I confess my reaction on Election Night, when it first looked like Trump might get in the White House, was sheer panic. It was a bit like Philip K. Dick’s “Black Iron Prison” closing down. On a personal level, I was about as terrified as the night I was arrested and put in jail. Now,…

Anarchism in and of itself is a bit of a conundrum. The term means many different things depending on who one talks to. In popular circles anarchism is equated with violence, chaos and a total disregard of any form of cultural or social order. In philosophical circles, however, anarchism is something very different. Anarchism is…

There has been much speculation and justified anxiety concerning how advances in Computer Science (in the field of Artificial Intelligence – AI – in particular) and Robotics could result in mass unemployment due to automation. However, the fact that compulsory education exacerbates this especially problematic aspect of technological progress is largely neglected in such discussions….

One of the more annoying things about our norms of discourse is that we tend to collapse our talk of the future into singular predictions rather than arrays of different possibilities each with different probabilities. It’s easier to pretend like we each have one singular future that we’re betting on. We more or less commit…

I had the pleasure of appearing before the Amherst Political Union (Amherst College) this week to discuss the election of Donald Trump as president and the future of liberty. What perhaps pleased me even more was meeting with a group of young libertarians eager to explore the nature and implications of natural-law free-market anarchism. The…

In June of 2014 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) detailed an audacious proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. The usual fall-out unfolded. Agency favorable Democrats and environmentalists smiled while Industry favorable Republicans, suits and the national conservative right cried: “Green is the new Red!” Now a regime change…

This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities….

While presidents almost always expand the power of their office and of the government, Donald Trump is likely to enact a degree of barefisted authoritarianism the modern United States is totally unprepared for. Even if the corrupt and limp political elites that have so far utterly failed to stand against him unexpectedly rally a steadfast…

There currently exist two very real and ever wicked threats to human civilization. Those threats are a looming environmental crisis and nuclear war. As different as the two appear, these threats are not isolated from one another — they are congruent. The growing environmental crisis is well documented, but the root ills are not well…

In a PBS segment Oct. 24, Judy Woodruff asked “What will Dakota Access protesters do if final pipeline restrictions are lifted?” Her guest William Brangham, who’s been covering the confrontation for PBS Newshour, elaborates: People don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. If the Army Corps agrees to this last permit and says to the…

Donald Trump says the presidential election is “rigged.” Although he provides no evidence for his charge, lots of things can be said about it. For one thing, he equivocates over the word rigged to include voter fraud along with news-media/polling bias — two very different things. The former suggests that the outcome is predetermined, the…

As structures of domination in our society increasingly reveal their true faces, the case for anarchy has never been stronger and the need for anarchy never clearer. The war machine marches on, raining down death on noncombatants and breeding terrorists. The surveillance state expands its reach. Police violence—against ethnic minorities, against members of marginal and…

Although October 10 was the tenth anniversary of Center for a Stateless Society, it’s coming up on the eighth year for me. In December 2008 I was invited to be the Center’s first paid writer, thanks to a donation large enough to cover one research paper and an op-ed. So I wrote a study entitled…

Anti-police sentiment is on the rise in America and around the world. In the wake of the death’s of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others (Rest In Power), even the DoJ admits that at least some police departments are highly racist in practice and the Black Lives Matter movement has sprung up in response….

The following is Part 2 of Pacifica Radio’s “Long Live Anarchy!” interview with Robert Anton Wilson. Part 1’s transcript can be read here. The interview ends abruptly, and unfortunately Pacifica was unable to find additional reels in their archives. –cn Hayden: How do you answer the charge that anarchism’s an outmoded political belief? That it…

Dear Supporters, Ten years ago, on October 10, 2006, the Center for a Stateless Society opened its virtual doors and began its sincere and quixotic quest to change the world by changing minds – about freedom, about markets and about anarchism. To quote C4SS cofounder Roderick Long’s founding statement, “For too long libertarians, and I…

At some point in the late fifties or early sixties, Pacifica Radio’s Charlie Hayden interviewed the inimitable Robert Anton Wilson on all things anarchism. Wilson waxes poetic on anarchism’s foundations and answers some challenging questions from a presumable skeptic in Hayden. While the exact date of the interview is unknown, the early to mid-sixties appear…

Have you ever considered the level of irony involved in the fact that so many of the same people who claim to distrust big government (“I love my country but fear my government”) also adamantly support the police against Black Lives Matter? These people, by and large, actually worship the culture of police lawlessness as…

In the wake of a tragedy, there is almost always an onslaught of public opinion articles, media coverage, and public commentary. In many cases, the media and the public respond to tragedy in a way that either supports state institutions or minimizes their negative functions and actions. This support for the state, its projects, and…

The non-aggression principle forbids assaults on the bodies and property of nonviolent people. Along with the Lockean theory of homesteading, this principle lies at the heart of contemporary libertarian doctrine. Although they promote the non-aggression principle, left-libertarians argue that interpersonal aggression is not the only impediment to liberty. Hunger, thirst, illness, heat, and cold have…