The Money Problem In the Light of Liberty Many thoughtful people are more and more aware that industrial depressions are caused chiefly by faulty control of money and credit. Most “reformers,” or those who recommend measures to remedy this, turn to government for issue and control of money. It is my purpose here to briefly…
Money and Your Freedom Dear Ron and Laura: Don has been East for a while and dropped in last night. Among other things he brought me up to date on your thinking and plants. I knew that my blast, when I was out to see you, would upset you. But I thought [it] worth while…
Excerpts From a Letter to a Friend Apropos your series of articles on Human Rights: There was a University of Chicago “professor” who wrote a book entitled Might is Right, under the pseudonym of “Ragnar Redbeard.” In it he maintained that life is essentially a battle in which “to the victor belonged the spoils,” and…
Economics of Liberty The following purports to be a clear and concise outline of libertarian economic theory. Liberty means to be free from as well as free to do. To be free means to be independent—not forced interdependence. Independence implies exclusion, hence a libertarian economy will involve property rights. Free exchange may be made by…
Reflections on Socio-Economic Evolution Aside from various forms of robbery, legal and illegal, there are three methods by which humans get sustenance in their relations with others—parasitism, benevolence, and reciprocity. Parasitism is the inescapable relation between mother and child which is absolutely essential for the prolongation of life. It is characterized by consuming what one…
Anarchism Applied to Economics Value is the exchange equivalency of something measured in terms of another thing. The fundamental quality upon which value depends is utility in satisfying desire. In economics, utility doesn’t mean the ‘real’ or ‘actual’ ability of a thing to accomplish or assist in accomplishing a result, but means the human estimate…
Laurance Labadie (1898-1975)—son of anarchist, labor organizer, and Greenbacker Jo Labadie—was a grouchy and hermetic man of a tradition that he felt had been left behind by so-called ‘progress’ and who kept unusual and, at times, deplorable company (years after his death, his friend James J. Martin would even take justifying anti-war positions to the…
Eric Fleischmann, Announcing: The Laurance Labadie Archival Project, October 26th, 2021. Tłumaczenie: Michał Leon Ślużyński. Laurance Labadie (1898-1975) – syn anarchisty, działacza związkowego i Greenbackera Jo Labadie’ego – był zrzędliwym i trudnym człowiekiem. Cenił tradycję, którą uważał za niesłusznie odrzuconą w imię postępu, i obracał się w specyficznych, czasem gorszących kręgach (wiele lat po śmierci Labadiego,…
Throughout my archiving of Laurance Labadie’s works, I have noticed he has unique spellings of a number of words. In particular, he spells “Kropotkin” (Кропо́ткин) with an “e” at the end: “Kropotkine.” For example, he writes in “Objections to Communism:” Most communist-anarchists are followers of Kropotkine, who showed that mutual aid was a factor in…
I am not a[n official] historian. I have never worked professionally in any field of historical studies. Difficulty in the details of the Laurance Labadie Archival Project is therefore bound to happen, with the latest conundrum being how the surname Labadie is pronounced. In my recent appearance on Mutual Exchange Radio, I used the pronunciation…
Ben Burgis and the Analytical Marxist Critique of Dialectics The title of this essay recalls the Congressional hearing that took place on December 5, 2023, in which Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, seemed to dodge difficult questions by uttering the phrase “it depends on the context.” The phrase immediately became meme-able, even the…
Eric F. Artículo original: A History of Timebanking, del 26 de julio de 2023. Traducido al español por Vince Cerberus. Extraído de “Paciencia y tiempo: bancos de tiempo y redes autoorganizadas de atención a personas mayores en Greater Portland, ME” Las raíces de los bancos de tiempo se pueden encontrar en lo que los primeros economistas de…
Escrito por Robert Anton Wilson. Artículo original: The Semantics of “Good” and “Evil”, del 12 de diciembre de 2015. Traducido al español por Vince Cerberus. La semántica del “bien” y el “mal” de Robert Anton Wilson El difunto Laurance Labadie me contó una vez una parábola sobre un rey que decidió que cada vez que se encontrara…
The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor. As Ricardo writes: In speaking then of commodities, of their…
Escrito por Eric F. Artigo original: In Lieu of Free Banking, do 23 de maio de 2023. Traduzido por Gabriel Camargo. Em círculos libertários e anarquistas de mercado, o conceito de sistema bancário livre sempre foi um importante ideal para uma genuinamente livre e saudável sociedade competitiva. Isso implica em um sistema monetário no qual…
In my previous article “In Lieu of Free Banking,” I outline the mutualist and individualist anarchist arguments for free and mutual banking, its potential ability to empower labor, and, briefly, some immediate proxies available via credit unions and alternative currencies. But I also point to Laurance Labadie’s assessment of Benjamin Tucker’s (and later his own)…
C4SS Editing Coordinator Eric Fleischmann was recently featured on the Non-Serviam podcast. The discussion covers a broad range of topics from to Marxism and historical materialism to Laurance Labadie and the history of free-market-anti-capitalism to agorism and its left-wing fundamentals. From the Non-Serviam Episode Description: Eric Fleischmann (he/they) is an anarchist indebted to communistic and continental…
In libertarian and market anarchist circles, the concept of free banking has always been an important ideal for a genuinely free and healthily competitive society. This entails a monetary system where banks not only hold currency but can issue their own currency or banknotes without the need for a centralized treasury. As such, the supply…
Eric Fleischmann. Artículo original: On the Labor Theory(s) of Value, del 4 de septiembre de 2022. Traducido al español por Camila Figueroa. La teoría laboral del valor o TVL es, según Wikipedia, “una teoría del valor que sostiene que el valor económico de un bien o servicio está determinado por la cantidad total de “trabajo…
De Eric Fleischmann. Artículo original: A Brief Look Back at Ithaca HOURS, del 23 de julio de 2022. Traducido al español por Camila Figueroa. Una de las monedas comunitarias más famosas de Estados Unidos es Ithaca HOURS, por lo que un repaso a su historia, función y eficacia parece apropiado en cualquier momento. Como cuenta…
