http://youtu.be/eZ0CsXmcjzE

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, discusses the prospects of achieving social justice through liberty with Jason Lee Byas and Grayson English of Liberty Minded.

As if the C4SS vs IP story wasn’t weird enough, it has taken a bizarre and unexpected turn in the past twenty four hours. The story so far:

On September 13th, 2013, C4SS’s student activist network, Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), published a letter dissociating from the S4SS UGent chapter for violating and activating the third S4SS design principle by using racist language, affirming racist conspiracy theories and even advocating violence as a justified or viable response to said theories in a S4SS identified and organizing forum. The third S4SS design principle states:

3. S4SS spaces are safe and valued spaces. We are dedicated to not only identifying agents of aggression, but dissolving institutions of oppression. [emphasis added]

Around 10 days later, the C4SS and S4SS websites were taken down by “not your typical DMCA letter.” In response, we chose to defend our site — not by a legal fight, but by doubling down on our free speech. Rather than being isolated or intimidated into silence by the legal censorship, we spoke out on social media and our websites. We spoke out about the legal threat against us and we re-published copies of the censored exposé on our other websites (here, here, here, here, here and here). We reached out to anarchist, anti-fascist, and information-freedom activists on the web and called on them to swarm against this censorious abuse of copy-power. And, to our immense gratitude, we got a lot of help from the web, including, but not limited to: Jad Davis at the jVerse, and wonderful stories in online media by Jesse Walker at Reason and Mike Masnick at techdirt. The social response to legal intimidation made it clear that bigotry could not count on copy-fascism to protect and hide it. We owe all of you a great debt of gratitude for what came next.

On September 26th, C4SS, regained access and redirected its domain back to its main site. That afternoon we received an anonymous 100 Bitcoin donation to our “Support the Center in this Fight” wallet: 129pipr12a5UUZ447bLYjx1paRnCXqG5vi. (Needless to say, “Some of us laughed, some cried, some screamed, but we were all in shock, until…”)

Later that evening we received an email from Olivier Janssens, the individual that had retained the lawyer, J.D. Obenberger, to draft and submit the DMCA takedown of the S4SS dissociation letter. In this email he identifies himself as the anonymous Bitcoin donor:

First of all, thanks for accepting my defeat. Lesson learned, for sure.

Even if it doesn’t matter to you, I’ve also learned a whole deal about getting ‘aroused’ by a group of guys and joining in bashing Islam. I have a whole other story to tell about that, but I guess thats for another time.

This escalated so far out of control, not just Streisand-wise, but for everything I stand for (intellectual property being evil is one of them). The choice was to pursue this further in court and fight for pro-censorship copyright, which I couldn’t even begin to imagine doing cause it would kill my principles. I am glad you guys were reasonable enough to accept my apologies. I can’t say this enough. I am grateful for the mature response on your blog.

In regards to the lawyer, I’ve been trying to get him to issue a takedown request all day. It seems this might be a first so I think he’s thinking on how to do it. He says that if I don’t counterfile, the site should go up again within 10 days ‘automatically’. I am still trying to push for him to send a letter asking for an earlier restoration, and will try to get you guys in CC or notify you as soon as it goes out.

As another token of good faith, and to make up for what happened, and to protect you from this in the future, I am going to send you 100 BTC.

That’s the story so far, but before you go C4SS would like to respond to a number points in this email and offer our reactions to it — so that our Supporters understand where we stand and everything else is crystal clear.

1. We did not accept anyone’s defeat. So long as IP and bigotry still exist as the damage holding back the vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority that we desire, this fight is still very much on.

Does this mean we are pursuing state sanctioned legal action against Janssens, his Copyfascist lawyer or the cowardly Bluehost that thought it safer to pull a longtime customer’s site rather than look twice at a DMCA takedown notice that Mike Masnick said, “On my first read, I wondered if it was fake, because not only is it completely over the top, in it, Obenberger more or less admits that the takedown has little to do with copyright…,” no it does not. We are anarchists. We have other means of solving, resolving and dissolving situations.

Does acting like anarchists and not pursuing state sanctioned legal action count as “accepting defeat?” Again, no it does not.

2. Do we believe that he has “learned a whole deal” about this “group of guys and joining in bashing Islam”? We have no idea, but we like to think the best of people.

Philip K. Dick once apologized for “preaching” that “The devil has a metal face,” when what he finally realized was that “[it] was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. … You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh…”

We do not know if behind Janssens’s “fierce, cold metal” mask of IP and bigotry is another “fierce, cold metal” mask covering some other drive for control or intolerance. We do know that under all masks there is, finally, a human face.

We also know that S4SS UGent is still active, they have not reached out to the rest of the network, nor have they taken steps toward following the S4SS design principles. They have not changed their name signaling their change in status or orientation. They have switched their Facebook group, now, to “private,” they have set up a “like” page, and they are planning events and scheduling speakers, still, titled as a S4SS chapter.

In order to protect the S4SS network and prospective members the dissociation letter, “S4SS’ UGent Not Anarchists (or Comrades),” will remain up as a warning until they decide to render it irrelevant through their actions.

3. Are we reasonable enough to accept his apology? We can only accept an apology for actions done to us – the use of the state to take down our site for almost three full days. We cannot and will not accept an apology from him on behalf of any other group or individual harmed by him, specifically the Muslim community. We have neither the right nor inclination. That is for him to do and for that community to consider. This is his moment of reflection and reconciliation.

We would even be happy to encourage and facilitate a conversation with members of the Muslim community for him, if he so desires. It would be a good learning experience for all of us.

4. Good faith, making up and further protection. We are in the process of making sure our writers get paid for their work and moving our site to a secure and civil liberty conscious host. After all of that is taken care of we will be actively donating, supporting and promoting, anarchist, anti-racist and solidarity economy projects around the world. So it is true that with this donation we will be “making up” for the damage done and protecting ourselves better for the next fight, but good faith is something that is earned everyday with everyone individually.

We wish him all the best and we will try to help him along his way the best we can. But never mistake our best wishes and noblest intentions for passivity or leniency. We want that world of vibrant social cooperation and we are – teeth bared – ready to fight for it.

“Evil is real like cement. … I thought I hated those guys [Nazis] before I did the research [for The Man in the High Castle]. After I did the research, then I had created for myself an enemy that I would hate the rest of my life. Fascism – wherever it appears, whether it is Germany, United States, Soviet Union or anywhere – fascism, wherever it appears, is the enemy.” —Philip K. Dick

NSA analyst Edward Snowden shook the intelligence community as well as the public when he released a trove of secret NSA files to the world. In the aftermath of his action, the United States government reared its aggressive head as it worked very hard to capture and imprison him. In the process a global drama ensued as well as an invigorated public discourse on the nature of privacy and what the government is doing to peer into our private lives.

As the investigation into how Snowden’s acts of rebellion were carried out, the NSA has reportedly uncovered that he accessed the documents via an internal website of the agency itself. The documents were posted to the internal website, and Snowden was able to access them easily with his security clearance. Under the radar of his supervisor he easily made digital copies of what he found.

Since the NSA data was leaked by Snowden the agency has apparently taken steps to limit employee options for storing data in an effort to avoid future leaks. The question, of course, is whether or not such efforts will truly have an effect. If they do stop leakers, will they serve to inhibit the overall communication process between what is already a mess of bureaucratic agencies? In other words, are their systems permanently disrupted no matter what they do?

Perhaps it goes even deeper, into something that has become pervasive. Kevin Carson’s Two, Three, Many Snowdens! has us look at an ever growing class of workers that are rebellious, anti-authoritarian hackers, and who happen to be getting jobs in government security.

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, participates in a discussion of the terminology of “capitalism,” the desirability and practicability of a free society and the centrality of peace with the crew of The Annoying Peasants Radio Show.

The purpose of ReadLiberty.org is to transcribe, preserve and spread all 403 issues of Liberty, Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order, an individualist anarchist periodical originally edited and published by Benjamin Tucker from 1881 to 1908.

As part of our activities we have decided to publish the whole Volume I of Liberty in the form of an eBook in ePub, Mobi and PDF formats. In the phase one an eBook containing issues 1-13 of the original Volume I will be made available. Once they are all transcribed, the eBook will be updated to contain all 26 issues of the original Volume I. And you can be a part of the book!

C4SS is very excited by this project. Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty, is not only a major influence on market anarchist thought, but it is greatly responsible for setting the style of market anarchist discourse. As Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson detail in their introduction to Markets Not Capitalism:

The history of the individualist and mutualist tradition is largely a history of ephemeral publications, short-lived presses, self-published pamphlets, and small radical papers. The most famous is certainly Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (1881-1908) … The independent, dialogue-based small press has provided a natural habitat for market anarchist writing to flourish – whereas liberal and Marxist writing found their most distinctive habitats in declarations, manifestos, and intricate, comprehensive treatises. …

Market anarchism aims to draw out social truths not by dogmatizing or laying down the law, but rather by allowing as far as possible for the free interplay of ideas and social forces, by looking for the unintended consequences of accepted ideas, by engagement in an open-ended process of experimentation and discovery that permits the constant testing of both ideas and institutions against competitors and bottom-line reality.

In other words, Tucker’s Liberty is not only an invaluable anarchist resource, but a glimpse into what a possible market anarchist culture would look like in all of its iterative glory, weirdness and experimentation.

Another reason we are excited by this project is that ReadLiberty is devoted to making Tucker’s Liberty available to anyone. As they clarify on their page’s Q&A:

Q: What license will be the book subject to?
A: As we don’t believe in the concept of IP it’ll be a subject to the CC0 “license”. Although you don’t have to we’ll be thankful if you choose to mark us as the authors of the transcription and let others to use the work in the same way. Happy reading, sharing, editing and selling!

Every little bit helps. Please donate $5 today and help bring Tucker’s Liberty to more and more people. (Link to their indiegogo page)

On September 4th, my op-ed Chelsea Manning and the State’s Abusive Transphobia was published as a letter to the editor in Urban Tulsa Weekly. The paper treated it as a “really convoluted counterpoint” to an asinine letter by Oklahoma State Senator Frank Simpson, who argued that Chelsea Manning was not a hero. State Senator Simpson consistently misgendered Chelsea Manning in his letter and echoed baseless state propaganda about the alleged “harm” caused by her disclosures of government criminality. My op-ed, published as a “counterpoint” to State Senator Simpson’s letter, primarily addressed different issues than his letter. As such, I posted a direct response to State Senator Simpson, and I am happy to say it was published as a letter on September 11th in Urban Tulsa Weekly.

To be clear, my letter was dealing largely with separate issues from State Senator Simpson’s. As such, I feel I should respond directly to his specific claims and questions.

Simpson asks: “did Bradley Manning demonstrate any attribute we would normally associate with heroism?”

Chelsea Manning demonstrated multiple attributes we would normally associate with heroism. First, she demonstrated courage and willingness to face great personal risk. In blowing the whistle on the U.S. government’s crimes, she risked death (as seen in the government charging her with a capital offense), decades of imprisonment, torture (which she did receive), and abuse from a prison system famously hostile to transgender individuals like her.

Second, she demonstrated moral principle. She expressed a commitment to truth and desire for reform as her motivations for leaking these documents. As she wrote in her chats with Adrian Lamo:

“If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”

“God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Her courageous and principled whistleblowing, for which she has been tortured and caged, did lead to substantial discussions, debates, and reforms. Her leaks provided evidence of corruption in the Tunisian government that helped spark the Arab Spring. Manning’s disclosures also shed light on what McClatchy Newspapers called “evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.” The outrage caused by exposure of this brutal war crime helped end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/

Simpson claims “Manning didn’t save anyone’s life.” This is simply false. By playing a pivotal role in ending the US military’s occupation of Iraq, Chelsea Manning prevented the deaths of both Iraqis and American troops that would inevitably have come from continued occupation.

Simpson also asserts that Manning’s disclosures “jeopardize the lives of thousands of our military personnel.” But prosecutors were unable to demonstrate that even a single person was harmed as a result of Manning’s disclosures. What does State Senator Simpson know that they do not? http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/08/01/the-government-cant-prove-bradley-manning-hurt-anyone-but-joe-klein-knows/

It appears that State Senator Simpson is unable to recognize courage, principle, and personal risk when they are staring him in the face. It also appears that he is interested in commenting on Manning’s actions without devoting any serious study to the matter. Perhaps voters should keep this in mind when considering whether he is informed enough to hold political power over them.

Sincerely,
Nathan Goodman

Bigotry and racism are oppressive ideas that run afoul of individualist ideals. Anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry are two forms of bigotry that have for at least the past decade been used to justify a litany of criminal acts of tyranny and state violence. The New York Police Department has “designated entire mosques ‘terrorism enterprises’ in order to justify the use of invasive methods to spy on congregants and imams.”

The United States government held Muslim blogger Tarek Mehanna in solitary confinement for years before convicting him and sentencing him to years in prison, merely for expressing opinions online. The U.S. government and their allies regularly use bombs to murder innocents in primarily Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The Holy Land Five are incarcerated by the U.S. government merely for making charitable donations and offering humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians. The French government bans veils worn by Muslim women. Belgium enforces a similar discriminatory ban.

Anarchists, libertarians, and radicals should stand against these oppressive state policies and the bigotry that fuels them. But under the name “Students for a Stateless Society UGent,” some racists have chosen to enlist anarchism’s name to the cause of racism and violent oppression. Last week the Students for a Stateless Society network made it clear that we will not stand for this kind of bigotry. S4SS UGent are not our comrades, nor are they anarchists. Here is our statement of disassociation from these bigots.

More development may be on the way for many of England’s national parks, with Tory Planning Minister Nick Boles claiming that villages are in danger of becoming extinct due to encroaching wilderness; he has said  national parks should be more than just wilderness. The idea is that development would be permissible on green spaces that nobody would miss, and that these areas should be used for more than just wilderness. This move towards wilderness development signals an ongoing theme of developing protected areas in national parks around England.

Of course, this action has been met with ire from environmentalists who believe that there is not more happiness to be derived from housing than there is from protected wilderness. There is also concern that developing protected areas would justify more development under the guise of sustainable construction. England has over 5,000 square miles of national parks whose protection is funded, of course, by taxpayers, but managed by State functionaries who can dish the land out to the biggest, fattest, most well connected of the political class. If this is truly for the people, then it would seem that the people should decide, not the political class.

Many libertarians might argue that Boles is exactly right, though, and that homes for people are more important than green space in national parks. Another consideration, however, is the issue of property as manifested in the context of State control. In other words, much of the problem above has nothing to do with housing, per se, but rather with monopoly land ownership and the predictable distortions that ripple out from such “ownership.”

Libertarians can sometimes be a bit soft on ecological concerns, but this does not have to be the case. Grant Mincy’s Libertarianism: An Ecological Consideration lays out ways in which libertarians can, and should, engage with sound ecology.

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, gave the talk “Achieving Social Justice Through Liberty” at the University of Oklahoma.

http://youtu.be/yYGYH3eC5yI

Q&A:

http://youtu.be/81uWXAiTC0k

The civil war in Syria and the implications for the United States government’s involvement is hot on the lips of most political analysts these days. The recent chemical attacks on civilians in Syria have ignited military interventionist rhetoric on the part of the Obama administration, but with an overwhelming number of people polled opposing such action, President Obama has decided to let congress vote on allowing limited, targeted military strikes against the Assad regime. These things, though, have a way of sending out ripple effects that often carry unforeseen consequences that last for generations.

For example, George Bush Sr.’s decision to invade Kuwait spawned what would eventually become an extended and global battle with al-Qaida, and from a foreign policy point of view, a limited attack against Syria would largely be symbolic of endorsing Obama’s “red line.” This can cause one or both of the following: Entrenchment in yet another foreign conflict or the ongoing assertion of United States supremacy.

A left-libertarian approach to the above comes in the form of Grant Mincy’s piece “TOL Response: 5 Foreign Policy Problems Libertarians Need to Address.” Since so much of what mainstream media pundits talk about, when it comes to foreign policy, is about what the best reaction to aggression or war ought to be, it is arguably more critical to get to the root of the issue. We need to start thinking less about reaction, and more about long term solutions to making civil war and Empire obsolete.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Miriam Daniell’s “Songs of Struggle and Sorrow” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Miriam Daniell’s “Songs of Struggle and Sorrow“.

$1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

“A voice rebellious, which should never cease…”

This chapbook is a new selection of poetry by Miriam Daniell, edited by the ALL Distro. The 34 poems in this collection were gathered from two main sources: her prolific contrib­utions to Benjamin Tucker’s individualist paper Liberty during 1892; and a series of several more poems prepared for posthumous publication by her friends, which appeared in the Chicago anarchist paper Free Society during 1902.

The Anarchist press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries published much more than ideological tracts, polemics and political analysis. In their newspapers, pamphlets, union halls, radical community schools and gatherings, Anarch­ists and labor radicals alike worked to build a broad, vibrant and lovingly crafted culture of creative solidarity and resistance. Theoreticians, workers, story­tellers and dreamers made car­toons, posters, poems, stories and labor songs. One of the most restless and, for a few years, one of the most prolific of these authors was Miriam Daniell (1860–1894), a strike leader in England and a prolific poet, writer and critic in the u.s. radical press.

Daniell was an English­-American labor activist, writer, and individualist anarchist. Born in England, she helped to organize a wave of textile workers’ and dock-­workers’ strikes in Bristol in 1889–90, one of the most significant labor uprisings in Bristol’s history. In 1890, she left a stifling marriage, and England, together with her close friend and fellow organizer Helena Born (the subject of the intimate “To H. B.,” included here). When she arrived in Boston, she became involved with both the free love movement and American individualist anarchism. For a few years she became a prolific contributor to the radical press, with work from her hand appearing in almost every issue of Tucker’s Liberty for several months running, until her hand was stilled by a tragic death at the age of 34. She left us these poems. The 34 collected here offer a sample not only of her feminist and radical labor poetry, but also her personal and confessional moments, her humor, her vivid sense of the eerie and grotesque, and her meditations on sorrow, struggle and loss.

The Center for a Stateless Society has named Nathan Goodman its first Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies.

Goodman, a C4SS Senior Fellow, is a writer and activist living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been involved in LGBT, feminist, anti-war, and prisoner solidarity organizing. Goodman has only been with C4SS for little over a year and in that time has become one of our most versatile and challenging writers. Goodman has published 18 commentary op-eds with C4SS, many of which have been republished with mainstream periodicals and sites like Counterpunch, South Carolina Chronicle and Legal Pro News. Goodman has also written two features, one review and participated in multiple media appearances. He is currently working on a number of scholarly studies for C4SS and has been translated into three languages.

This position honors the versatile, relentless and rebellious abolitionist Lysander Spooner whose life and work exemplifies total commitment to not just slavery’s containment and retreat from social life, but its pursuit and annihilation. A commitment that we feel is shared by Goodman through his tireless work for prison abolition and LGBT liberation.

We look forward to seeing where Goodman’s research and writing take Abolitionist Studies.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Nathan Goodman‘s “The Knowledge Problem of Privilege” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Nathan Goodman‘s “The Knowledge Problem of Privilege“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

In this essay, Nathan Goodman (Center for a Stateless Society) discusses how the Knowledge Problems facing elites, “experts” or “representat­ives” recur not only in economics, but also in cultural conflicts over gender, disability, and other systems of structural social privilege. The danger of trying to make decisions for others, when cut off from the dispersed, tacit or local knowledge that they have, show how Hayekian limits on what we can know also apply to the the struggles and the challenges of other oppressed and marginalized people.

“IN HIS CLASSIC ESSAY, “THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIETY,” F. A. Hayek explains the concept of distributed knowledge. Every individual has unique knowledge shaped by their experiences and preferences, knowledge that may not be accessible to others, no matter how well educated they may be. But Hayek’s point about distributed knowledge applies to more than just economic issues. It also applies to social issues. . . .

“JUST AS WITH ECONOMICS, THESE SOCIAL PROBLEMS of epistemological hubris become bigger when government gets involved. By definition, politicians do not have the knowledge of everyone their policies will impact. But often, when marginalized groups are impacted, politicians become extra prone to ignore those from an affected population. . . .

“ULTIMATELY CALLS FOR PEOPLE TO CHECK THEIR PRIVILEGE are not an attempt to silence. Rather, they are an attempt to get people to recognize the limits of their knowledge. Libertarians should have the humility to check our privilege, to listen to oppressed people who discuss their experiences, and to respect oppressed peoples’ rights to direct their own struggles for liberation. . . .”

Nathan Goodman is a writer and activist living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been involved in LGBT, feminist, anti-war, and prisoner solidarity organizing. He writes frequent commentaries for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and keeps a blog, Dissenting Leftist (dissentingleftist.blogspot.com).

“The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Carta de Chelsea Manning Ao Presidente Obama Solicitando Perdão.

Help our outfits−the Molinari Institute & the Alliance of the Libertarian Left Distro−get to upcoming Fall events, and carry on & expand our work of left-libertarian scholarship, publishing and outreach, beginning with a major presence at this month’s Libertopia 2013 Festival in San Diego, California (Aug. 30-Sep 2). Help us reach Libertopia!

The Molinari Institute is a small left-libertarian market anarchist think tank centered in Auburn, Alabama (though the people in it are more widely dispersed); more info at http://praxeology.net/molinari.htm

ALL Distro is an ongoing radical publishing project run by Molinari Institute member Charles W. Johnson. The Distro provides quality editions of anarchist classics and provocative perspectives on today’s radicalism, through ongoing series of handmade chapbooks, attractive and affordable printed booklets, and publishing and distributing books and magazines on left-libertarianism, individualist anarchism, free-market anticapitalism, and the anarchist movement and literary tradition. The Distro tables at political convergences, bookfairs, community markets and anarchist events. We also help local activists and ALL groups get packets of affordable and attractive materials for tabling, literature drops, and outreach. http://distro.libertarianleft.org/

We have a lot of traveling and a number of exciting events coming up this fall, including a literature table and sending several speakers (including Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, and Gary Chartier) to spread ideas, start conversations, and provide a left-libertarian, free-market anti-capitalist presence theLibertopia 2013 Festival, Aug. 30-Sep. 2, an annual libertarian festival in San Diego that attracts libertarian activists from around the country and the world.http://libertopia.org/2013

Later this Fall, we’ll also be distributing our literature and talking about individualist anarchism at the New Orleans Anarchist Bookfair and SFL Regional Conferences, a Fall semester speaking engagement at University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK, and a research and literature-gathering journey to the Labadie Collection in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For now, we are trying to cover the costs for Libertopia, and to replenish our travel budget, so that we can keep up with scholarship, speaking and traveling for an exciting Fall season. Here are the costs we’re trying to cover:

* To pay transportation and lodging costs to get the Charles Johnson and the ALL Distro from Auburn, Alabama to the festival in San Diego, California (approx. costs $800)

* To rent an exhibition booth at the conference for our literature and for person-to-person outreach (cost: $400).

* To cover transportation & lodging for Molinari Institute speakers who will be presenting workshops or panels at Libertopia (approx. costs $1,000).

* To replenish the Institute’s travel budget and provide seed money for travel costs on upcoming bookfairs, speaking appearances, research, etc. (approx costs $600).

More About the Molinari Institute & ALL Distro. We work to present a humane, consensual alternative to the politics of power and domination. In particular, we feel that a) libertarians need to take more seriously the ends valued by the radical left, including worker empowerment, sustainable growth, anti-corporatism, and an end to subordination, exclusion, and deprivation; and b) leftists need to take more seriously the means valued by libertarians, including private property, genuinely freed markets, voluntary cooperation, and anti-statist politics. We publish books (download free copies of several of them at http://praxeology.net/molinari-pubs.htm) and a magazine (download a free copy at http://praxeology.net/industrial-radical.htm), as well as op-eds through our media center (Center for a Stateless Society, at http://c4ss.org).

C4SS Fellow, Nathan Goodman, discusses left libertarianism, prison abolition and the prospects of life in a stateless society with The Annoying Peasant Radio Show.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of ALL Distro’s Bookshelf of the Libertarian Left that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with ALL Distro’s Bookshelf of the Libertarian Left.

$92.00 for the first copy. $72.00 for every additional copy.

We offer trade-paperback editions of left-libertarian books including works by Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, and Charles Johnson. You can:

• Purchase copies of individual titles with the listings below; or
• Pick up a whole little left-libertarian library: 5 books for $92^.00

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Jeremy Weiland‘s “Let the Free Market Eat the Rich” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Jeremy Weiland‘s “Let the Free Market Eat the Rich“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

“Along running debate among anarchists, especially between the individualist and collectivist schools, centers around the justice of wealth disparities. Certainly the existence of the State serves to enrich particular interests at the expense of others, but in anarchy would the rich dominate society–just as they do with the State? Even if we could immediately switch off the institutions that forcibly manipulate society, there is danger that the legacy of privilege and accumulated wealth could persist for some time, distorting markets and continuing to frustrate the balance of power between individuals . . . .

“The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how large scale aggregations of wealth require an outside stabilizing force and defensive agency to maintain, and how in a free, dynamic market there are entropies that move imbalances back to equilibrium. . . .”

“Let the Free Market Eat the Rich!” was written in May 2007 at the 6th Density blog. This revised version (2011) appeared as # 33 in Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier’s Markets Not Capitalism: individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power and structural poverty (pp. 301–308), and online at socialmemorycomplex.net

Jeremy Weiland is a software developer, writer and left-libertarian activist. He maintains the website Social Mem­ory Complex: a political economy of the soul, and lives with his wife in Richmond, Virginia.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“.

$20.00 for the first copy. $15.00 for every additional copy.

This book explores the impact of dramatic technological and social changes on work and manufacturing. Kevin Carson uses real-world examples and theoretical insights to illuminate the conflict between two economies: one a highly-capitalized, high-overhead, and bureaucratically ossified conventional economy, the subsidized and protected product of sustained collusion between big government and big business; the other a low capital, low-overhead, agile and resilient alternative economy, outperforming the state capitalist economy despite being hobbled and driven underground. The Homebrew Industrial Revolution explains clearly and powerfully why the alternative economy is winning–and why we should welcome its victory.

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-cap­it­al­ism, the in­div­idualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He is the author of ”The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand”, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com and frequently publishes short columns and longer research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

CONTENTS

• Preface
• 1. A Wrong Turn
• 2. Moloch: The Sloanist Mass Production Model
• 3. Babylon is Fallen
• 4. Back to the Future
• 5. The Small Workshop, Desktop Manufacturing, and Household Production
• 6. Resilient Communities and Local Economies
• 7. The Alternative Economy as a Singularity

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Clarence Lee Swartz‘s “The Practicability of Mutualism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Clarence Lee Swartz‘s “The Practicability of Mutualism“.

$1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

“The Practicability of Mutualism,” a classic statement of Mutualist theory and practice by Clarence Lee Swartz, first appeared as a two-part serialized essay in one of Edward H. Fulton’s many anarchist newspapers, The Mutualist, published from Clinton, Iowa, in December 1926 and January 1927. This is, to our best knowledge, the first time that the entire essay has ever appeared in print since its original publication.

“MUTUALISM IS A SOCIAL SYSTEM BASED ON RECIPROCAL and non-invasive relations among free individuals. The Mutualist standards are:

• INDIVIDUAL: Equal freedom for each — without invasion of others.
• ECONOMIC: Untrammeled reciprocity, implying freedom of exchange and contract — without monopoly or privilege.
• SOCIAL: Complete freedom of voluntary association — without coercive organization. . . .

“THE LIBERTARIAN IDEAL IS THE ONLY CONCEPT THAT PAVES the way for the operation of Mutualism. Perfect Mutualism could not exist under any form of authority. It would be thwarted and emasculated at every turn. Just as today every social and economic evil that serves to enslave humanity is the result of some form of governmental interference with freedom and with natural processes, so would the same or similar forces tend to nullify and counteract, to all extent, the advantages to be derived from the application of the principles of Mutualism. It is a plant that requires the fertile soil of liberty in which to make its unimpeded growth. . . .”

Clarence L. Swartz (1868–1936) was a California mutualist activist, writer and publisher. He was a close friend of the individualist Benjamin Tucker, and contributed frequently Tucker’s paper Liberty, as well as publishing his own anarchist journal, I (1899–1900). After Tucker was forced to retire from publishing by a disastrous fire in his New York book shop, Swartz became a leading figure in preserving, reviving, and carrying forward the tradition of individualist Anarchism and mutualism in America. During the 1920s, he edited an anti-prohibition magazine, The Libertarian, contributed frequently to Edward H. Fulton’s The Mutualist, prepared and published a collection of Tucker’s short articles, entitled Individual Liberty, and published his best-known work, What Is Mutualism? (1927), a new synthesis of individualist and mutualist thought on anarchist economics and strategy.