A tweet jokingly showing James C. Scott centrally planning his small chicken farm.  Even in his devastating critiques of high-modernist central planning, James C Scott acknowledges the benefits to planning and the levels at which it can occur with relative safety. The author M Black also challenges us not to fetishize decentralization in such a…

Anarchists have long made decentralization a core demand for the structure of our organizations and have placed tremendous faith in the decentralization of our organizations as a means by which to prevent the generation of hierarchies and abuses of power, among other issues. However, this faith is based on very little, and anarchists can stand…

Let me begin by stating how happy I am that this exchange is happening. As information technology has come to saturate our lives over the last two decades we’ve seen the debate over non-market economies remerge. A recent essay published in The Economist1 both summarizes the discourse and speaks to its increasing prominence. In the…

Now it may surprise some, but unlike many fellow freed market anarchists at C4SS, I am not a market anarchist because of the economic calculation problem. While I do think the economic calculation problem rightly points out that top-down command economies cannot adequately produce and distribute goods to meet the needs of society, anarchist economic…

There’s an eerie familiarity to the stay-at-home orders issued during COVID-19. I can’t help but relate this to my experience as an 11 year old during the month-long curfew after the communal riots of Bombay.  Growing up in India, communal life dominated our lives. While the state functioned along the lines of rigid, monopolistic, soviet-socialist…

Is it possible for our enemies to discover actual insights? The impulse to deny this is universal. The third reich dismissed special relativity as “Jewish physics” and lost significant advantage. The USSR worried that accepting Darwin’s insights in evolution would open the floodgates to capitalist social darwinism and so they hurt themselves by sticking with…

In 1939, Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician, came up with a formulation for optimization problems called linear programming (LP) after being tasked with planning production in the plywood industry during World War 2. A linear program is a constrained optimization problem with a linear objective function that is maximized or minimized subject to linear equality…

Mutual Exchange is the Center for a Stateless Society’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. In this fecund moment of global political collapse and upheaval, amidst pandemics and police repression, there are also seeds of a better world being planted. It is in this spirit that we open this Summer Mutual Exchange on Decentralization…

It’s a very difficult time for any person. And this is not war, it is not just an economic crisis, it is not just mass poverty or catastrophe. This is a pandemic, in some ways a cross between all these things. Ordinary people are at great risk, like all the major capitalist companies. The poor…

Anarchists face the question: Without nations and states wouldn’t a free society be especially ravaged by pandemics? Who would enforce quarantines without rebuilding a centralized institution of violence? It’s a fair question. Anarchism isn’t about a finite goal, but an unending vector pointed towards increasing liberation. We’re not in the habit of “good enough” compromises,…

Trust is the backbone of not just economies, but also the social fabric more broadly. With it, new worlds are possible, and without it, collapse is inevitable. Trust is built on dynamic and complexly layered reputations. We each have our own methods of building trust, and different communities have their own systems for developing reputation….

Guida anarchica all’ambientalismo Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 23 agosto 2018 con il titolo Decentralizing the Green Revolution: An Anarchist Guide to Environmentalism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Davanti al problema dei cambiamenti climatici o di altre forme di inquinamento, abbiamo solitamente due strade: da un lato l’individuo con il riciclaggio, le luci spente,…

When looking to solve the issue of climate change and other forms of environmental damage, people tend to look at two kinds of solutions: those targeting the individual, such as recycling, turning off your lights, bicycling, and unplugging your electronics when not in use, or more statist solutions, such as banning plastic straws, carbon taxes,…

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…

In Part I of this article, I responded to William Gillis’ review of Worshiping Power: An Anarchist Vision of Early State Formation. I wanted to give special attention to what I found to be his most interesting critique. Gillis takes me to task for focusing too much on the anthropological definition of the state, analyzing…

In a PBS segment Oct. 24, Judy Woodruff asked “What will Dakota Access protesters do if final pipeline restrictions are lifted?” Her guest William Brangham, who’s been covering the confrontation for PBS Newshour, elaborates: People don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. If the Army Corps agrees to this last permit and says to the…

[Trascrizione di Chad Nelson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 12 ottobre 2016 con il titolo Long Live Anarchy: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson (PartII). Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Questa è la seconda parte di “Long Live Anarchy!”, intervista con Robert Anton Wilson trasmessa da Pacifica Radio. La trascrizione della prima…

[Trascrizione di Chad Nelson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society l’otto ottobre 2016 con il titolo Long Live Anarchy: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson (PartI). Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Ad un certo punto tra la fine degli anni cinquanta e i primi sessanta, Charlie Hayden di Pacifica Radio intervistò l’inimitabile Robert Anton…

The following is Part 2 of Pacifica Radio’s “Long Live Anarchy!” interview with Robert Anton Wilson. Part 1’s transcript can be read here. The interview ends abruptly, and unfortunately Pacifica was unable to find additional reels in their archives. –cn Hayden: How do you answer the charge that anarchism’s an outmoded political belief? That it…

Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern…