Feature Articles
Hayek, Epistemology, and Hegemonic Rationality
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!…
Quakerism, Anarchy, and Everything In Between
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…
Laurance Labadie’s “Psychological Motives Behind Collectivism”
Psychological Motives Behind Collectivism Collectivism is a doctrine of the “crowd mind”, a philosophy of incompetency. To those who have ever been the losers in the unequal, privileged, and despotic struggle for existence, who have not felt the glory and satisfaction of conquering obstacles and the achievement of aims, the thought of peace and security…
7 Months of War, 7 Months of Hate*
To feel more hate because of the impossibility to change anything is one of the worst feelings that you can have. You will hate your enemy that brought death and suffering to others while being unable to stop it; like you are tied to a chair and your mouth is gagged. This is clearly torturous…
​​On Liberated Zones Theory: Or How BIPOC Folks Are Already Doing the Work
I have previously pointed out that the on-the-ground efforts in Rojava and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi can be seen as… attempting, as Wesley Morgan describes, “to create ‘dual power’ through the creation of cooperatives.” Morgan disapprovingly terms this “market syndicalism” and critiques it for simply creating “units in a market economy” and still relying “upon…
History of Egoist Anarchism
The term “egoist” has appeared often in the history of philosophy and social thought, as well as in political ideologies. However, while there are several variations and explanations of what egoism means, its usage has been quite inconsistent. Therefore, when reading about the subject, it is important to distinguish which type of egoism we are…
A Brief History of Individualist Anarchism
Throughout the world, the word “anarchism” has a variety of meanings. When most people think of “anarchism,” the first things that come to their mind are fire-setting bomb throwers and masked rioters smashing Starbucks and McDonald’s windows. In the popular imagination, anarchism is synonymous with chaos. Armed with this image of anarchism as a nihilistic,…
The First Intifada and Anarchism
The First Intifada (meaning shaking off/uprising in Arabic) was the first Palestinian uprising against Israel’s takeover of Palestinian territory, lasting from December 1987 until the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The “intifada,” which went down in history as the name of the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation, is known by this name all…
Constructing an Unfixed Freedom
[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Self Interest In every interaction and through every social structure, humans exercise an unavoidable psychological instinct known as self interest. It is a deep motivational factor that is inseparable from our subjectivity. Whether we are kind or cruel, it…
A Critical Consideration of my Critical Consideration
It’s been explained to me that every writer—whether of highbrow novels or online internet discourse—always has one or two things they’ve written that they dislike and which haunts them. For me that piece is “A Critical Consideration of Hensley’s Appalachian Anarchism,” which is a response to Dakota Hensley’s article “Appalachian Anarchism: What the Voting Record…
Why “No Gods” – How To Avoid Atheist Zealotry
Talking about “Christianity” is difficult; Christianity is the largest religion in the world, comprising a multitude of denominations, regional variants, and political projects – each with their own complicated histories and specific contexts to unpack. This means that any statement or conclusion with the words “all” or “most” will necessarily miss something, even in the…
Domination, Hierarchy, Authority, Rules, “Justification,” and The Burden of Proof
Noam Chomsky, a self-described anarchist, presents anarchism as:  Primarily [a] tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that…
Is There a “Self” Left to Talk About? A Reply to Ash P. Morgans
Ash P. Morgans has a lengthy critique of the contributions made by a number of “moralists,” including myself. And in reading their response I realized that what I thought I had written—a relatively short piece with a narrow-focus—was, in fact, a confused mess. This doesn’t mean I now disagree with my arguments: I still think…
On the Labor Theory(s) of Value
The labor theory of value or LTV is, according to Wikipedia, “a theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of ‘socially necessary labor’ required to produce it.” This theory of value was popular among early liberal economists like Adam Smith and David…
Materialism and Thick Libertarianism
Two years ago, I gave a presentation titled “Prerequisites for Freedom: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective” to a philosophy discussion group, in which I talked about the connection between thick libertarianism and 19th century North American individualist anarchism and how progressive and liberatory values are necessary for genuine and necessarily anti-capitalist individualism. For the uninitiated, the…
Bloody Rule and a Cannibal Order! Part III: The Nothing
Written originally as notes for the Egoist and the Anarchist, consider this final essay as a kind of postscript where I hope to challenge what I see as a problematic line of thinking present throughout this symposium: a tendency I’ll call phrase-making. Countless modes of thought, from metaphysics to political discourse, rely on “phrases,” i.e.,…
A Brief Look Back at Ithaca HOURS
One of the most famous community currencies in the United States is Ithaca HOURS, so a review of its history, function, and effectiveness seems appropriate at any time. As accounted by anthropologist Bill Maurer in his book Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason, Ithaca HOURS was started in 1991 in Ithaca, New…
Laurance Labadie’s “Comments on Interview Between Kerry Thornley and Harry Pollard on ‘Dialogue’”
Comments by Laurance Labadie on Interview Between Kerry Thornley and Harry Pollard on “Dialogue”  It may be somewhat gratuitous to comment on what Mr. Kerry Thornley has said on what he considers to be his understanding of economics in only a half hour show, but he has said enough I think plus his explicit endorsement…
Laurance Labadie’s “Superstition and Ignorance versus Courage and Self-Reliance”
Superstition and Ignorance versus Courage and Self-Reliance Every well informed person knows, today, that man has evolved from lower forms of animal life. With this evolution in my mind, we may imagine the progress he has made in ideas and social valuations. Primitive man worshipped the sun, which was natural because from it came both…
Vindicating the Luddites
I have for so long held the same ground – roughly where the anarchic end of Chestertonian Distributism overlaps the individualist end of Proudhonian Mutualism – that I am willing to go so far as to propose as a rule that getting it in the neck from both sides of a false dichotomy is a…
Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory