Within anarchist circles, there is a split between those who advocate markets and those who advocate forms of decentralized planning such as participatory economics or federated communes. While the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek has pointed out the numerous issues with centralized state planning, much of the same criticisms can apply to…

In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk stated that one of his values was “meritocracy, as much meritocracy as possible, so you get ahead as a function of your skill, and nothing else.”  “Meritocracy” is often framed by liberals as a thing that would be good if we actually had it, as opposed…

Infamous British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher espoused a fusionist ideology which sought to weld pseudo-individualism to the traditionalist collectivism of the nuclear family and the nation state in a manner not unlike her American counterpart Ronald Reagan. Unsurprisingly, this ideological chimera led to an incoherent world view that rhetorically championed the freedom of the individual,…

An anarchist walks out of a punk show to smoke. On her vest are anarchist patches with various standard slogans, “No Gods No Masters,” “Death To Transphobes,” “Kill Your Local Rapist,” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “Punch Nazis,” “From The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” “Make Total Destroy,” “The Only Good Cop Is…

“Tax the rich” is an all too common refrain on the left which, thanks to left unity, has even been echoed by many self-proclaimed anarchists. “Taxation is theft” on the other hand is a slogan many anarchists are hesitant to repeat due to its association with right-libertarians despite it being far more consistent with anarchist…

My previous three essays have been step-by-step demonstrations of my thinking — each applies specific examples in detail, tailored to specific topics. To answer Andrew Kemle’s question (“Is there a self left to talk about?”) I want a general way of articulating myself. It will hardly be comprehensive, but if I can at least sketch…

…but It Did Determine Our Regime of Property “You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself.”- Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own On December 12th, 2023 the AFL-CIO Facebook page posted a meme that stated “Elon Musk doesn’t create cars, Jeff Bezos doesn’t deliver Amazon packages, Howard Shultz doesn’t make Starbucks…

Worker cooperatives have long been championed by anarchists, socialists, communists, Marxists, anti-capitalists, and post-capitalist types as a means to achieve worker-ownership and workplace democracy within capitalism. Not only does their internal structure of horizontal democratic decision making help to internally solve Hayek’s local knowledge problem, but, according to Democracy At Work, [w]hen workers have a say in…

Brothers and sisters and compañer@s: I am going to try to explain to you how we reorganize autonomy, that is, the new structure of Zapatista autonomy.  I will explain more later with more detail.  Or maybe I won’t explain any more, because the practice is what matters.  Of course, you can also come to the…

At Future of Freedom Foundation, Jacob Hornberger writes: “America’s welfare state way of life is based on the notion that the federal government is needed to force people to be good and caring to others.”  Um, no. America’s welfare state way of life is based on the notion that, since the capitalist state redistributes massive…

I recently stumbled across a screenshot of this classic old tweet from Arthur Chu: Whenever such an observation appears on social media, it inevitably provokes a storm of responses along the lines of “workers wouldn’t be able to make anything if they had to make their own parts and tools.” For example, as part of…

“The land monopoly… consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation… the individual should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal occupation and cultivation of land.” -Benjamin R. Tucker, “State Socialism and Anarchism” Ironically, the non-aggression principle as understood by much…

I’ve been re-reading Avrahm Yarmolinksi’s Road to Revolution. It’s one of my favorite books on radical history. I happened to stumble upon it by chance sometime in twenty seventeen, a mere year after first self identifying with anarchism. Back then, while I never totally identified with anarcho-communism, I was adjacent to that as I primarily…

One of the main obstacles for a libertarian, even left-libertarian, appreciation of Marxian analysis is the assumption that it necessarily denies any role for the individual to play in both material struggle and general social analysis, leaving that entirely to mass class concepts like the proletariat, lumpenproletariat, bourgeoisie, etc. In contrast, libertarians right and left…

The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor. As Ricardo writes: In speaking then of commodities, of their…

Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above…

In my previous article “In Lieu of Free Banking,” I outline the mutualist and individualist anarchist arguments for free and mutual banking, its potential ability to empower labor, and, briefly, some immediate proxies available via credit unions and alternative currencies. But I also point to Laurance Labadie’s assessment of Benjamin Tucker’s (and later his own)…

In libertarian and market anarchist circles, the concept of free banking has always been an important ideal for a genuinely free and healthily competitive society. This entails a monetary system where banks not only hold currency but can issue their own currency or banknotes without the need for a centralized treasury. As such, the supply…

At the Hampton Institute, Shi Sanyazi argues that “Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not ‘Supply and Demand’”:  “The truth is that… our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand.  I know what they mean, of course. In the economic discourse between…

Malcolm X once said that all “[r]evolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” From the Marxist-influenced Landless Workers Movement seizing unused land in Brazil to Indigenous #LandBack efforts in North America, the struggle over land—both as a means of production and…