A persistent theme in popular culture, when it comes to issues of technological progress and the future, is that the super-rich will be the main beneficiaries of new technology. Billionaires with artificially augmented lifespans will retreat into their gated communities and anarcho-capitalist enclaves; the rest of us will live lives nasty, brutish and short, subject…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Wage Slavery and Sweatshops as Free Enterprise?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract. A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Labor Struggle in a Free Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so…

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it, In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that…

Arriva il 2015 e niente auto volanti. E la tranquillità, la sicurezza economica che, al di là dei balocchi, era la parte più seducente dell’anno 2015 in Ritorno al Futuro – Parte II? Perché mancano, così come mancano i fax e i CD? E perché, nel cinquantesimo anniversario della Fiera Internazionale del 1964-65, il futuro…

It’s 2015. Has anyone seen our flying cars? How about the tranquility and economic security that, beyond the cool gadgetry, created the appeal of the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II? Why do they seem as absent as its faxes and laserdiscs? And why, midway through the half-century anniversary of the 1964-1965 World’s Fair,…

On NAASN, an email list for anarchist academics, Wayne Price (whose review of my book I previously replied to here) responded to someone else’s  proposal to “abolish the state and see if capitalism survives until sunrise” as follows: [This is] what most people probably think anarchists advocate: society just as it is but with no…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The grain of truth in the otherwise ludicrous statist mantra that the financial crisis was caused by “lack of regulation” is that when you pass regulation…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Monopoly Privilege as “Individual Rights”” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. Market anarchists follow a tradition of libertarian socialism inaugurated by radicals like Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker, for whom capitalism was something very different from a legitimate free market. Examining the economic system of their day, they…

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010). Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s. Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner…

Molly Sauter. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014). “The aim of this work,” Sauter writes, “is to place DDoS [distributed denial of service] actions… in a historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and…

Dall’istituzione conservatrice American Enterprise Institute arriva un’altra difesa dello sfruttamento dei lavoratori. A farlo è il professor Mark J. Perry, autodefinitosi difensore della libertà e del libero mercato. In realtà la sua è più che una difesa; è una raccolta selezionata di citazioni e aneddoti che inneggiano alle fabbriche che sfruttano i lavoratori come una…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Try as he might, Mises could not exempt the capitalist corporation from the problem of bureaucracy. One cannot define bureaucracy out of existence, or overcome the problem of distributed knowledge,…

Last year at Salon Michael Lind asked “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (June 4): “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?” He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of…

Major political parties in the United Kingdom are so far divorced from market anarchism as to render them a homogeneous mass of irrelevance. That said, it’s worth examining the policy announcements in Wednesday’s Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne, if only to clarify the anarchist position and provide a critique of what many Brits incorrectly…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Paul Krugman: “Leave Obama Alone”” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. http://youtu.be/eBs0x9ieCp8 Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside. Krugman believes that the supposedly…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Blue or Red, They’re All About the Green” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. To glimpse the true relationship between big business and the State, we need only briefly examine the data on how the political action committees (PACs) of the nation’s largest and most influential companies…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Obama to GOP: Our Billionaires are Better Than Yours!” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. That’s not to say that the plutocratic constituencies of the two parties are identical, or that life might not be more tolerable for working people under one party’s agenda than the other’s. But…

About six months ago, when Uber was first becoming a visible national controversy, I wrote a column (“One Cheer for Uber and Lyft” C4SS, May 16, 2014) in which I argued that Uber, despite being a genuine example of neither peer-to-peer (p2p) nor sharing, was a step in the right direction because it offered at…

The conservative American Enterprise Institute offers yet another defense of sweatshops from a self-styled advocate of liberty and free markets, Professor Mark J. Perry. Indeed it is more than just a defense; it’s a selective compilation of quotes and anecdotes hailing sweatshops as perfectly praiseworthy routes out of poverty. Typical free market defenses of sweatshops focus…