The new HBO documentary Private Violence, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, follows victim advocate Kit Gruelle as she helps various victims of domestic abuse seek justice and freedom from their abusers. Gruelle is a domestic violence survivor herself, and her own story of abuse is told alongside the stories of women who she assists….

Goran Hugo Olsson’s new documentary Concerning Violence examines colonialism in Africa, drawing upon a wealth of archival Swedish news footage and tying the film together with text from Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. Excerpts from Fanon are read by Lauryn Hill, whose narration compellingly communicates Fanon’s ideas. I saw the film recently at the…

Chris Dillow, a heterodox economist who owns Stumbling and Mumbling blog, attacks managerialism from a position decidedly on the Left. But it’s a Left that’s friendly to markets, decentralism, and self-management, and hostile to the New Class version of bureaucratic socialism that dominated Britain from the Webbs to Harold Wilson. The central focus of Dillow’s critique of…

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Belknap, 2009). This third installment in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy, which began with Empire and continued with Multitude, is concerned mainly with the forms taken by the successor society emerging from the decaying corpse of corporate capitalism. This quote is as good a statement of the general theme as…

Ken MacLeod. Intrusion (Orbit Books, 2012). Imagine a near-future Britain with the full mix of paternalism and police state authoritarianism from Tony Blair’s New Labour days. But the ASBOs are issued pursuant to social policies framed by Cass Sunstein and Michael Bloomberg. And the apparatus of surveillance cameras and detention without trial has been augmented…

Ostrom begins by noting the problem of natural resource depletion—what she calls “common pool resources”—and then goes on to survey three largely complementary (“closely related concepts”) major theories that attempt to explain “the many problems that individuals face when attempting to achieve collective benefits”: Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” the prisoner’s dilemma, and Olson’s “logic…

Anarchists tend to look embarrassed when the subject of economics comes up. Or we mumble something about Proudhon and then sheepishly borrow ideas from Karl Marx. It has always struck me as ironic that anarchism began largely as an economic theory, think only of Josiah Warren, Proudhon and Tucker, but then abandoned the field to…

Unlike many dissident histories of the United States, which attempt to portray racial minorities, sexual subcultures and subordinate classes as “worthy victims” in terms of the social mores of the white middle class, Thaddeus Russell celebrates the kind of people that your parents may have warned you about: the low-down, no-count, not-respectable people. You know,…

Kevin Carson: If you can get past the flaws in Shermer’s book (things others might prefer to think of as my fixations, hangups, and dead horses), it’s quite an enjoyable read.

Kevin Carson: My first book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Blitzprint 2004, CreateSpace 2007; Kindle edition) has been translated into Polish through the gracious efforts of a collective of translators including Krzysztof Śledziński.

Nathan Goodman reviews the new film from Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill.

Seth Goldin: When is a contract not enforceable? When shouldn’t a contract be enforced?

Jeremy Weiland: To all left libertarians, anarchists, and advocates of a voluntary society, I give this book the very highest recommendation possible.

Download the free audiobook version of Markets Not Capitalism.

Wally Conger: I can ask for no better guidebook to fighting for and living the stateless life.

American politics has been a shifting coalition between two factions of capital.

Carson v. the Hegemon

David D’Amato reviews AK Press’s collection of anarchist writing on economics