A think piece by Walter Frick at Harvard Business Review (“Understanding the Debate Over Inequality, Skills, and the Rise of the 1%,” Dec. 21) draws a line in the inequality debate between those (mostly CEOs and other corporate apologists) who see it as resulting from a mismatch between the supply and demand for certain skills,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Derek Wall‘s “Corporate Capitalism, Not Simply a Product of the State” read and edited by Tony Dreher. I think there are number of arguments to suggest that if we replaced corporate control with market competition, we would, in a relatively short time, be back to concentrated markets. I am, incidentally, a…

All’American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry (“Yes, America’s middle class has been disappearing… into higher income groups,” 17 dicembre) spiega la contrazione della classe media e la crescita della disuguaglianza economica citando un recente studio del Pew Institute, dal quale risulta che, dell’11% per cento di americani che non fanno più parte del ceto medio, il…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Will Free Markets Recreate Corporate Capitalism?” read and edited by Tony Dreher. And when I say “free markets,” I am not referring to a society in which the majority of economic functions are organized through money exchange (the “cash nexus”) or business firms. By “free market” I mean only…

At the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry (“Yes, America’s middle class has been disappearing… into higher income groups,” Dec. 17) justifies the shrinking middle class and growing economic inequality by citing the finding of a recent Pew Institute study that of the 11% shrinkage in the American middle class, 7% have gone to the top…

Seemingly John Stossel never sits down to write without the goal of further lowering the bar for qualifying as a libertarian. This time (“My Trump Problem,” Reason, Nov. 11), he’s managed to push the criterion to the all-time low of being somewhat less statist than Donald Trump. Stossel’s first problem with Trump allegedly centers on…

In a preview article at The Guardian last July for his new book Post-Capitalism (“The end of capitalism has begun,” July 17), Paul Mason — following a path previously trodden by John Holloway and by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt — argued that the emergence of a successor system to capitalism would resemble not so…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Gary Chartier‘s “The State, Big Business and Economic Privilege” (Part 2 of 7), read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. …excerpted from Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist, available for purchase here. 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

Seeing Iain Murray’s title, How the State Keeps You Working Long Hours, got me pretty excited. Especially as I’ve been trying to fuse libertarian concerns with work-critical sentiments for a few years now. And though the post had potential, it ultimately fell flat. For one thing, it mainly comes from a non-anarchist perspective. So the chance…

We could use a radical in the presidential race — someone who really challenges the status quo — but Bernie Sanders isn’t it. Sanders of course calls himself a democratic socialist, but that tells us almost nothing. One gets the impression the socialist label was pinned on him and after resisting it, Sanders decided “socialist”…

So, going through the final rounds of work on Markets Not Capitalism with Gary Chartier and the rest of the Collective has really been reminding me that I’ve accumulated a lot of occasional and fragmentary writing — papers, paragraphs, notes, etc. — that I really ought to have been collecting for this blog and sharing more…

The state often imposes enormous regulatory hurdles like licensing fees and time-consuming and expensive classes on people trying to carve out a basic living. And it’s all done by the state for our supposed safety. But this is time and money that Achan Agit, a hair-braider from Iowa, simply didn’t have. Her case is particularly…

In the contemporary parlance, it is largely supposed that a capitalist is one who favors a free market economic system, yet this wasn’t always the case. In the nineteenth century, as the descriptor capitalist came into more frequent use, it was virtually always deployed as a term of abuse, in identification of exploiters; it was…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Gary Chartier‘s “The State, Big Business, and Economic Privilege” (Part 1 of 6), read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. …excerpted from Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist, available for purchase here. 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

Some anarchists and socialists argue that, even if markets can theoretically be non-capitalist, and non-capitalist market economies can exist, the dynamics of the market will eventually lead to the restoration of capitalism. The argument used by non-market anarchists and socialists is that, in a competitive market — even a competitive market of widespread distribution of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. In the early 20th century, technological historian Lewis Mumford coined the term “cultural pseudomorph” to describe the cooptation of new, liberatory technologies — technologies which opened the possibility of fundamentally new…

Two Letters from Voltairine de Cleyre on the McKinley Assassination: McKinley’s Assassination from the Anarchist Standpoint (1907) Six years have passed since William McKinley met his doom at Buffalo and the return stroke of justice took the life of his slayer, Leon Czolgosz. The wild rage that stormed through the brains of the people, following…

While the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party has injected some novelty into the utterly stale state of affairs that is British party-politics, he leaves much to be desired for those seeking radical change. My fellow traveller, Pete James put it rather well: It took me most of the week…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The Expropriation Continues” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. What’s variously called “cognitive,” “progressive” or “green capitalism,” celebrated in Paul Romer’s “New Growth Theory” and heavily promoted by the Gateses, Warren Buffett, and faux-left carpetbaggers like Bono, amounts to a scheme to give capitalism a new…

A little ways into The Utopia of Rules, an anarchist critique of state and corporate bureaucracy, author David Graeber asks, “Why are we so confused about what police really do?” It’s an important question, as the problem of police violence and impunity in America can no longer be ignored. For far too long, argues Graeber,…