Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule

Proudhon on method, and the "system" of society

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:12:00 +0000

[The bolded section is a great bit of clarification by Proudhon.]

Justice in the Revolution and in the Church

from the Study on Ideas

LVIII. — System of public reason, or social system.

How many times have I heard addressed this compliment that the jealous critic would undertake, for the honor of the century, to withdraw, if he comprehended its scope: You are an admirable destroyer, but you do not build anything. You throw people in the road, and you do not offer them the least assistance. What do you put in the place of religion? What do you put in place of government? What do you put in place of property? One says to me now: What are you putting in place of this individual reason, which, for the need of your cause, you are reduced to deny the sufficiency?

Nothing, my good man, for I intend to suppress none of the things of which I have made such a resolute critique. I flatter myself that I do only two things: that is, first, to teach you put each thing in its place, after having purged it of the absolute and balanced it with other things; then, to show you that the things that you know, and that you have such fear of losing, are not the only ones that exist, and that there are considerably more of which you still must take account. Of this order is the collective reason.

One asks what is the true system, the natural, rational, legitimate system of society, since none of those previously tested were resistant to the secret action that disrupts them. This has been the constant preoccupation of socialist philosophers, from the mythological Minos to the director of the Icarians. As we had no positive idea of Justice, nor of the economic order, nor of social dynamics, nor of the conditions of philosophical certainty, a monstrous idea has been made of the social being: it has been compared to a large organization, created according to a formula of hierarchy which, prior to Justice, was his own law and the very condition of its existence; it was like an animal of a species mysterious, but which, following the example of all animals known, should have a head, heart, nerves, teeth, feet, etc. From this chimera of an organism, which all have tried their best to discover, Justice was then deduced, that is to say that one attempted to make morality emerge from physiology or, as they say today, right from duty, so that Justice was still placed outside of conscience, freedom subject to fatalism, and humanity fallen.

I have refuted in advance all these imaginations, by exposing the facts and principles which exclude them forever.

With respect to the substantiality and organization of the social being, I have shown the first in that surplus of effective power which is proper to the group, which exceeds the sum of individual forces that comprise it; I gave the law of the second, showing that it reduces itself to a series of the weightings of forces, services and products, which makes the social system a general equation, a balance. That organism, society, the moral being par excellence, differs essentially so much from living beings, in which the subordination of organs is the law of existence. That is why society is averse to any notion of hierarchy, and thus made the formula: All men are equal in dignity by nature and must become equivalent in conditions through work and Justice.

Now, as a being is organized, such will be its reason: that is why, while the reason of the individual affects the form of a genesis, as can be seen by all the theogonies, gnoses , political constitutions, syllogistics; collective reason reduces itself, like algebra, by the elimination of the absolute, to a series of resolutions and equations, which means that there is really not, for society, a system.

It is not a system, indeed, in the sense that usually attaches to this word, but an order in which all relations are relations of equality, where there exists neither rule nor obedience, neither center of gravity nor of direction; where the only law is that everyone abide by Justice, i.e., balance.

Does mathematics constitute a system? It does not fall into anyone’s mind to say so. If, in a treatise of mathematics, some trace of systematization is detected, it is due to the author, not at all the science. It is thus in the social reason.

Two men meet, recognize their dignity, state the additional benefit that would result for both from the concert of their industries, and consequently guarantee equality, which means economy. There is the whole social system: an equation, and then a power of collectivity.

Two families, two cities, two provinces, contract on the same footing: there is always that these two things, an equation and power of collectivity. It would involve a contradiction, a violation of Justice, if there were anything else.

"Ireland!" A serialized novel from Tucker's "Liberty"

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:03:00 +0000

I've finally posted the complete text of Georges Sauton's novel, Ireland! Translated from the French by Sarah E. Holmes, it originally appeared serially in Liberty, but has not, as far as I can tell, been collected. It was one of the longest-running features in the paper, which often had several serials in progress, beginning November 14, 1885 and not ending until March 10, 1888. It is a rather typical political novel in the feuilleton style, with lots of characters and complications, and a substantial body count. Set during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, its English oppressors couldn't be more corrupt and brutal, and its United Irishman couldn't be more proud and doomed. It's a nice example of the type, and Holmes' translation is quite readable.

I've also recently posted the full text of Sidney H. Morse's "The Senator and the Editor," another, considerably shorter story serialized in Liberty. Like Morse's "Liberty and Wealth" (which ran in Liberty and seems to feature an alternate reality in which Josiah Warren's ideas dominated at New Harmony) and "Ethics of the Homestead Strike" (a serial from The Conservator), it plays some interesting games with current events.

Everything in the Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sun, 12 May 2013 20:40:00 +0000

I've had a chance recently to reread some old and in-progress translations from Proudhon's writings about philosophy, and naturally the impact of those writings changes as my understanding of Proudhon's larger project grows. But I'm honestly a little embarrassed that the material from the opening sections of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church hasn't made a stronger impression on me before now. Those sections, which discuss the nature and purpose of philosophy, the role of metaphysics, the accessibility of philosophical thought to the masses, and the relation of philosophy to justice, make a fairly remarkable set of arguments, many of which are what we would now probably call anti-foundationalist in character. In The Philosophy of Progress, Proudhon described his project in terms of an opposition to the absolute and an affirmation of progress, and challenged the idea of a criterion of certainty. In Justice, he asserts his criterion for, well, just about everything, and it turns out to be justice, understood as balance—and specifically as a balance between terms assumed to be equal in standing. The "anarchic encounter between equally unique individuals" turns out to be form of even the most basic exercises in gathering knowledge.

I encourage anyone interested in Proudhon's thought to read that material, and apologize in advance for some minor, but nearly all obvious, defects in the current form of the translation. More specifically, I encourage anyone who does read it to be open to the more extreme implications of this business of taking balance as the criterion—as the closest thing to a foundation that perhaps we have. If we understand the mature, post-coup d'état Proudhon as starting by placing everything in the balance of justice, then I think that while the difficult, later works do not become any easier to grapple with, we can at least more easily eliminate some of the preconceptions which hinder our engagement with them.

Benjamin R. Tucker in the Boston Globe

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:27:00 +0000

One of the aspects of Benjamin R. Tucker's career that has received comparatively little attention is his interest in European literature, and his translation efforts. His Five Stories a Week remains half-mythic for many of us who have devoted a lot of attention to Liberty and the Radical Review, but the same is true for quite a bit of the fiction that appeared in those magazines as well. I'll admit I've only read parts of Sarah E. Holmes' translation of Georges Sauton's "Ireland," despite all the time I have recently devoted to radical feuilleton literature. But as I have been working on migrating material from the old Libertarian Labyrinth to the new one, one of the things I've been try to do is follow up on as many of the notes and unfollowed leads tucked away in the old archive as I can, and one of the things that involved was to make sure I had a complete text of "The Handsome Orlando," Tucker's translation of a work by Oliver Chantal, which was widely published in newspapers in 1890.

The peculiarities of newspaper archives being what they are, completing a serial can require coming at the material with a number of strategies and through a number of search engines, where possible. A long-shot Google News search didn't advance my "Handsome Orlando" search much, but it did suggest that I had been missing a real trove of Tucker translations, tucked away behind a paywall in the Boston Globe archives. The access was fairly cheap, and the search apparatus was perhaps a little less than I paid for, so the first keyword searches, on several variations of Tucker's name, returned about 50 articles by or about him, with indications of about five stories, some of them serials, that he had translated for the paper. The peculiarities of newspaper archives being what they are, a variety of other searches has brought the count to five serials, one with roughly seventy-five installments, and a total of close to 200 articles. There are also just a couple of political articles. The Globe was consistent in announcing at the end of each installment when the next would appear, so completing the research will be fairly straightforward busy-work, once I print out a couple of 1890s calendar pages. And then I'll be able to begin to tell if the stories themselves are of interest.

But it's certainly not everyday anymore that I can add close to 200 records to one of my author bibliographies.

The future of the Libertarian Labyrinth archive

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:04:00 +0000

There's been a sort of elegiac quality to many of the responses to my recent change in focus and keywords. For me, although there are obviously costs involved with shifting from rhetorical ground that I've invested a lot in, the changes almost all seem like upgrades and improvements. It's a question of making the body of work I've done and the body of materials I've collected as useable as possible. That seems to mean a less partisan focus for the writing and the continuation of some ongoing improvements in the archives. Last year's big project was to improve the citations for materials in the Labyrinth wiki, and the additions of COinS metadata to a large number of articles. This year's move from a Mediawiki-based archive to one built on the Omeka platform means that cataloging data will take center stage, allowing me to begin to specialize the archive for research purposes. I've been wanting to bring together my various bibliographic projects for some time, and Omeka seems to be the right platform to do that. Omeka also provides much greater control over text formatting, so it will be possible to present the documents in the archive with more of their original formatting intact, and makes it easy to attach pdf/A file facsimiles where that seems most appropriate. It has a powerful, if complex, advanced search system, which will let researchers zero in more closely on the desired records. In fact, making the most of the system's capacities will probably be an ongoing project. The raw catalog may be a little less inviting to casual browsers than the wiki, but the ability to build exhibits will mean that I will fairly quickly be able to give the key collections a rather attractive presentation. Indeed, the ability to more easily curate and display individual authors' oeuvres, the content of particular magazines, or annotated texts (etc.) will free me up to use the catalog not just as a text repository, but as the bibliographic reference that I've angling towards for some time. At the same time, a developing partnership with my friends at The Anarchist Library means that some materials from the archive will also get distribution there, and in a little more systematic manner than we've managed so far. We're currently working together on improving the cataloging system for both sites, with vague visions of anarchist union catalogs no doubt dancing in various heads.

I'm hoping for a sort of Grand Opening about June 1. There are 2000+ wiki articles and blog posts to at least look over, in order to migrate all the texts currently available to the new archive, and there are indexes and finding aids to update. There are hard decisions to be made about metadata schemes and maybe a little reprogramming of some plugins to be done. But there is already a lot of information on the new site, with over 1000 bibliographic entries migrated and more texts input each day, and I would be interested in any feedback on the general look and feel of the place.

Instead of a Book... a Different Book

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:48:00 +0000

With the essay on Proudhon and the state finally in the hands of the reviewers, I've been able to think a little more seriously about what portions of the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book are both of general interest and unlikely to be better dealt with in the context of the Atercracy project. After recontextualizing and "rebranding," there is still a basic study of Proudhon's thought and its modern application that remains to be written. Here's a tentative outline of the "replacement" text:

EVERYTHING IN THE BALANCE:
Exploring the Theory and Practice of Proudhonian Anarchism

Introduction: The Long Road Back to Proudhon

Part One: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: An Introduction and Restoration
I. The Philosophy of Progress
Two Kinds of Truth
The Nature of the Revolution
II. Anarchism: Critical, Constructive and Ungovernable
III. Absolutes and Free Absolutes: Proudhon’s Theory of Beings
IV. In the Balance: Proudhon’s Theory of Justice

Part Two: Neo-Proudhonian Explorations
I. A Gift Economy of Property
II. State and Market as Collective Beings
III. Proudhon for Lovers
IV. Thinking Like an Anarchist

There are also a few purely practical observations on topics like occupancy and use, mutual banking, and the cost principle that I want to eventually write up, and those will probably appear on the mutualism.info blog.

A peek at the future...

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:12:00 +0000

It is looking more and more like the new site will combine my various archives, and be much more library-like. There is probably a blog in the future, but it may take some time to materialize. So there will undoubtedly be some wrap-up, reflection and bridging-to-the-future stuff here for a while yet. Some low-traffic wiki and blog projects like the Proudhon Library and Splendors of the Combined Order will be disappearing fairly quickly, and the archives ending up at the new Libertarian Labyrinth site, where I can use them to work through some questions about site design, cataloging, metadata, etc. That new library site is in a very unformed state, with much of the standardizing and adapting work still to be done, but if you want a glimpse, it's right here...

The ANARCHISMS Project

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Among the bridges from "Two-Gun Mutualism" to the broader project I'm taking on, one of the most important is probably the ANARCHISMS Project that I launched last month. The new research and writing program takes off from my always-increasing sense of anarchism's ungovernability, part of which is displayed in the enormous number of ways in which it has, and continues to be, summarized and advance. The real diversity of anarchist positions is hardly reducible to the sort of short-list of tendencies we tend to rely on, and our reliance on that short-list arguably stifles a considerable amount of past, present, and potential future diversity. There is, I think, a lot of room between narrow, sectarian categorizations and the sort of abandonment of basic anarchistic principle which perhaps we think we're guarding against .

The immediate interest in an ANARCHISMS anthology has complicated my initial plans, in a pleasant enough way. I certainly have enough, and varied enough material in hand to put together a "representative" collection demonstrating the real internal diversity of the tradition, but by the time that collection appears it would be preferable to also have assembled a larger body of manifestos, short intros, personal statements, etc., for those really interested in exploring anarchism's possibilities. Assembling that collection will also undoubtedly be a good first step to launching the new thing—for now, let's just grin and wink and call it Codename: Atercracy—which will take the ungovernable diversity of anarchism as its basic premise.

My goal for the ANARCHISMS Project is to construct an archive and index—and eventually a body of commentary—of the mass of introductory texts produced between roughly 1820 and 1920. And I would like to see the collection grow as comprehensive as possible. But that's no small task, since it was common in the late 19th century for anarchist periodicals to include one or more such summary statements in any given issue. So obviously it would help if others who are working their way through the literature could keep their eyes open for this sort of material. (Take a look at any of the first three pamphlets for a listing of what I've published so far.) My own list is currently considerably longer, and I'll try to post that on a project page within the next week or so, but in the meantime I would welcome comments here or contact through my profile page with additions, suggestions, links, etc.

As I said in the essays on ungovernability, I have little or no interest in attempting to end the debates over "true anarchism." I think they are a necessary part of the evolution of the idea, and obviously the ungovernability arguments mark my own position in the debate. But I also have a strong preference for better fighting—if fighting is what we have to do—and figure there are worse things to do at this stage of anarchism's development than make sure there is lots of high quality fuel for whatever fires we feel the need to set. I'm sure there will be some people, for whom the question of anarchism seems eminently governable and already decided, for whom these new projects will be an even greater affront than the mutualist resurrection, but I doubt many of those people ever see this blog. Among those still reading, and those likely to follow the project into its next stages, I have some hope that a catalog of anarchist diversity—and perhaps untapped anarchist potential—may hold some real attraction.

Beyond Mutualism

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:43:00 +0000

It's really not an April Fool's joke: I'm preparing to leave "mutualism" behind as the way I describe my politics. It's a reinvention that I have been contemplating for a long time, but there are obviously associated costs, given the amount of energy I've invested in attempting to restore the good name of the anarchism of Proudhon and Co. I certainly stand by all of that work—which will naturally go on, though in a somewhat different context.

Mutualism was always unstable ground on which to try to build. You can go back to some of the very first posts on this blog and find Kevin Carson, Larry Gambone and I attempting to clarify the various things that "mutualism" means and has meant, or look at my more recent work on "the ungovernability of anarchism" to see some more mature thoughts on those same complexities. I have no doubt that there might well be some good work left in that much-contested political label, but my own personal experience is that the costs of keeping the term viable seem to be—at this point in time, and for me—considerably higher than the benefits of continuing to fly it as a flag.

In important ways, the battle that Kevin, Larry and I were engaged in when this blog launched—the struggle to restore mutualism to its proper place among the anarchist traditions—has been rather spectacularly won. The hegemony of the sort of anarchist history which simply sidelines mutualism has largely broken down, and the strong arguments in its defense—anarchist history of the Black Flame school, for example—can't simply rely on general agreement. The work to restore Proudhon to his place in the anarchist canon is well underway, and a wide range of more-or-less mutualist figures now enjoy at least a certain amount of name recognition. Ben Godwin's mutualist banner, featuring Proudhon, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, Jeanne Deroin, Dyer D. Lum, Herman Kuehn, Alfred B. Westrup, Clarence Swartz and Sidney H. Morse, has become a sort of stock visual representation of the school—and if anarchists are still hazy about what some of those folks actually accomplished, we've still come a long way from where we were even a few years ago. Iain McKay and Crispin Sartwell have done their share in exposing wider audiences to key figures, and Charles Johnson, Roderick Long, and others—some of them some distance outside the traditional limits of the anarchist movement—have done important work, broadening and enriching that canon. I like to think I've done a little myself, with my archiving, translating and publishing endeavors, as well as in the various attempts at interpretation and extension of mutualist theory that I've engaged in.

But one of the problems with the contemporary mutualisms or neo-mutualisms has been the fact that they have necessarily had one foot in a still-obscure past and one in some boldly projected future. We ended up with a variety of rather unlike things bearing the same "mutualist" label because the burial of the original mutualisms had been fairly complete. As a result, we uncovered the mutualist tradition in roughly reverse historical order. First came the Tuckerite footnote, then the adaptation by Greene, and only later any real engagement with the philosophy and social science of Proudhon, his contemporaries or his predecessors. All of the modern confusions of Carsonian vs. neo-Proudhonian vs. proto-communist mutualism have quite naturally been the result—and all sorts of more-or-less organization tensions have naturally followed from them.

That—from my perspective, at least—is how the costs of this whole "mutualist" thing have come to soar well above the level of its benefits.

But there is another problem with the mutualist renaissance, which we might call a sort of "retrospective" character. While I think all the active currents of new mutualist thought present at least pieces of a fairly powerful strategy for moving forward—and indeed share a great deal in those terms—it is almost inescapable that a revived mutualism would be seen, and to some degree see itself, in terms of an anarchist history which, if it has significantly relaxed its strictures against mutualism, still treats mutualism as a particular school, with a particular, largely preliminary role to play in the development of anarchism. Subsequent developments in the tradition have established what is important about mutualism in terms of their disagreements and differences, and it has been the hardest of tasks to simply present the philosophies of the early-to-mid 19th century on their own terms and in their own vocabulary. (Think, for example, of the critiques which claim that Proudhon abandoned anarchism by "abandoning" an anarchist anti-statism which arguably wasn't even a thing for another decade or two.) We're encouraged to think of mutualism as what is left of anarchism when all the cool, revolutionary stuff has been claimed by other traditions, when it might make as much sense to say what mutualism was before we chopped it up, parceled it out, and did our level best to govern it. I'm perfectly happy to take things that far, but even if we didn't, there are lots of questions we might raise about whether our present tendency to define anarchistic schools according to the institutions and conventions they privilege or prohibit is faithful to the original vision of anarchist anti-authoritarianism that we all ultimately inherited. And then there are simply practical concerns that arise when we allow a contemporary political philosophy to be defined by the 19th century approximations that its historical proponents themselves understood as experimental and "approximate." There are lots of useful things that might be said about "mutual banking," Josiah Warren's "time store" or particular formulations of "occupancy and use" property norms, but they aren't, alas, the things that there has been much opportunity to say in the usual debates.

One of the results of the deeper and deeper delving into the history of mutualism has been a steady chipping away at most of the accepted wisdom about the tradition, and the neo-mutualists that have attempted to delve and build at the same time have naturally created difficulties for themselves. Our story, once freed from the dismissive narratives of mutualism's would-be gravediggers and successors, leads off in dozens of interesting directions, many of them unexpected, and we find "mutualism" dissolving off into a lot of different stories, some of which (like the role of women in early mutualist associations) those intent on dismissing mutualism might not be so pleased—or at least consistent—to silence. But mutualism does indeed dissolve in those expanding histories—at least to a very great extent—and we are left with something more general, and potentially more interesting: an anarchism that looks more than just a bit different from our own.

I have often talked about the necessity, in the work on property, of solving the problem of our basic opposition to property by confronting it seriously and pushing through. That has ultimately been my experience with mutualism as well. It has been necessary to take it on, and take it very seriously, in order to push through and see what sort of anarchism might be hidden on the other side. The realization that I might be most of the way through mutualism has been dawning on me as I have begun work on Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed, increasingly conscious that the very last thing I'm interested in doing is establishing yet another anarchistic "school" or identity, another way of disciplining the tradition. That way, it seems to me, lies the same old shit, the very stuff that often makes me ready to discard anarchism altogether.

But there is this body of accumulated work, much of which seems useful or even important, all laid out in the book outline, and no shortage of loose ends hanging here on the blog, so what does a shift away from mutualism mean for ongoing projects?

My hope is to proceed so that none of the really good stuff gets abandoned, but everything that does get pursued gets a more useful treatment than I can be certain of giving it in the context of a more-or-less partisan mutualist work of theory or history. And I think that moving away from the specific mutualist context will remove some obstacles to making sense of my work, which, after all, has come to cover a lot of territory that is not "mutualist" by any stretch of the imagination. Some of the fun of organizing the book has been precisely the partisan nature of it, the audacious project of retelling early anarchist history in a way which ought to have repercussions for the way we think of anarchist history in general—the "Proudhon's revenge" element. But arguably all of that sort of fun will be clearer—and stripped of at least some partisan silliness—if it is a question simply of reexamining anarchist history, without the mutualist lens. There is more than enough of interest in all the variations of what we might call "pre-classical" anarchism and the lingering influence of the "utopian" predecessors, without making a mutualist history, and there are a variety of elements that it will be easier to represent fairly, on their own terms, if there is no partisan lens at all.

Historical objectivity being out of the question, of course, my current plan for a reorganized TGM: Rearmed is attempt as much as possible to rely on that other anarchism which seems to be lurking in our anarchist past as the lens. Of course, anarchism has been what it has been and will be whatever we make of it, and to avoid as much as possible the "true anarchism" debates, I'm inclined to steal a word from Claude Pelletier and call the lens-anarchism "atercracy," and treat the unabashedly revisionist history as a sort of alternate timeline, a series of historically grounded speculations on what might have been, in the interest of carving out another usable historical account from the same material as the one that a resurgent mutualism has struggled against. If I do the sort of minimal reorganization I'm currently envisioning, the first volume will be rechristened something like The Spirit of '58, and focus on the story I've already begun telling in piecemeal fashion, from Etienne de la Boetie to the Paris Commune, with Proudhon and Déjacque situated at center stage, emphasizing the constructive side of anarchism. And then the second volume, Dancing with St. Ravachol, can address the more strictly negative side of anarchism, reaching back to at least Déjacque and Coeurderoy and forward into at least the 20th century. In the process of telling the story—and its various might-have-beens—the bits of TGM: Rearmed that at least some people are anticipating—the material on the "gift-economy of property" and "Proudhon for lovers"—will undoubtedly find their place, or be published separately.

Ultimately, and other concerns aside, the shift in focus will probably give me a better platform from which to spin off various other bits of radical history, like the oft-delayed Rogues radical biography project and some introductory author anthologies. The Mutualist will be a casualty of the adjustment, but I expect mutualism.info will receive the same sort of intermittent development that it has in the past.

I'm sure there will be lots of complications and concerns to deal with as I extricate myself from a familiar context and set out on a somewhat new course, but I've reached a point where I don't see—for myself—any way forward which does not involve a broadening of context.

I'll post links to whatever follow-up sites emerge, and to the Travels in the Libertarian Labyrinth volumes as they are completed. Beyond that, things will probably wind down here pretty quickly. Thanks to those who have followed along.

Closing a chapter

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:20:00 +0000

I've been doing a lot of wrestling for some time now with my place in the universe of anarchism, and contemplating the best way to perhaps get a useful hearing for the insights of my last decade or so of thought and research. While much remains unclear, the one thing that seems clearest to me at this point is that my reluctant role as mutualist movement-builder is almost certainly a misapplication of the talents I possess, and that the specifically mutualist context probably detracts from what are arguably broader insights about anarchist theory and history. So while I may yet have a lot of thinking and writing to do about mutualism and mutualists, and while, ultimately, the most radical and useful things I find at the heart of the anarchist project are essentially what I have been calling "two-gun mutualism," I am inclined to do my best from here on out to leave the label behind me. Two-gun mutualism was always intended as a transitional program anyway. I'm just transitioning a little sooner.

That means a final end to this blog, and a significant rethinking of the TGM: Rearmed book. I'll be active on the other blogs and archives, including trying to establish mutualism.info as a solid historical resource and finishing the "Travels" summaries of this blog, and eventually there will be a new "main" commentary blog to replace this, as I clarify the new stage of research and writing. But it will take a little time to separate myself from this particular way of thinking about the work I do and begin again, hopefully with a little more useful and sustainable focus.

Book fair report

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 23:39:00 +0000

I spent about a week in California this month, to attend the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, do a bit of research at UC Berkeley, see friends and plot some publishing projects. It will probably be a few more weeks before I entirely process the experience, which was, shall we say, fraught in a variety of ways, even by anarchist standards. The change of venue from one owned by the government to one owned by a porn company created a new set of conflicts, and also fed fuel to the conflicts which always surround the event, where communism and commerce always seem to be as entangled in practice as they are presumably opposed in theory. This year, a series of alternative events around the venue spread the mayhem, drew new lines—though these seemed, in many cases, as confused and confusing as the usual lines—and separated "camps" in such a way that the conflicts seem to have got a much less restrained airing. Some of that is doubtless very good, and some is almost certainly not, and who knows, at this point, what 2014 will bring. It's my reactions to all that stuff I'm still sorting out in my head, and will come back to at some point here.

For now, here's the less complicated news:

For a book fair in the process of exploding or imploding, with the usual suspects unusually scattered, it wasn't a bad couple of days for the Corvus Editions project. I compressed my usual prep period a bit, trying to be diligent pursuing the essay on Proudhon and the state, which has been exciting and challenging and, alas, consequently past deadlines, so I brought a selection of pamphlets, with the new ANARCHISMS series and Black and Red Feminism/La Frondeuse featured prominently. I constructed covers from pretty much whatever was attractive and on hand, with a stack of floral scrapbook paper I had picked up cheap a key ingredient, and once again it is clear that whether or not people actually read what I publish, they like it when I make the material pretty.

I bought less than I usually do, in part because some of the vendors I frequent were set up elsewhere. My friends at Black Cat have published a translation of Carlo Cafiero's Revolution, which is an important bit of early anarchist-communist theory. The second issue of Modern Slavery is out, and ditto, apparently, for Wolfi Landstreicher's translation of Stirner's Critics, although getting them required accessing some alternative venues and/or channels. (Get yours from Little Black Cart, and check out LBC's other new releases.)

Library research went very well. I scanned some material published at Icaria-Speranza by Jules Leroux, discovered that Louise Michel's play "The Strike" was entirely translated in The Commonweal, and, in the process, discovered some translations relating to Ravachol of which I had been unaware. I should be able to complete the transcription of "The Strike" sometime soon, and check it against the French text. I already know that it contains a few additions and a few deletions which need to be indicated.

In terms of publishing projects, I had a chance to spend a little time with my translating collaborator and the publisher interested in Joseph Déjacque's works, starting with The Humanisphere and some related writings, and expect to be back at work seriously on that within the week. We also discussed a collection of material related to Ravachol, which is taking shape fairly rapidly, although there's still a lot of archive-scouring and translation to be done. None of this was unexpected. What was unexpected was an enthusiastic offer—out of the blue on Sunday morning—to publish a collection from the ANARCHISMS series, by a publisher with the distribution to make carving a more representative anthology out of the growing stack of manifestos and introductions an attractive prospect. So it looks like that book will actually happen, and things on my end may happen fairly quickly. My goal is still to assemble a much larger collection of introductory pieces—and I'll probably be issuing some sort of call for assistance in assembling that soon, as well as some thoughts about the organization and potential uses of the archive—but I've already assembled enough material to facilitate some very difficult choices in weeding things down to the size proposed for the book. I've been able to talk up the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book, and it's follow-up, Dancing with St. Ravachol, but still don't have any sense if there's a logical publisher for the pair. Perhaps that will all look more interesting as it comes together—or perhaps a Corvus Edition will be the right size for the volumes. We'll see...

Introducing "ANARCHISMS" + new issues of "La Frondeuse"

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 03:41:00 +0000

I'm launching a new series of pamphlets collecting introductory summaries and personal statements attempting to define anarchism in the most basic terms. In the ANARCHISMS series, the texts will be collected with very little attention to tendency, beyond trying to mix things up in each issue, and without editorial comment. I am often asked for entry-level texts, and it's difficult to find material which does not come with some critical apparatus already attached. There are plenty of occasions where context and various kinds of helps are indispensable, but there is also a time for letting individual statements speak for themselves. I've assembled three pamphlets in the series and will continue to collect material as long as I find useful texts.

I've also assembled two new issues of La Frondeuse, the black and red feminist history project. The fifth issue collects writings by Emma Goldman, primarily on women's issues, including her critiques of suffrage. Issue six collects writings in a number of genres by Sophie Kropotkin, the very talented wife of Peter Kropotkin.

The Stammering Century

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:53:00 +0000

My review of Gilbert Seldes' The Stammering Century is now online at the Reason site. Check it out!

Proudhon on the State in 1861

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 04:45:00 +0000

You might expect that Proudhon's theory of the state would be most succinctly expressed in one of his essays on the subject of the state, like "Resistance to the Revolution" of the "Small Political Catechism." There are certainly key elements of the theory there, and more in The Theory of Property, but the clearest explanation appears to be tucked away in Proudhon's book on taxation. These are the relevant passages, and it is truly striking stuff:

from The Theory of Taxation (1861)

Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right.

Modern right, by introducing itself in the place of the ancient right, has done one new thing: it has put in the presence of one another, on the same line, two powers which until now had been in a relation of subordination. These two powers are the State and the Individual, in other words Government and Liberty.

The Revolution, indeed, has not suppressed that occult, mystical presence, that one called the sovereign, and that we name more willingly the State; it has not reduced society to lone individuals, compromising, contracting between them, and of their free transaction making for themselves a common law, as the Social Contract of J.-J. Rousseau gave us to understand.

No, Government, Power, State, as on wishes to call it, is found again, under the ruins of the ancien régime, complete, perfectly intact, and stronger than before. What is new since the Revolution, is Liberty, I mean the condition made of Liberty, its civil and political state.

Let us note, besides, that the State, as the Revolution conceived it, is not a purely abstract thing, as some, Rousseau among others, have supposed, a sort of legal fiction; it is a reality as positive as society itself, as the individual even. The State is the power of collectivity which results, in every agglomeration of human beings, from their mutual relations, from the solidarity of their interests, from their community of action, from the practice of their opinions and passions. The State does not exist without the citizens, doubtless; it is not prior nor superior to them; but it exists for the very reason that they exist, distinguishing itself from each and all by special faculties and attributes. And liberty is no longer a fictive power, consisting of a simple faculty to choose between doing and not doing: it is a positive faculty, sui generis, which is to the individual, assemblage of diverse passions and faculties, what the State is to the collectivity of citizens, the highest power of conception and of creation of being (D).

This is why the reason of the State is not the same thing as individual reason; why the interest of the State is not the same as private interest, even if that was identical in the majority or the totality of citizens; why the acts of government are of a different nature than the acts of the simple individual. The faculties, attributes, interests, differ between the citizen and the State as the individual and the collective differ between them: we have seen a beautiful example of it, when we have posed that principle that the law of exchange is not the same for the individual and for the State.

Under the regime of divine right, the reason of State being confused with the dynastic, aristocratic or clerical reason, could not always be in conformity with justice; that is what has cause the banishment, by modern right, of the abusive principle of the reason of State. Just so, the interest of the State, being confused with the interest of dynasty or of caste, was not in complete conformity with Justice; and it is that which makes every society transformed by the Revolution tend to republican government.

Under the new regime, on the contrary, the reason of State must in complete conformity with Justice, the true expression of right, reason essentially general and synthetic, distinct consequently from the reason of the citizen, always more or less specialized and individual (E). Similarly, the interest of the State is purged of all aristocratic and dynastic pretension; the interest of the State is above all an interest of noble right, which implies that its nature is other than that of individual interest.

The author of the Social Contract a claimed, and those who follow him have repeated after him, that the true sovereign is the citizen; that the prince, organ of the State, is only the agent of the citizen; consequently that the State is the chose of the citizen: all that would be bon à dire while it was a question of claiming the rights of man and of the citizen and of inaugurating liberty against despotism. Presently the Revolution no longer encounters obstacles, at least from the side of the ancien régime: it is a question of rightly knowing its thought and of putting it into execution. From this point of view the language of Rousseau has become incorrect, I would even say that it is false and dangerous.

Determination of the functions, attributes and prerogatives of the State,
according to modern right.

The State, a power of collectivity, having its own and specific reason, its eminent interest, its outstanding functions, the State, as such, has rights too, rights that it is impossible to misunderstand without putting immediately in peril the right, the fortune and the liberty of the citizens themselves.

The State is the protector of the liberty and property of the citizens, not only of those who are born, but of those who are to be born. Its guardianship embraces the present and future, and extends to the future generations: thus the State has rights proportionate to its obligations; without that, what would its foresight serve?

The state oversees the execution of the laws; it is the guardian of the public faith and the guarantor of the observation of contracts. These attributions imply new rights in the State, as much over persons as things, that one could not deny it without destroying it, without breaking the social bond.

The State is the justice-bringer par excellence; it alone is charged with the execution of judgments. De ce chef encore, the State has its rights, without which its own guarantee, its justice, would become null.

All of that, you say, existed before in the State. The principle then and its corollaries, the theory and the application remain at base the same, nothing has changed? The Revolution has been a useless work.

This has changed between the ancient and the new regime, the in the past the State was incarnated in a man: “L'Ètat c'est moi;”while today it finds its reality in itself, as a power of collectivity; — that in the past, that State made man, that State-King was absolute, while now it is subject to justice, and subject as a consequence to the control of the citizens; — that in the past the reason of the State was infected by aristocratic and princely reason, while today, exposed to all the critiques, to all the protests, it has strength only from Right and Truth; — that in the past, the interest of the State was confused with the interest of the princes, which distorted the administration and caused justice to stumble, which today a similar confusion of interests establishes the crime of misappropriation and prevarication; — that finally, in the past, the subject only appeared on its knees before it sovereign, as we saw it in the Estates General, while since the Revolution the citizen deals with the State as equal to equal, which is precisely what allows us to define tax as an exchange, and to consider the State, in the administration of the public funds, as a simple trader.

The State has preserved its power, its strength, which alone renders it respectable, constitutes its credit, creates awards and prerogatives for it, but it has lost its authority. It no longer has anything but Rights, guaranteed by the rights and interests of the citizens themselves. It is itself, if we can put it this way, a species of citizen; it is a civil person, like families, commercial societies, corporations, and communes. Just as there is no sovereign, there is no longer a servant, as it has been said, that would be to remake the tyrant: he is the first among his peers.

Thus liberty, which counts for nothing in the State, subordinated, absorbed was it was by the good pleasure of the sovereign, liberty has become a power equal in dignity to the State. Its definition with regard to the State is the same as with regard to the citizens: Liberty, in the man, is the power to create, innovate, reform, modify, in a word to do everything that exceeds the power of nature and that of the State, and which does no harm to the rights of others, whether that other is a simple citizen or the State. It is according to this principle that the State must abstain from everything that does not absolutely require its initiative, in order to leave a vaster field to individual liberty.

Ancient society, established on absolutism, thus tended to concentration and immobility.

The new society, established on the dualism of liberty and the State, tends to decentralization and movement. The idea of human perfectibility, or progress, has revealed itself in humanity at the same time as the new right.

________

Note D, Page 65.

Liberty and the State. — The antithesis of the State and of Liberty, presented here as the foundation and principle of modern society, by replacement of the supremacy of the State and the subordination of Liberty, which made the base of ancient society, that antithesis, eminently organic, will not be admitted by the publicists and partisans of the principle of authority, of the eminent domain of the State, of governmental initiative and of the subordination of the citizen or rather subject; it will not be understood by those who, formed by the lessons of the old scholasticism, are accustomed to see in the State and free will only abstractions. Those, just like the old partisans of divine right, are born enemies of self-government, invariable adversaries of true democracy, and condemned to the eternal arbitrariness of the reason of State and of taxation. For them the State is a mystical entity, before which every individuality must bow; Liberty is not a power, and taxation is not an exchange; principles are fictions of which the man of State makes what he wants, justice a convention and politics a bascule. These doctrinaires, as they are called, the skepticism and misanthropy of which today governs Europe, are as far beneath the ancient monarchists and feudalists, as arbitrary will is beneath faith, Machiavelli beneath the Bible. Europe owes to this school of pestilence the confusion of ideas and the dissolution of morals by which it is beset: the slack maxims Jesuits could produce nothing comparable.

This is not the place to open a discussion of the actuality of the State and of Liberty: I will content myself with referring provisionally to my work Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Fourth and Eighth Studies of the Belgian edition.

Note E, Page 66.

Opposition of collective and individual reason. See, on this curious subject, the work indicated in the preceding note, Sixth Study of the Belgian edition.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

If I had to guess...

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:40:00 +0000

...what was the single most important reason for "statism" becoming as prominent an anarchist keyword as it became in the early 20th century, I would have to go with Marxism. The term emerged as part of Bakunin's account of the struggles within the First International, and seems to have finally gained prominence in in anarchist circles the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. In the informal searching I've done in various digital archives the sudden increases in the use of the term line up very closely with the events.

Statism: It's not just for dentists anymore...

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 19:19:00 +0000

The story of anarchist anti-statism turns out to have an unexpected wrinkle, in which that tale crosses another story of anarchists and terminology that is rather bizarre. In attempting to clarify Proudhon's treatment of "government" and "the state," it has been necessary to follow those terms through a rather large number of texts and context, which add up to a rather dizzying number of uses, in order to draw some general conclusions about the shift in Proudhon's thought from what we might now think of as an anti-statist position to an analysis in which we find room for an anarchist state, but none for any governmental principle. Part of the difficulty has, of course, been the close association of anarchism with anti-statism in the present, which leads us to believe that Proudhon should have been an anti-statist, and leads us to take his strong critiques of the state, in texts like "Resistance to the Revolution," as evidence that he was a foe of statism at first, and then changed his mind.

The problem is that statism (étatisme) was not only not a keyword for Proudhon, but it does not seem to have been a keyword for much of anyone—in the sense generally given to it by anarchists—until the 1890s or so. Proudhon was among those who spoke of governmentalism (gouvernementalisme) as early as the 1840s, but statism does not seem to have become a common term among anarchists until the twentieth century, probably as much as a result of discussion of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy as anything else (although that book was apparently not translated into either French or English until relatively late in the century.)

Among non-anarchists, statism appears as in the nineteenth century as another word for statecraft or state's rights, and statist appears as a synonym for statistician.

Statism also appears as a word meaning something like a tendency to immobility. For example, in The Dental Cosmos in 1882, we find that:

"Every atom has a side of energy and a side of statism. When we find it awakened into energy we do not know the immediate cause of its awakening."

Here, however, we are not dealing with an origin in English or French, but with a word from Alwato, coined by Stephen Pearl Andrews and included in his serialized essay on "The Science of Universology" in The Index in the 1870s—and our tale has come back around to an anarchist's use of the term statism, but hardly the one we might expect. The connection to dentistry is an interesting one, and traces to a brief and very local enthusiasm for Alwato and universology among a couple of dentists prominent in the debates about dental nomenclature in the late nineteenth century. Among my nearly-completed pamphlets is a surprisingly large collection of articles from the dental journals relating to the adoption of Andrews' terminology....

A Notice and an Invitation

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:27:00 +0000

I'm finishing up my layman's introduction to Proudhon's theory of the state, for a book to be published in German, and it has been very interesting, demanding work. It has reconfirmed for me the fascinating depths of Proudhon's work, and the extent to which I've still really only begun to sound the most profound of them. It's a pleasant sort of hard work, but I admit I won't be sorry when I can put this part of it away. I suspect I will feel much the same about rest of the work for the Two-Gun Mutualism: Rearmed book. It will be a certain kind of pleasure to account for my thought in the still-conventional scholarly form (a bit of irony not lost on this unemployed bookseller) but it should be clear that what I've drawn up is the plan not just for the theoretical edifice I intend to build, but also for the fire-escape by which I fully intend to escape it when it's built. While I hope I'll be able to find a publisher for the work, and perhaps stir things up a bit on the infoshop/bookfair circuit, it's hard to ignore the fact that, so far, you all have refused pretty resolutely to be stirred, even when the work has taken me some provocative places.

The work has, of course, been the occasion for a profound transformation of my personal understanding of a range of topics, but that's not really a reason to continue my role as reluctant anarchist sect-builder—particularly as what I've learned in becoming a "two-gun mutualism" has only deepened my distrust of the politics of political identity which seems to drive the feuds between sects (including the sects who think we should all just be one sect.)

So my expectation is that a year or so from now—however soon I can wrap up TGM: Rearmed—I'll be essentially wrapping up this blog as well, and probably transforming mutualism.info into something a little bit more organized and FAQ-like. I've had another project gradually developing for quite awhile now, dealing with revolutionary mythologies, political violence, ethics outside the context of presumed prohibition and permissibility, and the question of whether anarchism presents some new "Good News" or is purely concerned with destroying and burying the old world of authority. The first phases of that will probably begin to appear fairly soon, under the title "Dancing with Saint Ravachol," starting with a serious examination of this question:

If Ravachol could appear as anarchism's "violent Christ," then which of our sins did he die for, and what new dispensation did his execution mark?

After all, Proudhon was far from the only figure who could pose provocative questions about anarchism's key concerns, and arguably the literature surrounding "Saint Ravachol" is a fine site to begin to dig into them again in a more overtly revolutionary context.

Part of what all of this means is that I will be in the midst of a transition, and at some point not too far down the line I will no doubt still be a "two-gun mutualist," but the focus of my research, writing and my passion in general will probably be elsewhere, in this continuation of the work to which I've committed much of the last 5+ years. So sooner, rather than later, is probably the time to come out and play, if you want to engage with the details of "the gift economy of property" and "anarchism of approximations" before they're just details relating to "my old project."

Collective force and the problem of authority

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:20:00 +0000

God, philosophy says finally, is, from the ontological point of view, a conception of the human mind, the reality of which it is impossible to deny or affirm authentically;—from the point of view of humanity, a fantastic representation of the human soul raised to the infinite. — Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church

In Proudhon's writings we encounter the notion that what lies behind the most durable examples of authority—chief among them the famous pair, God and the State—is, in fact, collective force. It is our own force, the force of society or humanity, to which we attribute a "higher" power and authority when we encounter it.

This notion has two important elements:

We really do encounter something, for which we need to account, since it is tied up with ourselves;
We are mistaken in associating these manifestations of collective force with a higher realm than our own, and attributing authority to them.

But having recognized manifestations of collective force as such, we would also be mistaken to assume that these organized collective beings have interests and reasons which are necessarily similar to, or compatible with, our own individual interests and reasons.

If we try to think about what anti-authoritarianism looks like in the context of this analysis, perhaps the majority of our concerns can be addressed by adjusting what actors we recognize and how we recognize them. We need to demystify notions like God and State, but we can't deny the organized bodies of collective force that do in fact exist. We need to be rid of the real "spooks," and learn to confront our own power when we find it coming around to meet us in slightly alien form—without elevating it as either a god or a demon. We need to learn how to benefit from the "collective reason" of these collective beings, and we need to learn how to come together differently when that reason, and the interests that go with it, are inimical to our own, and to the principles of justice and equality. There are lots of ways to approach this complicated set of tasks, some of which would answer to familiar names like "anti-statism," but probably not in the ways they do at present. The temptation to elevate Humanity in the place of God has largely passed us, but maybe not so with Society, or Nature, or the Market. And perhaps we still engage in a bit of idolatry in the ways we demonize the State.

For those who like clarity, without fundamentalist reduction, there may be some appeal in this focus on correctly identifying forces, on demystification, and on the leveling/horizontalizing of our critical framework—even if it runs counter to a lot of our current critical language and logic. There's nothing simple about the practical integration of these mute-but-powerful collective actors into our anarchism, but perhaps the difficulties will seem less as we really grapple with the theoretical problem.

Louise Michel, "Today or Tomorrow" (on Ravachol, 1892)

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 07:23:00 +0000

[Here's another of the articles written shortly after Ravachol's execution, in which Louise Michel added her bit to the Ravachol myth. There was a good deal of reference between the various contributions to L'Endehors. Michel began her article with a line from an article by Zo d'Axa and references Gustave Mathieu's "The Little Ravachol will Grow." This working translation is a little rough, but I'll be finishing these as a group.]

Today or Tomorrow.

Everything is good which strikes or stings.[1]

So much the better if these bandits have completed their work. The scaffold has started the party, and fire will beat its wings over the apotheosis.

The blood of Ravachol splashes, from the false collar to the cuffs, the cold man of the Élysée.

The Élysée! This is the point that attracts the looks! From it will rise in the air the final bouquet, and the cross of Our Lady of the Slaughter will be the streetlamp.

The sun has risen red in the prologue, and red it will set.

Yes, so much the better, it is necessary that this be finished, that we plow like a field the accursed institutions in order to dry up the blood.

Let the slaves, more debased than ever, shout some Marseillaises, an instant is enough to change these docile dogs into wolves; the winds blow liberty.

Pompeii danced whenVesuvius opened.

The trails of blood left by Deibler[2]from one city to another indicate the road of the executioners all the way to Montbrison where they slaughtered the dynamiter, the rebel, the anarchist who sang at the guillotine.

That is what is truly beautiful, the vision of those who die for justice; on the hideous trunk of the gallows, on the block, the neck clasped by the garrote or engaged in the infamous half-moon of the scaffold, they are worthy of the punishment that is offered by singing in the ordeal.

In the luminous bay that cuts into the night of death, isn’t it beyond the free unknown, the taking possession of the world by humanity, the new dawn illuminating new times;

Like a magnet, limitless progress attracting men from ideal to ideal, like from milestone to milestone, towards the future;

On the earth washed as after the rainstorms, an intense life germinating on the buried past;

Some still uncertain dawns covering in the infinite distance some eras of harmony, science and love which, glimpsed, are worth eternity; isn’t that enough to laugh at the torments?

It is fortunate that under the current circumstances pity is cowardly, or we would always have them.

It is better this way. They have wished for it. The merciless verdicts demand as response: Everything is good that strikes or stings!

The crumbs thrown to the crowd in the provoking celebrations are covered with the Ravachol’s blood; in this way, on the nights of the hunt, one throws to the dogs bread soaked in the blood of the quarry.

He, dreaming of the happiness of all, has passionately thrown his life in the faces of the executioners.

So much the better if the anger mounts, the intensity of the battle will be short, there will be no more small means, no more foolish qualms!

The Deiblers of the Élysée, by the way, will prevent nothing. Let it be in a little while or tomorrow, what does it matter!

When so many implacable wills have the same aim, so many convinced men the same untiring patience, the same scorn for death, the moment is imminent.

Each doing their work in their turn will be worth a thousand, and the little Ravachols will not have time to grow much before the deliverance.

The streets, by then, will no longer be changed into slaughterhouses, it is the slaughterhouses which will be blown up.

It is not with wishes that the man of the stone age took the cavern where the big cats peacefully devoured their prey.

Let each, like Ravachol, act according to his conscience, deploring the unwitting victims without letting themselves be diminished by hesitation; it is a lofty thought: the deliverance of the world.

Salute to the next flash of lightning thundering over the palaces, to the immense blaze that will end the orgy!

Nothing gives more to the struggle than the torture of a proud, brave man—it is no longer the time to cry for the dead, they must be avenged—this time it will be vengeance for all and always.

Here is the battle without mercy where the lost children of liberty offer themselves joyfully.

L’Endehors, No. 63, 17 juillet 1892.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

[1] The line appears in Zo d’Axa’s article, “14 juillet sanglant,” L’EndehorsN°62, 10 juillet 1892

[2] Anatole Deibler, French executioner from 1885 to 1939, responsible for the executions of Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, Emile Henry, Sante Caserio, three members of the Bonnot Gang, and a total of 395 men.

Anarchy is order! (Wait! What?)

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 01:19:00 +0000

I have often seen the phrase "anarchy is order" attributed to Proudhon—and to Bakunin, and Bellarrigue, and Elisee Reclus, and a French singer-songwriter named Leo Ferre. Often the phrase is actually Bellegarrigue's ("Anarchy is order; government is civil war") or the phrase "Anarchy is order without power," cited as appearing in the Confessions of a Revolutionary. That latter phrase does not seem to appear in that book (and I've searched pretty carefully) and it doesn't really sound all that much like Proudhon. There are a number of places where he talked about the relationship between anarchy and order, and lots of places where he talked about the fact that liberty is the principle (or "mother," in the famous phrase) of order. Curiously, though, the closest I could come to the actual phrase so often cited was this passage from The General Idea of the Revolution:

Croit-on qu'on lieu de rétablir les justices seigneuriales et les parlements sous d'autres noms et d'autres formes, de refaire l'absolutisme en le baptisant du nom de Constitution, d'esservir les provinces comme auparavant, sous prétexte d'unité et de centralisation; de sacrifier de nouveau toutes les libertés, en leur donnant pour compagnon inséparable un prétendu ordre public, qui n'est qu'anarchie, corruption et force brutale; croit-on, dis-je, qu'ils n'eussent acclamé le nouveau régime, achevé la révolution, si leur regard avait pénétré dans cet organisme que leur instinct cherchait, mais que l'état des connaissances et les préoccupations du moment ne leur permettaient pas de deviner?...

The passage has been translated as:

Can it be believed that, instead of reestablishing the seignorial courts and the parliaments under other names and other forms, of re-erecting abolutism after baptising it with the name of the Constitution, of enslaving the provinces as before, under the pretext of unity and centralization, of sacrificing all liberties, by giving them for an inseparable companion a pretended public order, which is but confusion, corruption and brute force—can it be believed, I say, that they would not have welcomed the new order, and completed the Revolution, if their sight had penetrated the organism which their instinct sought, but the state of knowledge and the distractions of the moment did not permit them to conceive?

The French reminds us that even as late as 1851, Proudhon often still used the word "anarchie" to describe disorder, so here we have a claim that "order... is only anarchy," but it is a "so-called public order" which is "only anarchy, corruption and brutal force." John Beverley Robinson, in his translation, chose to render "anarchie" as "confusion" in this case, and the title of the section in which the passage appears, "Anarchie des forces économiques," as "Chaos of Economic Forces."

Robinson may have rendered a service at the time, but it's one of a number of similar decisions that probably trip up us a bit now, when arguably it would be nice not to be shielded from all the tensions in Proudhon's work. I think that The General Idea, which is, I think, generally considered one of Proudhon's least controversial works, but which comes from a period where he was certainly not averse to bold, complex statements (such as the infamous The Revolution as Demonstrated by the Coup d'Etat of December 2), might read rather differently as an anarchist text in which "anarchy" as often as not means disorder.

Unpacking this sort of potential contradiction in arguably "foundational" texts is, of course, a sort of high-risk enterprise, for a variety of reasons. But my sense is that we have every opportunity to gain from the encounter. Our current sense of the significance of these texts, however well or ill-founded is already a string to our bow. Nothing says that the understanding we have built is worthless, even if it turns out it wasn't quite what Proudhon had in mind. And nothing commits us to whatever else we find in a rereading and rethinking. I think it is probably inevitable that our readings of historical texts will tend to have a double character anyway, with a present-oriented interpretation working alongside whatever we are able to glean about the contexts of composition and original composition. A text like The General Idea is fairly comfortably ensconced in the anarchist literature at this point, despite the many strange elements it contains. Perhaps our understanding would be opened up by treating it as it appears to have been originally presented: a work in which two visions of "anarchy" must almost certainly have been in play. I wouldn't be surprised if there was another antinomy—another of those productive contradictions Proudhon was so fond of—to be grasped in the play of anarchies and order.

From Proudhon's study on the State ("Justice," 1858)

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 07:02:00 +0000

-->

[These passages are taken from the Fourth Study, on “The State,” in Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church.]

[From CHAPTER I.]

V. — I will not make my readers wait for the solution. As you have just seen, I reduce all of political science to a single question, that of Stability.

Why is it that from ancient times until the present, the constitution of the states has been so fragile, that all the publicists, without exception, have declared them essentially instable? How are we to bestow stability and duration on them?

It is from this specific side that I tackled the political problem; it is on this terrain, still unexplored, that I pose the question.

And this is my response:

What we must consider above all in government is not the origin (divine right, popular right or right of conquest); nor is it the form (democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, simple or mixed government); it I not even the organization (division of powers, representative or parliamentary system, centralization, federalism, etc.): all these things are the material of government. what we must consider is the spirit that animates it, its thought, its soul, its Idea.

It is by their idea that governments live or die. So let the idea become true, and the state, however blameworthy its origin, however defective it appears in its organization, correcting itself according to its secret thought, will be sheltered from all outside attack, as from all internal corruption. It will radiate its thought around it, and constantly increase in scope, depth and strength. On the contrary, let the idea remain false, then legitimacy, popularity, organization, military power cannot maintain it: it must fall.

Now, as the idea, avowed or not, of the governments, has thus far been a prejudice radically opposed to Justice, a false political hypothesis; as from another side the succession of states in history is an ascending march towards Justice, we can, from this double point of view of theory and history, classify them all according to three different ideas, which we will examine one after the other:

1. The idea of Necessity, which is that of pagan antiquity;

2. The idea of Providence, which is that of the Church:

These two ideas, antitheses of one another, are the opposite extremes of an antinomy which ecompasses the world religious age;

3. The idea of Justice, which is that of the Revolution and which constitutes, in opposition to religious government, human government.

Thus, it is with government as with property, with the division of labor, and with all the economic forces: taken by themselves, and not considering the more or less legal thought which determines them, it is a stranger to right, indifferent to every moral idea; it is an instrument of force. As long as government has not welcomed Justice, it remains established on the idea of fatality and providence, it tends to inorganism, it oscillates from catastrophe to catastrophe. The problem is thus, after having prepared the economic terrain, to apply Justice to government, by freeing it from inevitability and arbitrariness. Such is the object of the Revolution.

____

CHAPTER VII

Government according to Justice. — Actuality of power; collective force; constitution of the Republic.

XLIV. — What makes the life of a state, we said at the outset, what determines its stability or its caducity, is its idea. If that idea expresses a relation of justice, the state will be, internally, sheltered from all dissolution; from the outside, no power will be able to prevail against it. If, on the contrary, the idea that rules the stat is false and iniquitous, even though universal prejudice is on its side, the state, in contradiction with itself, will perish sooner or later.

It seems that after that, the law of equality being demonstrated, we do not have to concern ourselves with government any longer. Let government rule itself according to the law of equality, and, whatever its form, from the moment that it only exists for Justice, it is assured of living; its constitution becomes a secondary thing, that one can abandon without inconvenience to the popular fancy or local tradition.

However, such a conclusion would only be true within certain limits: that is to say that, the balance of services, products and fortunes being accomplished, one can entrust to Justice the care of securing the state, and to give the definitive form to government. Apart from that, one would make a grave error, if one supposed that, economic equilibrium established, the government can preserve the organization that it was previously given according to its idea of inequality. The indifference of the economic science, in matters of government, does not go so far.

The idea of government given, the form follows: those two terms are linked with one another, as the organization of the animal is to its destiny. We know what the form of states has been up to the present, after the idea of the exploitation of man by man: despotic centralization, feudal hierarchy, patricians with followers, military democracy, mercantile oligarchy, finally constitutional monarchy. What is the proper form of republican government, organized by and for equality? That is a question from which it is impossible for us to shrink. Justice, without that, would lie to itself; it would not be Justice, having less creative force than its contrary, iniquity.

That is not all. Thus far we have only considered in government a form of action: we have not asked ourselves if that form covered something real; if we must see there a combination of the human brain, or the manifestation of a positive nature. Now, the state having its idea, which is its conscience, and then its form, in other words its organism, which is its body, we are led necessarily to believe that this word, state, power, government, indicates a veritable being, since that which unites the two attributes of existence, idea and form, soul and body, cannot be reduced to a nonentity. What is the actuality of the state? What does it consist of? Where is it found? — I will explain.

XLV. — From the beginning of these studies, we have posed to ourselves the question: What is Justice?

And the result of our research has been to demonstrate that religion made of Justice a divine commandment, and philosophy [made it] a simple relation, a necessity of reason, Justice, according to both, was reduced for the conscience to an abstraction; that thus right lacked reality in the heart of hearts, all of reality was a pure prejudice, a voluntary submissiveness, in no way obligatory, to certain proprieties themselves deprived of foundation. In such a case, atheism was right to maintain that Justice is a word, and good and evil just words; that there is no other right that strength, and that all that theology and metaphysics delivers in that regard is pure fantasy, logomachy, superstition.

However, we see Justice draw humanity along, produce civilization by its development, raise up high the nations that observe it, and doom, on the contrary, those that forget it. How would we attribute such powerful, real effects to an idea without subject, to a chimera?

To account for history and save morality, to explain religion itself, it was thus to demonstrate that Justice is anything but a commandment and a relation; that it is still a positive faculty of the soul, a power of the same order as love, superior even to love, a reality, finally: and that is what we have set about in these Studies.

Another question.

After have recognized Justice in its essence and its reality, we asked ourselves, passing from persons to things: what is the law of production and distribution of wealth, in other words, what is the economy? Does there really exist, can there exist a science of that name, having for object a determinable reality, possessing some principles of its own, some definitions, and a method; or must we see in that would-be science only the acts of a mercantilism without principle and without law, some caprices of the imagination, some zigzags of the will, in which it would be illogical to seek a shadow of reason, and which only falls under the good pleasure of the government?

In this latter case, it is clear that political economy, summarizing itself in a word, liberty, save for the exceptions that the state imposes, is not by itself a science: it is a negation, and the conclusions of socialism are without foundation.

For us, on the contrary, economics is a science in the most rigorous sense of the word; science having for aim to study the order of phenomena which, although produced under the initiative of liberty, and infinitely variable, still obey some constant laws, whose certainty is equal to that of all the laws which rule the universe. Some forces and laws, that is what makes up the reality of economics: there is nothing else in physics itself. Thanks to this actuality of Justice and of economics, society is no longer an arbitrary phantasmagoria, a transient figure; it is a creation, a world.

Now I continue:

What is the power in society? What produces the government,and gives rise to the state? Does the political idea correspond, like the legal idea and the economic idea, to a reality sui gêneris, or is it still only a fiction, a word?

According to the Church and all the mythologies, the social power does not have its base in humanity: it is of divine constitution. According to the philosophers, who will try to determine its conditions, government would result from the abandonment that each citizen makes of a part of his liberty; it would be the product of a voluntary renunciation, a sort of joint stock company, nothing in itself.

Some men, in recent times, appear to have sensed the radical insufficiency of all these conceptions. "Without the individual,” they have said, “without liberty, government, society itself, is certainly nothing. But can one not also say that, society once formed, it is another thing than the individual, an organism which impose its laws on the latter?...” it is thus that is formed the hypothesis of social being, real, positive and true.

But that is only one hypothesis: who vouches for that reality to us? What does it consist of? Where to grasp it? How to analyze its parts? Here everything is still to be done, and if the Revolution does not inspire us, there is no longer anything for us but to confess our powerlessness: there is no government.

I reason thus about government as I reason about economics and Justice. The government is a thing in which, despite all the disappointments, humanity perseveres, and which neither violence, nor subterfuge, nor superstition, nor fear, suffice to explain. A priori, that the political institution expresses, not a convention or an act of faith, but a reality.

That will be the subject of the last section. [The "last section" is the "Little Political Catechism," which appears in an English translation by Jesse Cohn in Property is Theft!]

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

Notes on the Notes: "They've a temper, some of them..."

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:41:00 +0000

Talking about the "Notes," there really does seem to be a certain amount of fear that if we don't couch our anarchism in a specific language of "anti-statism" we may somehow slide into the embrace of something we ought to oppose. Now, any set of terms or concepts can almost certainly lead us astray, if we let the terms do the leading, and not our principles. That, of course, includes those honored by time and tradition, if they have become fixed ideas. Recall that Proudhon's assault on "property" began with a pre-Stirner warning about such things—and then recall Stirner. And if that doesn't do it, recall the words of Humpty-Dumpty:

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
    "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master      that's all."

Notes on the Notes: Another thought on the relation between states and conflict

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:04:00 +0000

One of the common responses to my recent writing about Proudhon's theory of "the state" has revolved around the opposition of his definitions of "state" with the "territorial monopoly on force" stuff that is so common in our circles. I think the action is elsewhere.

It doesn't look like any of the socialists in the 1849 debate were very concerned with "monopoly on force." When Proudhon complains that "the state is external constitution of the social power," he's probably just agreeing with Louis Blanc (and possibly Pierre Leroux as well) about the definition of the "state," and differing on whether or not an external constitution of social power is a good thing.

One of the things I haven't addressed particularly well yet is the objection that Proudhon made to Blanc's apparent contention that society was always characterized by a sort of state of war, which required that externalization of social power to take a policing role, interposing everyone's power between everyone, in a sense, to protect those in need of defense. In 1849, Proudhon questioned whether or not such a warlike sort of interaction would create a policeman that could be trusted to keep the peace.

It's a good question, but it becomes more interesting in the context of Proudhon's mature theory, when he had developed his own theory of society as made up of a balancing of potentially antagonistic "absolutes." The approach that sees peace as the perfection/balancing of conflict still isn't Blanc's position, since it is unclear that the balancing could actually take place if the collective force mediated all these individual interactions (at least in the way that a policeman-state would likely structure that mediation.)

Instead we have a horizontal working-out of conflict, but within that context we also have the various "persistences* that make up the state. And these latter have no particular authority, no power to rule, but they are obviously going to be important players in that working-out process.

It seems possible and perhaps even most consistent, given the other elements that are present in contemporary mutualism, to pursue the same strategy we have sometimes taken with "the market" and champion some sort of "free/d state" strategy ("real democracy" for anarchists, or some such....) But one of the other potential lessons of Proudhon's sociology is, as I *did* suggest in the "Notes," that we need to look a little more closely at both how we think about the relation between the interests of "the market" an our own interests, and that we need to be careful that we have not replaced "the state" with "the market" as that external constitution of social power.

Presumably, the Proudhonian sociology doesn't really let us deny persistences like "state" and "market," and they are key actors (though not free absolutes, like the human actors, and thus unable to reflect and adapt by themselves) that constantly confront us in the course of our "individual interactions." So what should we see when we see these "collective beings," beyond the extent to which they may currently be hijacked by individual interests? I rather provocatively suggested "an inheritance" and "our children" in the "Notes," but I'm struggling to say something even stronger, since it appears to me that these problematic collectivities are the most "present" manifestations of justice that will remain on our anarchistically-leveled playing field, and that they will be a far better barometer of just how successfully we have "perfected" our conflicts.

It's not a question of changing in any way our opposition to social, political or economic hierarchy and rule, but of how we think about what persists in our societies. It seems to me that in our circles we have often fairly simply damned one sort of persistence, and pretended it was a conqueror, while praising another, only lamenting the extent to which it has been conquered. And I am fairly certain we need to escape from that particular interpretive apparatus, not just to make sense of the Proudhonian sociology, but to make sense of "the state" and "the market."

Which isn't to say it's an easy task...

Notes on the Notes: Three (+1) Proudhon Periods?

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:47:00 +0000

There's a lot to unpack and clarify in the "Notes on Proudhon's changing notion of the state," but one of the simplest elements to clarify may be the notion that Proudhon's development can be roughly broken into three periods:

1839-1846: an early exploratory period, marked by early insights and some provocative statements, but also by inconsistent or non-existent definitions of key terms ("possession," for example;)
1848-1852: a period when much of Proudhon's focus was on the 1848 Revolution and its aftermath in the Second Republic, marked by more occasional writings, many of them related to political events and rivals, and also marked by some rather dramatic variations in the strong claims Proudhon was willing to make at any given moment; and
1853-1865: a mature period, beginning with The Philosophy of Progress and the clarification of Proudhon's project that took place in that work, marked by a much more consistent approach to keywords (property, etc.) and the development of an increasingly complex, consistent, and powerful social science.

(We might also add a sort of virtual "fourth" period, indicated to us by the trajectory of Proudhon's unfinished work.)

There's no point in leaning too heavily on this scheme, since there is a considerable amount of useful work in every period of Proudhon's career, but as a matter of emphasis, it may help to recognize that the work in the period of the Second Republic may not be Proudhon's most consistent or least distracted—however interesting that period, and Proudhon's responses to it, may be in other terms.

Notes on Proudhon's changing notion of the state (3 of 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Shawn P. Wilbur) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:52:00 +0000

[part 1][part2]

The Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and will, think and act as a single man. In the Republic, every citizen, by doing what they want and nothing but what they want, participates directly in the legislation and in the government, as they participate in the production and circulation of wealth. There, every citizen is king; for he has the fullness of power; he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subjected to order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned in order, as the Provisional Government intends. It is liberty delivered from all its shackles: superstition, prejudice, sophistry, stock-jobbing, authority. It is reciprocal liberty, and not the liberty which restricts; liberty, not the daughter of order, but the motherof order.—P.-J. Proudhon, Solution of the Social Problem

I think that a couple of things should be fairly clear from the sketch I’ve given of Proudhon’s development:

1) It took a while for Proudhon to make a consistent social theory out of the insights of his earliest work.

2) The revolutionary period of 1848-1851, when Proudhon mixed his writing with periods in government, in exile and in prison, was a period when his ideas were in a considerable amount of flux, and his statements, while they were frequently as penetrating as they were bold, were not necessarily definitive—and were sometimes mixed with the sort of interpersonal tension we might expect among reluctant politicians.

3) The theory of collective force—so key to the critique of property—was a driving force in making Proudhon reconsider the necessary connection between “the state” and governmentalism.

Let’s step away from Proudhon for a moment and see if this sort of uncoupling of an institution and the despotic elements which seem to dominate it is really alien to our thought (however strange it may seem in the context of “the state.”) What Proudhon ultimately says about “the state” is very similar to at least part of what market anarchists say about “the market:” There is an emergent order, with logics different from those of the individual economic actors, which is captured or distorted by privilege—and which can be freed by disconnecting the market from the structures and relations of privilege (“government” chief among them) which distort its function. Of course, market anarchists tend to be among the strongest opponents of “the state,” tending to reduce anarchism towards mere anti-statism. For market-oriented mutualists, the project seems to be the one Proudhon laid out near the beginning of The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851):

“To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system, by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State.”

But the question remains whether this simple identification of “the Government or the State” is adequate to the analysis of the real manifestations of collective force. My strong suspicion is that many market-mutualists simply define “the market” in terms of those institutions which would remain after the governmental principle had been taken out of the equation, including some that revolve around the cash nexus, but others which do not. There would thus be “unregulated markets” in a particular sense, since governmental regulation would be eliminated more or less by definition, but also “unmarketed regulation” by other means, in the sense that economic customs and norms would not only be suspect to that cash nexus. I suspect that many market anarchists have accepted Proudhon’s non-governmental state without accepting his argument, and while clinging to an anti-statism which might well benefit from a little unpacking and clarifying along Proudhonian lines. What is uncertain is whether or not at least some market anarchists have actually transferred that “external constitution of the social power,” and the governmental principle, from “the state” (or “the gods”) to “the market.” This is a question of considerable importance, which hinges on the relationship between “individual” and “collective” reason (using those terms with the individual human being as a reference), and the way we imagine mutualistic justice—which is always essentially a question of “balance”—playing out.

So let’s get right down to it.

______

We have the elements of our social science pretty well identified:

1) We have a level “field of play” where the beings we are accustomed to consider “individual” and a range of organized collectivities can actually only claim “individual” status by the same title, their status as groups organized according to an internal law which gives them unity. People, families, workshops, cities, nations and “humanity”—as well, perhaps as animals, natural systems, and even individual human capacities—occupy non-hierarchical relationship with one another, despite differences in scale and complexity, and despite the participation of individuals at one scale in collective-individualities at another. This is key, I think. Without a governmental principle to elevate any of these individuals “above the fray” in any way, mutuality becomes absolutely vital—and dizzyingly tough to come to terms with.

2) We have “rights” manifested by nothing more than the manifestation of capacities—which means we have rights that are going to conflict and clash, and which are to be balanced by some sort of (broadly defined) commutative justice.

3) We also have a theory of freedom (although I’ve neglected to introduce it directly, along with at least one other key elements, in these notes so far) which is not primarily concerned with permissions and prohibitions, but with the strength and activity (the play) of the elements that make up the individual, and the complexity of their relations. Again, this is key, giving us another important justification for the kinds of moves Proudhon made with regard to the question of the state. In all of these elements so far, we see a move away from a legal understanding of individuals and society towards a much more material one (despite all the charges from our more Marxian comrades.)

4) Bound up with these other notions, we have the idea of the human being as a “free absolute,” which is essentially the completion and redemption of the notion that “property is theft.” When Proudhon did get around to talking about what I’ve been calling “ownness” (which is something close to “property in person” or the material material aspect of “self-ownership”) it is in 1858, in the work on Justice, in the context of an explanation of the origins of legal property. Allow me one more long quotation:

"Let us consider what occurs in the human multitude, placed under the empire of absolutist reason, so long as the struggle of interests and the controversy of opinions does not bring out the social reason.

"In his capacity as absolute and free absolute, man not only imagines the absolute in things and names it, which first creates for him, in the exactitude of his thoughts, grave embarrassment. He does more: by the usurpation of things that he believes he has a right to make, that objective absolute becomes internalized; he assimilates it, becomes interdependent (solidaire) with it, and pretends to respect it as himself in the use that he makes of it and in the interpretations that it pleases him to make of it. Each, in petto, reasoning the same, it results, in the first moment, that the public reason, formed from the sum of particular reasons, differs from those in nothing, neither in basis nor in form; so that the world of nature and of society is nothing more than a deduction of the individual self (moi), a belonging of his absolutism.

"All the constitutions and beliefs of humanity are formed thus; at the very hour that I write, the collective reason hardly exists except in potential, and the absolute holds the high ground.

"Thus, by virtue of his absolute moi, secretly posed as center and universal principle, man affirms his domain over things; all the members of the State making the same affirmation, the principle of societary absolutism becomes, by unanimity, the law of the State, and all the theories of the jurists on the possession, acquisition, transmission, and exploitation of goods, are deduced from it. In vain logic demonstrates that this doctrine is incompatible with the data of the social order; in vain, in its turn, experience proves that it is a cause of extermination for persons and ruin for States: nothing knows how to change a practice established on the similarity of egoisms. The concept remains; it is in all minds: every intelligence, every interest, conspires to defend it. The collective reason is dismissed, Justice vanquished, and economic science declared impossible." (Justice, Tome III, pp 99-100)

This is another side of the claim that all individuals claim their individuality by the same title. In order to claim any sort of property—to claim that anything is proper to themselves as individuals, that anything is their own—there is a necessary resource to absolutism, a bowing to the continuous demands of an evolving force, a demand for a separation that can only come through a denial of material interconnection. Property is necessarily despotic, and Proudhon finally made it clear how his early bon mot reached far beyond the mere critique of existing property relations. But, in the process, he posed some very significant problems for the constitution of a free society. Not the least of these is that, while all beings seem to manifest themselves to some extent as absolutes, not all of those absolutes are “free,” in the sense of being able to reflect on their natural absolutism or to modify their behavior accordingly.

5) That’s where mutualism comes in, with its complex mix of individualistic and socialistic elements, and its notion that each ethical actor—each free absolute—could carry with them a basic principle for encountering, recognizing and engaging with others, our beefed-up and extremely demanding version of the Golden Rule. However complex our social interaction may be, the mutual principle suggests that the first thing to do is to identify the other as an individual, and then to address them as such, specifically. Perhaps it’s not immediately clear how one practices an anarchic encounter with a non-human manifestation of collective force, but I think Proudhon gives us some very useful clues—not the least of which is proposing a basis on which we can at least begin to relate to any individual. That theory of the individual’s “title” is at least a common structure on which to build more substantive common ground. The identification of human beings as “free absolutes” at least makes it clear to us that if there is to be change in accordance with a conscious mutualistic ethic, it’s going to have to come from beings like us.

6) And we only underline that special responsibility, and the difficulties faced by human ethical actors, when we remind ourselves that, according to Proudhon—and we can probably point to confirmations in our own experience—the collective reason of the collective beings is not necessarily that of individual human beings, nor are the interests of those beings our own, or even necessarily in harmony with our own. Just as it would be a failure of mutuality to simply project our desires onto other human beings, we’ll have to go very carefully in any engagement with these collective beings, which are not themselves “free” in the sense we are. And it is unlikely that anything is made any easier by the fact that part of what we encounter in collective beings is our own force arranged in some larger assemblage according to a new law.

It’s the sort of stuff to make you head spin, and it flies in the face of an awful lot of conventional anarchist and philosophical terminology and theory. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful body of analytic tools for anarchists. The radical leveling of the analysis encourages us to find other means to talk about whatever is not simply governmental rule or systematic privilege in the realm of “hierarchy” and “authority.” What the plumber, or the educator, or the workplace logistics expert, brings to a given interaction is an organization of resources and a quantity of force usefully applicable in particular contexts—and perhaps that’s the best way to talk about that stuff in an anarchist context. The head-on confrontation with the fact that we appear to be hardwired in a way which creates both potentially antagonistic separation the possibility of reflective change in our social relations, and the identification of increasing freedom with increasing intensity in our attempts to work out those evolving balances, strikes me as a very promising direction—and one which provides one more rationale for the sort of complex, decentralizing, federative societies mutualists tend to lean towards. The possibility of demystifying the state, as we have worked to demystify religion and economics, is appealing.

But his business of encountering the state, or the market, or any number of other collective individuals on that radically leveled playing field isn’t likely to lose its more daunting aspects any time soon.

The best indications that Proudhon gave us of how this might play out are probably in War and Peace, a two-volume study as difficult as anything Proudhon wrote, and already subject to many misunderstandings. Rather than attempt to do justice to that analysis, perhaps, for now at least, we can tackle things a bit more simply.

If we set aside all the hot-button terminology, what are we talking about? In the case we have been examining most closely, it is a question of an encounter between a human individual and a collectivity emerging from the actions of human individuals, so that in that encounter we come face to face with the effects of the force we have exerted, organized together with the effects of the actions of others. We encounter ourselves, but not just ourselves, and the encounter is mediated by processes which are more or less “social.” We also encounter some manifestation of persistence (and probably complex, evolving persistence), with the result that, among other things, we probably don’t have any means of simply reducing this encounter to a mass of encounters with specific individuals.

These social persistences, not having bodies of their own, persist—or don’t persist—through us, through physical structures that we build or tear down, through practices and norms that we do or do not honor, maintain and modify. But their persistence means that often the building, maintaining and shaping is not a one-way street. Through customs, norms, languages, etc., they shape us as well—sometimes in ways that increase our health and freedom, and sometimes in quite opposite ways. The possibility that our actions contribute to persistent influences on other human beings, and perhaps on those not yet born, is something that anarchists—and particularly mutualists—probably ought to take into account.

The “how” is the more difficult question here, since this “encounter” with collective beings is never literal. We act in particular ways, and that adds force to particular organizational forms in particular realms of society. Obviously, part of the problem is addressed by simply taking our ethic of mutuality seriously, taking into account the “downstream effects” of our actions and the sorts of collectivities that they seem likely to strengthen. But then we are faced with all of the problems of planning and prediction. Collective beings are interesting to us in large part because they have their own reason and interest, whether we intend to celebrate that fact (as market anarchists often do with the emergent logic of “the market” and social anarchists sometimes do with “society”) or damn it (in which case you can pretty much just switch the terms.)

There’s a lot here to be teased out—and it seems we are still just posing the question in some ways—but if we take seriously the arguments we find in Proudhon for recognizing these collective beings the first consequence has to be to acknowledge that perhaps even our most rigorous application of the principle of mutuality on a more narrowly interpersonal basis will necessarily lead directly towards our goals of social justice. Given that, there are certainly reasons to question whether we can count on any institutions to guarantee justice if we failto apply that ethic to our individual actions.

I’m inclined to think of these collective beings as some combination of social “collective tissue,” inherited resources, and products of our collective production—and to think of the process of incorporating them into the complex counterbalancing act of mutualist justice as a matter of figuring out how to best balance careful stewardship of the resources, care for our fellows being both directly and indirectly through those connecting institutions, and care in what we produce and maintain. In order to strike that balance we probably need to be practicing the sort of sociology that Proudhon began to elaborate, incorporating its lessons into the institutions it creates, and using all of that as a guide to extending existing mutualist theory beyond it’s traditional bounds. The “cost principle,” for example, may have a lot to teach us that has very little to do with “labor notes,” as our opposition to any “right of increase” may strike more fertile ground as we distance ourselves a bit from the traditional concerns with specific forms of “usury.”

Lacking anything but just a sense that there is a potentially useful sort of analysis here, it’s hard to pursue the details too far. But perhaps there’s one more interesting indication we can make. Having rejected the governmental principle, there is no question of respecting any sort of manifestation of collective force which presents itself or is presented as a ruler, judge or arbiter. The market-arbiter is probably as lost to us as Louis Blanc’s state-policeman. Looking around for other ways to think about these abstract beings which seem at once to shape and be shaped by us, and acknowledging that perhaps this Proudhonian analysis will lead us to a fundamentally antinomian “solution,” let me suggest two passages from Proudhon as potential windows into the terms of one possible antinomy.

In the “Toast to the Revolution,” Proudhon argued that The Revolution (which was, for him, a sort of ongoing process) was both conservative and revolutionary. So, while we are committed to change in the direction of ever-great justice, both in our individual interactions and our institutions, we are probably also logically committed to a sort of stewardship role. If we are to go so far as suppressing any of these collective beings, we certainly need to do so with a clear understanding of the effects and their relation to the ethics of mutuality. Embedded, as we are, in a context in which governmentalism and destructive forms of absolutism are woven into the social fabric on almost all sides, we are undoubtedly doomed to some very tough choices—but that just means we need to bring our most powerful tools to bear on those problematic choices.

The passage with which I opened this particular section of the notes—the source of Liberty’s masthead slogan, “Liberty not the daughter but the mother of order”—suggests another way to approach our relationship with these collective beings. Arguably, one of the problems we have with them is a confusion about who is the child and who is the parent in the relationship—a natural confusion, given their evolving persistence. But these collective beings are in part defined by the fact that they are not “free absolutes,” that they cannot enter into relations with us except through the mediation of individuals, and therefore are fairly poor candidates for the parental role, even assuming that role was the relatively horizontal one of guidance and stewardship that anti-authoritarians generally expect from parents. In his early writings on the state, Proudhon explicitly associated the state with the infancy of humanity, and anarchy with its maturity. Perhaps, to the extent that the state will persist as an active actor in anarchist societies, we should be treating it as a sort of powerful child. As we free ourselves from governmental tutelage, perhaps it is precisely a parent’s role, or a role of tutelage, that we ought to adopt towards these children of liberty.