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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 (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…

[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…