From November 13-16th in San Diego, California, the Libertalia Project will be hosting its annual Libertopia Festival. The weekend is aimed at creating a temporary, free community where people interested in the ideas of liberty can come together to learn, educate, network, and create. Now in its 5th year, Libertopia has become one of the biggest yearly gatherings of libertarians and anarchists.

Which is why the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (ALL), a project of the Molinari Institute, and a coalition of various left-leaning libertarians, is trying to get to Libertopia. ALL publishes books, magazines, and pamphlets, as well as op-eds syndicated to mainstream media outlets around the world, to spread the message of free markets without capitalist domination, and voluntary social order without the state.

$400 will get ALL a booth at Libertopia 2014 and give left libertarianism a voice at the festival. The opportunity to engage this year’s Libertopia attendees on the ideas of radical market anarchism and left libertarianism is priceless in the fight against statism.

In a separate, but equally important, event, C4SS, also a project of the Molinari Institute, and a left-wing market anarchist think tank is trying to become a sponsor of the 2015 International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC) from February 13-15 in Washington, DC. ISFLC is the year’s premier libertarian gathering, bringing together over 2000 libertarians last year alone.

Students For Liberty, and it’s annual International conference, are leading the way in the modern libertarian student movement – providing it’s hundreds of members with resources for libertarian activism and spreading the message of liberty to the thousands more in SFL’s global network. It’s no surprise, then, that C4SS is trying to sponsor this wonderful event.

C4SS utilizes academic studies, book reviews, op-eds, and social media to put left market anarchist ideas at the forefront of libertarianism and to eventually bring about a world where individuals are liberated from oppressive states, structural poverty, and social injustice. In only 8 years, C4SS has substantially grown into a successful think tank, making big waves among the modern libertarian movement, especially the students.

$500 gets C4SS sponsorship at ISFLC and each sponsor is guaranteed at least a table in the exhibit hall, 2 attendee registrations, and a listing in the program and webpage. Getting a significant market anarchist presence at the year’s biggest libertarian event is crucial to spreading these ideas and making anarchism a substantial, unafraid, and robust part of the liberty movement, instead of a timid minority.

While C4SS and ALL are barely a decade old, they have already achieved massive success with spreading left libertarian anarchist views. The market anarchist community is bigger and more vibrant than ever with our ideas spreading to other libertarians like wild fire. This fire needs to keep going and more wood needs to be piled on.

That’s where you come in.

Both the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society are extremely close to affording sponsorship at Libertopia and ISFLC respectively but there is more to go. If you find these ideas worth exploring and you want a more diverse, intellectually stimulating libertarian community — whether you are a left market anarchist or you’re a conservative minarchist or you’re an anarcho-communist or anything in between — please share this post and donate if you can.

Every penny counts when we’re building the new world in the shell of the old

Fund the revolution at Libertopia!

Fund the revolution at the International Students For Liberty Conference!

Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is Keith Farrell, a Students For Liberty campus coordinator at the University of Connecticut (“Why the Pope is Wrong on Inequality,” City A.M., Aug. 21). He accuses the Pope of “scapegoating world poverty on the wealthy” and credits Marx with first coming up with the idea “that the success of some hurts others economically and that the rich have only gotten rich at the expense of the poor.” Farrell quotes a South Korean: “If someone has made a fortune for himself, fair and square, and has a lot of money, I don’t think that’s something to be condemned.”

An interesting hypothetical, but just how much of the economic elite’s growing concentration of wealth actually was made “fair and square?” Throughout his op-ed, Farrell implicitly equates the system we live under now with “economic freedom” and “free enterprise.” But that’s an example of what I call “vulgar libertarianism,” defending actually existing corporate capitalism as though it were a free market, and using “free enterprise” rhetoric to defend wealth and economic power which corporate capitalists have actually amassed through an overwhelmingly statist system of power.

Marx was hardly the first to figure out that in a class society, ruled by a class state, the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. It probably dawned on some Sumerian or Chinese peasant busting his hump with a hoe trying to produce enough to live on after paying rent to a temple priesthood. And plenty of radical free market thinkers — Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Franz Oppenheimer — have drawn the same conclusion more recently. The capitalist system we live under today is the lineal heir to the state-enforced class systems of thousands of years ago.

“Free markets,” far from structurally defining capitalism, are permitted to operate on its margins only to the extent that they’re compatible with the propertied interests controlling the state. Even in the supposedly “laissez-faire” nineteenth century, “free enterprise” was a superstructure erected on a foundation of centuries of massive robbery — the enclosure of land and dispossession of the peasantry, first in the industrializing West and then the colonial world, massive restrictions on the free movement and association of working people in industrial Britain, slave labor and the seizure of global mineral wealth. Today many of the fruits of that robbery, like absentee titles to vacant land and corporate ownership of Third World natural resources, and a monopoly on the supply of credit and the medium of exchange by the owners of stolen wealth, are still legally enforced.

Corporate capitalism today depends on even more statism — “intellectual property,” regulatory cartels and other entry barriers, and massive direct subsidies in such forms as the Military-Industrial Complex and the civil aviation and Interstate Highway systems.

It’s true, as Farrell says, that standards of living have increased in absolute terms despite the rise in inequality — true as far as it goes. But the advantages of technological progress are governed by the same targeted pricing that governs all monopolies: Giant corporations use patent monopolies to enclose technological progress and let just enough of the benefits of increased productivity trickle down to the working classes to make it worthwhile for them to keep buying, while appropriating the rest as monopoly rents for themselves.

Farrell’s statement that “capitalism has brought freedom and abundance” to South Korea bears similar looking into. South Korean capitalism was built on the foundation of US military occupation and a military regime installed by the occupation authority, which subsequently liquidated the quasi-anarchist society of self-governing village communes and self-managed factories that had emerged after the Japanese pullout in 1945. This regime put anarchists and leftists of all kinds in mass graves, and during its decades in power wasn’t exactly friendly to the “economic freedom” of — say — Korean workers who wanted to unionize.

Interestingly, Farrell shares one erroneous assumption with Pope Francis: That reducing inequality requires government “redistribution of wealth.” They’re both wrong. What we have now amounts to an upward redistribution of wealth, with “taxes” on the producing classes in the form of the state-enforced monopoly rents we pay to landlords and capitalists. We don’t need state intervention to redistribute wealth downward. We need revolution to stop the state from redistributing wealth upward.

It’s time for free marketers to stop acting as hired prize-fighters for the present system of power, and start using free market ideas to defend actual economic justice.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, Por qué el Papa está menos equivocado que Keith Farrell.

The first, led by Charles W. Johnson (with my assistance) will be a general overview of left-libertarianism, individualist anarchism, and free market anti-capitalism. We’ll focus on readings from Markets Not Capitalism, but also include plenty of material not found there. The group meets every other week on Monday nights at 7:00pm EST/4:00pm PST, with discussions typically going for about an hour and a half. The first meeting is on September 8th.

Also, Roderick Long and Kevin Vallier will be co-leading a general overview of Murray Rothbard and his place in libertarian history. Readings will primarily come from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, but will also include plenty of other material not found there. The group meets every other week on Tuesday nights at 7:00pm EST / 4:00pm PST, with discussions typically going for about an hour and a half. The first meeting is on September 9th.

From the official announcement:

SFL Virtual Reading Groups operate like Liberty Fund symposiums, in which participants are given a list of readings on the intellectual underpinnings of a free society and are then given the opportunity to share their own thoughts on the readings with each other. By creating a space for active discussion with other intellectually engaged students, led by capable and informed discussion leaders, VRGs give participants a unique chance to truly delve into a text in ways they might not have been able to on their own. Each reading group will meet every other week for 8 meetings over the course of 16 weeks. All readings are provided by SFL. 

Importantly, the deadline to apply for either (or both) of these Virtual Reading Groups is Sunday, August 31st. You can find more information about the VRGs and how to apply at the link just provided.

Some argue that “real” libertarianism or an improved libertarianism must also include anarchism, or progressivism, or critical race theory, or any number of perspectives….

For us today, it often seems that libertarianism is not enough; what we really need is left-anarchism or thick libertarianism or non-brutalist libertarianism or any number of camps out there.

In response Jeff Ricketson at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) (“Radicalism as Revolution: A Call for a Fractal Libertarianism,” May 18) has challenged Ruper’s call for monolithic unity and instead praised fractalism as a positive good:

What he should have called for is a libertarianism united under the common banner of freedom, with passionate, friendly discussion on the issues therein, and a fractal nesting of smaller, more specialized groups.

Fractalism and specialization, he says, are good because they increase the agility, resilience and adaptability of the larger movement in the face of change.

And this is quite true. It’s hard for libertarian activists working in specific communities to relate basic libertarian values to the particular needs and life situations of the people they’re working with, if they have to clear everything with the agenda approval authorities at Party Central Headquarters.

I myself, along with others at C4SS, have come under criticisms similar to those of Ruper for what our critics see as excessive attention to social justice concerns. They say we have lost our rightful focus on the “real” issues, the “big stuff” — like the corporate state, economics, class, war and civil liberties. Instead we have been distracted by “Political Correctness” and “Identity Politics.” We should stick to a simple, common libertarian agenda with broad appeal, limiting our focus to those “important issues” and avoid saying anything that might alienate white cultural conservatives who agree with us on the economic stuff.

Of course this is ironic, given that much of this hand-wringing over narrow, “inflammatory” agendas that might alienate someone in Flyover Country comes from a “pan-secessionist” movement that welcomes neo-Nazis and national anarchists, and whose leader called for purging the anarchist movement of LGBT activists. So apparently alienating the Chick-fil-A and Duck Dynasty crowds who wallow in their own sense of victimhood is a big no-no, but not showing support for gay or transgender people who are genuinely victimized every day by structural injustice isn’t so bad.

In any case, calls for One Big Movement, united around a simple common platform with the broadest possible appeal, are fundamentally wrong-headed. This is essentially the same argument that the old establishment Left — some of whom proudly call themselves “verticalists” — have made against the horizontalist direction the Occupy movement has taken. It’s the standard patronizing criticism from managerial-centrists in the liberal and “Progressive” community:

Appoint leaders and adopt a platform!

The thing is, Occupy came very close to doing that. The people from Adbusters and New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts who showed up at the early planning gatherings were all set to agree on One Big Demand for their common agenda, appoint public spokespersons, and all the rest. Had they done so, Occupy would have been another flash-in-the-pan movement that disappeared from the news in a few days. But David Graeber and a handful of other horizontalists — Wobblies and veterans of the Seattle movement — coalesced into an opposition group that quickly replaced the establishment people as the dominant culture within Occupy.

Instead of adopting an official leadership and agenda, Graeber and the horizontalists chose to follow the loosely networked model of the M15 movement in Spain. Instead of one common demand, or a short platform with a few key points, they decided to center their message on the “We are the 99%” meme — in loose opposition to things like the power of corporations and banks over the state, neoliberalism, imperialism, etc. — and let the various subgroups, communities and individuals that made up the broader movement set their own agendas relating their particular needs and concerns to that broader theme.

In other words, Occupy didn’t have a platform — it was a platform. It was a ready-made toolkit, brand and library of imagery and slogans to be used and adapted to the specific needs and agenda of any group that shared the general opposition to neoliberalism and the power of finance-capital.

Both Ruper and the center-left critics of Occupy are appealing to an outmoded mid-20th century organizational model. In this model, celebrated by Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith, industrial production required large, hierarchical, capital-intensive organizations that possessed economies of scale and extensive divisions of labor, and were governed by Weberian-Taylorist work rules, job descriptions and “best practices.” And agitating for political change was a function that required large size, capital and hierarchy just like GM, GE and all those industrial dinosaurs.

But guess what? Those industrial dinosaurs are obsolete. They are doomed. And their organizational model, and all who follow it, are likewise doomed. Technological changes have destroyed the material basis for most hierarchical institutions and caused capitalization requirements for duplicating their functions to implode. Cheap micromanufacturing tools, desktop technology that outperforms the work previously done by publishing houses and music studios, and networked many-to-many communications with virtually zero transaction costs, have enabled individuals and small horizontally organized peer groups to do things that previously required powerful institutions in giant glass and steel buildings, full of thousands of drones in cubicles, run by a bunch of men in suits at mahogany desks on the top floor.

The dominant economic and organizational paradigm today is networked, horizontal — stigmergic. It’s the organizational model of movements ranging from Wikipedia and the file-sharing movement to Anonymous and Al Qaeda. In this model, everything is done by individuals or small self-selected affinity groups united around many different agendas. Everything is done by the individual or small group most interested and motivated to do it, most qualified to do it, without waiting for anyone’s permission. And rather than “detracting” from some common mission, the contributions of the individuals and affinity groups are synergistic and mutually reinforcing. In file-sharing networks, when anyone cracks the DRM in a song or movie, it immediately becomes the common property of the whole network. When a new and improved IED is developed by a cell in Al Qaeda Iraq, it can be immediately adopted by any other cell that finds it useful — or left alone by any cell that does not. A stigmergic network is the ultimate in Hayekian distributed knowledge.

We no longer need to aggregate ourselves into large institutions in order to accomplishing anything, or get everybody together on the same page before anyone is allowed to take a step. The activists are already doing it themselves. What they need is simple: support and solidarity. They can decide for themselves what is important to the communities they are part of and work with, and how the broader libertarian agenda relates specifically to them. And meanwhile any of the rest of us can do the same with our own local concerns, while wishing our comrades well in the other sub-movements and offering them solidarity and support whenever we are in a position to do so.

All this means that it is totally unnecessary — not that it ever was necessary — for those seeking gender or racial justice to throw themselves under the bus and support the common economic-class agenda “Until After the Revolution” or “For the Good of the Party.” In fact it is counterproductive. The kind of forced unity and subordination to “important” issues that Ruper advocates is, paradoxically, the one way guaranteed to foster discord and division.

Based on my own conversations with friends, I think it’s pretty clear this tendency to subordinate “divisive” (race and gender) issues to the “important” (politics and economics) stuff is the main reason libertarianism and anarchism are perceived by women, LGBT people and People of Color as the province of “white anarchist dudebros.”

I’ve seen the same thing in online establishment liberal circles of the sort that call themselves “Pragmatic Progressives” (and are derided by others as Obots) and use the #UniteBlue hashtag. No matter what the issue — Obama’s use of drones to murder innocent civilians, NSA surveillance, corporate collusion in drafting the TPP — their standard responses are “So would you rather Romney was in office?” or “How will this affect Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016?” This kind of cynical opportunism at the expense of the needs of real human beings is ugly — wherever we find it.

If this forced unity around the “real” issues fosters division and resentment, then the way to foster unity is to actively address and take into account the specific interests and needs of different segments of the population. The practice of intersectionality — that is, taking into account the way different forms of oppression like class, race, gender, etc. oppression mutually reinforce each other and differentially affect different subgroups within activist movements — was not developed for the sake of a “more oppressed than you” competition. It was developed precisely in order to prevent internal fracturing of racial justice movements along class and gender lines, feminism along class and race lines, etc., by being mindful of the special needs of the least privileged within each movement.

If you want to see what happens to a movement that focuses on the “important” (economic) stuff without regard to intersectional issues, just look at the sharecroppers’ unions in the 1930s, that split into separate black and white movements — separately defeated — thanks to COINTELPRO-style efforts by the planter class to exploit racial divisions among the membership. Or you could take a look at the typical mainstream gathering and take note of how many attendees are white males, and ask yourself why the One Big Movement is so unappealing to the majority of the population who are women and People of Color.

Ruper’s claims are odd for a libertarian. After all, libertarianism is a system of views specifically orientated toward unique individuals of common or conflicting interests working together peacefully. If there is a danger of ideological debate between libertarians degenerating into useless bickering and a broken movement, then perhaps there’s good reason to reconsider libertarianism as a whole.

Despite this tension, there are compelling parts of Ruper’s article. In discussing topics which informed people care about, it is common for discussion to degenerate into wastes of time like ad hominem attacks or strawmen. In this regard, it is very important that libertarians are vigilant not to let infighting kill the movement. Focusing too much on personal grudges or allowing dialogue to rot into the aforementioned “time waste” just squanders energy and time. However, it is not the case that this means “reflective thinking” need be abandoned by any group in particular, much less the movement as a whole. A movement that does not define itself is powerless when calling for change. It can express disapproval for any number of problems, but without specific or clearly defined tenets, it cannot move. The “movement” stagnates. In this regard, it is useful to distinguish between two types of infighting: discussion and discord. Discussion is the necessary form of internal conversation that transforms a movement into a tradition. Discord is the partisan altercation that leads to the demise of groups like SDS. Both can appear tumultuous and divisive, but where tumult in discussion is passion, tumult in discord is budding enmity, where division in discussion reveals ideological questions to be addressed, division in discord leads to a fracturing of the movement.

Ruper, in all fairness, does say he appreciates libertarians’ intense self-analysis. He seems to just want libertarians to redirect their energies toward spreading broadly libertarian ideas, rather than converting members of the libertarian movement to a different faction therein. He specifically says defining people out of the libertarian movement is unhelpful, as it only splinters those working toward a common cause. He is right to call for caution in how libertarian movements build themselves, but it is impossible to imagine a movement that did not define who was not a supporter. Whether they are libertarians or not, people believe in varying numbers of libertarian principles. Who counts as a libertarian is, therefore, an important questions for groups seeking to push libertarian ideas. For a big tent group like SFL, a more lenient set of criteria (like simply believing in substantially greater individual liberty) might suffice. However, that does not mean that the end of necessary or even useful libertarian self-analysis is this politically expedient inclusion of all those who aim for freedom for whatever reason. Even for SFL, discussion and disagreement about the content of libertarianism (its thin core) and its implications (its thick perimeter) can show those outside the many and varied ways libertarianism can address problems. If someone is a fan of non-interventionism and open borders but not intellectual property abolition, seeing some libertarians defend copyrights and patents can draw them into the movement (hopefully, investigating the internal debate, they will find the evils of IP).

According to the article, SDS fell apart because they passed from being radicals to revolutionaries. By “radicalism” Ruper means getting to the root of problems and pushing for change in their fundamental causes. In his own words about revolution:

Revolutionary thinking goes a step further than radicalism by assuming the entire structure of society or a movement is corrupt and that it has to be torn down and started fresh. It posits that revolutionaries know what is best for all and that they can rationally design something better. In practice, it leads to massive upheaval and destruction, as can be seen from the blood-soaked streets of the French Revolution to the bomb-shattered legacy of Students for a Democratic Society.

His first sentence is accurate. There is no way to have true revolution without complete overhaul. This is why perpetual revolution is the activist’s dream. There can never be complacency, never stagnation, never degradation. The whole of society is in an unending state of flux toward social equilibrium. However, after that, Ruper’s claims are strange, even in the most charitable reading. Anarchists, for example, are revolutionaries in part because a better society cannot be rationally designed (at least not centrally). If revolutionaries don’t know how a better a society could function, even using a form of spontaneous order like Hayek or Proudhon imagine, then radicals certainly don’t either. The necessity of revolution is a conclusion arrived at from the same kind of reasoning “mere” radicals use, not an epistemic block that prevents revolutionaries from seeing the faults they supposedly have due to hubris. The idea that revolution leads to destruction and upheaval is accurate, but this is desirable in its nonviolent form. Assuming Ruper means violent revolution, even that is often desirable. When a people rise up against a tyrant who oppresses them, violence will result but it is still a just struggle.

There is a deeper problem with the radical-revolutionary split Ruper suggests. Today, one cannot be a consistent radical without being a revolutionary. With all the problems endemic to government from public choice issues to rights violations, it is fanciful to believe that anything short of complete overhaul is needed. As all the work at C4SS strives to show, there is no way to see the fundamental causes of the myriad social problems facing humanity today and not call for the abolition of government domination, institutionalized violence and social hierarchy. To be truly radical requires being totally revolutionary. The radical must be an activist, and the activist must pursue the aforementioned dream – perpetual revolution.

To more accurately draw the distinction, Ruper is probably reaching for, a successful movement can pass from advocating radicalism and, consequently today, revolution to advocating violent, isolating fanaticism. When SDS began planning aggressive efforts to change their society, they ceased using the means libertarians accept as justifiable. At the same time, they began to use means that isolate a movement and lock it into the socially unacceptable space of fanaticism. Libertarians, if they are to be consistent, should be radicals and revolutionaries but not fanatics.

So what is a libertarian to do? Ruper asks for a movement devoid of “revolutionary thinking” whose members waste no time infighting. This leaves libertarians with a milquetoast ideology, poorly defined and lacking passionate defenders or rigorous introspectors. This is far from what makes a highly successful movement. However, incivility and isolating extremism can destroy a movement. Fanaticism is a death sentence for any growing ideological minority. It seems that libertarianism needs a movement based on pursuit of common goals, with the varying ideological camps willing to put aside differences until their relevance is immediate, and able to discuss their differences within the larger groups they organize. The libertarian movement needs to become a fractal of nested associations between individuals. The left libertarian market anarchist and the paleolibertarian minarchist both belong in a big tent libertarian organization, but perhaps not at the same table. Together they can push for the ideals of nonviolent social cooperation, but on specific issues of social hierarchy they can take opposite sides. Within the big tent they can discuss the issue, and outside they can spread their ideals independently, but within the big tent no camp should try to push its particular ideals as though it represented the majority.

To implement this vision of activism, every organization needs a statement defining what its members aim to accomplish. For C4SS, it is a leftist vision of anarchy. For SFL (from their website, emphasis added):

Students For Liberty is an organization that supports liberty. SFL does not dictate the foundations upon which individuals justify their belief in liberty. Rather, Students For Liberty embraces the diversity of justifications for liberty and encourages debate and discourse on the differing philosophies that underlie liberty. What Students For Liberty endorses are the principles that comprise liberty:

• Economic freedom to choose how to provide for one’s life;
• Social freedom to choose how to live one’s life; and
• Intellectual and academic freedom.

Ruper has forgotten the mission of the very organization he supports. The call for a libertarianism including many groups, debating their differences and celebrating their likenesses is precisely the ideal SFL represents. In calling for an end to infighting in favor of ideological simplicity and purity, he has, ironically, come back to bite himself. He is pushing for a particular form of libertarianism and advocacy. In his own words:

There has been far too much “we would be better off if” and “this is why we can’t have nice things” rhetoric in the movement. Internal debates are healthy and good. We should study fringe ideas and be critical of our own beliefs, but not to the point where we devolve into tribal elitism over those differences… We need to be radical champions and unifiers, not dividers, of liberty.

To restate, Ruper is claiming to believe we would be better off with fewer “we would be better offs.” It is entirely unclear what a movement looks like without recommendations for the direction to move in, but it is true that “tribal elitism” is unhelpful. This is the crux of the fractal movement model. With each sub-group having a place in the big tent, no one group gets to dictate to the rest, and all get the benefits of working together. This makes perpetual revolution a kind of endless zooming in on the fractal. As the biggest tent achieves its goal, it can disband and the next largest set of groups can continue their work on their relevant differences.

In a sense, this fractal structure is seen in nature. No species is genetically pure, and for good reason. With variation in traits comes the ability to adapt to future, unforeseen problems and leave offspring. Evolution takes advantage of internal differences when they are adaptive or gets rid of them as maladaptive traits are explored. In the same way, social movements can take advantage of variation and internal discussion while discarding ideas as they are found inaccurate or other movements achieve their goals.

Ruper is right to caution against libertarianism going the way of SDS, and he is right to call for a united, championing libertarian movement, but he misdiagnoses the source of SDS’s ills, and is unduly alarmist about libertarianism, and especially SFL. Infighting is a libertarian pastime, and there cannot be a movement without rigorous self-analysis and recommendations about how best to work together. Ruper knows this, or he would not have written his article. What he should have called for is a libertarianism united under the common banner of freedom, with passionate, friendly discussion on the issues therein, and a fractal nesting of smaller, more specialized groups. Libertarianism needs deeper specialization with less incivility, not sterilized homogeneity with self-congratulatory discussion.

The first person known to adopt the label “anarchist” gives us some idea:

“It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be … exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused … disarmed … imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave us more verbs to go with that, but we’ll start here.

Government is not just a friendly association that keeps us safe, builds our bridges, cleans the streets – or contracts with private companies, often in backroom deals, to do these things.

Government is the body by which some people govern others – an instrument of rule by some over others. This is an inherently unequal relationship that allows people with the most access to power – typically those with something to offer other power players – to exert unfair advantages over other people. It sets up a hierarchy where some are expected to yield and some are given the privilege of initiating force due to the title of their office or the type of work clothes they wear. Being allowed to vote and protest does not mean that you are not expected to yield to the people in charge.

This is what I see as the foundation of the anarchist case against government.

Anarchy means without rulers. To the anarchist, no imposition of authority is considered legitimate.

Anarchy, put this way, is not an unachievable perfect utopia, nor something that we can have immediately, nor something that we have to wait generations for as we bide our time. But then again, it is kind of all these things.

The word anarchy can describe an ideal world where there is no authority, no subjugation, no rule of one individual over another – an ideal that societies move toward but can never fully reach. But anarchy can also describe a society where norms of anarchism are widely adopted – where impositions of authority are viewed as unjust and are met with efforts to resist or alleviate them.

In one sense we can we have this immediately – in everyday life, in social circles where individual autonomy and individuality are respected and suppressing them is not, and leadership in particular areas is gained through respect, not by pulling rank.

But to achieve this society-wide, it is necessary to create incentives that encourage others to behave and think this way in more social contexts, expanding communities of freedom.

Henry David Thoreau, who didn’t identify as an anarchist but was animated by the same libertarian spirit that drives anarchism, began his famous Civil Disobedience essay with a guiding principle.

“I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

How do people prepare for no government? The attempt to answer this question is one way to look at the anarchist project.

Some folks who agree with Thoreau here might say, “Right! We need to prepare people to govern themselves – by reducing the size of government and encouraging self-reliance.”

Others who read Thoreau might say, “Right! We need to use government to protect people from concentrated wealth while they prepare for self-governance.”

Still, others might say, “Right! Once we’re ready to make the revolution, the government will no longer be in the way of our efforts to make a free society!”

There is something to all of these views, but they don’t really connect to the track that anarchism is in – though people who identify as anarchists have expressed similar views.

Here we come to a real paradox of anarchism – it is a movement that cannot really be led in a traditional sense as you can’t force people to be free and coercing people to prepare for self-government would make you a ruler.

Yes, telling people why anarchy would be preferable to authority is important – but teaching requires more than preaching.

Education is one key to the anarchist project. It is not just about what is being taught but in how it is being taught. People participating in the pursuit of truth, often with the guidance of people with experience in the field, or collaborating with other learners, is not the same process as one group of people drilling dogma into the heads of others. Anarchists have recognized this. Their leading role in the Modern School Movement, which featured a student-directed approach aimed at developing children and adults, without regard to gender or class, into more complete individuals, is one example.

Concrete incentives are important to getting people to move in an anarchist direction. This is not separate from education, as the access to a quality education that respects freedom and won’t put you in debt is a valuable product. But it goes beyond education. To put it simply, if a movement is seen as providing concrete benefits to an individual and the people he or she cares most about, that individual is more likely to support that movement. This doesn’t mean pandering or selling out – it means applying principles in ways that help people.

Don’t think that government is feeding the needy? Then establish ways for the needy to feed themselves. This principle goes for creating new organizations and turning existing organizations toward liberty.

Don’t tell me – show me! Even better, make the show a production I want to participate in.

Culture underlies all of this. It is important to establish culture that respects liberty and wants to make individual sovereignty mean something by helping individuals get what they need to become sovereign over their own lives – to have a good ability to choose who, if anyone, to depend on.

Where did anarchism come from?

Anarchism as an idea and a movement emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. It opposed both the monarchies of European reactionaries and the emergent capitalist order that many saw as exploitative. It came from the ideas of utopian experimenters, labor reformers, and classical liberal intellectuals – which were overlapping categories at the time.

They recognized that liberty, equality, fraternity, and individual sovereignty were threatened by the existence of the state and by the concentrations of economic power wrought by coercion. They understood that any state – even one run by workers – was a dangerous instrument of oppression.

A number of schools of anarchism have sprung up since Proudhon proclaimed himself an anarchist in 1840.

Those who most closely followed Proudhon’s economic system adopted the label mutualist. Typically mutualists support individual possession backed by mutual banking systems, emphasize associations between free laborers, and reject property titles not based on occupancy and use, such as the landed estates that rule over laborers based on historic access to state administrators. Like most anarchists, mutualists hold that resources will become more widely available as the restrictions and privileges upheld by the state are removed.

Individualist anarchism also took root in the 1840s. Josiah Warren’s experience with American utopian colonies had convinced him that upholding the sovereignty of the individual and ensuring that every person received the full value of his labor were crucial ingredients for a successful equitable society. His writings had a profound influence on other libertarians in America. In Germany, Max Stirner came out with his 1845 book The Ego and His Own, which rejected morality and absolutes. Stirner’s egoism later became an influence on anarchists, and many, including Benjamin Tucker, incorporated Stirner’s ideas into their thought.

Collectivist anarchism, which was advocated by international man of revolution Mikhail Bakunin, emphasizes the collective association of workers instead of individual ownership like the mutualists and individualists. Labor was seen as a social endeavor and individuals could access the products of society so far as they contributed to it with their own labor.

Anarchist communism, advocated by Peter Kropotkin, goes farther by holding that individuals should work in common and receive resources based upon their needs, rather than upon their deeds.

Anarchist syndicalism takes the federated labor union as the basis for organizing revolutionary action as well as the basis for economic organization in an anarchist society. Workers’ federations would run factories, farms, and other workplaces.

Anarcho-capitalism was first expressed in the mid-twentieth century by Murray Rothbard and David Friedman, but was largely anticipated by Gustave de Molinari in his 1849 essay, “The Production of Security.” Anarcho-capitalists draw heavily on studies in economics, often in the Austrian school, to advocate a society where services typically provided by government are instead provided by market actors. Anarcho-capitalists generally see exchanges in a free market as choices made among equals and are therefore less concerned about credit, interest, rent, and labor issues than other anarchists.

Note that some anarchists would exclude other categories from anarchism. To me if the anarcho comes first and the economic preferences second then an advocate of any of these schools can rightfully be categorized as anarchist.

A number of other labels have been adopted by anarchists to show a particular emphasis in their goals and methods, and adopting one label by no means excludes the ideas of another. Anarcho-pacifism, related to Christian anarchism and the writings of Tolstoy, opposes any use of force or violence as inherently authoritarian. Green anarchism, of which primitivism is one subset, has a particular focus on ecology. Anarcha-feminism analyzes and combats patriarchy with anarchist principles. Anarcho-transhumanism explores the relationship between anarchist thought and major scientific advancements in human longevity and capability. Agorism sees opportunities for liberation in markets that aren’t sanctioned by the state.

All anarchists seek the greatest freedom for each individual, unrestrained by political, social, or economic authority.

The state is nothing mystical, but is an institution made of people. It is a social organization that incentives certain behavior, generally worse behavior than that encouraged by free association on principles of cooperation and solidarity. The state relies for its existence on force and deference to people of higher rank. It enforces its own monopoly. To get to the top, political leaders must please powerful interests and usually continue working with certain interests in order to stay in power.

Reforms that pass down through the government structure are filtered through layers of bureaucrats and administrators who will do what they can to improve their position and pass on the weight of governance to others. Government agencies are oriented to please politicians, not the public, and government enforcers owe allegiance to internal culture and rules, not to the outside community.

Social authority is the power exercised by prevailing custom, privileging some customs and lifestyles over others. When social harmony is based on respect for individuality and people are free to develop according to their wishes rather than fit into roles that others have given them, it creates a favorable environment for individual freedom and social progress.

Authority in the economic realm exists because the ability to achieve economic security and advancement is restricted by state regulations and economic elites, putting some in a disadvantageous or even desperate position.

Free association on anarchist principles will make society more productive and decrease inequality. Any inequality that does arise from different choices will be much less threat to liberty and autonomy because there will be greater alternatives in place and greater opportunity to create alternatives.

Anarchists who favor market mechanisms as an important component of a free society could be called market anarchists.

Do the words market and capitalism mean the same thing? This brings up a worthwhile semantics discussion.

The word capitalism, by its etymology, suggests an ideology of capital, favoring one factor in production over another. What is commonly called capitalism is often characterized by separation of ownership and labor, and a hierarchical employer-employee relationship (not to mention banksters and annoying over-commercialization).

A market could have these things – but a market itself is just a space of buying and selling. With a dispersal of economic power, more people have the power to buy and sell.

Some anarchists disagree. They think that the existence of a market means people will use their accumulated capital to take advantage of others.

The amount of wealth people have will never be equal and no attempt at perfect economic equality should be made, but when people are economically secure and value freedom highly they will protect their freedom, not sell it, so there would be nobody for the rich to take advantage of.

Economic security is one cornerstone of autonomy, and market anarchism shows its egalitarian nature as it aims for more generalized prosperity.

But action always proceeds from values and a free society must have the values of solidarity and  mutual aid – part of a complete package of upholding individual autonomy. The sovereignty of the individual requires individuals to have power over their own lives.

The value of mutual aid – helping people when they need it and expecting they will do the same for you – has been demonstrated in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Many first-hand reports underscore the lack of help from government agencies or the Red Cross. But a massive community response through personal connections and local organizations has arisen. A big one is the Occupy movement, which declared its intention to Occupy Sandy and launched massive efforts to provide relief. The benefit of motivated individuals drawing on local knowledge and networks to help each other has proved to be of immense value.

Anarchism envisions an active civil life of voluntary organizations operating on libertarian principles – social action that fills the gaps now held open by authority and its impact on personal life. Growing the libertarian social sphere makes the anarchist society more viable.

Getting to the world where no authority is recognized as legitimate will not be easy. The state and authoritarian structures are deeply rooted. But by dealing honestly and effectively with today’s problems, libertarians can invite participation in exciting and innovative paths toward liberty. In doing so, we prepare people for government which governs not at all – by motivating them to prepare themselves.