Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,…

Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new recruits have little…

Advocating work abolition, I encounter one specific objection very often. “Work,” they say, does not refer to, nor imply, coerced labour. An authoritarian Marxist I recently encountered made the claim that to speak of work abolition is the language of “empty” radicalism. They went on to claim that such “empty” radical language is confined to…

View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s C4SS Study: The Methodenstreit Revisited: Marginalism and the Lost Power Context The Methodenstreit was a long-running and fairly acrimonious debate over the methodology of economic science, between Carl Menger (posthumously regarded as the founder of Austrian economics) and Gustav Schmoller of the German Historical School, which eventually…

In episode no. 4 of Agoric Cafe, Roderick Long discusses the distinction between markets and capitalism in Bukharin and Preobrazhensky’s ABC of Communism, and in the Marxist tradition generally; or, how Marxism twists itself into a pretzel to avoid endorsing free-market anti-capitalism. Watch it here or below.

Di Kevin Carson. Originale: Victims of Capitalism Day, pubblicato il 10 maggio 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Su Reason Ilya Somin, secondo una sua pratica annuale iniziata nel 2007, ha scelto il primo maggio, festa dei lavoratori, per commemorare la “Giornata delle Vittime del Comunismo”. Somin parla di 80-100 milioni di vittime nel ventesimo secolo…

At Reason Ilya Somin, in keeping with his annual practice since 2007, has chosen May 1 — May Day — as his date for  observing “Victims of Communism Day.” Somin cites the “authoritative” Black Book of Communism as his source for a death toll of 80-100 million in the 20th century. To put that “authoritative”…

Paul Cockshott, the author of Towards a New Socialism, is essentially a NazBol. Everyone seems to ignore this, and I have no idea why. He is quite open about his hatred of gay men, sex workers, immigrants, and trans women — and his policy proposals are filled with horrific implications and unworkable ideas.  This isn’t…

In risposta a Gelderloos Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 26 novembre 2018 con il titolo The Megamachines Are False Specters – A Response To Gelderloos. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Ritengo vergognoso il fatto che gli anarchici non si occupino più di geopolitica o del futuro. I più grandi successi di questi ultimi due secoli…

I think it’s a shame that anarchists don’t write more on either geopolitics or analyses of the future; over the last two centuries our greatest successes have come from our imagination and foresight. For this reason I applaud Peter Gelderloos’ recent attempted forecast, published in a variety of forms by Crimethinc. There’s much to agree…

Di Frank Miroslav. Originale pubblicato il 24 settembre 2018 con il titolo The Future of Digital Proudhonism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Un recente articolo di Gavin Mueller per boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” è una critica marxista di quello che Mueller definisce “proudhonismo digitale”, un termine generico che indica chi crede che la tecnologia…

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale pubblicato l’undici ottobre 2018 con il titolo Forcing Marx Into the Automation Debate. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. L’automazione, ovvero la riduzione e/o eliminazione della partecipazione umana ai processi produttivi, è argomento economico fin dalla rivoluzione industriale. In genere, il dibattito verte sulla possibilità che l’automazione porti alla disoccupazione di massa. Riconosciuta,…

Automation, the reduction and/or removal of human participation in processes and procedures, has been a topic of economic discussion since the Industrial Revolution. The general dispute has been about whether or not automation will lead to mass unemployment. Acknowledging but passing over the primitivist perspective, in the 20th and 21st century, two camps have taken…

Gavin Mueller’s recent article for the boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” is a Marxist critique of what Mueller describes as “Digital Proudhonism,” a catchall term for those who believe that technology is lowering class barriers. Digital Proudhonism is not a formal ideology but rather an undercurrent expressed by a variety of individuals from all…

Much of the contemporary debate in libertarian circles about free speech and anti-fascist activism takes the form of asking whether libertarians should support or oppose the various actors operating under the name “antifa.” I find this framing of the issue inadequate and artificially limiting. First and foremost, it conflates the question of whether libertarians should…

Anarchists tend to pose our core differences with marxists in terms of degrees of radicalism or rootedness. One of the classic ways this gets stated is that marxism deals with the political whereas we deal with the ethical. These terms to the disagreement, once posed, are almost always immediately acknowledged and indeed embraced by both…

At some point in the late fifties or early sixties, Pacifica Radio’s Charlie Hayden interviewed the inimitable Robert Anton Wilson on all things anarchism. Wilson waxes poetic on anarchism’s foundations and answers some challenging questions from a presumable skeptic in Hayden. While the exact date of the interview is unknown, the early to mid-sixties appear…

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…

Derek Wall’s Response to Kevin Carson. My background is in ecosocialism. I am not an anarchist; in fact, I am currently International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. I would see ecosocialism as rooted in Marxist thought. So unsurprisingly I would tend to argue that non-capitalist markets tend to lead to the…

Introduction by Chad Nelson Involvement in the anarchist movement sometimes feels like a futile enterprise. How to get from here to there in a “real” world dominated by statists and authoritarians is a dilemma that confounds even the most sure-footed of anarchists. And when attaching oneself to an anarchist organization, it’s easy to be pessimistic…