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….

Download a PDF copy of Grant Mincy’s study Power and Property: A Corollary. The concept of property is widely discussed by social theorists and is a hot button issue within political circles. This is mostly because property is somewhat of an abstract concept. Property is a possession — it belongs to someone or something. Seems simple enough,…

Sento spesso persone che, senza riflettere, dicono: “Lo stato ha il diritto di tassare”, “lo stato ha il diritto di punire i criminali”, o “lo stato ha il diritto di controllare i confini nazionali”. Dentro di me, provo orrore per la facilità con cui si fanno queste affermazioni, per il fatto che molti considerino queste…

Don Blankenship, longtime Chief Executive Officer of coal giant Massey Energy, was indicted November 13 on charges that he consistently violated federal mine safety rules at the company’s Upper Big Branch Mine until an April 2010 explosion that killed 29 of 31 miners. The Charleston, West Virginia Gazette reports that a federal grand jury charges Blankenship with…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “How Libertarians Should — And Should Not — Approach Millennials” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Millennials are used to networked collaboration. In the workplace they view such collaboration with their peers as the way to get things done, and see traditional corporate managerial hierarchies as a form of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “From Whence do Property Titles Arise?” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by William Gillis, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Forgive the digression to my 90s Nickelodeon childhood, but in illustration I am reminded of an episode of Angry Beavers in which the brothers suddenly discover that they each have…

Libertarians are individualists. But since individualist has many senses, that statement isn’t terribly informative. Does it mean that libertarians are social nonconformists on principle? Not at all. Some few libertarians may aspire to be, but most would see that as undesirable because it would obstruct their most important objectives. Lots of libertarian men have no…

I’m usually pretty optimistic about the day after tomorrow — I’ve been dismissed more than once as a techno-utopian — but sometimes when I get depressed by NSA surveillance, drones, and the corporate state’s manufactured aura of inevitability, I need a story to cheer me up. Here it is: A Canadian artist copyrighted his land…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “There is No Hope/The Anarchist as Lover” read by Trevor Hultner and edited by Nick Ford. Music: Despair and Triumph, Danse Morialta, and Reawakening, by Kevin MacLeod. incompetech.com “The war culture is all-enveloping and there is no end. The American resolve against war does not exist beyond an Internet fad, entirely obliterated…

David Graeber. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011). David Graeber, as we already saw to be the case with Elinor Ostrom, is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and…

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 Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “The Dominant Idea” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “The Dominant Idea“. $1.50 for the…

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 Lysander Spooner‘s “Natural Law” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Lysander Spooner‘s “Natural Law“. $1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for…

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 “Millennial Liberty” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “Millennial Liberty“. $1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for…