Perhaps because I live in Chicago, perhaps because I work with other attorneys, in my day-to-day life I’m surrounded almost exclusively by people who identify with the mainstream, American left, centrist Democrats for whom mere mention of the word “libertarian” calls forth nightmarish imaginings of the Tea Party right. Regrettably, identifying myself as a libertarian…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “A Glance at Communism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Voltairine de Cleyre, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. An Anarchist-Communist is a person who is a man first and a Communist afterward. He generally gets into a great many irreconcilable situations at once, believes that property and competition must…

Last Friday, August 1st, President Barack Obama commented on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11. At first glance, his comments look like an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. After all, Obama acknowledged that “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques – techniques that I believe, and I think any fair-minded person would believe were…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Apio Ludd‘s “The Anarchist As Outlaw” read and edited by Nick Ford. The original debates over illegalism were therefore not about whether anarchists should take illegal actions – it was assumed that all anarchists did – but about whether individual reappropriation was a legitimate tactic – and for an egoist this is not…

An anonymous reader of Center for a Stateless Society‘s Tumblr recently asked: Two questions: 1) How exactly do the theory and practice proposed by free market anti-capitalists challenge the cultural logic of capitalism? 2) Don’t all market institutions — whether a large corporation or a mom and pop shop — desire a state as part…

Markets not Capitalism is a wonderfully compiled set of readings spanning 150 years of the market anarchist tradition. We must first commend Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson on their work in bringing all this great literature together and bundling it in a fantastic book for those interested in what market anarchism truly has to offer, as…

One paradox of empire is that it brings people from different origins into contact with each other while elevating one group above the rest. It’s at once international and provincial. It amounts to a provincial internationalism. One in which the central focus is still on a particular nation-state, but one that interacts with the rest…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Weed Legalization as Privatization, Disempowerment” read and edited by Nick Ford. Marijuana’s legalization seems much more like neoliberal privatization of markets than true liberation of them. While I do not question the decency of these first major marijuana retailers, there are legitimate concerns. Those most victimized by the state’s rabid oppression…

An excellent article published last week by Radley Balko in The Washington Post explores the racially discriminatory consequences of gun control laws in the United States, as illustrated through the lens of several recent news stories. Balko begins by discussing the arrest of Shaneen Allen: Last October, Shaneen Allen, 27, was pulled over in Atlantic…

I am not ashamed to call myself a libertarian anymore. Two years ago this month, a friend of mine suggested that I write an article for the Center for a Stateless Society, a group I had very little knowledge of, aside from said friend posting a few of their writings per week on Facebook. At…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “The Individualist and The Communist: A Dialgoue” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Voltairine de Cleyre, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. COM.: “Well, I admit that much. Certainly the employé cannot compete with his employer.” INDV.: “Then you admit that there is not free competition in the present state…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “We’re All Illegalists Now!” read and edited by Nick Ford. Being that the drug world is literally under siege by a domestic military operation, it is beyond anyone’s imagination how markets like the Silk Road could keep their doors open without a serious injection of class consciousness. All those involved in…

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While…

There is going to be a time of repression in this country. It may be quite harsh. For many, including libertarians, it may be frightening and discouraging. For the only vaguely committed it will be too much to bear and they will move back to safe positions in liberal-land or conservative-country, those establishment enclaves whose…

I’m not, in any way, a Noam Chomsky fan. However, I couldn’t help be struck by his description of anarchism in a recent interview. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from,…

The following article was written by Dyer Lum and published The Alarm, October 31, 1885. Another election is at hand. Again the seductive voice of the politician is heard appealing to ignorance to establish justice. It is not new to our ears; we once trusted it. We have fully realized the emptyness of its professions. What do…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Armies that Overlap” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Benjamin R. Tucker, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Let us narrow it a little: Socialism is the belief that the next important step in progress is a change in man’s environment of an economic character that shall include the abolition…

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, ‘this land is yours,’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor, or capital produces…

C4SS Feed 44 republishes Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “Anarchism and American Traditions” read and edited by Rhonda Federman. Feed 44: http://www.c4ss.org/ http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2 http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia Bitcoin tips welcome: 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

My first call to Direct Action was sparked by the scores of undocumented immigrants from Central America that ICE has been shipping to Phoenix. An AZ Central article reports that “The Border Patrol says about 400 migrants were flown from Texas to Arizona because of [a] surge in migrants being apprehended in Texas.” This mass…