The following is part of the 2019 May Poetry Feature at C4SS.  Something caught within your throat this morning, As I listened in, Some roughness at the ragged end, Trying to begin. And as we try another day, I hear the wheeze increase, I hear the fear and pain and grief, Like instruments at play….

Most of us in the radical labor movement are well aware of the historical bait-and-switch pulled with May Day and the modern American holiday established by the state known as Labor Day. Despite this many anarchists still take Labor Day as an opportunity to spread the message of worker liberation and freedom from capitalism. In…

Di Walker Storz. Originale pubblicato il 18 aprile 2018 con il titolo The Sick and the Damned. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. “Capivo che la differenza tra sani e malati era così profonda da annullare ogni differenza in termini di intelligenza o razza.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Il Grande Gatsby Se il capitalismo produce inevitabilmente il…

Postliberal and neoliberal thought views the individual as totally cut off from a social body, simply a biological unit in which malfunctions can be addressed through medical or pharmacological interventions. The tragicomic result of this simultaneous pretense toward empathy (capitalism with a human face) and individualism is “self-care culture.” “Self care” becomes both an industry and a deflection from the very real problems that capitalism causes.

Non le Aziende e non lo Stato Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato l’otto marzo 2016 con il titolo People Make Things – Not Corporations, Not Government. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Su Facebook Doug Henwood, autore di Wall Street e direttore del Left Business Observer, parlando di aziende del “settore pubblico” che fanno meglio del “settore…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 27 gennaio 2017 con il titolo Empires Don’t Practice “Free Trade”. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] In un suo recente commento pubblicato su The Future of Freedom Foundation, Richard Ebeling elogia il “trionfo del libero commercio” nella Gran Bretagna del 19º secolo (James Mill,…

In a recent commentary at The Future of Freedom Foundation, Richard Ebeling celebrates the “triumph of free trade” in 19th century Britain (James Mill, David Ricardo and the Triumph of Free Trade,” Jan. 23). As Ebeling frames it the British political elite, under the influence of classical liberal economists like Mill and Ricardo, realized that…

As you might have predicted, the incoming Trump regime is hostile to labor unions. In fact Raymond Hogler, professor of management at Colorado State University, predicts that Trump’s policies — including packing the National Labor Relations Board, appointing anti-union Supreme Court justices, and encouraging right-to-work laws — will be a “fatal blow” to organized labor…

Turtle Island (or as the illegal immigrants renamed it, North America) has a long and storied history of labor activism. After the Civil War, the nation saw a rise in union activity. With the fight for the eight hour workday, libertarians, socialists, communists, and anarchists alike joined together to fight for working class liberation. Eventually…

Ever since the famous communist Joseph Déjacque coined the political use of the term libertarian in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon back in 1857 as a way to differentiate his views from those of the authoritarian communists within the anti-capitalist movement, the philosophy of libertarianism has always implied working class rebellion. At least until a…

There’s an old saying that when you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get up there on its own. In the official capitalist ideology — especially the version that prevails in neoliberal America — great wealth is seen as the reward for superior entrepreneurship, foresight and personal drive. As…

My BHL colleague Chris Freiman has three questions for left-libertarians concerning how we reconcile our “commitment to workplace democracy” with the “other commitments that libertarians are inclined to have.” Here I suggest some answers. Does workplace democracy really eliminate bosses? Most libertarians, Chris notes, “would deny that granting all citizens a vote in a political…

At Reason, Brian Doherty tears into Bernie Sanders for opposing what the latter calls “unfettered free trade” (“Bernie Sanders Hates The World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them,” April 5). “This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the…

The repeated denunciations of the “coup media,” which supposedly favors the impeachment (a “coup,” in the government’s supporters language), is interesting because it shows how short everyone’s memories are (“Novos discursos, o mesmo golpismo“, Carta Capital, April 4; “Deputado Paulo Pimenta publica roteiro de golpe jurídico-midiático em 13 passos“, Jornal do Brasil, March 25). Nobody…

One important point my colleague Kevin Carson has emphasized repeatedly is that the prevailing labor relations in our society are not just a natural outgrowth of voluntary exchanges in a free market. Instead, they have resulted from pervasive state intervention that constrains the options of workers, thus leaving them in a worse position to bargain…

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed. This is most clear with trade. Sanders and Trump are flaming protectionists, which means they peddle perhaps the oldest, most-thoroughly discredited economics doctrine ever spoken. (An…

On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer — recently pointed to the U.S. Arpa-E agency’s development of an advanced storage battery as an example of the “public sector” outperforming the “private sector” (March 3 at 10:48AM).  “While VC is funding the world’s first stabilized action camera,”…

In most American political discourse, freedom and equality are treated as inversely related:  that is, economic freedom can only be increased at the expense of raising inequality, and economic equality can only be increased at the expense of reducing economic freedom. But at Stumbling and Mumbling blog, Chris Dillow (“Inequality against freedom,” Feb. 23) shows…

As used by right-wing apologists for “free market capitalism” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), capitalism is the source of everything good in the world — but also something that never existed. And it switches repeatedly back and forth from one to the other, every couple of sentences, in the same argument. I learned…

A think piece by Walter Frick at Harvard Business Review (“Understanding the Debate Over Inequality, Skills, and the Rise of the 1%,” Dec. 21) draws a line in the inequality debate between those (mostly CEOs and other corporate apologists) who see it as resulting from a mismatch between the supply and demand for certain skills,…