The heat of a presidential election campaign is a good time to reflect on the old Howard Zinn quote about voting: “Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But what really matters, for building a genuinely just…
CONTENT WARNING: rape, sexual assault, physical abuse, violent misogyny, child abuse Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at the DNC recently has been hailed by many as an historic moment in feminist history, as she is the first woman to be nominated by a major party. If she wins the race, she…
A young biker sits with his back against a graffitied stone wall off a hiking trail near the Nevada border, his face buried in a notebook. His name is Jax Teller and he’s the vice president of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club – Redwood Original, or SAMCRO for short, and the book he’s reading…
One of the most challenging elements to a post-Brexit order is the organisation and understanding of law. Since our accession into the EEC, our laws have been increasingly harmonised with and even led by European Union directives and court judgments. Thus we’ve moved into the position of having legislation more dominant in legal acquiescence than…
If the Democrats’ approach under Clinton is doubling down on Obama’s technocratic neoliberal caesarism, with the constant, quiet upward ratcheting of automated drone warfare and electronic surveillance, the alternative from Trump’s GOP is out-and-out fascism. And when I say “fascism,” I mean the kind with smashed windows, lynchings and brownshirt thuggery in the streets. Nowhere…
If anarchism is to get anywhere as a movement, it requires us to build the world we wish to see. To paraphrase the classic wobbly mantra, our goal is and should be to “build a new world within the shell of the old.” In order to do this we must actually create the structures which…
“By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.” – Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin in Paolo Novaresio’s The Explorers A revolutionary is someone who knows the political world in which they want to…
The decentralisation of political authority is, in itself, undoubtedly a victory for the anarchist cause. However, in the case of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, it may be strange to look at it this way, given the reasons for which the Leave side of the campaign won. The Leave campaign was grotesque…
It is no secret that many within libertarian, anarchist, radical socialist, feminist, and queer liberationist circles are critical of the institution of marriage at best. It’s roots as a patriarchal ceremony based on, among other things, a warped view of property rights, its historical ties with the authoritarianism of the church and state in deciding…
Elites will never be stripped of their privilege by the method of their ascension. The impoverished will never stop being robbed of their potential by handing it over to new elites. The decision by the majority of voting British citizens to leave the European Union has been seen as a mandate against unaccountable technocratic governors…
If right-libertarians have a “comparative advantage,” it’s in writing by-the-numbers puff pieces on “free trade” that borrow the language of Ricardo and Cobden to defend what amounts to a totalitarian corporate lockdown on the world economy. This time it’s Richard Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation (“Free Trade Versus Political Fallacies,” June 15) doing…
An article published in January by the New York Times, “Why Cartels Are Killing Mexico’s Mayors,” gives some harrowing insight on the obviously violent and corrupt nature of governance in Mexico. The beginning of the article details a newly-elected mayor brutally murdered right in front of her family, a sign that her anti-corruption rhetoric didn’t…
The following practices determine whether a state activity can be categorized as genocide according to the United Nation’s Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of…
Guns, if you don’t have a healthy fear of them you probably don’t know much about them. From victims of gun violence to conscientious gun owners, hundreds of millions of Americans are well acquainted with their destructive power and the need for safety in managing their use. However, the fear left unchecked by other external…
Michael Gibson tries to demonstrate the infeasibility of a universal basic income by showing that people actually like to work, as evidenced by the increase of hours relative to increased prosperity witnessed during the 20th and 21st centuries. According to him, a UBI would not work as major disincentives are created, which Gibson shows by…
At a time when government space programs like NASA’s seem to be in permanent retrenchment — shifting to a strategy focused on uncrewed probes, fighting to maintain an “International Space Station” that looks like a joke compared to Golden Age science fiction visions of giant cartwheel stations in orbit — a lot of people see…
If you ask an economist to suggest areas where the state should be involved, one answer you’re likely to hear is that states should provide “public goods.” A public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rival. By non-excludable, economists mean that once the good is produced individuals cannot be excluded from consuming…
Free people are prosperous people. When not forced to do otherwise, they work out the best ways for achieving their ends. These ends are often shared or overlapping, so cooperating with others is often a natural way of successfully resisting and overcoming the engulfing harshness of the natural world. When people bring things into the…
Complaints about “entitled Millennials” are practically an entire literary genre in their own right these days, but their younger siblings are coming in for their share of criticism too. At the Washington Post, Laura Hanby Hudgens (“Do teachers care more about schoolwork than your kids do? Here’s how to fix the apathy problem,” May 26)…
In Reason, William Ruger and Jason Sorens seek to offer an alternative to the sort of thick libertarianism to which many of those associated with the Center for a Stateless Society are committed. They seek to defend what they call “virtue libertarianism.” Sometimes, they seem to be concerned with virtues in the narrow sense of…
