This episode is hosted by C4SS’s Elinor Ostrom Chair in the Study of Self Governance, Nathan Goodman. Nathan is joined by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall for a deep dive into the authors’ new book, How to Run Wars, A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite, available from June 18th on Amazon, or through the Independent Institute. E-book versions are available for Kindle, Apple iBooks, and Barnes and Noble Nook and links are available in the show notes below.

• Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1598133926/theindepeende-20
• Apple iBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/how-to-run-wars/id6502372918
• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-run-wars-christopher-j-coyne/1145071631?ean=9781598133943

Christopher Coyne is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, the Associate Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center, and the Director of the Initiative for the Study of a Stable Peace (ISSP) through the Hayek Program. He is the Co-Editor of The Review of Austrian Economics and of The Independent Review.

Abigail R. Hall is an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida. She is an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. She is a Non-Resident Fellow with Defense Priorities and a Public Choice and Public Policy Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. She earned her PhD in Economics from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Hall’s broader research interests include Austrian Economics, Political Economy and Public Choice, and Defense and Peace Economics. Her work includes topics surrounding militarism, the U.S. military, and national defense, including, domestic police militarization, domestic extremism, arm sales, weapons as foreign aid, the cost of military mobilization, and the political economy of military technology. Her coauthored books include How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (2024, Independent Institute), The Political Economy of Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the War on Terror (2023, Cambridge University Press), Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (2021, Stanford University Press), and Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (2018, Stanford University Press).

Virtual reading groups are a way to learn better together. Participants meet for 90 minutes a week to discuss freely supplied readings with a scholar’s help. Mutual respect, curiosity, and consistent participation are expected. Meetings are recorded so others can learn from our conversations. Applicants will be emailed further instructions on how to participate.

The ancient Greeks were the founders of Western philosophy, and many of their ideas are still part of philosophical debates today. In this reading group we will examine and discuss texts from the Greek philosophers (in English translation!) covering a range of issues – metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political – including arguments on such timeless topics as causation, agency, and free choice; the possibility of knowledge; the problem of universals; reductionism, dualism, and the nature of the self; the nature of space, time, matter, and infinity; the existence and nature of God; the roles of wisdom, pleasure, and social success in the good life; the relation between self-interest and moral virtue; the relation between morality and religion; the nature of political power; and the case for or against political obedience. The focus will be on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, although we will look briefly at a few other thinkers as well. The reading group is intended to be suitable both for beginners in Greek philosophy and for those more familiar with it.

MEETINGS: Saturdays, June 29 – August 17, 1:00pm – 2:30pm EDT

APPLY HERE

Today I talk with Roderick about his 2013 blog post “Eudaimonism and Non-Aggression,” one of many early 2010s blog posts across the libertarian ecosystem debating the pros and cons of the non-aggression principle, or NAP. As usual, Roderick thinks both sides make some good points, but ultimately lands on the side of the NAP. Though in order to avoid the common pitfalls of the NAP, such as downgrading it to a mere rule of thumb or applying it in a reductionist manner, Roderick counsels libertarians to turn to Ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in order to situate the NAP in the broader ethical outlook concerned with human flourishing known as eudaimonism. This was one of my first introductions to eudaimonism and still serves as a very useful entry point into these ancient ideas. I’ve sent this article to many libertarians looking for more robust and sophisticated ways of grounding libertarian ideas, and I hope you find my discussion with Roderick insightful.

Roderick T. Long (A.B. Harvard, 1985; Ph.D. Cornell, 1992) is professor of philosophy at Auburn University, president of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, editor of The Industrial Radical and Molinari Review, and co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. A founding member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, Long blogs at Austro-Athenian Empire and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Video version on Patreon. 

Video version on YouTube:

Audio version:

If there are two contemporary anarchist theorists whose work occupies and influences my thought the most, they are Kevin Carson and Wayne Price. Carson has spent a huge segment of his career not just reconstructing a mutualist political economy as an alternative to the anarchist default to the economics of Karl Marx but also making incredibly original contributions to the fields of decentralized technology/production and spontaneous organization theory. Wayne Price in turn has dedicated his mind to a task that at first seems wholly opposite to Carson’s: working to adapt Marxist economics and political strategy to an anarchist core through works like The Value of Radical Theory An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and Marx’s Economics for Anarchists. 

Yet despite their obvious differences, Price speaks highly of Carson, writing in his article “Conceptions of Dual Power and Prefigurative Politics” how through Carson’s work we “learn a great deal about how anarchism might function in a decentralized but modern technological society.” In the same piece, Price ultimately rejects the dualism between revolutionary class-struggle anarchism and cooperative dual power rooted in classical mutualist proposals like “a nonprofit ‘mutual’ bank to link up peasants, small businesses, artisan shops, and workers’ self-governing industrial associations.” Carson in turn, whose work on primitive accumulation and state capitalism has always been strongly influenced by Marxist historical analysis, has increasingly been inspired (just read his C4SS bio) by the work and praxis of autonomist Marxists—especially Sylvia Federici, John Holloway, and Massimo De Angelis—in advocating not just anti-statist, decentralized labor struggle but the undertaking, as he writes in his latest book Exodus, of “an ever larger share of production of life’s necessities in the social sphere, in self-provisioning in the informal economy, through commons-based peer production, or through cooperative labor by workers using affordable high-tech tools in their own homes and shops.”

My reason for outlining the thinking of and overlap between Carson and Price is that my own work is very much an attempt at synthesizing libertarian Marxism and left-market anarchism/neo-mutualism. Such is the effort elucidated in my new (or rather ‘updated’) series of articles out on Mutualism Co-op:

• “In Lieu of Free Banking”
• “Beyond Free Banking: On Marx’s Critique of the Proudhonists”
• “The Individual in Marxist (and Proudhonian) Social Analysis”
• “Historical Materialism: A Brief Overview and Left-Libertarian Reinterpretation” (Third Edition)
• Market Anarchist Plus: Our Plan of Work” (Second Edition)
• On Liberated Zones Theory; Or How BIPOC Groups are Already Doing the Work (Second Edition)

With this series I am attempting to even further bridge the gap that Carson and Price have worked toward closing and to further reunite market anarchism with its historical context as part of the socialist political movement and working class economic struggle. As an anarchist, I of course remain highly critical of state socialists, but I do see the sense, at least in particular contexts, in market socialist Richard Wolff’s call for a combined Proudhonian-Marxist approach involving both bottom-up and top-down changes. I look toward ways in which these leftist cross-ideological efforts can help create net reductions in state power and progress against economic exploitation.

This is just the beginning, as I am ultimately attempting to draw together a more cohesive “red mutualism” (a term coined by critics on the libertarian right). This may include thoughts on industrial democracy in a freed market setting, the theoretical place of base and superstructure, state-captured markets as the basis of the circulatory social relationship of Capital based on surplus value extraction, the freed market as a historical trend toward social self-governance akin to Bakunin’s and Marx’s understanding of communism, and beyond. I hope to see this culminate in a contribution on a mutualist synthesist of Marxist and agorist theories of class struggle for the Mutualist Reasoning Collective’s upcoming anthology on 21st century mutualism. For now though, I intend to take a break from both hosting The Enragés podcast and writing on politics. I want to focus on exploring—on the ground, through praxis—what Kali Akuno, as I quote in my piece “Market Anarchist Plus,” calls the “shared practices” which will allow revolutionary anti-capitalists to “coordinate our work to the greatest extent possible” (and to take a deeper dive into liberation theology).

MER is back for 2024! If you’re wondering what the show format will look like this year, please take a look at the 2023 (and early 2024) Director’s Report, which details how we’ll be handling various shows this year. We won’t be publishing every month, but I hope to put out more MER content than last year.

This episode brings Austrian economics into the gender identity discussion. We get into a lot of messy and fascinating questions about gender, identity, and social structures.

Read the paper here.

Mikayla Novak is senior fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is the author of Inequality: An Entangled Political Economy Perspective (2018) and Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy (2021). Her research work has been published in a range of academic journals, including Research Policy, Constitutional Political Economy, Review of Austrian Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics, and Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice. Mikayla’s research interests include Austrian and evolutionary economics, public choice, entangled political economy, economic sociology, public finance, and regulatory economics.

And listeners will recognize Akiva Malamet, a returning guest to the show. Akiva previously appeared on our June 2020 episode of Mutual Exchange Radio to discuss his work on Nationalism and Identity Formation. He is a contributing editor at Unpopulist and an MA candidate at Queens University, and a long-time friend of C4SS.

“Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now” was the lead essay of Cato Unbound’s 2008 discussion “When Corporations Hate Markets” and later included in C4SS’s “Markets Not Capitalism.” The essay is one-half political economy, sketching out the basic ideas behind freed-market anti-capitalism, and one-half political psychology, exploring the various pitfalls leading virtually everyone, from libertarians to conservatives to socialists, to conflate freed markets with capitalism and thereby bolster the mutually reinforcing power of both capitalism on the one hand and statism on the other. The piece is ambitious in scope yet accessible to readers unfamiliar with freed-market anti-capitalist arguments (so almost everyone). It’s still one of my go-to pieces to share with people interested in these ideas and I hope you enjoy my discussion with Roderick about it.

Roderick T. Long (A.B. Harvard, 1985; Ph.D. Cornell, 1992) is professor of philosophy at Auburn University, president of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, editor of The Industrial Radical and Molinari Review, and co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. A founding member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, Long blogs at Austro-Athenian Empire and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Video version on Patreon. 

Video version on YouTube:

Audio version:

C4SS scholar and coordinator, Cory Massimino, was featured this past November on The Curious Task podcast, hosted by Alex Aragona. In this episode, Cory discusses prison abolition, natural rights theory, and recent movements around prison reform and abolition. It’s a great episode and digs into some of Cory’s most groundbreaking work on the prison abolition movement and the philosophy behind it.

We’re excited to release this first episode of a new C4SS podcast with both audio and video versions, hosted by Cory Massimino!!

The Long Library 

Roderick Long is a C4SS Senior Fellow, philosopher, writer, anarchist theorist, and one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. The Long Library is a monthly series dedicated to interviewing him about his many writings which span more than four decades and explore topics ranging from political and moral philosophy to economic and social theory to metaphysics and epistemology to cultural and literary analysis and beyond. You can learn more about Roderick Long here and here.

Episode 1

In our first episode I talk to Roderick about his 2004 monograph “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections.”  This is one of the first things I had ever read by Roderick and greatly hastened my journey to anarchism. It remains one of the most concise, accessible, wide-ranging, and good faith introductions to libertarian anarchist arguments and I always include it among the zines when I table for C4SS at book fairs and conferences. It makes for a great entry point into not only libertarian anarchist thought but The Long Library itself. I hope you all enjoy our first stop on this exploration of the writings of Roderick Long.

Video version on Patreon. 

Video version on YouTube:

Audio version:

Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon (February 2-4) is the year’s premier gathering of libertarians – and C4SS is a mere $400 away from covering an exhibitor table. This is a wonderful opportunity to introduce left-market anarchist ideas to libertarians from around the globe.

Each year, we try to send a crew and it is always a rewarding experience. Reaching young folks who may not even have heard of market anarchism or mutualism and introducing them to the broader reality of political and philosophical thought is always exciting. 

With your help, we’ll be sending representatives to this year’s conference as well. If you’re in attendance, please come say hello in the tabling hall! And consider making a donation to help us cover the cost of tabling. Every penny helps and we truly appreciate any and all donations to this year’s tabling fund.

The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, 15-18 January 2024, at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, 811 7th Ave. & 53rd St., New York NY 10019 (room TBA). Most of the presenters are C4SS folks. (And the ones who aren’t, we still like!)

The symposium comprises two back-to-back sessions on Tuesday afternoon. (The first session in particular turns out to be unhappily timely.) Here’s the schedule info:

Session 1: Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression
G7C. Tuesday, 16 January, 2:00-3:50 p.m.

Chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Speakers:

• Irfan Khawaja (Independent Scholar), “Teaching Machiavelli in Palestine”
• Akiva Malamet (Queen’s University, Canada), “Free Migration as Self-Determination: Open Borders and Project Pursuit”

Commentator: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Session 2: Topics in Radical Liberalism
G8C. Tuesday, 16 January, 4:00-5:50 p.m.

Chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Speakers:

• Jason Lee Byas (University of Michigan), “The Problem of Pervasive Historic Injustice”
• Nathan P. Goodman (Mercatus Center, George Mason University), “A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation”
• Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society), “Ayn Rand’s Novel Contribution: Aristotelian Liberalism”

Commentator: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Cory Massimino chats with Jason Lee Byas about public choice theory, reparations (for slavery and other injustices), and war.

Jason Lee Byas is a fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan. His academic work focuses on punishment (and its alternatives), rights theory, and justice beyond the state.

Look out for more info on our 2024 podcast season soon! MER will be changing a bit and we’ve got an exciting new show in the works that I think will be especially appreciated by long-time friends and supporters of C4SS. On that note, if you’d like to support our podcasts and C4SS in general, a great way to do so is to pledge a donation on Patreon!

Roderick Tracy Long is in need of financial help. Our readers are likely to be familiar with his contributions to our site. And whether in appreciation of those writings and/or human empathy in general may want to help Roderick Long out. He is accepting gifts via GoFundMe and asks people to email or message him on Facebook about “loans” and “other options.”

To quote from his Facebook update:

Most of my debts and high-interest loans were paid off, and I was working away at reducing the remainder. The summer, as usual, was lean – reduced salary. Then I had a massive water leak that the water company admits wasn’t my fault (my neighbours, now evicted, were leaving the outdoor spigots on, theirs and mine both) but they’re still charging me for most of it. Last week I had to have emergency dental surgery (a jagged tooth was jabbing painfully into my tongue), not covered by my dental insurance. Had to go back for another high-interest loan for those. Then today I found out a creditor is in the process of sucking a couple of thousand dollars out of my account. Other bills are coming due and I don’t see how to pay them.

There is more information at the link below. Please help!

Assumably, many of you are following the news out of Palestine and Israel. I’ve honestly had trouble keeping up. Not because I’m busy, but because it’s difficult to think about what’s happening and because most commentary on the matter has been, frankly, dogshit.

If there was ever a time when anarchist voices were needed, now is one of those times. I’m writing today to ask for nuanced commentary that respects all humanity. 

Our commitment to human life, self-direction, and peace is unique, and this past week has made that painfully clear. I know we will not all agree on the particulars. The policy recommendations, the cause and effect analyses, the moral lessons. 

But I know we can do better. I know we can say something that is neither apologetics for an apartheid state nor an excuse for indiscriminate violence as a resistance tactic. 

I trust y’all and I hope we can offer some kind of corrective to the violent, tyrannical thinking behind most of the commentary that’s been published on this horror from all sectors basically everywhere. We stand against Hamas, against the state of Israel, and against bombings, borders, rapes, and war.

With love and solidarity,
Alex

For the 26th installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by Shane Ross (@taocuck) to discuss their article Emma Goldman and Individualist Anarchism (https://c4ss.org/content/56246), which is part of Center for a Stateless Society’s Mutual Exchange Symposium on egoism, as well as the website Mutualism Co-Op (https://www.mutualismcoop.com), of which Eric and Shane are both member-owners.

Shane is a daoist, anarchist and mutualist writer based in the twin cities. They focus on community education and mutual aid in their local area, and plan to continue studying philosophy through college.

Shane’s previous Enragés appearence – https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-enrages/episode/repel-the-collective-machine-with-shane-ross-89234965

Mutualism Co-Op Twitter – https://twitter.com/MutualismCoop

Support Mutualism Co-Op – https://www.patreon.com/mutualismcoop

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

For the 25th installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by Cory Massimino (@CoryMassimino) to discuss his 2015 article What is Anarchism? (https://c4ss.org/content/36946).

Cory Massimino is a Fellow and Mutual Exchange Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society. His research focuses on virtue ethics, market process economics, and anarchist political theory. His writings have appeared in outlets such as The Guardian, The Independent, and Playboy. Cory lives in Florida with his wife and their four cats.

Paper by Peter J. Boettke – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3516829

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

Alex McHugh interviews sci-fi author Dennis Danvers on anarchist ideas in fiction, his books The Watch and Leaving the Dead, and the life of a writer.

Mr. Danvers has written a variety of well-received sci-fi novels, including Circuit of Heaven, Time and Time Again, and End of Days, as well as the Locus and Bram Stoker nominee Wilderness. His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Space and Time, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, F & SF, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Lightspeed, Tor.com, See the Elephant, Apex Magazine; and in anthologies Tails of Wonder, Richmond Noir, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Remapping Richmond’s Hallowed Ground, and Nightmare Carnival. He taught fiction writing and science fiction and fantasy literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia for over thirty years.

Thanks for your continued patience with our wonky publishing schedule! This was a fun one to record as it’s a bit different from our usual fare. If you’d like to support our podcasts and C4SS in general, a great way to do so is to pledge a donation on Patreon!

C4SS Editing Coordinator Eric Fleischmann was recently featured on the Non-Serviam podcast. The discussion covers a broad range of topics from to Marxism and historical materialism to Laurance Labadie and the history of free-market-anti-capitalism to agorism and its left-wing fundamentals.

From the Non-Serviam Episode Description:

Eric Fleischmann (he/they) is an anarchist indebted to communistic and continental thought but engaged primarily in the traditions of mutualism, North American individualist anarchism, and modern left-libertarianism while applying a background in anthropology and philosophy to helping build the solidarity economy in unceded Wabanaki territory on Turtle Island. He has been involved in various capacities with numerous leftist, left-leaning, and labor-oriented organizations—generally ones which promote forms of politico-economic decentralization and democratization and/or degrees of left unity.

For the 24th installment of The Enragés, host Eric Fleischmann was joined by H.B. Dillon Williams IV (@MorpheusRage) to discuss their article Molotov Pill Bottle: Radical Answers to Failed Capitalist Healthcare (https://c4ss.org/content/56444).

H.B. Dillon Williams IV (they/he) is a mexican-indigenous irish genderqueer anti-fascist anarchist rapper, father of three, activist, Magic player, and avid fan of dofflin music. Dillon entered the activist world with Abolish ICE Denver in 2018. In 2019 they worked with the Caravan Support Network that came out of the national organizing Abolish ICE groups, traveling to Tijuana, Mexico to help, gaining organizing experience as well as first-hand knowledge of the border crisis which has recently reached another high point under the Biden administration. They continued migration activism in Phoenix after that and began working for Medicare which ultimately prompted this article. Through this time he has developed his philosophy incorporating insights from organizing. Still a student of Modern Monetary Theory and agorism with a lot of different sympathies. Find their IG @ Rage.Incarnate

Just The Pill – https://www.justthepill.com

Hey Jane – https://www.heyjane.com

Aid Access – https://aidaccess.org

Support C4SS – https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

Throughout my archiving of Laurance Labadie’s works, I have noticed he has unique spellings of a number of words. In particular, he spells “Kropotkin” (Кропо́ткин) with an “e” at the end: “Kropotkine.” For example, he writes in “Objections to Communism:”

Most communist-anarchists are followers of Kropotkine, who showed that mutual aid was a factor in evolution and who tried, like Marx, to conceive a society in which mutual aid was the sole factor in its maintenance, but whereas Marx saw that authority was necessary Kropotkine thought that men could iron out their differences by voluntarily agreeing to maintain a standard of “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”

For some time I was unsure where he got this spelling from; but after digging further and looking back at some other writings, I believe he picked it up from his own father Joseph Labadie, whose description of Kropotkin goes like this: “Kropotkine was a small man, with a large head, bushy hair and whiskers, talked English very well, and his movements were quick, as tho surprised.” 

This is also the spelling that Benjamin Tucker, a close associate of the elder Labadie, utilizes, writing:

Suppose I had said to Kropotkine that the real question is whether Communism will permit individuals to exchange their labor or products on their own terms. Would Herr Most have been so shocked? Would he have printed that in black type?

The spelling appears to be a French variation of the name, usually combined with the first name “Pierre” to make “Pierre Kropotkine.” This linguistic connection makes sense not only because the Labadie family’s ethnic background can be traced back to France, but because of Tucker’s interest in French literature, he being a fan of Scènes de la Vie Future by Georges Duhamel and a translator of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la Propriété? Ou Recherche sur le Principe du Droit et du Gouvernment. There’s nothing really groundbreaking about pointing out the origin of the “Kropotkine” spelling, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Tune in this Friday at 7:00 PM as the crew plays Ratchelor and Brianna Coyle joins us to discuss How Furry Fandom is Used as a Proxy War on Queer Folks.

We’ll be raising funds for the ACLU and celebrating pride month while discussing how things took such a sharp turn towards bigotry in recent years, the deterioration of the Libertarian Party, and Brianna’s work with the Democratic Freedom Caucus.

• Watch on Twitch: @Antifa_Gaming
• Watch on Facebook: ANGL Facebook Page

Or, click below to watch on YouTube: