Study: “Progressive” is the new “Reactionary”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Does progressivism point the way to a brighter future, or has it become the last line of defense for a failed political and economic status quo?

In his latest research study, released today by the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson makes the case for progressives as the bitter-enders of a social project made obsolete by liberating technologies and the production and distribution methods those technologies make possible.

“Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization” traces the development of managerialism in the political and economic realms, the history of progressive attachment to the managerial vision, and the siege mentality displayed by progressives as they confront what Carson calls the “Network Revolution.”

“For liberals,” writes Carson, author of _The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto_, “the American Golden Age was the ‘Consensus Capitalism’ of the New Deal and the first post-WWII generation. … This general affinity for large-scale organization and hierarchy, more recently, has been reflected in hostility to the new forms of networked organization permitted by the emerging technologies of the late twentieth century.”

The study is freely available online and may be reproduced under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

ON THE WEB

Center for a Stateless Society:

http://c4ss.org

“Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization” — PDF download:

http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Thermidor-of-the-Progressives.pdf

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The Center for a Stateless Society is a project of the Molinari Institute and dedicated to building public awareness of, and support for, market anarchism.

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