Mutual Exchange Radio

In this episode of Mutual Exchange Radio, host Zachary Woodman interviews Jesse Spafford. Jesse is a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL - Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on social and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. Jesse espouses a version of left-libertarianism that's quite different from what you’ll hear promoted by many here at the Center—a philosophical position that holds that certain moral principles traditionally associated with libertarianism are compatible with egalitarian views about the distribution of resources. It's a great episode for libertarians and anarchists alike. As Zach and Jesse dig into these differences and discuss what a stateless society should look like, you'll find yourself questioning all kinds of prior assumptions.  Further Reading: "Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property," The R

In this special edition of Mutual Exchange Radio, Alex McHugh interviews Ilya, a Russian social anarchist and anti-fascist. Ilya has written for C4SS a couple of times as well as translating some English articles into Russian. In this interview, part of our "Around the World" mini-series with C4SS contributors across the world, we dig into the current muted nature of Russian political activism, the Russian far-right and the dangers they pose, and antifascist hardcore and anarcho-chanson music. Get the “Dispatches from Russia” Zine: https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/dispatches-from-russia-reports-from-citizen-ilya/   Additional Notes: “Coronavirus: Why Mutual Aid is Important”: https://c4ss.org/content/52819 “The Russian Government’s Far Right Friends”: https://c4ss.org/content/53943 More on “Male State” (Russian group similar to the Proud Boys): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_State Shared equity construction fraud in Russia: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/30/investment-scandal-russ

In this episode of Mutual Exchange Radio, host Zachary Woodman interviews libertarian commentator Shikha Dalmia. Shikha is a former policy analyst for the Reason Foundation and has contributed to publications including Bloomberg View, the Washington Examiner,  Reason magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. In this interview, we discuss two timely issues in American politics: immigration and populism. Starting with a philosophical discussion of what our priorities should be in how we respond to rising populism and authoritarianism, we discuss various options for moving forward. Should we move more radically in order to try and protect the rights of those targeted by populists and authoritarians -- or, as Shikha suggests, should we focus on limiting the damage done to liberal democratic institutions by surging populism?  Thank you for your continued support! Look out next month for a return to more radical perspectives after this deep dive into democracy and liberalism for the start of the season. Yo

We're excited to share this pilot episode of our new show with Joel Williamson, The Enragés. Joining Mutual Exchange Radio on the C4SS podcast roster this year, The Enragés will take a deep dive into the recent works of C4SS writers and scholars on the site. You can find the new show in all the same places as Mutual Exchange Radio, including Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, and on our Patreon.  In this first episode of The Enragés, host Joel Williamson sits down with Kevin Carson to discuss Kevin’s recent piece on the Center for a Stateless Society website “The Myth of the Private Sector, Part I: Why Big-Small and Vertical-Horizontal Trumps ‘Public-Private’”—a conversion that spans from the role of government interference in the scale and structure of economic institutions to the definitions of “large” and “small” to possible right-libertarian objections to Kevin’s argument and beyond. Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair i

Posted first on Patreon, this is a special Season 2 bonus episode with a new focus we're trying out: C4SS around the world. Our network is a truly global one and if this is content y'all enjoy, I'd like to do a short series spotlighting some of the brilliant people we're connected to outside of the U.S.  For this first episode, I interview C4SS contributor Camilo Gomez on an entirely different kind of presidential crisis. Camilo hosts the podcast, “History and Politics” which has featured a few other folks from C4SS. Besides podcasting, Camilo is a freelance writer based in Lima. In this interview, Camilo walks us through what’s happening with the Peruvian presidential crisis and what anarchists and left-libertarians outside of Peru should know about the situation.  Let us know if you want to see more of this kind of content and we may make the series a part of our Season 3 line-up! (You can email editor@C4SS.org if you're not a supporter on Patreon yet.) - Alex McHugh

This episode is Part II of a two-part interview with Aurora Apolito and William Gillis, two of the lead contributors to our summer symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. Listen to Part I here, or on Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher. Aurora Apolito is a mathematician and theoretical physicist. She studied physics in Italy and mathematics in Chicago, and later worked for various scientific institutions in the US, Canada, and Germany. She also works on mathematical linguistics, and on mathematical models for neuroscience and has authored six books on various aspects of this work. I should also note that Aurora Apolito is a pen name meant to differentiate this research from her work in other fields. Our other guest is someone most listeners will be familiar with, William Gillis. Will currently acts as technology coordinator at C4SS and was formerly our coordinating director. Will is a second-generation anarchist who's worked as an activist in countless projects and capacities since getting involved

This episode is Part I of a two-part interview with Aurora Apolito and William Gillis, two of the lead contributors to our summer symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. Part II will be released on December 21st, although patrons can access that here now.  Aurora Apolito is a mathematician and theoretical physicist. She studied physics in Italy and mathematics in Chicago, and later worked for various scientific institutions in the US, Canada, and Germany. She also works on mathematical linguistics, and on mathematical models for neuroscience and has authored six books on various aspects of this work. I should also note that Aurora Apolito is a pen name meant to differentiate this research from her work in other fields. Our other guest is someone most listeners will be familiar with, William Gillis. Will currently acts as technology coordinator at C4SS and was formerly our coordinating director. Will is a second-generation anarchist who's worked as an activist in countless projects and capacit

Aria DiMezzo is a candidate running for Sheriff in Cheshire County, New Hampshire as a republican. Why have a Republican sheriff candidate on an anarchist podcast, you ask? Well, Aria is not what you’d expect from a GOP cop. She has had many encounters with police in her life, and very few have been positive. She is high priestess of the Reformed Satanic Church, a trans woman, and an anarchist. And she is definitely not a socially progressive libertarian trying to hijack the Republican Party, as you will discover in our conversation. In this conversation we discover why and how, exactly, an anarchist trans women is running for Sheriff as a Republican, Aria’s views on economics, moral dimensions property rights, police, criminal justice, and religion, as well as some reflections on the complicated relationship between socially left-wing views and the libertarian movement as it currently exists. This conversation was a fun one, unique to have. It is not every election year you see such an interesting candidate

Joining us today is Emmi Bevensee. Emmi is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and currently organizing the Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. They identify as a solarpunk mutualist and research disinformation and fascism on the internet as a Mozilla Open Web fellow and data scientist. In this discussion, we discuss Emmi’s lead essay in C4SS’ recent Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. This is a rich discussion about a complicated issue that anarchists of all stripes, and political theorists more generally, need to take on: how do we get the goods delivered to where they need to be in society. Emmi expresses a sense of skepticism about claims social anarchists have made that communes can economically coordinate in the absence of markets. We also discussed the lead essay of and their reply to another essay from the exchange which tried to give a mathematical formulation to social anarchist attempts to work around the ca

Bio:   Akiva Malamet is completing his BA in Government at the  Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) in Israel. He is an incoming MA student in Philosophy and member of the interdisciplinary program in Political and Legal Thought (PLT) at Queen’s University, Kingston, and Frédéric Bastiat Fellow in political economy and public policy with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has written for Liberal Currents, Libertarianism.org, and other publications. He was a winner of the 2018 ‘Carl Menger Undergraduate Essay Contest’ for his paper “Spontaneous Order as Social Construction”, from the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics (SDAE).   Essays for show notes:  https://www.liberalcurrents.com/fearing-ourselves-dignity-and-disgust-in-a-pandemic/ https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/vice-virtue-nationalism https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/reconciling-libertarian-leftist-views-power-equality  https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/postmodernism-libertarian-introduction  https:

Joining me today is Vermin Supreme. You might know Vermin as the satirical presidential candidate from the last few election cycles who ran on a platform of free ponies and mandatory tooth brushing, or you might just know him as that guy with a boot on his head. But this year, he’s running a slightly different campaign for the Libertarian Party Presidential Nomination. Rather than his usual dog and free pony show, he’s seriously promoting left libertarian and anarchist ideas such as mutual aid and non-domination to the largely right libertarian audience in the LP. In this interview, we discuss this campaign, as well as the use of humor as a de-escalation tactic at tense protests, his history of activism within anarchist communities, and where he sees himself standing within anarchism ideologically. This was a very entertaining discussion that is quite different from the sorts we usually have on this show, so I hope you enjoy it.

Joining me today is Jason Lee Byas. Jason is a fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society. He is also a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan. His academic work focuses on punishment (and its alternatives), rights theory, and justice beyond the state. He approaches that work from within the liberal, libertarian, and anarchist traditions -- all of which broadly construed. Today, we discussed some recent work he’s been doing on “methodological anarchist” approaches to political philosophy as well as the nature of violence and its relation to a theory of just property rights and distributive justice. The first part of this conversation centers on a bias a lot of analytic political philosophers have of myopically focusing on the realm of justice applying to the state and what political theory and discourse would look like if we adopted a “methodological anarchist” framework that sees the nexus of justice as existing in social norms writ large rather than just official institutions. The second

Joining me today is Joel Williamson of Non-Serviam media. Joel is an individualist anarchist from Texas who has been involved in different activist projects over the years. These projects range from fundraising to support political prisoners such as Ross Ulbricht, organizing “counter economic farmers markets, and engaging in varied direct action efforts. His activism has most recently been focused on Non Serviam Media, which is a small collective dedicated to exploring the world of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas through audio and video production. If you spend much time in the left libertarian or anarchist podcast space, you may have come across Non Serviam’s excellent podcast Joel hosts called Non Serviam. If you enjoy this show at all, you probably would enjoy, if you are not already enjoying, that show. I went back and looked at our guest backlog, and roughly half of our past guests have also appeared on Joel’s show. Because of the similarities between our shows and audience, we figured some cross-

Joining me today is Roderick Long. If you spend much time looking at C4SS’ work or any work in the market anarchist tradition in the last twenty years, you have likely come across Roderick’s work and surely something inspired by or responding to it. Dr. Long is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University, president of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, editor of The Industrial Radical and Molinari Review. He is a founding member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, an original founding member of C4SS, and senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society. His work centers on the intersection of ethics, especially in the Aristotelian tradition, political philosophy, especially in the libertarian anarchist tradition, and philosophy of social science. You can find Long’s writing on his blog, the Austro-Athenian Empire, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and, of course, C4SS.org, among other places. Today’s discussion centers around Long’s work on libertarian class theory, as well as the normative co

Joining me today is Anthony Di Franco. Anthony works at the intersections of complex adaptive systems and computing and focuses on developing convivial technologies, decentralizing infrastructure, and increasing the agency of individuals and communities. He is a co-founder and board member of Counter Culture Labs, a group of biohackers in Oakland, where he founded the Open Insulin project, an effort to develop open technology for insulin production at microbrewery scale and organize patient-led cooperatives to manufacture it. Additionally, he is currently pursuing computer science research on foundational technology to make software easy to create and modify for laypeople, built on declarative programming techniques together with techniques for representing uncertain information.

This month, we bring you a special episode from the Please Try This at Home transhumanism conference. In this episode, podcast producer Alex McHugh interviews Jahed Momand on autonomous medicine. Jahed is a PNW-based anarchist interested in epistemological anarchism and radical approaches to science. He writes long-form essays and a newsletter at againstutopia.com. In the episode, we get into the problems caused by hierarchy and authority in scientific discovery, and specifically the limitations this system has placed on treatment options for mental health issues. Jahed’s research focuses on depression, but we also dig into other mental health issues, such as psychotic disorders and personality disorders. It’s a bit science-heavy, but Jahed explains the terms well and anyone with a basic understanding of biology should be able to keep up.  

Today, Nathan Goodman is joining Mutual Exchange Radio to discuss the provision of public goods and welfare in a stateless society. Nathan is a PhD student in economics at George Mason University. Previously, he was the Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). His research interests include defense and peace economics, Austrian economics, public choice, Bloomington school institutional analysis, self-governance, and analytical anarchism. Our discussion centers around his research on why national defense might not always be a public good and how the Mormon church has found ways around game theoretic problems that arise in mutual aid. He also gives a really helpful introduction to polycentricity and some key economic concepts. 

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Joining me today is Will Gillis. Will is the director of the Center and is a second generation anarchist who’s worked as an activist in countless projects since getting involved in the lead-up to N30. He studies physics and writes regularly on the egalitarian potential of markets. His writing can be found on his website, humaniterations.net, as well as on C4SS.org. Today’s discussion centers around a technical topic in political philosophy that has utmost importance for real-world political movements and many ideological debates: the distinction between positive and negative liberty. Will positions himself as defending a universalist conception of positive liberty as primary and against particularly neo-Lockean libertarian views that place negative liberty as fundamental, but in many ways he comes at it from a different, more highly consequentialist perspective than most theorists. He also has some interesting theories for how

Today we are joined by Kelly Wright. Kelly has written for the Center on topics ranging from the history of anarchist thought, transgender liberation, and police militarization. Kelly also served as Chelsea Manning’s Campaign Manager for her run for U.S. Senate in the Democratic Primary in Maryland in 2018 and is a member of Chelsea’s support committee providing material support for Chelsea as she defies a federal grand jury. Our topic today is on the legal tools the US Government has to target whistleblowers and dissenters and restrict the civil liberties of every day Americans. Today we cover the legal ground surrounding grand juries, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other examples of legal overreach by the state. Kelly is able to draw from a wide variety of examples from the history of state overreach. 

My guest today is Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Dr. Rojas is an expert who works on the sociology of political movements and social theory. He is the author of several books, including Theory for the Working Sociologist, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 and From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. He is also currently co-editing Contexts, the official magazine of the American Sociological Association. Today we discussed the economics, sociology, and ethics of immigration and the open borders movement. We are exploring what a world with little to no immigration restrictions might look like and Dr. Rojas’ case for why it would be preferable, both on economic and on ethical grounds. Dr. Rojas addresses some of the most common objections to open borders from the left and the right. He is a very knowledgeable expert on the sociology of immigration as well as a passionate advocate for i