Encounters with Anarchist Individualism

From Libertarian Labyrinth by Shawn P. Wilbur

How does one become an anarchist?

The process would seem to involve an encounter with anarchism.

Perhaps we find, in the anarchism we encounter — and let’s say, from the outset, that anarchism comes in a variety of flavors — something that appeals to us. Perhaps the opposite is true, but, finding something in the underlying idea of anarchy that still tugs at us, we persist — and in drawing our own conclusions about the Beautiful Idea, we encounter a different kind of anarchism, one of our own construction, — perhaps very rudimentary in its elaboration, at least at first — in the practical consequences that we suspect will emerge from some more sustained encounter.

Or perhaps we don’t get out much, politically speaking, and instead of encountering any of the established forms of anarchistic thought, we follow our own path from the recognition of a fundamental, structural obstacle to our happiness — a glimpse of archy, the dominant idea, an idea so dominant that its name may strike us as alien, although the idea behind the name is ubiquitous; — perhaps we the recognize the archism underlying all of the other ideologies of the status quo — with or without being able to put a name to it — and then go in search of the opposite principle, in search of the oppositional practice. No doubt this sort of immaculate conception in the realm of ideology is comparatively rare, in a world where manufacturing new -isms is a social media sport, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious limit to range of ways in which we can mix suffocating connection and real isolation these days.

So let’s just acknowledge that there is a wide variety of different paths that we can take from our first brush with anarchist ideas to the subsequent encounters by means of which we manage to attach ourselves to anarchism, to become an anarchist in some meaningful sense. Sometimes the path is one marked by careful analysis. More often, I suspect, it involves a sort of leap of faith. It isn’t clear that the identification, the attachment is any more authentic in one case than in the other.

What does seem clear is that the process of attachment, of becoming an anarchist — whether we manage to make anarchism our own or whether we make our own anarchism — is almost certain to be an ongoing one…

I must have written a dozen variations on this theme over the last few years, as I have gradually refined my ideas about anarchism-in-general. Those familiar with my past work will recognize a variety of allusions, going back to the decade-old work on “the anarchic encounter,” which once enjoyed a certain pride of place in the revived theory of anarchistic mutualism. The notion of the encounter as a fundamental element of anarchist practice is one that I have returned to quite a number of times over the years, both on the blog and in my notebooks. Towards the end of Constructing Anarchisms, I went so far as to posit the encounter as essentially the whole of anarchist practice. 

In this approximation of anarchism, I am ultimately giving in to the temptation of reducing “anarchist practice” to the practice of three kinds of encounter:

1. Encounters with the self, in which we recognize the anarchic, plural and evolving character of selfhood;

2. Encounters with others who share with us a commitment to the pursuit of anarchy (if, perhaps, they don’t always share precisely the same understanding of that notion);

3. Encounters with those who do not share that commitment.

And in subsequent work in the notebooks, I’ve made some attempts to take the reduction even one step further, looking for a conception of anarchistic practice to go with the definitions proposed in “A Schematic Anarchism.”

I am not, of course, particularly known for a tendency to reduction or simplification — and I have lost none of my sense that anarchists, collectively, still have a complex, difficult and important work ahead of them, tending to elements of the anarchist tradition that are almost certainly overdue for a bit of care and maintenance, if we are ever to transform the rich, but barely intelligible bundle of things that we have inherited into a basis for organizing fundamental change in our relations. However, as I have said before:

Anarchy is a simple, accessible notion, sufficient to provide the necessary glue for a real, diverse and evolving anarchism—the only anarchism worthy of the name. (Propositions for Discussion, 2015)

Nothing about the application of anarchy, nothing about anarchism or being an anarchist seems particularly simple, but anarchy itself —our beautiful idea — remains, I think, a beacon, a point by which we can orient ourselves, despite the inescapable difficulties of practical anarchism and the old messes we still probably have to clean up.

The question for some time now has been to find the shortest distance between what is simple about anarchy and what we would need to know about its application in anarchism in order to make a good start at the work of care and maintenance that the anarchist tradition seems to require. My intuition, which has grown stronger the deeper I have dug into the history of anarchisms, is that there are probably shortcuts — gambits of precisely the sort that I prefer — built right into the foundations of that anarchist tradition.

The “schematic anarchism,” “the journey back” and the “bilge-rat’s gambit” are all, in the end, attempts to cheat a bit in the face of all the complexity, conflict and sometimes outright confusion that the anarchist tradition confronts us with, whether we are engaged in our first encounters with it or whether we are old hands. This return to the metaphor of the encounter and the book that I’m hoping to construct over the next few years — make no mistake — they are a bit of a cheat as well. And I want to highlight that fact, perhaps even a little bit more than is strictly necessary. Anyone who claims to have a single, coherent story to tell you about anarchism and its tradition, anyone who claims to be privy to the proverbial “verdict of history,” anyone really who isn’t just a bit overwhelmed by the question of where to go from the encounter with the beautiful idea — which is indeed beautiful, but not safe or comfortable to love — is probably either kidding themselves or trying to kid you…

There’s a funny lesson that I’ve learned in my decades of studying the anarchist tradition. Or maybe it’s two lessons. Anarchism has been blessed or cursed with a number of remarkably successful slogans, bons mots, etc., starting with “property is theft!” The first lesson — or first part of the lesson — is that those slogans have proven extraordinarily serviceable. The funny part of the lesson is that we have very consistently forgotten or misunderstood their origins and their original meanings — part of that mess we really still need to clean up — but somehow they have still served us pretty well.

I’ve thought a lot about cases like “property is theft,” as I have proposed my concept of “a schematic anarchism,” and now again, as I prepare to propose an anarchistic encounter as the “one weird trick” at the center of a book on general, synthetic anarchist theory. Proudhon’s phrase has been almost universally misunderstood, when it hasn’t just functioned as a kind of inkblot test, onto which any number of would-be interpreters of Proudhon and anarchism have simply projected more-or-less fanciful interpretations of their own. Proudhon’s own explanation is perhaps not the most compelling part of his work on property, nor is it a part of his work that has drawn much specific attention. And, let’s face it, nobody really likes that kid anyway… Still, somehow, the phrase remains, is known, however vaguely, by people who have no idea who said it. This is no small thing, when it’s time to try to explain what old Pierre-Joseph was actually talking about. As much as I may roll my eyes at nearly all of the popular interpretations in circulation, I couldn’t be more thankful for the fact that there is so often at least a place to start to correct the misconceptions.

The strategy for the writings on “a schematic anarchism” was born from a search for similarly durable landmarks, from which an examination of anarchism could start and to which it could return if, as seemed likely to be the case, some parts of the process simply led us astray. Starting from etymology is obviously the silliest move, the sort of thing that we groan about when we encounter it in debate, but somehow it seems to work — and to work quite well, provided we don’t kid ourselves about what we’re up to.

The “anarchic encounter” was always really a metaphor, on which I hoped to eventually hang a more thorough analysis of anarchistic social relations. The elaboration has been slow, but the metaphor has remained surprisingly serviceable — and saw a real revival over the course of the “Constructing Anarchisms” project. The metaphor has its source in a pair of passages from Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church — a work that I have translated over the past couple of years and will continue to revise and annotate in 2025 — which summarize in just a few lines a rudimentary anarchist social system. There is a little more to work with than a bon mot or some etymological cues, but not a great deal more. Again, it is a question of a focus for elaborations that it would probably not be accurate to say all follow directly from the original source. But you have to start somewhere — or start again somewhere, as many times as it is necessary to start again — and the encounter is a somewhere that has served me well for some time now. I’m hoping others will have a similar experience.

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The experience will begin in earnest in the next installment. I’m going to sip a bit of cheap merlot and listen to the last of the soggy neighborhood fireworks barrage, before turning in for the night. What I can and should say right now is that this work of general, synthetic anarchist theory that I’ve taken on attempts to draw on the literatures of various anarchist tendencies as sources for the elaboration of those focal paragraphs from Proudhon’s Justice, starting with what I expect will be a year-long encounter with anarchist individualism, as I try to work out a theory of the anarchistic subject. The center of my exploration of anarchist individualism will be E. Armand’s most substantial work, the Anarchist Individualist Initiation, a book that I have grown to appreciate more and more, the deeper into Armand’s body of work my research has taken me. I will also be engaging in an issue-by-issue reading of at least the early years of Armand’s newspaper, l’en dehors, those leading up to the publication of the Initiation and those during which discussion of the work formed a significant part of the paper’s content. Beyond that, I expect to return to the method of the “Rambles in the Field of Anarchist Individualism,” following leads through the literature as they appear.

Expect at least a couple of posts each week in this series of “Encounters with Anarchist Individualism.” At this point, I don’t have any clear idea about a writing schedule. The various ongoing translation and annotation projects will probably determine that. As the year progresses, there will undoubtedly be some convergence of the two projects — the New Proudhon Library and the Encounters — as I work toward a concerted study of mutualism in 2026, which will itself involve addressing the close connections between anarchist individualism and mutualism.

I had intended to add some new translations to this first post, including Armand’s  The ABC of « our » anarchist individualist demands — which celebrates its hundredth anniversary on December 31, 2024 — but decided not to wait. You’ll find it and a collection of Armand’s writings about Christmas among the items feature on the front page of the Labyrinth. Enjoy those for now. There are others either completed or nearly so.