One of the main obstacles for a libertarian, even left-libertarian, appreciation of Marxian analysis is the assumption that it necessarily denies any role for the individual to play in both material struggle and general social analysis, leaving that entirely to mass class concepts like the proletariat, lumpenproletariat, bourgeoisie, etc. In contrast, libertarians right and left…

The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor. As Ricardo writes: In speaking then of commodities, of their…

Escrito por Eric F. Artigo original: In Lieu of Free Banking, do 23 de maio de 2023. Traduzido por Gabriel Camargo. Em círculos libertários e anarquistas de mercado, o conceito de sistema bancário livre sempre foi um importante ideal para uma genuinamente livre e saudável sociedade competitiva. Isso implica em um sistema monetário no qual…

Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above…

In my previous article “In Lieu of Free Banking,” I outline the mutualist and individualist anarchist arguments for free and mutual banking, its potential ability to empower labor, and, briefly, some immediate proxies available via credit unions and alternative currencies. But I also point to Laurance Labadie’s assessment of Benjamin Tucker’s (and later his own)…

In libertarian and market anarchist circles, the concept of free banking has always been an important ideal for a genuinely free and healthily competitive society. This entails a monetary system where banks not only hold currency but can issue their own currency or banknotes without the need for a centralized treasury. As such, the supply…

David Harvey. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (London and New York: Verso, 2023). David Harvey may be familiar to some from his background as a Marxist geographer focusing on neoliberalism and uneven development, or for his development of Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” concept. The Grundrisse itself amounts, more or less, to a voluminous…

Market anarchism, as defined by Center for a Stateless Society, is the “advocacy of replacing the state with civil society while pointing to free market economics to explain the workability and/or desirability of such.” This ideology has very rarely if ever supported a sizable movement on its own and instead has, according to Charles Johnson…

The fundamental tenet of anarchism is the resistance to an Archos, Greek for “master.” To advocate for anarchism is to position oneself in opposition to a master, i.e., to claim the fundamental right of self-determination, autonomy, and freedom from a centralized system of (especially coercive) control. To act anarchically simply means to act independently of…

Cory Doctorow (2017). Walkaway. New York: Tor I. The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at…

Shareable, a nonprofit media outlet co-founded by Neal Gorenflo in 2009, is devoted to the sharing economy (the real sharing economy of platform cooperatives and other open, self-organized effort — not proprietary, walled-garden, Death Star platforms like Uber and Airbnb). In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a…

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016). I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.)….

Eugene W. Holland. Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Holland’s work is in the same general autonomist tradition of analysis as Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx, and the concept of “Exodus” as developed in Negri’s and Hardt’s Commonwealth. The general idea of Exodus is that, when technology…