Radley Balko (2013). “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” New York: PublicAffairs This book was a timely read after the last book I reviewed for C4SS, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall. Tyranny Comes Home gives a “macro” overview of the broader policy implications of U.S. military adventurism, while…

Stevphen Shukaitis. “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” Sociological Review 57 Suppl (2009). In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees speculative fiction about life and travel in outer space as a form…

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016). I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.)….

C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “Floating Through New York’s Underground Economy,” — a review of Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy, by Sudhir Venkatesh. It is read by Athena Roberts and edited by Tony Dreher. Readers with libertarian, voluntarist or anti-prohibitionist leanings will be simultaneously pleased…

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy, by Sudhir Venkatesh Penguin Press (2013) Sudhir Venkatesh’s Floating City documents the author’s time in 21st century New York among the city’s “hustlers, strivers, dealers (and) call girls,” as one of the book’s alternate subtitles describes it. The book is largely a…

Chris Dillow, a heterodox economist who owns Stumbling and Mumbling blog, attacks managerialism from a position decidedly on the Left. But it’s a Left that’s friendly to markets, decentralism, and self-management, and hostile to the New Class version of bureaucratic socialism that dominated Britain from the Webbs to Harold Wilson. The central focus of Dillow’s critique of…

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

Welcome to the second edition of my libertarian leftist weekly review! There are many exciting new pieces to share. I will be sending 30 a week. Let’s get started. A hot topic of late has been the potential war with Syria. Here are some articles addressing it from an anti-war/anti-imperialist perspective: 1. Rob Urie talks…

Welcome! This is my first weekly review. In the tradition of the individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, it will be edited to fit the editor. The political-cultural-economic angle will be anti-state, anti-authoritarian, left-wing market anarchist, anti-imperialist, libertarian, and pro-sex feminist. Let us begin with a rundown of some fantastic foreign policy related pieces: 1. Sean Scallon discusses…