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…

The History of a Prognostication In 1886, at the request of the editor of North American Review, [Benj]. R. Tucker wrote his famous essay, “State Socialism and Anarchism; How far they agree, and wherein they differ[;”] the article, while paid for, was not published, perhaps because of fear, because of “the Haymarket affair.” The editor…

— If desire shapes energy infrastructure, how do we build a non-extractive libido?  “For what happens to whomever does not want to recognize that political economy is libidinal, is that he reproduces in other terms the same phantasy of an externalized region where desire would be sheltered from every treacherous transcription into production, labour and…

In the first installment of this series, I argued that the “public” vs. “private” distinction was in large part meaningless because the similarity in organizational style of centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratically managed institutions outweighed their nominal ownership by the government or by private business. But there’s another sense in which the “private sector” is virtually…

Market anarchism, as defined by Center for a Stateless Society, is the “advocacy of replacing the state with civil society while pointing to free market economics to explain the workability and/or desirability of such.” This ideology has very rarely if ever supported a sizable movement on its own and instead has, according to Charles Johnson…

Download a .pdf version of the zine here. Cover art by Alex. Web: crowskult.art | Twitter: @crowskult | Instagram: @crowskult     Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy Ağaca balta vurmuşlar “sapı bedenimden” demiş. They hit the tree with an axe, and the tree said “the handle is of my body.” – Turkish proverb   Introduction…

Markets with free information flow help determine relative prices. But this effect can be difficult to observe in a deceptive or sparse marketplace. Murray Bookchin laments the loss of the “moral economy” as a reflection of losing the civic space and of losing our way in the chase for a homogenized global market catering to…

Introduction Friedrich Hayek is quite the contested figure in left-libertarian circles. Praised as a genius of libertarian philosophy on the one hand and as a white knight for capitalist hierarchy on the other, his ideas, like those of most theorists, are nuanced and require further investigation. Philosophy does not necessitate historicism – Sidestep the Marxists!…

Quakers or Friends are members of the Religious Society of Friends, a religious sect rooted in Protestant Christianity which is not restricted to any particular creed or theology but rather brought together by an opposition to violence and a common belief in the God, Divinity, and/or Light in all human beings. In A Quaker Book…