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…
De Kevin Carson. Artigo original: “Intellectual Property” Keeps Right On Killing. Traduzido para o português por Gabriel Serpa. Os habituais apologistas das grandes empresas do agronegócio, como o colaborador da revista Reason, Ron Bailey, citam estudos que demonstram a improbabilidade de o glifosato, ingrediente ativo do herbicidaRoundup, causar câncer nas concentrações que aparecem em produtos de supermercado….
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…
First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their…
An Interview With Kevin Carson Here we bring the second part of the interview with Kevin Carson, made by Diego Avila and Luis R. Vera. To access the first part click here. In this part, we finish with the questions related to the counter-economy and Venezuela as other parts of Latin America, as well as…
[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this and this episode of The Enragés] Mastering most things humans do requires lifetimes of practice. Woodworking, gardening, and painting are just a few crafts whose histories stretch back thousands of years. But modern telecommunication, the act of communicating nearly instantaneously with someone from afar,…
Traducción al español: La fatal arrogancia de Hayek View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s C4SS Study: Hayek’s Fatal Conceit Oskar Lange famously said, against the background of the debates over Ludwig von Mises’ economic calculation argument, that a statue of Mises should be erected in the planning ministry of a future socialist…
(Originally published at Cato Unbound on November 10, 2008) Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge? No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare….
(Originally published by Rad Geek People’s Daily on May 29, 2008) Here’s a great post from a bit more than a year ago at Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26), which I just got around to reading: I was responding to this key point: [P]eer production isn’t an assault on the principles of a free society, but an extension of…
A little over 100 years since anarchists, socialists, communists, libertarians, and radical unionists in the so-called united states successfully won the long, difficult, and bloody battle for the eight hour workday, we are still overworked and underpaid despite technological advancements necessitating less and less labor to maintain the same quality of life. To quote Bertrand…
