Following in the footsteps of my recent article “Come Take it, I Deere You” I’ve found through Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow that General Motors (GM) has also declared that you don’t really own what you buy. To be more specific, the software that makes up that vehicle is merely “licensed” to the owner of the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Grant A. Mincy‘s “Sao Paulo: Worthy of Wilderness” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford. “Sao Paulo is heavily industrialized and mechanized, however, and the financial sector demands sprawl. The city is heavily managed by zoning restrictions, creating spaces of capital, places of poverty and state enclosure. Social classes are…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Anarchism of Despair” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. “There is a deep despondency hidden even within the most sanguine of anarchisms, for imagining and expecting a freer, fairer world tends unavoidably to throw into sharp relief the long and arduous journey ahead. The anarcho-pessimism typified…

One of my favorite anarchists and writers of all time was recently featured by actress Mary Tuomanen. Tuomanen read an excerpt from perhaps my favorite essay by de Cleyre called The Dominant Idea and it was presented during the 2015 Voices of a People’s History at Plays and Players in Philadelphia. Just for some background, the main…

With criminal justice reform front and center in today’s news, it’s as good a time as ever to revisit some of the various anarchist approaches to issues of crime and punishment. One particular analysis written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Anarchism and Crime, remains as relevant today as when it was written —…

Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, Second Edition by scott crow (PM Press 2014), 288 pages. Four years ago, anarchist activist and co-founder of the radical humanitarian aid organization Common Ground Relief (formerly the Common Ground Collective) scott crow released his memoir about the nearly three months where he and…

On April 29th, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could “prohibit judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting funds for their campaigns”, in the case of, in the case of Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar. Much has been made of Chief Justice John Roberts remarks: Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences…

La Questione del Fallimento del Mercato Un bene pubblico, così come definito dagli economisti, è un qualunque bene dal cui godimento non possono essere esclusi i non contribuenti. La teoria dei beni pubblici interessa i libertari per due ragioni: primo, perché molte cose che reputiamo importanti (strade di comunicazione, istruzione, difesa personale, antincendio, difesa nazionale,…

Just a quick blog post on May Day. Today is not about state communism, big government or a nationalist takeover of the “democratic” system. Today is a day to celebrate worker solidarity movements that have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor. Today is every bit as much about labor as “Labor Day.” The…

How can you tell an American progressive from an American radical? A progressive laments the condition of working people and proposes to further empower the government. A radical laments the condition of working people and proposes to empower individuals by diminishing the power of government. Of course government power and individual power differ in kind:…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Anarchism Without Adjectives” read by Ian Anderson and edited by Nick Ford. “So what can we say about the general outlines of a stateless society? First, it will emerge as a result of the ongoing exhaustion, hollowing out and retreat of large hierarchical institutions like state, corporation, large bureaucratic university, etc. It…

The Civil War caused a huge schism in the American libertarian movement from which it wouldn’t recover for decades. Inner conflicts between abolitionists who favored the war and the invasion of the South, ones who saw the war as inevitable and required to end slavery, and those who thought the war was an egregious moral…

Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” Audio version, read by Mike Gogulski • Introduction to the Portuguese Version of Iron Fist • • Versione in italiano • • Версия на русском • << Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page Introduction Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by…

There’s a particular narrative–surprisingly common in certain corners of the anarchist scene–that no one has really bothered to call out and so has grown rather fat and comfortable over the last few decades. It goes something like this: Thinking or acting from a big-picture perspective is–if not The Problem–then at least a major root cause…

Binoy Kampmark discusses the atrocities of the Shia militias. Anand Gopal discusses the creation of an Afghan Blackwater. Laurence M. Vance discusses limiting the government’s carbon footprint. David S. D’Amato discusses decentralism and libertarianism. Kevin Schwartz discusses hyping a proxy war in Yemen. Laurence M. Vance discusses the drug war litmus test. Glenn Greenwald discusses…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Anarchism is a broad tradition of historical ideas that contain common elements that are nevertheless, sometimes, conflicting. There is no set of positions that you must hold in order to count as a real anarchist. Rather, in my view, anarchism involves…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “The Poverty of the Welfare State [PDF]” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Joe Peacott, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. As the government, at various levels, attempts to cut back on welfare and other entitlement payments to poor people and/or require people to work in exchange for their welfare…

In the 1997 Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy” viewers meet Frank Grimes, a man who has never caught a break. He has had to work hard, if not outright struggle, for everything he has in life. Grimes is hired to work at the nuclear power plant alongside Homer Simpson, who is very much the opposite of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Ricketson‘s “A Left-Libertarianism I Don’t Recognize” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. In fact, what left-libertarianism has as its central tenet is that every individual should have complete control over their life and no one else’s. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and the myriad other bigotries that can haunt the…

“You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But…