In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Tag: economic debate

  • Only the good (blogs!) die young

    I am pleased to add to my blogroll the apparently defunct blog No More Sunsets. The most recent post there was titled Back soon and dated July 16, 2012, with the text

    I’m in the process of moving so I’ll be out for the next couple of weeks.

    I hope the author is doing OK.

    I strive to keep my blogroll as on-topic as possible. By this I mean that no matter how small this list turns out to be, I want it to be a catalog of the online offerings of the “non-market, anti-state sector.” By this I mean those who, when push comes to shove, are anti-statist, and who, at least on occasion, suggest that the market mechanism—the price signals, the absolute centrality of voluntarism—might be a contributor to the problem of de facto or de jure statism.

    Putting the left back in left libertarianism is definitely a recurring theme at No More Sunsets. There is an article pointing out differences between Proudhonian mutualists and “neo-mutualists.” Those ridiculously non-credible “primitive” economies in which three persons exist or two classes of economic goods exist are referred to not as Edgeworth boxes but as Imagination Island or Crusoe’s island. Also subject to questioning are such supposedly unalloyed goods as voluntarism, individualism, agorism, efficiency, etc.

    I can’t read anything on this excellent blog without having a lot to say, but it is closed to comments. Apparently this has not always been the case. Perhaps I will start a series of blog posts here that are essentially comments on posts at No More Sunsets.

    At any rate, my purpose in posting this is to offer gentle encouragement to a writer whose work I admire and who I’d like to think of as a fellow anagorist. This is in the spirit of NMS’ own post in that vein:

    Mutualism and Solutions to the Social Problem is a new blog with extremely powerful posts. Hopefully, they continue blogging. All too often, I see people who start on a project and give up shortly after. Please show your support by checking them out.

  • Quotebag #89

    “As for the libertarians themselves, we must not be shocked that they re-iterate the Sumerian division between the elect and the debt-bound with the devotion appropriate to a middle born climber.”—Crow Falls Down

    “A hierarchy is a machine — basically a steam engine straight out of the factory age — for compelling people to do what they have no direct rational interest in doing, for the benefit of those with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest.”—Kevin Carson

    “It is not simply a ‘reward for services rendered’ that I’m supposed to believe. It is life held ransom to illegitimate structures of control called companies, corporations, private industry. Both subjugator and subjugated sing the same song. If ‘Work or die’ is the chorus, then ‘No excuses’ would be the crescendo. ‘If I can do it, you can too’ we mindlessly drone.”—Prodigeek

    “The government/market dichotomy is pervasive in contemporary political and economic debate.”—Unlearningecon

    “The capitalist state is run by capitalists. Tear it down without simultaneously tearing them down, and another one will pop up, and we’ll be playing whack-a-mole for eternity.”—anon.