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…

With Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, coauthors Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon provide a balanced biography — thorough, yet a concise 300 pages; sympathetic yet markedly non-hagiographic — of not only the titular comics stalwart, shown punching through the comics page like one of his larger-than-life creations in the playful cover illustration; not even just…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “We’re All Illegalists Now!” read and edited by Nick Ford. Being that the drug world is literally under siege by a domestic military operation, it is beyond anyone’s imagination how markets like the Silk Road could keep their doors open without a serious injection of class consciousness. All those involved in…

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “The Libertarian Virtue Of Slack” read and edited by Nick Ford. The common libertarian nowadays is of the same non-interventionist temperament as the Taoists. They endorse individual preference, spontaneity and self-interest. They loathe the State and central planners of all kinds. Most libertarians identify, also, as individualists — both methodologically and…

Bloomberg ha pubblicato una notizia secondo cui “il più grosso gruppo d’affari di Wall Street ha avanzato la proposta di un consiglio stato-industria che si occupi di guerra cibernetica,” consiglio che sarebbe guidato da “un grosso rappresentante della Casa Bianca” e composto da rappresentanti dell’alta finanza e di almeno otto agenzie federali. Il suddetto “gruppo…

Market anarchism is grounded in the sovereignty of each individual and the simple idea that all relationships between adults ought to be voluntary and consensual, permitting everyone the freedom to do anything she wishes, as long as she respects the identical right of all others. The “market” in market anarchism refers to the fact that…

Bloomberg reports that “Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council,” led by a “senior White House official” and composed of representatives from the finance industry and no fewer than eight US federal agencies. The aforementioned “trade group,” the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, has already brought in former National…

When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” one is left scratching one’s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist — a Nobel laureate yet — tell it straight: The managerial state…

On July 7th, Molly Knefel published a great piece on jury nullification in The Nation. Knefel opens by discussing the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted of “assaulting” a police officer who had assaulted her, and sentenced to a prison term that most of the jurors who convicted her…

At first glance, a no-holds-barred conversation with an anarchist might seem the most inappropriate centerpiece imaginable for a magazine issue marking the bicentennial of the United States of America. But then again, Karl Hess was no ordinary “anarchist.” For all its brazen anti-statism, Hess’s “red-white-and-blue anarchy” fits like a glove with a cover that proclaims “Happy…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian and Catholic Social Teachings” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Free markets don’t have to mean the particular incarnation of corporate world dominance we see all around us today. For an entire tradition, an individualist anarchism that once blossomed in the United States, free…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nick Ford’s “The Individualist Anarchist and Work” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 2 of THE NEW LEVELLER read and edited by Nick Ford. The individualist anarchist may first notice in this situation that the individual is crushed not only by the political arrangements but the systematic and institutional arrangements of work….

C4SS Feed 44 presents “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Competition, next to the division of labor, is one of the most powerful factors of industry; and at the same time one of the most valuable…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jason Lee Byas‘s “Toward an Anarchy of Production, Pt. II” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 2 of THE NEW LEVELLER read by Stephen Ledger and edited by Nick Ford. A new worry, then, might be that we’re just stuck between two equally unappealing alternatives: either rigidly conservative communism, or an alienating world…