Originale: Kevin Carson, The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis. Traduzione italiana di Enrico Sanna Versione stampabile pdf Nota del traduttore Per le citazioni tratte dai libri di Ivan Illich mi sono basato, per quanto mi è stato possibile, sulle edizioni in italiano. In alcuni casi, soprattutto quando le citazioni sono molto brevi, non…

      Introduction: Two Kinds of Society Illich’s most common term for the kind of society or mode of production he is critiquing is “industrial age.” The overall theme of his projected future writing, he notes, is “an epilogue to the industrial age.” I want to describe the fading monopoly of the industrial mode…

De: Dawie Coetzee. Título original: Manufacturing Scarcity, del 30 de enero 2013. Traducido por: Juan Pirela Parra. Si bien estamos de acuerdo en que el sistema prevalente de capitalismo de Estado depende del mantenimiento de una escasez artificial, parece haber poca claridad en lo que respecta al como esta se mantiene. Específicamente, hay dudas sobre…

I want to begin by praising Apolito’s piece. It both tackles the strongest argument against anarchism, the problem of achieving coordination at scale, and models the problem using insights from the cluster of fields that lie at the base of complex systems. Whatever my disagreements with them over markets, this is a welcome addition to…

I’m a big fan of Aurora and hope that her contribution to this symposium helps encourage more anarchists to engage fearlessly with the mathematical dynamics of an anarchist society. But I must admit my disappointment, I was hoping her contribution would seriously engage with the arguments for markets and either present a novel alternative or…

Note: In order to properly display some of the mathematics in this piece, it’s hosted here as a .pdf. Or, click the image below the introduction. The problem of scale is perhaps the most fundamental problem of anarchism. We all know by direct experience that anarchism works well on a local scale. Most people who…

The Communard Manifesto (Las Indias, May 9, 2016). Translated by Level Translation. By way of background, the Communard Manifesto comes out of the Las Indias Cooperative Group, which is a real-world venture in establishing a phyle — a non-territorial networked economic support platform — of the kind that Las Indias’s David de Ugarte described theoretically…

Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder to Steven Horwitz. As with Derek Wall, I’m gratified by the thoughtful tone of Steven Horwitz’s response to my lead essay. Where he agrees with me, he makes some good points of his own that add to what I was trying to say — particularly in regard to “free markets” not meaning the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Try as he might, Mises could not exempt the capitalist corporation from the problem of bureaucracy. One cannot define bureaucracy out of existence, or overcome the problem of distributed knowledge,…

In a recent post on Linkedin, author and business consultant Tim Williams explains the “Complexity Tax,” contending that in many cases “growth actually produces diseconomies of scale.”

Dawie Coetzee: The way to create scarcity is to withhold output, but, in many cases, the creation of scarcity depends on a significant increase in output.

Kevin Carson: If you can get past the flaws in Shermer’s book (things others might prefer to think of as my fixations, hangups, and dead horses), it’s quite an enjoyable read.

This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation.

Ross Kenyon encounters what he terms “the nationalistic geoist argument” and discusses the consequences it has for the Free State Project, the Seasteading Institute, and all secessionists.