The relationship between democracy and anarchism is undoubtedly a contentious one. In his work The Principle of Federation1, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon makes it clear that democracy has an important legacy to respect. Because Proudhon declared that Universal Suffrage was above The Republic, he had to evaluate the character of democracy in ideal terms. Proudhon categorized democracy…

Bitter Harvest is a recently released wartime romance, set during the state-induced Ukrainian famine of 1932-33: otherwise known as the Holodomor. Directed, written, and funded by members of the Ukrainian diaspora, it was filmed on location in Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests, which some of the crew participated in.

At some point in the late fifties or early sixties, Pacifica Radio’s Charlie Hayden interviewed the inimitable Robert Anton Wilson on all things anarchism. Wilson waxes poetic on anarchism’s foundations and answers some challenging questions from a presumable skeptic in Hayden. While the exact date of the interview is unknown, the early to mid-sixties appear…

Last Sunday (March the 13th) I attended the protests against president Dilma Rousseff in Rio — and all was not well. My friends and I were violently antagonized by a subset of the protesters and the police had to intervene for our safety.  This is my side of the story, accompanied by my thoughts on what…

As if Thomas Sowell weren’t sufficient to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of pro-capitalist apologetics, we now have corporate apologists trolling the #ResistCapitalism hashtag on Twitter. Although most of the people using it today seem to think it’s an original piece of wit they just came up with on their own, the “Lookit them tweeting #ResistCapitalism…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Shawn P. Wilbur‘s “Limiting Conditions and Local Desires” read and edited by Tony Dreher. If we are to find a social order that more closely resembles emergent harmony them armed peace or open war, what are we to do? If we cannot take, then perhaps we can give. We know the…

Radicalism or Rules of Thumb? William Gillis’s Response to Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder With such a nice response from Kevin it’s probably incumbent upon me to emphasize some disagreements — or perhaps just nuances — I was hoping to draw out. Along the way there are a few quibbles I’d make in response to Kevin’s commentary,…

Land Allocation Rules are Necessary Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder to William Gillis As an alternative to what Will regards as the typical approach in advocating for a set of property rules — basically a sales pitch promoting the features of one compared to all the others — he proposes “one where we don’t exclusively compare prefigurative…

Geo-mutualism Represents a Middle Ground William Schnack’s Reply to Jason Byas on Economic Rent Jason Byas asks Fred Foldvary which territory is due the rent. “Do I owe rent to the territory roughly corresponding with Decatur, Georgia? Or is it something more like the size of DeKalb County? Or is it to something the size…

The Organic Emergence of Property from Reputation Property as a Useful and Necessary Toil, Not a God For centuries radicals have debated alternative property systems, and I’m glad we’re having these conversations. But what has been consistently disappointing about them is how little they generally seek to explore the underlying roots of “property” itself. To be sure, all…

How Rothbardians Occupy Part of the Occupancy-and-Use Spectrum Jason Byas’s Response to Kevin Carson Are We All Mutualists Now? Maybe: Lockeanism as Occupancy & Use The first thing to say in response to Kevin Carson’s opening essay is that he’s largely right. As this exchange’s representative Rothbardian, I agree with his suggestion that the differences…

Geo-Mutualism Offers Inter-Community Dispute-Resolution Carson’s Occupancy-and-Use Regime Has No Such Mechanism I’d like to thank Kevin Carson for taking the time to reply to my critique of his original statement. Before I continue to respond, I’d like to also take a quick moment to do something which I should have done in my first response,…

Limiting Conditions and Local Desires Occupancy-and-Use: Neo-Proudhonian Remarks by Shawn Wilbur There is a great deal that could be said in response to Kevin Carson’s opening statement, from the “neo-Proudhonian” mutualist perspective, but I’ll try to keep things at least relatively short. Like Kevin, my introduction to the notion of occupancy-and-use land tenure was through…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Riggenbach‘s “Why I Am a Left Libertarian” edited by Nick Ford and read by Riggenbach himself. Many libertarians say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum has become meaningless and useless. But to the extent that this is true for them, this is only because they have allowed themselves to be befuddled…

Introduction by Chad Nelson Involvement in the anarchist movement sometimes feels like a futile enterprise. How to get from here to there in a “real” world dominated by statists and authoritarians is a dilemma that confounds even the most sure-footed of anarchists. And when attaching oneself to an anarchist organization, it’s easy to be pessimistic…

This column was inspired by one of Rupert Murdoch’s tweets on September 6: “Big military brings peace through strength.” A cliched tweet by Murdoch isn’t what most people would consider a news hook. But it’s just the latest expression — caveman syntax perhaps included — of an insidious idea that anyone born in the United…

Many libertarians say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum has become meaningless and useless. But to the extent that this is true for them, this is only because they have allowed themselves to be befuddled by political fraud and, perhaps, by a weak background in political history. The spectrum is just as useful and meaningful as…

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…

Editor’s Note: Individualist anarchism has often been described as a kind of “free market anti-capitalism.” Individualist anarchism supports a “free market” in the sense that it supports private property, money, commerce, contracts, entrepreneurship, and the profit motive. Not only do we oppose any violent repression of those things, but we welcome their presence as crucial to…

Todo ano, nesta época, alguém do mundo libertário de direita, repetindo ritual obrigatório de Ação de Graças, faz voltar à tona a velha ladainha acerca de os Peregrinos, em Plymouth, quase morrerem de fome por causa do  “comunismo,” até direitos privados de propriedade e capitalismo os salvarem. Este ano, John Stossel (“Deveríamos Estar Agradecidos pela…