In early September, Reuters reported on a new Federal Reserve survey showing widening wealth and income gaps in the United States. “All of the income growth,” Reuters reports, “was concentrated among the top earners …  with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income.” The Fed survey will no doubt disconcert those…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Carlos Clemente‘s “Vulture Funds vs. Argentina” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. The most outrageous fallacy in this line of reasoning is the conflation of the political class of a country with its citizenry at large. Whenever vultures succeed in collecting the full value on defaulted government bonds, the…

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 David S. D’Amato‘s “Avowals of Selfhood: Review of Egoism” read and edited by Nick Ford. For the egoist, individualism must precede anarchism, for the affirmation of self is the source of the denial of all authority — individualism being the more general thing, anarchism a specific implication. Any anarchism that sets itself…

Amnesty International declared that the sentence passed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, on a case in which the Guatemalan government did not investigate the tragic murder of a teenager, tells the whole world that violence against women will not be tolerated. Maria Isabel Veliz Franco was 15 when she was sexually abused, tortured and…

Anarchism and hierarchy have a tricky and messy relationship. Some anarchists proclaim to be against all hierarchy (sometimes even defining anarchism as such) and others proclaim they are simply against the state and don’t care about hierarchy itself. I believe individualist anarchism, rightly understood falls somewhere in between these extremes. Individualist anarchism, in short, is…

I love to backpack, surf, hike and climb. When I’m not able to engage in these pursuits, I sometimes find myself watching video of others adventuring in beautiful, remote locales. It helps me to hold on to some of those joyous and motivating travel feelings. I enjoy footage from decades past, when things were wilder,…

The protests, police violence, and repression in Ferguson have sparked nationwide conversations about police militarization and misconduct. There’s some incredibly promising potential here, as more and more people become aware of the brutality of the modern criminal justice system. However, there are also some potential pitfalls that deserve cautious examination. First, the good. Popular commentators…

Pope Francis’s remarks on poverty, inequality and capitalism — most recently at his open air mass in Seoul — don’t sit well with many conservatives and right-leaning libertarians. The Pope’s remarks include criticism of growing economic inequality and a call to “hear the voice of the poor.” Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is…

State ideologies require an underlying cultural disposition, if they are to stand the test of time. This cultural disposition is inevitably tied to the core concepts of an ideology. Nationalism subordinates the individual’s values to those of their national community, while numerous strands of socialism focus upon the lives and pastimes of the proletariat. Romantic…

A Teenager Slain On Saturday, August 9, eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was walking with a friend on the 2900 block of Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri. He was on his way home on the hot, humid afternoon, walking down the middle of the street when the two were approached by Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson. Reports of what…

Last week, Radley Balko published an interesting piece on the question “After Ferguson, how should police respond to protests?”  He contrasted the militarized approach seen in Ferguson and in the Battle of Seattle with less reactionary and more cooperative forms of policing. One police chief Balko praised was Chris Burbank of Salt Lake City, my hometown….

Immanuel Ness, ed. New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism (Oakland: PM Press, 2014) (Amazon link). In his foreword to the book, Staughton Lynd describes the official model of unionism in the United States, first pioneered by the company unions under the American Plan (especially by the company union…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The Question is, Why Would ANYONE Trust the Government?” read and edited by Nick Ford. What was government doing, back when trust was so high? As soon as it emerged as global hegemon after WWII, the US began resorting to direct invasions, military coups and death squads when countries refused to…

Zygmunt Bauman, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents, writes that religion, in its traditional form, used to celebrate human insufficiency. With a path more or less outlined for her entire life, the individual found herself powerless to change the conditions she was inserted in. In contrast to what he considers the “postmodern” condition, of uncertainty, premodern…

It is easy to see moral irony in the arguments of those who support Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s government in the ongoing dispute against a group of so-called vulture funds, led by the highly litigious Elliot Associates. Anyone even slightly familiar with the corrupt shenanigans of Fernandez, her late husband — former president Nestor Kirchner — and their…

Last Friday, August 1st, President Barack Obama commented on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11. At first glance, his comments look like an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. After all, Obama acknowledged that “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques – techniques that I believe, and I think any fair-minded person would believe were…

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…