Hello, fans of fun and games (gaming)! This month, we’ll have two Anti-Nazi Gaming League live streams, our normal stream on Friday, April 21st, and a special 4/20 Coup de Gras V stream on Thursday, April 20th. 

First, tune in on 4/20 for a stream on all things stoner culture, drug policy, weed in the media, and so much more. Plus, we’ll announce the theme for the upcoming 2024 Coup de Gras festival (February 9-15th) and share a bit about our plans for the fest. As with last year’s Coup de Gras streams, this show will feature a  variety of guests popping in and out throughout the night as we play Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl!

Then, the very next night, Friday, April 21st, we’ll do our regular monthly stream, playing The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog and discussing blue laws, cosplay, and transphobia. In particular, Logan will be reporting back from Megacon Orlando, where we passed out some ANGL zines and swag for the first time ever!

Both livestreams start at 7:00 PM EST. See you there!

• You can find both shows on Twitch: @Antifa_Gaming
• 4/20 show on Facebook
• 4/21 show on Facebook

The grand finale volume to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies went live today on the site of the Scholarly Publishing Collective. Check it out here.

Unlike the print edition [link added], the e-platform version is the only one with full-color images!

The 2023 grand finale is a double issue and constitutes the last volume in the journal’s 2+ decade history as the only critical scholarly periodical devoted to the study of Ayn Rand and her times. It will be live on Project Muse in 2 weeks, and should be in the hands of subscribers in about 2-3 weeks. I’ll post an update when I have it.

Also of interest, the JARS site now has links to the Master Author Index to Volumes 13-23 (which joins the “Master Author Index to Volumes 1-12“) [pdf links].

MER is back!! In this episode, with Cory Massimino, Tux Pacific discusses their unique take on cryptocurrency, the connection between markets and anarchism, and being anti-capitalist in a capitalist world.

Tux Pacific (they/she) is a cryptographer, anarchist, and the founder of Entropy, a decentralized custodian for crypto. Their crypto-inclusive perspective has been shaped by their non-traditional background as a trans person and a market post-left-ish anarchist.

You can reach Tux on Twitter @__tux or via email tux@entropy.xyz

Look out for these upcoming MER episodes soon…

• April: scott crow, with Alex McHugh
• May: Jason Lee Byas, with Cory Massimino

As well as an episode of The Outgroup (only available for Patreon supporters!) with some new voices from within C4SS. This episode will cover: the war in Ukraine one year on, anti-trans legislation in the US and elsewhere, and the Signature and SVB collapses.

The Enrages should also return next month!

Join us this Friday, March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day!) at 7:00 PM EST as we stream Tonight We Riot with independent journalist Ford Fischer. As editor-in-chief of News2Share, Ford focuses on raw video journalism, often covering protests across the political spectrum.

We’ll be discussing protest coverage, representation in media, and some of the discourse around riot journalism that’s attracted a lot of attention in recent years.

Tune in on Twitch: @Antifa_Gaming

Facebook: C4SS Facebook Page

Or Youtube: 

For the (very delayed) 23rd installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by Ryan Neugebauer to discuss Ryan’s article Market, State, and Anarchy: A Dialectical Left-Libertarian Perspective (https://c4ss.org/content/56583).

Ryan is a left-libertarian committed to the dialectical libertarian framework put forth by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, defending individual freedom & flourishing through the art of context keeping. Ryan supports subjecting all institutions and facets of society (the state/governance, economics/business, schooling, culture, etc.) to critique and supporting more autonomy and less hierarchy in all areas of life; preferring bottom-up, decentralized and non-hierarchical governance and coordination wherever possible.

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

Turkish journalist Kaan Goktas, a cypherpunk, author, and father, was sentenced to two years in prison for insulting the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, by posting a 300-year-old Ottoman poem.

Thankfully Goktas was able to flee to Montenegro but had to leave his family and most of his life behind. He’s currently applying to the Montenegrin government for asylum and is seeking financial support both for this process and for living expenses.

Please help by donating here if you’re able. Even a tiny bit helps!

Goktas’ story is emblematic of the growing crackdown on free speech and free press in Turkey as Erdoğan’s government has become increasingly authoritarian. Erdoğan has always been an enemy of freedom and his policies have only gotten worse the longer he’s been in power.

Please spread this story as widely as you can!

Those interested in learning more about the political climate in Turkey, Erdoğan’s abuse of power, and regional news will be happy to know that Mr. Goktas will be writing for C4SS soon, as well as translating previous articles into Turkish. So look out for those pieces here and help us in supporting a radical journalist facing state repression.

Tune in this Friday, February 17th at 7:00 pm EST as we stream live from Coup de Gras IV: A New Hope! We’ll be playing Bloc by Bloc and celebrating Mardi Gras at Fontainebleau State Park.

Coup de Gras is an annual anarchist Mardi Gras celebration thrown by Krewe de Main and the Center for a Stateless Society deep in the bayous of Cajun Country. Equal parts anarchist bookfair and Carnival celebration, Coup de Gras is a yearly camping festival and unconference which aims to bring together libertarian socialist politics and the traditions of Mardi Gras.

Want to get updates about the festival and unconference? Subscribe to our Riseup list.

Or tune in on Twitch: @Antifa_Gaming

Facebook: @CoupdeGrasFest

Or Youtube: 

Dear C4SS supporters and friends, 

First, let me extend an enormous thank you for all of your support throughout 2022! It’s admittedly been a difficult year here at C4SS (as I imagine it’s been for most of you as well), but here we are in January 2023, ready to take on more than ever before. 

Staying on top of everything we want to achieve is a difficult task and it can be hard to quantify our impact with so many diverse projects and a horizontal organizational structure. But it’s clear we’re making waves in radical spaces around the world.

In October, we tabled at the international student for liberty conference, LibertyCon, distributing materials including four brand-new zines and engaging numerous curious college students. While we got some funny questions (including “what is a zine?”), the overall response was quite positive and we heard from a Brazilian SFL-er that our work had been key in resisting the rightward shift within the liberty movement there. We’re hoping to send some representatives to LibertyCon Europe this April as well. 

On the classically anarchist side, we attended the NYC Anarchist Bookfair in September and received a warm welcome there as well. At both conferences, we were surprised to find many younger activists are not only familiar with left-wing market anarchism as a position, but the Center itself. 

See more recent photos on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

This is, of course, thanks to the brilliant work our writers, fellows, chairs, translators, and coordinators do both at the center and on the side. In terms of related projects, there are two very exciting recent publications you should check out: 

• First, C4SS writers Emmi Bevensee and Frank Miroslav are included in a new collection on antifascism from AK titled ¡No Pasarán!
• And Kevin Carson’s newest book, The State: Theory and Praxis was just published and is now available on Amazon.

If you prefer to buy books from the C4SS Counter-Economic Store (we certainly appreciate it), the store will be back in action very soon and is being rehauled a bit for easier navigation. It’s been a struggle to keep the store running ever since our access to PayPal was first cut off in September 2021 but we’re very excited to start filling orders again soon and look forward to providing you with all the LWMA stickers, books, pins, and zines you might desire. 

Continuing the trend from last year, our translators are shining especially bright. This year, Translation Coordinator Enrico Sanna translated Kevin Carson’s “Communal Property: A Libertarian Analysis” into Italian. It’s now available in English, Italian, Portuguese, and Turkish. Our Turkish translators deserve a special shout-out for their prolific translation efforts. We also got a Spanish version of “Hayek’s Fatal Conceit” courtesy of Venezuelan translator Kathiana Thomas. 

Our two main podcasts have continued on as well. Unfortunately, Joel Williamson has moved on as host on The Enrages, but he’s been replaced by the very capable Eric Fleischmann and he came back for the most recent episode in December. Mutual Exchange Radio continues to evolve and I’m particularly proud of the episode we did with our Russian translator, Citizen Ilya, on war resistance within Russia. 

We’ve also launched a brand-new livestream project called the Anti-Nazi Gaming League, which covers gaming and pop culture news from an LWMA angle while we live-play a thematically appropriate game. Check it out to watch me fail miserably at Lego Batman, or hear about the nerdy interests of C4SS scholars like Cory Massimino, Nathan Goodman, and Kevin Carson. 

Finally, we’re once again co-hosting the Coup de Gras Mardi Gras festival and anarchist unconference in Slidell, LA. The festival runs from February 17th through the 23rd and will feature live performances, outings to Mardi Gras parades, unconference sessions, and a mutual aid project on Ash Wednesday. To learn more or request comped tickets, get in touch with us at coupdegras.riseup.net. 

So, as we get started on another year of advocacy, investigation, and education, we need your help to keep the wheels rolling. We make a point of compensating all of the writers, translators, and coordinators who dedicate their time to make this work possible. This means we need your generous support as often as you can spare it. 

The best way to support C4SS is to become a backer on Patreon, where you can pledge a monthly gift. This continual cash flow helps us smooth out compensation and plan for the future. If you’d instead like to make a one-time gift, please visit c4ss.org/support to do so. You can give via credit card using Stripe, donate on Venmo, mail us a check, or – to donate via cryptocurrency – please contact us at editor@c4ss.org (Ethereum preferred). 

Thanks for your time in reading this, and look out for another update this spring! We’re making an effort to stay in closer touch with our supporters and community, so these updates will now go out twice a year in spring and fall. 

In love and solidarity, 

Alex McHugh 

C4SS Coordinating Director

Join the ANGL team and C4SS editor Evan Pierce TONIGHT at 7:00 pm EST as we discuss fake people, recent shithead moves, AI art, and how artificial intelligence might affect the future of gaming and tech.

You can watch on Twitch @antifa_gaming!

Or on Facebook.

Or on YouTube: 

On a very special 22nd installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by former host of The Enragés Joel Williamson (@NalevoA3) to discuss his article Constructing an Unfixed Freedom; originally published at Mutualism Co-Op and now available at Center for a Stateless Society (https://c4ss.org/content/57640).

Joel Williamson is an individualist and mutualist anarchist from Texas who has participated in a variety of activist projects over the years. His passion for a freer world has been expressed through a range of anarchist organizations including Non-Serviam Media, Center for a Stateless Society, and Mutualism Co-Op to name a few.

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

In our final episode for the season, Ash P. Morgans talks to host Alex McHugh about egoism, anarchism, and religion. This conversation was an excellent cap-off to our Mutual Exchange symposium on egoism and anarchism and continues some of the discussions that came up throughout the symposium. Particularly, we explore the intersections of ethics, morality, anarchism, and religion from the egoist or Stirnerite perspective.

Look out for more MER in the new year, with Zachary Woodman returning as host! If you’re not already a supporter of C4SS on Patreon, please consider becoming a patron today. You get access to bonus content, some thank-you swag, and it really helps us keep these shows going on a regular basis. Happy new year!

Kick off the new year and the road to Coup de Gras with the Anti-Nazi Gaming League!

On Friday, Jan. 6th we’ll stream from 7-10pm EST with a variety of special guests including Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Evan Pierce, and many more.

• Watch on Twitch for the first time ever! @antifa_gaming
• Or YouTube: https://youtu.be/D79vO_SSGjw
• Or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1316909995822171

Time doesn’t stand still: In a daring approach to pacifying the inner city of Berlin and restricting the amount of motorized traffic, the Berlin senate – featuring a governing coalition of Greens, SocDems, and Left – have passed a rather interesting resolution, as German center-left paper taz reports.

Among other changes, parking dues for bikers (of any kind of bike) will cease to exist. This includes bipedal bikes, e-bikes, and motorized bikes. Already, cars in Berlin are not solely entitled to the city’s public parking space. Prior to this resolution, however, hardly any biker knew they could also use these spaces, even though they would have had to pay the same dues that car owners would. Thanks to the new resolution, however, the culture war will hit the streets shortly and, looking at online comment sections… dang will it hit. The new resolution, enabling bike users to reclaim public space by parking bikes without paying dues, has brought attention to the fact that it has, in fact, always been legal. Activists could, hypothetically, simply claim all of Berlin’s parking space (given they can provide the labour and number of bikes). Car owners cannot displace parking bikes, that would be illegal. Of course, this doesn’t prevent car owners from taking to the internet and threatening all kinds of counter-activism against an expected wave of anti-car activism.

Resonating through online comment sections is the argument that this, rather than providing a positive solution, simply exacerbates an ongoing conflict, pushing it towards real escalation this time. People say it is a politically sponsored culture war move, and it is. But does it matter? Any democratic society, even one that aims to be such, should on the one hand be accustomed to conflict. Diversity and pluralism imply conflict and conflicts drive conclusions.Wouldn’t we have to rely on such conflict to achieve political patronage because resolutions depend on gates closed by the state to be opened, given true freedom of association enabling modes of peaceful resistance, many more conflicts would much earlier reach the light of day and eventually be sorted. Also, how many politically sponsored culture war moves has the conservative to reactionary side of the political landscape pulled the last 80 years, thanks to such state patronage? In a statist society, the government keeps the gate for all substantial change. A gate has been opened. I, for once, look forward to seeing this conflict here unfold – in all its greatness.

Join the Anti-Nazi Gaming League TONIGHT (12/16) at 7:00 PM EST as we bring some family on the stream to celebrate the holidays, play the Die Hard NES game, and discuss everything from the 2022 Game Awards, to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and more.

You can watch on Facebook here.

Or on YouTube:

Senior fellow of C4SS Kevin A. Carson joins the Cyber Dandy Podcast to discuss his new book The State: Theory and Praxis.

Kevin is the author of several works including Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, and The Desktop Regulatory State, all of which are freely available to read at kevinacarson.org.

Watch the interview on Youtube:

Things are at a bit of a standstill with the Laurance Labadie Archival Project, and this is mainly due to the fact that on top of all the other work I’m doing I simply do not have the time or energy to transcribe, edit, and respond to each of his works. The last of these efforts was intended for me to be able to immerse myself (as much as is possible) in the kind of discourse that Labadie himself was doing: a back and forth between lay philosophers and political theorists in publicly available magazines. And I stand by this effort as it has allowed me to engage with Labadie in a way that feels very personal. 

That being said, I’ve come to the realization that to do that for every one of his pieces is unnecessary and makes the effort more about myself than the actual subject of this project. So going forward, I plan to focus first and foremost on transcribing and publishing Labadie’s works—the point of the project in the first place—while adding responses when I feel compelled. I will continue to edit these pieces (and noting the edits) as many of them are only drafts and deserve some final touches before being published. In the meantime, I think I will sit down with my copy of Anarcho-Pessimism and dive back into Labadie’s fascinating thinking.

Update 12/16/22: I will also be foregoing footnoting corrections I make to spelling and grammatical mistakes in Labadie’s collection of drafts. My goal was originally to be absolutely transparent with the editing in the archive but marking down each and every error at the bottom of someone else’s work has become obviously cruel. I will continue to note corrections that have a significant impact on the writing.

On the 21st installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by Cathy Reisenwitz (@CathyReisenwitz) to discuss her 2014 article Know Thine Enemy: Political Ignorance and Libertarianism (https://c4ss.org/content/28154).

Cathy Reisenwitz runs the Sex and the State newsletter on Substack and has bylines in TechCrunch, The Week, VICE, Daily Beast, and other fine publications.

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

Recently I received an email from eBay outlining the following:

Tell Congress to Stop Requiring Unnecessary Tax Reporting and Protect Seller Privacy

A problematic tax reporting provision will force millions of Americans to receive confusing and burdensome IRS forms. These additional income tax forms (1099-K) will be issued for the sale of virtually all goods, even used or pre-owned goods, where no income tax is owed. This new change will mean even people selling only a few things a year online will receive confusing tax forms intended for businesses. 

We need your help to change this law before January 1, 2023.

Now normally I would ignore an email from a large corporation asking me to help change legislation, but this struck a chord with me as not just an anarchist but more specifically an agorist [1]. While it certainly is not going to be the central catalyst for the emergence of a stateless non-violent society, eBay—or rather the people using it—is still in many ways part of the counter-economy (particularly from a green market agorist perspective) and should be defended from these types of interventions. These new regulations would, as the email outlines, require marketplaces “to report sellers who have more than $600 in annual sales to the IRS. That means millions of eBay sellers, including those who may only sell a few items a year, will have their sales reported and will need to keep careful records of their transactions—even if no taxes are owed.” This is an obvious attempt at greater legibility, surveillance, and profitability for the state from voluntary, horizontal exchanges online and, even if it isn’t the most pressing issue at the moment, should be opposed by agorists, anarchists, and libertarians alike. See here to send a letter to Congress.

1. For a good introductory overview of agorism, see Derrick Broze’s “What is Agorism? A History of Agorist Theory and Practice.”

This month we’re joined by Cathy Reisenwitz. Cathy is the creator of the Sex and the State newsletter and has bylines in TechCrunch, the Daily Beast, The Week, Reason, and more. We’ll be playing Overcooked! and discussing pumpkin fucking discourse on Twitter, as well as new and upcoming releases like Wendell & Wild.

Tune in this Friday, November 18th at 7:00 PM EST.

Watch on Facebook: C4SS Facebook page

Watch on YouTube:

We’re excited to announce that Kevin Carson’s latest book, The State: Theory and Praxis is now available for purchase on Amazon! 

Adding to Carson’s large body of work, this book covers many important topics for anti-capitalists of all stripes. In this new manuscript, Carson:

… examines the class nature of the state, navigates between the contending errors of reformism and accelerationism, and considers how best to engage with a dying system and manage its decline while simultaneously carrying out our primary task: creating a successor system within its interstices.

Get it today on Amazon for $10, and be sure to check out the rest of Carson’s work, including Exodus, The Desktop Regulatory State, and Organization Theory.