Burn the Black Flag In nearly every major city and most small towns, there are anarchists, or people with unlabeled anarchist values, plotting ways to create space for our radical projects promoting positive freedom. In most cities, our efforts are duly encumbered with the toil of filling in the abyss of gaps in state services:…

Gelderloos complains at length about perceived small misreadings and misrepresentations in my piece warning about skews to “Diagnostic of the Future” but then he engages in a number of such himself. “They say I claim that fascism should only be critiqued at the institutional level, and never at the ideological level.” But note that I…

William Blum began his adult life as an anti-communist liberal working as a technical functionary in the US State Department, until he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War and went on to a career in radical journalism. Among other things, he covered the Pinochet coup from Chile and worked with renegade CIA officer Philip Agee…

I think it’s a shame that anarchists don’t write more on either geopolitics or analyses of the future; over the last two centuries our greatest successes have come from our imagination and foresight. For this reason I applaud Peter Gelderloos’ recent attempted forecast, published in a variety of forms by Crimethinc. There’s much to agree…

Even if you’ve never read a comic book or seen a superhero movie, Stan Lee has affected your life. His storytelling. His approach to heroism. His moral lessons. His ethos, embodied in the catchphrase “Excelsior!” The Mount Rushmore of modern pop culture surely has a spot for him. His imagination permeates humanity’s modern collective imagination….

Gavin Mueller’s recent article for the boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” is a Marxist critique of what Mueller describes as “Digital Proudhonism,” a catchall term for those who believe that technology is lowering class barriers. Digital Proudhonism is not a formal ideology but rather an undercurrent expressed by a variety of individuals from all…

Reason magazine editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward have recently debated the question of minarchism (i.e., minimal government) vs. free-market anarchism. As an anarchist, I’m obviously on Mangu-Ward’s side of the debate. But both writers make some assumptions about strategy that I find problematic. I’ll start with Gillespie, who expresses impatience with “boring, tedious, and…

If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest. By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on…

When evaluations of reality become seen entirely in terms of their utility as rhetorical weapons it ruins a group’s capacity to get an accurate lay of the land and efficiently strategize. Everything becomes about winning debates, not about ultimately winning ground. One of the main things the social media age has done is collapse divides…

In Part I of this article, I responded to William Gillis’ review of Worshiping Power: An Anarchist Vision of Early State Formation. I wanted to give special attention to what I found to be his most interesting critique. Gillis takes me to task for focusing too much on the anthropological definition of the state, analyzing…

There is a common joke in computing circles to announce at the beginning of a course that “The last person in the room must close the door.” Though at first blush the request seems reasonable, this is an example of an uncomputable function. The last person to enter the room has no way of knowing…

When “The Market” Is Just Money Laundering the Bloodsoaked Riches of Statism When the USSR fell one of the “privatization” schemes was to just hand workers stock certificates in the companies they worked at. The problem of course was that the economy was seized up and everyone was starving. So gangsters and the children of…

By definition no consistently anti-statist libertarian believes that government property is legitimate. The state, by its very nature, cannot be meaningfully consented to; its claims to ownership are the claims of a ranting madman armed to the teeth and soaked in blood. It is also broadly recognized that, because the state is aggression at its…

In 2012, sixteen-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodríguez was murdered in Nogales, Mexico by a Border Patrol agent across the wall, on the U.S. side. The agent shot from behind the rusted iron slats, the existing border wall in Sonora, about 50 feet above the boy. The murderer claimed that the boy was “throwing rocks in…

Since its publication, I have come across two reviews of Worshiping Power that I would like to respond to, not to bat a discursive ball back and forth, but to engage with the flow of conversations that form an integral part of our interaction with the world around us. One is William Gillis’ “The Tangled…

When anarchists talk about counter-economic action, we envisage exchanging goods and services independent of state jurisdiction. Our purpose is to press the bounds of the regulatory state. It doesn’t matter if our efforts are illegal per se. Legality is not a moral prescription. A proper concern for institution building is uncommon in counter-economic philosophy. The…

Everyone is bad at consent but it’s worth getting better anyways. No one is perfectly autonomous but it’s worth respecting agency anyways. Many of our problems are endemic to the tools we use. These are parts of the truth that often get left out. Sometimes better consent and autonomy practices look like sloppy, complicated cry-fests,…

There are many threads in Will’s post, spiraling out in several different directions, and it would be impossible for me to fully respond to all of them within the length appropriate for a response post. Furthermore, much of what I have already said can be cross-applied to his post – for instance, he seems to…

Emmi Bevensee & Logan Yershov’s “Free Speech Dreams and Fascist Memes” is probably the single most thoughtful and nuanced defense of violently disrupting fascist assembly. Of particular note is the way that it draws out something lingering implicit in most other defenses of that tactic. This is what I will call the “disease theory of…

Common Ground It’s worth mentioning that there is some shared intent here. I take issue with Jason’s framing of it as being ‘liberal’ but appreciate his search for common ground. I assume that we are all: Opposed to fascism: Although we debate its exact boundaries, there is a clear center mass that we are all…