[Listen to a Mutual Exchange Radio Podcast discussing this essay here] Ideas related to Universal Basic Income (UBI) have been gaining some traction lately with the goals of mitigating inequality, addressing the increasing precarity of technological unemployment, and attempting to ensure that people can meet their basic needs. As an anarchist seeking freedom for all,…

Governments have various ways to control the markets and attempt to preserve equilibrium. The most familiar one is price-fixing1 and punishing the infringers by reliance on governments’ forces. The rationale behind this is that governments will allocate resources to the best interest of the community and, as they have authority, they can easily mobilize the…

As the world responds to the COVID-19 (or coronavirus) pandemic, we’re seeing many opportunities to highlight the anarchist perspective. Right now, mutual aid is the shining star of the last-ditch efforts to minimize the impact on the global north.  From communities passing the hat for those who are out of work, to neighbors dropping off…

Gamestop’s disdain for their workers is well known and the accounts are numerous. Whether it’s their Circle of Life program or low pay, if you work in-store at Gamestop, you’re likely not having a great time. But now the company has gone all-in on their exploitation. Gamestop has recently responded to coronavirus by trying to…

Resistance to our oppressors can often seem like a monumental, if not impossible task. Facing off against massive police and military institutions can make any means we employ to resist them seem pointless. However, it is my contention that it is possible to resist even the greatest institutions of domination within our times, not by…

When talking to your local anarcho-syndicalist on why someone should join their union, they usually give a long list of all the things taken for granted today that are the result of organized labor fights in the past, with the weekend being the most enthusiastically mentioned. Now it is easy to believe that the eight-hour…

Consensual non-monogamy, that is romantic relationships with multiple partners,  has long been a prime candidate for the next battleground in America’s on-going culture wars. The issue got an unexpected push from the traditionally conservative state of Utah, whose Republican-dominated Senate recently voted unanimously on a bill that would remove the threat of imprisonment for polygamy….

Solarpunk is a somewhat newer subculture inspired by science fiction, most notably steampunk and cyberpunk, and environmentalism. It is a media genre that has produced amazing works in the fields of video games, animation, film, television, literature, and music. It also exists as a real life movement which has influenced areas of society such as…

On January 21, 2017, I took to the streets of DC alongside thousands of other women supposedly joined in unity and solidarity with the rights of all women, but what I experienced said otherwise. Even in the weeks leading up to the march there were issues between white organizers and organizers of color as well…

From December 10th-13th, 2019 (December 14th-17th for those in the UK due to the desire to not limit access to important political news during an election period), YouTube creators and their supporters went on strike, refusing to upload or watch any content or even log onto the site, to protest YouTube’s new terms of service….

It has to be said, whoever coined the term Degrowth has done a tremendous disservice to those who advocate scaling down the current industrial mode of production to simultaneously stop climate change and improve human conditions for all. To briefly summarize, Degrowth is a proposed method for decreasing carbon emissions which calls for scaling down…

It’s been 32 years since capitalism came to Russia. Starting with Gorbachev’s reforms, which legalized entrepreneurship on the 5th of February 1987, capitalism reigns wild in Putin’s Russia. Bureaucracy has evolved into wild capitalism and a lot of party members have become democrats and criminals. In modern Russia, everything that must belong to the people…

According to Black Cat, money without the state involves a “core paradox” – “it [non-state money] will inevitably be used without the state being there to stop its usage, but it cannot be used while the state is present.” However, as the author also acknowledges, “as people free themselves from the state, moving beyond its…

When the average american thinks of libertarianism, they often think of right-wing minarchists and self-proclaimed constitutionalists. These types don’t believe in full anarchism, but in limiting the state’s powers to only the bare minimum needed to enforce the united states constitution. These types often champion rights they see the constitution as protecting:  freedom of speech,…

The black bloc, at least as I have experienced it, is a very extreme departure from everyday economic life.  No one buys or sells anything — in fact, you shouldn’t even bring your wallet to something like this. They’ll use it to ID you. Instead, everyone gives everyone else things — if you need anything…

Over the past few weeks, the topic of indigenous self-determination and the decolonization of US-occupied lands has re-emerged, not only with the protests against neoliberal austerity in Puerto Rico, but also in less-covered protests by indigenous Hawaiians and allies on Maunakea. What’s occurring on Maunakea could very well be considered the next DAPL protest, as…

In Brantford, Ontario, the police recently escalated their drug sweeps, ostensibly in response to a record number of overdoses in the community from drugs laced with fentanyl. Mayor Kevin Davis, who is on record as supporting a proposal for a supervised injection site, showed his cognitive disconnect by also speaking glowingly of the raids. But…

There is a lot of talk lately about fusionism, the term coined by National Review writer Frank Meyer in the Cold War to describe the alliance between conservatives and libertarians against communists that aligned them with the Republican Party. Some wonder if fusionism is truly dead; I wonder why it lived so long. The alliance…

Uber and Lyft sometimes get cited as agorist ventures by misguided anarcho-capitalists. While it could be claimed that these models are slightly more agorist in nature than the traditional taxi industry, it is far from the model we should be striving for. Instead of being an agorist model for transportation services, it is merely traditional…

The Brexit Party has just done extremely well for itself in the EU elections, though it should be noted that it and the Tories got less than half the total votes. If I had to describe the whole affair, it would be as such: the whole thing became, essentially, a second Brexit referendum. The “remainers”…