C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Left-Libertarianism: Its Past, Its Present, Its Prospects” read and edited by Nick Ford. This form of left-libertarianism should not be confused with the position of the same name associated with Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, combining self-ownership (the libertarian part) with some sort of common ownership of natural…

“It takes money to make money.” An old, oft-repeated saying, it is certainly true enough as a statement describing the functioning of capitalism. The idea is that once one possesses capital, she can loan it to others for interest or rent, or else invest it in some productive enterprise to earn profits, sitting back and…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Poison as Food, Poison as Antidote” read and edited by Nick Ford. But it is an all-too-common mistake – and this tendency to underestimate the chasm between free markets and corporatism is enormously beneficial to the state, enabling a slick bait-and-switch. When free markets and government grants of privilege to…

The following article was written by Max More and published with The Freeman, February 1, 1999. Max More is president of Extropy Institute in Marina Del Rey, California. Large Corporations Will Not Come to Dominate the Economy Giant corporations controlling national governments. Corporate behemoths regimenting their workers, controlling their customers, and obliterating their smaller competitors. The rich get richer…

The book I will discuss below develops and defends the idea of law without a state. The book’s blurb tells us the following: This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of non-aggression,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Dawie Coetzee‘s “There is More to Industrial Enclosure than Patents” read and edited by Nick Ford. I wonder about the motivation in forgoing these patents, given that many are relatively toothless. Tesla obviously wishes to play the heroic underdog, to imply solidarity with the open-source movement despite operating in an industry legally…

The term “market anarchism” may give some people the mistaken impression that market anarchists envision a society organized primarily around the cash nexus. In part this is because one definition of the term “market” itself equates to the market as an institution: The sphere of exchange. It may also reflect the fact that many anarcho-capitalists,…

It is easy to criticise a government. Apologists and supporters defend it by claiming that they are doing the best they can, and they point to small token victories as evidence of progress. “Look at what this government has done for you”, they say, but my response is always, “is that it?” The ease of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace ‘Anti-Capitalism’” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Gary Chartier, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of “anti-capitalism.” To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that…

Introduction to the C4SS Edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow Kevin A. Carson Download a PDF copy of The C4SS Edition of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow. This book is actually a heavily abridged version of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops, edited by Colin Ward with a lot of his commentary thrown in….

At Slate, Will Oremus raises the question “What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?” (“The New Luddites,” August 6). Rather than being “the cure for economic doldrums,” he writes, automation “may destroy more jobs than it creates”: Tomorrow’s software will diagnose your diseases, write your news stories, and even drive your car. When…

Recently the story went viral of the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture threatening a Mechanicsburg seed library on the grounds that it was in violation of regulations intended to thwart the danger of (ahem) “agri-terrorism.” To comply with the regulations, the library would have to confine itself to distributing only store-bought seeds and not distributing…

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recently released long-term predictions for the global economy through 2060 (Paul Mason, “The best of capitalism is over for rich countries — and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060,” The Guardian, July 7), economic growth will stagnate to something like two-thirds its present level…

According to a recent story at Shareable by Kelly McCartney and Sarah Baird (“Pennsylvania Seed Library Investigated by Department of Agriculture,” August 7), the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is investigating an heirloom seed library as a possible vector of attack by “agricultural terrorists.” Libraries for sharing traditional and heirloom seed varieties are a growing phenomenon nationwide, intended…

Another water crisis is making national headlines. This time ground zero is in the mid-west. More than 400,000 people in and around Toledo, Ohio cannot drink water from their taps due to high levels of the dangerous toxin microcystin in the public drinking supply. The cause of this disaster is particularly concerning, however, as it is not the…

Critics of libertarianism on the Center-Left sometimes depict it as a radical ideology that would turn upside down everything we know — a doctrine of such thorough-going change that the critics are compelled to ask “what society in human history was ever organized along libertarian lines?” Not so! Nick Gillespie (“Why an 1852 Novel by…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Open the Borders Now and Forever” read and edited by Nick Ford. Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that…

An anonymous reader of Center for a Stateless Society‘s Tumblr recently asked: Two questions: 1) How exactly do the theory and practice proposed by free market anti-capitalists challenge the cultural logic of capitalism? 2) Don’t all market institutions — whether a large corporation or a mom and pop shop — desire a state as part…

Markets not Capitalism is a wonderfully compiled set of readings spanning 150 years of the market anarchist tradition. We must first commend Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson on their work in bringing all this great literature together and bundling it in a fantastic book for those interested in what market anarchism truly has to offer, as…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Weed Legalization as Privatization, Disempowerment” read and edited by Nick Ford. Marijuana’s legalization seems much more like neoliberal privatization of markets than true liberation of them. While I do not question the decency of these first major marijuana retailers, there are legitimate concerns. Those most victimized by the state’s rabid oppression…