Marijuana’s legalization seems much more like neoliberal privatization of markets than true liberation of them. While I do not question the decency of these first major marijuana retailers, there are legitimate concerns. Those most victimized by the state’s rabid oppression of marijuana markets will find themselves very often out of luck, as extensive background checks are required by law, and any drug felony charge is enough to exclude individuals from operating as vendors. TakePart magazine notes in an article that even as weed is legalized, those in prison for the crime of possessing or selling marijuana will remain there. While new businesses boom with customers, those who formerly tried to compete in this market remain locked up in cages.

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Being that the drug world is literally under siege by a domestic military operation, it is beyond anyone’s imagination how markets like the Silk Road could keep their doors open without a serious injection of class consciousness. All those involved in the drug community are criminals. Whether or not we are all revolutionaries is up for debate. We are criminals first and foremost. When you buy an ounce of pot from your friend, you are in no uncertain terms worthy of being pumped full of bullets in the view of most police and even many citizens.

Those employing the Silk Road must keep aware of this fact. Many imagine Silk Road to be something of a revolution, and I’d largely agree with that analysis. But the state does not see you as revolutionaries. To them, drug users are of the same class as rapists and killers. Those engaging in such activities ought to adjust their activities in accordance with this.

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At this point in time, it seems of little doubt to most that Ross Ulbricht was none other than a Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR). According to files obtained by the feds off of Ulbricht’s computer, it also appears that he is the first DPR. Moreover, it appears that the first revolutionary drug market kingpin was an utter failure at securing his anonymity. Rather than by an any means necessary approach, Ulbricht advertised his website online and kept tabs on his computer of his escapades. In 2012 when federal agents appeared at Ulbricht’s residence to inquire on packages ordered from his own creation, he did not see this as justification enough to clear out his residence as soon as possible and move to Russia the next day. Instead, he stayed planted in San Francisco confident in his ability to evade law enforcement.

While it’s naïve to assume the story of the DEA and FBI aren’t distorting the truth in their favor, they are almost certainly lying about the details of a series of assassinations allegedly commissioned by Ulbricht, it is also naïve to assume that Ulbricht is not who the feds say he is. With the arrest of Ulbricht, soon after came the seizure of the Silk Road’s servers and Ulbricht’s personal effects, linking him almost certainly with a DPR identity.

Many see this story as implausible. How could the mighty DPR fumble the anonymity ball so much, stay so content in his uneasy status as a resident of the American empire? But I see this not as implausible, but as inevitable. Market solutions are imperfect and unstable things, especially in the face of an all-out war against them by the single largest police force in the world.

The War on Drugs is not a euphemism for aggressive public policy. Since its inception, it has acted as a literal war on drug users, sellers and producers. SWAT raids, invented for the purposes of hostile situations, are used to bust down the doors of hundreds of Americans every year. Billions and billions of dollars are sunk into arming local police departments, which have transformed into military bases equipped with tanks, rockets and innumerable assault weapons. Even those who are not invested in the drug world are affected by this militarization. Innocents gunned down police officers are nothing more than collateral damage which police are only held responsible for in the most brutal cases, and never to the fullest extent possible.

Being that the drug world is literally under siege by a domestic military operation, it is beyond anyone’s imagination how markets like the Silk Road could keep their doors open without a serious injection of class consciousness. All those involved in the drug community are criminals. Whether or not we are all revolutionaries is up for debate. We are criminals first and foremost. When you buy an ounce of pot from your friend, you are in no uncertain terms worthy of being pumped full of bullets in the view of most police and even many citizens.

Those employing the Silk Road must keep aware of this fact. Many imagine Silk Road to be something of a revolution, and I’d largely agree with that analysis. But the state does not see you as revolutionaries. To them, drug users are of the same class as rapists and killers. Those engaging in such activities ought to adjust their activities in accordance with this.

With this in mind, I think a strong case can be made for why those who get into running these markets ought to have a past as a criminal. Idealism is great, but is also blinding and very often naïve. DPR failed because they were too optimistic, because they saw themselves as something other than just a drug kingpin. Of course, their actions do constitute one of the most revolutionary acts of our time. While many of us are happy in talking about counter-economics, it’s rare that someone takes the initiative to start up a project as massive and dangerous as the Silk Road. For this we owe DPR much as an entrepreneur, flawed as their tenure was in perspective. But I believe that many of the pitfalls of a young and inexperienced person with law enforcement tactics is ultimately what led DPR to their and the first Silk Road’s demise.

If we are to believe the DEA and FBI, Ulbricht bought into at least one totally bogus assassination scheme, and was involved in two others they are not elaborating on. It’s my opinion, and the opinion of many who have analyzed this case, that all these so-called assassination attempts were nothing more than entrapment to attain definite charges to tag on to the DPR’s identity. But all of these attempts were in fact rather obvious law enforcement schemes that they knew would work, because they already had a trace on Ulbricht’s identity from his posts on the clearnet advertising the Silk Road during its inception. The feds not only had a track on him, but since they knew Ulbricht had no history with law enforcement, they knew he was naïve.

When you are turned from a citizen into a career criminal by the state, it is a natural reaction that your class will inevitably encounter and have to deal with non-state criminals. Whether it be the Cartels, whose products are all over the Silk Road and other markets, or the Mafia protected gay bars that were a necessity from the 20s to the 60s due to the act of homosexuality being a criminal offense, criminals will mix together. And it’s not obvious that the results are undesirable. As mentioned, the Mafia acted as protector to gays and also to drug users for many years. They created legal bastions of excess. They didn’t do it cause they gave a shit about gays or drug users, but because they were in it for the money. They were in it for a living, not as a revolutionary project. Ulbricht could not even muster the sense to get the hell out of America AFTER the feds had spoken to him about packages originating from Silk Road vendors sent to his goddamn home address. This is not a man with good criminal sense, and that is what a criminal enterprise needs

It is not my intention here to be provocative or to endorse all elements of criminal culture. The Mafia was as patriarchal as it gets despite their enabling of peaceful, public queer-mingling. Still, it must be noted that the queer community was much more interested in social liberation than bland democratic reformism when they were still considered criminals. It’s my opinion that being on the wrong side of the law can be freeing. When you are a criminal, you are also very much an outcast from society. If you are a drug user, you must be careful to hide it. But very often those engaging in nonviolent criminal activity do not see what they are doing as morally heinous, and many are forced to the well-informed conclusion that law cannot possibly be morally dictating.

Unfortunately, criminal life is also violent. Often, this is because of the State, but much of it is cultural. It’s sadly true that there is no, or at least little, honor among thieves. Criminality is as encouraging of dishonesty as it is of independent thought.

This is also why counter-economics matters. The Silk Road is the ultimate counter-economic institution at this point in our history. It is fueled by a decentralized currency which is quickly rising to prominence due to its use in purchasing illegal items and services. One of the great benefits of counter-economic strategy is that it naturally normalizes nonviolent illegal behavior. It undermines criminality, it refuses to acknowledge undue guilt for one’s actions. As of now, those who are in the businesses of illegal drugs are of the criminal class. We must acknowledge this and come to terms with the reality of such a life. We must also work to undermine the cultural norms that allow for such lawful discrimination. Through freeing ourselves now through counter-economic activity, we free ourselves from the social restraints that made us into criminals. So get involved, become a criminal, join the Silk Road and smash the state for fun and profit!

The case has naturally been met with media and public outrage. How could this happen? How could our justice system make such a profound and life shattering mistake? How can we fix this? Some will argue that reform is necessary, while others will argue that some government agents are going to need to lose their jobs. For anarchists, though, only one solution will suffice: Abolition of the police institution and the state at large.

To understand why abolition is the only viable option, it is important to understand the history of the police in the United States. There are two main starting points for the institution. In the north police were primarily used for controlling workers who might otherwise revolt against the political class. In the south they were primarily used for catching escaped slaves. Both of these, coupled with the aggressive criminal monopoly of the state, meant an evolution directly leading to such cases as Browder’s imprisonment and worse. Since such an institution is well beyond any hope of reform, how do we destroy it, and what do we replace it with?

There are a variety of tactics for resisting and replacing the state, but the one I favor most is agorism. One thing I like to ask people when debating the validity of the state and its monopoly on security is this: How do you think the police would behave if we could simply call and cancel our accounts? How inclined would they be to imprison a teenager if they were fully accountable for their actions due to market forces and social pressure? I would wager that they would behave differently. Not because of some magnanimous spirit that didn’t exist before and not just because we could put them out of business, but because we could also go after them as the criminals they are. Those two elements, market forces and social pressure, are largely missing from the current paradigm. Stripped away from the false virtue of statism, they are nothing but people who do their jobs poorly at best, and murderously at worst.

Sadly, there will continue to be more like Browder who watch years of their life tick away as the criminal political class and its soldiers kidnap, torture, imprison and kill innocent people. The way we stop them, the way we fight them, is by taking away the illusion that they are the only option for a secure and free society. They are violent criminals, and they have no place in a free society.

Karl Hess estava entrando de cabeça na esquerda quando Rothbard deu a New Left como uma causa perdida. Mesmo durante as tentativas mais entusiasmadas de Rothbard em colaborar com a esquerda, Hess ainda estava mais a esquerda de Rothbard. Como eu mencionei na parte 1, em um momento ele era associado ao Industrial Workers of the World. Ele continuou se movendo em direção à esquerda na década de 1970, em 1975 escreveu o livro de tendência socialista libertáriaDear America.

Como a década de 1970 avançava, seu esquerdismo assimilou um tom mais na linha do livro “Small is Beautiful”, com uma ênfase na tecnologia de escala humana e democracia de bairro. Neste período, ele escreveu o livro altamente recomendadoCommunity Technology e foi co-autor do livro Neighborhood Power, com Davi Morris.

Por volta de 1980 ou mais, Hess também iniciou uma tímida volta à direita, embora ele nunca tenha ido tão longe nessa direção como Rotbard foi em seus últimos anos. Sua auto-biografia Mostly on the Edge, escrito após sua volta para a direita, ainda preservava muito do seu espírito, em geral, descentralizador e anticorporativismo de seus últimos anos.

Em relação a carreira de Samuel Edward Konkin III, dependo, entre outras coisas, do próprio relato dele da história do Movement of the Libertarian Left – MLL (Movimento da Esquerda Libertária). Se você deseja a história completa e complicada de todas as organizações que ele construiu, parta para o relato de Konkin (junto com os obituários por Jeff Riggenbach e Phil Orborn) e você terá todos os detalhes organizacionais e as anedotas humanizantes que você possa arcar. Estou pulando muita coisa aqui porque meu foco principal está em suas ideias e nas pessoas de hoje que foram influenciadas pelas ideias dele.

Konkin (também conhecido como SEK3), natural do estado canadense de Alberta e um credor social em sua juventude inexperiente, foi um aliado de Rothbard que remonta desde os dias da separação da Young American for Freedom (ele foi um dos delegados de Wisconsin, na convenção que ocorreu em St. Louis). Seu Movement of the Libertarian Left continuou a desenvolver o pensamento de Rothbard em direção a esquerda que o próprio Rothbard tinha abandonado.

Apesar da desilusão de Rothbard com a aliança esquerda-libertária, a colaboração de 1969 entre o Young Americans for Freedom e os dissidentes do Students for a Democratic Society teve sua dinâmica própria. Por exemplo, de acordo com a história do Movement of the Libertarian Left de SEK3, o grupo de ativistas chamado Libertarian Alliances formou-se em um número de campus de faculdades inteiramente na década de 1970. O fenômeno foi iniciado em Fevereiro de 1970, quando o grupo California Libertarian Alliance organizou uma conferência chamada Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation. Entre os oradores estavam Karl Hess, o libertário de livre mercado Robert LeFevre, Carl Oglesby, e o atual deputado federal pelo estado da Califórnia Dana Rohrahacher, que era conhecido pelos radicais do Young Americans for Freedom como “Johnny do baseado”, da época de quando ele servia para alguma coisa, e o próprio Sam Konkin.

A partir do Libertarian Alliance da Universidade Wisconsin-Madison, e atraindo aliados envolvidos com o crescente Libertarian Alliances de toda Nova Iorque e costa oeste, Konkin estabeleceu muitos de seus amigos viajantes para dentro de um movimento rothbardiano de esquerda que levou o nome “New Libertarian Alliance – NLA” (Nova Aliança Libertária), em 1974. Konkin criou a NLA como uma organização de vanguarda e fora dos padrões, para promover sua estratégia de Contra-economia e sua ideologia do Agorismo. Em 1978 ele fundou o “Movement of the Libertarian Left” (Movimento da Esquerda Libertária) como uma contraparte mais acima do NLA. O Agorist Institute apareceu em algum momento depois disso, caso você ainda esteja por dentro (eu não estou disfarçando a graça desta proliferação maluca de organizações, acredite em mim – veja, a seguir, mais sobre isso).

O foco estratégico principal de Konkin, de acordo com sua posição anti-política doutrinária, era o que ele chamou de “Contra-economia” ou “Agorismo“. A ideia foi esboçada no New Libertarian Manifesto (O Novo Manifesto Libertário) de Konkin: construir uma contra-economia de mercado negro e drenar recursos do vínculo do estado corporativo, até que a contra-economia de livre mercado finalmente suplante completamente o sistema de capitalismo de estado.

As ideias de Konkin sobre contra-economia se encaixam em um alcance considerável com as ideias de esquerda da dualidade de poderes e políticas prefigurativas. Eu examinei uma estratégia de contra-economia baseado nesses conceitos, de uma perspectiva socialista libertária consideravelmente à esquerda de Konkin em “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old“:

Contra-instituições econômicas, infelizmente, funcionam dentro do escopo de uma economia de capitalismo corporativo maior. Eles competem em mercados no qual a instituição cultural das empresas dominantes é de cima pra baixo e hierárquica e estão em alto risco de absorver essa cultura institucional por elas mesmas. É por isso que você tem um setor sem fins lucrativos e cooperativo do qual a gestão é indistinguível de sua contrapartida capitalista: salários de prestígio, fazer mimos na gestão intermediária, irracionalidade burocrática e adesão servil para o dogma de teoria motivacional/ gerencial mais recente. O problema é agravado por um sistema financeiro capitalista, que amplia o reforço positivo (na forma de crédito) para empresas seguirem um modelo organizacional ortodoxo (mesmo quando a organização de baixo pra cima seja muito mais eficiente) (…)

A solução é promover tanto quanto possível a consolidação dentro da contra-economia. Precisamos voltar ao trabalho de “construção da estrutura da nova sociedade dentro da casca do antigo”. Um ótimo acordo de produção e consumo já ocorre dentro da economia social ou da economia do dom, do trabalho autônomo, do comércio de permuta e etc. As ligações entre setores precisam ser ampliadas e fortalecidas entre aqueles envolvidos nas cooperativas de consumo e produção, trabalho autônomo, sistemas de câmbio local (Local Exchange Trading System), jardinagem domiciliar e outras produções familiares, comércio de permuta informal, etc. O que as contra-instituições econômicas já existentes precisam é começar a funcionar como uma contra-economia corrosiva.

A outra maior inovação de Konkin foi o seu desenvolvimento da teoria de classe libertária. As raízes da teoria de classe de Rothbard e Konkin se apoiam nos pensadores franceses como Saint-Simon, Charles Comte e Charles Dunoyer e na ala radical do liberalismo clássico inglês. Eles identificaram a classe dominante como aqueles proveitos que adquiriram suas riquezas por agir através do estado.

O pensador clássico nessa tradição foi o livre-mercadista radical inglês Thomas Hodgskin, que fez a distinção entre direitos de propriedade “natural” e “artificial”. A primeira distinção, dizia, resultava naturalmente da posse e servia para certificar o domínio do indivíduo do seu produto de trabalho. Os direitos artificiais de propriedade, por outro lado, foram criações do estado em que permitia o titular a coletar tributo do produto do trabalho. Os detentores dos direitos de propriedades artificiais incluíam os grandes latifundiários com seus arrendamentos feudais, os capitalistas mercantilistas com ligações políticas e os beneficiários de diversos outros privilégios e imunidades.

As ideias dos positivistas franceses e de Hodgskin foram retomadas com a distinção de Franz Oppenheimer em sua obra The State (O Estado) entre “apropriação natural” e “apropriação política” da terra e entre os “meios econômicos” e “meios políticos” para a riqueza. Apropriação política da terra foi o principal meio político para a riqueza.

Os economistas políticos clássicos tinham reconhecido que a maioria das pessoas entrará no emprego assalariado apenas quando toda a terra estiver apropriada e já não tiverem acesso direto ao trabalho autônomo em sua própria terra. Isso foi uma observação comum feita por Adam Smith, David Ricardo e Thomas Malthus. A contribuição radical de Openheimer foi observar que, embora a terra estivesse, de fato, completamente apropriada, ela nunca fora apropriada naturalmente. Pelo contrário, ela tinha sido apropriada politicamente pelos grandes latifundiários agindo por intermédio do estado. Os grandes latifundiários usaram seus direitos artificiais de propriedade da terra para controlar o acesso e cobrar tributos àqueles que trabalharam nela e, em muitos casos, para manter várias extensões de terreno de fora de uso por completo. Somente sob estas circunstâncias, em que os meios de subsistência direta foram feitas inacessíveis para o trabalho, poderia o trabalho ser forçado a vender seus serviços sobre condições desavantajosos (a literatura da classe dominante britânica, na época dosCercamentos, estava cheia de admissões francas de que o único modo a levar as pessoas a trabalharem duro o bastante, por um salário baixo o bastante, era roubar suas terras). O privilégio foi o meio político para riqueza e o estado era o meio político organizado.

Rothbard fez disso a peça central de sua teoria de classe, tratando o conluio com o estado como o meio político para a riqueza e a classe dominante, como aquelas que se vincularam ao estado e usaram de seus subsídios, privilégios e proteções especiais como uma fonte de lucro. Rothbard expôs estes princípios, entre outras passagens, em “A Anatomia do Estado“.

Konkin pegou essa ideia básica e lidou com elas, aplicando-a em detalhe às condições concretas do capitalismo de estado americano. A classe dominante não era apenas de funcionários estatais, mas os bancos centrais, os grandes interesses financeiros associados e os altos comandos da economia corporativa intimamente ligada ao sistema financeiro estatista. O Agorismo foi o movimento revolucionário daqueles comprometidos nos meios econômicos na tentativa de tirar o máximo das atividades econômicas quanto fosse possível do controle da classe dominante. A teoria de classe agorista de Konkin foi estabelecida no primeiro capítulo, de seu trabalho inacabado, de Agorism Contra Marxism. Esse capítulo está anexado ao excelente Agorist Class Theory, de Wally Conger, que, por sua vez, é baseado no capítulo e fragmentos sobrevividos da obra de Konkin na área. Uma profunda análise de classe do sistema financeiro e de seus satélites industriais, baseada na mesma versão da teoria de classe libertária, está estabelecida em um artigo de Walter Grinder e John Hagel: “Toward a Theory of State Capitalism”.

Como disse Konkin, a teoria de classe agorista e marxista concordam em quase tudo de quando se trata daqueles que estão no topo e na base de seus respectivos sistemas de classe. “As diferenças surgem como uma se move para o meio da pirâmide social”. A principal diferença em relação ao meio é que a teoria de classe agorista é muito mais próxima do “producerismo pequeno burguês” dos populistas do século 19. Agoristas não tem nenhum problema com o empreendedorismo ou o lucro empresarial. O que eles tem um problema é com a classe rentista, obtendo rendimentos absenteístas vindo de grandes fortunas com a ajuda do estado. Aqueles que estão no topo da pirâmide geralmente agem através do estado para se certificar de que eles não terão que se envolver com empreendedorismo. Pelo contrário, o estado os protege do risco e da competição, e por isso, os permite a acumular arrendamentos seguros de longo prazo (veja, por exemplo, aqui e aqui – por favor, veja!).

Em 1999, Konkin fundou o grupo do Yahoo, Left Libertarian, o ponto de encontro através do qual eu, pela primeira vez, entrei em contato com ele, com suas ideias e seu largo círculo de amigos. Tive vários anos de debates estimulantes lá que influenciaram meu desenvolvimento para nenhum fim. Em 2007, três anos após a morte de Konkin, a lista implodiu sobre uma disputa política entre J. Neil Schulman e basicamente todo o resto do grupo, e a maioria das figuras importantes no círculo de Konkin migraram para o grupo Left Libertarian 2. O antigo grupo do Yahoo de Konkin é praticamente uma concha vazia, embora Neil Schulman e Kent Hastings continuem com o grupo (e com os artigos, que valem a pena dar uma olhada). Por causa de uma disputa similar com Neil sobre os direitos do nome “Movement of the Libertarian Left – MLL”, muitos membros do grupo Left Libertarian 2 colaboraram em formar uma organização sucessora, o Alliance of the Libertarian Left – ALL. Mais uma vez, quase todas as figuras importantes do antigo Movement of the Libertarian Left migraram para o Alliance of the Libertarian Left e deixou o antigo corpo como uma concha vazia sob a posse de Schulman.

Eu sei, eu sei. Eu sou o primeiro a reconhecer o quão cômico a sopa de letrinhas das organizações de Konkin deve parecer para alguém de fora. Para fazer graça, numa referência a certo trecho do excelente filme “A Vida de Brian”, do grupo humorístico britânico Monty Python, é como se um homem fundasse a Frente da Judéia Popular, a Frente Popular da Judeia e todas aquelas outras organizações “divisoras” ao mesmo tempo. A personalidade de Sam me lembra um pouco a de Bakunin. Com seu entusiasmo infantil por fundar organizações infinitas (com acrônimos legais, claro) e publicações, emitindo cartões de visita e formando grupos clandestinos conspiratórios, é difícil de acompanhar tudo sem um cartão de pontuação.

Mas suas ideias merecem ser levadas seriamente por si só e seu trabalho teve efeito crítico que desmente o fator de riso em todas as mitoses organizacionais descrita anteriormente. Suas ideias teóricas n’ O Manifesto do Novo Libertário e em seu trabalho inacabado sobre a teoria de classe agorista são, ambas, contribuições monumentais ao pensamento libertário. Suas ideias inspiraram um largo círculo de libertários proeminentes que são influentes em uma ampla gama de organizações e publicações atuais, e seus efeitos em cascata continuam a se espalhar continuamente.

A mais importante associação de seguidores rothbardianos de esquerda de Konkin atualmente é a Alliance of the Libertarian Left  (ALL). Não há nada que remonta a “Frente Popular da Judeia” ou fragmentações do tipo. Na verdade, é um exemplo clássico de como um grupo de afinidades deve ser organizado em uma era de políticas interconectadas. É uma comunidade ampla e vibrante de rothbardianos de esquerda e outros aliados da esquerda (como eu). Uma organização guarda-chuva de algo como uma “Internacional Agorista”.

Em certo sentido, o Alliance of the Libertarian Left é uma melhoria sobre o seu antecessor Movement of the Libertarian Left. O antigo Movement of  the Libertarian Left foi quase inteiramente composto de amigos e pensadores agoristas de Konkin. Embora fossem descendentes da tentativa de Rothbard com a aliança com Nova Esquerda, o ALL incluiu somente um lado da aliança – o lado libertário de mercado. Não houve qualquer “novos-esquerdistas” ou socialistas libertários em vista. O mais próximo que eles chegaram em dialogar com a esquerda genuína foi quando alguns anarco-comunas ou georgistas pararam na lista do Left Libertarian por um tempo e depois seguiram em frente. Embora o núcleo do novo Alliance of the Libertarian Left seja composto dos antigos associados de Konkin, inclui um acréscimo muito maior de movimentos da esquerda. Diversos seguidores de Benjamin Tucker e mutualistas do meu tipo (que enfatizam os aspectos socialistas tanto quanto os aspectos do mercado do anarquismo individualista) e uma grande variedade de geolibertários. Além do antigo núcleo dos agoristas, existe um bom número de pequenos associados agoristas. Chuck Munson (Chuck0), do Infoshop, ainda possui uma ligação amigável com vários membros do ALL. Em um certo sentido, o Alliance of the Libertarian Left é o tipo de aliança de esquerda-direita que Rothbard tentou e falhou em atingir quase quarenta anos atrás.

Portanto, apesar da aparente tolice de Sam com todas as suas organizações, no final, ele construiu algo importante que durou. Ele gravou o seu pensamento em uma ampla gama de pessoas e aproximou todos elas juntas, e a maioria delas ainda está junta e construindo sob os pensamentos de Konkin e de cada outra pessoa. Sua influencia continua alimentando o movimento libertário grandemente de um modo mais amplo de muitas maneiras que nós nunca podemos imaginar completamente a importância no decorrer de nossas vidas.

Basta olhar para os links no site do Alliance of the Libertarian Left ou clicar no blog agregador associado do movimento, o Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left, que você pode achar uma grande variedade de sites hospedados pelos antigos camaradas lutadores de Konkin da época de St. Louis, os discípulos mais recentes do rothbardianismo de esquerda e da contra-economia e até mesmo alguns novos amigos esquerdistas mais novos como eu, que – embora nunca tenhamos nos considerados como seguidores de Rothbard ou Konkin – temos sido influenciado fortemente pelos seus pensamentos.

O site de Brad Spangler, Agorism.info, reproduz O Novo Manifesto Libertário juntamente com muitos outros panfletos de Konkin.

O Agorist Action Alliance (A3) foi criado por Spangler como uma organização ativista pela coordenação da propaganda agorista e organização contra-econômica.

KoPubCo, uma publicação pertencente ao antigo associado de Konkin, Victor Koman, imprimiu muito da literatura do MLL, incluindo reimpressões do New Libertarian Notes e Strategy of the Libertarian Left.

A revista acadêmica fundada por Rothbard, Journal of the Libertarian Studies, desde Dezembro de 2004, tem um editor rothbardiano de esquerda, Roderick T. Long.

Outro membro do Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Sheldon Richman, é editor da revista The Freeman, fundada por Leonard Read. Em anos recentes, ele tem mudado sua postura editorial em uma direção decididamente libertária de esquerda e tem sido um crítico verbal do capitalismo de estado.

Joseph Stromberg – embora completamente sem filiação com o Alliance of the Libertarian Left – é, contudo, uma espécie de uma eminência rothbardiana de esquerda. Ele próprio rejeitou, como tentativas artificiais, dividir a carreira de Rothbard entre fases de inclinação à esquerda e direita. Mas a divisão é muito útil em minha opinião e Stromberg claramente enquadra-se na categoria rothbardiana de esquerda quando se trata de sua análise do papel dos interesses na política externa e interna dos EUA.

Provavelmente, as duas peças centrais do seu corpo de trabalho são:

1. Sua análise sobre o progressismo corporativo na política interna americana em “The Political Economy of  Liberal Corporatism“, e

2. Seu esforço prolongado em integrar teorias da esquerda radical (Hobson, Beard, W. A. Williams e os neo-marxistas) do capital monopolista e do imperialismo dentro de um quadro teórico austríaco, em “The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire“. Este artigo eu não posso recomendar o suficiente.

Além disso, vale a pena navegar nos arquivos nos sites LewRockwell.com e Antiwar.com. Embora o Mises Institute não mantenha um arquivo de autor, seu trabalho pode ser encontrado por uma busca no Google de seu site. Provavelmente sua única grande obra, ao lado de dois artigos mencionados acima, é sua bibliografia comentada ao longo da literatura revisionista sobre guerra e política externa: “Guerra, Paz e o Estado“.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson.

Tradução de Rodrigo Viana. Revisão de Adriel Santana.

To the modern agorist, the agora or uncorrupted free marketplace is the goal; the means of going from the current statism to the agora is called “counter-economics.” “All non-coercive human action committed in defiance of the State constitutes the Counter-Economy,” according to SEK III in his book An Agorist Primer. He mentions some specific examples of what is meant by non-coercive action in defiance of the State:

• Tax evasion
• Inflation avoidance
• Smuggling
• Free production
• Illegal distribution
• The free flow of both labor (“illegal aliens”) and capital across borders
• Information and secrecy of that information
• And many more

The general idea of counter-economics is very similar to what Robert Neuwirth calls System D as reported in an interview called Why Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy. Neuwirth says that

there’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard…the street economy…l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that. (bold emphasis mine)

Nevertheless, the reason why I want to mention System D is because it helps me starkly illustrate that in the final analysis what is being discussed here is simply human survival. This is a discussion that, without being hyperbolic, does touch upon life-and-death issues. To make this unexceptionable point crystal clear, Neuwirth, in his book The Stealth of Nations, mentions how System D has helped people survive the financial crisis:

A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated—in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D—fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.

He further illustrates the survival issue with an example from Latin America:

Studies of countries throughout Latin America have shown that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial crisis. This spontaneous system, ruled by the spirit of organized improvisation, will be crucial for the development of cities in the twenty-first century. (bold emphasis mine)

Perhaps one of the most impressive examples of the counter-economics idea in action is that of what businesspeople did in order to evade the price control laws of Nazi Germany. It also gives me the opportunity to bring to light an issue that seems to be neglected; nevertheless, it does play an important role in undermining the establishment of state sovereignty. In a truly brilliant passage found in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott mentions that shifting of linguistic practices is vital for state evasion and for state prevention:

State rulers find it well nigh impossible to install an effective sovereignty over people who are constantly in motion, who have no permanent pattern of organization, no permanent address, whose leadership is ephemeral, whose subsistence patterns are pliable and fugitive, who have few permanent allegiances, and who are liable, over time, to shift their linguistic practices and their ethnic identity. And this is just the point! The economic, political, and cultural organization of such people is, in large part, a strategic adaptation to avoid incorporation in state structures. (all emphasis is mine)

With that prologue now out of the way, let me get to my main point: that the behavior of some businesspeople (I cannot say all because it is fairly easy to demonstrate that some businesspeople wanted fascism or even created it) acted as perfect textbook examples of agorists evading the Nazi price controls introduced in 1936.

In his book The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism, Günter Reimann, much like James C. Scott, emphasizes the importance of permanent change—or subversion of “standardization”—as a key method for evading the will of the State. Conformity truly is the jailer of the world. Reimann notes that

manufacturers may introduce changes in standardized products which result in making the finished article more complicated, solely for the purpose of enabling the manufacturer to claim that the finished product is a “new article,” which will not be subject to the old price restrictions. The State is enforcing more standardization of production in order to save raw materials; manufacturers must do exactly the reverse in order to defend their private interests. (bold emphasis mine)

To further evade the State’s price control system, buyers and sellers would set up these “combination deals” that amounted to selling scarce resources for a higher price while “tricking” the State into thinking that one was following the prescribed price orders. I want to reproduce in full Reimann’s story about how the buyers and sellers executed this legerdemain because it illustrates an actual way of appearing to be “legitimate” while actually being the complete opposite:

A peasant was arrested and put on trial for having repeatedly sold his old dog together with a pig. When a private buyer of pigs came to him, a sale was staged according to the official rules. The buyer would ask the peasant: “How much is the pig?” The cunning peasant would answer: “I cannot ask you for more than the official price. But how much will you pay for my dog which I also want to sell?” Then the peasant and the buyer of the pig would no longer discuss the price of the pig, but only the price of the dog. They would come to an understanding about the price of the dog, and when an agreement was reached, the buyer got the pig too. The price for the pig was quite correct, strictly according to the rules, but the buyer had paid a high price for the dog. Afterward, the buyer, wanting to get rid of the useless dog, released him, and he ran back to his old master for whom he was indeed a treasure.

In the end, the peasant never actually sells his dog since the buyer effectively gives the dog back to him by releasing the dog. The buyer gets the pig, which is the official side of this transaction, but the seller gets to keep the official price for the pig plus the phantom dog sale price, thus the seller gets a price above the State mandated price for selling his pig.

Naturally, the State is going to try to crackdown on such prestidigitation, a fancy word for any sneaky sleight of hand behavior. Being Nazi Germany, the State’s response was quite predictable. According to Reimann, the State used “control purchases” in order to catch people for audaciously circumventing its price rules. What exactly were Nazi “control purchases”? They consisted of the following:

• Secret police agents
• The secret police agents would be plainclothes officers and would pose as harmless buyers, but willing to offer a higher price than the official price
• The secret police agents would then try to induce businesspeople to make an illegal transaction with them

To me this sounds like a drug sting operation but for such prosaic items as selling pigs! A pig sting! (That has double entendre written all over it.)

In order to avoid getting caught, the idea of shifting one’s linguistic practices comes into play among those engaged in productive activity. Reimann points out explicitly that when applying agorism, one must learn to speak a new language:

In order to discuss illegal business transactions in a manner that makes them seem legal, businessmen in fascist countries learn to speak the language of experienced underground adversaries of the regime. They are often uncertain as to whether a prospective buyer is “reliable” and therefore talk in terms which are innocent and the meaning of which can be interpreted in different ways. (bold emphasis mine)

In conclusion, I think that one possible way to “market” agorism to people who are currently not agorists is to show that the underlying ideas have a long and honorable history. I have tried to illustrate this by using both a recent and a historical example. In the recent example, i.e., the current financial crisis, agorism and System D have helped desperate people on multiple continents earn a living and stay alive. Agorism and System D thus are helping people survive. The compare and contrast is blatantly obvious: the greedy ruling class caused the problem through their central bank monetary policies but the agorists provided the solution and it is working in practice. The Nazi example demonstrates that agorism is a tool for undermining a totalitarian regime. Once again, agorism can position itself as being on the side of humanity against some of its most monstrous enemies. And how did our pig buyer and pig seller do it: through a negotiated exchange in which both parties came to an acceptable agreement. In other words, voluntary exchange subverts totalitarianism once again.

Karl Hess was just getting into his full left-wing swing when Rothbard gave up the New Left as a lost cause. Even during Rothbard’s most enthusiastic attempts at collaboration with the Left, Hess was already to the left of Rothbard. As I mentioned in Part I, at one point he was a Wobbly. He continued to move leftward into the 1970s, in 1975 writing the libertarian socialist tinged Dear America.

As the 1970s wore on, his leftism took on more of a “Small is Beautiful” coloring, with an emphasis on human scale technology and neighborhood democracy. In this period he wrote the highly recommended book Community Technology, and coauthored Neighborhood Power with David Morris.

By around 1980 or so, Hess also started drifting back to the right, although he never went as far in that direction as Rothbard did in his last years. His autobiography Mostly on the Edge, written after his shift back to the right, still retained much of the generally decentralist and anti-bigness spirit of his earlier years.

In considering the career of Samuel Edward Konkin III, I rely among other things on his own account of the history of the Movement of the Libertarian Left (PDF). If you want the full, complicated history of all the organizations he built, go to Konkin’s account (along with obits by Jeff Riggenbach and Phil Osborn) and you’ll get all the organizational details and humanizing anecdotes you can handle. I’m skipping over a lot here, because my main focus is on his ideas and the people today who were influenced by them.

Konkin (aka SEK3), a native Albertan and a social crediter in his callow youth, was an associate of Rothbard dating back to the days of the YAF schism (he was a Wisconsin delegate at the St. Louis convention where it took place). His Movement of the Libertarian Left continued to develop Rothbard’s thought in the leftward direction that Rothbard himself had abandoned.

Despite Rothbard’s disillusion with the libertarian-left alliance, the collaboration of 1969 between YAF and SDS dissidents had a certain momentum of its own. For example, according to SEK3’s history of the Movement of the Libertarian Left, Libertarian Alliances formed on a number of college campuses through the 1970s. The phenomenon was kicked off in February 1970, when the California Libertarian Alliance organized a Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation. Speakers included Karl Hess; the free market libertarian Robert LeFevre; Carl Oglesby; Dana Rohrahacher (yeah, him), who was known as the “Johnny Grass-seed” of the YAF radicals back when he was good for something; and Sam Konkin.

Starting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libertarian Alliance, and drawing associates involved with the mushrooming Libertarian Alliances all over New York and the West Coast, Konkin organized many of his fellow travellers into a left-Rothbardian movement that took on the name New Libertarian Alliance in 1974. Konkin created the NLA as an underground organization, for promoting his stategy of Counter-Economics and his ideology of Agorism. In 1978, he founded the Movement of the Libertarian Left as an above-ground counterpart to the NLA. The Agorist Institute popped up at some point thereafter, if you’re still keeping track. (I’m not blind to the humor in this mad proliferation of organizations, believe me – more about which below.)

Konkin’s chief strategic focus, in keeping with his doctrinaire anti-political stance, was what he called “Counter-Economics (PDF)” or “Agorism.” The idea was outlined in Konkin’s New Libertarian Manifesto (PDF): to build a black market counter-economy, and drain resources from the corporate state nexus, until the free market counter-economy finally supplanted the state capitalist system altogether.

Konkin’s ideas on counter-economics dovetail to a considerable extent with the left-wing ideas of dual power and prefigurative politics. I discussed a counter-economic strategy based on those concepts, from a libertarian socialist perspective considerably to the left of Konkin’s, in “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old“:

Economic counter-institutions, unfortunately, work within the framework of a larger corporate capitalist economy. They compete in markets in which the institutional culture of the dominant firms is top-down and hierarchical, and are in great danger of absorbing this institutional culture themselves. That’s why you have a non-profit and cooperative sector whose management is indistinguishable from its capitalist counterparts: prestige salaries, middle management featherbedding, bureaucratic irrationality, and slavish adherence to the latest motivational/management theory dogma. The problem is exacerbated by a capitalist financial system, which extends positive reinforcement (in the form of credit) to firms following an orthodox organizational model (even when bottom-up organization is far more efficient)….

The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” A great deal of production and consumption already takes place within the social or gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers’ and producers’ co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a cohesive counter-economy.

Konkin’s other major innovation was his development of libertarian class theory. The roots of Rothbard’s and Konkin’s class theory lie in the French thinkers Saint-Simon, Comte, and Dunoyer, and in the radical wing of English classical liberalism. They identified the ruling class as those interests that obtained their wealth by acting through the state.

The classic thinker in this tradition was the English free market radical Thomas Hodgskin, who made the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” rights of property. The former, he said, followed naturally from possession and served to secure the individual’s ownership of his labor product. Artificial property rights, on the other hand, were creations of the state which enabled the holder to collect tribute from the product of labor. Holders of artificial property rights included the great landlords with their feudal rents, the politically connected mercantile capitalists, and the recipients of assorted other privileges and immunities.

The ideas of the French positivists and of Hodgskin were taken up in Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between “natural appropriation” and “political appropriation” of the land, and between the “economic means” and “political means” to wealth. Political appropriation of land was the chief political means to wealth.

The classical political economists had acknowledged that most people will enter wage employment only when all the land is appropriated and they no longer have direct access to self-employment on their own land. This was a commonplace observation made by Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. Oppenheimer’s radical contribution was to observe that although the land was indeed all appropriated, it had never been naturally appropriated; it had, rather, been politically appropriated by the great landlords acting through the state. The great landlords used their artificial property rights in the land to control access to it and charge tribute to those working it, and in many cases to hold vast tracts of it out of use altogether. Only under these circumstances, in which the means of direct subsistence were made inaccessible to labor, could labor be forced to sell its services on disadvantageous terms (the British ruling class literature at the time of the Enclosures was full of frank admissions that the only way to get people to work hard enough, for a low enough wage, was to steal their land). Privilege was the political means to wealth, and the state was the organized political means.

Rothbard made this the centerpiece of his class theory, treating collusion with the state as the political means to wealth, and the ruling class as those who attached themselves to the state and used its subsidies, privileges and special protections as a source of profit. Rothbard stated these principles, among other places, in “The Anatomy of the State.”

Konkin took this basic insight and ran with it, applying it in detail to the concrete conditions of American state capitalism. The ruling class was not only state functionaries, but the central banks and associated large financial interests, and the commanding heights of the corporate economy most closely tied to the statist finance system. Agorism was the revolutionary movement of those engaged in the economic means, attempting to take as much economic activity as possible out of the control of the ruling class. Konkin’s agorist class theory was set forth in the first chapter of his unfinished work Agorism Contra Marxism. That chapter is appended to Wally Conger’s excellent Agorist Class Theory (PDF), which itself is based on the chapter and surving scraps of Konkin’s work in the area. An in-depth class analysis of the financial system and its industrial satellites, based on the same version of libertarian class theory, is set forth in an article by Walter Grinder and John Hagel: “Toward a Theory of State Capitalism (PDF).”

As Konkin said, Agorist and Marxist class theories pretty much agree when it comes to those at the top and bottom of their respective class systems. “The differences arise as one moves to the middle of the social pyramid.” The main difference regarding the middle is that Agorist class theory is a lot closer to the “petty bourgeois producerism” of the nineteenth century populists. Agorists don’t have any problem with entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial profit. What they have a problem with is the rentier classes, deriving absentee incomes from huge fortunes with the help of the state. Those at the top of the pyramid generally act through the state to make sure they don’t have to engage in entrepreneurship. Rather, the state protects them from risk and competition, and thereby enables them to collect secure long-term rents (see, for example, here and here – please do!).

In 1999, Konkin founded the LeftLibertarian yahoogroup, the venue through which I first came into contact with him, his ideas, and his wide circle of friends. I had several years of stiulating discussion there that influenced my development to no end. In 2007, three years after Konkin’s death, the list imploded over a political dispute between J. Neil Schulman and just about everybody else, and most of the important figures in Konkin’s circle migrated to the Left-Libertarian2 group. Konkin’s old yahoogroup is pretty much an empty shell, although Neil Schulman and Kent Hastings stayed with it (and the archives are well worth digging into). Because of a similar dispute with Neil over the rights to the name “Movement of the Libertarian Left”, several members of LeftLibertarian2 collaborated to form a successor organization, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Again, just about all the leading figures in the old MLL migrated to the ALL and left the old body as an empty shell owned by Schulman.

I know, I know. I’m the first to acknowledge how comical Konkin’s alphabet soup of organizations must seem to anyone on the outside. To beat you to the joke, it’s like one man founded the Judean People’s Front, the Popular Front of Judea, and all those other “splitter” organizations at the same time. Sam’s personality reminds me a bit of Bakunin’s. With his childlike enthusiasm for founding endless organizations (with cool acronyms, of course) and publications, issuing name cards, and forming conspiratorial undergounds, it’s hard to keep track of it all without a score card.

But his ideas deserve to be taken seriously in their own right, and his work had a serious effect that belies the snicker factor in all the organizational mitosis described above. His theoretical ideas in the New Libertarian Manifesto, and in his unfinished work on agorist class theory, are both monumental contributions to libertarian thought. His ideas inspired a large circle of prominent libertarians who are influential in a wide range of organizations and publications today, and their ripple effects continue to spread outward.

The most important association of Konkin’s left-Rothbardian followers today is the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. There’s nothing remotely “Judean People’s Front” or splinterish about it. If anything, it’s a textbook example of how an affinity group should be organized in an era of networked politics. It is a large, vibrant community of left-Rothbardians and other left-wing allies (like me). It’s an umbrella organization something like an Agorist International.

In a sense, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is an improvement on its MLL predecessor. The old MLL was almost entirely made up of Konkin’s Agorist fellow-thinkers. Although it was descended from Rothbard’s attempt at a New Left alliance, it included only one side–the market libertarian side–of the alliance. There weren’t any New Leftists or libertarian socialists in sight. The closest they came to dialogue with the genuine left was when some anarcho-commies or Georgists stopped by the LeftLibertarian list for a while and then moved on. Although the nucleus of the new ALL is made up of Konkin’s old associates, it includes a much larger accretion of left-wing movements. Several Tuckerites and mutualists of my general stripe (who stress the socialist as much as the market aspect of individualist anarchism), and quite an assortment of geolibertarians. In addition to the old core of Agorists, there are a good many small-a agorist fellow-travellers. Chuck Munson (Chuck0) of Infoshop even has friendly ties with several members of the ALL. In a sense, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is exactly the kind of left-right alliance Rothbard tried and failed to achieve almost forty years ago.

So despite Sam’s seeming silliness with all his organizations, in the end he built something important that lasted. He impressed his thought on a wide range of people, and brought them together, and most of them are still together and building on his and each other’s. His influence continues to leaven the broader libertarian movement in ways we may never fully realize the importance of in our lifetimes.

Just by looking at the links on the Alliance of the Libertarian Left site, or clicking the movement’s associated blog ring, the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left, you can find a wide range of sites hosted by Konkin’s old fightin’ comrades from the St. Louis days, more recent disciples of left-Rothbardianism and Counter-economics, and some even newer left-wing friends like me, who–despite never having considered ourselves followers of Rothbard or Konkin–have been strongly influenced by their thought.

Brad Spangler’s site, Agorism.Info, reproduces the NLM along with many of Konkin’s other pamphlets.

The Agorist Action Alliance (A3) was created by Spangler as an activist organization for coordinating agorist propaganda and counter-economic organization.

KoPubCo, a publishing outfit owned by old Konkin associate Victor Koman, has reprints of much of the MLL’s literature, including reprints of New Libertarian Notes and Strategy of the Libertarian Left.

The Rothbard-founded scholarly journal, Journal of Libertarian Studies has since December 2004 had a left-Rothbardian editor, Roderick T. Long.

Another member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Sheldon Richman, is (sic) editor of Leonard Read’s long-lived periodical The Freeman; he has in recent years moved its editorial stance in a decidely left-libertarian direction and been a vocal critic of state capitalism.

Joseph Stromberg – although completely unaffiliated with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left–is nevertheless something of a Left-Rothbardian eminence.  He has himself rejected as artificial attempts to divide Rothbard’s career into left- and right-leaning phases.  But the division is quite useful in my opinion, and Stromberg clearly falls into the left-Rothbardian category when it comes to his analysis of the role of interests in U.S. foreign and domestic policy.

Probably the two centerpieces of his body of work are:

1. His analysis of corporate liberalism in American domestic policy in “The Political Economy of Liberal Corporatism,” and

2. His extended effort at integrating radical left-wing theories (Hobson, Beard, W.A. Williams, and the neo-Marxists) of monopoly capital and imperialism into an Austrian theoretical framework, in “The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire (PDF).” This article I cannot recommend highly enough.

In addition, it’s worthwhile to browse his archives at LewRockwell.Com and Antiwar.Com. Although Mises.Org… doesn’t maintain an author archive, his work can be found by a Google search of their site. Probably his single greatest work, aside from the two articles mentioned above, is his lengthy annotated bibliography of revisionist literature on war and foreign policy: “War, Peace, and the State.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008. 

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Os Rothbardianos de Esquerda – Parte 2: Depois de Rothbard.

Edited for New Libertarian participation

Before 1969

Prior to 1969, there was no “organized” Libertarian Movement. In the 1800s, circles formed around Lysander Spooner’s individualist abolitionism in Massachusetts, followed by Benjamin Tucker and his Liberty magazine (not to be confused with the Seattle ‘zine of the 1980’s & 1990’s) which upheld the black banner of individualist anarchy from 1870’s to 1907. In that year, the entire stock of back issues and books were burned and Tucker left America to live obscurely in France until his death in 1939.

The orgy of statism peaked first with World War I and then receded. Randolph Bourne uttered the memorable line, “War is the health of the State” just before his death in 1918 and the Roaring Twenties saw a brief revival of freedom. The two main spokesmen were Albert Jay Nock and his Freeman magazine (where Suzanne LaFollette first came to prominence) from 1920-24, and then H.L. Mencken and his American Mercury in the late 1920’s and through the 1930’s until the approach of the second statist orgasm, World War II.

Nock’s student, Frank Chodorov, was responsible for the first proto-libertarian student organization in the 1950s, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (still around, but now called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute). Murray Rothbard, a political fan of Chodorov (but disagreeing with his Georgist deviation on “The Land Question”), formed the Circle Bastiat in the late 1950’s after being purged from William Buckley’s National Review. (Buckley was a fan of Nock himself, and had described himself as a “philosophical anarchist” before anointing himself the avatar of modern American conservatism, having “seen a Dream Walking.”)

Robert LeFevre and Leonard Read, like Rothbard and Chodorov, evolved from the “Old Right” alliance against the ultra-statist New Deal war machine of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Classical liberals (like John T. Flynn) and anarchists and even socialists like Norman Thomas joined in the great America First crusade against U.S. imperialism between 1939 and 1941 with never less than 80% of the people behind them…until Pearl Harbor.

LeFevre had a fling at running for Congress with the likes of Richard Nixon in 1948, but soon realized that one could not build a movement for freedom without first re-informing the American people what freedom was, something they had lost in five decades of non-stop statism. He formed the Freedom School in Colorado and his youthful graduates became the original activists in the student movement. Older people attended Read’s Foundation for Economic Education in upstate New York.

Rothbard was attracted to the growing student movement and actually entered the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with his small following. He broke with those libertarians still clinging to an alliance with the anti-New-Deal Right by opposing Barry Goldwater in 1964 and beginning publication of Left & Right in 1965. He actively attended New Left meetings, wrote for Ramparts magazine, and even formed tactical alliances at the Freedom & Peace Party conventions with Maoists against old-line socialists.

LeFevre’s students began the Libertarian American in Texas and Liberal Innovator (then just Innovator) in California but, when Kerry Thornley became editor, also pursued a pro-New Left alliance. The Innovator leafletted Goldwater delegates at the 1964 Republican Convention at the San Francisco Cow Palace. Innovator also published the first articles concerning underground market activity which was later to be known as Counter-Economics. Alas, the Innovator contributors went underground just as the Libertarian Movement was about to explode above ground.

Daniel Rosenthal, Sharon Presley, Tom McGivern and others broke from the Youth for Goldwater campaign to form the Alliance of Libertarian Activists, the first explicitly libertarian activist organization at the end of 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley. Meanwhile, the earlier 1960 Youth for Goldwater which had reformed at Buckley’s Sharon, Connecticut estate continued to attract libertarian students largely unaware of the other groups. The new student group, Young Americans for Freedom, had one libertarian chair, the founder, Bob Schuchman, who rejected the label “Young Conservatives.”

Thus, while the early libertarian activists following Rothbard and LeFevre mostly fought on the side of the New Left, the later and much larger group of hard-core campus activists who sympathized with liberty found themselves on the opposite side in the largest anti-New Left group, YAF, in the summer of 1969.

A Word About Ayn Rand

Jerome Tuccille’s claim (in his book title and elsewhere) that It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand was not accurate, but was indicative. Tuccille himself joined Rothbard and others in the early pre-St. Louis attempt to create a Libertarian movement out of YAF and SDS chapters, the Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA). Rand herself opposed independent political activism, always supported Republican candidates (going back to Wendell Willkie) or no one, and strongly rejected any association with libertarianism. She called her followers Students of Objectivism and they operated on campuses independently. (For example, at the University of Wisconsin in 1968-70, around 300 of them were called Committee to Defend Individual Rights, or CDIR.) But it is true that many YAF members were influenced by reading Rand, and chapters in Pennsylvania and Maryland were openly Randist. Don Ernsberger and David Walters of Pennsylvania formed the Libertarian Caucus within YAF with Dana Rohrabacher and Bill Steele of California (LeFevrians). According to David Nolan of Colorado, an earlier Libertarian Caucus was tried at the previous National YAF Convention of 1967.

Another of Rand’s following who contributed to early libertarianism was Jarrett B. Wollstein, who created Students for Rational Individualism and The Rational Individualist magazine. Along with Rothbard’s new Libertarian, which he changed when he found the name was used by an obscure newsletter to Libertarian Forum, and LeFevre’s Rampart Journal, Rational Individualist became the leading libertarian publication until 1971. Also influenced by Rand was Lanny Friedlander, who began a fanzine called Reason in 1968.

Writing for RI and Rampart Journal was anarcho-objectivist Roy Childs. Childs wrote an “Open Letter to Ayn Rand” which obtained no response from her other than the usual purge for questioning her ideology. But its case that objectivism lead naturally to free-market anarchy left unanswered provided a conduit for many conversions to libertarianism by such as philosopher and friend of Childs, George H. Smith.

In 1968, Ayn Rand split with her chief disciple, Nathaniel Branden, who had run her activist organization, Nathaniel Branden Institute or NBI. Ex-objectivists filled the ranks of YAF and SRI.

At the end of 1968, Rothbard attempted a Left-Right Anarchist supper club in New York with anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin which lasted two meetings. Rothbard was joined by the former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, Karl Hess, in Libertarian Forum and in SDS activism. Hess went so far as to join the Black Panthers; his article in early 1969 in Playboy, “The Death of Politics,” was second only to Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is A Harsh Mistress (published serially 1967-68) with its portrayal of a largely successful libertarian revolution on the moon in swelling the ranks of the about-to-be-born libertarian movement.

1969-1974

If the Libertarian Movement has a golden age, it ran from August 1969 through around August 1974. The SDS convention split several ways, purging the anarchists before the other delegates even arrived. The Young Americans for Freedom began purging racist and Randist chapters in July, and both sides, libertarians and traditionalists or “trads,” engaged in “papering” their chapters with members to maximize delegate strength in St. Louis for the National Convention over the Labor Day Weekend. Assisting the libertarians was the proximity of the World Science Fiction convention, also that weekend in St. Louis, and the number of Heinlein fans who would be attending and available to accept delegate status.

The trads, already in power, succeeded in stripping most of the libertarian delegates of credentials, but about 200 hard-core libertarians retained delegate status and many who came as trad supporters (such as the founding editor of NEW LIBERTARIAN) switched to the Libertarian Caucus when they saw the repressive treatment of the authoritarian trads. Agitating additionally was the small Anarchist Caucus of RLA and the Student Libertarian Action Movement, or SLAM. The AC peaked at about 30 delegates, and could not get more than that for self-styled “philosophic anarchist” Michael Ingallinera. Karl Hess led a rally under the famous St. Louis arch which was dispersed by the police.

Dana Rohrabacher, the “Johnny Grass-Seed” of the Libertarian Caucus, could not get more than 220 votes and was most popular of the pure libertarians. Harvey Hukari of Stanford, running independent of both the “National Office” trad slate and the LC, did better but still could not win. James Farley, claiming to be a libertarian running on the NO slate, on the other hand, received the highest delegate vote total (around 500 out of 800). Samuel Edward Konkin III, a Wisconsin delegate, and his anarchist friend Tony Warnock (both rightly suspected of having been won over by Rohrabacher and Rothbard) found they had been replaced by alternates when they had gone for a late breakfast, even though they arrived back an hour or more before their state’s votes were to be declared.

The most spectacular moment at the St. Louis YAF convention of 1969 occurred when an AC member lit a xerox of his draft card in front of television cameras and was attacked by YAF trads football-style. Libertarians tried to form a line to protect him and the subsequent physical battle radicalized a lot of “fusionist” libertarian-conservatives. Though some like Jared Lobdell tried to mollify libertarians with a strong anti-draft minority plank, and unopposed Chairman David Keene appealed to both sides for unity, the purges continued after the convention.

That fall, the Libertarian Caucus and the Students for Rational Individualism merged into the Students for Individual Liberty, dually based in Pennsylvania and Maryland around Ernsberger/Walters and Wollstein/Childs. Rohrabacher and Steele, after their purge, formed the California Libertarian Alliance, and announced a huge convention in early 1970. Rothbard and Hess jumped the gun with a Left-Right Conference at the Hotel Diplomat in October 1969 (Columbus Day Weekend).

The RLA conference did attract New Left individualists and former YAF anarchists, but the free-marketeers stayed to hear Rothbard and his Circle Bastiat brothers, Leonard Liggio and Joseph Peden, discuss economics and revisionist history, while Hess led a contingent to join the March on Fort Dix of New Leftists. When the latter returned pursued by FBI agents, the RLA collapsed and Rothbard swung right.

In February 1970, backed by Riqui and Seymour Leon of LeFevre’s relocated Rampart Institute (in Santa Ana, California), the California Libertarian Alliance hosted the Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation at USC. Nearly 500 activists showed up to hear LeFevre, SDS former president Carl Oglesby, Hess, Rohrabacher, SEK3, and most of the early activists. Press coverage of libertarians (such as the con coverage in the LA Free Press) was growing, peaking with the 1971 color cover on the New York Times Magazine (see below).

Libertarian Alliances and SIL chapters spread to every major campus during 1970. The Madison, Wisconsin, UW Libertarian Alliance sprouted chapters in neighboring high schools and started the newsletter, Laissez Faire. Its five issues were the first volume of what was to become NEW LIBERTARIAN. During the Cambodia demonstrations in May, UWLA rallied former YAFers and YIPpies and was attacked by both National Guard tear gas units and Maoist Progressive Labor heavies.

During the summer of 1970, SEK3 established contacts with Eastern libertarians, and brought Columbia students Stan Lehr and Lou Rossetto (now publisher of Wired) into the Movement. They formed the Columbia Freedom Conspiracy. SEK3 moved to New York University and formed the NYU Libertarian Alliance, changing the newsletter name to NYU/New Libertarian Notes (in ironic homage to New Left Notes) and recruiting most of the NYU Science Fiction Society as the kernel of NYULA. Quickly seeding LA’s on other campuses, he formed the New York Libertarian Alliance, but in deference to the older group, formed from the objectivist Metropolitan Young Republican Club (MYRC), called by Gary Greenberg the New York Libertarian Association, NY LA was seldom used publicly leaving “NYLA” to the association. NYLA was part of SIL while the Libertarian Alliance was strongly identified with the California LA.

NYLA and the New York LA worked together on Libertarian Conferences such as Freedom Conspiracy’s Columbia Libertarian Conference of 1971 where Milton Friedman was confronted by SEK3 as to his responsibility for the withholding feature of income tax. Friedman’s ready embrace of the “credit” excused as needed to fight World War II (which was questioned by most of the revisionist-historical libertarians there) discredited him and his Chicago School throughout the Libertarian Movement and put Ludwig von Mises (and Murray Rothbard)’s Austrian School of Economics in the forefront of free-market theory. NYULA attended Mises Circle meetings at NYU and Mises was guest of honor at subsequent East Coast Libertarian Conferences hosted by SIL at Drexel Campus in Pennsylvania.

By 1972, NYU Libertarian Notes had evolved from a mimeoed fanzine into a typeset semi-prozine; with the growing infrequency of The Radical Individualist (now just The Individualist) it became the major cross-factional publication with its credo, “Everybody appearing in this publications disagrees.” Still influential was SIL’s SIL Notes, but it too began skipping issues. In New York, RLA’s Abolitionist was expanded into Outlook even as RLA changed its name to the Citizens for a Restructured Republic (CRR) and abandoned Weatherman tactics for electoral alliances. Rothbard urged support for Mark Hatfield or William Proxmire as anti-war candidates, but when they were eliminated, he balked at supporting George McGovern.

On the west coast, Rohrabacher, Leon and LeFevre published two issues of Pine Tree which became Rap magazine. As usual, the California Libertarians were far too early and hip for the rest of the movement or the market. Most ambitiously, Leon Kaspersky tried to distribute a monthly libertarian tabloid, Protos but gave up. All failed within a year. The earliest libertarian bookstore attempt was made by Berl Hubbel in Long Beach, the prophetically-named Agora Black Market Bookstore.

Lanny Friedlander, based in Massachusetts, sold Reason to minarchist (term coined by SEK3 in 1970 and appearing in Newsweek in 1972) Robert Poole and anarchist Manny Klausner who along with objectivist philosopher Tibor Machan moved it to California and relentlessly rightward, eventually out of the Libertarian Movement altogether. It did achieve the highest circulation of any publication calling itself libertarian at 10,000 (it continued to grow after it embraced neoconservatism); second was Robert Kephart’s Libertarian Review which peaked at 7,000 under its subsequent ownership by Charles Koch and control by Ed Crane.

In 1971, the New York Times published its cover story on Rossetto & Lehr of Columbia. In 1972, Edith Efron referred to Libertarianism as a third position distinguished from Liberal and Conservative in TV Guide. Libertarian media recognition began to drop because of a new organization appearing in early 1972 to the near-universal scorn of the highly anti-political and even revolutionary libertarian movement, the “Libertarian” Party or LP. To everyone’s amazement, including the few LP supporters, it won an electoral vote for its presidential candidate John Hospers, and its vice-presidential candidate, Toni Nathan, the first woman to get an electoral vote. As a reward for his defection from Virginia’s all-Nixon electoral college delegation, Roger McBride was given the 1976 LP nomination and nearly brought it back down to total obscurity.

In October 1972, Samuel Edward Konkin III and LP founder David Nolan debated the morality of voting in NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES.

The real crucial election turned out to be the New York mayoral election of 1973; SEK3 and the LA had agreed to join the Free Libertarian Party of New York though explicitly urging the LP’s destruction; SEK3 won election to the Executive Committee and promptly built a coalition of upstate minarchists and Manhattan radicals who matched in strength the New York City “anarchists” who were willing to oppose the state but embraced party politics: partyarchs (also coined by SEK3 in NLN). The only campaign which all participated in was Fran Youngstein for Mayor. Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard was attracted to Youngstein and his scornful opposition to the LP (he supported Nixon in ‘72 as did Rand) ended. The NLN anarchists, who were Rothbardian in most respects but adhered to the California Libertarian Alliance (LeFevre) anti-political position as most consistent, were forced to split and walked out of the 1974 FLP Convention just as their coalition partners were winning control, leaving a stalemate. However, enough won delegate status to the Dallas National LP convention to ally with the moderate Reformers of E. Scott Royce who ran against Edward H. Crane III and the Nolan National Office.

After Royce’s defeat, Crane created an authoritarian machine and purged several state newsletters as sympathetic to SEK3 and the “radical caucus.” Those campus LAers who resisted the LP and the LPrc who worked outside the party as a revived SLAM, now called for a New Libertarian Alliance which was announced in 1974 after Dallas. As partyarchs geared up for the 1974 congressional elections (which produced nothing), the NLA surged up only to go…underground. SEK3’s response to electoral politics was refusal to pay taxes, obey regulations or in any way give the State vampire its blood — Counter-Economics — combined with Libertarian Theory. In other words, politically-aware black marketeers, or agorists.

1975-1980

Aboveground, the Party was left with the dregs and vacillators of the Libertarian Movement; underground the NLA built its counter-economy. But still another factor entered in 1975: the vast fortunes of Charles and David Koch, and the Cato Institute they endowed. Ed Crane, already in control of the LP, became chair of Cato and disburser of funds. A complex of offices was set up in San Francisco and Cato bought Libertarian Review from Kephart, keeping Roy Childs as editor but hiring Jeff Riggenbach to keep LR actually running. Riggenbach wrote for NL as well.

NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES had come a long way; it serialized an interview that J. Neil Schulman had got with Robert A. Heinlein, the first such interviewed published in decades. NLN’s circulation took off and it nearly hit a thousand at the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C. with the final installment of the Heinlein interview. In 1975, SEK3 finally gave up on the East and with the hardest core (except for John Pachak, the long-time layout artist), piled into a Toyota for a legendary three-week trip across the U.S. to relocate in Los Angeles.

Between December 1976 and January 1978, SEK3 and those who had come from New York with him (Andy Thornton, J. Neil Schulman, Bob Cohen) plus Southern Californians like Victor Koman and Chris Schaefer put out NEW LIBERTARIAN WEEKLY — 101 issues of NLW before finally retreating to monthly and less frequent publication. Ironically, the publication with the best history of on-time frequent publication (even better than reason which delayed and skipped several issues early in its publication career) burned itself out in weekly production and never returned to regular on-time publication again. During that time, NLW not only became the premier publication of anti-party libertarians and “journal of record” of the Movement, but also took up the cause of opposing “monocentrism,” the monopolization of the Libertarian Movement by Koch money and power, the legendary “Kochtopus.”

Just as NLW sputtered down in frequency to just plain NEW LIBERTARIAN magazine, Rothbard broke with the Kochtopus. Relations between MNR and SEK3 were maximally strained during 1977 when Rothbard joined the Kochtopus and moved to San Francisco. Rothbard was described as the “Darth Vader” of the Movement (Star Wars had just been released). Rothbard lashed back with his attack on the “space cadets” of science-fiction oriented libertarians, and was attacked himself within the LP by “space cadets” who labeled his faction “grubeaters.” But Rothbard had a falling out during the 1980 Clark for President campaign with Crane who controlled the campaign, and his “shares” in Cato were confiscated by the other Board members. NL promptly supported Rothbard in his cry, “They stole my shares” and relations were largely repaired.

Edward Clark and his vice-presidential running mate, David Koch, did get the highest number of votes ever for the LP (nearly 900,000) but at an incredible cost per vote. And the few thousand votes Hospers had received in 1972 had at least got him an electoral vote. The LP began its long decline. (Hospers himself turned against the LP.)

1981-1990

With Rothbard’s opposition to the Kochtopus, Crane’s control slipped fast. Students for a Libertarian Society quickly collapsed and its handpicked leader, Milton Mueller, dropped out of the Movement. Cato’s attempt to reach out to Left-Liberals, Inquiry magazine, plateaued in circulation and was combined with Libertarian Review, which could not break the 5,000 level of circulation. At the 1983 LP National convention, Crane lost a close battle with the combined Right-Center coalition who put California state apparatchik David Bergland up against CFR member turned mild isolationist, Earl Ravenal. Koch’s money was pulled out for the 1984 election and Ed Crane turned on the Libertarian Party.

In 1985, at the Libertarian International Convention in Oslo, Norway, Crane and Konkin were to debate the validity of the Libertarian Party for libertarians. After SEK3’s demolition job, Crane got up and refused to defend the party, even shaking Konkin’s hand. Alas, Crane was moving rightward.

Rothbard, too, lost interest in the Libertarian Party with no one left of consequence to fight over it. A feeble attempt was made to stop Rothbard’s candidate, Republican U.S. Representative from Texas, Ron Paul, from getting the 1988 nomination., mostly from the Association for Libertarian Feminists (ALF) who strongly opposed him on abortion. When Paul’s vote continued the decline from the Clark high, Rothbard blamed the “Left” Libertarians (apparently still in the LP) and luftmenschen with no visible means of support (Agorists and other counter-economists?), and quit the party. With Llewellyn Rockwell, Rothbard formed the Ludwig von Mises Institute and announced an alliance with Rockford Institute’s Thomas Fleming and his paleoconservatives as an attempt to revive the Old Right.

While the LP declined schism by schism, the New Libertarian Alliance sprouted to above ground entities. In 1978, the Movement of the Libertarian Left was formed out of remaining above ground activists to restore and continue the alliance Rothbard and [Carl] Oglesby had begun between the New Left and Libertarians against foreign intervention or imperialism. MLL’s internal newsletter was Tactics of the MLL; it also began a theoretical journal after the publication of SEK3’s long-delayed New Libertarian Manifesto. The responses by Rothbard, LeFevre, and anti-voting/anti-activist Erwin “Filthy Pierre” Strauss and Konkin’s replies became the basis of Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance #1. SNLA#2 began SEK3’s Agorism Contra Marxism serialization and George Smith’s criticism of Rothbard’s “Leninist” Libertarianism. Within a decade, Rothbard had swung right and the Berlin Wall had fallen. (Agorism had made the East European Marxist journals and was vigorously debated in the early 1980s.)

On December 31, 1984 The Agorist Institute was formed on that symbolic date and with the logo of “the tip of the iceberg.” So in 1985 MLL was turned over to Victor Koman and Mike Gunderloy while SEK3, J. Kent Hastings and John Strang concentrated on AI. The New Isolationist newsletter combined the editorial skills and writings of Konkin and Royce, with Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky from the New Left, Thomas Fleming and Charles Reese from the Old Right, and many other anti-interventionists.

Meanwhile, NEW LIBERTARIAN brought forth its long-awaited time capsule of the new generation of Science Fiction Authors of the 1980s in 1990. The triple-sized issue, first with a color cover, mutated into a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein who had just died. Contributors included Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, Victor Koman, Brad Linaweaver, L. Neil Smith, J. Neil Schulman, Oyvind Myhre of Norway and Chris Shaefer on the films based on Heinlein writings. Libertarian science-fiction fans (frefen) had turned their parties into “Heinlein Wakes” in the late 1980s, and that culminated in the largest, most international gathering of libertarian writers at The Hague over the “Bank Holiday” weekend in late August where NL All-SF Triple Issue premiered. Final copies were not available until the NASFiC in San Diego the following weekend.

The Libertarian Party was in such bad shape that SEK3 called for a ceasefire and re-direction of energy in the previous issue of NL; with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, key libertarians “retired” to engage in a personal life for a couple of years.

1991-Today

Reason had drifted further and further away from mainstream, let alone radical, libertarianism in the 1970s so that by 1985 only Libertarian Review and NEW LIBERTARIAN remained with plus-1000 circulations. When LR and Inquiry quit, NL was not left alone. Bill Bradford, a lifetime subscriber to NL, started his own Centrist Libertarian magazine, Liberty. Briefly, it was inclusive, but soon it purged Rothbard and Konkin (Bradford claimed an Editorial Board he created had the responsibility, not him) and it defined itself between agorist/inclusive NL, paleolibertarian Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and the neoconservative Reason. In 1991, Reason under its new editor Virginia Postrel crossed the line and became the only publication to be viewed by some as libertarian to endorse the Gulf War. Even Reason’s former editor Robert Poole and Cato’s Ed Crane opposed the naked imperialist maneuver.

When the agorists returned to activism in 1994, they found a changed Movement — but not victorious, as they had assumed it would be. Liberty was rehashing objectivism and Ayn Rand’s personal life over and over with the vapid sneering attacks by cowardly nom-de-plume “Chester Alan Arthur” substituting for political (or anti-political) analysis; the Libertarian Party had run an out-and-out scoundrel and party-funds embezzler, Andre Marrou, for President in 1992; Jeff Friedman was editing a “theoretical journal” claiming that Libertarianism was based on Egalitarianism (one of Murray Rothbard’s essays and book titles was Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature) and embracing chunks of deconstructionism, postmodernism, and even Liberalism; and, rather than rallying the demoralized, de-socialized Left to the Libertarian (black) banner, nearly all factions were cozying up to (different) parts of the already victorious and thus scornful statist Right. Reason was gone completely from Libertarianism, as was Reason.

With Chris Hitchens and Alex Cockburn calling for a revived New Left/Libertarian Alliance on CSPAN and in Left publications, SEK3 and the revived MLL answered them positively with the pamphlet “What’s Left?” and subsequent meetings of the Karl Hess Club (successor of the anti-Party Libertarian Supper Club of Los Angeles and Albert J. Nock/H.L. Mencken Fora). But the Original Gang Libertarian ranks thinned considerably. Robert LeFevre had died in 1986; Karl Hess left us in 1994 and Murray Rothbard in January 1995. The struggle for the minds (what was left of them) and hearts of the Libertarian Movement was thus engaged.

New Isolationist revived first; then the long-awaited Agorist Quarterly, the theoretical journal of The Agorist Institute, challenged J. Friedman’s Critical Review and began the development of the foundations of Counter-Economics and the rest of Agorism. Finally, NEW LIBERTARIAN returned to set the movement straight again with NL 187 in December 1996 (dated April 1997.) Deviationists, sell-outs and compromisers fled in terror; the hard-core and unyielding defenders of freedom, as well as those who had been shut out of dominant libertarian publications for their individualist, non-conforming viewpoints, rejoiced.

And they all turned into .PDF files (Adobe Acrobat^TM), moved to the World Wide Web of libertarian cyberspace, and lived happily ever after . . .

I’m feeling profoundly under the weather so it’s as good a time as any to indulge in that most venerable of radical pastimes, ranting about Star Wars.

I discovered Star Wars the same way any poor eight-year-old did in the early 90s, through the comics section at my local library. Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi were richly watercolored and stunning in their scope. And eventually I got bored enough to follow up on their source films. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Star Wars was an acceptable geekdom in the otherwise harsh projects. Star Wars was gangsta. And the root of this I suspect lies in its dramatically different character from Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the myriad superheroes and chain-mail wearing dragon-slayers cranked out monthly. Star Wars feels familiar.

Having turned to the comics section only after exhausting the rest of the stacks, I was knowledgeable enough to recognize the technological trappings as laughable, but gracious enough to appreciate the sly self-effacing shrug in “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The realism of Star Wars is its resonance with our common experience of ‘how reality works.’ Reality is complicated, gritty, lived-in, with more components than you can ever experience or understand. Obi-Wan and Luke don’t know the names of all the alien species dicking about in Wuher’s cantina and it wouldn’t occur to them to try. The galaxy is a big place. And the Empire’s success in this context is awe-inspiring and despair-inducing even while being obviously incomplete. Star Wars is what the world looks like to kids dealing dope on street corners. Scraping by in the chaotic brutal periphery, proud of the various impressions of home and community found there, using fantastic tools without the slightest understanding of how they work, in awe of the state while waking up every morning simmering in hate for it. Star Wars creates an environment in which the colors are brighter but everything else is the same. And then it wraps us up in the fantasy of meaningful resistance.

Maintaining this essential “tone” of Star Wars has been probably the most uproarious issue in the last three decades of popculture. Everyone knows the prequels dropped the ball, although the list of widely identified missteps is a bit shallow in description (more on that later). But Star Wars has been grappling with this burden from the very beginning. Some poor sod at Marvel Comics is told “we’ve got a license” and all of a sudden he’s forced to make difficult decisions about what would best signify the “star warsness” of a story as opposed to a Buck Rogers story. It’s not enough to draw some familiar outfits or even capture the characters’ voices, what fans are addicted to is the feel of the world. And it’s an inarguable fact that almost everyone has been failing to nail that in one way or another ever since.

I’m not going to suggest that my extensive fandom (which collapsed before high school) or presumed media studies prowess grants me perfect depth in analysis. Every writer and artist that’s worked on Star Wars has brought their own subjective lens and I’m not immune. But I do have one very simple point that I think should unarguably frame the issue:

The most potent and successful component of Star Wars was the taste of reality that suffused its fantastical nature.

Lucas believed his winning formula was the genre mixing pot, something he struggled to stir up in the prequels and Lucasfilm has slightly more successfully adopted as their guiding light in the T-Cannon. But this is wrong. Objectively and empirically wrong.

And now, in recognizing that, I’d like to talk about what can and could have been done to save the taste we all long for and yet have all but given up on re-experiencing.

Let’s start with Return of the Jedi. I’ve held onto an idealization of RotJ for far too long, mostly through the way my earlier experience with Dark Empire and Ian McDiarmid’s starkly redeeming performance in most of the prequels set the Emperor front and center in my head. But the too cool for school bros that kvetched obnoxiously about the Ewoks not being uber badass mech-driving Wookies actually had a point. Lucas had a really good idea with the Ewoks — a tiny band of dismissably cute primitives ends up being critical in the Empire’s downfall — but he focused too much on them and too little on the unavoidably eye- and mind-catching rebel fleet. The Ewoks go from being a realistically unexpected counterpoint to an off-tone chirpy Fern Gully fairy tale.

In the process we’re denied a chance to soak up the random realness of the assembled rebel fleet (either before battle or during). The sudden diversity we glimpse finally has the opportunity to sell the notion of the Rebellion. We want to see a whole variety of aliens, capital ships and one-off fighters. Even an eight-year-old can’t swallow the idea of the near monolithic resistance army almost as clean-cut as the Imperials.

You see this is where Star Wars inevitably loses me, and where I think it also begins to lose everyone else whether or not they fully recognize it. Simply put the actual ranks of the Rebellion are portrayed as nearly as white (human) and clean-cut as the Empire. Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie in so far as they aren’t are an exception against that backdrop. And in being allowed to be that exception they’re implicitly an elite. RtoJ does some nice things to consciously try and rectify all this: introducing the Mon Calamari, Lando’s Sullustan copilot, sticking a Dressellian into the mission briefing, making the Endor strike team extras scruffy hippies with beards, long hair and varying baggy clothes. But it doesn’t go anywhere far enough. And the moment the continuity of novels and comics picked up after the second Death Star gets vaporized that same unimaginative, undetailed, monolithic interpretation of the Rebellion (and the war) started spiraling out of control. The Rebellion immediately became The New Republic and all of a sudden the whole damn struggle wasn’t about overthrowing totalitarianism and breakin’ the law as one pleases but rather restoring the rightful regime. The Empire half-collapses and The New Republic steps in to take over. A very conventional war is fought for five or six years and then there’s a single galactic congress and a single galactic military and everything is essentially the same as under the Empire except shit gets voted on. Everything from there on out is basically a Star Trek story minus the scientists.

(It’s a pretty obvious reality that the Star Wars tone cannot allow for the existence of scientists. Most writers, no matter how stupid, have caught on to the paradigm dissonance it would create and stepped aside. Indeed the best explicitly banished science out to the fringes of Star Wars history. One of my favorite summations was the throw away factoid that no one knows how hyperdrive works and no one cares. Sadly in both our world and theirs the mindset of science is alien and unrealistic to the average person. Star Wars has tinkerers and engineers but the horizon of its aspirations is the horizon of the capitalist and working man. This is why midiclorians were so repulsive to the fans. And why building a ridiculously scaled up blaster to shoot rebellious planets was more swallowable than discovering e=mc^2 and carpet bombing them with nukes.)

Star Wars took a turn for the suck a long time ago and those mistakes have been continuously compounded by everyone writing in its world since. The stream of what revamps writers are caught in showcases the growing desperation to get back to the roots. The obvious piece of advice: Stop Writing About Han, Luke and Leia! Keep characters obscure rather than dynastic and focus on separate concurrent sagas about little people! Is a waste of breath — we’re talking about space-fantasy genre trash after all.

But it’s worth asking the question, hypothetically what developments after Endor would still retain the rich Star Wars feel?

To answer that I think it’s necessary to get a tad political.

First I’d like to point out a number of positive things about the prequels that were entirely new yet felt solidly Star Wars: Shitty battle droids produced en mass by rich people to create their own private armies? Fucking good idea. Palpatine’s slow machevellian rise to power. The Republic deteriorating to showing its inherent unviability. The Jedi being scared and reflexively conservative. A local dispute with a WTO/IMF stand-in. Secession. Shiny things with a hint of decay… Granted, Lucas screwed up and made things ridiculously dynastical, rammed the camera directly at big issue stuff (battles, debates, etc) rather than dancing around the periphery, and thought things like slapstick, 50s kitch, and cheesy romance were the perfect additions to his formula. Oh and neutering Iain McDiarmid’s menace with a silly latex-and-force-lightning debacle and hell, shitty dialogue mixed with shitty, shitty acting. But mainly he fucked up at something that was a good idea and one that he actually meant to accomplish: Moral quagmire. Every once in a while the prequels stop fearfully candy coating everything and start to embrace the theme that shit is fucked up and folks can’t be sure anything they do means a damn. The inescapable point of any hypothetical Star Wars prequels was always going to be how ridiculous the notion of a monolithic purely good team is. When Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan speaks of the Old Republic he does so with some obvious nostalgia, but it’s also clearly tempered with depression, not at the impediments to its restoration, but at the realization that it was an unworkable delusion.

So here’s my proclamation: The Rebel Alliance is not some orderly conspiracy by political powers to restore the Republic, rather it has to be an alliance of rebels emerging in different places and different contexts for vastly different reasons. Oh there’s rebellion everywhere, proles shouting “five-oh” and taking out stormtroopers in back alley shoot outs, terrorist cells blowing up upper class human civies on Eridu, businessmen hiring pirates to attack Imperials getting to close to their illegal bacta operation. There’s slave rebellions on Kashyyyk and secret worker councils in the Kuat shipyards and speciesist underground armies and liberal dumbfucks on Alderaan and ideologues of Every Conceivable Stripe. Roving clusters of buddy fighter pilots making attacks where they can, working off of one or two official contacts with other resistance groups. Shit is complicated. So the Yavin 4 resistance was largely humans bankrolled by rich core world dissidents (Alderaan, Chandrilla…) and they may have been a logistical center best tied to the other groups. But they’re dwarfed by all different kinds of actions and uprisings. Slowly growing more tied together and making some serious gains but suffering starker attrition as they do.

I’m partial to the notion that Palpatine, being Sith and a genius, was irreplaceable. If keeping a Galactic Empire tied together was remotely feasible without massive psionic magic the Republic would have become an Empire long ago. And I’m partial to the notion that the Imperial Navy was crippled at Endor. So even while many, many people and classes were indebted and dependent on the Empire their hold was shattered in much of the galaxy immediately following Endor, including Coruscant (that’s what you get when you build your ridiculous city planet on top of miles of lumpenproles). The Imperial power structures that manage to persist (economic, political and military) end up splitting in a variety of ways. In many cases the regional governors assume sovereign control over their territories. The Imperial Navy as a whole probably holds together quite well, lumping up in one or at most two broad regions.  Maybe there’s some epic civil war, maybe not.  However you cut it “Empire” is a self-evidently outdated word. A regional body (probably over a chunk of the core) faced with fraying effects all around needs an ideological narrative to even make sense. Notions of purity, elitism and order have to be harped on much, much harder (causing openly recognizable inefficiencies in some respects). Everywhere else Imperial structures persist by means of superficial shifts matched with appeals to Old Republic “great civilization” narratives.

For the vast majority of the galaxy the collapse of the Empire means a sudden return to local governance. Corrupt administrators, republican governments, traditional rulers, gangsters, warlords, corporate operations… With a ton of un-ruled marketplaces as well as idealic fringe communities as well.

It’s utterly preposterous to assert the Rebel Alliance would hold together in these conditions. Until Endor there had never been anything close to a single coherent “rebel fleet”. Ackbar is sick of all your traps. (Also your non-traps. The only decent genders have tentacles.) He’s going home to Mon Calamari. Obviously. Because that’s his motivation. Or if he has an ideological one for the shape of the galaxy as a whole (communist!, anarchist!, libertarian!, fish-philosophy!) then fine, he has that, but there’s just no way in hell it’s going to be uniformly shared by all the different components of the rebellion. The vast majority are just doing it for their homeworld, or their families or revenge or general insurrectionary spirit. Sure some rich planets that have fallen from the Empire’s grace long in an abstract way for the privileges they had under the Republic — but they just broke the back of the only military force anywhere near capable of bringing everyone else in line.

Nobody gives two shits what some human in a big robe says on the remains of a looted Coruscant. (And oh yeah, there’s a massive amount of looting/piracy in the immediate aftermath of Endor as the luckiest dispossessed start divvying shit up and entropic egalitarian forces rush back into the market.) Cooperation? Don’t shit me. Everyone remembers what everyone else got up to under the Empire. And they all restructured differently. Everyone in power fears every other new planetary power for either being an iota too radical or an iota too conservative.  Between such parties setting up even the loosest of galactic federations makes no sense. There isn’t an overarching enemy to be fought against, it’s not even clear who still is “Imperial” and who isn’t, but there are uncountable threats springing up all over the place as well as rubble and workcamp files to be sorted through back home. The Alliance was a success, now it’s over.

That said undoubtedly some groups forged in the rebellion would continue kicking. Whether through shared ideology or simply having no home to return to. Some folks like Wedge and Hobbie would cluster in different ways, decide on targets/priorities and keep fighting.  But there is absolutely no simple big picture. There are no maps of the galaxy half in red and half in blue, gradually ceding to blue.

And Leia is most definitely not elected Chancellor of Everything from media popularity and hero worship. (Star Wars doesn’t have a galactic press or internet in any relevant way, it’s not a sedate information-age setting. Kids fix their father’s landspeeder and deal deathsticks out by the slave pens. Remember, it’s the sort of world where “I just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the senate” makes sense. Where Leia has to personally drag a little bit of data from one star system to another with a whole fucking starship. Folks aren’t checking live feeds on space-twitter.)

That said, Star Wars is an optimistic bit of fantasy and I have some optimistic paths the galaxy could take without chucking all sense of gritty reality.

First, Luke actually trains Leia. They gather, inspire and collaborate with other force sensitives. And then search for surviving Jedi knowledge, vanquish local evils and forge their own way. Not at the center of things, but at the periphery. The Jedi remain a faint, passing legend for a long time. They do not chuck Star Destroyers around with their minds. Nor are there creatures that block their access to the energy field of life itself. They do not set up shop on Yavin IV just because we’ve seen it before and anything that’s been seen has to have its backstory explained (missing the whole point!). They are wanderers. Healing and freeing. And no longer chained to the flag of a centralized government or reactionary tradition they slowly start to make progress in aggregate. There is no Jedi council or even an order. No one Jedi ever encounters or even learns of, much less communicates with, more than a tiny fraction of their kin. But dictators, oligarchs, gangsters and politicians dissolve in their wake and more utopian, collectivist societies emerge.  (Also, incidentally, Ben’s impression in the force never goes away.  That’s not something unique, it’s just what happens to every damn Jedi who meditates on what life wants rather than what they want.  Vader was surprised by this because he hadn’t finished developing as a Jedi.)

Second, trade becomes impossible to regulate. Smugglers and other agorists proliferate wildly until their various mutual-aid networks become the most stable galaxy-spanning social institutions. Taxation is impossible for the same Iain Banks space-is-3D reasons — at least without the sort of massive capital investment that disappeared with the Empire.  Entities like the Trade Federation can only emerge in the context of a larger state.  Asteroid bases and hijacked capital ships go from obscure relay points to major conduits of culture and civilization.  A proliferation of small non-localized pirates is certain, but this isn’t impetus for the creation of large scale governance because there’s nothing a government could do any better than mutual aid / insurance networks.  All this erodes the hell out of regional governments and core worlds with unsustainable cultures suffer badly.  (Poor Coruscant was always going to end up another Nar Shadda.)

The long term future of the Star Wars galaxy is in space, even more so than before.  A populace split more fairly between sedentary planet-sized governments / collectives and flowing circuits of the cheerfully nomadic free-wheeling traders criss-crossing the stars. The peace that is ushered in hardly complete, but it’s better regulated and more egalitarian than the Republic ever was.

Writers have always assumed the Republic arose from colonizers attempting to keep in contact and assert control during an era in which space travel was less well known.  A time where the relatively few ships that existed were financed by institutions.  In which the galaxy was a lot emptier for travelers with possible dangers around every corner. Over its existence those initial conditions have slowly changed.  I like this interpretation because it gives meaning and substance to the massive social shift Palpatine wrought. The Empire was an intelligent if desperate attempt to adapt the Republic’s outdated mechanisms and drive to deal with the now teeming and highly connected galaxy.

Basically a totalitarian Empire makes sense, a rotting and unsustainable Republic makes sense, a teemingly complex anarchic and increasingly more nomadic post-collapse culture also makes sense.  But a more or less decent galactic-sized democracy instantly formed and accepted out of the goodness of all the Rebels’ hearts?  Totally unbelievable.  And basically a stubborn Liberal lack of imagination.

In short the only believable future is one in which the death-stick dealing teens win. The world doesn’t go back to bureaucrats, committees, corporate laws, and stodgy religious institutions.  Or if it starts to the forces leading that push are fought just as furiously as the Empire was. The only new world coming is one of the Han Solos and Lando Calrissians. The grubby working class, the petty criminals and entrepreneurs. Frequently sketchy, but basically decent.

The major upsets when they exist are not from the development of new scientific breakthroughs (pah!) but from discovery of new functions in the ancient tech everybody is already walking on. Or the discovery of ancient unknowably storied locales like Korriban. (Indiana Jones tapped the same Lucas genius for making you feel like there was too much rich context to ever pick apart.) There are no Sith because the Sith with their very specific historical greviance (christ it’d be nice if the piling up KOTOR era stuff managed some tangible motivations beside the over-harped and cartoonish “hate makes you powerful” shit) died with Palpatine. Rather there are Jedi who fuck up, Jedi who disagree on bad days, and psychopaths who were lucky enough to be successful at moving the nickle around with their minds when they were eight.  Shit can get dramatic, stakes can get relatively big scale, but not so big — the empire’s dead and with it the only time in thousands of years there was even the economic capacity for things like Death Stars much less the social context to apply it meaningfully. On the whole the Galaxy starts living a bit more nomadic and anarchic like The Culture except without any conscious or noticeable moral enlightenment. Factions jockey back and forth. Local powers try to act imperialistically. Ideologies clash and shift. The Jedi go on. Quietly. Less perceptibly.

That’s how Star Wars ends in my head.