“Contra doctrinaire libertarians, freedom is a high-dimensional design space.” ~ Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Co-Founder A distinctive feature of left-libertarianism is its commitment to liberty and egalitarianism – not as moderating influences on each other, but as complementary and mutually reinforcing components of their philosophy. In this sense, they continue a view on markets that goes…

“The great Randolph Bourne realized that ‘war is the health of the State.’ It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.” — Murray Rothbard In Tyranny Comes Home professors Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall methodically…

Let us be clear that ecocide is happening. While we may yet avoid the severest possibilities of global ecological collapse the situation has long been grim. And it’s not just a matter of capitalism or the state making uniquely bad decisions, the tensions at play are deep — at the core of homo sapiens itself….

Massimo De Angelis. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (London: Zed Books, 2017). Massimo De Angelis is a thinker very much in the autonomist tradition; he mentions being a student of Harry Cleaver. This comes through loud and clear in his focus on the self-activity of ordinary people, and on…

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016). I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.)….

Derek Wall. Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States (London: Pluto Press, 2017). I’ve known Derek Wall for some time as a friend on Twitter, a fellow admirer of Elinor Ostrom, an Ostrom scholar, and an official in the Green Party of England and Wales. This is not my first introduction…

There are few figures the alt-right hate more than Jeffrey Tucker — which may be something of a plot twist, given his alleged hand in the racist Ron Paul newsletters of the 80s. Yet Tucker has evolved into a passionate critic of racism, the alt-right and Trump. An affable and optimistic proponent of cosmopolitanism and…

In Living My Life, anarchist, orator, immigrant, writer, and activist Emma Goldman chronicles her prolific life through a tumultuous period in world history. Born in 1869 in czarist Lithuania she became one of the millions of Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States in droves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries….

There are numerous points in Shane Burley’s Fascism Today: What It Is And How To End It where I stopped, reread a passage, and with a little bit of shocked relief went “that is entirely accurate!” I don’t mean to damn with faint praise. In this last year’s stampede of everyone suddenly writing about fascism…

There is no reviewing Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House without commenting on its questionable cannonicity. But there’s also no mistaking its appeal as a supplemental to the last season of electoral politics in America. Like any good expanded universe offering it tries to enrich and deepen everything that entertained…

Rothbard, Murray, ed. Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. Auburn. Alabama Ludwig Von Mises Institute. 2007 The mid-sixties was a unique time in the history of the libertarian movement, as well as in the world at large. US involvement in Vietnam was escalating, the Cold War was at its height, and the civil…

It’s about time. Someone has finally written a biography on the real father of the animal liberation movement – Ronnie Lee. Lee’s lifelong work for animals spans five decades and counting. During this time, he has been involved in just about every form of animal advocacy imaginable — direct action, grassroots vegan outreach, public interest…

Of all the State’s activities, incarceration – especially on a mass-scale – is probably one of the most brutal, disruptive, and inhumane. Of all the state’s activities, the census is probably one of the most… boring. But if we care about the former, we should care about the latter. As it stands, the census counts…

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 2010. The New Press Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argues mass imprisonment and related policies have created a racial caste system for black Americans, which parallels the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th to…

The dearth of anarchist theory in print is sometimes pretty embarrassing. Our discourse is rich, but it can also be maddeningly ephemeral and inaccessible, lost to zines and interpersonal conversations. While illegibility can be a defensive weapon against outside authorities, it also frequently reinforces power relations by increasing barriers to access. It’s painful to have to…

Spoiler alert: Contains plot information about the recent Wonder Woman movie   In director Patty Jenkins’ new DC Comics movie, Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot portrays our heroine, Diana, with grace, strength, and utter conviction.  As a child, Diana yearns to train in the ways of the warrior. Her mother, the Queen of the Amazons, warns…

With all the attention given to last month’s release of Chelsea Manning, whose sentence was only commuted by the Obama administration after it became politically convenient, we must not overlook the fact that the Obama administration also had the opportunity to pardon another famous whistle-blower.

Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age: or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995). In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so…

Bitter Harvest is a recently released wartime romance, set during the state-induced Ukrainian famine of 1932-33: otherwise known as the Holodomor. Directed, written, and funded by members of the Ukrainian diaspora, it was filmed on location in Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests, which some of the crew participated in.

Alexander Reid Ross. Against The Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017). Despite the right’s stereotype of antifascist activists as close-minded thugs or paid protesters, in reality the majority have long been quite geeky, prone to lining their bookshelves with obscure fascist screeds and abstruse historical tomes. This comes with its own problems. Fascism is a multifaceted phenomenon to say…