Marcus Brancaglione. Lessons from the Practice of Basic Income: A Compendium of Writings and Data. Edited by Bruna Augusto. Translated by Monica Puntel, Leonardo Puntel, Carolina Fisher (São Paulo, 2016). This is a collection of writings by Marcus Brancaglione. Brancaglione is President of ReCivitas (Institute for the Revitalization of Citizenship); Bruna Augusto, who edited the…

This is the second part in a series. Be sure to check out parts 1, 3, 4 and 5. As radical leftists, we tend to favor looking at the bigger picture. We favor radical change in the world around us and it is with that goal in mind and many lifetimes worth of collective analysis that we tend…

Guy Standing. The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback Press, 2016). I looked forward to reading this book based on previous readings of Guy Standing’s work, based on his status as both a labor organizer and a theorist of the precariat’s role in the economy. I wasn’t disappointed….

There’s a lot of disagreement in American politics — from Berniecrats, to the centrist neoliberal establishment, to right-libertarians, to nationalist reactionaries like Trump and his followers — on TPP and other trade agreements. But there’s one thing they all agree on: calling it “free trade.” And they’re all wrong. At Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is…

If you are interested enough to read this, you might as well just watch the movie. Steal This Film is available for free on Youtube and other locations on the internet and is less than an hour and twenty minutes in length. The film was created by a group calling itself the League of Noble Peers, for the…

In what seems to be becoming an annual tradition, neoconservative grey eminence Bill Kristol tweeted in December 18, “When I first saw Star Wars in 1977, I was inclined to root for the empire. 25 years later, @JVLast proved me right.” Kristol authored a similar series of tweets in October of last year, and praised…

Erik Olin Wright. Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010). Although this book covers much of the same ground, and does much of the same work, as autonomist and post-capitalist theories like Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth and Mason’s Postcapitalism, Olin-Wright comes from the entirely different tradition of analytical Marxism. This school approaches Marxist…

There is a general feeling in the academic world: things could be done in a much better way. But what exactly has gone wrong? I would argue the main problem is that we have allowed ‘irrational authority’ (also known as hierarchy) to take over reason and knowledge. To start, let me differentiate between rational and…

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…