[Di James Wilson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 29 febbraio 2016 con il titolo Henry Kissinger on Trial. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.]

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, di Christopher Hitchens (2001)

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, libro di Christopher Hitchens del 2001, è stranamente tornato alla ribalta questo mese, mentre l’ex segretario di stato di Richard Nixon è nelle cronache. La rinata rilevanza di Kissinger è cominciata quando la candidata alla presidenza, il democratico Hillary Clinton, si è vantata di essere “rimasta molto impressionata quando Henry Kissinger ha detto che era da tanto che nessuno dirigeva il dipartimento di stato come me. Ora capisco cosa si deve fare per migliorare l’efficienza del nostro governo.”

Non ha detto, però, che la relazione tra i Clinton e i Kissinger è personale oltre che professionale, dato che da tempo le due famiglie vanno insieme in vacanza. Nel dibattito presidenziale che ne è seguito, Bernie Sanders ha colto l’opportunità per usare l’approvazione contro i Clinton stessi, dicendo: “credo che Henry Kissinger sia stato uno dei segretari di stato più distruttivi nella storia moderna di questo paese,” e aggiungendo: “io non prendo consigli da Henry Kissinger.” La prima frase di Sanders è minimizzante. Meglio descrivere Kissinger come assassino di massa e criminale di guerra.

I crimini di Kissinger contro l’umanità sono ben documentati e sono tanto il soggetto del libro di Hitchens che il titolo di un  documentario associato al libro. Con poco meno di 80 pagine, di facile lettura, il libro è un’eccellente introduzione ad una delle figure più infami della politica americana. E riesce a delineare bene anche i fatti criminali degli Stati Uniti durante la guerra fredda. Il libro, di interesse per i libertari, riporta molti esempi della malvagità di cui lo stato è capace. Ai libertari di sinistra in particolare non sfuggiranno i tanti casi in cui l’America è intervenuta violentemente a favore di industrie americane ed élite di potere del terzo mondo.

La rilevanza data all’antiinterventismo può sembrare ironica data l’avversione di Hitchens a idee libertarie. Agli inizi della carriera, Hitchens si definiva socialista con tendenze marxiste. Col tempo lasciò la sinistra, anche per l’alleanza di questa con Bill Clinton, che lui, spesso con buona ragione, criticava fortemente. Si alienò amici e molti lettori approvando la Guerra al Terrore, compresa l’invasione americana dell’Iraq. Qualcuno ha speculato sul ruolo giocato dalla sua forte avversione per la fede islamica. Negli anni seguenti l’invasione, Hitchens diventa famoso per il suo ateismo e per la sua critica della religione. Scrive di molti argomenti, cerca sempre la controversia ed è ricordato soprattutto per la personalità colorita e il bere pesante. Muore sotto i riflettori combattendo il cancro.

La sua precedente reputazione in questo libro, in cui l’autore si attiene al soggetto, gioca un ruolo minimo. Sostiene che Kissinger dovrebbe essere processato “per crimini di guerra, crimini contro l’umanità, violazione delle leggi comuni, convenzionali e internazionali, fino al complotto per uccidere, rapire e torturare.” Hitchens si limita ai crimini secondo le leggi americane e internazionali. Parla, ma solo di passaggio, di incidenti come l’incoraggiamento dei curdi iracheni a prendere le armi contro Saddam Hussein nel 1974 per poi abbandonarli allo sterminio. Poca anche l’attenzione dedicata all’appoggio di Kissinger all’apartheid in Sud Africa e alla destabilizzazione dell’Angola, così come alla copertura offerta alle Squadre della Morte dell’America Centrale negli anni ottanta.

Sebbene li ritenga ripugnanti, Hitchens non pensa che queste cose siano abbastanza lontane dalla realpolitik da metterle al centro del libro. Si concentra invece sull’attività svolta da Kissinger nelle amministrazioni Nixon e Ford. Hitchens spiega come la campagna presidenziale di Nixon fece saltare i negoziati sulla pace in Vietnam, nel 1968, semplicemente incoraggiando i sudvietnamiti a ritirarsi dal negoziato in cambio della promessa di termini più favorevoli in caso di vittoria di Nixon. Kissinger, che partecipava all’incontro, ebbe un ruolo importante nel fornire a Nixon informazioni riguardanti i piani dell’amministrazione Johnson. Questo fece di Kissinger il personaggio chiave del sabotaggio, che prolungò la Guerra di Vietnam di quattro anni. Il risultato, come nota Hitchens, fu “la morte di circa ventimila americani e un numero incalcolabile di vietnamiti, cambogiani e laotiani.” Con il fallimento del negoziato, Nixon riuscì a minare la “piattaforma di pace” sostenuta da Humphrey e vincere le elezioni del 1968. La guerra di Vietnam si concluse alle stesse identiche condizioni proposte a Parigi nel 1968.

Hitchens insiste molto sul fatto che il coinvolgimento di Kissinger nel sabotaggio degli accordi vietnamiti fu la ragione che spinse Nixon a conferirgli il primo incarico (consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale). Kissinger presidiò anche il comitato segreto “Forty Committee”, che valutò e approvò tutte le azioni segrete portate avanti dal governo americano tra il 1969 e il 1976. Probabilmente, ciò gli fornì conoscenza piena e responsabilità di tutte le operazioni segrete, compresa la Operation Speedy Express, che prevedeva l’uccisione di 5.000 civili disarmati e bombardamenti indiscriminati in Laos e Cambogia. Il risultato fu la morte di 300.000 laotiani e 600.000 cambogiani e una lunga crisi sanitaria. Secondo Hitchens, Kissinger era favorevole al prolungamento della guerra fino a dopo le elezioni del 1972 e mentì quando disse di aver preso misure per minimizzare le vittime civili.

Quindi Hitchens parla del coinvolgimento di Kissinger in uccisioni e stragi in Bangladesh. Il paese aveva appena ottenuto l’autonomia dal Pakistan, allora stato vassallo americano. Servendosi di armi fornite dagli Stati Uniti, che approvarono implicitamente, il Pakistan si vendicò attaccando la capitale bengalese di Dacca. Risultato: tra mezzo milione e tre milioni di morti e una grossa crisi causata dai profughi. Seguì qualche anno dopo, con l’appoggio americano, un golpe che rovesciò il governo eletto democraticamente per installare un regime amico di Kissinger.

Il capitolo seguente parla del golpe cileno del 1973, in cui l’amministrazione Nixon, aiutata dal sabotaggio economico organizzato dalla CIA, organizzò l’uccisione del capo di stato e lo stesso golpe. A quei il Cile era la democrazia più sviluppata di tutto l’emisfero meridionale, ma elesse Salvador Allende, di tendenze socialiste, che minacciò la nazionalizzazione di un’industria ampiamente dominata da società americane come la ITT, la Pepsi Cola e la Chase Manhattan Bank. La CIA organizzò il golpe e insediò il regime repressivo di Augusto Pinochet. Hitchens racconta del rapimento e dell’uccisione di un generale che impediva l’ascesa di Pinochet, della moltiplicazione delle squadre della morte e delle migliaia di cileni scomparsi, torturati e uccisi.

Qualcosa di simile si trova nel capitolo seguente, a proposito di un golpe nell’isola di Cipro con l’appoggio americano, golpe che si lasciò dietro migliaia di morti civili e 200.000 profughi. Quindi Hitchens parla dell’invasione di Timor Est da parte dell’Indonesia, invasione avvenuta durante la visita al dittatore indonesiano Suharto del presidente Gerald Ford e dello stesso Kissinger. L’invasione, con l’approvazione di Ford e Kissinger, portò alla morte di 100.000 civili, uccisi con armi fornite dagli Stati Uniti.

Hitchens indaga anche sullo strano caso di Elias P. Demetracopoulos, giornalista greco in esilio critico verso il regime di Nixon per il supporto fornito alla dittatura militare greca. Demetracopoulos scoprì che Nixon, durante la campagna presidenziale del 1968, aveva ricevuto 549.000 dollari dalla dittatura greca tramite l’ultraconservatore affarista greco Thomas Pappas. La legge americana vieta le donazioni elettorali da parte di governi esteri. Non solo ma, dato che la dittatura greca riceveva fondi dalla CIA, è possibile che si trattasse di denaro reindirizzato verso la campagna elettorale. Anche la vicenda del furto di documenti legato allo scandalo Watergate, secondo Hitchens, sarebbe stato il tentativo di accertare, tra le altre cose, se il partito Democratico fosse a conoscenza dalle connessioni di Pappas. Lo stesso Demetracopoulos scoprì riferimenti alla sua morte in un documento già segretato, scoperta che spinse Hitchens ad indagare sul possibile complotto appoggiato da Kissinger per la sua uccisione.

In tutti questi casi, Hitchens accusa Kissinger di aver partecipato a diversi crimini, che si sia trattato di pianificarli, offrire aiuto o semplicemente approvarli. In appendice parla dell’agenzia di consulenza privata Kissinger Associates. La “Associates” assiste aziende clientelari come American Express, ITT, Lockheed, Anheuser-Busch, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Coca Cola e Union Carbide nei rapporti con stati, solitamente repressivi, come quello di Saddam Hussein. Queste attività hanno permesso a Kissinger di trarre profitto dalle sue attività e connessioni politiche.

Hitchens nota come molti collaboratori di Kissinger siano finiti in galera o siano usciti dalla politica in disgrazia, anche se qualcuno ha proseguito la propria attività nelle amministrazioni seguenti. Questo libro è un eccellente atto d’accusa rivolto non solo contro un pericoloso politico, ma anche contro quel sistema politico che ha permesso a Kissinger di prosperare. Fa molto per sbugiardare l’idea di America come egemonia benevola, o anche solo capace di interventi esteri volti al bene. Se si pensa a Hillary Clinton, poi, visto come lei si vanta dell’appoggio ricevuto da quest’uomo, il libro è anche un’accusa contro l’attuale establishment politico.

If anything can be said to be entertaining about liberals’ reaction to Putin’s possible role in the DNC leaks, it’s what it inadvertently reveals about the unexamined foreign policy assumptions they share with conservatives. Coming as it does on top of a long Trump history of weird Putin adulations, the possibility that Russia hacked the DNC emails and released them to benefit Trump has the mainstream liberal press buzzing with the kind of Red Scare talk we haven’t seen since the Cold War. Liberal outlets ranging from Alternet to Slate to Talking Points Memo are breathlessly citing figures from the “realist” and neoconservative GOP foreign policy establishment like John McCain, Max Boot and National Review, accusing Trump of “dangerous naivete” about Russian expansionism, and citing the “communist infiltration” of Henry Wallace’s campaign as a precedent (Kali Holloway, “Donald Trump: Traitor, Liar, Danger to the World,” AlterNet, July 31; Franklin Foer, “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West, and it looks a lot like Donald Trump,” Slate, July 21; Allegra Kirkland, “McCain Backs Up Romney; Trump’s Foreign Policy is ‘Dangerous’,” Talking Points Memo, March 3). Regarding the first title, it’s always nice to see a liberal (and, however incongruently, self-proclaimed “Left”) publication sounding like the American Legion.

A few disclaimers before I get into the meat of things. First, I am not a Trump apologist; I think a Trump presidency would be uniquely catastrophic compared even to the godawful Mrs. Clinton, or to any U.S. president in my memory. Second, I don’t contest that Putin’s regime is autocratic, or that he has made aggressive wars against his neighbors. And third, I consider it quite disturbing that Russian intelligence may have hacked into the servers of a major U.S. political party. If the latter is in fact the case, Putin’s use of the information to manipulate the internal U.S. political process, and Wikileaks’ promotion of the increasingly odious Julian Assange’s personal agenda, rather than operating as a transparent, P2P platform, is even more disturbing.

With all that out of the way, though, the liberal or center-left framing of all these issues — and what it leaves out — sheds enormous light on the unquestioned assumptions about American power shared by liberals, “realist” conservatives, Reaganites and neoconservatives in the national security establishment.

In every case, Russia and other official enemies like Iran are viewed as uniquely aggressive, whereas the nature of American imperialism — which actually doesn’t even exist in their conceptual framework — is entirely defensive. We’ve already seen this perspective, exemplified by Neera Tanden’s (of Center for American Progress) email to Clinton in which she argued that, despite her purported distaste for policing the world, the U.S. was nevertheless “the only adult left in the room” when it came to maintaining a stable world order (presumably based on common neutral principles agreeable to the “international community”).

Let’s take all the liberal criticisms one at a time, starting with Trump’s admittedly bizarre praise for Russian strongman Putin (picture George Costanza: “Step off? You told Saakashvili to step off? That’s too much!”). You’d have a hard time finding such fulsome praise for a violent and oppressive foreign leader from more moderate American politicians — or would you? How about Hillary Clinton’s consistent defenses of Benyamin Netanyahu’s repeated murderous rampages into Gaza, or her expressed desire to take America’s relationship — not just with Israel, but personally with Netanyahu — to “another level”?

Putin’s intervention in Western political processes — backing right-populists and racist xenophobes like LePen, Berluscone, the Golden Dawn and British National Party, going way back before his support for Trump — is another major liberal point in his indictment. It’s decidedly odd, though, that such intervention in the internal politics of foreign countries should figure so prominently in critiques by Clinton backers, when one of the most notable critics is a former Director of Central Intelligence. The CIA would never intervene in the internal political affairs of another country, right? Other than Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Congo, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, the rest of South America, Namibia and Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Iraq, Honduras, Libya…

As for Putin’s aggression, it takes a unique set of blinders to call his 2008 altercation with Georgia, or his recent intervention in eastern Ukraine and occupation of the Crimea as aggression, while portraying as purely “defensive” the eastward expansion of NATO and the installation of a right-populist (and arguably neo-Nazi) regime in the Ukraine that is every bit as authoritarian as Putin’s.

I remember in August 2008 when there was a united front of talking heads on all the major cable news channels — CNN, Fox and MSNBC — referring to Putin’s “aggression” against Georgia. But the simple and inescapable fact of the matter was that Georgia initated the dispute by invading a province whose autonomy had been guaranteed by treaty — with Russia as a guarantor. It’s hard to escape the conclusion — as stated by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their “Propaganda Model” of the American media — that cable news, the wire services and major newspapers of record are every bit as slavishly subservient to the foreign policies of the American state as are the official media organs of any totalitarian regime.

In every case, whenever the U.S. maintains hundreds of military bases around the world (including on the very borders of “aggressors”), overthrows foreign governments, installs dictators, or actually invades and occupies other countries, it’s either an isolated “mistake” (like Vietnam or Iraq) that deviates from the general tendency of America’s foreign policy of promoting peace, stability and democracy, or a genuinely “defensive” measure in support of those same benevolent policy goals. As I recall some Democratic Senator saying on C-SPAN, during the ’90s debates on Bill Clinton’s Balkan wars, “I was taught in school that America never fights wars to add a dollar to its treasure, or a square mile to its territory.”

And in the official American ideology, echoed in perfect harmony by the mainstream press, any country that challenges, disobeys or attempts to secede from this neoliberal world hegemony enforced by the United States is an “aggressor.” For example Allegra Kirkland, in the article linked above, cites — with apparent approval — McCain’s warnings of not only a “neo-imperialist Russia,” but “an assertive China,” an “expansionist Iran, an insane North Korean ruler, and terrorist movements that are metastasizing across the Middle East and Africa.” I have a hard time thinking of any recent example of “expansion” or “assertion” by Russia, China or Iran that isn’t far overshadowed by the American state’s consistent history of expansion from its founding to the present day.

Today Russia’s military budget is a tiny fraction of what the United States spends on what it quaintly refers to as “Defense.” And how many military bases does the U.S. have around the world, compared to what Russia has outside its own borders. It’s hard to take talk of “expansionism” seriously when both the forces of the “defending” superpower complaining of the “aggression,” and the territories threatened by the “aggressor,” are on the immediate border of the “aggressor” and on the other side of the world from the “defensive” power.

Iran is an odd case of “aggression,” considering its regional footprint and ambitions are arguably far smaller than when it was a U.S. regional proxy under the Shah — and considering the U.S. encouraged and aided Saddam in an all-out blitzkrieg attack on the Islamic Republic (one of those examples of “making aggressive war on his neighbors” the U.S. later used to justify invading Iraq). And when the U.S. was preparing to attack Saddam (hated and feared by Iran, understandably, far more than by the U.S.), Iran offered to reach an accommodation by which it would aid the establishment of a stable, moderate Shia majority regime in cooperation with the U.S.

Those terrorist movements spreading across the Middle East didn’t just start spreading on their own. They got a lot of help. They are the cumulative result of Western intervention in the region going back to the Sykes-Picot Treaty (which divided the former territories of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France) and the Balfour Doctrine (which officially invited the Zionist colonization of Palestine). Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist doctrine promoted by Al Qaeda and ISIS, was originally the official religion of the House of Saud, whose unification of the Arabian peninsula was actively supported by the U.S. Al Qaeda owes its origins almost entirely to the American effort to destabilize the USSR’s secular left-wing satellite regime in Afghanistan, and then to back anti-Soviet Wahhabist guerrillas there (because it seemed such a good at the time to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam). And ISIS has its origins in both Al Qaeda Iraq POWs of the post-invasion U.S. counter-insurgency, and some anti-Assad guerrilla groups backed by the U.S. in Syria. It is, in other words, the cumulative blowback from a century of Western and U.S. imperialism.

As for Russia and China, they are certainly attempting to expand as regional powers and to exert greater power over their neighbors, at the expense of American desire for a unipolar world under its own hegemony. But it’s hard to imagine a course of regional expansionism on their part that would remotely match the United States’s record of regional expansion in its own hemisphere. Specifically, the regional expansionism (genocide against the native population, in addition to conquest) by which the United States established itself as a continent-sized nation in the first place, claimed a unilateral sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine, and overthrew virtually every single government in Latin America at least once, are measures Putin would be hard-pressed to match.

Imagine the situation reversed, with Russia or China having a navy of ten or so capital ships, unmatched by any other country in the world, maintaining carrier groups in the Caribbean and labelling the U.S. as a threat because its military forces exceed its “legitimate defensive needs.” Imagine them guaranteeing the territories of every country in Central and South America against U.S. military invasion. That’s the position the U.S. is in now, in enforcing a global political and economic order against regional powers, and in which it considers itself on the “defensive” against “aggressors.”

In other words the United States claims a unique right to determine who is the “aggressor” and “defender” in every conflict around the world, to define what military forces are reasonable for every other country’s “legitimate defensive needs,” to define as “a threat” any country that defies its will, and to define as “an aggressor” any country that attempts to deter or resist military attack by the United States.

It’s time to flush this “American exceptionalism” down the toilet, along with the official legitimizing ideologies of every other state in the world. The United States is a government like all others, and its primary function — like that of all other states, including Russia, China and Iran — is to serve as executive committee of the ruling class coalition that controls it. The only real difference is that, because the U.S. is the most powerful state in the world, it does the same thing as other states on a much larger scale. In this case, it acts not simply as the enforcer of a domestic class system but as enforcer of an international political and economic order created after WWII to serve the interests of capital on a global scale.

There are no “good” states. “Treason” against all of them — including the United States — is loyalty to the working people of the world.

Richard Ebeling discusses the events of 9-11 and the aftermath.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the pre 9-11 evil that contributed to the attacks.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the dominant paradigm and libertarian challenges to it.

Glenn Greenwald discusses how Facebook will work with the Israeli govt in censorship efforts.

Alon Ben-Mier discusses Bibi’s land grab approach.

Aisha Maniar discusses a former Gitmo prisoner.

Lew Rockwell discusses the truth about war and state.

Paul R. Pillar discusses the legacy of 9-11.

Ivan Eland discusses whether we are safer 15 years after 9-11.

Lawrence Wittner discusses how it is time to ban nuclear weapons.

Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon discuss Bibi’s claims about the alleged human rights of Israeli setllers.

Arnold August discusses Obama’s selective memory about 9-11 and the Chilean coup.

Avia Chomsky discusses race, deportation, and immigration in the U.S.

Laurence M. Vance discusses ticket scapling.

Stephen Kinzer discusses frustrating the war party.

Noam Rotem discusses the ethnic cleansing of Arab villages in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Stanley L. Cohen discusses how Palestine will suffer no matter who is elected.

Mary L. Dudziak discusses how war lost its politics.

George H. Smith discusses the ethics of belief.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity discusses how the U.S. media has ignored the CIA cover up of the torture report.

Mina Al-Oraibi discusses the occupation of Palestine.

Richard Hardigan discusses how people in Palestine with disabilities aren’t immune to Israeli violence.

Yves Engler discusses Canada in the Congo.

David Swanson discusses the killing of native peoples.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the parallels between the treatment of people in Palestine and Native Americans in the U.S.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the religious fervor of nationalistic rituals in the U.S.

Uri Avnery discusses why peace can happen between Israel-Palestine.

Zaid Jilani discusses how Bibi has added new settlements while getting a massive aid package from the U.S. govt.

Laurence M. Vance discusses what libertarians want from government.

David R. Henderson discusses why foreign airlines should be allowed to fly between U.S. cities.

Howdy, folks! Another Sunday is in progress, which means it’s time for me to rub another Media Coordinator Weekly Update in your eyes. Don’t worry, I don’t think it stings.

Of course I didn’t try it on myself first, are you serious?

The Week in Commentary

We started the week off strong with Logan Glitterbomb’s article on antifascist graffiti artists reclaiming walls in Germany from neo-Nazis. “Fight Hate, Paint Back!” was picked up all over the place – including, as y’all might expect at this point, our 2016 MVP: the Augusta Free Press.  Her piece was also picked up in the Gilmer, TX Mirror and the Buffalo Network, which seems to be an online news service that caters to a few counties in Wyoming. Neat!

Kevin Carson’s piece, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?” made its way not just to the Augusta Free Press‘s commentary repository, not only to the Gilmer Mirror‘s pages, but also to the Libertarian Alliance blog. Thanks for publishing, y’all!

As always, all pickups are added to a list at the bottom of each article, and those lists are edited over time as more pickups come in.

There were a couple more commentaries released this week that don’t yet have enough pickup information (or in the case of Kevin’s second Op-ed of the week, hasn’t been sent out yet) to pull through, but you should check them out anyway, because they’re stellar.

1. Billy Christmas wrote a fantastic examination of the British left’s relationship with gentrification.
2. Logan Glitterbomb wrote about the ongoing prison strike, and how the majority of organized labor abandoned prison workers.
3. Kevin Carson skewered nationalism with his piece on the ramifications of Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem.

I’m sure we’ll be revisiting these pieces next week, especially that last one (since I haven’t even sent it out yet…).

How’d the Mutual Exchange end? Let’s find out

I mean, I couldn’t just leave the Mutual Exchange hanging. Let’s see how everything finished.

Here’s the rundown. For everything prior to Monday, check out my last update.

1. C4SS Senior Editor Chris Shaw starts things off on Monday with an examination of markets where agorism can thrive; namely, energy and small manufacturing.
2. C4SS contributor and freelance reporter Derrick Broze draws the line and separates agorism from anarcho-capitalism.
3. As if Broze’s piece wasn’t spicy enough for you, C4SS Research Scholar Nathan Goodman comes in hot with a piece on the benefits and pitfalls of agorism, syndicalism and other anarchist pursuits.
4. C4SS Senior Fellow Nick Ford responds with the question: “Does agorism require intent?” and “Can Agora-Syndicalism and Libertarianism get along?”
5. Derrick Broze jumps back in with a reply to both Ford and Goodman arguing that there is a “Need For A Self-Aware, Intentional Agorist Movement.“
6. Finally, C4SS Fellow Logan Glitterbomb also addresses Ford and Goodman, arguing further that agorism, syndicalism and illegalism are definitely compatible.

I would say that this month’s Mutual Exchange was a success! I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Odds + Ends

Sheldon Richman’s new Feature, “Trade Is a Labor-Saving ‘Device’,” is up. Excerpt:

Outside politics life is rather different. Our actions have a reasonable chance of making a difference to ourselves and those we care about; the costs of our actions fall largely on ourselves; and acquiring information in order to act more intelligently is thus worthwhile. As a result, those who try to sell us goods and services have an incentive to behave responsively and responsibly, unlike candidates for political office.

Kevin Carson has a book review out, covering Nicholas Hildyard’s new book, “Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South.” Excerpt (from the review, not the book, duh):

To be sure Hildyard is not, so far as I know, an anarchist. But while remaining open to state reformist measures as part of a total agenda package for fighting neoliberalism, he expresses considerable skepticism towards a strategy focused on such measures. For example the traditional social democratic remedies of progressive taxation and redistribution, he writes, “arguably threaten to become a regressive end-of-pipe ‘solution’ that perpetuates the violence of capital while retrospectively compensating a few of those from whom capital has looted…” And he takes a similarly reserved view of a global justice focused on “persuading ‘policy makers’ in powerful institutions (the World Bank, the G8, the G20, national governments, corporations and the like) to do the right thing.”

And finally, over at our wonderful blog, Natasha Petrova has compiled yet another monster list of links to libertarian and other writers who have written good stuff recently.

Housekeeping

This is more of an administrative note than an update with what C4SS is doing, but I did want to use just a smidge of space to let y’all know that I’ve finally gotten my C4SS.org email set up. If you are a member of the media and you have inquiries about any of the work we do, you can now reach me directly at trevor@c4ss.org. Also I’ve set up a Twitter. I’m @trevor_c4ss.

Anyway, how can you help keep this roller coaster going? I’ll tell you. But first I have to start a new paragraph, change the header size to Heading 2, and shout…

Donate! It’s how we get paid!

That’s right, folks. C4SS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that you can send your tax deductible donations to. That money goes to funding projects, keeping the site up and – arguably most importantly – paying our writers. To quote our support page directly:

The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) functions on the enthusiasm of writers and volunteers, but it is the continued donations of supporters that keeps us going and growing. We have big plans and even bigger dreams for C4SS and we need your help.

Fundraising is not begging or charity. It is a barometer of success, support and professionalism. It is about offering an opportunity to participate in the project, the task at hand. So we ask you, dear supporters, let us know how we are doing and play a crucial part in our success by giving to C4SS.

So yeah. I think that’s as good a place as any to wrap up. See you next week!

Outside politics life is rather different. Our actions have a reasonable chance of making a difference to ourselves and those we care about; the costs of our actions fall largely on ourselves; and acquiring information in order to act more intelligently is thus worthwhile. As a result, those who try to sell us goods and services have an incentive to behave responsively and responsibly, unlike candidates for political office.

That’s why, by and large, people act smarter in the personal realm than they do in political realm.

To see the difference, think about the saving of labor. Normally we see this as a good thing. We buy electric toothbrushes, power lawnmowers, dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, and self-cleaning ovens, among many other things, precisely to save labor. Why? Obviously because labor is work — exertion. Most of what we think of as work we would not do if we could have the expected fruits without it. (Of course we sometimes are paid to do things we’d do anyway, but then it is something more than mere work.) Saving labor through technology not only relieves us of particular exertion; it also frees us to obtain other things we want but would otherwise have to do without — including leisure. Thus labor-saving enables us to have more stuff for less exertion. Time and energy are scarce, but our ends are infinite. That’s why no one in private life fails to see labor-saving as good.

Frederic Bastiat captured this in a fable about Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe had a two-week project planned: making a plank. This would require many days of labor, cutting down a tree, trimming the trunk, and fashioning the plank just so. Next he would re-sharpen his tools and then replenish the provisions he would consume during the project. As he prepared to start the job, Friday excitedly delivered the news that a piece of wood, well suited as a plank, had just washed up on their island. Terrible news, Crusoe said. Friday didn’t understand, so Crusoe explained: obtaining the plank without effort — that is, for free — would cost him weeks of labor. He said:

Now, labor is wealth. It is clear that I shall only be hurting my own interests if I go down to the beach to pick up that piece of driftwood. It is vital for me to protect my personal labor, and, now that I think of it, I can even create additional labor for myself by going down and kicking that plank right back into the sea!

The genius of Bastiat’s fable is that people will readily spot Crusoe’s foolishness. But it is equally certain that few will apply the lesson to the “national economy,” which is nothing more than a lot of people, arbitrarily grouped into a “nation,” who produce and trade, when permitted, with other people arbitrarily grouped into other “nations.”

When Bastiat’s interlocutor calls Crusoe’s reasoning “absurd,” Bastiat replies:

That may be. It is nonetheless the same line of reasoning that is adopted by every nation that protects itself by interdicting the entry of foreign goods. It kicks back the plank that is offered it in exchange for a little labor, in order to give itself more labor. There is no labor, even including that of the customs official, in which it does not see some profit. It is represented by the pains Robinson Crusoe took to return to the sea the present it was offering him. Consider the nation as a collective entity, and you will not find an iota of difference between its line of reasoning and that of Robinson Crusoe.

People can easily see that the free “imported” plank gives Crusoe time to make something else or to relax, but they don’t see that imports delivered at prices lower than domestic alternatives similarly free up scarce labor and resources, enabling us to make things we want but hitherto couldn’t afford, or make leisure feasible. Presented with this argument, the protectionist will undoubtedly ask what the newly freed labor would make. We should give the answer that Bastiat gives:

As long as a person has wants to satisfy and time at his disposal, he always has something to do. I am not obliged to specify the kind of work he could undertake to do.

Or:

If the total quantity of consumers’ goods enjoyed by the … people could be obtained with one-tenth less labor, no one can predict what new satisfactions they would try to obtain for themselves with the remaining available labor. One person would want to be better clothed; another, better fed; this one, better educated; that one, better entertained.

Trade is a labor-saving “device.” We each have two legitimate ways to acquire any good: produce it ourselves or acquire it through trade (after producing something else). For most goods, trade will be the lower cost method. (See why “comparative advantage” is “The Most Elusive Proposition.”) The day is simply too short to make everything we want. Thus trade makes us wealthy. When government interferes with trade, it makes us poorer.

Bastiat believed that people found the destruction of cross-border trade (“protectionism”) attractive “because, as free trade enables them to attain the same result with less labor, this apparent diminution of labor terrifies them.” (Read about the bias against saving labor in Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.) Why do people who try to save labor every day believe this? Because they think a society’s principles of well-being are different from those of an individual’s. As long as they do, political candidates will feed the bias.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may or may not know that trade unfettered at political boundaries makes people wealthier. We need not waste time (which of course could be put to better use) wondering if they are demagogues or just ignoramuses. Rather, we should devote our scarce energy to showing people that what is good for them individually — saving labor — is just as good when observed from a bird’s-eye view.

While it is true that syndicalism and illegalism can diverge from and even sometimes butt heads with agorism, there seems to be much use in such alliances. It was within this spirit that Nathan Goodman offered critiques of each possible tactic and alliance and while some of the points speak for themselves, others require some fleshing out and questioning.

While it is noted that all labor unions, even alt labor organizations, can sometimes use coercive tactics, I agree with Nick Ford that such tactics are no more prevalent in the syndicalist movement than any other per se. That’s rather simply a pitfall of our species as a whole that we must work past as best as possible. But syndicalism is not just anti-authoritarian or alt labor, it is a tactic with an end goal: syndicalization of the means of production. When Nathan Goodman says that syndicalism can be compatible with agorism to an extent but the tactic of actual syndicalizing a workplace is not compatible or at least should not be encouraged, he is effectively saying that syndicalism is in fact not compatible with agorism at all.

“Syndicalism may also involve the coercive transfer of property, particularly when it entails seizing factories from their owners. There are worthwhile questions to ask about the legitimacy of existing property claims given historical injustices such as the enclosures and other state actions that have privileged capitalists and impoverished workers. However, action that serves to transfer property from one person (or group of persons) to another person or group without the consent of the initial owner is zero or negative sum action. Given that we have limited time, labor, resources, and entrepreneurial alertness, there is a real opportunity cost to devoting our efforts to securing transfers rather than production and mutually beneficial exchange.”

Syndicalism as a tactic involves using labor unions and alt labor organizations to challenge the boss’ power, improve work conditions and treatment, and eventually oust the boss, taking over the workplace as a worker’s syndicate and running it collectively. Without that last part, it just becomes plain old unionism though admittedly with a more anti-statist leaning. Syndicalism has as part of its philosophy a detailed critique of current capitalist property rights, agreeing with many left-libertarians that much of their property is the result of theft, coercion, enclosure, corporate subsidies, state licensing regimes, zoning laws, government bailouts, tax breaks, intellectual property laws, and other political favors, and therefore is illegitimate. And while, yes, if the original owner can be found, the property should revert back to their control and the decisions about what to do with it should rest with the original legitimate owner, as Rothbard and many others have pointed out, finding the original or “legitimate” owner can sometimes prove to be difficult or even impossible. It was in such a case that Rothbard claimed that the next best option was to turn such property over to those who have put the most labor into it recently, the workers. And while I can agree that working towards creating other forms of production and mutually beneficial exchange is a more productive way to go for the most part (I mean why syndicalize a McDonald’s instead of just starting a newer better restaurant collective that is more in line with anarchist values?), we have to remember that radical syndicalism is a tactic used mostly by the poorest on the economic ladder. These are the folks who are largely kept from participating as equal actors in the marketplace because of our rigged capitalist-state economy. Starting new business ventures, even on the black and grey markets, can involve either startup costs that are hard to afford or risks that some are unwilling to take. Unions and alt labor organizations offer a means of survival in an unfree market. Once the market is opened up to true competition, it will be much easier for someone to start a better business in an industry rather than being stuck trying to change an already existing business structure. Competition is a better tactic for eating the rich than directly taking over their property but as long as the market is rigged in their favor and they prevent true competition through the use of the state, syndicalism is a way to battle them within the confines of the skewed market they created and will hopefully aid in helping to truly free the market. I would even argue that while homesteading or syndicalizing already existing businesses isn’t as productive in terms of labor as is other forms of entrepreneurship, it can lead to more productive labor than before as traditional hierarchical businesses and corporations suffer much from knowledge problems as managers, CEOs, and other bosses rarely have the knowledge of what it actually takes to produce a product or perform a service that the rank and file workers who actually perform such tasks on a regular basis do. With workers actually in charge of their own work, they are able to do away with unnecessary and counter-productive corporate rules and regulations while also experimenting with new ways of doing things and new labor-saving technology in a way that actually benefits workers and increases production instead of threatening their jobs and financial security. All in all, collectives have the ability to run much more efficiently than top down businesses and as such can be far more productive business models.

Now as far as Nathan’s take on illegalism, it’s far too simplistic. He narrows the entire philosophy and set of tactics down to one small element of it: theft. But it should be noted that theft is only a very small part of illegalism and not all illegalists even participate in theft. As far as theft goes however, that was one of the tactics that fits more uneasily with agorism at best as pointed out in my original essay on the subject. While I generally see theft as antithetical to agorism, I do agree with the illegalist approach to theft as a tactic. Illegalists are not just willy nilly thieves who will just as soon rob a house or steal a personal car as they would rob a bank. Illegalists have ethics, much like agorists, that set them apart from your average criminal. Illegalists, when they do advocate theft, only advocate stealing from crony capitalists as a form of reappropriation. A consistent illegalist will not steal your purse or your car radio but will steal groceries from Wal-Mart. And while theft as a tactic might not be the most productive economically (the idea of attributing worth on the basis of economic productivity is questionable in itself but an altogether different topic), it is again a tactic of those most marginalized by the current unfree market. Theft, in illegalist terms, is a form of survival first and foremost. Don’t have food, go grab some off the grocery store shelf. No need to pay for it. Much as in the case of illegitimate property claims in our discussion of syndicalism, if a capitalist sells a product that is the result of worker exploitation and government favors, do they actually have legitimate claims on such products to begin with? Illegalism allows those shut out by the system to obtain the means for basic survival on the small scale. Larger scale actions like bank robbing and redistribution of the stolen wealth are noble and bold actions and are a way to challenge unjust rigged markets and illegitimate property claims but are extremely risky and, while proving to be immediately useful if successful, does nothing inherently to change the underlying system and only hopes to inspire others to eventually revolt which seems like a pipe dream at best. As a tactic, much like the illegalist tactic of revolutionary assassination, large scale reappropriation seems far less useful with the potential risks usually far outweighing the reward in terms of anarchist organizing. While I understand and even agree with the motives behind such actions when taken up for a revolutionary cause, I see them as far less useful and even useless at times as a means for long-term movement building and strategy. But illegalist tactics such as theft for survival, sabotage, counterfeiting, and black and grey market entrepreneurship (where illegalism and agorism meet) such as drug dealing, gun running, and sex work, are useful either as survival tactics in an unfree market or as ways to build a new world in the shell of the old while also working to slowly break the shell apart.

People don’t like seeing their gods blasphemed, and the backlash against Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem has revealed the completely religious nature of American patriotism.

Tomi Lahren, whose views on racial matters are about what you’d expect from a “conservative commentator” on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, has been on a nonstop outrage jag ever since Kaepernick’s stance made the news. As the protest movement of variously sitting, kneeling and raising fists during the national anthem has spread, Kate Upton has joined Lahren’s social media campaign to make football games a safe space for hyper-sensitive patriots. The complaints, predictably, reached fever pitch on 9/11. Upton responded to the decision of several Dolphins to kneel during the anthem by chiding: “You should be proud to be an American. Especially on 9/11 when we should support each other.” The most egregious comments though, which get right to the heart of the national unity cult, came from Lahren: “We aren’t white & black, we are red, white & blue.” “[W[e are Americans and we stand together.”

Howard Zinn ably deconstructed this idea that our common identity as Americans is somehow more important than race or class differences:

“[Our present leaders] bombard us with phrases like ‘national interest,’ ‘national security,’ and ‘national defense’ as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

“Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.”

The cult of national unity is an old one, and it exists for a reason. It dovetails with, and reinforces, a number of other patriotic American myths. Among them is the myth of “American Exceptionalism” — i.e., that America is the uniquely “indispensible nation” in promoting “peace and freedom” around the world, and is entitled to maintain military forces larger than the rest of the world combined, and unilaterally define as a “threat” or “aggressor” any country that defies American dictates, because of this beneficent role.

Another myth associated with the cult of national unity is the American Dream. We see this in the belief by the majority of Americans that they are “middle class.” The myth encourages Americans to believe that wealth is just a matter of hard work and ingenuity, and to identify with the “53%” of “taxpayers” and “makers vs. takers” against class warriors like Occupy, in the belief that someday they too may hit it big.

It also commonly appears in conjunction with the cult of The Troops as guarantors of “our freedoms,” as illustrated by Upton’s Instagram comments on 9/11. The anthem, she said, “represents honoring the many brave men and women who sacrifice and have sacrificed their lives each and every single day to protect our freedom.”

All this despite the hard realities that America’s wars have been overwhelmingly fought to secure capitalist access to the land, natural resources and markets of the world, and the rich get the great majority of their wealth by extracting rents from the rest of us with the help of the state.

America is “exceptional” among the developed Western nations in that it is the world’s biggest settler state, created by European colonists supplanting and exterminating the indigenous population on a continental scale, and in the role that slavery played in building our economy. It is exceptional, probably not unrelated to the previous fact, in the size of its prison system and the way its culture glorifies police and soldiers. It is “exceptional” only to the extent to which its people have been successfully inculcated with myths of a “Shining City on a Hill” and a “Classless Society.” These myths obscure the criminal reality of America’s role in the world; America’s reality is hidden behind the official idealistic facade.

Thanks to this whole complex of quasi-official ideologies, America has attained the unique status of global enforcer of class rule. It is equally unique in concealing the very existence of class conflict from a significant part of its domestic population.

Fortunately, as evidenced by the rise of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the protest movement inspired by Kaepernick himself, the spell of this patriotic cult is wearing off. Power, ultimately, depends on consent. And consent depends on deception and ignorance. Once people begin to see through its legitimizing ideologies, the system of power is doomed.

With the passing of “Labor Day” earlier this month it’s useful to reflect upon its origins and the state of the labor movement as it stands today.

First celebrated on Sept. 5, 1882 in New York City by members of the Central Labor Union, a branch of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor with a parade, it coincided with a Knights of Labor conference being held nearby. Members of the CLU were required to march in the protest which was in favor of the 8 hour workday or be fined by the union as a consequence, in an authoritarian move that strained the relationship between rank-and-file union members and the union bosses.

The CLU continued to hold celebrations of the sort annually, at first on the exact anniversary, but eventually moving it to the more familiar first Monday of September. Oregon became the first state to officially declare the annual event a state holiday in 1887, with Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York following soon after.

It wasn’t until the aftermath of the Pullman strike in 1894 that President Grover Cleveland and his ilk established Labor Day as an official federal holiday in an attempt to appease the labor movement with a false symbol of progress. Out of fear that holding Labor Day on May 1st, as it had been and continues to be celebrated around the world in remembrance of the Haymarket affair of 1886, would strengthen the communist and anarchist elements of the labor movement, Grover chose the first Monday of September, a move backed by the CLU.

From its origins, Labor Day stands as a slap in the face to the truly radical labor movement. Founded by an authoritarian union and officialized as a move to suppress the libertarian and communist elements, Labor Day stands as a stark reminder of the cooperation between corporate interests, state power, and big labor against the rank-and-file of the working class. As the union bosses climbed the social-political ladder and formed alliances with those in power, those with more radical politics were effectively abandoned by many of the big unions.

In today’s labor movement, the big unions and their leaders still have yet to truly stand with the working class. Currently one of the biggest waves of organizing amongst incarcerated workers within prisons is making significant progress, winning demands in Texas and other places and leading up to a coordinated general prison labor strike that began on Friday, September 9th, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising. Their demands are varied from prison to prison but one call remains the same: to end prisoner slavery as made legal by the 13th amendment to the US Constitution, which states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

That’s right, the myth that slavery was ended by the 13th amendment is blatantly false. Because of this prisoners are paid a few cents, or in many states nothing, as compensation for their forced labor. With this scheme, business owners are able to profit off the use of slave labor without the social stigma present in traditional chattel slavery. Even when individual states have enacted a minimum wage for inmates, it’s never over a few cents an hour making it next to impossible for prisoners to pay for their necessary expenses, such as hygiene products, food, and medical care, without outside help.

Even with the minimal cost of paying those prisoners who are required to be compensated under law, it is actually cheaper than traditional slavery. Under the old model, a slaveowner would have to pay for all of the slave’s expenses themselves. Under the current model, the bill falls on the taxpayers while the businesses benefiting from the slave labor merely pay a few cents per slave at most. The government, like the highwayman, holds us a gunpoint and forces us to pay for their corporate slavery scheme while their lackies lock up the poor and people of color for increasingly petty crimes.

But now the slaves are revolting and big labor is nowhere to be found. In fact prisoners and even ex-convicts, unlike the anarchist or the communist who can disguise their politics in unfriendly territory, are not even allowed membership into big labor. Currently the only union in the U.S. that actually accepts their membership is the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW not only accepts their membership but actively recruits inmates, waiving their dues entirely, and helps them to establish union branches inside prison facilities and offering outside support in their campaigns. The IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee has been the driving force for unionized prison labor. Outside of the IWW, the unions have left them in the cold. In the vacuum created by their noticeable absence, non-union worker solidarity groups, alt labor organizations, prisoner rights groups, anti-racist groups, and even environmentalist groups have stepped up to the plate, offering solidarity and support to those who need it. According to itsgoingdown.org, there were over 50 planned solidarity demonstrations across the nation on the 9th and 10th drawing attention to and showing support for the strike.

While big labor works to protect its membership only, working with corporate and state interests to obtain their goals, others on the fringes of the labor movement still hold onto the idea that this fight is for the working class as a whole. A class which includes communists, anarchists, and yes, even convicts. So I urge you in reflection of Labor Day to fight back against big labor and extend solidarity to the whole of the working class. Plan a solidarity event in your area and let the media know that inmate workers have outside support.

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Nathan Goodman does a great service by offering critiques to the Agorist, Illegalist, and Syndicalist framework. Where he succeeds in uncovering important questions for practitioners of these schools of thought, he may fail for lack of imagination or direct experience. As someone who identifies as an Agorist or Counter-Economist and practices the philosophy on a daily basis, my response to both Goodman and Ford is only interested in the sections of their essay’s associated with Agorism.

Briefly, Agorism is the philosophy that calls for the creation of counter-institutions to the state using a strategy of counter-economics to syphon political power and moral support away from the state. Samuel E. Konkin III, founder of Agorism, called for entrepreneurs to make use of the so-called black and grey markets. In the footnotes of Chapter 3 of The New Libertarian Manifesto, Konkin writes the following:

“In short, the “black market” is anything non-violent prohibited by the State and carried on anyways. The “grey market” is used here to mean dealing in goods and services not themselves illegal but obtained or distributed in ways legislated against by The State. Much of what is called “white-collar crime” falls under this and is smiled upon by most of society.”

 Nathan Goodman offers a critique of the use of the black market. Specifically Goodman compares prison gangs and their black market transactions with Agorism and asks what is an agorist to do about these unsavory situations?

“While these governance institutions lack the state’s monopoly jurisdiction and provide governance in a way that enables black market transactions, they can be just as authoritarian and violent as states.

 So prison gangs route around the state in order to facilitate and govern black markets. But they also engage in predatory violence, and they benefit from state policies. How should an agorist think about these institutions? Surely we should not valorize them as purely the agents of the counter-economic social change we want to see in the world.”

 “By working through the market process, agorist entrepreneurs have incentives to create value, access the dispersed knowledge that is coordinated through the price mechanism, and adapt their actions when they become destructive rather than productive. However, black markets are distorted by the state in ways that often benefit particular participants in those black markets. These actors may become predatory and embrace unproductive entrepreneurship that undermines liberty rather than advancing it.”

This is an apparent blind spot in Nathan Goodman’s Agorist research. Namely, Konkin distinguished the peaceful black and grey markets of Agorism from violent market actions which he called “the red market”. As Nick Ford noted,

“In Samuel Edward Konkin III’s work he made the distinction between black markets and red markets and he explains this in his pamphlet Counter-Economics, “The Counter-Economy is the sum of all non-aggressive Human Action which is forbidden by the State. Counter-economics is the study of the Counter-Economy and its practices. The Counter-Economy includes the free market, the Black Market, the “underground economy,” all acts of civil and social disobedience, all acts of forbidden association (sexual, racial, cross-religious), and anything else the State, at any place or time, chooses to prohibit, control, regulate, tax, or tariff. The Counter-Economy excludes all State-approved action (the “White Market”) and the Red Market (violence and theft not approved by the State)”

It seems obvious that educated Agorists would not support the violent actions of prison gangs or any other institution. Goodman goes on to ask what Agorist’s might do about counter-economic entrepreneurs who are incentivized to support state intervention in the interest of reducing competition. Goodman writes:

“In an agorist framework, bootleggers are understood as part of the black market, the counter-economy. Bootleggers provide goods that people have a natural right to purchase. They are entrepreneurs who route around the state to provide goods and services that have been unjustly criminalized. And yet because state intervention reduces the competition they face, these counter-economic entrepreneurs have incentives to support state intervention.”

 Nick Ford also handles this point,

“While Goodman is correct that from an agorist framework they would be considered a part of the black market, being a part of the black market and the counter-economy are not always the same thing. From my perspective a black market is simply a type of market whereby illegal goods are bought and sold. The counter-economy on the other hand is, I’d argue, a certain type of black market whereby the people involved are intentionally trying to mitigate the state’s efforts and do it for radical purposes.”

I completely agree that there is a critical difference between the casual patron of the black and gray markets and a “conscious Agorist” or a practicing counter-economist. The average bootlegger or prison gang member may be participating in the black market, but cannot be thought of as a conscious agorist until an understanding of the philosophy has been achieved. Konkin understood this and made note of the importance of “consciousness-raising activity” and infecting the Statist economy with Agorist thought and action. Konkin writes:

“Now we can see clearly what is needed to create a libertarian society. On the one hand we need the education of the libertarian activists and the consciousness-raising of counter-economists to libertarian understanding and mutual supportiveness… Note well that libertarian activists who are not themselves full practicing counter-economists are unlikely to be convincing. ‘Libertarian’ political candidates undercut everything they say (of value) by what they are doing”

The debate around ideology and intent is indeed one of growing importance as knowledge of the philosophy of Agorism expands thanks to the trend towards decentralized, peer-to-peer, digital tools. Nick Ford points out that Agorists (including Konkin) tout the Soviet Union’s black market as an example of the counter-economy in action, but often “much of the “counter-economy” had nothing at all to do with undermining state authority in any intentional or ideological way.” Eventually, Russians turned away from the black markets and joined the state-capitalist markets.

“What are agorists to make of this?,” Nick Ford asks. “For one thing I think they should temper their historical examples with more historical context but with that in mind it’s still true that black markets are a flexible and powerful tool for revolutionary struggle through peaceful means. But at the same time they are a strategy that can be co-opted like anything else. If we have folks who are just bootleggers to make money or people who are doing things only to survive then the agorist revolution is unlikely to happen.”

On this last point, Ford could not be more correct. As outlined by Konkin in the quote above, “consciousness-raising” is needed in order to secure an agorist revolution. In response to Ford’s request that agorists “tempter their historical examples with more historical context”, I would like to ever-so briefly provide an example of the counter-economy, and possible Agorist action, that I have not found referenced anywhere else. I am speaking of the “informal sector” of Peru during the 1980’s and 90’s. The informal sector was made up of individuals who operated outside government laws and regulations. The activities of the informal sector are conducted outside the legal system without regard to government regulations, including an informal economy.

In his 1989 book The Other Path, Hernando De Soto provides a detailed study of the emergence of the Peruvian informal economy, and how it operated. De Soto argued that government regulations on housing, transportation, and trade should be removed to allow the dynamics of the informal economy to take over. Unfortunately, De Soto and The Other Path seem to equate capitalism and the free market, going as far as promoting “market-oriented reforms” which will allow the informal economy to become the new statist economy. Rather than promoting total liberation through the use of the informal economy and a truly freed market, De Soto and his Institute for Liberty and Democracy believe that the capitalist system will liberate the people. Despite these shortcomings, The Other Path is recommended for the student of counter-economic activity.

One last important point on Peru’s informal economy is the fact that these black market entrepreneuers were investing and creating informal businesses as a direct attempt to escape the regulations of the state and the violence of the Maoist-terror group The Shining Path. When The Other Path was released it was designed to counteract the Marxist propaganda of The Shining Path, who had been teaching the peasant class that the market was something to despise rather than a tool for liberation. The book would become a best seller and help the growing informal economists recognize the power of unfettered trade and market action. Unfortunately, in the absence of a truly informed and organized Agorist movement, the informal economy seems to have been absorbed by the Peruvian Statist economy.

In the near future I plan to do a full-scale study on The Other Path examining the implications for the Agorist movement. For now, I hope the mention of Peru’s informal economy helps illustrate to Nick Ford that there are indeed examples of the power of the counter-economy. While the informal economy was without a doubt part of the black market as outlined by Konkin, it’s difficult to determine if the informal economy as a whole could be considered Agorist or counter-economic. De Soto does provide examples of individuals who recognized the value and power in removing their economic activity from the State’s thieving hands.

Now, if only we could elevate the consciousness of the larger Anarchist milieu and propel the Agorist revolution forward.

La Guerra civil causó un enorme cisma en el movimiento libertario estadounidense del cual no se recuperaría por décadas. Conflictos internos entre abolicionistas que favorecían la guerra y la invasión del sur, quienes veían la guerra como algo inevitable y forzoso para acabar con la esclavitud, y entre aquellos que pensaban que la guerra era un atroz mal moral en sí mismo, innecesario para acabar con la esclavitud; estos conflictos causaron un fraccionamiento del movimiento libertario que lo dividió en otros pequeños movimientos sociales radicales, tales como el de librepensamiento, amor libre y el movimiento obrero. Luego de 1865, la tradición individualista subsistió, no en el seno de un movimiento libertario distinto, sino como una facción radical dentro de estas causas sociales más amplias. Considerando el crecimiento astronómico del estado debido a la guerra y el creciente declive del pensamiento radical individualista, parecía que la llama de la libertad se había extinguido.

Nacido el 17 de abril de 1854 en Massachusetts, Benjamin Tucker creció en una familia cuáquera y radical unitaria. Se matriculó en el MIT, pero tras un ominoso encuentro con tres prominentes anarquistas individualistas (Ezra Heywood, William Greene y Josiah Warren) en la convención de la Liga por la reforma laboral en Nueva Inglaterra en 1872, Tucker habría de convertirse en un activista anarquista, periodista y ensayista. Se alinearía fuertemente con el movimiento obrero y tendría algunas conexiones con los movimientos de librepensamiento y amor libre (al igual que sus colegas radicales). El hilo conductor a lo largo de su pensamiento fue, no obstante, el individualismo.

Tucker construyó su teoría del anarquismo individualista (que él llamó « anarquismo bostoniano  » para distinguirse de los « anarquistas de Chicago », que por lo general favorecían menos los mercados y más la violencia como medio para lograr el cambio social) sobre los principios de la soberanía individual y la teoría del valor-trabajo, la cual era de ordinario aceptada por el común de los economistas remontándose hasta Adam Smith, pero que fue descartada más tarde por el gremio tras la revolución marginal de los austríacos tempranos, tales como Carl Menger y Eugene Böhm von Bawerk. Para los anarquistas del siglo diecinueve, la teoría del valor-trabajo, o « Costo como límite del precio », era la extensión natural de la soberanía absoluta del individuo sobre sí mismo. El trabajo era visto como la fuente de toda riqueza, siendo el trabajador naturalmente dueño de los frutos de su labor como una extensión de su habilidad para ser dueño de sí. La teoría del valor de Tucker estaba íntimamente relacionada con su visión ética basada en el hecho de que cada individuo tiene el dominio único sobre su cuerpo y su propiedad justamente adquirida, la cual requería que se la combinara con trabajo.

Tucker y sus colegas anarquistas individualistas eran anticapitalistas, pero favorecían el libre mercado. Veían el capitalismo como representante de una economía estatista que beneficiaba artificialmente a los capitalistas a expensas de los trabajadores al extraer plusvalías a través de rentas artificiales. Tucker pensaba que los frutos de las clases trabajadoras eran y son sistemática y coercitivamente tomados por las élites bajo el estatismo. Veía al estado como el propagador de la clase dirigente. Tucker identificó los cuatro grandes monopolios: dinero, tierra, patentes y tarifas (Charles Johnson ha identificado aún más). El rol de estos monopolios es la concentración de capital en manos de unos pocos y la creación de un sistema de salarios. Mas el origen de estos monopolios radica, no en el libre mercado, sino en el estado.

En lugar de adoptar retórica procapitalista, pues los anarquistas estadounidenses veían a los capitalistas en gran medida como brazos del estado, estos se mostraban amigables con el « socialismo » (algunos anarquistas individualistas modernos quieren reclamar el término socialismo del monopolio que ahora tienen los estatistas sobre el término). Tucker veía el hilo conductor que ligaba a todos los socialistas, de Warren a Proudhon a Marx, como una óptica donde

            […] el costo es el límite apropiado para el precio. Estos tres hombres realizaron las siguientes deducciones: que el pago natural para el trabajo es su producto; que este pago, o producto, es la única fuente justa de salario (dejando por fuera, por supuesto, regalos, herencias, etc.); que todos aquellos que derivan el salario de alguna otra fuente lo abstraen directa o indirectamente del pago natural y justo del trabajo; que este proceso de abstracción toma generalmente una de tres formas: interés, renta y ganancia; que estas tres constituyen la trinidad de la usura y son sencillamente métodos diferentes para imponer tributos para el uso del capital; que, siendo el capital sencillamente trabajo almacenado que ya ha recibido plenamente su pago, su uso debería ser gratuito, sobre el principio de que el trabajo es la única base para el precio; que el prestamista de capital tiene el derecho a su devolución intacta y nada más; que la única razón  por la que el banquero, el accionista, el rentista, el manufacturero y el marchante pueden exigir usura del trabajo estriba en el hecho de que son respaldados por un privilegio legal o monopolio; y que la única forma de asegurar al trabajo el goce de su producto entero o pago natural es derribar los monopolios.

Tucker distinguía entre socialismo de estado y socialismo de Mercado. Su programa socialista individualista consistía « […] en la destrucción de estos monopolios y la substitución de estos por la más libre competencia […] la cual reposaba sobre un principio muy fundamental, la libertad del individuo, su derecho a la soberanía sobre sí mismo, sus productos y sus asuntos, y la libertad a la rebelión contra el dictamen de cualquier autoridad. » Abolir los monopolios (esto es, la reforma económica) se convirtió en la tarea central de Benjamin Tucker, mientras que su misión se convirtió en « abogar por la justicia del trabajo. » De sus dos más grandes influencias, Warren y Proudhon, Tucker escribió:

[…] al proceder en su búsqueda por la justicia del trabajo, se encontraron cara a cara con el obstáculo de los monopolios de clase, observaron que estos monopolios reposaban sobre la autoridad y concluyeron que lo que había que hacer era, no fortalecer esta autoridad y así volver el monopolio universal, sino arrancar de raíz a la autoridad y darle pleno dominio al principio opuesto, la libertad, al volver la competencia, la antítesis del monopolio, universal.

Tucker rechazaba la visión de Marx y del socialismo de estado como « la doctrina según la cual todos los asuntos del hombre deberían ser administrados por el gobierno independientemente de las elecciones individuales », y en su lugar siguió a los individualistas (principalmente a Warren y a Proudhon):

Tal como la idea de arrebatar el capital a los individuos y dárselo al gobierno encaminó a Marx en un sendero que termina volviendo al gobierno todo y al individuo nada, asimismo  la idea de arrebatar el capital a los monopolios protegidos por el estado y ponerlo a fácil alcance de todos los individuos encaminó a Warren y a Proudhon en un sendero que termina volviendo al individuo todo y al gobierno nada. Si el individuo tiene el derecho a gobernarse a sí mismo, todo gobierno externo es tiranía. De allí la necesidad de abolir el estado.

Son precisamente las barreras al acceso creadas por el estado y las regulaciones económicas las que previenen la competencia y por lo tanto concentran el poder económico y los recursos en las manos de unas pocas élites políticamente arraigadas. Es sobre la autoridad del estado, que Tucker objetó, que reposa la explotación capitalista, la cual Marx objetó legítimamente. Rechazar esa autoridad significa acoger « el anarquismo, el cual podría describirse como la doctrina según la cual todos los asuntos de los hombres deberían ser administrados por individuos y asociaciones voluntarias, y según la cual el estado debería ser abolido. »

Tucker y su « impertérrito Jeffersonismo » dieron lugar a un nuevo movimiento libertario en 1881, cuando fundó Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order, una publicación periódica que sirvió como canal para lo que Tucker llamó Anarquismo filosófico en la escena política radical estadounidense, imprimiéndole específicamente su propio sabor, el cual incorporaba un pensamiento egoísta a favor del trabajo y del mercado y que recoge elementos de Josiah Warren, Pierre Joseph Proudhon (el autor del subtítulo para Liberty), Herbert Spencer y Max Stirner. La publicación sirvió asimismo como una plataforma para un discurso que moldearía la tradición individualista y el movimiento libertario para siempre.

Los individualistas entre los movimientos de librepensamiento, amor libre y el movimiento obrero convergieron en la publicación Liberty de Tucker, la cual publicó a radicales tan importantes como Lysander Spooner, Auberton Herbert, Joshua K. Ingalls, John Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros y Wordsworth Donisthorpe. El magazín registró y creó todos los debates y controversias de la tradición individualista radical por cerca de tres décadas y, de acuerdo a Wendy McElroy, « proveyó un centro en torno al cual un movimiento revitalizado podía brotar y crecer. » Al lograr la convergencia de las facciones individualistas restantes tras el cisma de la guerra civil, Tucker y Liberty fueron instrumentales en el avivamiento del movimiento libertario estadounidense y fueron vitales para su éxito y crecimiento durante el siglo veinte.

El periódico librepensador Boston Investigator dio la bienvenida al primer número de Liberty en 1881 diciendo « el señor Tucker es habilidoso e industrioso, muestra radicalismo e independencia; la suya será una gaceta interesante y sugestiva. » El diario claramente sobrepasó las expectativas.

Para 1908, sin embargo, Liberty había llegado a su fin y, para 1930, mi radical bostoniano preferido pensaba que la libertad misma había llegado a su fin:

 […] el insalvable obstáculo para la realización de la anarquía ya no es el poder de los consorcios, sino el hecho indisputable de que nuestra civilización está agonizando. Puede que duremos aún un par de siglos; por otro lado, una década podría precipitar nuestro final. […] Seguramente la edad oscura. El monstruo, El Mecanicismo, está devorando a la humanidad.

Nueve años después, Benjamin Tucker falleció creyendo que la llama de la libertad se había extinguido permanentemente. Tengo la esperanza de que, cien años más tarde, el movimiento libertario que debe su renacimiento y existencia a la chispa interna de Tucker en 1881 no permita que su llama radical e independiente se extinga.

Artículo original publicado por Cory Massimino el 22 de abril de 2015

Traducción del inglés por Mario Murillo

Nicholas Hildyard. Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

I discovered Nicholas Hildyard’s work at Corner House in 2005, and was heavily influenced by it. thecornerhouse.org.uk He’s one of the best writers around on the false pretensions of so-called “free market” policies like privatization and deregulation in the global South (I wrote about some of his previous work here and here). So naturally I snapped up a review copy of this book as soon as I heard of it.

Licensed Larceny is onlyabout a hundred pages — really more a monograph than a book — but despite Hildyard’s economy of prose the book packs more information than many books three times that length.

There’s a lot of radical analysis of infrastructure “privatization” (more aptly described as “enclosure” or “looting”) out there — some of the best of it by Hildyard himself — but this new book from him focuses on a phenomenon that’s become relevant more recently: “public-private partnerships” in providing infrastructure.

Hildyard addresses three major functions of public-private infrastructure partnerships (although he treats them in pretty much opposite the order of importance I discuss them below): 1) The vital importance of public-subsidized infrastructure in propping up the bottom line of corporate enterprise in late capitalism; 2) its importance as a guaranteed profitable outlet for surplus investment capital in a time of chronic overaccumulation; and 3) it commodifies new areas of life and incorporates them into the cash nexus.

State-subsidized transportation and other support infrastructures have been vital to industrial capitalism since the beginning, and were central to the structure corporate capitalism took from the late 19th century on. But they became even more important as the 20th century wore on, as a way of countering capitalism’s chronic tendency towards falling direct rates of profit by socializing an ever greater share of the operating costs of big business.

And “public-private partnerships” are just the latest outcome of

deeper structural forces that have their roots in a centuries-long trend that has massively increased both the scale and the costs of the physical infrastructure — roads, railways, ports, airports, waterways, energy facilities and the like — that dominant forms of industrial capital need in order to expand.

This steady tendency towards socializing increasing shares of the operating costs of capital was the subject of James O’Connor’s book Fiscal Crisis of the State.

And globalization in particular — the expansion of industrial capital into the global South, along with the extraction of natural resources from those countries — relies heavily on enormous expenditures on transportation, water and power infrastructure. This has been true since the British built a railway system in India, literally for the purpose of hauling stolen loot to ports to be taken back to Britain (and that system was financed with guaranteed rates of return, resulting in a massive transfer of wealth from Indian peasants taxed to pay off the bonds to British rentiers). It amounts to the people paying to screw themselves. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a book correlating povery levels in the various regions of India with the length of time the British had been there, starting with Warren Hastings in Bengal (aka modern-day Bangladesh).

Since the former European colonies achieved nominal independence after WWII, the main function of foreign aid and of World Bank loans has been to subsidize the road and utilities infrastructures necessary to make foreign capital investment — like offshored factories — profitable. A great deal of transportation infrastructure was built in the Global South for the explicit purpose of facilitating a shift from food production for subsistence or local markets to cash crop production for the export market — an adjunct, obviously, to other policies like enclosure, eviction and proletarianization. As Kwame Nkrumah put it, most Western “foreign aid” in the neocolonial era is what would simply have been called “foreign capital investment” under colonialism.

And as Hildyard points out, the main purpose of these “massive infrastructure corridors” being built around the world today is to facilitate the extraction of wealth on a larger scale.

The priority is thus to construct a global network of interconnected infrastructure corridors, logistics hubs and new cities aimed at speeding up the circulation of commodities between sites of resource extraction, production and consumption.

In region after region around the world — sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, South America — these new “infrastructure corridors” are being built on a continental scale, with massive new port facilities and high-capacity highways and railroad lines across continental interiors. The projects for Africa, with its corporate-enclosed mineral resources, are especially ambitious. The effect will be to further increase the regional lockdown of global resource extraction companies, which have already terrorized and evicted indigenous populations.

And in every case, whatever the location, the model of “development” that’s being promoted is not one of local manufacturing economies serving local populations, but the movement of extracted resources through global supply chains and of goods produced by cheap sweatshop labor through global distribution chains.

The comment of one official in the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) is telling: “Without this kind of planned network of physical integration, South America would not stand a chance in the 21st century.” The various regions of the Global South are in a race to the bottom, in which they have to compete with imposed top-down development elsewhere. But what’s needed for everybody to “stand a chance” is to stop subsidizing infrastructure and abolish subsidized global supply and distribution chains, eliminate corporate control of mineral resources and production facilities, and reorient production to serving local markets everywhere — including in the West.

Too many Leftist movements in the Third World, despite rhetorical resistance to corporate globalization and neoliberalism, pursue development agendas that in practical terms dovetail quite well with the model described above. Both the Worker’s Party in Brazil and Ecuador’s President Correa have continued to promote traditional infrastructure projects — usually involving mass relocation of indigenous populations and abrogation of traditional land tenure rights — to facilitate resource extraction.

Whether by neoliberal governments or nominally “Leftist” governments, the facts on the ground — enclosure of water, forest and arable land commons, and the conversion of peasant farmers into agricultural labor, enforced by brutal police repression of resistance — are basically the same. In the Nacala corridor of Mozambique alone, for example, more than 100,000 people will likely be forcibly relocated to develop the Lurio River.

The existence of these artificially cheap long-distance supply and distribution infrastructures promotes artificial “comparative advantages” and “divisions of labor” between nations, based on competition in cheap labor supplies, and makes it artificially profitable to shift capital around the world in search of the cheapest labor. Behind the false Ricardian and Cobdenite language, what we’re really talking about here is global capital existing in a symbiotic relationship with authoritarian states that enforce work discipline and keep labor docile.

Alfred Chandler argued that national-scale manufacturers were only profitable in the U.S. because the American state had subsidized a national system of high-volume trunk rail lines that could support nationwide wholesale and retail networks with high-speed, reliable throughput. The same function by the Interstate Highway System was the basis for Walmart’s and other big-box retailers’ “warehouses on wheels” distribution system. And the “infrastructure corridors” Hildyard writes about serve the same purpose on a global scale.

Far from being an increase in efficiency resulting from “free trade,” this is a net decrease in efficiency from supply and distribution chains and market areas on a scale far beyond the point of decreasing returns. The only reason there are apparent economies of scale is that most of the cost side of the ledger is shifted to the taxpayer.

Besides subsidizing operating costs and putting the corporate bottom line artificially in the black, these public-private partnerships also serve an essential function in countering late capitalism’s chronic tendency towards overaccumulation and a shortage of profitable investment outlets for all the available capital. Because of all the built-in monopolies and artificial property rights in capitalism, an enormous share of the economic output is shifted in the form of rents to propertied classes with a high propensity to save. Meanwhile, the reduced purchasing power of the producing classes result in a chronic problem of idle production capacity in existing industry — let alone the need for investment in new production capacity on a scale remotely comparable to the piles of capital the rentiers are sitting on.

So any state policy that creates artificially profitable outlets for these giant piles of capital is a lifeline.

As Hildyard argues, the bulk of money invested in public-private infrastructure projects may be private, but the public is involved in guaranteeing either a revenue stream or a rate of profit on about 95% of it. “The guarantees typically embedded in PPP contracts” include

guaranteed rates of return; minimum guaranteed income streams; guarantees on loan repayments; guarantees against currency exchange rate risks; guaranteed minimum service charge payments, irrespective of the performance of the PPP; and guarantees of compensation should new legislation affect the profitability of their investments.

Typical guaranteed rates of profit on funds invested in infrastructures range from 15% to 25%, usually over a period of many years. One of the more egregious guarantees is the “Take or Pay” contract, which guarantees the buyer will pay for contracted goods and services regardless of whether they are delivered. Availability payments guarantee payment of a fee for availability of an infrastructure once it’s constructed, regardless of whether it’s actually used.

And private investors are quite clear that they have no interest in projects without guaranteed rights of return. As one investment management firm director put it, “You could have a pipeline that you don’t want to touch because there are are no contractual rights on it and it is completely market-exposed to price.” Remember the claim in all that cheerleading propaganda for “our free enterprise system” that says “profit is the reward for risk”? No. The state exists to absorb risk, shield capital from it, and guarantee profit without risk.

It’s an example of the phenomenon Chomsky described as socializing the costs and risks of capital, but privatizing the profits.

And of course the public ultimately pays the price. “Public-private partnerships” usually result in increased prices (like increased utility rates — for example the Ugandan power distributor Umeme, which raised electric rates 24% in 2005 and sought a further 37% hike in 2007). These guaranteed revenue streams and returns also mean private capital has a lien on large shares of tax revenue, and increase the likelihood of future debt crises that can be used to blackmail governments into “structural adjustment programs” (quite likely involving the “privatization” of public infrastructures at nominal prices).

So — much like government financing of deficit spending with guaranteed-return bond issues — these “partnerships” simply soak up surplus investment capital that would otherwise lie idle, and provide a guaranteed rate of return on them. They’re the functional equivalent of USDA programs that provide giant landlords a guaranteed rent on land they hold out of productive use.

Not only does the financing of the infrastructure itself soak up capital that would otherwise lie idle and reduce the crisis of overaccumulation, but the repackaging of the investments as securitized loans involves an enormous expansion of the FIRE economy with new instruments that carry guaranteed returns.

The new infrastructures built by “public-private partnerships” in the global South are intended as the centerpiece for new regional economic models based on wealth extraction. And these economic models require forcing — literally, by direct or indirect violence — activities currently outside the wage system and the circuit of capital into their control. This means not only repurposing land to production for the cash nexus and dispossessing those currently using it to produce directly for their own needs, but abrogating commons rights and customary possessory rights in the land and replacing them with new property regimes from which rents can be extracted. This is a direct continuation of a long-term project that’s been underway since the beginnings of colonialism.

It takes hard political work to build the social, legal and economic infrastructure that embeds such forms of extraction to the point where they are assumed to be ‘normal’. As long as capital expands, that hard work is never done. Labour must not only be commodified where it is not commodified, but new ways must be found to squeeze more profit from it; previously unexploited forms of social solidarity must be transformed into a form that can yield profit; existing markets must be nurtured and new markets created; old forms of rent expanded and new income streams created from which rents can be extracted; property rights upheld and established in areas where property has not previously been recognized; and so on.

Hildyard’s last chapter, on possibilities for activism, is just as thought-provoking as the rest of the book. The chapter’s epigraph from John Holloway is quite appropriate.

The future of humanity depends now on our being able to bring to life within the old, rotten and increasingly violent capitalism, flashes, intimations, anticipations, fragments of the world of dignity that we want to create.

To be sure Hildyard is not, so far as I know, an anarchist. But while remaining open to state reformist measures as part of a total agenda package for fighting neoliberalism, he expresses considerable skepticism towards a strategy focused on such measures. For example the traditional social democratic remedies of progressive taxation and redistribution, he writes, “arguably threaten to become a regressive end-of-pipe ‘solution’ that perpetuates the violence of capital while retrospectively compensating a few of those from whom capital has looted…” And he takes a similarly reserved view of a global justice focused on “persuading ‘policy makers’ in powerful institutions (the World Bank, the G8, the G20, national governments, corporations and the like) to do the right thing.”

In keeping with the quote from Holloway, Hildyard’s focus is overwhelmingly on prefigurative approaches that involve building the successor society here and now, and stress the role of the producing classes as revolutionary subjects actively involved in liberating themselves and constructing a new society. It’s basically the same approach that autonomists like Toni Negri refer to as “Exodus.”

Although Hildyard doesn’t preclude — again — “making policy demands that are directed at reforming existing institutions.” But the primary focus, from the perspective of the producing classes as revolutionary subject, is on demands that “arise from the pressing need to build alliances and to expand political space.” Justice becomes a matter of discovery by the revolutionary subject — “the process of discovery itself shapes ‘justice’ through the relationships it forms and the new class conflicts that may emerge from those relationships.” And the coalescence of a revolutionary subject on a macro scale is the result, not of organizational mass and central coordination on the Old Left model, but the spontaneous proliferation of horizontal ties of solidarity between movements engaged in the process of combating the injustice where they live and create space for building a new society.

It is a product of those flashes of mutual recognition where people come to see something of their own struggle in someone else’s, and vice versa where they come to identify with others who may have quite different interests and to whom they may previously have been indifferent or even opposed; and where they are drawn together not so much because they come from or are ’embedded in absolute sameness’, but because they come to realise that their life courses are being ‘determined by ultimately similar processes and outcomes’. In this process, they open themselves up to the realisation of something previously unrecognised, shifting the boundaries of what is ‘possible’ in the process.

We constitute ourselves a revolutionary subject through the relationships we form in process of our local efforts at building a new society.

To the extent that struggles emerge from the process of building counter-institutions at a local level or issue level, and the opposition we face from power structures, the revolutionary potential of stigmergic organization reveals itself in its power to instantly facilitate global awareness, shift resources, and to transform the struggle of each into the struggle of all in an unprecedented manner.

Hildyard shows an especial fondness for the kinds of precedents in working class self-organization described by thinkers like Pyotr Kropotkin, E. P. Thompson and Colin Ward.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when working-class culture was being constructed through myriad relationships that brought an expanded awarnesess of oppression, working class life went on ‘more or less entirely outside of society’: unions, dissenting church groups, workers’ clubs, reading groups, worker-run creches, mutual aid societies and other cornerstones of working-class communities arose partly because wider society ignored working-class needs for schooling, healthcare and childcare…. To survive, workers were reliant on their own institutions and support networks. These were not only a response to the deprivations suffered: they were also a conscious attempt to buld an ‘alternate social and moral order’.

And today, the increasingly precarious and lumpenized working class “is re-emerging to forge new cultures of provisioning, nurturing and mutual support to weather the destruction that the whirlwind of neoliberalism is inflicting.” “Rather than looking for a ‘to do’ list that will be implemented by someone else, they are building their own power ‘to do’….”

This whole general approach, for technological reasons, is more feasible now than ever. What’s more, I would add that technological changes that facilitate stigmergic organization reduce the need for large-scale coordination and organizational mass on the part of activist movements far below what Hildyard himself envisons.

The chief advantage of our side is that while capital relies heavily on organization, organization is less and less necessary for us. Exodus — the use of networked communications and cheap, ephemeral, small-scale production tools to build economies of direct production for use outside the capitalist state — makes it possible to suck resources out of the existing system.

Even in directly combating the old institutions, networked communications technology and ubiquitous platforms act as force multipliers — what John Robb called “individual superempowerment” — that enable small groups, acting independently of one another or only loosely coordinating their efforts, to engage in “open-source insurgency” (Robb’s term, again). Corporations and states are more vulnerable than ever before to monkey-wrenching, culture-jamming, open-mouth sabotage, doxxing, leaks, and similar efforts by thousands of independent groups around the world acting on their own.

For example, the very same strategy by which capital has used production offshoring and distributed global supply chains to bypass labor organization in the imperial core, and thus hollowed out the First World working class, has also rendered it vulnerable to disruption. Stigmergic coordination of thousands of local self-directed nodes, each node relying on technologies of superempowerment, combined with the extreme vulnerability of just-in-time supply chains, offer the possibilty of doing to global manufacturing corporations what a swarm of piranha do to a cow.

And we should remember that, for all the air of triumphalism in neoliberal rhetoric, the phenomena Hildyard describes in this book are mainly reactions to the terminal crises of a dying system. They’re being adopted because the previous stuff wasn’t working to stave off collapse — and this stuff won’t work much longer either. Capitalism’s original foundation and continuing dependence on cheap stolen resource inputs, looming crises like Peak Oil in the supply of those resources, and capitalism’s increasing dependence on cost socialization to remain profitable (with the result that the demand for subsidized inputs outstrips the state’s fiscal capacity to provide them), all point to a system hitting the wall of sustainability.

What’s more, the technologies that facilitate Exodus are a crisis of sustainability in their own right. A revolution in cheap micro-manufacturing tools, advanced small-scale food production techniques that extract enormous amounts of produce from small areas of land, and so forth, mean that capitalism’s original strategy of using physical control of the means of production to extract surplus labor is obsolete. The means of production are becoming so cheap, and so easily replicable, that capital must rely increasingly on state-enforced monopolies like “intellectual property” to prevent us for producing for ourselves. But the very technologies that facilitate Exodus also render those monopolies less enforceable. What The Pirate Bay and SciHub have done for the record, film and academic publishing industries, torrent sites for garage factories to download pirated CAD/CAM files will soon do for global manufacturing corporations.

For anyone interested in prefigurative politics and the building of counter-institutions, reading the last chapter — and mining its references for further reading — is a worthwhile project in its own right. But even without this final chapter, the information in the previous chapters would justify buying the book.

I: Does Agorism Require Intent?

Nathan Goodman has recently published a great piece on some of the drawbacks and potentials  of agorism, direct action and trying to synthesize agorism with illegalism or syndicalism. In this piece I’ll address a few of his general arguments and then move to address his specific points about agora-syndicalism. In addition I shall make some critical remarks of my own towards agorism in line with the helpful comments I feel Goodman has made.

Goodman starts off with an interesting example, “In an agorist framework, bootleggers are understood as part of the black market, the counter-economy. Bootleggers provide goods that people have a natural right to purchase. They are entrepreneurs who route around the state to provide goods and services that have been unjustly criminalized. And yet because state intervention reduces the competition they face, these counter-economic entrepreneurs have incentives to support state intervention.”

While Goodman is correct that from an agorist framework they would be considered a part of the black market, being a part of the black market and the counter-economy are not always the same thing. From my perspective the black market is simply a type of market whereby illegal goods are bought and sold. The counter-economy on the other hand is, I’d argue, a certain type of black market whereby the people involved are intentionally trying to mitigate the state’s efforts and do it for radical purposes.

This opens up a larger discussion with some of my problems with agorism, one of which being the matter of ideology and intent. Agorists like to point to the Soviet Union as a great example of a flourishing black market but much of the “counter-economy” had nothing at all to do with undermining state authority in any intentional or ideological way. The black market was a way to survive and once state-capitalist markets started replacing it as the Soviet Union dissolved more and more, Russian folks turned away from the black markets.

What are agorists to make of this?

For one thing I think they should temper their historical examples with more historical context but with that in mind it’s still true that black markets are a flexible and powerful tool for revolutionary struggle through peaceful means. But at the same time they are a strategy that can be co-opted like anything else. If we have folks who are just bootleggers to make money or people who are doing things only to survive then the agorist revolution is unlikely to happen.

On the other hand the whole point of agorism is to have politically conscious individuals using black markets for counter-economic goals. Ironically, the libertarian community writ large seems to have forgotten this and sometimes appears more focused on who is making the most untaxed money then who is providing the most useful services for undermining the state.

One final point on the bootleggers is that we can see them in multi-faceted ways. In Thaddeus Russell’s book A Renegade History of the United States he points out the long history of mafia members providing gay bars for queer folks. Obviously members of the mafia were providing a valuable community service in defiance of the state but they’re also not particularly good people.

In this case an agorist would do well to try to compartmentalize in both political and moral ways with realizing that one of the great (and sometimes bad) things about markets is that people don’t necessarily have to be obviously good to do obviously good things for people.

Goodman makes a second point that I found somewhat puzzling, “So prison gangs route around the state in order to facilitate and govern black markets. But they also engage in predatory violence, and they benefit from state policies. How should an agorist think about these institutions? Surely we should not valorize them as purely the agents of the counter-economic social change we want to see in the world.”

In Samuel Edward Konkin III’s work he made the distinction between black markets and red markets and he explains this in his pamphlet Counter-Economics, “The Counter-Economy is the sum of all non-aggressive Human Action which is forbidden by the State. Counter-economics is the study of the Counter-Economy and its practices. The Counter-Economy includes the free market, the Black Market, the “underground economy,” all acts of civil and social disobedience, all acts of forbidden association (sexual, racial, cross-religious), and anything else the State, at any place or time, chooses to prohibit, control, regulate, tax, or tariff. The Counter-Economy excludes all State-approved action (the “White Market”) and the Red Market (violence and theft not approved by the State)”

Konkin is obviously drawing from Mises here and uses a broader definition of “counter-economy” than I am. Nevertheless, I think it’s clear that we can easily separate out the violent and non-violent sort of illegal markets if we’re to advocate or be agorists.

II: Can Agora-Syndicalism and Libertarianism Get Along?

Goodman makes some interesting comments about the tensions between syndicalism and libertarianism, “However, even unions that have syndicalist or alt-labor tendencies can engage in coercive tactics that undermine libertarian principles. … Syndicalism may also involve the coercive transfer of property, particularly when it entails seizing factories from their owners. … Agorist counter-economic action shifts incentive towards productive entrepreneurship and away from unproductive entrepreneurship. Syndicalist direct action may do this under some circumstances, particularly when it employs the innovative free-market model used by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. But when syndicalist and illegalist direct action involves coercive transfer as a key tactic, it fuels an unproductive entrepreneurial process that can contribute to economic stagnation.”

For the sake of space, I’ll summarily respond to each point individually:

1. I wouldn’t dispute Goodman’s claim that alt-labor organizations can engage in coercive tactics but this seems like a minor quibble at best. Any labor organization or organization period can engage in coercive tactics but this doesn’t seem like a pitfall so much as an inherent possibility given human action. If Goodman could give us some reasons why this latent possibility in any organization is particularly worrisome from alt-labor organizations then perhaps I’d be more inclined to argue his point but as is, it doesn’t leave much to work with.
2. I agree with Goodman that syndicalism is done best when it is done peacefully and thus involving the state as little as possible. Much as I enjoy Rothbard’s Confiscation and the Homestead Principle where he calls for the seizure of capitalist property that relies on state subsidies to high degrees, implementation of this idea in peaceful ways would be difficult to say the least and likely bloody. I think his example of the Immokalee Workers is a great one and I would prefer to see more of that for many of the reasons Goodman rightly suggested as well as others.

There are other points to dispute or praise from Goodman but I think this suffices for now. I am hopeful that Glitterbomb or others may respond to Goodman about his challenges to agora-illegalism as I think they are also well put and worth considering.

Every day I despair of the British Left, and hearing them on the issue of housing is no exception. On the one hand, they should be praised for being the only ones to draw serious attention to the very real problem of rising rents and urban displacement. On the other hand, however, there are serious problems – dangers – in their criticism of gentrification. For starters, its not clear what they are talking about when they refer to gentrification. While there is not a total lack of nuance (see Niall Crowley’s parsing of a distinction between gentrification and regeneration), it seems to be used as a placeholder for anything from cultural appropriation to localised economic growth (While on the right it is taken to simply be rising land values pure and simple, and is therefore defended as a beneficial side-effect of economic growth, notwithstanding the socio-cultural adjustment it brings.)

For the sake of argument, lets us say that gentrification is the outcome of a partnership between local government and established developers to give those developers privileged access to high-potential urban land, usually with some subsidy from local government, or outside of the wealthiest regions, the Left’s beloved EU, in return for something local civil servants and politicians want (sometimes so-called affordable housing, sometimes a high-salaried private sector job in years to come).

The main complaint is that the government should not be spending money on these projects (so far so good) because they should be spending it on building “affordable housing” – that is, housing owned by the local government so they can set the rent below what the market would charge, rather than commercial property and housing which will have above average rental value (and herein lies the problem).

The distinction between affordable housing and other kinds of housing is a non-starter. The average price of housing is a function of supply and demand: for a given level of demand; building any housing at all will decrease the general price level of housing. Housing those who are marginalised from economic participation in ghettos is the least good response to the problem of economic marginalisation. It puts those who are discriminated against by the police all in one place; it geographically concentrates the crime that comes with the inevitable shadow economy that the marginalised are forced to turn to; it creates urban apartheid. As if this wasn’t enough, it’s also a short-term policy: as soon as the political winds change the rents are increased, or the sights are bulldozed for more lucrative development, and people are left homeless, or have to move to cheaper parts of the country. You don’t want a whole class of people to be utterly dependent on their being a Corbyn-led Labour party in government.

What is needed is to address the root causes of urban poverty and homelessness in the first place. And that is the very system that enables both gentrification and large-scale social housing projects: the planning system. Local government decide which sites can be used for what; whether they must remain vacant, commercial, residential, recreational, etc. The problem is local government don’t know which sites are needed for housing (no one does). Those who have the money and/or political pull to lobby local government are the only one’s who have access to the planning system to get it altered in their favour. The fact that there is a need for more housing doesn’t create a niche in the market for building more housing, because the land to do it with, whilst being physical available, is not legally available. The planning system is what artificially stunts the supply of housing, thus keeping it expensive, and keeping the poorest homeless. It is just one of many legal devices used by the unholy alliance of state and land-owners to ensure one part of the population can live off the labour of the other.

Why is the British Left silent on this coercive apparatus which has created urban poverty as we know it? A cynic might think that it is because the middle class left is more interested in controlling other people’s lives through the planning system via their electoral coalition, than actually addressing systemic problems in our economy. The argument that we need affordable housing is often paired with an aesthetic disgust of new architecture, modern bars, overly manicured green areas – spaces marketed at newcomers to the middle class. These projects generate a lot of revenue, and the people who work, live, and play in them like them. One can criticise government planning on the basis that it is going to be worse at anticipating consumer preferences. But that isn’t what the Left typically does; it is far more interested in criticising the bad taste and bad decisions of those who have only recently achieved serious spending power, and are altering the aesthetic landscape of cities with their choices. Much of the agenda of what Roderick Long as called “the aristocratic left” is snobby micro-managing the lives of working class people under the guise of respect and care.

The libertarian Left must err on the side of caution with allying with the establishment Left when it comes to housing policy. Though we both oppose gentrification, our reasons for doing so, and our alternatives to it, radically diverge.

I am generally favorable to agorism, direct action, and other anarchist strategies that emphasize building the new world in the shell of the old. However, I recognize that there are no panaceas. All strategies have costs and benefits, and strategies for social change may have serious pitfalls and unintended consequences. This essay employs some basic concepts from economics in order to explore potential pitfalls of direct action strategies.

Bootleggers and Baptists: Black market entrepreneurs as beneficiaries of state action

One common phenomenon in regulatory policy is “bootleggers and Baptists.” First discussed in a paper by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, the phrase refers to how seemingly opposed constituencies often support the same regulations. Sunday closing laws, which shut down bars and liquor stores on Sundays, received support from Baptists on moral grounds, but also from bootleggers who would see their competitors shut down on Sundays.

In an agorist framework, bootleggers are understood as part of the black market, the counter-economy. Bootleggers provide goods that people have a natural right to purchase. They are entrepreneurs who route around the state to provide goods and services that have been unjustly criminalized. And yet because state intervention reduces the competition they face, these counter-economic entrepreneurs have incentives to support state intervention.

Similarly, drug prohibition increases the profits reaped by drug cartels. Prohibition deters competitors from entering the drug market. This raises the prices of drugs. However, addiction makes demand for drugs inelastic. That is, users are not particularly responsive to price. So an increase in price increases profits. As Milton Friedman once said “if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.”

David Skarbek’s recent work on prison gangs expands this point. Skarbek documents how prison gangs have risen to power as a result of mass incarceration. When prison populations are small, reputation can provide the right incentives to govern black markets. Someone who engages in dishonest behavior in a drug transaction could have their reputation ruined and face ostracism. Once prison populations are larger, however, people cannot know the reputation of their fellows. Governance must be provided by other means, and so prison gangs rise to power.

While these governance institutions lack the state’s monopoly jurisdiction and provide governance in a way that enables black market transactions, they can be just as authoritarian and violent as states. Skarbek documents how prison gangs collect taxes from gangs outside the prison by threatening their members with violence inside prisons if the outside gang fails to pay taxes. These gangs also enforce their rules through brutal violence. Citing a survey of prison officials where high scores indicate greater frequency of activity, Skarbek explains “prison gangs engage in predatory actions often, including intimidation (148 points, the highest score), assault (134), abuse of weak inmates (133), extortion (131), theft (117), strong arm robbery (99), robbery (89), rape (83), murder (79), arson (61), and slavery (52).” So prison gangs route around the state in order to facilitate and govern black markets. But they also engage in predatory violence, and they benefit from state policies. How should an agorist think about these institutions? Surely we should not valorize them as purely the agents of the counter-economic social change we want to see in the world.

The economic way of thinking provides us with good reasons to anticipate that agorist approaches to social change will be superior to strategies that emphasize reforms implemented through the political process. Politics is insulated from the entrepreneurial market process, and therefore lacks feedback mechanisms to ensure that value is created rather than destroyed. By working through the market process, agorist entrepreneurs have incentives to create value, access the dispersed knowledge that is coordinated through the price mechanism, and adapt their actions when they become destructive rather than productive. However, black markets are distorted by the state in ways that often benefit particular participants in those black markets. These actors may become predatory and embrace unproductive entrepreneurship that undermines liberty rather than advancing it.

Syndicalism, illegalism, and other counter-economic allies

My colleagues and comrades Logan Glitterbomb and Nick Ford have proposed alliances with illegalists and syndicalists as potential ways for agorists to increase their counter-economic impact. Illegalists engage in theft as a means of individual empowerment, insurrectionary defiance of the state, and redistribution of wealth away from the ruling class. Syndicalists engage in alt-labor tactics and wildcat unionism to advance the interests of workers in their organization. Their goal is often to seize the means of production and establish firms managed democratically by workers.

Illegalists and syndicalists are in some sense natural allies for agorists, as all three philosophies emphasize anti-authoritarian direct action that defies the state’s repressive legal regimes. However, I have some qualms about both syndicalist and illegalist tactics, and I think there are real pitfalls for use to be aware of.

Alt-labor organizations often avoid the worst pitfalls of union organization. Establishment unions, such as the AFL-CIO, have often established crony relationships with the state. The AFL-CIO, for example, supported expanding intellectual property protectionism and censoring the internet through such laws as SOPA and PIPA, because this law would benefit their members in the entertainment industry. These establishment unions have also historically excluded immigrants, people of color, and women. The syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World was largely formed in order to provide a more inclusive union that avoided these exclusionary policies. Moreover, while the AFL-CIO embraces the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board, alt-labor organizations such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have gained their victories by refusing to work through these bureaucratic channels.

However, even unions that have syndicalist or alt-labor tendencies can engage in coercive tactics that undermine libertarian principles. For example, the Industrial Workers of the World, a favorite of anarchists and left-libertarians, successfully filed an action against non-profit Sisters’ Camelot at the National Labor Relations Board. Rather than acting in a counter-economic manner, the IWW here chose to go to the federal government in order to punish a private organization for their hiring and firing decisions.

Moreover, illegalist and syndicalist tactics may undermine property rights even when they do not involve appealing to the state. This is fairly obvious for illegalist tactics, which explicitly valorize theft as a form of direct action. Syndicalism may also involve the coercive transfer of property, particularly when it entails seizing factories from their owners. There are worthwhile questions to ask about the legitimacy of existing property claims given historical injustices such as the enclosures and other state actions that have privileged capitalists and impoverished workers. However, action that serves to transfer property from one person (or group of persons) to another person or group without the consent of the initial owner is zero or negative sum action. Given that we have limited time, labor, resources, and entrepreneurial alertness, there is a real opportunity cost to devoting our efforts to securing transfers rather than production and mutually beneficial exchange.

Economist William Baumol draws an important distinction between productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. A great deal of unproductive entrepreneurship is mediated through the political. Rent-seeking, lobbying, securing monopoly privileges, and war-profiteering are all good examples. But unproductive entrepreneurship can also occur outside the state apparatus, through theft and plunder. Regardless of whether the state is involved, this can create a cycle, where each act of unproductive entrepreneurship creates new niches for unproductive entrepreneurial profits. Illegalists who are engaged in theft, for example, may make theft easier for others or develop networks that help others build skill sets conducive to theft. This reduces total wealth, trust, and social cooperation.

Agorism is desirable in large part because it uses productive entrepreneurship to enlarge the productive sector of the economy and starve the unproductive state sector. Agorist counter-economic action shifts incentive towards productive entrepreneurship and away from unproductive entrepreneurship. Syndicalist direct action may do this under some circumstances, particularly when it employs the innovative free-market model used by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. But when syndicalist and illegalist direct action involves coercive transfer as a key tactic, it fuels an unproductive entrepreneurial process that can contribute to economic stagnation.

These points can provide reasons to avoid seeking transfers and coercive redistribution even when historical injustice makes the legitimacy of property titles highly dubious. It may be that the prevailing economic distribution is profoundly unjust, but that the best way to rectify this is to let the free market eat the rich and to outcompete the privileged elites that currently hold unjust wealth. Attempting to rectify it coercively can encourage unproductive entrepreneurship and weaken the social norms of individual liberty and mutually beneficial social cooperation that we seek to foster as market anarchists. As Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne argue in their paper The Political Economy of Forgiveness, embracing reconciliation rather than vengeance after atrocities is often the best way to begin cultivating the norms of peaceful social cooperation that are conducive to free and flourishing societies.

Agorism, and to some extent syndicalism and illegalism, have significant advantages over the top-down pursuit of public policy. These grassroots tactics allow people with local knowledge to act in ways that advance their own well-being and liberation, rather than asking bureaucrats or politicians who lack this knowledge to implement reforms from the top down. Direct action tactics operate within a polycentric context that allow them to seek goals that may seem utopian, while at the same time avoiding the fatal conceits of attempting to impose panaceas on diverse environments where they may not fit. However, these strategies face real pitfalls, downsides, and trade offs that we should take seriously. I hope that this essay can start an honest conversation among anarchists about these potential pitfalls, and enables anarchists to start building solutions to them.

It’s common among centrists to describe themselves — in contrast to the “far Left” and “far Right” — as the “rational adults” who can compromise and get things done. The “rational adult” trope usually appears in conjunction with “Horseshoe Theory,” according to which wisdom and reasonableness inhere in the political center and deviation from the center is identified with greater “extremism” the further to the Left or Right one goes.

In fact Michael Arnovitz (“Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason,” The Policy, June 12) comes right out and says that, because the Right and Left criticize Clinton for opposite, mutually inconsistent reasons, her critics must be wrong — presumably meaning that splitting the difference between them puts her in the Baby Bear position at the exact center, which is “just right.”

The problem is that centrism, as such, has no content. It has no meaning, in a two party system, except in relation to the territory staked out by the two mainstream political parties at any given time. But in fact the positions taken by those two parties are neither mutually exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. And the great majority of issues they agree on — the fundamental structural assumptions of corporate capitalism and American global hegemony — never become visible as “issues” at all because they’re not in dispute.

The “two sides” reflect the range of acceptable disagreement within a ruling class that shares most of its interests and assumptions in common. In fact even bringing up the concept of a ruling class, or of the basic structure of our system as reflecting the interests of that ruling class, is enough to make Chris Matthews clutch his pearls over “tinfoil hats.”

So that means both “centrism” and “extremism” are defined entirely in terms of the status quo. A centrist is one who implicitly accepts the normality and legitimacy of the existing system and its power structures. Any radical structural critique that looks into the role of class interest, race or gender privilege or the exercise of unaccountable power in its creation, is “extremist.”

“Moderates” are defined entirely in terms of how closely they adhere to a system regarded as normal, natural and inevitable in its fundamental nature, and “extremists” by how far they deviate from it.

Any “reform” that involves tinkering around the edges of a power structure without fundamentally changing it, and can be implemented by the same classes of people who are running the present system, will be classified as “moderate.” Any proposal that involves changing the fundamental power-structure and disempowering the current ruling class is “radical.”

Radical structural analysis refuses to treat the existing state of things as something that’s “just that way,” or “what most people want.” It sees the exercise of power for what it is — being in the interest of some at the expense of others. And it is therefore labeled “extremist” by the “centrists” who hold power.

Some of the most ardent centrists — like the smarmy Chris Matthews — dismiss any such radical structural critiques as “conspiracy theories.” On a late 2010 episode of the Matthews show, a guest who opposed the new TSA scanners and associated peep-or-grope regime claimed that the scanners were actually ineffective and mentioned that a number of high-ranking Homeland Security officials had stock in the company that made them. Matthews was near-apoplectic in denouncing this “conspiracy theory” — despite his own 30-second spots on MSNBC quoting Eisenhower on the Military-Industrial Complex.

So we wind up with a policy-making elite who limit themselves to a set of alternatives ranging from M to N, governed by what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realism.” As Buckminster Fuller put it: They’re trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created those problems. Ivan Illich described such people’s approach as “attempting to solve a crisis by escalation.”

A good example of the latter is urban planners, who attempt to solve the traffic congestion caused by car-centered monoculture development by building new freeways and bypasses — which simply generate more traffic to and from the new suburbs and strip malls that grow up at every cloverleaf along the new subsidized highways. Or the American national security state, which deals with terrorism (the product of blowback from previous imperial intervention) through new interventions which generate even more terrorism.

Although centrists see themselves as the “adults in the room,” who see what must be done and don’t draw back from doing it, they also pride themselves on being the “real” humanitarians and idealists. To quote Michael Lofgren:

The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.

Centrism is utterly unself-critical, insofar as it ignores its own status as a component in a legitimizing ideology. Any system of power includes a cultural reproduction apparatus that tends to create the kinds of “human resources” who accept as normal and given the structure of power under which they live.

As part of a legitimizing ideology, centrist Horseshoe Theory is guilty of — as @NerbieDansers, a friend on Twitter, pointed out — “constant erasure of violence for which the reasonable, moderate center is responsible”; instead it “turns violence into a function of mere distance from a mythic peaceful center.” The system represented by the center is not simply “responsible” for violence; massive levels of violence have been, and are, entailed in establishing and maintaining the system of power that centrists recognize as normal.

The present system is not some natural or inevitable fact of nature that “just happened,” because it makes the most sense to do things that way. It is a thing with a beginning, a history — and (with apologies to Marx) it’s a history written in letters of blood and fire. As I have written elsewhere:

Bear in mind that the corporate-state power structure didn’t come about naturally or spontaneously.  It came about through conscious, massive application of political power over the past 150 years.

From the Gilded Age on, the state intervened massively in the market to create a society dominated by giant, centralized organizations like government agencies and corporations, and later by centralized state education, large universities, and nonprofit foundations. When this state-created and state-subsidized centralized industrial economy became plagued with chronic excess capacity and underconsumption, the state turned toward policies to keep it going.  This included a domestic economy centered on federal spending to absorb surplus capital through such massive state spending projects as the Interstate Highway System, a military-industrial complex that ate up huge amounts of surplus industrial output, and a foreign policy aimed at forcibly incorporating the markets and resources of the entire planet as a sink for surplus capital and output.

At the time the system was being imposed by the state, there was large-scale resistance by a general population that didn’t accept it as normal.  From the 1870s through WWI, a major part of the population refused to accept as normal a situation in which they worked as wage labors for large authoritarian hierarchies.  Movements such as the farm populist movement and the Knights of Labor amounted to near-insurrections, and such measures as the post-Haymarket repression and Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman Strike constituted counter-revolution.

After the insurrection was defeated, the white-collar bureaucrats controlling corporate and state hierarchies adopted an educational system aimed at processing people who accepted the structure of power as normal.  The official public education movement, advocates of “100% Americanism,” and the like, aimed at creating “human resources” who were “adjusted” to accept authoritarianism and hierarchy as normal, and to “comply” with any orders coming from an apparatchik behind a desk — whether in a classroom, factory, or government office.

But we don’t have to look at history to see how much violence is at the heart of the system that these “reasonable centrists” take for granted. The system requires massive ongoing violence for its preservation. Just pick up a copy of William Blum’s KILLING HOPE and look at the United States’ post-WWII record of invading countries, overthrowing governments, backing military coups and sponsoring death squads. And the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has prevailed for the past few decades has been defined around the legitimacy of such intervention. Even so-called “liberals” share the consensus that, as Chomsky put it, “America owns the world.”

The “reasonable centrists,” for their part, are typically shameless apologists for this consensus and the bloody intervention it promotes. The current news is full of examples of what garbage human beings these “adults in the room” really are.

At Business Insider, Josh Barro (“Donald Trump  and the GOP’s crisis,” May 3) contrasts Trump to “adults in the room” like Jeb Bush. The first three of Trump’s deviations from the alleged moderate orthodoxies of the donor class that Barro mentions are “opposing free trade, promising to protect entitlements from cuts, [and] questioning the value of America’s commitment to military alliances.” The fourth, challenging the growing acceptance of transgender people, is common to most of the GOP. So in practice, the main differences the Republican “adults in the room” have with Trump are his rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy on the global political hegemony of the U.S. and the corporate order it enforces, not his godawful social views.

Neera Tanden — head of Center for American Progress, Hillary Clnton ally and Clinton appointee to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee — in 2013 stated on Twitter in regard to Syria that “while I don’t want to be the world’s policeman, an unpoliced world is dangerous. The US may be the only adult in the room left.”

Clinton herself, most centrists’ beau ideal of an adult in the room, associates herself with figures like Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic National Campaign Committee denied national party campaign funds in 2006 to candidates who opposed the Iraq war, and as Chicago mayor has run political cover for a police illegal detention site and promoted school charterization on the largest scale seen outside New Orleans. She voted to authorize Bush’s war in Iraq and regurgitated his lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” in order to maintain her future viability as a politican. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she was consistently the strongest voice in favor of military intervention as a tool of policy; she was the most influential voice behind Obama’s reluctant intervention in Libya, and to this day regrets that she did not persuade him to intervene in Syria full-scale. More recently she has not only defended Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, but promised to take America’s relationship with Netanyahu — not just Israel, but Netanyahu — to “the next level.”

Clinton recently devoted an entire speech (after praising her hosts, the American Legion — which started out as a right-wing paramilitary fighting Wobblies in the street) to smarmy self-congratulations that “the United States stands up to dictators” and promises to continue to maintain the world’s largest military to meet all the “threats” out there. This despite the fact that she actively encouraged a right-wing military coup in Honduras, and wears with pride the endorsement of her vacation buddy, war criminal Henry Kissinger, who was instrumental in Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende and the sweep of the entire South American continent by military dictatorships, as well as the invasion and genocide in East Timor.

As for all those “threats,” Clinton and Tanden share the same operating assumptions as Henry Kissinger and the rest of the bipartisan National Security establishment — a set of assumptions summarized by Chomsky’s statement quoted above that “the United States owns the world.” It is for the United States to unilaterally define what size military is sufficient for a given country’s “legitimate defensive needs,” while it defines its own “defensive” needs in terms of the ability to project offensive force anywhere in the world and successfully invade and defeat any other country. It is for the United States to unilaterally define “aggression” anywhere in the world, to define as a “threat” the capability to successfully defend against an American attack, and to define as “defense” encircling any such country, on the other side of the world, with offensive military bases.

The United States is the hegemonic power which upholds a global political, economic and military order established at the end of WWII, which exists to integrate the markets and natural resources of the Global South into the needs of Western corporate capital; and in the parlance of the U.S. National Security elite, any country which attempts to challenge that order by seceding from it is a “threat.”

In the name of upholding this global order against “threats,” the United States since WWII has invaded and/or overthrown the governments of more countries than any other empire in history, backed military coups and death squads, with a death toll of multiple millions.

This is what your “adults in the room” have done. They have constructed a system of power, first domestically and then globally, the main purpose of which is to extract surplus labor from us to feed the rentiers they represent. In enforcing this system of power, they have inflected megadeaths on the world, and have no compunctions against inflicting more. The “adults in the room” are monsters. It’s time to take away their plaything — the American state — which they have used to wreak this destruction and mayhem on the world, and to make sure nobody else ever wields it again.

The goal of this essay is three-fold. First, I will identify the key concepts which outline the philosophy of Agorism and the strategy of Counter-Economics, as outlined by Samuel E. Konkin III in The New Libertarian Manifesto and An Agorist Primer. Second, I will illustrate how radicals of all stripes can utilize the strategy of counter-economics, as described by Konkin, without necessarily endorsing his philosophy of Agorism and it’s specific tenets. Finally, I will describe what sets Agorism apart from Anarcho-Capitalism and other schools of thought. I will show that although the Counter-Economic strategy can be utilized by nearly any individual, Agorism itself is not simply a strain or subset of Anarcho-Capitalism, but a unique political philosophy of its own.

Before I dive in, allow me to briefly explain the inspiration for the title of this essay and the essay itself.  As I will demonstrate, the Agorist message and Counter-Economic strategy can be of use to any individual who finds themselves in pursuit of a more free, just, and ethical world. However, the reason the title focuses on Anarcho-Capitalism is because I have noticed a trend in “right-libertarian”/AnCap social media circles where individuals claim to support the ideas of Konkin and his Agorism yet also express a distaste for left-libertarianism. My goal is to help readers with this viewpoint understand the essential role Konkin and his “New Libertarianism,” or Agorism, played in developing the American Left-Libertarian movement.

Agorism As Consistent Libertarianism

Let’s start by getting an understanding of Konkin’s vision. Konkin called for the creation of a revolutionary movement lead by workers and entrepreneurs voluntarily cooperating in economic exchanges that take place outside of the State’s grasp. He called this movement The New Libertarian Alliance. Konkin based his revolutionary ideas on a foundation of Libertarianism in the vein of Rothbard and the American Individualist Anarchists before him. In The New Libertarian Manifesto Konkin writes:

“Where the State divides and conquers its opposition, Libertarianism unites and liberates. Where the State beclouds, Libertarianism clarifies; where the State conceals, Libertarianism uncovers; where the State pardons, Libertarianism accuses.

Libertarianism elaborates an entire philosophy from one simple premise: initiatory violence or its threat (coercion) is wrong (immoral, evil, bad, supremely impractical, etc) and is forbidden; nothing else is.

Libertarianism, as developed to this point, discovered the problem and defined the solution: the State vs the Market. The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market. Thus did Economics become part of Libertarianism.”(1)

From this, Konkin developed his views on property:

“Libertarianism investigated the nature of man to explain his rights deriving from non-coercion. It immediately followed that man (woman, child, Martian, etc.) had an absolute right to this life and other property – and no other.

All theft is violence initiation, either the use of force to take property away involuntarily or to prevent receipt of goods or return of payment for those goods which were freely transferred by agreement.” (1)

Konkin became involved in the burgeoning libertarian movement in the late sixties. At this point the lovers of liberty were beginning to recognize the potential for a national movement of anti-statist, pro-market radicals. In the midst of this opportunity Konkin saw libertarian activists being lured into “get liberty quick” schemes, such as electoral politics. In a counter-attack to the enemies of liberty, Konkin outlined a new philosophy that he believed was simply the result of applying libertarian principles to their most consistent and logical ends.

“The basic principle which leads a libertarian from statism to his free society is the same which the founders of libertarianism used to discover the theory itself. That principle is consistency. Thus, the consistent application of the theory of libertarianism to every action the individual libertarian takes creates the libertarian society.

Many thinkers have expressed the need for consistency between means and ends and not all were libertarians. Ironically, many statists have claimed inconsistency between laudable ends and contemptible means; yet when their true ends of greater power and oppression were understood, their means are found to be quite consistent. It is part of the statist mystique to confuse the necessity of ends-means consistency; it is thus the most crucial activity of the libertarian theorist to expose inconsistencies. Many theorists have done so admirably; but we have attempted and most failed to describe the consistent means and ends combination of libertarianism.

New Libertarianism (agorism) cannot be discredited without Liberty or Reality (or both) being discredited, only an incorrect formulation.” (1)

Briefly, Agorism calls for the creation of a new society by competing with the State directly, rather than relying on voting, electoral politics, or calls for insurrectionary violence. Konkin coined the term Agorism after the Greek word agora for “open marketplace”. In order to achieve this agora, Konkin called for entrepreneurs to make use of the so-called “black and grey markets”. “In short, the ‘black market’ is anything non-violent prohibited by the State and carried on anyways,” Konkin wrote. “The ‘grey market’ is used here to mean dealing in goods and services not themselves illegal but obtained or distributed in ways legislated against by The State.” (2)

For Konkin, a truly libertarian society would be Agorist – “libertarian in theory and free-market in practice”. This society would include a respect for justly acquired property, voluntary cooperation between entrepreneurs and producers, and replacing all of the State’s “services” with private competition among individuals and collectives.

“Libertarian analysis shows us that the State is responsible for any damage to innocents it alleges the ‘selfish tax-evader’ has incurred; and the ‘services’ the State ‘provides’ us are illusory. But even so, there must be more than lonely resistance cleverly concealed or ‘dropping out?’ If a political party or revolutionary army is inappropriate and self-defeating for libertarian goals, what collective action works? The answer is agorism.” (3)

The goal of Agorism is to replace all non-consensual, coercive relationships with voluntary relationships based on mutual benefit via entrepreneurship in the black and grey markets. This shuffling of “large collections of humanity from statist society to the agora” was “true revolutionary activity”. According to Konkin, Agorists should not launch “attacks” on the State. “We are strictly defensive,” Konkin wrote in An Agorist Primer, his follow-up to The New Libertarian Manifesto.

Further, Konkin described an agorist as “one who lives counter-economically without guilt for his or her heroic, day-to-day actions, with the old libertarian morality of never violating another’s person or property”. The philosophy stresses the importance of taking action. “An agorist is one who lives agorism. Accept no counterfeits. There are agorists “trying to live up to it.” There are, of course, liars who will claim to be anything. As Yoda said so succinctly, ‘Do. Or do not. There is no try.’ That’s Agorism.” (4)

Counter-Economics As Defined by Konkin

If Agorism is Konkin’s premier philosophical contribution, his recognition of Counter-Economics as the path towards Agorism is equally important. The term Counter-Economics can be attributed to the time and period in which Konkin developed his ideas. “Counter-Culture was a popular phrase, the only lasting victory of the “hippies.” Counter-Economics implied that the “revolution wasn’t finished” and that the Economic System needed to undergo the same up-ending as the Culture had,” Konkin wrote.

As defined above, the black and grey markets are part of the Counter-Economy, which Konkin defined as “All (non-coercive) human action committed in defiance of the State”. In line with libertarian principles of non-aggression, Konkin labels initiatory violence in the form of theft or murder as the “red market”, the one type of activity that is shunned in his counter-economy.

Konkin explains that as the State’s repressive and oppressive activities increase, the people will begin seeking economic alternatives to State regulation and interference. This provides an opportunity for forward-thinking Agorists to launch and support counter-economic businesses and activity. Konkin believed that once the counter-economy had progressed to the point where entrepreneurs were providing the public with protection and security services that could rival or defend against the State, the Agorist revolution would be complete.

“Slowly but steadily we will move to the free society turning more counter-economists onto libertarianism and more libertarians onto counter-economics, finally integrating theory and practice. The counter-economy will grow and spread to the next step we saw in our trip backward, with an ever-larger agorist sub-society embedded in the statist society. Some agorists may even condense into discernible districts and ghettos and predominate in islands or space colonies. At this point, the question of protection and defense will become important.”(3)

“Eventually, of course, after a period of increasingly rapid change of this kind, the “underground” will break into and displace the “overground”; the state will wither away into irrelevance, its taxpayers, soldiers, and law-enforcement people having deserted it for the marketplace; and we’ll be left with a free, agorist society.” (4)

Counter-Economics As A Tool For All Radicals

Konkin envisioned a world of decentralized, peer to peer communities consciously and voluntarily doing business in the counter-economy as a means towards ending the State and liberating the people. The range of (and opportunity for) counter-economic activity has only increased with the expansion of the internet and decentralized technology like crypto-currencies. Konkin discussed various forms of counter-economic activity including, using cash to avoid detection, barter, investing in precious metals, undocumented employment, use of illicit and illegal drugs and medicines, prostitution, bootlegging, gambling, weapons dealing, or simply providing a service while accepting payment in non-statist currencies.

The possibilities are essentially endless and should be welcomed by all radicals who are seeking alternatives to Statism and the status-quo. Any individual or collective who recognizes the economic monopoly that is maintained by continued use of the Federal Reserve Note (dollar) should be supportive of counter-economic measures and investing in creating alternatives. Whether your idea of economic freedom is collective ownership or individualist in nature, Agorism offers an opportunity for communes, mutual banks, time stores, and marketplaces based in the counter-economy. This will allow all non-statist counter-economic ventures to cooperate and compete in the pursuit of a more free society. As Nick Ford has noted, there is opportunity for an Agorist-Syndicalist alliance, and in our first book, John Vibes and I propose the creation of an Agorist-Mutualist alliance. Quite simply, if you want to abolish the State and the privileged class who benefit from its existence, create alternatives to the current paradigm and outgrow the archaic institutions of yesterday.

I should note that Konkin was critical of communism. In “Counter-Economics: Our Means” he writes, “the anti-market commune defies the only enforceable law – the law of nature. The basic organizational structure of society (above the family) is not the commune (or tribe or extended tribe or State) but the agora. No matter how many wish communism to work and devote themselves to it, it will fail. They can hold back agorism indefinitely by great effort, but when they let go, the ‘flow’ or ‘Invisible Hand’ or ‘tides of history’ or ‘profit incentive’ or ‘doing what comes naturally’ or ‘spontaneity’ will carry society inexorably closer to the pure agora.” (3)

However, I do not think his personal perception of communism should discourage individuals from investing in the counter-economy. There is bound to be a wide range of activity, opinions, and solutions. In a truly freed market each of these persuasions could co-exist.

Understanding Konkin’s Vision of Agorism

It is important to distinguish counter-economic activity from full on Agorist activity. While one may be a drug dealer, prostitute, arms dealer, barber without a license, or other grey/black market entrepreneur, it does not follow that one is also a conscious practicing counter-economist or Agorist. Generally, economic activity in the black and grey markets is always counter-economic because it is untaxed and removes the State from the situation. But, without the awareness of Agorist philosophy and conscious effort to remove economic power away from the State, one is simply breaking the State’s law. While flouting the state’s laws against victimless crimes is a commendable act, it does not make one an Agorist. In short, you can support and participate in counter-economic ventures without wholeheartedly embracing Konkin’s ideas, but you would not be an Agorist.

So what differentiates Agorism from Anarcho-Capitalism and other forms of market-anarchism?

As noted earlier, Konkin was a vital part of the establishment of the Left-Libertarian movement of the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The Movement of the Libertarian Left was born of Konkin’s experiences working with Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess on Left and Right, a journal dedicated to bringing together the anti-statist “right” and New Left of the late 60’s. These experiences greatly influenced Konkin’s thinking and development of Agorism. When asked why he chose to identify as a “libertarian left” or left-libertarian, Konkin said he was “to the left” of Rothbard, so it became natural to refer to the his movement as left-libertarian. He also noted his interest in continuing “Rothbard’s 1960-69 alliance with the anti-nuke, then anti-war New Left”.

“Among important figures in the development of the modern libertarian movement, Konkin stands out in his insistence that libertarianism rightly conceived belongs on the radical left wing of the political spectrum,” writes David S. D’Amato for Libertarianism.org “His Movement of the Libertarian Left, founded as a coalition of leftist free marketers, resisted the association of libertarianism with conservatism. Further positioning it on the left, agorism embraces the notion of class war and entails a distinctly libertarian analysis of class struggle and stratification.”

When asked about the main differences between left-libertarian/agorism and anarcho-capitalism, Konkin said, “In theory, those calling themselves anarcho-capitalists do not differ drastically from agorists; both claim to want anarchy (statelessness, and we pretty much agree on the definition of the State as a monopoly of legitimized coercion, borrowed from Rand and reinforced by Rothbard). But the moment we apply the ideology to the real world (as the Marxoids say, “Actually Existing Capitalism”) we diverge on several points immediately.”

In Konkin’s words, “the “Anarcho-capitalists” tend to conflate the Innovator (Entrepreneur) and Capitalist, much as the Marxoids and cruder collectivists do. Agorists are strict Rothbardians, and, I would argue in this case, even more Rothbardian than Rothbard, who still had some of the older confusion in his thinking.” Konkin also said the AnCaps of his time had a tendency to “believe in involvement with existing political parties” and using the “U.S. Defense complex to fight communism”, terrorism, or any other misguided cause. While it may be said that AnCaps who support the Defense Department are a minority in 2016, the point does illustrate that since the beginning of the Agorist movement there has been an effort to segregate from the AnCap element.

Konkin believed “a lot more than statism would need to be eliminated from individual consciousness” for a truly free society to exist. Based on this statement (and his writings elsewhere) it seems clear that Konkin espoused a “thick” libertarianism that fights for collective liberation through individual means and does not end its analysis at Statism. Indeed, Konkin specifically wrote about the oppression waged against women and the gay community. (4) Another difference between Konkian libertarianism and that of “right-libertarians”, is the issue of class. Although the right typically avoid class-based analyses, Konkin helped develop what has become known as “The Agorist Class Theory”. The Agorist Class Theory refutes Marx’s communist class theory and recognizes the differences between non-statist entrepreneurs and Statist-Capitalists.

Konkin elaborated on these ideas in an interview and in discussions on the Left-Libertarian Yahoo group. Again he stressed the importance of separating the “non-innovators, and pro-statist Capitalists” from the “non-statist Capitalists (in the sense of holders of capital, not necessarily ideologically aware)”, calling them “neutral drone-like non-innovators”. When it came to the working class, Konkin argued that the State stifled innovation and entrepreneurship which kept the working class busy doing meaningless busy work. He called workers and peasants “an embarrassing relic from a previous Age at best and look forward to the day that they will die out from lack of market demand”.

Additionally, Konkin made favorable comments towards workers movements. In the Left-Libertarian Yahoo Group, Konkin said he approved of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) attempt to recruit libertarians. Konkin said he wanted “to remind old MLL members and inform newbies that, free-market and pro-entrepreneur as we are, MLL supports genuine anarcho-syndicalist unions which consistently refuse to collaborate with the State. (In North America, that’s the IWW and nothing else I know of.)” He noted that the IWW split with the U.S. Socialist Party for the same reasons his MLL split with the U.S. Libertarian Party – “a rejection of parliamentarianism for direct action”.

Konkin also disagreed with conflating the terms “free enterprise” and “capitalism” with the “free market”. “Capitalism means the ideology (ism) of capital or capitalists,” he wrote. “Before Marx came along, the pure free-marketeer Thomas Hodgskin had already used the term capitalism as a pejorative; capitalists were trying to use coercion — the State — to restrict the market. Capitalism, then, does not describe a free market but a form of statism, like communism. Free enterprise can only exist in a free market.” (5)

Konkin referred to his movement as “revolutionary” and “radical”, terms that are generally used to describe left-leaning movements, and rejected by “right-libertarians” and conservatives. The use of terminology from the New Left was not a mistake. Konkin was consciously making an effort to distinguish his brand of “revolutionary market-anarchism” from the growing Anarcho-Capitalism movement.

In conclusion, Samuel E. Konkin III successfully created an extension of libertarian philosophy by utilizing tactics that are consistent from theory to application (Counter-Economics) while providing a path towards a more free society. He made efforts to acknowledge the differences between his movement and others, but at the same time recognizing that the counter-economic attack can be waged by a wide spectrum of anti-Statists. If we can successfully create a Panarchist Alliance of Counter-Economists, we may yet construct a truly freed market that allows free experimentation and trade between different schools of thought. In this space we will see the Conscious Agorist Movement flourish.

Footnotes:

1. Agorism: Our Goal, The New Libertarian Manifesto
2. Footnotes of Counter-Economics: Our Means, The NLM
3. Counter-Economics: Our Means, The NLM
4. Applied Agorism, An Agorist Primer
5. Applied Economics, An Agorist Primer

Lawrence Davidson discusses moral idiocy among the powerful.

Branko Marcetic discusses COINTELPRO.

Ramzy Baroud discusses Israeli efforts to divide people living in Palestine.

John Cavanagh discusses the man who put advoacy for Laotians on the map.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses whether U.S. soldiers fight for our freedom or not.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses statist school indoctrination.

Kathy Kelly discusses a good beginning toward the end of US empire.

Tom Engelhardt discusses 15 years of American air war.

Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons, and Naomi LaChance discusses Hilary Clinton’s national security advisors.

Cory Massimino discusses Gary Johnson’s recent gaffe.

Shawn Regan discusses 5 ways govt keeps Native Americans in poverty.

Julie Leininger Pycior discusses Mexcian-Americans and LBJ.

Julian Brave NoiseCat and Anne Spice discusses resistance to expansionism on Native American land.

Jesse Walker discusses anarchy, swamp, and utopia.

Ben Norton discusses people who got basic facts about the Syrian conflict wrong.

Charles Hughes discusses govt regulation of volunteer efforts.

David S. D’Amato discusses why libertarians can be pro-environment.

Robert Fantina discusses newspeak and Israel=Palestine.

Yoav Litvin discusses Israel-Palestine.

John Knefel discusses the forever war.

Missy Ryan discusses U.S. bombing across the globe.

Wendy McElroy discusses the revolution of rising expectations.

Sanford Ikeda discusses the refusal of a 49er to stand for the national anthem and the left-right divide.

Zaid Jilani and Alex Emmons discuss Wolf Blitzer’s fear of defense contractors losing business.

Alex Emmons discusses the neverending post-911 war.

Scott Beauchamp discusses why Hilary Clinton’s apology about her Iraq vote isn’t enough.

Jonathan Cook discusses whether the Israeli govt will face war crimes charges brought by the ICC.

Marjorie Cohn discusses 15 years after 9-11.

Wilson Dizard discusses how Trump and Hilary will repeat the foreign policy mistakes of the past.

Ted Galen Carpenter discusses the idea that the U.S. can do no wrong in foreign affairs.

Modern markets are fundamentally unfree. Most libertarians and anarchists realise this, and see that centuries of systemic state intervention have created infrastructures that are wasteful, coercive and destructive. The majority of capitalist markets, rather than developing through spontaneous order, are in fact borne out these infrastructures, growing as deformed appendages that have some elements of competition and ground-up innovation, but mostly being suited toward government-created and subsidised corporations who are so capital intensive that they rely on and use these infrastructures to keep their profitability, and with it their monopoly status.

In a world of climate change, extremely high levels of waste, stagnating innovation and the increasing precarity of large sections of the world population, these markets are kept alive by gargantuan states and starved taxpayers. They rely on cheap, abused labour in East Asia and South America, and on the continuing use of diminishing resources. Energy, water and shelter, three of the most important things for human survival, are locked in these statist-market processes where water is being used in increasingly more wasteful ways (usually for the vagaries of industry, agribusiness and corporate supply chains[1]), planning laws are continually outlawing new home ideas and homes for the homeless, and the world is still reliant on fossil fuels.

These markets are ripe for the activity of black market entrepreneurs and illegal communities who can develop significant independence away from the state. In creating these markets, spaces of economic and political freedom can be developed, curtailing the power of the state and moving toward off-the-grid, independent communities and neighbourhoods akin to the concepts of Eric Wichman.

Energy is already being honed in as an area for agorist activity. The development of standalone power systems means that communities no longer need to link up to state-created electricity grids, instead providing their own power with their choice of electricity variability and pricing. Guerrilla Solar is a movement that has begun using photovoltaic energy production in unlinked solar panels. They want “to place energy made from sunshine, wind and falling water on this planet’s utility grids with or without permission from utilities or governments”[2], thus creating a form of independence that previously might never have been possible. New technological advances are increasingly making solar and wind energy significantly more intensive. Combined with new metering technologies which place the use and pricing mechanisms of electricity increasingly into the hands of those who use it, new markets can grow out of this, as they already have with the Guerrilla Solar movement and the market for off-the-grid photovoltaic technology. Equally, new hydrogen fuel cell technology may well be profitable for black market entrepreneurs in creating new electricity grids and markets. Such fuel cells have the capacity to power streets of houses, with this power being scaled up consistently. Unfortunately, as is the way with developing technologies, patent after patent and regulation after regulation has been placed on hydrogen fuel cells. However, with their burgeoning use in cars, entrepreneurs may well be able to illegally deconstruct and redevelop this technology for homes and community power grids, putting the blueprints for such technology online in open source platforms.

In a similar vein, water is an area in need of new entrepreneurial and illegal activity. Increasing amounts of water are being wasted to keep corporate supply chains and large, corporate farming as the major economic actors in the global economy. With this, they are developing a larger ecological footprint as we see more issues of drought and water scarcity[3]. There already exist off-the-grid ways of illegally collecting water and using it in one’s own community. Rainwater collection and directly taking water from local lakes and reservoirs has been something done for centuries. The state however, in its infinite wisdom, is already declaring such means illegal[4], forcing homeowners to connect themselves to municipal or private water mains. The best way to deal with this challenge is to simply continue collecting water illegally, while at the same time creating new markets and private legal systems that can push against the hegemony of the state. An Ostromite way of looking at this can mean the development of water sale markets with community members as shareholders and the water systems held as local or regional commons. Further, new metering technologies that already effect electricity can be used with water, thus developing the capacity to measure particular types of water use. This can lead to households and commons relying on cheaper local sources and using utility company sources less and less. Altogether, new markets are created with new entrepreneurial opportunities, and all of them would be illegal or semi-legal.

Housing has been subject to state planning and interference for large parts of the 20th century onwards. The myriad of planning and zoning laws effectively legislate the control of the housing market by monopolistic development and construction companies. Now these regulations are becoming even more pernicious, both ecologically and socially. On an ecological level, the way housing is designed and constructed needs a fundamental rethink. Large, energy intensive houses are becoming obsolete with the development of un-gridded electric-generation technologies. The way such houses interact with the surrounding environment usually necessitates the dredging and clearance of land, rather than housing being built into existing natural infrastructure. At a social level, there are increasing levels of homelessness in the US and the UK, as well as massive increases in rents and house prices due to government-led housing bubbles. Where there have been attempts to build box houses for those homeless, they have been ripped down by city governments based on local ordinances which forbid such activity. Similarly, housing projects which aren’t developed by favoured companies and aren’t massive in scale are rejected by local governments and banned by the stupidities of planning laws.

Despite this, there now exists open source housing development plans and software, as well as the ability to 3D print certain sections and parts. This has culminated in the Wiki House[5], a project where houses can be 3D printed and made in a box-like fashion, with all of it being left to the homeowner to decide upon. Similarly, in more rural neighbourhoods, large development firms are being shunned in favour of local alternatives, as they turn out to be cheaper and quicker due to their use of local materials and their desire to build individual housing units into the existing natural environment, rather than flattening land for massive housing projects. Again, whole new environments are created for the redevelopment of economies of scale which favour entrepreneurial activity over monopoly power. By ignoring planning laws and ordinances, housing can be pulled back into the realm of the local rather than being a tool of rentiers and corporations.

By creating a community around these off-the-grid, illegal market systems, the state becomes less able to penetrate such a tight-knitted system, forcing the state to rely on pure violence against its citizens (which in the world of 24 hour news and social media might not be as feasible as some think). In its stead exist independent communities with empowered members. As noted in 2006, 180,000 families already off-the-grid in the United States alone[6]. The state can only penetrate our lives when it has full control over the things that provide us them. As I’ve noted, the state is beginning to lose its grip, and in some cases has no interaction with communities whatsoever in these economic sectors. However, more needs to be done, and more agorist entrepreneurs need to develop technologies that pull the economy out of the hands of the state, and into the hands of the individual and their community.

[1] McKinsey & Company, The Global Corporate Water Footprint, P.3

[2] http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/guerrilla-solar.aspx

[3] McKinsey & Company, The Global Corporate Water Footprint, P.4

[4] http://www.disclose.tv/news/Florida_court_rules_offthegrid_living_is_illegal/100317

[5] https://medium.com/basic-income/google-homes-and-wikihouses-8609c917ad14#.l8ijug4nb

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid

Every prohibition, no matter how reasonable, has its bootleggers and every state, no matter how authoritarian, is unable to truly enforce a total ban on anything. So when a father in Berlin discovered swastikas painted on a children’s playground, a symbol that is actually illegal according to German law, he realized it was more effective to take matters into his own hands.

Placing two spray cans on the checkout counter at a nearby art supplies store, the father told the cashier what he planned to do. The cashier, admiring the man’s determination but realizing that he wasn’t actually a graffiti artist, offered to take care of it. And so the cashier, together with the NGO The Cultural Inheritance, launched #PaintBack, a project that turns swastika graffiti into works of beautiful hate-free art.

As stated before, German law strictly prohibits anything related to National Socialism including political parties, propaganda, chants, salutes, and symbols. And yet despite this legal framework for denazification put into place following those infamous events of WWII, neo-Nazi activity in Germany still exists and has even gained political representation since these laws were enacted. Like all proscriptive laws, it fails because outlawing certain activities only forces those participating to change their tactics while the letter of the law is used against those not actually engaging in hateful activity. In fact, several anti-fascists were persecuted under these laws for using swastikas for anti-Nazi purposes until the law was modified so that it, “shall not be applicable if the means of propaganda or the act serves to further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching, reporting about current historical events or similar purposes.”

When it comes to fascist graffiti, the law is about as useful as it is against any graffiti artist. Most are careful enough to avoid police and tracking the artist down afterwards is difficult if not impossible unless there were witnesses. So what’s to be done to show that such hatred is unwelcomed in one’s community? Well aside from the obvious tactics of direct confrontation of such groups, stopping them from spreading their propaganda.

Turning bigoted symbols into flowers, cute animals, windows, and other amazing pieces proves that there are other ways of dealing with symbols of hate that don’t involve the state or their private protection racket known as the police. This peaceful reaction allows citizens to combat hatred in a creative way that actually serves to beautify the city.and engage local children, who have come up with many of the designs for PaintBack.

“Kids, they have a different imagination. When they see a swastika, for them it’s just some symbol,” said Ibo Omari, the cashier who took on the project, “They don’t have an association with racism or Nazis. They tend to redesign it much easier than adults so most of the designs were created by kids.”

Who knew combating hatred could be turned into a community art project involving local children? This is just one of many creative ideas that can happen when we choose to solve our own problems instead of merely relying on the state.

Translations for this article:

• Turkish, NEFRETE GRAFİTİYLE KARŞI KOY!

Howdy, folks! Another Sunday has arrived, which means it’s time to talk about what C4SS is doing, where we’ve been and what we’ve got coming down the pike. It’s your Media Coordinator Weekly Update.

An Agora Around Agorism

God, I love alliterative puns.

Anyway, every month C4SS picks a theme, and a selection of our Fellows square off against thinkers from other organizations and fields in a friendly debate/symposium on that theme. We call this program Mutual Exchange. 

This month, we’ve centered the discussion around the countereconomic theory of agorism. Here’s a very brief rundown of what we’ve published so far in the series:

1. C4SS Senior Fellow Nick Ford set the stage with an essay discussing what, exactly, agorism and countereconomics are.
2. C4SS Fellow Jason Lee Byas contends that agorism is a way to bring libertarian politics out of the realm of electoral politics or state policy.
3. C4SS contributor H.B. Dillon Williams IV (dang, what a name) brings both historical context and an argument that agorism and illegalism go hand in hand.
4. C4SS Senior Editor Chris Shaw conceptualizes how new technologies can help further agorist goals.
5. Nick Ford is back with a piece on combining countereconomics with classic anarchist/syndicalist tactics like the General Strike.
6. Freelance journalist Derrick Broze assesses where the agorist movement is at in the project of moving from statism to freedom.
7. C4SS Fellow Logan Glitterbomb calls for an agorist-syndicalist alliance.
8. C4SS Lysander Spooner Research Scholar Nathan Goodman discusses the promising synthesis between agorism and feminism.
9. Logan Glitterbomb comes back with a one-two punch on the similarities between agorism and illegalism, and how agorism is different from ethical consumerism.

We’ve got plenty more coming down the pike, so keep your eye on the Feature Articles section for daily updates to the series.

The Week In Commentary

We had a bit of a busy week this week on the commentary front.

First, major shoutouts must go to the Augusta, GA Free Press – y’all publish so much of our stuff it’s crazy. Kevin Carson got both of his op-eds from this week posted there. So did Meg Arnold with their piece on safe spaces. Thanks y’all!

Last week’s late submissions were Kevin Carson’s piece on capitalism not making us richer, and my piece on Colin Kaepernick. Kevin’s piece was picked up by the Augusta, GA Free Press. My piece was picked up by Antiwar.com, the Augusta, GA Free Press and the Michigan Standard.

All in all, everyone had a pretty good week when it came to pickups.

Steal This Review

James C. Wilson has a great review of Abbie Hoffman’s seminal rebel’s cookbook, Steal This Book, up in our review section now. Steal This Book holds a lot of significance for me, since once upon a time I was a member of a forum dedicated to bringing it to the internet in a wiki format. Here are some choice excerpts for the review:

If you are looking for an in-depth collection of arguments about the evils of the current system, this is not the book you are looking for. In fact it assumes in the intro that readers have already reached their ideological conclusions and are prepared to act on them.

and

This book is a fun read, and provides a heavy dose of late 1960’s radicalism.  While many of the tips and tricks it offers are obsolete, it remains an entertaining work that boldly displays the spirit of the era that created it. In the years following its release, the US government discontinued drafting people to fight in Vietnam, taking away one of the New Left’s unifying issues. Also, a series of financial downturns took a heavy toll on much of the free-wheeling spirit of the sixties. Despite this, the influence of  anti-authoritarianism, as well as its opposition to racism, sexism and imperialist adventurism are still strongly felt today. It is quite a book, and I’m glad I stole it.

Fantastic.

Honestly, this week at C4SS was a really good one. Everyone has been bringing their A-games lately, and while we’re not churning out op-eds daily the ones that are coming out are golden. And there’s a way you can help. Want to know how?

Come closer.

Lemme whisper it in yr ear…

DONATE! It’s how we get paid!

Yes, that’s right. The Center for a Stateless Society is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that funds all of its projects – from commentaries to Mutual Exchanges and everything in between – with y’all’s support. We are able to continue doing the work we do because you’re helping us move the work along. Head on over to our support page to learn more.