Mutual Exchange Radio

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. You can always give us feedback or suggest guests by emailing us at [email protected], or by sending us a message on Patreon!

And we're back on YouTube! You can now find Mutual Exchange Radio, The Enragés, and bonus content like our recent live episode of The Outgroup, our roundtable show for patrons on the C4SS YouTube channel.

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 in Social Theory. He is an anarchist without adjectives, heavily influenced by autonomism and the new municipalist movements. His written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, and The Desktop Regulatory State all of which are freely available online. His book Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century is forthcoming. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things and The Art of the Possible, as well as his own blogs, Mutualist Blog and Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.

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 [email protected] if you're not a supporter on Patreon yet.)

- Alex McHugh

To kick off Season 3, we brought on YouTuber Yusuf Mahmood for a timely interview on the events in the capital on January 6th. Yusuf grew up in the Baltimore area and recently graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park with two degrees in economics and philosophy. He has long been an activist in the libertarian movement, working on issues of systemic racism, civil liberties, and economic justice. He has worked and interned at organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Niskanen Center, and Students For Liberty. He is a writer and video essayist who publishes videos on his YouTube channel, YusufTakes. 

Yusuf has done work on the relative importance of often unjust liberal institutions and democratic norms in the face of fascist autocrats, even from a more radical perspective, and so is a perfect person to talk to given the relevance of those insights to what we saw this week. In this conversation, we discuss how we got here, the facts surrounding the event, where this might be going, and what we can learn from it. It is a bit of an unusual conversation, but one I think a lot of people are having given how exceptional and disturbing these events are. 

You'll also notice we have updated the MER logo! We're ready for Season 3 to be our best one yet -- so look forward to a jam-packed year, exciting and timely guests, and more Patreon bonus content than ever before. 

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 in the lead-up to N30 (also known as the "Battle in Seattle"). Gillis studies high energy physics and has held a deep fascination with the egalitarian potential of markets since 2003. Their writing can be found at C4SS.org and humaniterations.net.

Here are both Will & Aurora's essays in the summer Symposium:

• The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, Aurora Apolito
• Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, William Gillis
• Centrifugal Tendencies in Information & Wealth, William Gillis

*Support Logan Glitterbomb* As noted in this episode's intro, we're currently raising legal defense funds for C4SS writer Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Learn more and donate here.

Meet the podcast team:

• Zachary Woodman - Host
• Tony Dreher - Audio Editor
• Can Standke - Editing Assistant
• Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor
• Cory Massimino - Treasurer
• Alex McHugh - Producer

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 capacities since getting involved in the lead-up to N30 (also known as the "Battle in Seattle"). Gillis studies high energy physics and has held a deep fascination with the egalitarian potential of markets since 2003. Their writing can be found at C4SS.org and humaniterations.net.

Here are both Will & Aurora's essays in the summer Symposium:

• The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, Aurora Apolito
• Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, William Gillis
• Centrifugal Tendencies in Information & Wealth, William Gillis

*Support Logan Glitterbomb* As noted in this episode's intro, we're currently raising legal defense funds for C4SS writer Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Learn more and donate here.

Meet the podcast team:

• Zachary Woodman - Host
• Tony Dreher - Audio Editor
• Can Standke - Editing Assistant
• Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor
• Cory Massimino - Treasurer
• Alex McHugh - Producer

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 running in an election that very few would normally pay attention to, but hey it's 2020.

Meet the podcast team:

• Zachary Woodman - Host
• Tony Dreher - Audio Editor
• Can Standke - Editing Assistant
• Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor
• Cory Massimino - Treasurer
• Alex McHugh - Producer

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 calculation problem by Aurora Apolito. This was an interesting informative discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having it.

Meet the podcast team:

• Zachary Woodman - Host
• Tony Dreher - Audio Editor
• Can Standke - Editing Assistant
• Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor
• Cory Massimino - Treasurer
• Alex McHugh - Producer

Joining us today is Akiva Malamet. Akiva is completing his BA in Government at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) in Israel. He is an incoming MA student in Philosophy and a 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). This episode is hosted by producer Alex McHugh.

Akiva's essays:

• Fearing Ourselves: Dignity and Disgust in a Pandemic
• Vice in The Virtue of Nationalism
• Akiva Malamet on Israeli Politics and Jewish Culture (podcast)
• The Zen of Chaos
• If Not Now, When? Contextualizing the White Supremacist Threat to Muslims and Jews
• Postmodernism: A Libertarian Introduction
• Reconciling Libertarian and Leftist Views of Power and Equality

Black anarchist/radical resources:

• Burn Down the American Plantation
• #8toAbolition
• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
• As Black as Resistance

Meet the podcast team:

• Zachary Woodman - Host
• Tony Dreher - Audio Editor
• Can Standke - Editing Assistant
• Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor
• Cory Massimino - Treasurer
• Alex McHugh - Producer

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.