At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow comments on libertarian elitists like Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan, who argue for restricting the franchise because most people “Just Don’t Understand Economics”:  When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths…

Recently on Facebook, left-libertarian activist Brianna Coyle posted: Radical idea: The amount of freedom someone has in their life shouldn’t be dependent on how much money they have, or whether or not they own property. “Freedom of association” in the context of property rights is a privilege afforded only to those who own property. Freedom…

The Woke Nightmare That Doesn’t End! It’s in commercials! It’s on storefronts! It’s on social media, on television shows and streaming platforms! We may not be able to define what “woke” is, but, dammit! Like any obscenity, we know it when we see it! They’re ramming it down our throats and shoving it up our…

At the Hampton Institute, Shi Sanyazi argues that “Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not ‘Supply and Demand’”:  “The truth is that… our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand.  I know what they mean, of course. In the economic discourse between…

Steven Greenhut, apparently filling in for Christian Britschgi as Reason’s resident landlord whisperer, recently voiced his concern that “The COVID-19 Pandemic Permanently Damaged Property Rights.”  I know proppity is a word to conjure with among right-libertarians. From my anarchist perspective, the term — as opposed to possession — carries far less weight. But I regard…

Infantile Radicalism A mature person is one who has outgrown childish emotional impulses. He has learnt about himself and his environment thru personal experience, and has become able to control his emotional feelings in a rational manner. He has emerged from the sheltered dream world of childhood and been weaned to face reality. His reactions…

Di Kevin Carson. Articolo originale pubblicato il 26 aprile 2016 con il titolo Capitalism Comes in Many Flavors? Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. In un recente commento pubblicato sul Washington Post dal titolo La crisi d’identità del capitalismo americano (26 maggio 2016), Steven Pearlstein fa una tassonomia del  capitalismo che, a suo dire, “esiste in tante…

David Harvey. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (London and New York: Verso, 2023). David Harvey may be familiar to some from his background as a Marxist geographer focusing on neoliberalism and uneven development, or for his development of Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” concept. The Grundrisse itself amounts, more or less, to a voluminous…

Psychological Motives Behind Collectivism Collectivism is a doctrine of the “crowd mind”, a philosophy of incompetency. To those who have ever been the losers in the unequal, privileged, and despotic struggle for existence, who have not felt the glory and satisfaction of conquering obstacles and the achievement of aims, the thought of peace and security…

Karl Widerquist’s “A Dilemma for Libertarianism” deserves to be better known. It exposes a contradiction in natural rights libertarianism, a set of principles held by those who seek to build a capitalist political philosophy on the basis of property rights.  These principles typically include: That individuals can legitimately own property if the property was justly…

Throughout the world, the word “anarchism” has a variety of meanings. When most people think of “anarchism,” the first things that come to their mind are fire-setting bomb throwers and masked rioters smashing Starbucks and McDonald’s windows. In the popular imagination, anarchism is synonymous with chaos. Armed with this image of anarchism as a nihilistic,…

I just finished reading The Conquest of Bread by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). The book inspired Catalonia syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War, Magonism in Mexico, and the Occupy movement but still… I wasn’t expecting anything, I thought I’d be very bored because the book was written in 1892, I was sure it…

Ensayo escrito por Kevin Carson. Título original: Hayek’s Fatal Conceit Versión en español realizada por Kathiana Thomas • Versión pdf A4 • • Versión pdf compaginado • Oskar Lange es recordado por haber dicho, durante los debates acerca del argumento del cálculo económico de Ludwing von Mises, que se debería erigir una estatua de Mises…

La Tragedia della Proprietà Privata e la Farsa della sua Difesa Saggio di Kevin Carson. Pubblicato originariamente il 19 agosto 2020. Titolo originale: Capitalist Nursery Fables: The Tragedy of Private Property, and the Farce of Its Defense. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Scarica qui la versione pdf Introduzione Da quando è comparsa la società di classe,…

Two years ago, I gave a presentation titled “Prerequisites for Freedom: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective” to a philosophy discussion group, in which I talked about the connection between thick libertarianism and 19th century North American individualist anarchism and how progressive and liberatory values are necessary for genuine and necessarily anti-capitalist individualism. For the uninitiated, the…

View or download a PDF copy of Eric Fleischmann’s C4SS Study here: Historical Materialism: A Brief Overview and Left-Libertarian Reinterpretation Introduction One of the most famous theories forwarded by Karl Marx is that of historical materialism—although Marx himself apparently never used that exact term in his work [1]. To put it succinctly, Merriam-Webster defines historical…

Is anarcho-capitalism a form of anarchism? The resounding cry from anarchists of all stripes—including myself—is NO! The debate rages on, but two questions are raised by this claim: why isn’t it anarchism and if it isn’t anarchism then what is it? I believe the answers are: because it fails to meet the deeper commitments of…

There is an expression in Afrikaans, om die dam onder die eend uit te ruk. Translated literally, it means “to pluck the pond out from under the duck,” to take a thing so far that it begins to miss its own point. The expression springs to mind because an obsession with groups of people literally…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Preface  This article was originally composed as a series of posts on Facebook; I prefaced my series with the warning: “I have no use for being in anyone’s fan club, whether the U.S. libertarian/classical liberal communities, the Democratic Party,…

 View or download a PDF copy of Joseph Parampathu’s C4SS Study here: Prison Labor: Capitalism Without Markets, Understanding the Economics of Totalitarian Institutions Abstract Prison labor remains a paradox in many ways. Simultaneously sparsely studied or recorded, and ubiquitous; derided by labor unions and free workers as unfair competition and lauded by businesses as…