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…

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…