Center for a Stateless Society

Anarcho-“Capitalism” is Impossible Anna Morgenstern on words and their meanings.

"Under anarchism, mass accumulation and concentration of capital is impossible. Without concentration of capital, wage slavery is impossible. And without wage slavery, there’s nothing most people would recognize as 'capitalism.'" - Anna Morgenstern

c4ss.org/content/4043

End War by Ending the State D'Amato: To be consistently and undeviatingly anti-war means to be anti-state.

"To reject war and the state, in turn, is to favor a safer world, not the treacherous, entropic nightmare prophesied by today’s flag-bearers of military adventurism." - David D'Amato

c4ss.org/content/9610

Progressive Border Patrol This is the second part of the series called “Nice Cops and Other Cryptids” exploring apologism for prominent agents of the state. Part 1, “Nice Cops” can be found here. Most people don’t realize the ...

"Open migration and ending the war on drugs are the quickest paths to further destabilizing the horrifying drug cartels' oligopoly of violence." - Abbey Bee

c4ss.org/content/49833

"What if Newton had claimed to own calculus, or the law of gravity? Would we have to pay a fee to his estate every time we used one of the principles he discovered?" - Roderick Long

c4ss.org/content/14857

The Last Person in the Room Must Close the Door: Hayek in the Age of Computing There is a common joke in computing circles to announce at the beginning of a course that “The last person in the room must close the door.” Though at first blush the request seems reasonable, this is...

"Computing power, no matter how capable, will never be able to appropriately manage resource allocation nor plan the economy. " - Jocheved Matt

c4ss.org/content/50986

Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin What Kind of Commitment Is Libertarianism?

"Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society." - Charles Johnson

c4ss.org/content/12460

No, Stossel. The Pilgrims Were Starved by a Corporation, Not by Communism. Each year at this time somebody in the right-libertarian world, reenacting an obligatory Thanksgiving ritual, drags out the old chestnut about the Pilgrims at Plymouth almost starving from “communism”...

"What the received version of the Plymouth story leaves out is that the role of the 'collective farm' in the little drama is played not by the naive Puritan zealots seeking to 'hold all things in common' but by a private corporation." - @kevincarson1.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/22792

The Internet was always anarchist, so anarchists must learn to become responsible for operating it The fundamental tenet of anarchism is the resistance to an Archos, Greek for “master.” To advocate for anarchism is to position oneself in opposition to a master, i.e., to claim the fundamental right ...

"Many engineers believed this approach was too chaotic to succeed. How could a system of coordination function with no command center? It would be pure anarchy!" - Tech Learning Collective

c4ss.org/content/53593

Bill Cosby, Rape Culture and Individual Responsibility On July 26th, 35 of Bill Cosby’s rape victims came forward to discuss their rapes and the culture that ignored their cries for help. A serial rapist going uncharged for years due to celebrity is indic...

"We owe it to ourselves to create a world in which rapists are held accountable for their actions and a culture in which human rights violations like rape are viewed as the atrocities they are." - @peacenotpeas.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/39385

Autonomy and Action “By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.” – Attributed to...

"I want to live in a world of peaceful, spontaneous experimentation, where individuals can shape their own political environment; a world with an array of self-actualized communities that create their own social and economic norms." - Joel Williamson

c4ss.org/content/45672

From Stirner to Mussolini Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced h...

"There is, I believe, a substantive sense in which fascism really did emerge from (individualist) anarchism, and that’s as our antithesis." - @rechelon.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/56480

Where Are We At Now? My Assessment When I wrote my original piece after the election and before Trump took office, I somewhat underestimated how rapid and extensive his power grabs would be. I very badly underestimated ho...

"What Trump has in mind is clearly a consolidation of power on the model of Hungary’s Victor Orban; but he’s doing everything completely in the wrong order, and as ineptly as humanly possible." - @kevincarson1.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/60723

Radical Liberalism: The Soul of Libertarianism Libertarianism has lost sight of its soul. This has grown clearer and clearer since Donald Trump announced his improbable campaign for President a little over two years ago. His particular brand of po...

"This gives us the radical liberal’s core philosophy of social change: whenever possible, refuse to submit, and enable others to do the same." - @jasonleebyas.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/49939

The Age-Old Question: Is Anarcho-Capitalism Anarchism? 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 anarc...

"So many anarcho-capitalists and other right-libertarians are falling prey to the allure of fascism, monarchism, white nationalism, and other forms of reactionary authoritarianism." - Eric F.

c4ss.org/content/56712

Abolition: An Economist’s Perspective [Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] It may seem strange for an economist to write about abolition. After all, economists focus on choices at the...

"Police, prison guards, border patrol agents, soldiers, and other agents of the state beat, choke, shoot, murder, harass, berate, humiliate, assault, and rape people all too often. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong. It’s unacceptable." - @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/54883

When Owning the Libs Trumps Fighting Fascism Recently Beth, an online anarchist friend, commented that “people’s models for genocide are wrong.” Genocide “rarely looks like the Holocaust,” involving the killing of “thousands and millions in camp...

"In stressing the unique level of the fascist threat today, we do not deny that it is an outgrowth of strong racist, patriarchal, and authoritarian currents which have existed throughout the country’s history." - @kevincarson1.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/60609

Night of the Living ‘Things’: Zombie Archaeology If capitalism is good at anything, it is making things. I mean “things” not in an ontological or otherwise formal sense but more in the manner that declutter gurus use it: general assorted human-made ...

"Instead of us brushing aside the dust of ages to reveal our own past, artifacts rise from the grave—bursting forth and dragging our history back to us. This is where the zombification comes into play." - Anon

c4ss.org/content/51845

Self-Employment, Workplace Democracy, and Moral Theory What Matt Zwolinski Gets Wrong About Left-Libertarianism Over at The Bleeding Heart Libertarian,1 Matt Zwolinski has a recent post about what we left libertarians get right and get wrong. According to...

"While hierarchical firms do result in fewer transaction costs, this comes at the expense of stifling the localized and tacit knowledge that workers have in guiding the firm." - @zacharywoodman.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/60672

Alienation, Deprivation, and Play In trying to understand the moral paralysis that undermines the revolutionary energy so essential to our collective survival—an energy that has no real place within the narrow ideological confines of ...

"The very logic of production now permeates all aspects of life, turning even our emotions and most private experiences into commodities in the digital marketplace." - Alexander Migursky

c4ss.org/content/60836

Book Review: Red Moon I had Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon on my Goodreads to-read list for a long time, mainly because I’m a fan of his other work and the title sounded evocative. But I put off reading it time and again ...

"'Revolution' is not an event, but an ongoing process that never ends." - @kevincarson1.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/60834

Why Myanmar’s Military Dictatorships are Fascist Regimes The term “fascism,” as George Orwell once cautioned, has often been diluted, losing its precise meaning and becoming a generic slur. This has led to its misapplication, where its core ideology is over...

"Fascism thus emerged from a synthesis of socialist and nationalist ideas, seeking to attract a mass following by prioritizing the nation over internationalist solidarity." - Hein Htet Kyaw

c4ss.org/content/60832

Proudhon on Democracy P-J Proudhon’s understanding of democracy is a classic example of the concerns about the representative democratic process which many classical liberals expressed. The following was written a few week...

"Democracy, like monarchy, after having posed as its principle the sovereignty of the People, ends with a declaration of the incapacity of the People!" - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

c4ss.org/content/43565

C4SS Panelists on Borders, Liberty, Equality, and Anarchy The Markets and Society Conference this weekend (October 17-20) in Falls Church, Virginia will feature many interesting panels on topics from war to borders to trade to public choice to feminism to AI...

Hear from C4SS panelists @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social, @jasonleebyas.bsky.social, Roderick Long, @corymassimino.bsky.social, and Keith Taylor this weekend at the Markets and Society Conference. More details below👇

c4ss.org/content/60826

The Free Market as Class Warfare A recent story on the British elections reports on a letter warning voters that a Labour government would prove harmful to the country’s economic recovery. Endorsed by leaders in Britain’s business co...

"Maybe the consistent defenders of open competition, private property, and individual sovereignty belong with the radical left, committed to challenging the present economic system and vindicating the rights of the poor and underprivileged." - David D'Amato

c4ss.org/content/37116

The Carnage in the Middle of the Road Anthony Gregory: They must make their decision: liberal means through liberal ends or conservative means through conservative ends. Dancing in the center divide is bound to get someone killed.

"The state is about privilege. It is about power. It is about class stratification, redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, war, torture, tribalism writ large, prisons, police, borders, and control." - Anthony Gregory

c4ss.org/content/14484

Cory Massimino On Radical Liberalism Longtime C4SS Fellow, Mutual Exchange Coordinator, and contributor Cory Massimino was recently interviewed by Aaron Ross Powell on (Re)Imagining Liberty about the ideas of radical liberalism, how radi...

Hear @corymassimino.bsky.social talk to @aaronrosspowell.com on @reimaginingliberty.com about the ideas of radical liberalism, how radical liberalism differs from the many varieties of illiberalism, and more.👇

c4ss.org/content/60816

Flooding Trump’s Zone: Networked Warfare Still Works In the period leading up to Trump’s inauguration, spokesmen for the President-elect repeatedly stressed that he would hit the ground running. Metaphors like “fire hose,” “shock and awe,” and “flooding...

"Our capacity for helping one another, for using the power of networked organization to get vital information to the people who can best make use of it, and swarming would be strongmen with opposition, is beyond anything in Trump’s playbook." - @kevincarson1.bsky.social

c4ss.org/content/60152

Laurance Labadie’s “Anarchism and the Money Problem” Commentary This piece was likely written in the early to mid 1930s, and the draft version was archived in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan Library. As per my update I hav...

"Here we come in contact with privileges and handicaps maintained by the government. These artificial restrictions and handicaps, no less than natural obstacles, affect the exchange value of things under which they are produced." - Laurance Labadie

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On the latest episode of Mutual Exchange Radio host @zacharywoodman.bsky.social interviews @mattpolprof.bsky.social about the possibilities of liberal socialism, the anarchist critiques thereof, and more.👇

c4ss.org/content/60792

Our Present Attitude I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority.

"I believe there is no peace now, and there never will be peace, so long as man rules over man; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an Anarchist." - Voltairine de Cleyre

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