Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff Manifesto (2002) reads like a less political and more sardonic version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s tale of the working poor in America, Nickel and Dimed. The subtitle, A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine that Fired me, and Three I Can’t Remember means that Levison gives a more detailed account…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The State as Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Sometimes the capitalist state’s internal rules and procedures, created to serve an economic ruling class, in specific cases wind up sabotaging the very interests they were created to serve. Much like the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Should Labor be Paid or Not?” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Benjamin Tucker, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. “Labor” should be paid! Horrible, isn’t it? Why, I thought that the fact that it is not paid was the whole grievance. Unpaid labor has been the chief complaint of…

I hate when people support violence, but claim to advocate non-violence. We see it when a liberal condemns protesters for rioting but then advocates laws that enable armed police officers to arrest and armed guards to cage people for possessing firearms. We see it when presidents who use cluster bombs against civilians condemn violence by protesters and…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Ricketson‘s “Justice is for Victims” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. Given how easy it is recognize in both paradigms that justice is about victims, why do people so often think justice is about punishing the criminal? Often, when protesters call for justice in the name of a victim, they…

Last November, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) launched a ten-year drive to end “the scourge of statelessness.” In December,  UNHCR Senior Regional Protection Officer on Statelessness Emmanuelle Mitte appealed to journalists (in west Africa and worldwide) to promote the effort, citing the press’s “responsibility to carry out advocacy, and sensitisation on the issue.” But the campaign, starting…

Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, “at ten in the evening.” The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever! –Murray Bookchin Part of the dissolutionary strategy advocated by C4SS is called Open Source Insurgency or embracing institutional,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Industrial Economics” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Dyer D. Lum, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The legalized power given to money determines the difference; it makes it more than the mere instrument of exchange; it becomes an implement of exploitation, having a fictitious value and culling from industry…

Another year is over. The New Year holiday is a natural time of reflection. When the ball drops and fireworks pop in the early January sky 2014 will be gone. A whole new year of human history will begin. A whole new year to continue our beautiful struggle. If there is one fact our collective history…

On NAASN, an email list for anarchist academics, Wayne Price (whose review of my book I previously replied to here) responded to someone else’s  proposal to “abolish the state and see if capitalism survives until sunrise” as follows: [This is] what most people probably think anarchists advocate: society just as it is but with no…

Wayne Price. “Kevin Carson’s Revival of Individualist Anarchist Economic Theory” Anarkismo.net, November 30, 2014. Wayne Price’s overall summary of my approach in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (also available online) is quite even-handed and fair (unlike some others, e.g. the critique of Markets Not Capitalism, ed. by Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier, by Crimethinc’s Magpie…

Peace on Earth and goodwill toward all — in a world of conflict, ’tis the season of peace. Sadly, this holiday season the United Nations released a study indicating that 2014 is among the worst years on record for the world’s children. Chronicled in the report is another disturbing history of war and state violence. An estimated…

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010). Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s. Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner…

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray…

Arizona’s Tonto National Forest is a landscape of beautiful complexity, from the Sonoran desert’s flowering cacti to the gorges and mountains of the Mongollon Rim. Home to rare desert lakes, fertile river valleys, meandering streams and grand plains stretching across the horizon, its air is still sweet, mixed with juniper, fir and ponderosa pine. On December…

Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 18 (Summer-Fall 2014) PDF Particularity and the Anarchism of Everyday Life Colin Ward was a libertarian communist. He named Pyotr Kropotkin as his primary economic influence, and described himself as “an anarchist-communist, in the Kropotkin tradition.” This was not empty praise. He produced an abridged edition of Kropotkin’s…

Recently, in a comment on my short piece, “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism,” philosopher and prominent libertarian Tibor R. Machan cited George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an example of what happens when we attempt to do something about inequality. To Machan, inequality is a “fabricated problem,” and Orwell’s fairy story is a cautionary tale on…

Recently, a law was passed in California that redefines how sexual relations happen on college campuses. The law states that affirmative consent must be given throughout sex. Past relationships between the two individuals cannot be taken as consent and neither can consent be presumed when people are incapacitated from drugs or alcohol, unable to communicate, or…

The recent events surrounding Michael Brown’s death raise the topic of justice in modern society to a new place in public consciousness. Many have called for justice for Brown, and almost always this consists of calling for the indictment, prosecution, and punishment of Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot Brown. Would this be true justice for Michael…

We are nearing the end of the year and November was another fantastic month for the Center for a Stateless Society. We were honored to be able to publish a Portuguese translation of Kevin Carson’s The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand and included a brand new introduction, by Carson, just for our Portuguese speaking readers….