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…

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….

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…

A new pamphlet featuring two classic short essays is now available for download thanks to the efforts of the Tulsa Alliance of the Libertarian Left — [PDF] Anarchism Without Hyphens & The Left/Right Spectrum (by Karl Hess). Please note that the format of the PDF file features a staggered page order layout intended to facilitate printing…

These three short stories all come from the same Cory Doctorow collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). Free download here. The three are all set against a background of what I call the “DRM Curtain,” a transnational corporate Empire based on artificial scarcities enforced through a maximalist version “intellectual…

The prospect of compulsory vaccination (“Should Obama make vaccines mandatory for all children,” Dr. Manny Alvarez, Fox News, January 30) should trouble even those who think the practice can be defended in principle as a kind of self-defense. The burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the 1960s emphasized a theme with a prominent American pedigree, powerfully expressed…

Journalist Barrett Brown, a woman who wanted to become a member of ISIS and a rapper named Tiny Doo. Not a list of people that seem to fit together in many ways ordinarily but here’s the rub: Each will be spending portions of his or her life in prison. Brown is guilty of, as he puts…

The life of Laurance Labadie appears very much like his anarchism, a deliberate, often anachronistic struggle against the vogues and prevailing winds of his day, a hopeless attempt to revive an energy faded or extinguished entirely. His thought belonged to a libertarian strain regrettably anchored to those of the previous generation or two, to a…

Via the Association of Libertarian Feminists discussion group (natch) I found this video by up-and-coming YouTube star Cameron Watt (on Facebook anyway), from his channel Libertarian Socialist Rants (LSR). His title is “My Thoughts on Feminism”, but as my Tweet on it explains, it’s really about why the hierarchy analysis of anarchism necessitates feminism. The embed…

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, Reason is the only magazine with the guts to tell it like it is — that everything is just fine. This time Jim Pagels (“Misleading Inequality Report Is Nothing to Fear,” January 22) reassures us that inequality’s nothing to worry about, despite Oxfam’s “misleading” recent report that the 1% may soon have more…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Labor Struggle in a Free Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so…

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it, In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. … Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration…

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…

Last year at Salon Michael Lind asked “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (June 4): “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?” He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Paul Krugman: “Leave Obama Alone”” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. http://youtu.be/eBs0x9ieCp8 Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside. Krugman believes that the supposedly…

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…