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…

If you consider yourself a centrist, you’re being played. (I assume I’m addressing ordinary people here who pride themselves on being one of the “adults in the room,” and not members of the establishments of either major party, leading figures in the military-industrial complex, affiliates of mainstream think tanks like Brookings, or talking heads like…

The death of former Israeli prime minister and president Shimon Peres (age 93), the last major figure of Israel’s founding generation, has brought an outpouring of tributes for a man who reputedly had, as President Obama put it in his eulogy, “the capacity to see all people as deserving of dignity and respect.” Unfortunately, the…

Ever since the famous communist Joseph Déjacque coined the political use of the term libertarian in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon back in 1857 as a way to differentiate his views from those of the authoritarian communists within the anti-capitalist movement, the philosophy of libertarianism has always implied working class rebellion. At least until a…

Whenever we libertarians point out democracy’s perverse incentives (as I do here) we risk being accused of elitism. However, those who assume that the only alternative to rule by the people is rule by an aristocracy reveal a tragically incomplete awareness of the choices before us. Rather than choose among rulers, we should ask why anyone…

I keep thinking I couldn’t be any more repulsed by right-libertarian apologists for big business. And every time, I run across something like William F. Shughart II’s crude apologetic for the Dakota Access Pipeline at the so-called “libertarian” Independent Institute (“Environmentalists’ Questionable Tactics in North Dakota,” Sept. 12). Since the beginning of capitalism, its propagandists…

Benjamin Netanyahu has been perhaps the most anti-Palestinian Israeli prime minister of a large rogue’s gallery dedicated to driving the aggrieved Palestinians out of the land they and their ancestors have lived in and worked for millennia. This oppression — which has included ethnic cleansing, savage war on the people of the Gaza Strip, routine brutality and humiliation,…

The capitalist market system is defined by the strictures of wage labour relations and the regulatory mechanisms, which are the used for the valorisation of capital and the commodity production which maintains, expands and homogenises this valorisation. These are the inevitable products of capitalist exchange relations and the creation of a general equivalence in which…

If anything can be said to be entertaining about liberals’ reaction to Putin’s possible role in the DNC leaks, it’s what it inadvertently reveals about the unexamined foreign policy assumptions they share with conservatives. Coming as it does on top of a long Trump history of weird Putin adulations, the possibility that Russia hacked the…

Democratic politics makes savvy people stupid, at least when they act politically. This has long been demonstrated, and it applies both to voters and policymakers. Several things account for it: the impotence of one vote, the consequent futility and hence wastefulness of acquiring information, the dispersal of the costs of government, and the resulting theatrical…

While it is true that syndicalism and illegalism can diverge from and even sometimes butt heads with agorism, there seems to be much use in such alliances. It was within this spirit that Nathan Goodman offered critiques of each possible tactic and alliance and while some of the points speak for themselves, others require some…

Nathan Goodman does a great service by offering critiques to the Agorist, Illegalist, and Syndicalist framework. Where he succeeds in uncovering important questions for practitioners of these schools of thought, he may fail for lack of imagination or direct experience. As someone who identifies as an Agorist or Counter-Economist and practices the philosophy on a…

I: Does Agorism Require Intent? Nathan Goodman has recently published a great piece on some of the drawbacks and potentials  of agorism, direct action and trying to synthesize agorism with illegalism or syndicalism. In this piece I’ll address a few of his general arguments and then move to address his specific points about agora-syndicalism. In…

I am generally favorable to agorism, direct action, and other anarchist strategies that emphasize building the new world in the shell of the old. However, I recognize that there are no panaceas. All strategies have costs and benefits, and strategies for social change may have serious pitfalls and unintended consequences. This essay employs some basic…

The goal of this essay is three-fold. First, I will identify the key concepts which outline the philosophy of Agorism and the strategy of Counter-Economics, as outlined by Samuel E. Konkin III in The New Libertarian Manifesto and An Agorist Primer. Second, I will illustrate how radicals of all stripes can utilize the strategy of…

Modern markets are fundamentally unfree. Most libertarians and anarchists realise this, and see that centuries of systemic state intervention have created infrastructures that are wasteful, coercive and destructive. The majority of capitalist markets, rather than developing through spontaneous order, are in fact borne out these infrastructures, growing as deformed appendages that have some elements of…

Utilizing markets to combat unethical business practices is a long tradition amongst activists from various ideologies. Whereas agorism seeks to combat cronyist practices of utilizing corporate welfare, tax breaks, lobbying, intellectual property laws, and other special government granted privileges to maintain economic status and even monopoly over certain products or ideas as well as other…

Karl Marx considered the lumpenproletariat to be the segment of the working class with the least revolutionary potential and in fact went as far as to deem them as potentially counter-revolutionary. However, this class of  “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry,…

Marginalized people are often excluded from the formal economy. This exclusion can be driven through state interventions, such as occupational licensing laws, that erect barriers to entry. This can be coupled with discrimination by employers, barriers to accessing education, and other social factors that impede success in the formal labor market. This leads to transgender…