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…

There are striking parallels between the industrial gigantism of the United States and the Soviet bloc in the 20th century, and their institutional cultures. This is true in particular of agriculture. Both were based on extremely large-scale farms, with high levels of mechanization and heavy use of synthetic fertilizers. From the Cuban Revolution until the…

Andrew turned suddenly toward Julia and, with the distinct disdain for anything ‘liberal’ that identified him as either a leftist or a conservative, spoke bluntly: “You care so much about the environment that you don’t even care about people. Are people in the ‘third world’ just supposed to give up factories? I’m not saying the…

Infantile Radicalism A mature person is one who has outgrown childish emotional impulses. He has learnt about himself and his environment thru personal experience, and has become able to control his emotional feelings in a rational manner. He has emerged from the sheltered dream world of childhood and been weaned to face reality. His reactions…

Laurance Labadie and His Critics Laurance Labadie, the last of the individualist anarchists, heir of Warren, Spooner, and Tucker has in recent months been dismissed as a veritable fossil by a young Wobbly (who feels that individualist anarchism is hopelessly bourgeois), characterized by a disciple of Ludwig Von Mises as being “incapable of reasoned thought,”…

Interview with Laurance Labadie My father, as you know, was an anarchist in Detroit. Mother was a devout Catholic, but gentle and undomineering. Neither of them told me what to do and how to behave. They never said, “Don’t do this” or “Don’t do that,” but let me develop in my own way. Father never…