“Konkin’s entire theory speaks only to the interests and concerns of the marginal classes who are self-employed. The great bulk of the people are full-time wage workers; they are people with steady jobs. Konkinism has nothing whatsoever to say to these people. To adopt Konkin’s strategy, then, would on this ground alone, serve up as…
The goal of this essay is to examine where the counter-economy and the “Agorist movement” is in relation to Samuel E. Konkin III’s hypothesis of a progression from Statism to Agorism in four phases. Readers who are new to the philosophy of Agorism and the practice of counter-economics are likely better served by reading The…
Organizing a Counter-Economic General Strike: A First Pass What is a General Strike? There will be more than a few entries in this symposium expressing some ways that agorists can form meaningful alliances with either illegalists or syndicalists. I’ve had the latter idea going for a few years now and have a large (currently) unpublished…
Agorism is the philosophy of counter-economic activity eventually overcoming the statist economic consensus. It’s not simply black market activity, but rather a whole alternative economy that operates just below the surface of state capitalism. While seen by some (including Rothbard) as a niche element to the state’s leviathan, Konkin himself noted that the counter economy…
Is there anything we as agorists, anarchists, and others of the left can do to build a revolution? What does agorism tell us about our ends, the society we wish to create, based on its means? Agorism is an anarchist philosophy of revolutionary counter-economics, but it is not the first. Agorism’s use of black and gray markets to empower…
Often, libertarians work towards their goals by campaigning for politicians and ballot measures that promise to enact them. Agorists work towards their goals by working towards their goals. Agorism is libertarian politics beyond policy. It’s the familiar focus on individual liberation, respect for persons and their property rights, the market process, and the self-organizing power…
I: What is agorism? There is a lot of what I’d call “201” discussion of agorism in this symposium but I think it’s helpful to take a step back and make sure we don’t let some of the fundamentals go under-analyzed. For example, what is counter-economics? What counts as a counter-economic activity and what doesn’t?…
Introducing the 2016 September Mutual Exchange Symposium The Monthly Mutual Exchange Symposium is C4SS’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through exchange. September’s Mutual Exchange Symposium will explore the philosophy of agorism. Originally coined by radical libertarian social theorist Samuel Edward Konkin III, agorism is a theory of social change that aims to bring about a…
If you frequent right-libertarian social media circles, you’ve probably run across — more than once — the popular “World Population Living in Extreme Poverty, 1820-2015” meme. It’s a graph that shows high levels of absolute poverty relative to the total world population through the mid-20th century, with a rapid increase starting about 1950 in the…
Praxeology maintains its importance precisely because it implies fundamental principles as the guiding action in scientifically studying human action and understanding its dynamics and relations. From coming from these principles, human actions can be understood as having particular reasoning’s and laws which inform how further understandings of human action can be qualitatively determined and mapped….
During one of the many civil wars between patricians and plebians that racked the early Roman Republic in Livy’s account, Menenius Agrippa — a spokesman for the oligarchy that had enclosed the common lands and reduced the Latin peasantry to tenant status and debt peonage — defended the privileges of the landed aristocracy with a…
Arguing against the Minimum Wage has often been the preserve of the ‘right’ (presuming the simplistic and problematic left-right dichotomy that we impose as a conceptual framework to make sense of contemporary politics); however, the ‘left’ also suffers heavily from the Minimum Wage and, despite it purporting to be a pro-poor law, it works to…
The heat of a presidential election campaign is a good time to reflect on the old Howard Zinn quote about voting: “Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But what really matters, for building a genuinely just…
CONTENT WARNING: rape, sexual assault, physical abuse, violent misogyny, child abuse Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at the DNC recently has been hailed by many as an historic moment in feminist history, as she is the first woman to be nominated by a major party. If she wins the race, she…
A young biker sits with his back against a graffitied stone wall off a hiking trail near the Nevada border, his face buried in a notebook. His name is Jax Teller and he’s the vice president of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club – Redwood Original, or SAMCRO for short, and the book he’s reading…
One of the most challenging elements to a post-Brexit order is the organisation and understanding of law. Since our accession into the EEC, our laws have been increasingly harmonised with and even led by European Union directives and court judgments. Thus we’ve moved into the position of having legislation more dominant in legal acquiescence than…
If the Democrats’ approach under Clinton is doubling down on Obama’s technocratic neoliberal caesarism, with the constant, quiet upward ratcheting of automated drone warfare and electronic surveillance, the alternative from Trump’s GOP is out-and-out fascism. And when I say “fascism,” I mean the kind with smashed windows, lynchings and brownshirt thuggery in the streets. Nowhere…
If anarchism is to get anywhere as a movement, it requires us to build the world we wish to see. To paraphrase the classic wobbly mantra, our goal is and should be to “build a new world within the shell of the old.” In order to do this we must actually create the structures which…
“By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.” – Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin in Paolo Novaresio’s The Explorers A revolutionary is someone who knows the political world in which they want to…
The decentralisation of political authority is, in itself, undoubtedly a victory for the anarchist cause. However, in the case of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, it may be strange to look at it this way, given the reasons for which the Leave side of the campaign won. The Leave campaign was grotesque…
