"When we compare the Victorian antecedents of our public institutions with the organs of working-class mutual aid in the same period the very names speak volumes. On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and, on the other, the Friendly Society, the Sick Club, the Cooperative Society, the Trade Union. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous association springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above."
--Ward, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response.

I just thought I'd remind anyone who's inclined to donate to the C4SS 1st Quarter fundraiser, and hasn't already done so, that things are winding down. Next Friday, Feb. 26, is the last day. As you can see from the Chipin widget in my sidebar, we've taken in just under half of the funding target. That means that, even though all of us writers have kept up the schedule we committed to based on $2945 in funds for the quarter, we'll get paid about half of what was originally budgeted. So absent a big surge in contributions, C4SS will probably have to drastically scale back our Second Quarter publication schedules to reflect what people have demonstrated they're actually willing to pay for.

If you're interested in contributing, you can just click on the Chipin widget to the left.

And thanks to all who do, and all who've contributed so far.

...if we do our jobs right, seizing the privileged classes’ surplus wealth will be a moot point, because before we’re done it will all be worthless to them anyway. The state capitalists have pursued models of extensive growth from adding more subsidized inputs, because the state has given them preferential access to capital and large tracts of land. The counter-economy, as a matter of necessity, must follow an intensive growth model based on more efficient extraction of value from the same level of inputs....

The main struggle, from the standpoint of the counter-economy, won’t be remedying the lack of capital—the capital is becoming increasingly useless to us. The struggle will be combating the state capitalist system’s attempts to prohibit doing things more cheaply and efficiently. Reducing the capital outlays and overhead costs of the countereconomy, and defending it against attempts at suppression, are our main revolutionary orders of business.