At Reason, editor Nick Gillespie interviews Dan Griswold of the Mercatus Center (“Donald Trump and the End of Free Trade,” Nov. 21) on Trump’s likely abandonment of TPP and his trade policies in general. Trump’s views on economics, like his views on everything else, are obviously nonsense; but they’re not nonsense because TPP embodies “free…
Most of the hatred directed at Center for a Stateless Society these days comes from the paleo-conservatives at Mises.org and LewRockwell.com, and their almost indistinguishable friends on the alt.right. So it’s kind of refreshing to get some negative attention from the Old Left for a change — namely, the anarcho-syndicalists at Workers’ Solidarity Alliance (Geoff…
As my C4SS comrade Charles Johnson has pointed out, circumventing state authority and capitalist monopoly is far more cost-effective than lobbying and organizing to reform the law. This is confirmed, once again, by news of open-source hardware projects that offer much cheaper versions of two outrageously expensive medical devices: the EpiPen and the MRI machine….
Peter Frase. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2016). Frase’s book builds on Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction a hundred years ago in the Junius Pamphlets that “[b]ourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Specifically, he sketches — in very broad strokes — two versions of…
As structures of domination in our society increasingly reveal their true faces, the case for anarchy has never been stronger and the need for anarchy never clearer. The war machine marches on, raining down death on noncombatants and breeding terrorists. The surveillance state expands its reach. Police violence—against ethnic minorities, against members of marginal and…
If you consider yourself a centrist, you’re being played. (I assume I’m addressing ordinary people here who pride themselves on being one of the “adults in the room,” and not members of the establishments of either major party, leading figures in the military-industrial complex, affiliates of mainstream think tanks like Brookings, or talking heads like…
The capitalist market system is defined by the strictures of wage labour relations and the regulatory mechanisms, which are the used for the valorisation of capital and the commodity production which maintains, expands and homogenises this valorisation. These are the inevitable products of capitalist exchange relations and the creation of a general equivalence in which…
While it is true that syndicalism and illegalism can diverge from and even sometimes butt heads with agorism, there seems to be much use in such alliances. It was within this spirit that Nathan Goodman offered critiques of each possible tactic and alliance and while some of the points speak for themselves, others require some…
Nicholas Hildyard. Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). I discovered Nicholas Hildyard’s work at Corner House in 2005, and was heavily influenced by it. thecornerhouse.org.uk He’s one of the best writers around on the false pretensions of so-called “free market” policies like privatization and deregulation in the…
I am generally favorable to agorism, direct action, and other anarchist strategies that emphasize building the new world in the shell of the old. However, I recognize that there are no panaceas. All strategies have costs and benefits, and strategies for social change may have serious pitfalls and unintended consequences. This essay employs some basic…
Utilizing markets to combat unethical business practices is a long tradition amongst activists from various ideologies. Whereas agorism seeks to combat cronyist practices of utilizing corporate welfare, tax breaks, lobbying, intellectual property laws, and other special government granted privileges to maintain economic status and even monopoly over certain products or ideas as well as other…
Agorism is the philosophy of counter-economic activity eventually overcoming the statist economic consensus. It’s not simply black market activity, but rather a whole alternative economy that operates just below the surface of state capitalism. While seen by some (including Rothbard) as a niche element to the state’s leviathan, Konkin himself noted that the counter economy…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) on constitutonal grounds. According to the suit, that section — which criminalizes not only the circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but criminalizes the sharing of information about how to do it — is a violation of…
The only function of “intellectual property” is to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance — to take goods that, thanks to the advance of human knowledge, should naturally be getting cheaper, and make them artificially expensive. This is nowhere more evident than in the war corporations are fighting against their own customers’ right to…
During one of the many civil wars between patricians and plebians that racked the early Roman Republic in Livy’s account, Menenius Agrippa — a spokesman for the oligarchy that had enclosed the common lands and reduced the Latin peasantry to tenant status and debt peonage — defended the privileges of the landed aristocracy with a…
The Communard Manifesto (Las Indias, May 9, 2016). Translated by Level Translation. By way of background, the Communard Manifesto comes out of the Las Indias Cooperative Group, which is a real-world venture in establishing a phyle — a non-territorial networked economic support platform — of the kind that Las Indias’s David de Ugarte described theoretically…
Just this past May, Elsevier — the most notorious of the price-gouging proprietary academic publishing crime families — acquired the open-access academic repository SSRN. That’s right — a publisher that charges $30 to access 30-year-old papers is closing off free legal alternatives while simultaneously whining about sharing sites like Sci-Hub. Meanwhile, a Science magazine survey…
The heat of a presidential election campaign is a good time to reflect on the old Howard Zinn quote about voting: “Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But what really matters, for building a genuinely just…
On June 28th 2016 history was made when not only one but two openly transgender candidates won their respective congressional primaries. The victories were even more momentous given the current climate and opinions about the way that trans folks should live their lives. Whether it is about which restrooms they use, the protections they do…
Eugene W. Holland. Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Holland’s work is in the same general autonomist tradition of analysis as Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx, and the concept of “Exodus” as developed in Negri’s and Hardt’s Commonwealth. The general idea of Exodus is that, when technology…
