Mutual Exchange Radio

Welcome to Mutual Exchange radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Today’s guest is Maggie McNeil, an author, journalist, and blogger who is an expert on sex work and a sex worker herself. Maggie has written a series of short stories on sex work, Ladies of the Night,  runs her own blog, The Honest Courtesan, and has had her writings featured in outlets such as The Washington Post, Reason Magazine and Cato Unbound. Most recently, she was featured prominently in the documentary The War on Whores, which you can rent on Vimeo. Today we discussed the legal and moral issues surrounding sex work in which Maggie gave her strongest case for decriminalization and responded to some common objections, as well as the social and moral implications of its decriminalization and normalization. You can tell that Maggie really knows the empirical literature on this topic and that made this an especially informative conversation. I hope you learned as much as I did.

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Today’s guest is Kevin Carson, a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society who holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He has written books such as Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available on C4SS’ website. 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, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.

Today, we discussed a study he published last year for the Center on New Libertarian Municipalism. Libertarian Municipalism is an idea that has its roots in one of the most famous social anarchist thinkers of the twentieth century, Murray Bookchin. However, Kevin is more interested in modern movements focusing on a more decentralized model of a market economy based on common ownership of certain resources, drawing from thinkers such as Elinor Ostrom. Its focus is on an openly democratically run city on a local level, transforming local governments into partners in the transition to a post-capitalist economy. In this discussion, we cover the history of the idea of libertarian municipalism, what the movement on the ground has looked like in recent years, the policy implications of it for local cities, economic indicators that society is progressing in that direction, and common objections to the idea. It was a fun conversation that allows leftist thinking to move on from focus on, from the center, electoral political outcomes on the national level and, from more radical circles, violent insurrections that are impractical in the near future.

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new project from C4SS: Mutual Exchange Radio.

Our inaugural guest for this show is Gary Chartier, a distinguished professor of law and business ethics at La Sierra University and a leading Anarchist philosopher. He’s the author of such books as Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics in a Stateless Society, The Consciousness of an Anarchist, and Radicalizing Rawls Global Justice and the Foundations of International Law.

Intro/Outro Music by Dan Burns