STIGMERGY: The C4SS Blog
Director’s Report: Spring 2018

At its inception C4SS focused on getting timely editorials with an anarchist focus published in newspapers around the world. However, with the slow decline of print media, many of the community newspapers that served as our bread and butter have dried up. Meanwhile, thankfully, our profile has risen as an incubator of theory and discourse. Consequently over the last eleven years we’ve slowly shifted focus from getting republished in mainstream media to things like publishing academic studies, translating anarchist material into fifteen languages, and hosting symposiums and debate between anarchist thinkers across the spectrum. Over the last year we’ve expanded the number and role of our editors to assure consistent quality and help nurture new writers. Additionally we’ve built a more active social media crew. Looking forward we’ve invested major energy into a number of new upcoming projects.

That said, while many of us have become preoccupied with these projects it’s important that we continue to fill our unique role providing a source of timely anarchist commentary on current events and also avoid creating a sense of institutional remove or inaccessibility around the Center. To those ends we’re looking to train up new writers.

We’re proud to have have collaborated with ALL Distro for years and they’ve done incredible work spreading Left Libertarian materials, however the primary maintainer has become preoccupied in his academic work and so over the last year we’ve been working to put together our own full fledged store. We will offer a wide range of products, not just books and zines but a host of unique buttons, stickers, and apparel. Some of which was available early to fans who visited our table at a number of bookfairs and conferences. All of which will be accessible as public domain information in addition to purchasable material goods. Running a store for ourselves will enable us to provide more materials, to directly profit from purchases, and to generally lend the institutional weight of the Center to better fulfill customer demand.

Available in our store will also be book versions of our popular Mutual Exchange symposiums, which are in the process of going to publication. The first of these books was published not that long ago and we’ve loved the feedback so far. Nowhere else will you find anarchists thinkers from across the spectrum debating in good faith and with great depth topics like property, democracy, and antifascism.

We’re in the process of building towards a new mutual exchange this summer that we’re very excited about and can’t wait to reveal.

Eleven years of nonstop publication has given C4SS a rich backlog of material to pull from, but it can also become inaccessible. We’ve renewed our audio projects. Check out our youtube channel for uploads of the audiobook version of Markets Not Capitalism, read aloud by Stephanie Murphy as well as continuing new recordings of C4SS articles. You can also now download the audiobook on Bandcamp, for free if you like, of course.

While C4SS continues to reserve money each month for the efforts by our active translators, we’ve also undertook a massive translation effort to get several core articles like the introduction to Markets Not Capitalism, Charles Johnson’s The Many Monopolies, and Kevin Carson’s The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand, translated into a number of world languages where anarchist content — to say nothing of market anarchist ideas — is rare. We’re now in the process of formatting those translations for distribution as booklets or pamphlets.

There are many more projects in various stages of work, from grants for investigative reporting and quantitative analysis, to reading groups and meetups. If you’re interested in getting involved drop us a line.

Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory