Shawn P. Wilbur

Constructing an Anarchism: « My Anarchism »

But the butterfly motif...what does it mean? We need to know!

from Libertarian Labyrinth

It was sort of a wild idea: to propose a year-long course on anarchist ideas, on short notice, for an audience of whoever shows up, and to start off with the elaboration, largely on the fly, of an idiosyncratic anarchist synthesis, drawing on a wide variety of source material. But here we are, finishing up that first and probably most difficult phase of things.

Constructing an Anarchism: Encounter and Entente

from Libertarian Labyrinth

I’m going to tackle two concepts together this week—and start to set up the final summary for this portion of the workshop as well. As an experimental space assembled quickly and redecorated on the fly, “Constructing an Anarchism” has served me pretty well. But it was a space designed for more activity, more encounters with other participants, than it has actually seen—and I would be lying if I said it hasn’t felt just a bit cavernous when I give myself time to think about it. So I want to get the last two components of my anarchism on the table and then perhaps move fairly quickly into the summary.

Constructing an Anarchism: Contr’un

Contraaan like a...

From Libertarian Labyrinth

Perhaps there is more than we can safely and specifically call anarchistic in the realm of practice, but I’m inclined to limit this final discussion to a narrow range of interactions in which people, as I put it in the posts on guarantism, “get mixed up” with one another, but without, as we have said, pacts or contracts—or the creation of anything resembling the polity-form. The very specific thing that I have been attempting to pull from Proudhon’s social science is a way of characterizing those particular interactions in some general sense: an anarchic “social system,” with all of the attendant difficulties and necessary cautions about systems recognized.

Constructing an Anarchism: Guarantism (Application)

In resultant anarchy the basic social unit will be marriage with Proudhonian analysis.

from Libertarian Labyrinth

I had anticipated the need for one last serious theoretical intervention at this point, in order to set up the comparatively programmatic elements in the remaining posts. The emergence of some new details in the “social system” section of Proudhon’s Justice—as discussed in the last post—offers a different and more direct path forward. But let’s start by quickly examining the road we won’t be traveling.

Constructing an Anarchism: Guarantism (Theory)

from Libertarian Labyrinth

For Charles Fourier, Guarantism was one of the stages between Civilization, the undesirable present state of things, and Harmony, a state in which the harmonious expression of the passions would occur more or less naturally, thanks to lessons learned and tendencies developed along the way. Guarantism wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough that he resisted describing it too fully, lest we be tempted by its relative splendors.

Constructing an Anarchism: Individualism

Regina : "Shawn, stop trying to make Proudhon happen! It's not going to happen!"

from Libertarian Labyrinth

We’re in a stage of the construction of this first anarchism where we have to focus on the ideological and practical implications of the theory of collective force and unity-collectivities we have been exploring. I had originally intended to address these questions in a different manner, focusing on the concepts of mutualism and federation, but the concerns remain much the same.

Constructing Anarchisms: Halfway to Anarchism

Are we there yet?

from Libertarian Labyrinth

We’re halfway through the process of constructing our experimental anarchism and, with the hardest part of my work now done, I’ve been spending more time thinking about how we might continue things in 2022, with the work done this year serving as a foundation.

Constructing an Anarchism: Aubaine

from Libertarian Labyrinth

Aubaine is not, like anarchy, one of those notions that anarchists could hardly do without. It perhaps not even, like governmentalism, an old term that anarchists might consider reviving. Proudhon settled on the term in his early critique of property, but his usage was, I think, somewhat idiosyncratic and led Benjamin Tucker in some odds directions in his translation. Frédéric Tufferd made good, if perhaps equally idiosyncratic use of the term in “Unity in Socialism,” but the shift in anarchist language he discussed there would continue—and within a few decades it appears that the term was used in the anarchist press primarily in its more general sense of “windfall” or even “godsend.” So, rather than building this concept into the foundation of the anarchism under construction, it probably makes sense to use our encounter with it as an occasion to clarify a few points already on the table—and then let it go.

Constructing Anarchisms: The Anarchist and «Their Own»

from Libertarian Labyrinth

The level of difficulty in this works varies considerably from post to post—or from paragraph to paragraph—and from moment to moment. Thoroughly stuck in the middle of this post, for example, I turned to the material on collective force and worked through it in record time. Then I puttered at translation and went to bed. Or tried to go to bed. Got up and re-outlined the opening for this post. Went back to bed. Got up again and scribbled a bit more in a notebook. Made a bit of headway the next day. Ran errands. Took the afternoon ramble—and came back with the outline for a short, but potentially book on individualism and anarchist practice…

Constructing an Anarchism: Collective Force

from Libertarian Labyrinth

In general, I’ve had pretty good luck keeping up with the demands of the project, despite all of the distractions of multiple crises. This weekend I’m running a bit low on steam. So the post connecting the discussion of governmentalism with that of collective force will follow this post—which is perhaps not a bad thing—and should then be followed by a post discussing the polity-form, before I get to next week’s discussion of the question of the aubaines and exploitation.

Constructing an Anarchism: Governmentalism

from Libertarian Labyrinth

GovernmentalismArchy, particularly in the political realm; the organization of social relations according to the principle of authority or governmental principle, as well as the ideology that holds that form of social organization as superior or necessary. Governmentalism was the target of anarchist critique in the era before the emergence of statism as a primary concern.

Readings for Constructing Anarchisms on Immediatism

from Immediatism

Immediatism podcast has provided audio files for most of the Constructing Anarchisms readings suggested by Shawn Wilbur for weeks 1-4. The full Constructing Anarchisms workshop project may be accessed at Libertarian-Labyrinth.org, along with pdf's for each of the essays read on Immediatism, with some being both in French and English. Continue to send feedback and requests to Cory@Immediatism.com. And, continue to watch the site for upcoming readings in the Constructing Anarchisms workshop.

Constructing an Anarchism: Tradition

from Libertarian Labyrinth

I’ve decided to skip “Notes” this week and devote the time to other projects. (So if, for example, you were interested in 175 installments of anarchist writing, fiction and memoir, on exile in New Caledonia, I’ve at least provided the bibliography.) The post on An-Anarchy has elicited some passionate responses, but they have mostly been of the “after the horse has bolted” gate-keeping variety. And while it is true that even those conflicts have their uses — C’est du choc des idées que jaillit la lumière and all that — some kinds of light are considerably less likely to provide much clarity for our particular purposes here.

Constructing an Anarchism: Approaching An-Archy

from The Libertarian Labyrinth

What is anarchy? This is a question that I have returned to repeatedly, a bit obsessively, with different results each time. I have come to the conclusion that anarchy is what we might call a still-emerging concept. At times it strikes me as almost shockingly self-evident, bold and bare like the lovers in some one of a thousand anarcho-naturist poems—or sometimes maybe just bold...

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