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…

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now is a fantastic survey of decentralized anti-capitalist projects across the globe. In particular, they use the examples of Unitierra—“a new form of university”—and the Zapatistas in Mexico to identify the difference between “scaling up” and…

I cannot remember when I last saw a Von Dutch hat. I remember being offended twenty years ago, when for a time they were all over the place, on the heads of people imitating at third hand the ironic poses of other people who had never heard of Kenny Howard; who had no idea who…

[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…

I have a saying that goes something like: ‘I don’t trust anybody who thinks taxation is theft but profit isn’t.’ The former is a common sentiment among libertarians left and right, who argue, like Michael Huemer, that “[w]hen the government ‘taxes’ citizens, what this means is that the government demands money from each citizen, under…

If one’s goal is to have productive exchanges when the word capitalism is thrown into play, they must stop doing two things: naively assuming people are more or less on the same page when the term is used; and suggesting that one or another meaning of the word is completely wrong. Some use the term…

It’s never been easy to know what to make of self-styled free-marketers who see global capitalism as a real-life instantiation of their values. Given the deep and decisive role of state violence in the creation of global capitalism, they’re either unaware of the basic facts, and so unqualified for their positions, or engaged in a…

One of the central claims of capitalism is that it is the best system to bring supply and demand together; when people need a good or service, the capitalist market will provide. However, the reality of the situation can be quite the opposite. An excellent example of this—from my perspective as a lay person whose…

To read Proudhon, to many non-mutualist thinkers beyond anarchist academia, is laughable. Anarchist communists will insist that Bakunin, Kropotkin and Bookchin expand on Proudhon, rendering the original mutualist promise as empty (ironic considering the massive amount Bakunin took directly from Proudhon.) Anarchist capitalists insist that his theories were flawed, socialist, and/or didn’t rely on the…

From the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to today (and likely to continue with the sudden rise of Omicron), we—speaking particularly of the U.S.—have seen a massive disruption in global supply chains. The obvious (and correct) answer to ‘why?’  is that labor is the basis of society, and when it—particularly that part involved in moving…

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,…

It’s best to start this piece off by admitting that I am not particularly tech-savvy. I am a cheerleader for open-source, peer-to-peer, decentralized, appropriate, etc. technology, but, otherwise, I am only about as knowledgeable about this stuff as your average zoomer [1]. However, some things in the technological and digital world appear quite obvious to…

The Automotive Free Clinic is starting a right to repair campaign in Alabama in coalition with a number of different organizations. Modern equipment such as passenger vehicles, semi trucks, and farm equipment are controlled electronically by proprietary software. Often, this software is not made available to the public, meaning that only dealerships and authorized repair…

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…

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…

Right-libertarian apologists for capitalism seem to have a thing about using holidays as vehicles for their talking points. Every Thanksgiving, Reason trots out John Stossel’s ahistorical buncombe about how communism almost killed the Pilgrims before private property saved them from starvation (despite my debunking it every year). On Christmas, we get apologetics for Ebenezer Scrooge,…

Ni Kevin Carson. Orihinal na artikulo: Who owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism, Setyembre 12, 2012. Salin ni Raj. May magandang kasabihan tungkol sa kung paano gumagana ang kapitalismo sa buhay natin (Hindi ko maalala kung sinong nagpauso noon, pero sa tingin ko si Noam Chomsky): “Lugi para sa lahat, kita para…

The degree to which the US trade embargo on Cuba has affected the economy of that country has been a matter of recent debate. I’m not concerned directly with Cuba here, but with the nature of what neoliberal ideology calls “free trade” more generally — of which an interesting discussion erupted as an offshoot of…

A No-Government Doctrine for the 21st Century Almost everyone today accepts at least one utopian idea: that slavery is so morally unacceptable that the practice must be stomped out wherever found, and any institution that depends upon it must immediately crumble. It’s probably even an understatement to just say people accept that idea. It’s the…