Tag: authority
Q: What do Individualist Anarchists Think of An Anarchist FAQ?
McKay, Iain, 2008 An Anarchist FAQ, Section G: Is Individualist Anarchism Capitalistic? Anarchist Writers, accessed 25 May 2015, McKay, Iain (2012) An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 2 (AK Press) Section G: Is Individualist Anarchism Capitalistic?,   The Anarchist FAQ Collective’s “Anarchist FAQ“ is a massive work, which has been constantly maintained and updated since 1996. The FAQ gives very…
Liberty or Authority? A Useful Political Spectrum
Conservatism and libertarianism don’t belong together. Even in cases where conservatives are using the same rhetoric as libertarians, they too often don’t mean anything like what we mean; their “free market” is an apologetic for the economic status quo and global corporatism, their “equality before the law” is reserved only for traditionally privileged in-groups (think…
Jeff Riggenbach Reads: The Anarchism of Despair on Feed 44
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…
Disillusion and Dispossession: An Expansion
Anarchists usually don’t get too hot and bothered about general elections. While a change of command can no doubt mitigate some of the harms inflicted by particular governments, it makes no meaningful step towards the better world that anarchists want to see. We don’t feel any great victory if and when the lesser of two…
Disillusion and Dispossession: Thoughts on the Tory Victory
As an anarchist, I avoid doing anything that expresses consent to being governed, or an endorsement of any government; I am therefore a principled ballot-spoiler. However, this time around I was secretly rooting for a Labour victory (or at least a Conservative defeat). The Conservative Chancellor has been sustaining and inflating the housing bubble, particularly…
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Idols on Feed 44
C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Idols” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford. “These issues, among others, were not discussed because too many people were outraged with one of the few young voices breaking through the elder echo chamber with an important question. Unaware that this was actually an…
Baltimoreans Pushed to Their Limits
We speak of the blowback that results from American foreign policy, the senseless, heinous acts of terror that represent an unfocused and irrational rebellion against American imperialism. We understand that calling it what it is, blowback — pointing out the causal relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism — is not an attempt to exculpate…
How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition on Feed 44
C4SS Feed 44 presents “How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Since intellectual property is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing…
The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand
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…
Libero Mercato Come Lotta di Classe
Un articolo recente a proposito delle elezioni britanniche citava una lettera che ammoniva gli elettori sostenendo che un governo laburista avrebbe danneggiato la ripresa economica del paese. Avallata dai leader delle maggiori industrie britanniche e inviata al quotidiano The Telegraph, la lettera sosteneva che l’elezione di un governo conservatore avrebbe mandato questo segnale al resto…
Toxic Waste and Inequality Are Good for You on Feed 44
C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Toxic Waste and Inequality Are Good for You” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. After making the arguments above, Pagels slips and reveals the real source of his primary concern: “Most income inequality reports focus only on the most negative interpretation of the data, creating a narrative that the…
The Best of Critiques; The Worst of Critiques
Megan Erickson’s article on techo-fixes for education (“Edutopia“) in the March issue of Jacobin is an excellent critique of corporate-driven education “reform” efforts like those of the Gates Foundation and IDEO. As a critique of attempts to build an alternative educational model around decentralizing technology in general, it’s… not so excellent. The immediate object of…
The Free Market as Class Warfare
A recent story on the British elections reports on a letter warning voters that a Labour government would prove harmful to the country’s economic recovery. Endorsed by leaders in Britain’s business community and submitted to The Telegraph, the letter argues that the election of a Tory government would signal to the rest of the world…
Desktop Regulatory State in the News Again
According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…
“I Don’t See Class”
I hear expressions like “I don’t see race” or “I’m color-blind” a lot from people who want to ignore the issues of structural power imbalance or privilege in race issues. The same people are fond of equating racism to simple bigotry; by this standard, white bigotry against blacks and black bigotry against whites are equally…
Listen Libertarian Municipalist!
Murray Bookchin. The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy. Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York and London: Verso, 2015). This book is a collection of Bookchin’s essays on libertarian municipalism and communalism, extending from the period when he still considered himself an anarchist until his final post-anarchist phase. In…
Free Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism
Objectivist scholar Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom, called for a “dialectical libertarianism.” By dialectical analysis, Sciabarra means to “grasp the nature of a part by viewing it systemically — that is, as an extension of the system within which it is embedded.” Individual parts receive their character from the whole of which…
Russell Brand’s Revolution
We’ll get to the book in a bit, but first I have to say a few things about the phenomenon of Russell Brand himself. Frankly, I’m a bit worried for Russell Brand. He has shown tremendous personal courage in recent years, transforming himself from a bad-boy British comedian/celebrity, whose comedy revolved around his own dionysian…
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Idols
If you’re outside the liberty movement social media universe, you might not have known that The Happening was absolutely happening last weekend. What was The Happening, you ask as I admire your ignorance of the affair? Well, the International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC) was kicking off with movement darlings Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano….
Jeff Riggenbach Reads: History of an Idea on Feed 44
C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. So long as the confusion between free markets and plutocracy persists – so long as libertarians allow their laudable attraction to free markets to fool them into defending plutocracy, and so long as those on the left allow their…
Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory