Sadly, this holiday season the United Nations released a study indicating that 2014 is among the worst years on record for the world’s children. Chronicled in the report is another disturbing history of war and state violence.

An estimated 230 million children currently live in political territories subjected to violent conflict. The executive director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, as reported by the New York Times, states: “Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds … They have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves.”

As we reflect on this year of violence, imagine alternatives and act for social change perhaps we may revisit an age-old political ideology as liberating, co-operative and peaceful as it is misunderstood. The rich political tradition to which I refer is anarchism.

In popular circles the word anarchism has come to mean complete disorder or chaos — a state of perpetual violence. This is unfortunate as liberty rejects violent coercion. Anarchic practitioners advocate highly ordered societies rooted in the principles of free association, mutual aid and cooperative labor.

This libertarian idea is deeply ingrained in the human spirit. Labor organizer Rudolph Rocker describes anarchism as “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind” which, “strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.”

This is my favorite description of anarchism. Liberty is not a doctrine, but rather a praxis innate to human thought and action — the underlying principle being that one should always challenge authority and dismantle unjustifiable concentrations of power. The result is a more libertarian relationship between people and their institutions. Anarchism is thus a human phenomenon.

When feminist movements organize for women’s agency over their own bodies and life without fear of violence, we see anarchism.

We see anarchism in Mexico as the population seeks liberation from violent drug cartels, complacent government and oppressive state policies.

We see anarchism in prisons as inmates band together in these dehumanizing institutions to demand living conditions free of violence and sexual battery.

We see anarchism in war-torn regions of the world where individuals risk their lives to save innocent victims of the drone strikes and barrel bombs of oppressive regimes.

We see anarchism in towns and neighborhoods challenging the monopoly of violence held by the police.

We see anarchism in movements that seek the protection of wilderness areas and native lands from the clutches of extractive industries and the iron fist of capital.

We find anarchism in the new technology and falling communications costs that allow all of us to craft markets and labor together free of regulatory restriction.

We see anarchism in our everyday social interactions — telling our family and friends we love them and being kind to strangers.

These are but a few examples. Anarchism is everywhere.

Human action counters systems of power and domination. We have witnessed movements rise against all the bad that has happened this year at the whims of the powerful. This is our age-old tale: History is a race between state power and social power.

So, in the spirit of the season, let us decide to embrace liberty. Let us no longer follow the whims of those who wish to command and control society. Instead, let us labor to coordinate and cultivate the free societies and communities we wish to live.

It is in anarchic order that we see everything humanity can be. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward all are not mutually exclusive — peace IS goodwill. It is our inclined labor that reminds us we can and will build a peace that makes life on Earth worth living — a peace for every child of humanity. When that’s accomplished we will know freedom; such grandeur is only attainable in liberty.

And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

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David Vine and Nick Turse discuss U.S. bases in the Middle East.

David Stockman discusses how the war party won.

Doug Bandow discusses why North Korea should be talked to.

Grant Babcock discusses non-violence and modern libertarianism.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses Max Boot’s plan for Iraq.

Lawrence Wittner discusses whether wars defend American freedom or not.

Brian Terrell discusses drone strikes and protests to stop them.

David S D’Amato discusses top down anti-poverty efforts.

Glenn Greenwald discusses who the victims of drone attacks are.

Stephen Kinzer discusses why sending troops will not fix Iraq’s problems.

Steve Coll discusses drone warfare.

Dave Lindorff discusses the metasizing of the police state in America.

Sheldon Richman discusses Hilary Clinton and Henry Kissinger.

Faiza Patel discusses the recent Obama admin statement on torture.

Sheldon Richman discusses natural law and immigration politics.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the torture report.

Gwynne Dyer discusses how Western militarism fuels blowback.

Grant Babcock discusses breaking away from conservatism.

Spencer Ackerman discuses drone strikes and accuracy.

Kathy Kelly discusses Obama’s expansion of war in Afghanistan.

Jason Brennan discusses the morality of killing government agents.

Tom Engelhardt discusses Iraq War 4.0

Kevin Carson discusses how state justice failed Michael Brown.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the Hunger Game movies and war.

Dave Lindorff discusses Michael Brown’s killing.

Najdorf beats Averbakh.

Najdorf beats anonymous player.

Paul went on to point out that many want to embrace liberty up to the point of allowing something they disapprove of. But this obviously isn’t the libertarian attitude that affirms liberty is a fundamental human right not up to debate. Each person deserves the freedom to choose – just because you disapprove of their practices, be it doing drugs or practicing a different religion, doesn’t give you the right to use force against them.

However this doesn’t imply some sort of cultural or moral relativism. “Just because you allow somebody to have a lifestyle you disapprove of doesn’t mean you have to endorse it,” Paul explains. So while I may not agree with your choice to do heroin everyday, I should let you be. I can’t let my moral preferences morph into rights violations. If everyone understood this and didn’t let their own opinions and biases lead to creating systems of coercion, the world would be a much freer place.

And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

Sheldon Richman points out one of the values that complements non-aggression is anti-racism (Paul has done so as well), which is, after all, just a form of the tolerance that Paul and Mises refer to. I’ve gone even further and argued libertarians ought to be proponents of feminism, gay and trans liberation, and worker empowerment. Now even if these values, for one reason or another, turn out to not be complementary to non-aggression, the reason, if we are agreeing with Mises’ and Paul’s conception of liberty, it can’t be because the philosophy is only concerned with that single idea: for non-aggression is going to inevitably bring along other ideas with it.

For reasons that Paul, Mises, and Rockwell have shown, non-aggression can and does involve, even benefit from, complementary values. They have embraced “strategic thickness” and rightfully so.

Dan Sanchez discusses Tolkien, Plato, and the state.

Kevin Carson discusses the controversy over Burger King.

Darian Worden reviews a book about the Modern School movement.

Shamus Cooke discusses Progressive Democrats going to war.

Patrick Cockburn discusses fear of ISIS.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the legalization of heroin.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses the market.

Ivan Eland discusses the fight against ISIS and U.S. policy.

Arthur Silber discusses suicide and being a parent.

Arthur Silber discusses suicide and parenting.

Majorie Cohn discusses perpetual war under Obama.

Salon.com interviews Ted Rall.

Sheldon Richman discusses the clueless character of America’s foreign policy elite.

David R. Henderson discusses Richard Epstein’s case for intervention.

George Leef discusses a new book on libertarianism by Tom Palmer.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses ISIS and fixing the government.

Studies in Emergent Order discusses Anarchy and Legal Order.

Colin P. Elliot discusses how police militarization is a consequence of policing the world.

Gary Chariter discusses a new book on who rules America.

George H. Smith has released the eighth part of his series on social laws.

Sheldon Richman discusses the anti-militarist heritage of Herbert Spencer.

Robert C. Koehler discusses the God of war.

Peter Hart discusses the PBS left on airstrikes.

Joel Schlosberg discusses the conquest of the U.K. by Scotland.

Kevin Carson discusses online learning.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses Ron Paul at LPAC.

Robby Soave discusses a case of zero tolerance school policies.

Viktor Korchnoi draws Edmar J. Mednis.

Mikhail Tal beats Mikhail Botvinnik in a world championship game.

Right-libertarians or non-left libertarians aren’t known for an overwhelmingly positive view of labor unionism. Walter Block was the target of a past blog post by me that illustrates this. This post challenged the simplistic notion that labor unions are just creatures of government. This notion tends to be at the core of anti-unionism amongst some libertarians.

Anti-unionism amongst libertarians serves no good purpose. Libertarian individualism is certainly compatible with a form of unionism that involves self-interested workers forming a voluntary association to deal with the power of the boss. People are not only oppressed by government. The power of the boss can be immensely repressive too.

Liberty is a multi-faceted thing. It certainly doesn’t exclude freedom in the workplace. Libertarians who wish to provide a comprehensive attack on authority and oppression should take notice of this truth. A boss can serve the role of a mini-state with all the attendant consequences for human freedom.

Libertarians who desire to reach the majority of people dependent upon employers for a livelihood need to offer an analysis like the above that will connect to their experiences as subordinate employees. Not only is it politically prudent, it’s the approach most compatible with human liberty.

Human liberty is preferably defended in this more totalistic fashion. It’s far better to advocate liberty in all areas of life rather than settle for a limited amount. The workplace is a key battleground for liberty. One that requires libertarians to step up to the plate and provide answers.

Nobody who loves liberty wants to be told when they can and can’t go to the bathroom. Something that an employer has the power to control. And a power worth contesting in the name of freedom. Not to mention all the other attendant petty tyrannies listed in Corey Robin’s linked piece above.

Some libertarians worry that unionism or labor struggle generally is collectivist and must depend on government coercion to succeed. This confuses collectivism with collective action. The second issue of government coercion being necessary is addressed in my post on Walter Block linked to above. Please consider commenting on that post and this one!

This framing of the immigration issue is entirely wrong. It rests on the assumption that an inflow of “illegal” immigrants is a bad thing. The notion stems from a belief in the morality of nation-states and border control. If we abandon this idea, we can see that the real immigration problem pertains to border enforcement. It’s also related to miserable conditions in other countries. This horrific context is what leads many people to immigrate.

It’s definitely a problem when force is initiated against people simply crossing an imaginary line on a map. That’s one aspect of the real immigration problem. Another is the aforementioned miserable conditions. These consist of poverty and violence. Both of which contribute to people choosing to immigrate. If they lived in a better context, they may not feel the need to do so. This is not to say there is a moral issue with their choice to immigrate though.

This violence is partially the fault of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. recognition of the coup government in Honduras is one example. Another is the past terrorist wars waged by Reagan in Central America. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to violence unleashed by U.S. foreign policy. It’s the most relevant though.

A just resolution of the problems surrounding immigration would involve ending imperialist U.S. violence around the world. It would also involve opening the borders. These are the positions consistent with radical libertarianism and anarchism. In contrast, the present framing of the issues by politicians is non-libertarian or non-anarchist. The latter statist take is morally grotesque.

One way to go about helping this solution along is to pressure politicians to declare safe havens in areas under their control. Another related approach is to have non-governmental institutions harbor or help refugees from other countries. One could also donate to organizations that push for illegal immigrants to receive legal defense in court like the ACLU.

All of these options are important for furthering freedom of immigration. This principle of freedom of movement follows naturally from the non-aggression principle. Let’s work to implement the above solutions! All we have to lose is our chains. The time to act is now.

She also goes on to accuse libertarians of thinking that civil liberties violations allegedly created by Bush are actually the invention of Obama. A baseless charge for which I am aware of no evidence. As if that weren’t bad enough, she postulates that libertarians are just “ass covering”. A notion implying that they aren’t really seriously opposed to this stuff.

All that aside, the meat of the piece revolves around a contrast between the liberal and libertarian conceptions of policing. Her central piece of empirical evidence for the liberal conception is what happened when Liberal Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, got involved. She specifically mentions him putting the head of highway police, Ron Johnson, in charge, and his marching with the protesters.

The central problem with this line of reasoning is that Jay Nixon recently declared a state of emergency along with a curfew in Ferguson, Missouri. He also recently sent in the National Guard. There are also police abuses still occurring such as the threatening of reporter, Chris Hayes. Ron Johnson broke a promise to not enforce the curfew with military style trucks and tear gas. He also ordered the arrest of journalists. It appears that the old approach is still in effect.

Another major part of her thesis is that non-violence has proven itself more effective than violence. This is ironically combined with mentioning that Ronald Reagan cracked down on blacks carrying guns in the form of the Black Panthers. Not to mention that there is no unifying libertarian view on the use of violence against government as a form of protest. We can grant truth to her argument without believing it’s refuted libertarianism.

The final part of her piece worth addressing pertains to her queer view that libertarians view police as inherently authoritarian. This implicitly means all libertarians believe this. The fact is that some libertarians do oppose all police while others want to have private policing. Not all libertarians even think government police are inherently authoritarian. There are minarchists who support them.

That having been said, her liberal conception of government police as serving in an accountable “serve and protect” function ignores a number of factors. The factor of officer friendly belonging to a monopolistic organization. This means people can’t escape abuse easily. Another issue is that the government police may only be officer friendly for respectable members of the community who aren’t violating any unjust laws deemed socially necessary.

The final problem with her analysis is that all government relies on the initiation of force to survive. Officer friendly will eventually have to be unfriendly to anyone seeking the services of a non-government protective association. In the context of most governments, they also have to eventually be unfriendly to those evading compulsory taxation. Her goal of police who genuinely serve communities is better realized in left-wing market anarchy. One way to go about creating rights protection outside of government is to encourage things like non-government sanctioned neighborhood watch and jury nullification. Both of which can serve to protect rights without the state. The first by deterring violent crime through citizen watch and the second by freeing people unjustly headed for imprisonment. Please get started on this vital task today!

Kevin Carson discusses how the makers and takers aren’t who you think.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the War on Drugs, intervention, and immigrant children.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Saudi complicity in the rise of ISIS.

Gina Luttrell discusses bootleggers, baptists, and birth control.

Justin Raimondo discusses how neocons are going undercover.

Ivan Eland discusses resolving conflict in artificial states.

Bionic Mosquito discusses the criteria for a just war.

Eric Peters discusses the non-aggression principle.

Patrick Cockburn discusses ISIS in Syria.

Norman Solomon discusses the god complex of Uncle Sam.

Wendy McElroy discusses voluntaryist anthropology.

Sheldon Richman discusses the smear of isolationism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses how government power is about having power rather than catching terrorists.

Nick Gillespie discusses a libertarian foreign policy.

Jeffrey Miron discusses libertarianism.

Andrew Bacevich discusses the lessons from America’s war for the Greater Middle East.

Justin Raimondo discusses the new meaning of isolationism.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Christians in Iraq.

Sheldon Richman discusses Jane Cobden.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the practicality of libertarianism.

Sheldon Richman discusses the politics of the border.

Sheldon Richman discusses why he can’t help being a libertarian.

John LaForge discusses censorship and myth-making surrounding the atomic bomb.

Ron Jacobs discusses Tonkin and Watergate.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how ISIS is winning on two fronts.

James Rothenberg discusses the American flags and its followers.

Empty Wheel discusses whether civil libertarians are falling for faux NSA reform.

Alexey Shirov beats Boris Gelfand.

Yifan Hou beats Li Chao.

Two years ago this month, a friend of mine suggested that I write an article for the Center for a Stateless Society, a group I had very little knowledge of, aside from said friend posting a few of their writings per week on Facebook. At the time, I was young and in college, a (embarrassingly, lapsed) member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and just starting to find myself in my new role as an opinion columnist and journalism student.

At the time I leaned very heavily toward the most straight-forward version of anarcho-syndicalism I could muster: I believed that political revolution could be fomented solely by worker action, won solely by worker action, and a new world created in the shell of the old – all exclusively by worker action. The post-revolution world I envisioned was vaguely communist, but there were still questions I couldn’t answer and discrepancies I couldn’t readily avoid.

I was wary, at first, being an anarcho-syndicalist, of being thrown into the lion’s den of what I thought were a bunch of Ayn Rand-loving criminal capitalists, but James Tuttle, the Center’s new director and a Fellow Worker, convinced me to write my first op-ed for them, concerning Todd Akin’s incredibly terrible “legitimate rape” comment. It was, as far as anarchist opinion pieces go, fairly weak, and the first draft actually included a harebrained message of support for a Democratic political candidate in the upcoming election as a means of getting Akin away from public view.

Luckily, Tom Knapp, one of the Center’s Media Coordinators, put a stop on that first draft, forcing me to look at what I was writing and ask myself, “Is this something an anarchist would actually advocate for?”

In other words, you can talk the talk, but can you commit to walking the walk?

This was the first time in my life that an editor challenged my very convictions. At first, I didn’t know how to deal with it. Was I angry? Was I disappointed? Did I just lose what might be my only chance to write for an anarchist website because I was subconsciously still a statist? Noam Chomsky, for all the good work he did on syntactic structures, behaviorism and foreign policy, had never prepared me for this.

Instead of backing down and forgetting about that stupid Center for a Stateless Society, I decided to put my money where my mouth was. I opened the draft document and wracked my brain for several hours while neglecting school work and taking up study space in the university library. I scoured anarchist reference websites, looking for anything I could find that would be able to tie in the article’s specifics with both anarchism and feminism. In the research stage for that first op-ed, I tried to pack as much Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman and pamphleted versions of random anarcha-feminist material from The Anarchist Library in my head as I could before I remembered:

Keep it simple, statist.

The best writing is often the least convoluted. Getting to a point and putting an exclamation mark on that point quickly is much more effective than throwing excessive quotes and stats at the reader. I cut about 300 words from that first draft and added, at most, another 100 that got to the point I wanted to make much better.

Looking back on that first article from the place of growth that two years and a handful of other writings affords, I can see that it still has its share of issues. But by forcing me to think like an anarchist instead of just positioning myself as one, Knapp, Tuttle and the whole of C4SS taught me something incredibly valuable – not only about writing, but about having courage in my convictions.

I’ve learned a lot since I was accepted into C4SS, first as an Op-ed contributor, then as a Fellow. I’ve been exposed to mutualism, critiques of intellectual property, critiques against the prison system, the benefits of stigmergic networks and more. Behind all of this was a group of men and women who challenge each other not to stick themselves into an ideological rut. By helping each other grow, they themselves grow.

The point of this essay is not to blow sunshine up the posteriors of the people I write with. There’s plenty I disagree with them on – some topics I’ve made my differing opinion known; others, not so much. I still identify largely with anarcho-syndicalism, and I’m still mostly not convinced by the propertarian arguments some of my colleagues espouse. And yes, I am aware that in the libertarian movement more broadly, there are problems with racism, misogyny, homophobia and other social diseases. But the same can be said about more than a few movements and organizations on the Left. If all we do is accuse each other’s movements of moral impurity, not only will there never be any chance of a dialogue between us, there will be no way for us to address these concerns separately with any efficacy.

This is why I don’t shy away from the “libertarian” descriptor. I see genuine promise in a lot of what libertarianism has to offer, and I legitimately believe that the left can add to that canon and create something in synthesis that is more powerful than either milieus can create separately. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left, college organizations like Students For Liberty and our own Students for a Stateless Society, and the growing number of people who are already combining social-left concerns with libertarian theory – and talking about it publicly – are beginning to make it possible for an even newer libertarianism to emerge.

It is indeed possible for someone like me – someone who identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist, an anti-capitalist and a feminist – to be a libertarian.

This is something that entrenched pundits and Quixotic windmill-tilters who write nothing but smear jobs on the people they think are in charge of the libertarian movement fail to understand. We’re no longer solely defined by what Lew Rockwell’s stable of columnists write, or what the Ludwig von Mises Institute publishes. It isn’t accurate to pigeonhole libertarians to “devotees of Ayn Rand,” or “followers of the Chicago School of Economics” anymore, if indeed it ever was. Libertarianism contains multitudes, and the tides are shifting.