Kevin Carson

books

2022: The State: Theory and Praxis. Writing the section on engagement with the state in Exodus left me wanting to write a lot more, especially considering how prominently the issues in that section figured in intra-Left debates in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. election cycles. Just about everything I’ve written from 2010 on, this book involves some aspect of postcapitalist transition. And while Homebrew Industrial Revolution and all the books since were meant to be timely and influential (at least as influential as realistically possible), this is more true of The State than any of the others.
2021: Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century (Carson Exodus) Exodus applies the findings of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution regarding micromanufacturing technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communications and stigmergic organization in The Desktop Regulatory State, to the questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition. Three of my research papers at Center for a Stateless Society were much more limited preliminary investigations into some of the same subject matter: “Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real,” “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis,”2 and “Libertarian Municipalism.”
2016: The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks. This book... is the development of ideas on network organization and stigmergy I touched on in Homebrew Industrial Revolution. It applies many of the same ideas in the realm of information that I developed earlier in regard to physical production in that book.
2010: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. In researching and writing my last book, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, I was probably more engaged and enthusiastic about working on material related to micromanufacturing, the microenterprise, the informal economy, and the singularity resulting from them, than on just about any other part of the book. When the book went to press, I didn't feel that I was done writing about those things. As I completed that book, I was focused on several themes that, while they recurred throughout the book, were imperfectly tied together and developed. One of the implicit themes in Organization Theory which I have attempted to develop since, and which is central to this book, is the central role of fixed costs—initial capital outlays and other overhead—in economics. The higher the fixed costs of an enterprise, the larger the income stream required to service them. That's as true for the household microenterprise. On the other hand, innovation in the technologies of small-scale production and of daily living reduce the worker's need for a continuing income stream. It enables the microenterprise to function intermittently and to enter the market incrementally, with no overhead to be serviced when business is slow. The result is enterprises that are lean and agile, and can survive long periods of slow business, at virtually no cost; likewise, such increased efficiencies, by minimizing the ongoing income stream required for comfortable subsistence, have the same liberating effect on ordinary people that access to land on the common did for their ancestors three hundred years ago.
2008: Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective: This book had it origins in a passage (the “Fiscal and Input Crises” section of Chapter Eight) of my last book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. If you read that passage (it’s available online at Mutualist.Org), you’ll get an idea of the perspective that led me to write this book. The radical thoughts on organizational pathologies in that passage, both my own and those of the writers I quoted, dovetailed with my experiences of bureaucratic irrationality and Pointy-Haired Bossism in a lifetime as a worker and consumer.
2007: Studies in Mutualist Political Economy http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html This book is an attempt to revive individualist anarchist political economy, to incorporate the useful developments of the last hundred years, and to make it relevant to the problems of the twenty-first century. We hope this work will go at least part of the way to providing a new theoretical and practical foundation for free market socialist economics.

Edited: 2025-09-23 20:18:21.130568 | Tweet this! | Search Twitter for discussion

Bill Seitz