any significant fraction of the material presented so far, I imagine the point has been made.

If we go back to the beginnings of the anarchist tradition, we find that the clearest conceptions of anarchy were complex, with multiple meanings in play. (See “Proudhon’s Barbaric Yawp,” “Anarchy, Understood in All its Senses.”) And sometimes the conceptions were not as clear as they might have been, if only because anarchist thought was a work in progress. (“Anarchy: Historical, Abstract and Resultant”)

Moving forward through the anarchist past, we encounter a range of difficulties that have made the transmission of ideas from generation to generation, or even just between contemporary factions, anything but clear and simple. We can’t escape the fact that ignorance and confusion have, at times, been woven into the fabric of anarchist tradition, nor should we neglect the fact that the urge to rectify that sort of error has been persistent enough to almost count as an anarchist current on its own. Almost from the beginning, students of anarchists ideas have proposed means of coming to terms with the anarchist past, often seesawing between despair and optimism. (“The Bankruptcy of Beliefs,” “The Rising Anarchism,” “The Anarchist Question.”) We might seesaw a bit ourselves, seeing how perennial some of the questions we face have been throughout the anarchist past, but I think there is something reassuring in finding that the questions have already been asked, often by some of the most familiar names in anarchist history, even if those investigations have not always received the attention they perhaps deserve.

A Theory of Archy

One of the things I’ve learned about the study of the anarchist past is that many of the things we imagine it can’t provide us are indeed there, ready and waiting, but we tend not to find them until we’ve done enough work on our own to know what we lack. Five years ago, when I wrote “Toward a General Theory of Archy,” archy was really just another in the series of neologisms that filled my writing at the time. I knew that I had reached certain limits, however temporary, in my reading of the “classics,” where the shifting vocabularies and conceptual toolkits add layers of complexity to ideas that are already challenging. So I was expanding my own conceptual toolkit, with mixed success, trying to establish some comparatively fixed points to which I could relate the shifting senses of more familiar keywords in the works of Proudhon, Bakunin, etc.

Archy is not really arche in any of its historical senses. At first, I simply wanted a kind of place-holder for all of the things that anarchists have opposed historically. I discovered parallels between Proudhon’s critiques of capitalism and of governmentalism, then hoped to extend those critiques to institutions, like the patriarchal family, that Proudhon had not adequately analyzed or critiqued. Much of what I will be sharing in the coming weeks was ultimately a product of that project, although the insights came in fits and starts. (“Escheat and Anarchy,” like “Anarchy, Understood in All its Senses,” emerged from the correction of existing translations.)

For a few years, I spoke about archy in public forums and including it in my writings, as if the notion had secured its place in historical anarchist theory—and there weren’t many bold enough to call my bluff. And eventually it was no longer a bluff, as I found that the term did indeed have a certain currency in certain 20th century anarchist circles. By the time I wrote “Archy vs. Anarchy,” I didn’t need to make or avoid any claims about the novelty of the term—but I suppose there may be plenty of other more or less unauthorized innovations there.

“Archy vs. Anarchy” is a simple introduction to the anarchism I’ll be constructing over the coming weeks. I have paired the three short readings on archy with René Furth’s long, but very interesting article on “The Anarchist Question,” as preparation for my post on Tradition, rather than revisiting the material from the “Extrications” series, which some of you may have already read. I will summarize what I think is useful from those exploratory writings. Those trying to pace their reading schedule should notice that next week’s readings will include Voline’s essay “On Synthesis,” which, again, some participants will have already read, and that “Escheat and Anarchy” will be more thoroughly discussed in Week 7, when we look at Proudhon’s theory of exploitation.

There are 72 Comments

This guy smells like a "market anarchist". The name of his website "The Libertarian Labyrinth" should be an immediate red flag (no pun intended), and his focus on Proudhon and mutualism is another. How closely do these hopelessly confused "free-market Libertarians" identify Proudhon with their anarcho-capitalist pseudophilosophy? Look no further than the article What is Mutualism on Libertarianism.org.

lol I'm dying to hear why you believe the name of his site is a red flag. I'm pretty sure I know why, but would love it if you explained it.

Not a market anarchist, but perhaps being a synthesist, is still enough to set off platformists (or even just those who name themselves after them.) D'Amato is, of course, notoriously unrepresentative of any tendency but his own. If you want to understand my take on Proudhon and mutualism, it would be easy to just look at the book chapter I dedicated to the question. As for "libertarian," was that a totally bad-faith bit or are you really ignorant of the long-standing and continued anarchist use of the term?

I think it is possible for the family institution to exist without it being patriarchal or hierarchical, but it must be devoid of discipline.

Having rescued myself from the Libertarian Party/anarcho-capitalist swamp some thirty years ago, after meeting some real anarchists in Chicago, I feel confident in my ability to diagnose the cancer of "market anarchism" whenever it tries to invade the anarchist milieu in North America. Yes, I read Ayn Rand as an impressionable teenager, moved on to Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and the rest of the gang, and eventually ended up working for a brief time collecting signatures to get a Libertarian candidate on a state ballot, and as a phone solicitor at the party headquarters in DC.

"Humanispherian" (Shawn Wilbur, I presume) calls himself a "synthesist"; well, if by that he means trying to synthesize any part of the "market anarchist" ideology with the strong, proud, and unequivocally anti-capitalist theory and practice that makes anarchism an ideal worth fighting for, then he belongs in the same intellectual sandbox with the rest of the Libertarians, "market anarchists", minarchists, and anarcho-capitalists. The key point that they all have in common is their inability to think outside of the framework of market transactions and property rights, treating human relations as economic relations. As an earnest and confused young market anarchist said at a talk he gave during an anarchist conference in Chicago years ago, "All human transactions are market transactions." To which I responded that, if that were true, then absolutely everything in our lives would be a commodity. As an anarchist, I reject market relations and commodification in every way.

So you've been an anarchist for thirty years, but think everyone who uses the word "libertarian" is a capitalist? To be honest, that doesn't sound like time well spent. I'm not surprised if my username doesn't suggest a different context for "libertarian." Three decades is a long time to keep that new-convert dogmatism intact. But now I'm trying to picture you haranguing the "Libertarian Labor Review" crowd about how they need to repent from their sinful capitalist ways. I've been an anarchist for close to thirty years myself, but I arrived from the left. The LP and anti-state capitalism have never struck me as the sort of thing that anarchists ought to give any ground to, even in matters like labels.

I'm not a communist, but imagine that my anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist papers are in order. I'm particularly fond of Proudhon because he gave us a clear theory of capitalist exploitation that also applies to government and various social hierarchies.

The thing that strikes me about this exchange, in the context of "Constructing Anarchisms" and particular this post, is how clearly it demonstrates the need to free ourselves from repeating the same silly mistakes. Kropotkin said some pretty silly things about the anarchists and anarchist-influenced workers that came before him—in part quite clearly because he didn't know any better. He would fairly quickly temper his position quite a bit. When you talk about your "ability to diagnose the cancer of "market anarchism" whenever it tries to invade the anarchist milieu in North America," and then go on to talk about a lot of people who quite obviously weren't anarchists, it seems clear that you're also talking through your hat. After all, the fact that neither of us are "market anarchists" doesn't change the history. We can almost certainly point to the emergence of three different phases of actual market anarchism (a bit avant la lettre, since anarchism didn't come into widespread use until even later) in North America by the time of the Saint-Imier Congress—all in the context of workers' struggles that are hard to dismiss as "cancer." If your sectarianism demands you close your eyes to that—or deny it—then perhaps a rethink is in order.

Anyone who's spent a good amount of time looking at Shawn's work(and this includes some of the post-leftists that you like a lot) has much appreciation for what he's doing. He in fact incorporates the post left into his world view likewise. I would think someone like you would also know that the term libertarian connotes different things in different historical and discursive contexts.

In terms of the market, the market does represent a desire and passion distribution problem that many anarchists(including you obviously) are not prepared to deal with. Desire and human excess is a pretty sticky problem and the market is one way to manifest these things. This does not make market ideology legitimate in my view but the problems it represents need to be talked about in a nuanced manner a manner you clearly lack at least relative to this issue.

I say all this as a pro-anarchy Stirnerian post-leftist.

If I seem to use the terms "Libertarian" (as in Libertarian Party members or fellow-travelers), "market anarchist", and "anarcho-capitalist" interchangeably, it is because I know that they share the most important ideological assumptions, explicitly or implicitly. It is precisely these assumptions - the desirability or inevitability of market relations and commodification - that Shawn Wilbur ("humanispherean") has failed to address, even though I specifically mentioned them in my previous post.

Wilbur insists that he is not a "market anarchist" but a "synthesist", but he is vague about what he is trying to synthesize, and why. Take a look at the chapter on Mutualism - his contribution to the Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (ahem!). Terms like "credit", "exchange", and "property" abound there, and the author's attitude towards these notions is far from disapproving. At one point, he makes the following statement: It is clear that by the 1870s, mutualism was a waning force within the anarchist milieus. And then: For much of the twentieth century, mutualism remained essentially moribund. So why is he trying to revive it now? Why does it deserve attention as anything more than an historical curiousity?

If there is another star in this chapter besides Proudhon, it is the "independent writer and scholar" Kevin Carson, of whom Wilbur says this:

His first major work, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, attempted to show that elements of Marxian and Austrian economics [Von Mises, Hayek, Carl Menger] could be understood as compatible, particularly in the context of a Benjamin R. Tucker-inspired mutualism or "free-market anti-capitalism".

The final paragraph has the author "speculating about its [mutualism's] future" - none, I hope.

Each of your "responses" is so obviously an address to the jury that it's sort of hard to take your arrogation of the role of Defender of Anarchism at all seriously. If you want to make your case in some way that warrants defensive rebuttals, then you need to do more than repeat the magic words of more-or-less Marxist critique, as if you had presented a substantive critique of your own. So far, you seem uncertain who you are talking to. I'm not Kevin, or David D'Amato, or the kid you heard talk thirty years ago in Chicago, or any of your youthful influences—so talking about them, as if you were talking about me and my beliefs, just suggests you're not thinking even the basic things through. The difficulty in responding to charges about "market relations" and "commodification" is that they are concepts with clear functions within the apparatus of a specific communistic ideology, but they aren't terms that can be so easily used to describe actual economic relations—provided, at least, that your goal is not simply to beg all the important questions. I've already said that I'm not a communist, so it should come as no surprise—particularly when I've already said it—that my understanding of the locus and mechanism of exploitation is not a Marxist one, but instead the specifically anarchistic account we find in Proudhon's work. Having been through these debates many times over the last few decades, I can say with some certainty that the issue lurking behind the vague references to "market relations and commodification" is the Marxian theory of alienation. Proudhon had arguably addressed most of the forms of alienation well in advance of Marx. Even the appeal to the Gattungswesen seems addressed in Proudhon's theory of collective force and its various elaborations in the later works. And my own position is considerably more unbending, in an anarchistic sense, than Proudhon's was in many respect—something that might be obvious in the writings for the "Constructing Anarchisms" project (assuming you had read them and had any real knowledge of Proudhon's thought to compare them to.)

With regard to anarchist synthesis, I'm taking cues from various figures, most of whom could not be mistaken for "market anarchists:" Voline (of course), Mella, Nettlau, etc. The general point is that anarchists get sidetracked from the pursuit of anarchy and substitute other projects, then using their individual hobby-horses as clubs against those who have succumbed to the lure of different partial projects—or even against those who pursue anarchy as their primary goal. "Synthesis" is a notoriously imperfect description of the process of constantly recentering anarchy, and sometimes anarchists have allowed the terminology to be another kind of distraction, but Voline's 1924 essay "On Synthesis" at least provides a useful account of how anarchist thought tends to develop and what obstacles we should be looking out for. As for the material of synthesis, our is a rich and diverse tradition, so there is a lot to look at in order to help us get a clearer sense about anarchy and its applications.

As for the revival and reconstruction of "mutualism," well, that is—as I think my chapter shows pretty clearly—another contested and perhaps not entirely adequate label. But Proudhon's social science is a powerful, unfortunately neglected set of tools and "mutualism" is the obvious modern label to use in the project of recovering those tools for modern application.

I don't even consider it to be a legitimate term in regards to problematic human affairs. Exploitation to me is commensally neutral much like germs. There are good and bad aspects of exploitation and dynamics in between. I prefer to focus on compulsion as a problem and not exploitation as that is a much more clearly delineated problem and not a value loaded term like exploitation.

Compulsion and exploitation are simply different kinds of relations—and different kinds of problems where we recognize them as such. I'm inclined to think that exploitation is not particular laden with moral values, when used in the descriptive sense that I prefer—but also that the relations described are hard to approve from any of the various anarchist positions with which I am familiar, including conscious egoism. As in the case of terms like "synthesis" and "mutualism," perhaps there are alternatives with less baggage. But none come immediately to mind that possess the same degree of simple explanatory power without a great deal of specialized exposition.

I'm also not inclined to shy away from terms that seem a bit "value-laden" if the questions they raise seem useful. Sort of like considering oneself an "egoist," when neither the conventional sense of "ego" or that of "selfishness" is quite the thing in question.

The thing is the weighted use of the term does tend to be on the moralistic value loaded unqualified asubjective side of things. For me, it's a commensalistic issue like germs in that there are positive and negative relations of exploitation. I like to recall Bob Black's Fourierian idea of filthy mud children(in Abolition of Work) where they are made to do the dirty work because they like to get dirty. The caveat and warning he adds is that this should not be an weighted expectation but a compatiblistic set of relations between the parties involved. That's a good example of positive exploitation(probiotic vs antibiotic). Exploitation is at most a quantitative problem when too much systematic weight and build up happens. This makes you look at exploitation in a new way. Compulsion then is the issue-the toxin-not the germ that is exploitation.

The thing about egoism is that there are already qualifiers in regards to which kind one is. The western modern substance rational kind or the more non substance non foundational open ended interest kind of someone like Stirner. Exploitation has never been looked at in a multifaceted way where there can be positive negative and in between and quite frankly most leftists simply are unable to look at things that way. They are the secular versions of the religious type who use the term as a tool of paternalism and for me exploitation will always be linked to paternalistic moral faggory.

I would still insist that compulsion is the more useful term to utilize as far as anarchy, egoism and ethics goes and you'll note that most communists and Marxists are not interested in the problem of compulsion as that will potentially get in the way of the work they want us all to eventually get back to.

You live in the World of Ideas, my friend.... I dunno in what kind of ivory tower you sit through that world, but it's surely not one where you are exposed to the conditions of daily life in this society. where "market relations" and "commodification" are easily-observable social dynamics, REGARDLESS of Marxism. Is this because butlers are serving you everyday, or because you live at your mom's place where you get meals on wheels? When was the last time you dealt with an over-the-counter exchange or isolating yourself in a car on the highway or time in prison? What is not commodity, around you?

Isn't it wonderful how the internet provides us with people we don't know, but can use as objects to bolster our own sense of "realness"? We should all send Al Gore a thank-you card or something.

I get the vague joke about Al Gore, but in the case that wasn't a joke, Tim Berners-Lee is the main creator of the internet.

The fact we're communicating through virtual means across a screen doesn't make its reality of commodification less real, as nobody really needs Marx (save at best a shadow of Marxian analysis) to acknowledge how people are massively turning themselves into commodities through it. Among many other stuff happening IRL. Calling anyone a "Marxist" for pointing that out makes you look like some obsessive anti-commie (coz Muhrika!), if not some bigoted purist.

But I don't see a problem taking some shit from Marxian authors, especially postmodern, just like I don't see an issue taking some concepts from authoritarian theorists who're at least as equally problematic, like, say, Heidegger, Hobbes or even Hegel, as far as this ain't endorsing their entire theoretical systems.

I was sniping back, gently, at the "ivory tower" bullshit.

Anyway, there are, I think, real problems with using just the terms "market relations" and "commodification" as if they were a sufficient critique of another anti-capitalist position. There is no problem pointing to capitalist market relations and capitalist forms of commodification. There is no difficulty in understanding how those notions function in the present economy or in Marxist critique. But I don't think it should be controversial to say that anarchists are under no obligation to accept either the present capitalist reality or the Marxist analysis and alternative. So if our friend the dead Ukrainian wants to attack my standing as an anarchist and anti-capitalist, then, at the very least, it seems necessary to give those terms enough definition to make a comparison of our ideas at least possible. As for "taking some shit" from Marxism, remember that I was the one ready to discuss the details of the 1844 Manuscripts in order clarify things, so maybe "obsessive anti-commie" and "bigoted purist" are a bit off the mark.

"But I don't think it should be controversial to say that anarchists are under no obligation to accept either the present capitalist reality"

You wish!

Okay well... anarchists neither are under obligation to believe in the heliocentric model, or in quantum physics, or even in the notion that society even exists in some way, or that you are anarchist yourself... This goes on and on!

Of course, all well-established or accepted notions and values are to be questioned, or else anarchism wouldn't mean anything to me. But some realities are more solid than others.

Shawn Wilbur: I must say, I find Voline's pontifications about Life, Truth, and all that in On Synthesis a bit short on substance, but he does seem keen on "unifying" the anarchist movement under one big ideological tent. Really, though, I'm much more interested in your assessment of Proudhon's theories as a "powerful set of tools" ripe for a "modern application". In all the verbiage of your replies to me so far, you have yet to state clearly what your own position on market relations, private property, money, credit, exchange, and the sanctity of contracts is. Do you see these things as compatible with the ideal of an anarchist society? Do you believe that any of these things could exist without the coercive power of a State to enforce compliance? So far, I have had to infer your attitude from the intellectual company you keep (Proudhon, Kevin Carson).

Isn't the really notable thing in this exchange that you keep making strong, specific claims about my "attitude," while also complaining that you don't have anything substantive to base them on? If you're really interested in my ideas, they are well documented online and free for the reading. But, so far, you far more intent on your own sectarian pontifications. Maybe you could just find another hobby?

Shawn Wilbur: In my opinion, the topics you choose to write about, and the authors you choose to reference, give some pretty substantial clues about your beliefs, but I would be happy for you to prove me wrong, if you will only give some straight answers in this thread to the very specific questions I just asked you in my last post, instead of vaguely referring me to other online sources. We are here, now, having this discussion - so why not answer the questions here?

If you weren't so intent on playing Grand Inquisitor—excuse me, Anarcho-Grand Inquistor—you might notice that you haven't actually covered yourself in glory when it comes to those straight answers so far. The fact that you have chosen to attack on the basis of what you admit are just guesses on your part—twitchy reactions to topics you think anarchists shouldn't concern themselves with—doesn't seem to bother you. But there's no reason that the performance should impress me.

You're obviously sure, despite that curious lack of evidence, that I have beliefs that demand a full confession—and all that seems left for you is to figure out how best to beat or cajole that out of me. But any real clarification between us would demand a bit from you as well, like some clarification of just what the charges are—some explanation of what you think "market relations and commodification" entail, with or without a reading of the 1844 manuscripts and related texts—and some effort on your part to understand the Proudhonian social science, so that you can make some useful comparison of my position to your own. It's a lot easier, of course, to make vague objections to my "verbiage" and just keep insisting that what is important is whether or not I "disapprove" of the right words. You don't have to demonstrate any actual knowledge of anarchist theory, history or the ideas of mine you are pretending to critique—and can concentrate on the bizarre project of trying to whip up a little moral panic on, of all places, Anews.

The question is whether you're really up for some rather specific discussion of economics and anarchist theory, or whether that's more than you wanted to take on.

The market is a construct, like the industrial agricultural structure built on land ownership. Everything is free but has been claimed and then monopolized and then sold for profit. Christianity is a merchant based ideology built upon the church and its marketplace.
All talk about currency and economics is sublime rhetoric best avoided to maintain a pure anarch heart!

What I'm up for, Shawn, is some clarification from you about why you think discussions of Proudhonian mutualism (or "social science", or whatever your preferred term is), have any relevance to contemporary anarchist theory or praxis, when, as you yourself pointed out, that whole line of thought has been basically moribund since the 19th century? What is it about the musings of self-avowed "market anarchist" Kevin Carson's attempt to fuse Marxist and Austrian economics into some kind of "free market anti-capitalism" (a bastardized phrase, if I ever heard one) that you think any anarchist should give two shits about?

If you want to have specific discussions of economics and anarchist theory, that's fine with me. You can start by explaining why anarchists should be concerned about economic theory in the first place. We'll see where that takes us in our conversation.

You obviously didn't read the chapter all that carefully. I suppose all that disapproving of words can get in the way of understanding them. It was a description for an encyclopedic source, not a political program. Indeed, the lack of any particular pitch at the end for modern Proudhonian thought was a concession to the genre. But if you want a more partisan version of the same history, I can provide:

What we find in Proudhon's thought is an analysis of society, and the elaboration of the social scientific apparatus for more analyses of its kind, in which anarchic relations play a central role. It's good stuff, both predating and extending far beyond the work of Marx, while also providing the tools for a unified, specifically anarchistic critique.

But the transmission of that body of thought to modern anarchism was fraught with difficulties. The infamous "Proudhonist" workers who helped found the International were not actually particularly Proudhonian—and then they were largely forced out of the International. The anarchistic collectivists borrowed haphazardly from Proudhon. Bakunin's work is much easier to understand if you understand his borrowings from Proudhon, but he wasn't the sort of writer who provided us with many footnotes. The the anti-authoritarian communists, with much evidence of understanding the work, made a point of distinguishing themselves from the earlier tendencies, while the anarchist individualists embraced them, but with much the same partial understanding. "Mutualism" was a label whose content changed again and again, retaining some vague link to Proudhon—or people's vague memories of Proudhon—but without incorporating the Proudhonian social science. Some twists and turns later, Carson inspired a revival in interest in "mutualism," but, again, without a great deal of knowledge of what that label had designated in its earlier stages.

So, in answer to your question, it was not the Proudhonian social science that somehow had its day and was found wanting within the anarchist tradition. Instead, it was the specific associations and organizations clustered around the label that went through its ebbs and flows. Something similar is true of "collectivism," which designated a range of different positions, united by certain key figures and organizations. Anarchist communism has arguably had its deaths and rebirths as well. How many times has anarchism itself been declared essentially moribund? I doubt you would really object to the various attempts to "get back to basics" through which anarchism has been given new life. My work recovering a variety of largely forgotten theory, including the Proudhonian social science, is just that.

Do you think that a specifically anarchistic understanding of social relations is beyond the realm of things good anarchists should give a shit about? If not, then our only beef is that you seem to imagine that anarchists of other tendencies aren't concerned with the specifically economic side of social relations—when in fact they, like you, are arguably a lot more obsessed with economics than I could ever manage to be. If you want to critique capitalist exploitatiom, you're going to end up doing some economic analysis. If you want to avoid exploitation within presumably anarchistic relations—which is presumably what your whole stupid attack is about—then you're going to have to do a bit more. Just disapproving of the right words isn't going to get the job done.

Poor ol' Pwimitivism got dealt a harsh blow by the emerging Idpol anarcho- neo-narcissists. They scrapped a lifestyle which deprived them of digital identity display in the 2000s and all its gadgets. Certainly the Pwimitivists could have allowed for some micro-solar technology and sustainable gadgetry, but no and so they lost popularity . Now there's a new green mutation but its reverted back to a neoliberal reformist agenda and even the anarchists have joined their ranks. Even JZ is informally banned from this site, sad :(.
Its weird, you have godfearing "anarchists" voting for Biden/Harris and burning cop cars and wanting prisons closed down.
We anarchs shall be the only free ones, roaming the land and cities eating free food and never paying rent, travelling without using currency and never working our whole lives the way only true anarchs can, amen.

whatever good analytical points might be buried in your dense prose are completely undermined by your ableist slur. speech impediments do not equal lower intelligence, you arsehole

Troll starting his comment with well-known racist linguistic stereotype (the "w" in the place of "r")

Thecollective plz remove fucking racist bigots from this site. Thank you.

the well-known racist linguistic stereotype is to put "r" in the place of "l"; using the "w" in place of the "r" is a predominantly british slur based on a stereotype of upper-class/under-educated twits

"r" for "l" is racist toward East Asian people, "w" in the place of "r" is low-grade racist toward Black people in North America.

Now GTFO back to 8kun, you upper-class/under-educated twit.

perhaps that anti-black phoneme replacement is regional; no black people where I live do that, so it doesn't register as racist

Thankyou 09:57, 'twas the upper-class who were my intended victims and also the racist Idpol divisionists.

So it's not Proudhon's ideas that have been useless to anarchists for a hundred and fifty years, just the "specific organizations and associations clustered around them"? Yes, well, I look forward to a rousing discussion of credit, banking, land value taxation, etc. at the next Proudhonist anarchist conference. Seriously, though, the fact that you quite unconsciously misquoted and misinterpreted my question, "Why should anarchists be concerned about economic theory?" by conflating social theory with economic theory just proves the point I made earlier about a whole group of people - "anarcho-capitalists", "minarchists", "free-market anti-capitalists", etc. - who are incapable of thinking outside of the framework of economics, and insist on viewing human social relations through the prism of economic theory. The "economic" side of social relations is precisely what anarchists should be fighting to transcend.

think all that I learned from reading this thread is a vague sense of who hurt you when you were still a young makhno ;)

Maybe you should work a little harder at understanding my conscious thought before you try to tackle the unconscious part. But it would be interesting to know if you added a gratuitous echo from Marx just because that's the easy, knee-jerk thing to do or because you are more consciously and actively engaged in the same sort of communist sectarianism and purity-politics that purged those not particularly Proudhonian French workers from the International, split the workers' movement again and again before finally rendering the project of the International impossible, misrepresented anarchist opponents for the pettiest of reasons, undermined a good deal of what was more anarchy-centered in anarchist communism, etc.

Mutualism has generally waxed and waned in relation to its power in various eras to be a vehicle for "back to basics" anarchist theory, whether that has been revivals of Proudhon, applications of Stirner or the kind of general reappraisal of early anarchist history that has driven the "Proudhonian" side of the current revival. You are not, of course, obliged to take advantage of the tools recovered or unearthed in the productive periods, but you should probably have better rationales than you've shown so far for actively opposing the process.

You clearly know absolutely fuck-all about Proudhon. That's no surprise, of course. But your aggressive thought-policing, inspired by the mere appearance of words you hate or fear, is a bad look, probably boding ill for your version of anarchist social relations. The real problem, however, is not that your dogmatic resistance to other ideas gives your responses here an ugly, authoritarian quality, but that it is clear that no matter how politely and carefully the complex ideas of figures like Proudhon are explained to you, you are likely to keep coming back to the marxist snark and the ritual sprinkling of ill-defined scare-words, rather than engaging in anything like conversation or debate.

But no other windmills have presented themselves yet this morning, so let's give it another go anyway:

"Why should anarchists be concerned about economic theory?" — Anarchists have traditionally been concerned about economic theory because our experience under the various hierarchical systems that exist has been one of exploitation. And presumably we will not stop being concerned with it until there is absolutely no possibility of it being an issue. "Je suis anarchiste" and "La propriété, c'est le vol" emerged together for a reason. Different radical tendencies have proposed different solutions, in the short or long term. Few, if any, have ever really escaped economic thinking. You can carefully choose your words and pretend that foregoing explicit accounting is not just another way of arranging exchange—one only made attractive by certain basic economic arguments about production, scarcity, etc.—and you can pretend that common or collective control of resources is not "property." But these are ultimately word-games, good for ideological purposes, but potentially debilitating if your projected utopia is confronted with real difficulties. Pretending that capitalist economics are the only kind of economics is a luxury suitable only for those with a crisis-proof system in place—or those without much opportunity to put their beautiful system to any real test. And you seem to be living proof that certain anarchists will always be obsessed with economics, to the point of attacking strangers because they got a whiff of something that might threaten their ideological calm. If you're consistent, and not just an opportunistic ideologue, you're always going to be keeping a close watch on the neighbors, carefully making sure that no one gives any sign of "keeping track" (other than you and the other self-appointed guardians of communism, of course.)

I am happy to say that I labor under no such burden.

The most serious charge leveled against me, I suppose, is that I am part of that crowd who are "incapable of thinking outside of the framework of economics, and insist on viewing human social relations through the prism of economic theory." There are certainly folks out there for whom all relations are relations of "exchange" (variously defined) or relate in some fundamental way to "property" (even more variously defined.) One sort of "market anarchism" at least flirts with that perspective—and an ex-LP operative would certainly be familiar with the capitalistic versions of the framework.

That's not me. And it is not the basic move made in Proudhon, at least as I understand his work. Capitalism fetishizes "the market" and elevates it above other forms of social relations. Capitalist ideologues attempt to naturalize "property," hierarchical organization, firm-based organization of "the economy," particular notions of "profit," etc. Proudhon's first works direct attack that naturalization, demonstrating that most of that stuff doesn't even make much sense. And then he moves to rethink all of that in the form of meaningfully social relations. (Paying some attention to the specific ways that he uses the concept of "society" is a good way to get started teasing out his own "critique of political economy.") The recognition of collective force in his first critiques of capitalism quickly leads to a general social theory that incorporates the concerns that have been drawn apart as "economic"—concerns that will continue to be ours as long as we face any threat to our sustainable flourishing.

People who want to present themselves as more-social-than-thou anarchists should probably, at a minimum, attempt to address individuals as people, rather than engaging in the most abstract sorts of freak-outs over decontextualized words, appealing to the gallery, etc. There are unfortunately plenty of would-be anarchists who seem ill-prepared to deal with the real diversity of opinions, forms of expression and such that we can count on experiencing in anything like anarchic relations.

Hmmm, wasn't it Oscar Wilde who described economics as "the dull science" It was Thales and his olive presses who first introduced the notion to me that millionaires are dullards, and those enthralled by transactional relationships such as Elon Musk and his tribe as philistines. I have been proven correct!

"If, however, you were not expecting Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the Panopticon, as the source for the “basic, common meaning” of anarchy—particularly as the rest of the explanation sounds an awful lot like Proudhon—well, you’re not alone."
[...]
Placing Kropotkin in the villain’s role was even a kind of thought experiment I played out in a long-ago post on “the Benthamite anarchism and the origins of anarchist history.” Unsurprisingly, the idea of Bread Santa as the bad guy was too alien even for much outrage."

I'd make a parallel between Bentham's Panopticon and Orwell's "1984", and between Fourier's Phalanstery and Huxley's "Brave New World". The implications of the phalanstery should have the same sinister ring as the panopticon, just a different piece of furniture for the same totalitarian society. Utilitarian logic taken to the extreme applied to world building/ world domination can only create dystopias. Their signature architectural widgets are not a staple, but that sort of utilitarian logic persists. The fixation on the shape and manner, the different arrangements which are merely the means, the particular technological solution towards the end which is disciplined, docile and productive bodies. Thinking that people are playthings that can be capriciously arranged, they fancy themselves playwrights of a social drama, they don't only write the script but design the stage and props.

Some references to think about 19th century naive utopian "ballast" not yet purged:
http://jessica-f-angel.com/phalanstere
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/get-thee-to-a-phalanstery-or-how-fo...
https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/early-nineteeth-utopian-philosophy/

Kropotkin's and Proudhon's 19th Century utopianisms were not each respectively emblematized in an ideal architectural typology. Their social idealism felt comfortably at home in the housing and factories of their time. This would prove to hurt them in terms of branding. They were more concerned with the program, Kropotkin being more of a central planner and Proudhon, well you tell me, I haven't read him. Gladly place either as the role of villain, as anarchists are by definition, but also place them as enemies of anarchy.

The competing totalitarian movements, red and brown fascists, or democratic capitalists, claiming/appropriating/imposing their own aesthetics, and technocratic mercenaries selling their modernist style to any regime that would adopt it, becoming the default style of mass produced housing, factories and malls etc around the world. Situationist critique responded to these developments, but Debord was as complacent with workers councils as Constant was with d.i.y. dollhouses.

Now you see the most naively utopian grasping at straws to render an iconic blueprint (for example https://crimethinc.com/2020/11/02/exercise-what-would-an-anarchist-progr...), where others are content with adorning a social profile or a meme in a way that would summarize their ideology in a catchy gesture.

So in constructing <<my own>> anarchism, I'd like to make sure I'm not participating in that line of hobbyists as obsessive sim city optimizers, minecraft world-builders, scale model building aficionados, lord of the ring style novella writers, dungeon masters of all stripes (though everyone makes fun of larpers instead nowadays). These avant guard managers do not fancy to manage the world as it is, but play god and start a world from scratch. Funny if they keep the game to themselves, not if they try to promote it as a program to inflict their vocation on others.

"<em>This anarchism thing never been easy.</em>
<em>We all have to start somewhere.</em>
<em>Sometimes even our best and brightest have been a bit off the mark, even in relation to the basics.</em>"

This is true, except that those often held up as best an brightest weren't that bright, merely prolific writers and speakers on the spotlight.

But what's with Ben Constant's DIY dollhouses?

Headache-inducing designs... Now there's a intense pressure to profitability in architecture since the industrial revolution where the more streamlined, simplistic designs tend to be favored for mass production, to a point they're no longer design at all. This probably the other reason why people like LeCorbusier were favored by city planners over crackpot artists like Constant.

Ok, that was a long convoluted detour on your part just to say you're against any of those cybernetic approaches to constructing anarchism. I agree it's a crucial no-go. Let's say that given the intimate, latent interaction between architecture and politics, anarchists here aren't the ones to be expected to bring new building designs for the State to green-light.

Personally if I was an architect, green, self-sustained vertical cities would be my logos, but I know society's not ready for people like me. The Existent prefers the mediocre for its prison cities.

Omg NO we anarchs are not wanting to be ready for vertical cities because they crowd our horizon(tal) imaginations!

Try as he might to distance himself from the rest of the "market anarchists", Libertarian Party dimwits, and "anarcho-capitalists", Shawn Wilbur simply cannot hide his fascination with market relations (note that I said "market relations", not "The Market"). By championing Proudhon's dubious theories of political economy, by his constant efforts to give those theories a contemporary relevance among anarchists that they simply do not deserve (and won't get), Wilbur proves with each succeeding post in this thread that I was spot-on in my assessment of his work. Not that I really care what Proudhon had to say about anything, but if you want to know what gets this contemporary "free-market anti-capitalist" excited, take a look at Proudhon's "First Memoir" in What is Property?:

We need to labor in order to live. To do so is both our right and our duty. [fetishizing work] - p. 282

We need to exchange our products for other products. [fetishizing exchange} - p. 282

Liberty is essentially an organizing force. To insure equality between men and peace among nations, agriculture and industry, and the centres of education, business, and storage, must be distributed according to the climate and the geographical position of the country, the nature of the products, the character and natural talents of the inhabitants, &c., in proportions so just, so wise, so harmonious, that in no place shall there ever be either an excess or a lack of population, consumption, and products. There commences the science of public and private right, the true political economy. It is for the writers on jurisprudence, henceforth unembarrassed by the false principle of property, to describe the new laws, and bring peace upon earth. Knowledge and genius they do not lack; the foundation is now laid for them.

Stirring stuff, indeed. Try reading that to a crowd at the next BLM or Black Bloc protest you go to, and see how long it takes for them to start throwing molotov cocktails at you.

"take a look at Proudhon's "First Memoir" in " Umm, in? In where? Or is it everywhere free?

The mix of relentless dogmatism and strangely personal malice in this little campaign is really striking—and more than a little creepy. But it also presents a sort of depressing picture of a certain kind of anarchism. After all, if it was really certain that my approach will never get any traction with anarchists, it would be sort of silly to blow up the comments on one of my posts. I think we all see plenty in the anarchist milieus each day that makes us shake our head—but generally without completely losing it in the process.

A clear sign of a weak theory or ideology in crisis is the inability of its adherents to tolerate even mild deviations from their program or minor challenges to their beliefs. Has a certain kind of anarchist communism, having already been worked over by the influences of marxism, syndicalism and platformism, really reached the shouting-at-strangers level of basic uncertainty regarding its own project? Is it disconnected enough from the idea of anarchy that random and ill-directed harassment falls with the scope of its "praxis"? That would be sad. But there is a lot of basic discouragement and disfunction out there.

Anyway, if you really want to talk about our differences in terms of a competition, that doesn't worry me a bit. My approach, as evidenced by the "Constructing Anarchisms" project, is to meet anarchists where they are and hopefully steer them toward resources that will help them become clearer about anarchy and its application. And I've dug up a lot of potential resources over the years, drawn from and suitable for incorporation in a variety of anarchist tendencies. I don't stalk people I disagree with and I've got the good stuff, historically speaking. Maybe there are anarchists out there with a thing for internet commenters who could double for political police, but I like to think that the number is smaller than that of those with a healthy curiosity about the anarchist past.

"random and ill-directed harassment falls with the scope of its "praxis"?" So true, the rock throwing, burning rampaging horde that gives anarchy its name.
Time for some serious inner delving and vagabond escape from the cultures that infect us.

'Has a certain kind of anarchist communism, having already been worked over by the influences of marxism, syndicalism and platformism, really reached the shouting-at-strangers level of basic uncertainty regarding its own project?'

Yes. See Reddit et al

says a guy that calls himself makhno. Could be quoted a lot of crap from makhno too... who cares?

After three paragraphs of almost nothing but incoherent personal attacks against me in his last response, Shawn Wilbur still is trying to deflect attention away from the fundamental questions I have brought up in every one of my posts in this thread: Why should contemporary twenty-first century anarchists care about the theories of political economy of Proudhon? What do they have to offer that is relevant to current anarchist projects and struggles? Even more importantly, why should contemporary anarchists try to articulate a theory of political economy at all, if what we really want to achieve is a world where people do not relate to each other as economic actors, where work and self-sacrifice are not ends in themselves, and we do not submit to the logic of scarcity, production, and exchange which underlies all theories of political economy, including Proudhon's?

I'm content to believe that most people interested in anarchism are fully capable of figuring out for themselves what parts of the tradition are useful in which specific contexts. And if communism can't stand a little attention being deflected away, then perhaps it has problems that communists should make some effort to address.

But, yeah, you also seem like kind of an awful person.

"then perhaps it has problems that communists should make some effort to address."

Tho don't get your hopes up about this. If there's one important thing to learn about commies, it's that they never do this type of effort! As I'm sure you'll understand that their entire moral system relies on big externalities.

sigh ... communism isn't a "moral system", nor do communists have a single, unified sense of morality

As my nigga Martucci said, communism(even anarcho), is monochromatic crap and any mono societal system will INEVITABLY develop a series of social reified forms and given that communism is largely a modern idea it will probably develop a moral system just like the last century’s series of authoritarian totalitarian shitshows.

well I'm an anarchist so I'm not suggesting what society should be or will be, only pointing out what words don't mean.

"might as well be" is good enough for what you call analysis, just don't drag the rest of us down with you ;)

hi humanispherian

my best guess would be that some of the trolls here are always trying to salt the earth, preventing any useful or interesting discussion. not sure this is the best example of that but it's worth considering!

He's talking about using him in a broader structural sense in a similar vein to how certain non orthodox Marxists or commies use Marx beyond his polyecon ideas. To that end I think this is a good thing due to the fact that anarchism/anarchy lacks some good solid theoretical postulations. As I've said on twitter modern anarchism/anarchy really only has TWO solid postulatable thinkers, Proudhon and Stirner. With Proudhon there is an under explored social science as Shawn has been pointing out for YEARS. The reason this is a good thing is because anarchists/anarchs could use something that structurally challenges Marx and the commies to flow from him.

If you think he's just trying to bring back crude mutualist ideology then you're not paying attention to his words.

I agree with Shawn Wilbur that anarchists should be able to figure out this kind of stuff for themselves, so I encourage any one who is interested to take a long look at What is Property? and find passages (the longer the better, because we don't want to cherry-pick) which they think are the most relevant and useful to contemporary anarchists, then share them with us here.

I read the chapter Property is Murder, then thought of Sartre's People are Hell, then went into a nihilistic solipsistic trance for 1 hour, had a coffee, went to work flipping burgers so I could pay the rent. Thx ;)

Anon 15:15 Totally see how a 21st century critique of economy and work replaces these antiquated obsolete frameworks. It takes an anthropologist like Graeber to place christian mindset, repentance, Jesus and debt as the building blocks to Western economic theory.

Historical figures "speak for themselves" when we allow them to, by taking them seriously and not forcing them into some framework that was not their own. The way that you avoid cherry-picking and decontextualization in general is not to pick bits of any particular size, but to make sure that you can relate each bit, of whatever size, to the rest of the work. We begin to really understand a work when we understand its general purpose. If you can outline the work, then you can begin to pick it apart again and determine what works and what doesn't, what is useful and what isn't. With *What is Property?* you might perhaps get away with addressing the three main parts of the work separately. It divides fairly naturally after Chapter III and again after Chapter IV. But good scholars have got themselves in trouble trying to find, for example, a conclusive statement in the middle of the third chapter, only halfway through the twists and turns of the argument in that chapter.

To be honest, though, I would think that the exercise you propose would be difficult and not particularly useful for most modern anarchists. One of the reasons that a few of us feel we ought to get to the bottom of things with figures like Proudhon is that there is a lot of labor involved that others could easily be spared. That's the point of making specific commentaries, translating specific works and providing updated and corrected summaries of the work as a whole. Particularly in the context of "Constructing Anarchisms," the point is to touch on some of the material that is most directly related to the most basic sort of anarchist theory. I expect to go through the whole year without more than a passing mention or two of "mutual banking," "cost the limit of price," "occupancy-and-use," etc.—with those mentions most likely to be historical in nature. Modern mutualism almost certainly isn't what you think it is—but it also isn't the subject of this joint exploration.

Why should it be difficult for any contemporary anarchist to read Proudhon and form their own judgement about his ideas? The opinions of scholars and amateur experts may have their value, but surely the first thing each of us needs to do is exercise our own critical faculties on any original material that we may be interested in, before we start relying on commentaries. Proudhon's name is well-known among anarchists, and his work is readily available to those who wish to explore it. We all have our own estimation of what anarchism means to us, our own theories developed out of our experiences and struggles, so let us begin by approaching this anarchist author directly and without pre-conceived notions based on what we have been told by others, to see what his words mean to us. Starting in this way can lead to much more fruitful discussions.

The vast majority of Proudhon's work, including near all of his mature work, has not been translated into English and key works, while available online as scanned manuscripts, have yet to be published in French. And there is simply a lot of Proudhon to read. So the materials are readily available to those who have a certain set of skills — although, let's face it, if you do the work to make them more readily available, there are ideologues who are going to call you names on the internet. But there are also questions of historical context, which require either considerable individual study or some help from someone who has already done the work, that have to be addressed if you aren't going to make presentist errors. Anyone can indeed do everything required, on their own and "from scratch," provided they want to put in the time—but it's a significant commitment.

But my point was really a simpler one. Understanding "What is Property?" is a very small part of understanding Proudhon's ideas, but it's a great place to start, provided you really can avoid preconceived ideas about what Proudhon was trying to accomplish in it. That means, at a minimum, setting aside Proudhon's proposals of the next decade, along with the critiques of Marx, Déjacque and Kropotkin, and any sense of certainty that the words Proudhon uses in the work mean what a modern anarchist, prepared by the preconceived notions current in the anarchist milieus, would expect them to mean. You apparently found it difficult to read anything in my post on Anarchy because you objected to the name of my website and were offended that I talked about Proudhon. You'll pardon me if I think your present introduction to independent study and discussion is just a different kind of attack. If you have paid any attention to the actual project of "Constructing Anarchisms," then it should be obvious that all the readings consist of are examples (and generally multiple, diverse examples) of how someone might think about key concerns—and that the expectation is that participants will eventually construct their own body of theory, once we've worked through some of the possibilities and some of the obstacles they are likely to encounter, sketching out, in the process, a very rough outline of anarchism's historical development. I don't imagine the joint exploration actually holds any interest for you, given your consistently antagonistic attitude. But you might try that whole "no preconceived notions" thing long enough to behave like an anarchist and let other anarchists pursue their own projects. Your accusations have all been precisely based in preconceptions.

As What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government is Proudhon's most famous work, I believe it would be an excellent place for any curious contemporary anarchist to start exploring his ideas, and they needn't stop there, if they feel the desire to go further. After engaging with the author on their own, they can discuss what they've read with others, read commentaries like Shawn Wilbur's, learn about Proudhon's mature works and the historical context in which they were all written, and incorporate whatever of value they find in his writings into their own theory and praxis.

I think that Proudhon's own declaration in Chapter One gives an excellent idea of the spirit in which the exploration of this book should begin:

Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments. It is in accordance with universal consent that I undertake to correct universal error; from the opinion of the human race I appeal to its faith. Have the courage to follow me; and, if your will is untrammelled, if your conscience is free, if your mind can unite two propositions and deduce a third therefrom, my ideas will inevitably become yours. In beginning by giving you my last word, it was my purpose to warn you, not to defy you; for I am certain that, if you read me, you will be compelled to assent. The things of which I am to speak are so simple and clear that you will be astonished at not having perceived them before, and you will say: “I have neglected to think.” Others offer you the spectacle of genius wresting Nature’s secrets from her, and unfolding before you her sublime messages; you will find here only a series of experiments upon justice and right a sort of verification of the weights and measures of your conscience. The operations shall be conducted under your very eyes; and you shall weigh the result.

Just out of curiosity, as you are now presenting yourself in something of the guide-and-expert role, how much of Proudhon's work have you actually read? Can you give any reason for choosing the author's "most famous" work as the best places to start? Is it not also the work most likely to be subject to preconceived notions? Why, for example, wouldn't it make more sense to read a work like "The Philosophy of Progress, which Proudhon presented as a summary of his work at the beginning of his "constructive" period? Proudhon said something very similar to the bit you quoted in that work as well, and perhaps it was always true, but isn't there perhaps some advantage in beginning with a work focused on method, rather than try to discern the method while slogging through a dozen proofs of the proposition that property is mathematically "impossible"? If it is a question of "letting the author speak" as directly as possible, isn't a focused, more mature work probably a better place to start?

If it's really a question of letting the author speak, without the likelihood of generations of rivals and enemies shouting him down before he gets the chance, perhaps the best option would be to go straight to the most neglected of the still-unpublished manuscripts, where Proudhon's final thoughts remain largely unheard, expressed in all their unpolished glory. The technical difficulties are, of course, more considerable, but you don't seem particularly concerned about them.

I confess, though, without any clearer rationale than "most famous," it still seems to me that you have started by freaking out that Proudhon was being presented without the lens of common preconceptions and are now selling a plan of sticking to well-trodden, widely preconceived territory as the way to be independent and unbiased.

So what's the rationale? "Famous" isn't usually an unquestioned anarchist criterion.

I look forward to the day when Proudhon's untranslated and unpublished late manuscripts are finally published in English, but in the meantime, I see no reason why anarchists shouldn't begin right now to familiarize themselves with those works that we do have available for study and discussion. If anyone believes that What Is Property?, one of Proudhon's earliest works, is not the best place to start, then I would be happy to know what they think of The Philosophy of Progress - a work with which I am unfamiliar, and would be happy to explore along with other contemporary anarchists, particularly those who, like me, are reading it for the first time.

A guide and expert to Proudhon I certainly am not, nor would I wish ever to present myself as one. My current knowledge of the author goes no further than his best-known work in English, and I would benefit as much as anyone else from approaching that and his other available writings with the fresh and unbiased perspective that study and discussion with fellow anarchists new to Proudhon's work would bring.

...DON'T READ PROUDHON Y'ALL!

but then I was like...OKAY READ PROUDHON BUT NOT THAT BIT!

give it a rest, Mack.

Just to provide a brief preliminary glimpse of what readers like myself who are new to Proudhon's work The Philosophy of Progress can expect, I offer the first few paragraphs from Section I, "Of The Idea of Progress":

That which dominates all my studies, its principle and aim, its summit and base, in a word, its reason; that which gives the key to all my controversies, all my disquisitions, all my lapses; that which constitutes, finally, my originality as a thinker, if I may claim such, is that I affirm, resolutely and irrevocably, in all and everywhere, Progress, and that I deny, no less resolutely, the Absolute.

All that I have ever written, all that I have denied, affirmed, attacked, and combated, I have written, I have denied or affirmed in the name of one single idea: Progress. My adversaries, on the contrary—and you will soon see if they are numerous—are all partisans of the absolute, in omni génère, casu et numero, as Sganarelle said.

What then is Progress?—For nearly a century everyone has talked about it, without Progress, as a doctrine, having advanced a step. The word is mouthed: the theory is still at the point where Lessing left it.[2]

What is the Absolute, or, to better designate it, Absolutism?—Everyone repudiates it, nobody wants it anymore; and yet everyone is Christian, protestant, Jew or atheist, monarchist or democrat, communist or Malthusian: everyone, blaspheming against Progress, is allied to the Absolute.

If, then, I could once put my finger on the opposition that I make between these two ideas, and explain what I mean by Progress and what I consider Absolute, I would have given you the principle, secret and key to all my polemics. You would possess the logical link between all of my ideas, and you could, with that notion alone, serving for you as an infallible criterion with regard to me, not only estimate the ensemble of my publications, but forecast and signal in advance the propositions that sooner or later I must affirm or deny, the doctrines of which I will have to make myself the defender or adversary. You would be able, I say, to evaluate and judge all my theses by what I have said and by what I do not know. You would know me, intus et in cute, such as I am, such as I have been all my life, and such as I would find myself in a thousand years, if I could live a thousand years: the man whose thought always advances, whose program will never be finished. And at whatever moment in my career you would come to know me, whatever conclusion you could come to regarding me, you would always have either to absolve me in the name of Progress, or to condemn me in the name of the Absolute.

Progress, in the purest sense of the word, which is the least empirical, is the movement of the idea, processus; it is innate, spontaneous and essential movement, uncontrollable and indestructible, which is to the mind what gravity is to matter, (and I suppose with the vulgar that mind and matter, leaving aside movement, are something), and which manifests itself principally in the march of societies, in history.

From this it follows that, the essence of mind being movement, truth,—which is to say reality, as much in nature as in civilization,—is essentially historical, subject to progressions, conversions, evolutions and metamorphoses. There is nothing fixed and eternal but the very laws of movement, the study of which forms the object of logic and mathematics.

HEY MISTER, PROPERTY IS BULLSHIT!
Huh, you talking to me?
I NEED A PLACE TO SLEEP TONIGHT!
Well, there's a space in the attic with an old mattress in it?
I TAKE MATTRESS AND ATTIC THANKÝOU.
I'm heading home now with my food and supplies.
I COME HOME WITH YOU NOW!
Umm,,,,well okay, you may as well help carrying this food.
I CARRY MY FOOD!
I bought this car 9 years ago and it hasn't missed a beat.
NICE CAR, SEAT VERY COMFORT, WHAT SPEED WE GOING AT?
We're doing 60 mph now. This is my place on the left with the big tree out the front.
I LIKE MY HOUSE AND TREE!
I'd like you to meet my wife Sarah.
HELLO MY WIFE SARAH I AM HUNGRY!
Oh dear, we have a guest for dinner.
I LIVE IN ATTIC NOW!
Umm Sarah, Bob is staying with us for a while until he sorts things out.
Ohh, how nice, he can help you with the chores around the house.
ME HELP AROUND THE HOUSE AND MAKE YOU HAPPY SARAH.
Umm Bob, I'll show you the stairs to the attic and you can tidy things up.
ME HAVE HOUSE AND WIFE NOW, ME EAT SOON THEN SLEEP.

Sooo, I'm guessing that the Bob in this hypothetical is Bob Black who doesn't work and therefore has no money or property, and he's holding and pointing a gun at this guy but that isn't mentioned? Or else the guy with the wife and house is a serial killer. We'll never know, unless there's a second chapter.

Bob Black wouldn't need a gun or money, he would use his charm to get his non-working anarchist self fed and housed!

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