Anarchoblogs

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. - R. Buckminster Fuller

Instead of fighting government, we should simply render it obsolete, argues Dave Ridley in one of his best videos yet. For example, Dave’s journalism works toward making mainstream media obsolete. The Porc-411 service has superseded AAA he says. And carrying a firearm [on which you're well-trained] helps fossilize the police.

Which One First?

Dave’s really on to something here. What (quasi-) government institutions should we consign to the dustbin in our own lives? And how? What are the most powerful ones? The most vulnerable ones? The most pernicious? The most unpopular? Here are some ideas. I’d like to hear yours as well.

1. Police: Getting basic firearm training, practicing regularly and carrying a pistol is a great start. What about neighborhood patrol? Detective for hire?
2. Food and Drug Regulation: Produce your own food and drugs (see, for example, permaculture) and/or trade with others outside of government control to get what you need. This effectively shortcuts government regulation. I produce free range chicken eggs and trade with you for unpasteurized organic cow milk.
3. Road and Bridge Building and Maintenance: Fill in potholes, film your work and take up a collection. A more advanced example would be to save one of those bridges that has been practically abandoned by the state for lack of funds.
4. Social Safety Net: Form a charity to feed, clothe and shelter homeless people. Organize the unemployed to compete with the enterprises that laid them off. Form mutual aid societies.
5. Dispute Resolution: Offer your arbitration services for hire. Offer insurance against things that commonly turn out badly for folks.
6. Currency: Offer an incentive for customers to pay you in gold and silver. Convert your USD holdings into silver and gold coins. Mint your own silver money and help others convert, too.
7. Education: Homeschool/Unschool. Try to avoid or reduce property taxes, or any other activities that support government schools. Self-study and/or hire private tutors instead of going to a state-subsidized college, trade school or graduate school.
8. Health Care: Offer private EMT services with your own 911-type alert system. If you’re a doctor, offer your services for gold and silver at reduced rates.
9. Package Delivery: Here’s an interesting proposal for competing with the USPS, UPS and Fedex. Boycott the government postal system as much as possible.
10. Water, Electricity and Natural Gas: Get your water from a well and filter it yourself. Produce your own electricity from solar, wind and water sources. Heat by burning wood.
11. Broadcast Spectrum: Use and produce online media. Air pirate radio and TV signals.

We Can be Our Own Masters

Working together, we can enhance our own independence, build wealth for ourselves, achieve more personal liberty and free time and otherwise be our own masters. All this while weakening the fascist police state. Where do we start?

As of 12:01AM January 1, 2010 (today) we are officially living in a state of liberty - the stateless society. We’ve achieved our goal! Yippee! Break out the champagne. Celebrate. You can finally live your life freely and without worrying about what materials or activities the reigning gang has penalized, taxed or prohibited. Live free! Do what you’ve always wanted to do! Start that business. Grow some hemp. Take your license plates off. Throw your 1040’s in the trash. Import stevia.

Before you Fall Asleep

But don’t go to sleep on your couch in front of your 52″ HDTV yet. We’ve received word that there is this big gang of con men gunning for us. They’ve tricked quite a few poor souls into obeying their edicts. They want to take over our industries and run our lives. So it’s time to go back to work. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance after all.

Plenty of Fun to be Had!

We only need 3 per cent of the population with us. And there’s a plenty of fun to be had blowing up all kinds of stuff: sacred cows, white markets, you name it. Proceed forward ever more boldly against these shysters. Play along with them when you’re left with no other choice but be conscious of our resistance to their schemes. They shall not succeed. Let’s get to work!

Photo credit: DieselDemon. Photo license.

Let’s draw a line and make a spectrum. On the Far Left is pure agorist; on the Far Right is pure statism (I’ll leave it to the theologians to discuss as to whether statism is so Evil that it cannot exist in purity). An entrepreneur accepts all risk and operates purely underground on the Far Left. A person rejects all risk and imposes his will (or, more likely, that of his superior in the hierarchy) on others on the Far Right.

Now let’s take our compass and protractor and discern the “middle.” With my ideological tools, I see it as a largely aboveground business, accepting incorporation but only as a camouflage, afraid to deal with the Counter-Economy but equally in fear of the consequences of following regulations which will weaken or destroy the business. A highly unstable position, to be sure, as it should be. Tilting to the Right decreases risk but leads to a weaker business and less profit and thus the incentive to go ever-further right, begging, bribing and cajoling more and more statist intervention to assist the market-alienated firm, until finally it becomes indistinguishable from a branch of the State.

Tilting to the Left increases risk, but also profit and fitting supply to demand. As the company becomes more Counter-Economic, it prospers accordingly and has more capital to re-invest (since it’s paying little or no taxes) but if “outed” by the State, it can suffer ever-greater penalties. Finally, it goes completely underground and is a major Enemy of the State and essentially a key part of the Agorist Revolutionary strategy.

What keeps most entrepreneurs hovering between semi-agorist and semi-bureaucratic are the countervailing vectors of Fear of Risk/Failure vs Fear of Violence and Coercion. A few break free in one direction, embracing the risk and enjoying the freedom for however long they can succeed, and a few go the other way, embracing the State and reveling in whatever power they are granted over others.

Accepting money or any favours whatsoever is always wrong. Seizing property in the State’s sphere is always right. And what about those who fear for their families, that they will not be able to support their spouse or have their children seized and taken away? Where does cowardice fit on the political spectrum?

– “Deep Agorist Theory”, Samuel Edward Konkin III, 22 November 1999, LeftLibertarian mailing list

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Tags: agorism, counter-economics, morality, SEK3, statism

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Yes, Virginia, there is a coherent market anarchist strategy for achieving liberty. Since we’re programmed to accept only state-run elections as a valid change vector, this can be hard to accept - but it’s true. If you dismiss it out of hand, you’re letting a great opportunity pass you by, so please give this your full attention. Perhaps you can even work these strategies for achieving liberty into your repertoire?

Agorism, Voluntaryism and Open Source Peaceful Evolution

The agorist strategy is simple: stop supporting the government and start working for your own benefit. Don’t fund the government. Ignore its licenses and regulations. Do business “off the books” in ways that are either outright illegal or simply unauthorized (i.e., practice counter-economics). As we starve the government, we simultaneously build up the power of our free market until we can support defense providers strong enough to suppress the state. To learn more, check out agorism.info and especially read the New Libertarian Manifesto.

To reform oneself and help others do the same is the voluntaryist strategy. Voluntaryists withdraw their support of and compliance with the state. Voluntaryists first and foremost improve themselves and live their lives without aggression. For voluntaryists, the fight for liberty starts at home. Voluntaryists also practice civil disobedience, direct action (the solving of problems privately instead of demanding government action), education and counter-economics. Here are 15 tactics used by voluntaryists to advance liberty.

Open Source Peaceful Evolution is a concept that marries voluntaryist and agorist insights with open source organizational tactics and fourth generation warfare thinking. I’ve stolen the concept of open source insurgency from John Robb and molded it to libertarian purposes with a vision for non-aggression and a call to action in the form of the Free Me Project, a takeoff on the Free State Project. Click here to learn the 11 simple principles of advancing the process of peaceful evolution towards greater liberty.

Tactics

While a strategy is a plan of a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, tactics are how you go about achieving that plan. For example, one strategy for liberty might be to break up the left-right coalition that underpins the state. One tactic used to achieve this goal might be to convince individual progressives and conservatives that the market is the best way to achieve their goals. Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action is a great compendium of non-violent tactics you will find useful.

Does it Look Random?

If market anarchist resistance tactics look random to you, they might be! But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s stigmergic. Stigmergy, according to Wikipedia, “is a form of self-organization [that] produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. Gee, that sounds like the free market!

Too Slow?

With a paradigm like agorism or open source peaceful evolution, any principled act of resistance, no matter how random or disorganized it may seem, throws a cog in the works. Our actions are cumulative and will eventually bring about liberty. Too slow? Join us now to accelerate the pace!

Photo credit: Muffet. Photo license.

Kyle Bennett has posted An Agorist Manifesto in 95 Theses over at the Free Agents Network social site

Worth a look, in my view. And, as Kyle says: “Suitable for nailing to an appropriate door near you…”

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Tags: agorism, Free Agents Network, Kyle Bennett

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If you think limited government is the best way to secure and protect your life, liberty and property, that’s your prerogative and I don’t want to convince you otherwise in this article. In fact, I want to help you achieve your goal - by sharing with you the rich repertoire of effective libertarian tactics used by voluntaryists, agorists and other market anarchists.

Minarchist Toolset Built for Honest Government

Your struggle for liberty desperately depends on your early and successful adoption of anarchist tactics. The fact is that your toolset - voting, electioneering and protesting - is too easy for the tyrants to ignore. Votes can be disregarded or made irrelevant. Independent candidates get locked out of news coverage. Begging voters to choose the red team over the blue team, or vice versa, is an absurd waste of time because we all know it makes no difference. Even if you elect a good candidate, the other 99 per cent overrule her. Protests are controlled, limited and subverted. Face it, your toolset is built for an open, honest government - not for this tyrannous police state.

Your Goal Requires a Real Revolution

Yes, that’s right. This is not your ideal form of government. This is not simply a constitutional republic that has lost its way and needs a few pure-hearted patriots to right its course. This is a dictocracy, where a small elite controls political office. They aim to continually expand both their own power and that of the offices they hold. Only a real revolution will return it to the minimal size you seek. This dictocracy has declared war on you. Will you join the resistance?

Liberty Tactics

With that in mind, here are eight libertarian tactics you can use right now to not only gain more liberty for yourself, but also weaken this police state. Make no mistake, only by strengthening your network and weakening theirs will you be able to build a coalition for the truly limited government you seek.

1. Improve Yourself. Improve your mind by reading more and watching less TV. Improve your body by getting off the couch - exercise, eat right, etc. Work on maintaining a positive attitude. Build your emotional intelligence, your leadership and communication skills. Learn new and useful things that will facilitate your survival, such as: riflery, canning, permaculture, welding, carpentry, etc.
2. Disobey. Any order from this tyrannous police state is illegitimate. Disobey it until such time as they have the proverbial gun to your head. You don’t have to go to jail, just resist as long as you can. This is not license to act immorally, only to stop obeying illegitimate authority.
3. Stop Subsidizing the Enemy. Don’t pay taxes. Don’t loan the government money. Don’t perform services for them. Use their Federal Reserve Notes (dollars) as little as possible. Use honest silver and gold money or barter instead.
4. Start a Cash Business. Work under the table, dealing in cash only. Provide alternatives to services offered by the state or its corporate allies at a better price, with better service. Get rich and don’t give a penny to this police state.
5. Learn How to Defend Yourself. Take an NRA-approved pistol course and go to your local range weekly at least. Attend every Appleseed event you can. At Appleseed, good folks teach you not only how to use your rifle but also about the sacrifices the founding fathers made. Get a battle rifle and train on it until you’re an expert.
6. Produce your Own Food. Start a garden. Learn about permaculture. Get some chickens, rabbits and/or goats. Trade with your local food producers. It’s better nutrition anyway.
7. Don’t Aggress. Don’t use the government against your neighbor. Don’t support enlarged government programs of any kind. Don’t call the cops on your neighbor. Settle disputes privately.
8. Connect - and Replicate - Locally. Work together locally on these tactics with like-minded folks. Things done in a group are more likely to succeed and continue. The whole will be stronger than the individual parts. Unite, or die, as Ben Franklin put it.

Afraid?

Afraid to stop paying your taxes? Do these tactics require considerable restructuring of your life? Great personal inconvenience? Your significant other or children will never go along with it? Just took out a new mortgage with that $8,000 federal credit? Like your couch too much? Can’t imagine yourself mowing your own lawn, much less gardening or firing a rifle? Worried you’ll be branded as a tax cheat, terrorist or cop-killer? That’s what the founding fathers were, remember? Did they shirk their duty? If not you, who? If not now, when?

Are you of Sufficient Character?

No one ever said liberty was easy. It means responsibility, which most people dread and shirk. But you distinguish yourself by seeking out more and more responsibility. If you admire the founding fathers, consider their hardships. Are you of sufficient character and integrity to do what it takes to live free, and not die? Let’s find out together, shall we?

Photo credit: ubrayj02. Photo license.

The BBC’s documentary A Farm for the Future is both shocking and encouraging. It’s shocking as it lays out how modern farming methods are doomed by their dependence on fossil fuels and encouraging as it explains how productive and efficient permaculture can be.

22 Billion Slaves?

Here are some interesting facts I picked up from the piece.

1. The energy supply we currently depend on from fossil fuels is the equivalent of 22 billion slaves working around the clock. My, are we privileged!
2. The average age of farmers in the UK is 60.
3. We are losing the technology needed to farm manually (as opposed to using mechanized tractors, bailers and such).
4. Plowing the soil destroys it by killing the living things within it that sustain its fertility. Mechanized farming has accelerated this process.
5. Permaculture gardening in a wooded area can produce enough food for 10 people in just one acre, more than with modern farming methods. Also, it requires small amounts of work.
6. Cereal farming will not be sustainable. But it can be replaced with nuts, such as hazelnuts, which are nutritionally similar to rice.

Highly Recommended

The 48 minute show is visually pleasant and quite informative. I highly recommend you give it a gander. The government is only mentioned once, at the end, where the narrator calls for government permaculture solutions - which is of course laughable.

My Strategy for Prosperity

My strategy for future prosperity includes moving to a rural area and setting up a garden, including livestock. I want to live off the land not because I necessarily think the world is going to end (though it might!), but because it is a healthy lifestyle. I want to enjoy the rest of my life close to nature and not dependent on vulnerable government-controlled supply chains. I want my son to grow up knowing how to provide for himself. I want independence, and liberty. What about you?

On a private mailing list, someone asked:

Aren’t Black Markets and Free Markets mutually Exclusive?

Free markets don’t exist in any real sense anywhere today. State prohibitions, subsidies, taxes, regulation, privilege and the rest make them impossible on any substantial scale.

“Black market” as commonly understood is a problematic term, since it encompasses both harmless things that governments ban (the cannabis trade, for instance) in most places, as well as harmful things that governments also ban (murder for hire, for example).

I personally favor the market analysis given by agorist theory, which breaks down things along two axes:

• White market: State-approved, moral (i.e. non-rights-violating) (e.g. on-the-books employment)
• Gray market: Banned unless done in state-approved manner, moral (e.g. off-the-books trade)
• Black market: State ban, moral (e.g. drugs)
• Red market: State ban, immoral (e.g. murder for hire)
• Pink market: State-approved (and largely state-conducted), immoral (e.g. taxation, conscription, compulsory education)

Visual illustration on slide 7 of a powerpoint I made for a presentation to a libertarian meeting this summer at http://www.nostate.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/What-Sort-of-Libertarian-Are-You1.ppt (reproduced for readers of this blog below).

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Tags: agorism, black market, free market

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FFS! Why are the propertarians so hell-bent in appropriating all the concepts of socialists for their own ends? Libertarianism was twisted to mean Capitalist Minarchism. Anarchism has been pulled over by the AnCaps trying to make it mean Private State Capitalism. And now Libertarian Socialism? Will it ever end? Will you leave us no term untainted? What next? Communism?

No wait, that one has only been taken over by the statists instead…

Ok, enough ranting, lets look at why Brad Spangler believes that Agorism is a valid LibSoc movement.

His confusion seems to emanate from misunderstanding what Socialism entails. He is under the impression that socialism means simply anti-currently-existing-capitalism which is patently false. Socialists were never merely interested in shallow opposition to the current status quo but rather against all the building blocks of what makes capitalism. Socialists recognise that the exploitation coming from Capitalism, the wage-slavery, rent and usury that is rampart in our society stems from Private Property and the possibility of accumulation it repressents.

Of course Socialists spend the most energy criticizing the current system rather than any fantasy laissez-faire utopia Liberals could think of but it’s a great jump to consider that this was their only opposition and therefore as long as someone proposes a non-contemporary capitalist system, they are also “socialists.”

Basically, the point that Brad confuses is this

* Labor-based ownership rights? Check.

Socialism is not simply labour-based ownership rights. It is persistent labour-based ownership rights. That is,  the ownership of any capital or land is held by whoever is currently working it. In other words: via Possession. This is a profoundly anti-propertarian proposition as it would prevent the basic concepts that make capitalism capitalist: The Capitalist mode of production Or more specifically Wage-labour (and also Rent.)

While under Agorism the theoretical initial redistribution of ownership rights made after a revolutionary effort might be based on labour (although I fail to see how their theory aims to achieve this), they would not change the system so as to prevent wage-labour or rent. This means that very soon, the inequalities would start to amass, people will be turned into proletarians en masse and de-facto states (those private defense companies) will be required to prevent the class struggle from escalating once more. Enter democratization of the states to pacify the proletariat and you’re back where you started.

So unless your main purpose is to manage to allow all workers to own the capital and land they are working on, you are no socialist. And to extend that, unless your main purpose also includes the abolition of all hierarchy and domination of human over human, you’re neither an Anarchist or a Libertarian. A system therefore which will not systematically prevent wage-slavery (a mode of production encompassing both non-worker-onwership of capital and hierarchy) cannot be Libertarian Socialist.

And if you’re such a Libertarian Socialist who still wishes to have free markets as well. Then you’re a Mutualist, not an “Anarcho”-Capitalist.

A clarifying question might be this: Do you embrace the free markets because you believe they will achieve egalitarianism (ie allow the workers to own the means of production?) If so, you’re indeed socialist but such a perspective would require that you reject the free markets if you discover that they cannot, in fact, achieve this goal. However, if you’re for free markets and private property in principle whether wage-slavery, rent, usury and vast inequality will persist or not (but just think they won’t) then you are no socialist.

Agorism fails this test. If does not worry about whether labour-based ownership will remain after their revolutionary change but only that past aggression is reneged according to propertarian principles and afterwards, come what may. But those propertarian principles are also a result of the past aggression and unless they are abolished as well, the fix will be impotent.

This kind of confusion seems to be very common in those who do not seem to understand Anarchist or Socialist thought. The same way that Anarchism is mistakenly conflated with Anti-Statism, now we see Socialism being mistakenly conflated with Anti-Capitalism and ending up with absurd propositions such as a “Socialist” system which would have the capitalist mode of production as dominant or an “Anarchist” society where people enter voluntary slavery or simply sell their liberty piecemeal. People refuse to understand the political history behind these two concepts and use their own definitions.

So yeah, if you simply define Socialism as merely Anti-Capitalism, then all sorts of things become “Socialist”.  Feudalism for example. However defining yourself into Libertarian Socialism would still not make you a LibSoc as the greater LibSoc movement defines itself. Much like Socialism, so does Libertarian Socialism not apply via self-description either and to pursue such a path is to unnecessary muddle the waters and provide the appearance of infighting to outsiders.

Insightful? Funny? Informative? Spot On? Helpful?

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: The Kudos economy and some criticism. | Why are you a Market Anarchist? | Distinctions of Ownership

Hermes in the Agora (Communication, Cultural Mediation and the Anarchic Spirit) By Nick Louras I. It is Hermes who concerns us here, god of language and magic, the subtle, but all-powerful, spirit of communication, invoked with every act of social intercourse, embodied in every word that reaches another’s ear. At its most simple, Anarchy is Hermes unfettered. So long as [...]

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