The Occupy movement, shouldn’t be a movement, it should be a paradigm shift of thinking based on breaking their chains and becoming self-sufficient. Assume your power and create the system you want instead of asking for the system to change itself. The globalists behind the system, that can’t be voted out, have been in control of governments for generations and will not yield control willingly.

Since we are dealing with a hierarchical system, the best way to defeat it is to stop consenting and withdraw. We the people are the bedrock that the bricks of the pyramidal control system lays on. The different pillars of control are stacked on top of us, and if we stopped supporting it, the mechanisms of control will fall. We need to shake the very foundation of the system, and let the bricks fall where they may. Then we can seek out ways to rebuild that will benefit us individually and collectively.

Our focus needs to be shifted towards competing government institutions, personal protection agencies, dispute resolution agencies, mutualism and voluntary exchanges. The idea of working together and creating community based solutions independent of government is revolutionary. This means using counter-economic actions like barter, borrowing and untraceable currency are peaceful ways to withdraw economic consent to the State.

Everyone in Occupy has a skill, talent or idea that can be used to help them manifest the reality they want. Working on yourself, then organizing with others to build new ways to exchange goods and services are the key. Decentralized peer-to-peer non-coerced mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges was the model of the past, and is the emerging model now. With access to relatively cheap high level technology, we can build the Agora online that will help connect and foster Agorism in real life.

Check out our site based around “crowdfunding” each other instead of politics, PostPolitical.us.

Currently we are working on the online Agora of exchange, so stay tuned!

During Houston’s 2011 End The Fed Rally, attendees were fortunate to have their minds expanded by the revolutionary strategy of Agorism by John Bush. John is a hard working activist and inspiring speaker based out of Austin, Texas. John is not only spreading the message of true freedom, he is also working on numerous projects based on mutual aid and voluntaryism.

H/T CopBlock.org

More on the ideas:
Agorism.info http://agorism.info
Voluntaryist.com http://voluntaryist.com
Private Defense Agencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agency
“Justice Without the State” video with Bruce Benson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN34fUtpJkg
Edward Forchion “NJ Weedman” Modern Day Hero http://copblock.org/9588/edward-forchion-nj-weedman-moden-day-hero
Anarchy & the Law: The Political Economy of Choice edited by Ed Stringham http://amazon.com/Anarchy-Law-Political-Economy-Choice/dp/1412805791
“Ed & Elaine Brown: Property Rights Advocates Jailed for Life” http://libertyontour.com/2011/06/13/browns/

More from John and his crew:
Liberty Bell http://lonestarsmart.net/libertybell
Lone Star SMART http://lonestarsmart.net/
Operation Defuse – http://operationdefuse.com
Black & Yellow Pages http://indigoagora.com/black-yellow-pages
DEA & FBI Agree: Drug Prohibition is Futile http://libertyontour.com/2010/10/09/dea-fbi-agree-drug-prohibition-is-futile

Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link — Enforcement
by Kevin Carson of C4SS

Goo-goo liberals and “good citizens” of all stripes are fond of saying that “We must continue to obey the law while we work to change it.” Every day I become more convinced that this approach gets things precisely backwards. Each day’s news demonstrates the futility of attempts at legislative reform, compared to direct action to make the laws unenforceable.

The principle was stated most effectively by Charles Johnson, one of the more prominent writers on the libertarian Left (“Counter-economic Optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009):

“If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, …then… you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.”

Far greater success can be achieved, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Johnson wrote in the immediate context of copyright law. In response to an anti-copyright blogger who closed up shop in despair over the increasingly draconian nature of copyright law, he pointed to the state’s imploding ability to enforce such laws. The DRM of popular music and movie content is typically cracked within hours of its release, and it becomes freely available for torrent download. Ever harsher surveillance by ISPs in collusion with content “owners” is countered by the use of anonymizers and proxies. And the all-pervasive “anti-songlifting” curriculum in the publik skools, in today’s youth culture, is met with the same incredulous hilarity as a showing of “Reefer Madness” to a bunch of potheads.

The weakest link in any legal regime, no matter how repressive on paper, is its enforcement.

I saw a couple of heartening news items this past week that illustrate the same principle. First, a judge in Missoula County Montana complained that it would soon likely become almost impossible to enforce anti-marijuana laws because of the increasing difficulty of seating juries. In a recent drug case, so many potential jurors in the voir dire process declared their unwillingness to enforce the pot laws that the prosecution chose to work out a plea deal instead. The defendant’s attorney stated that public opinion “is not supportive of the state’s marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear available under any circumstances…” The same thing happened in about sixty percent of alcohol cases under Prohibition.

Public agitation against a law may be very fruitful indeed — but not so much by creating pressure to change the law as by creating a climate of public opinion such that it becomes a dead letter.

Another morale booster is the rapidly improving technology for recording cops, which Radley Balko (a journalist whose chief bailiwick is police misbehavior) describes in the January issue of Reason Magazine (“How to Record the Cops”). Miniaturized, unobtrusive video cameras with upload capability can instantly transmit images for storage offsite or stream content directly to the Internet — which means that the all-too-frequent tendency of thuggish cops to seize or destroy cameras will result only in video of the very act of seizure or destruction itself being widely distributed on the Internet. “Smile, Officer Friendly — you’re on Candid Camera!”

The practical implication, according to Balko, is this:

“Prior to this technology, prosecutors and the courts nearly always deferred to the police narrative. Now that narrative has to be consistent with independently recorded evidence. And as examples of police reports contradicted by video become increasingly common, a couple of things are likely to happen: Prosecutors and courts will be less inclined to uncritically accept police testimony, even in cases where there is no video, and bad cops will be deterred by the knowledge that their misconduct is apt to be recorded.”

As such technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous, police will increasingly operate in an atmosphere where such monitoring is expected — and feared — as a routine part of their job. Even the most stupid and brutal of cops will always carry, in the backs of their minds, the significant possibility that this might be one of the times they’ve got an audience.

New technology, empowering the individual, will soon deter cops in a way that decades of civilian review boards and police commissions failed to achieve.

So the goo-goos have it backwards. Don’t waste time trying to change the law. Just disobey it.

A good article by Ross Kenyon from the Center for a Stateless Society, illustrating the pervasive stereotypes that are perpetuated against anarchists.

How would the NAACP respond if a politician or other public figure had said this about all black people?

Recently, US Representative John Boehner (R-OH) odiously mischaracterizedanarchist philosophy and painted an inaccurate portrait of its core values, saying that at Tea Party events there are “Always a couple of anarchists who want to kill all of us in public office.” Anarchism is an ideology based on individual freedom and opposition to institutionalized aggression, not on some insane love of public mayhem.

Yes, when people hear the word “anarchist” their neurons start firing on images of Molotov cocktail-wielding, black bandanna-wearing street fighters at G20.

That impression is more a product of 200 years of Boehner-style smear rhetoric than an accurate perception of what anarchism means or what anarchists do. It’s on par with any other stereotype — the “lazy/violent Negro” used to justify Jim Crow, the “potential pedophile” trotted out to support discrimination against homosexuals and other sexual minorities, the hopped-up robber or rapist offered up as justification for the war on drugs.

Yes, there are violent and insurrectionary anarchists, just as there are people who resemble those other stereotypes. No, those particular people are not representative of this diverse movement any more than those other stereotypes are representative of African-Americans, LGBTQ persons, or recreational drugs users.

I’ve attended Tea Parties as an anarchist because I’m a sincere libertarian who cares about limiting the power, scope, and size of government and fighting its unjustified intrusion upon the lives of peaceful individuals. Many of of my fellow Tea Party attendees intuitively and intellectually grasp the danger of the unlimited state and seek to reduce its influence over their personal lives. Anarchism is a radical extension of that reasonable impulse, not the nihilist tantrum that Boehner makes it out to be.

At Tea Party events, I like to ask questions of people who care about limiting governments.

How is land is justly acquired? Most people accept homesteading, occupancy and use as appropriate justification to call a parcel of land one’s own.

In reply, I note that the state homesteads nothing, produces nothing, but merely draws a political boundary and declares that if one lives within the stated arbitrary geographical area one must buy defense and justice services from its monopolistic organization.

What happens if someone attempts to buy competing services not linked to artificial political borders? Agents of the state will throw that person in a cage (and kill them if they resists).

Market anarchism is such a basic and consistent idea, an idea so in tune with the values professed by the Tea Partiers, that it’s only natural for anarchists to show up and challenge fellow freedom-lovers to adopt it.

I agree that a consistent philosophy which values and respects the peaceful choices of the Tea Partiers and their neighbors is indeed a threat to Boehner and his ilk, but not a threat of the type he claims. It’s not a death threat, it’s the threat of a pink slip.

—–
C4SS News Analyst Ross Kenyon is a senior of American History at Arizona State University. He is a member of the ASU Students For Liberty leadership team, as well as a summer intern in Washington, DC.

In 2001, three years before his death, SEK III provided the website Libertarian Peacenik, with a brief history of the new libertarian philosophy that emerged after the movement split in 1969.

In July 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society split in Chicago four ways and the Anarchists were purged. Over Labor Day Young Americans for Freedom split.  The Anarchist Caucus and then-separate Libertarian Caucus were purged the following month. In October (Columbus Day weekend) the two groups met at the Hotel Dipomat [sic] in New York City at the first Libertarian Conference hosted by Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess.  The following February, Los Angeles (USC) hosted the Left- Right Festival of Liberation, with such luminaries as SDS ex-president Carl Oglesby (who recently ran for Congress as LP), Robert LeFevre, Karl Hess (again), and many others not as well remembered.

Five Hundred people showed up. The conference was covered in the LA Free Press and many Establishment papers, got extensive reporting on KPFK (which had a Libertarian radio show) and KUSC (which had TWO Libertarian shows, Lowell Ponte’s and Ron Kimberling’s).

I attended all of the above except the first-mentioned (since I was a YAF “libertarian” minarchist until September 1969); I worked side by side with Dana Rohrabacher on the last-mentioned.  He may be an Orange County congressman now, but back then he was the Johnny Grass-seed of the movement, travelling to YAF chapters, singing his libertarian folk songs, and “turning on” the conservatives so they would “tune in” to Libertarianism.

Our Movement grew exponentially through 1972 and even 1973, going from a few thousand students to over 100,000 and recognition in such publications as TV Guide (where Edith Efron, a sympathizer, equated us with conservatives and liberals in an article about equal time provisions).

One of the terms I personally coined, “minarchist,” partly to amuse Murray Rothbard, appeared in Newsweek.

Also in 1971, two Libertarians I had recruited from Columbia University (with the help of David Friedman), got a full-color, full-page cover in the magazine section of the New York Times, standing in front of a red fist above the words “Laissez Faire!”  That was Stan Lehr and Lou Rossetto.  Some of you know the latter from his entrepreneurial days as the original publisher of Wired magazine.

We then organized an East Coast Libertarian Conference at Columbia with the help of Gary Greenberg (remember my posting, “One of Ours at Ground Zero”?).  During that Conference, Jeffrey St. John attempted to defend minarchy from Roy A. Childs.  St. John’s trouncing pretty much ended minarchy as a serious intellectual position within the Libertarian Movement.

Then and only then did David Nolan (who had been active in the earliest formation of the YAF Libertarian Caucus in 1967 but missed the explosive events “under the arch” in St. Louis in 1969 and had not been radicalized) announce the formation of the Libertarian Party.

New Libertarian (my magazine, begun 1970, currently up to 188 issues, and usually #3 in circulation after Reason and Liberty/Libertarian Review), then called New Libertarian Notes, published a debate between David and me in the November 1972 issue which came out just before the presidential election.  The Libertarian Party idea was met with universal scorn by movement activists, either on principle (LeFevrians, Revolutionary Rothbardians) or as hopelessly premature (Right Rothbardians, more conservative types).  And Hospers-Nathan did get a pathetic vote total.

Remember, few people calling themselves Libertarians in 1972 would vote and those were arguing over who would stop the war without socializing the economy the worst: McGovern or Schmitz (theBircher candidate of the American Party).  Surprisingly, both Rothbard and Ayn Rand came out for Nixon!

What kept you partyarchs (a term meaning “sell-out anarchist who claims to oppose the State but embraces a State’s Party,” so technically you minarchists cannot be partyarchs) in the running was the defection of Roger MacBride, a Nixon elector, breaking his pledge (i.e., breaking a contract, appropriate for the start of a State or a Party) and voting for Hospers-Nathan.  Thus was the LP put on the political map, and MacBride was rewarded with the next nomination (1976).  The LP was taken over by “anarchists” (i.e., partyarchs, which is why I coined the term) starting with New York’s Youngstein for Mayor Campaign in 1973.

Then Ed Crane brought Charles Koch’s billions into the LP (bought the national party) and the LP’s highest vote total (for president) was achieved for Ed Clark in 1980 in an orgy of wasted spending. The LP has yet to recover to that level.

Most anti-political Libertarians simply avoided contact with party supporters after 1974.  Ironically,Harry Browne, who had made his fortune denouncing any form of political action, or even overt social action, in 1973, denounced me for going to LP meetings and inviting LPers over to debate us. The LP’s total membership has never been more than 5% of the total number of people calling themselves Libertarian.

There is a LOT more detail, but this should get you started.  Feel free to check any and all facts presented here.  Back in 1974, much of this was published in a special issue of New Libertarian called “Anarchist Graffiti: Where Were You in 1969?” and the rest in 180 or so other issues of NL.  You can also find some of it in back issues of Reason and Libertarian Review, and if you can find them, The Abolitionist and Outlook.  The Society for Individual Liberty, which ultimately absorbed most of the old YAF Libertarian Caucuses had a magazine (Rational Individualist) and a newsletter (SIL News); if you can find the issues, you’ll get a lot of first-hand views of the events at the time.  SIL was merged with the Libertarian International in 1990 to form the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) which still hosts the majority of Libertarian Conferences around the world.

Other countries with major Libertarian Movements (very few with parties) include England, Estonia, Costa Rica, Canada (especially Alberta, my home province), Australia, France, The Netherlands and New Zealand.  Last I checked, only Costa Rica and NZ had parties, although Costa Rica calls its party Movimento Libertario or Libertarian Movement.  They have a very popular congressman in office.

Estonia has both a large Agorist (counter-economic, black market) AND an above-ground political movement.

Although they didn’t call themselves Libertarian, you might include Czechoslovakia’s recent government of Vaclav Klaus.  Then again, since they were ousted for corruption, you might not want to.  Poet, playwright, and intellectual leader Vaclav Havel is still pretty hard-core.

This is just a taste. At least you can’t claim ignorance in our future exchanges. (Yes, some back issues of NL are still available; I sell them on the literature table at the Karl Hess Club every Third Monday of the month. KHC traces its history all the way back to 1971 when Dana Rohrabacher and Seymour Leon started the very first Libertarian Supper Club of Los Angeles.)

–  Freely as ever, SEK3 (Original Libertarian, who earned his Capital L in the streets and the convention halls of the Battle of St. Louis)

“War is the Health of the State.”  – Randolph Bourne, 1918.

Originally appeared in “The Dandelion”, spring 1980

Read from “Mostly on the Edge”, by Karl Hess, in the selected readings section. The book is an autobiography

Karl Hess (1923-1994) was an American writer and libertarian activist. He joined the Libertarian Party and was the editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990. This short text first appeared in the magazine “The Dandelion” in 1980. It stresses the position already highlighted by the historian and theoretician of the anarchist movement, Max Nettlau that anarchy means freedom and voluntary self-organization and no one in the anarchist movement is interested in prescribing which of the various “isms” (capitalism, communism, mutualism, Catholicism, etc.) any anarchist should follow. This message is very relevant now that the interest for anarchy is growing and that some people, who profess to be anarchists, are battling in order to promote very vigorously (and in some cases trying to impose) their own brand of anarchism, either anarcho-communism or anarcho-capitalism. To all of them the message from Karl Hess is: neither anarchist-communist nor anarchist-capitalist, because “there is no hyphen after the anarchist”

Frank Chodorov, individualist

I recently ordered Fugitive Essays by Frank Chodorov (1887-1966), a collection of his essays, and have been thoroughly enjoying the read. In it, he rails against statism of all stripes. He is a staunch individualist who opposed intervention in the marketplace and foreign affairs.

I just finished reading his essay entitled If We Quit Voting, and felt that it would fit in quite nicely on JustLive. It originally appeared in July 1945 in a monthly newsletter Chodorov established called “analysis.” It later appeared as a chapter in his book: Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962), and finally as an included essay in Fugitive Essays. Below is the text for If We Quit Voting:

—————————

If We Quit Voting
by Frank Chodorov

New York in midsummer is measurably more miserable than any other place in this world, and should be comparable to the world for which all planners are headed. Why New Yorkers, otherwise sane, should choose to parboil their innards in a political campaign during this time of the year is a question that comes under the head of man’s inscrutable propensity for self-punishment. And if a fellow elects to let the whole thing pass him by, some socially conscious energumen is bound to sweat him with a lecture on civic duty, like the citizeness who came at me.

For twenty-five years my dereliction has been known to my friends and more than one has undertaken to set me straight; out of these arguments came a solid defense for my nonvoting position. So that the lady in question was well parried with practiced retorts. I pointed out, with many instances, that though we have had candidates and platforms and parties and campaigns in abundance, we have had an equivalent plenitude of poverty and crime and war. The regularity with which the perennial promise of “good times” wound up in depression suggested the incompetence of politics in economic affairs. Maybe the good society we have been voting for lay some other way; why not try another fork in the road, the one pointing to individual self-improvement, particularly in acquiring a knowledge of economics? And so on.

There was one question put to me by my charming annoyer which I deftly sidestepped, for the day was sultry and the answer called for some mental effort. The question: “What would happen if we quit voting?”

If you are curious about the result of noneating you come upon the question of why we eat. So, the query put to me by the lady brings up the reason for voting. The theory of government by elected representatives is that these fellows are hired by the voting citizenry to take care of all matters relating to their common interests. However, it is different from ordinary employment in that the representative is not under specific orders, but is given blanket authority to do what he believes desirable for the public welfare in any and all circumstances, subject to constitutional limitations. In all matters relating to public affairs the will of the individual is transferred to the elected agent, whose responsibility is commensurate with the power thus invested in him.

It is this transference of power from voter to elected agents which is the crux of republicanism. The transference is well nigh absolute. Even the constitutional limitations are not so in fact since they can be circumvented by legal devices in the hands of the agents. Except for the tenuous process of impeachment, the mandate is irrevocable. For the abuse or misuse of the mandate the only recourse left to the principals, the people, is to oust the agents at the next election. But, when we oust the rascals do we not, as a matter of course, invite a new crowd? It all adds up to the fact that by voting them out of power, the people put the running of their community life into the hands of a separate group, upon whose wisdom and integrity the fate of the community rests.

All this would change if we quit voting. Such abstinence would be tantamount to this notice to politicians: since we as individuals have decided to look after our affairs, your services are no longer needed. Having assumed social power we must, as individuals, assume social responsibility; provided, of course, the politicians accept their discharge. The job of running the community would fall on each and all of us. We might hire an expert to tell us about the most improved firefighting apparatus, or a manager to look after cleaning the streets, or an engineer to build us a bridge; but the final decision, particularly in the matter of raising funds to defray costs, would rest with the town-hall meeting. The hired specialists would have no authority other than that necessary for the performance of their contractual duties; coercive power, which is the essence of political authority, would be exercised, if necessary, only by the committee of the whole.

There is some warrant for the belief that a better social order would ensue when the individual is responsible for it and, therefore, responsive to its needs. He no longer has the law or the lawmakers to cover his sins of omission; need of the neighbors’ good opinion will be sufficient compulsion for jury duty and no loopholes in a draft law, no recourse to “political pull,” will be possible when danger to his community calls him to arms. In his private affairs, the now sovereign individual will have to meet the dictum of the marketplace: produce or you do not eat; no law will help you. In his public behavior he must be decent or suffer the sentence of social ostracism, with no recourse to legal exoneration. From a law-abiding citizen he will be transmuted into a self-respecting man.

Would chaos result? No, there would be order, without law to disturb it. But, let us define chaos. Is it not disharmony resulting from social friction? When we trace social friction to its source do we not find that it seminates in a feeling of unwarranted hurt, or injustice? Then chaos is a social condition in which injustice obtains. Now, when one man may take, by law, what another man has put his labor into, we have injustice of the keenest kind, for the denial of a man’s right to possess and enjoy what he produces is akin to a denial of life. Yet the power to confiscate property is the first business of politics. We see how this is so in the matter of taxation; but greater by far is the amount of property confiscated by monopolies, all of which are founded in law.

While this economic basis of injustice has been lost in our adjustment to it, the resulting friction is quite evident. Most of us are poor in spite of our constant effort and known ability to produce an abundance; the incongruity is aggravated by a feeling of hopelessness. But the keenest hurt arises from the thought that the wealth we see about us is somehow ours by right of labor, but is not ours by right of law. Resentment, intensified by bewilderment, stirs up a reckless urge to do something about it. We demand justice; we have friction. We have strikes and crimes and bankruptcy and mental unbalances. And we cheat our neighbors, and each seeks for himself a legal privilege to live by another’s labor. And we have war. Is this a condition of harmony or of chaos?

In the frontier days of our country there was little law, but much order, for the affairs of the community were in the hands of the citizenry. Although fiction may give an opposite impression, it is a fact that there was less per capita crime to take care of then than there is now when law pervades every turn and minute of our lives. What gave the West its wild and woolly reputation was the glamorous drama of intense community life. Everybody was keenly interested in the hanging of a cattle rustler; it was not done in the calculated quiet of a prison, with the dispatch of a mechanical system. The railriding of a violator of town-hall dicta had to be the business of the town prosecutor, who was everybody. Though the citizen’s private musket was seldom used for the protection of life and property, its presence promised swift and positive justice, from which no legal chicanery offered escape, and its loud report announced the dignity of decency. Every crime was committed against the public, not the law, and therefore the public made an ado about it. Mistakes were made, to be sure, for human judgment is ever fallible; but, until the politician came, there was no deliberate malfeasance or misfeasance; until laws came, there were no violations, and the code of human decency made for order.

So, if we should quit voting for parties and candidates, we would individually reassume responsibility for our acts and, therefore, responsibility for the common good. There would be no way of dodging the verdict of the marketplace; we would take back only in proportion to our contribution. Any attempt to profit at the expense of a neighbor or the community would be quickly spotted and as quickly squelched, for everybody would recognize a threat to himself in the slightest indulgence of injustice. Since nobody would have the power to enforce monopoly conditions none would obtain. Order would be maintained by the rules of existence, the natural laws of economics.

That is, if the politicians would permit themselves to be thus ousted from their positions of power and privilege. I doubt it. Remember that the proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters. It is a necessity for political power, no matter how gained, to have the moral support of public approval, and suffrage is the most efficient scheme for registering it; notice how Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin insisted on having ballots cast. In any republican government, even ours, only a fraction of the populace votes for the successful candidate, but that fraction is quantitatively impressive; it is this appearance of overwhelming sanction which supports him in the exercise of political power. Without it he would be lost.

Propaganda, too, would bombard this passive resistance to statism; not only that put out by the politicians of all parties— the coalition would be as complete as it would be spontaneous—but also the more effective kind emanating from seemingly disinterested sources. All the monopolists, all the coupon-clipping foundations, all the tax-exempt eleemosynary institutions—in short, all the “respectables”— would join in a howling defense of the status quo. We would be told most emphatically that unless we keep on voting away our power to responsible persons, it would be grabbed by irresponsible ones; tyranny would result. That is probably true, seeing how since the beginning of time men have sought to acquire property without laboring for it. The answer lies, as it always has, in the judicious use of private artillery. On this point a story, apocryphal no doubt, is worth telling. When Napoleon’s conquerors were considering what to do with him, a buck-skinned American allowed that a fellow of such parts might be handy in this new country and ought to be invited to come over. As for the possibility of a Napoleonic regime being started in America, the recent revolutionist dismissed it with the remark that the musket with which he shot rabbits could also kill tyrants. There is no substitute for human dignity.

But the argument is rather specious in the light of the fact that every election is a seizure of power. The balloting system has been defined as a battle between opposing forces, each armed with proposals for the public good, for a grant of power to put these proposals into practice. As far as it goes, this definition is correct; but when the successful contestant acquires the grant of power toward what end does he use it? Not theoretically but practically. Does he not, with an eye to the next campaign, and with the citizens’ money, go in for purchasing support from pressure groups? Whether it is by catering to a monopoly interest whose campaign contribution is necessary to his purpose, or to a privilege-seeking labor group, or to a hungry army of unemployed or of veterans, the over-the-barrel method of seizing and maintaining political power is standard practice.

This is not, however, an indictment of our election system. It is rather a description of our adjustment to conquest. Going back to beginnings—although the process is still in vogue, as in Manchuria, or more recently in the Baltic states—when a band of freebooters developed an appetite for other people’s property they went after it with vim and vigor. Repeated visitations of this nature left the victims breathless, if not lifeless, and propertyless to boot. So, as men do when they have no other choice, they made a compromise. They hired one gang of thieves to protect them from other gangs, and in time the price paid for such protection came to be known as taxation. The tax gatherers settled down in the conquered communities, possibly to make collections certain and regular, and as the years rolled on a blend of cultures and of bloods made of the two classes one nation. But the system of taxation remained after it had lost its original significance; lawyers and professors of economics, by deft circumlocution, turned tribute into “fiscal policy” and clothed it with social good. Nevertheless, the social effect of the system was to keep the citizenry divided into two economic groups: payers and receivers. Those who lived without producing became traditionalized as “servants of the people,” and thus gained ideological support. They further entrenched themselves by acquiring sub-tax-collecting allies; that is, some of their group became landowners, whose collection of rent rested on the law-enforcement powers of the ruling clique, and others were granted subsidies, tariffs, franchises, patent rights, monopoly privileges of one sort or another. This division of spoils between those who wield power and those whose privileges depend on it is succinctly described in the expression, “the state within the state.”

Thus, when we trace our political system to its origin we come to conquest. Tradition, law, and custom have obscured its true nature, but no metamorphosis has taken place; its claws and fangs are still sharp, its appetite as voracious as ever. In the light of history it is not a figure of speech to define politics as the art of seizing power; and its present purpose, as of old, is economic. There is no doubt that men of high purpose will always give of their talents for the common welfare, with no thought of recompense other than the goodwill of the community. But, so long as our taxation system remains, so long as the political means for acquiring economic goods is available, just so long will the spirit of conquest assert itself; for men always seek to satisfy their desires with the least effort. It is interesting to speculate on the kind of campaigns and the type of candidates we would have if taxation were abolished and if, also, the power to dispense privilege vanished. Who would run for office if there were “nothing in it”?

Why should a self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded in thievery? For that is what one does when one votes. If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what we can do toward cleaning up the institution so that it can be used for the maintenance of an orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be done; we have been voting for one “good government” after another, and what have we got? Perhaps the silliest argument, and yet the one invariably advanced when this succession of failures is pointed out, is that “we must choose the lesser of two evils.” Under what compulsion are we to make such a choice? Why not pass up both of them?

To effectuate the suggested revolution all that is necessary is to stay away from the polls. Unlike other revolutions, it calls for no organization, no violence, no war fund, no leader to sell it out. In the quiet of his conscience each citizen pledges himself, to himself, not to give moral support to an unmoral institution, and on election day he remains at home. That’s all. I started my revolution twenty-five years ago and the country is none the worse for it.

————–

Other works by Frank Chodorov:

• The Economics of Society, Government and State (1946)
• One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (1952)
• The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1952)
• The Rise & Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces That Underline Social Institutions (1959)
• Flight to Russia (1959)
• Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)
• Fugitive Essays (1980)
  

Learn more about Agorism in this informative audio series based on Konkin’s theory of counter-economics in order to defeat the state. Background info and Youtube audio via Pete Eyre.

ARLINGTON, VA -Last summer Mike Gogulski posted an audio version of himself reading The Agorist Class Theory(.pdf from Agorism.info), written by Wally Conger based on the notes of the late Samuel Edward Konkin III (which includes a foreword by Brad Spangler).

In an effort to encourage more people to reject the violence of the State and life free, moral lives, I decided to take Mike up on his suggestion that somebody turn the mp3’s he created into videos and a playlist on YouTube.

For a bit more on Agorism check out this exchange between Rothbard (Konkin on Libertarian Strategy) and Konkin’s response (Reply to Rothbard).

Agora! Anarchy! Action!

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Today (July 8th) is Samuel E. Konkin III birthday, he would have been 63, in memoriam I posted a great audio version of his classic work ‘New Libertarian Manifesto’, with text included. The video is narrated by Mike Gogulski [www.nostate.com].

Free download of SEK III’s New Libertarian Manifesto in .pdf form.

New Libertarian Manifesto — The 25th Anniversary Edition, by Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004), brings the groundbreaking work back into print. First published in October, 1980, the Manifesto is the most concise treatise on Counter-Economics and Agorism available to the public. Five chapters encompass Konkin’s unique view of libertarianism: I. Statism: Our Condition; II. Agorism: Our Goal; III. Counter-Economics: Our Means; IV. Revolution: Our Strategy; and V. Action: Our Tactics. The 25th Anniversary Edition is the fourth printing of the book, which has been an underground anarchist classic. Also included in this edition are critiques of New Libertarian Manifesto by Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D., Robert LeFevre, and Erwin S. Strauss, and replies by Samuel Edward Konkin III, which were published in Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance in 1981 and long out of print until now.

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Agora! Anarchy! Action!

I hate capitalism and loathe the state, so I'm gonna smash this window and grab this nifty smart phone. Never mind the fact I just helped capitalist corporations, insurance companies and police officers pockets get fatter. FAIL!

Frankly, I’m fed up with protests that achieve nothing, but more power for the state and less credibility for dissent. We can walk out of the system anytime, you don’t need to go to these criminals and ask for your inherent rights.

Agorism promotes the idea of ignoring government, by dispelling the myth that these crooks are your rulers. Therefore no need to protest, assert your rights through direct action, siphoning power and money from the state, eventually causing its demise.

At these protests, you see cops dressed up like stormtroopers, protecting the so called leaders. These police state minions have families, and are just as much affected by the globalists as we are. The global elites at the top, have cleverly placed us in opposition, positioning both sides to attack each other, while the puppet masters remain unscathed.

Okay rant begin…

This years G20 resulted in another failed smash and burn protest conducted by undercover cops, and misdirected black-bloc anarchists. Do these political activists really believe that thrusting themselves against the system with aggression will work? The crime syndicate posing as our leaders, can care less about you marching in the streets, yelling at the top of your lungs with signs and breaking things. The people who are performing these acts, are unknowingly playing a part in their plan. They need public dissent to their tyrannic reign, displayed as violent inarticulate troublemakers, who are a threat to the public. This justifies the states authority, allows more police state measures, and loss of liberty through legislation.

At past events, undercover cops have been exposed posing as anarchists, in order to create havoc that enables all protesters at these events to be targeted. We have covered this extensively in a previous article with video evidence, here.

Paul Joseph Watson from Prison Planet also makes some good points about these provocateurs:

An eyebrow-raising photograph of one of the anarchists who set fire to a Toronto police car during anti-G20 protests this past weekend shows him wearing Nike clothing, a potential indication that provocateurs dressed up as black-bloc “anarchists” were again employed by authorities to cause mayhem in order to justify a brutal police crackdown and crush free speech, as peaceful protesters were attacked and arrested while the anarchists who torched the cars were left alone.

The picture shows the two culprits who set fire to the police car congratulating each other and looking remarkably relaxed about potentially being caught by police considering what they had just done. One of the men is wearing Nike pants – the distinctive logo of the company can be seen above his left pocket.

Why would a hardcore anarchists so dedicated to his cause that he is willing to torch a police car be wearing clothing made by a company that anarchists universally abhor, and one that has routinely been targeted by anarchists for well over a decade?

During this years (2010) G8/G20 summit, Canada spent 1.2 billion on security. Considering the ridiculous staged and organic violence that has occurred, the state can save some face and justify the enormous bill that the taxpayers get stuck with. Just think if no one showed up to protest, it would be a much more powerful statement of dissent with no media spin. The state would look like despotic fear mongers, who are afraid of their own citizens for no apparent reason. But instead, the state will grand stand about the destruction, seeking more political control, and the capitalist imperialism system will get a new influx of cash to fix all the broken glass, destroyed cars and buildings. So who benefits? The people who work for the capitalist system fixing things, insurance companies, police making overtime, politicans and so on. The media and government can also keep the stereotypical perceptions about anarchism intact, bolstering the state further.

While the G20 craziness was going on, individuals rejecting the system with direct action, gathered at the annual Porcupine Freedom Fest in New Hampshire, sponsored by the Free State Project. Events like this, should take place during these globalist meetings worldwide, in order to demonstrate our freedom, and viewpoint that the state isn’t our ruler. Imagine if more people organized peaceful festivals that coincided on those days and refused to work, buy, or watch TV for example.

Seems to me that planning a major freedom festival or event during these globalist meetings on the far side of town, away from the police, would be more productive. All the cops will be tied up protecting the crime syndicate, leaving us free to express ourselves and congregate. Meeting like minded people, minus the pepper spray, rubber bullets, and possible arrest, would be a far more beneficial experience.

Agora! Anarchy! Action!

PorcFest 2010 group photo

Photo via nealus on Flickr

Oscar winning documentary on freedom activist Karl Hess.

Via Wikipedia

Hess began reading American anarchists largely due to the recommendations of his friend Murray Rothbard. Hess said that upon reading the works of Emma Goldman he discovered that anarchists believed everything he had hoped the Republican Party would represent, and that Goldman was the source for the best and most essential theories of Ayn Rand without any of the “crazy solipsism that Rand was so fond of.”

From 1969 to 1971 Hess edited The Libertarian Forum with Rothbard.

Hess eventually put his focus on the small scale, on community. He said, “Society is: people together making culture.” He deemed two of his cardinal social principles as being “opposition to central political authority” and “concern for people as individuals.” His rejection of standard American party politics was reflected in a lecture he gave during which he said “The Democrats or liberals think that everybody is stupid and therefore they need somebody… to tell them how to behave themselves. The Republicans think everybody is lazy…”

In 1969 and 1970, Hess joined with others, including Murray Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, Dana Rohrabacher, Samuel Edward Konkin III, and former Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby to speak at two “left-right” conferences which brought together activists from both the Old Right and the New Left in what was emerging as a nascent libertarian movement. Hess later joined the Libertarian Party which was founded in 1971, and served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990.

Here is another great interview from Mother Jones about Hess.

Kevin Carson takes on statist liberals and anarcho-capitalist ideologues alike in this brilliant article about Somalia and anarchy.

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Somalia — Is That Really All You Got?
by Kevin Carson

Rachel Maddow, a popular liberal commentator on MSNBC, recently iterated — for the umpteenth time — the standard liberal talking point of Somalia as a supposedly unanswerable argument against anarchy. The Somalia reference, when done according to formula, comes as the follow-up to a one-two punch – usually preceded by the “drown government in a bathtub” quote from Grover Norquist.

Following a snarky allusion to the idealized “small-government conservative” vision of society (“which, you know, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of bucolic and awesome, right?”), Maddow went in for the kill: “When you see it in action in a country that hasn‘t had a government in about 18 years, it actually looks like this. This is Somalia.”

But this is dirty pool for several reasons. First, no intelligent anarchist argues that the sudden and catastrophic implosion of the state will result in a peaceful, self-regulating society.

We’ve lived through centuries of the process which Pyotr Kropotkin described in “Mutual Aid” and “The State,” by which centralized territorial states suppressed bottom-up, self-organized alternatives, and caused civil society to atrophy. Under such circumstances, when the state suddenly disappears, the result is likely to be a power vacuum with nothing ready to take its place, and the proliferation of all sorts of social pathologies.

What most of us want to do is reverse the centuries-long process Kropotkin described, by building alternative social institutions, organized on a voluntary cooperative basis, to supplant the state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, conventionally regarded as the father of anarchism, described it as devolving or submerging the state in the social body. And this by no means implies the anarcho-capitalist vision of a society where all functions are performed by for-profit business firms. It could just as easily mean a society of worker and consumer cooperatives, common property, free clinics, community supported agriculture, intentional communities, urban communes and squats, and the kinds of mutual aid arrangement described by Kropotkin in “Mutual Aid” and E.P. Thompson in “The Making of the English Working Class.”

So it would make far more sense to look at a stateless or near-stateless society that’s been that way for a long time, under comparatively stable conditions (like some of the near-stateless areas in Southeast Asia described by James Scott in “The Art of Not Being Governed”), and the institutions by which people peaceful govern their lives.

Second, “Somalia” does not equal “Mogadishu.” Most of the horrific, Mad Max scenes captured in Somalia are in Mogadishu, where the central state was most powerful before the collapse and the institutions of civil society were accordingly most atrophied. As Roderick Long, director of C4SS’s parent body the Molinari Society, put it, “the farther one gets away from Mogadishu, the more one gets into relatively peaceful areas that have always been anarchic or close to it, barring occasional intrusions from the statebuilders in the city.” In other words, the further you get from Mogadishu, the less Somalia resembles “Somalia,” and the more it resembles the kind of stable society described by James Scott.

Third, the proper comparison to Somalia is not the United States and similar societies in the West, but to the actual state that existed in Somalia before the collapse of central power. Given that comparison, things in Somalia aren’t that bad at all. For example: a study by Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford and Alex Nowrasteh took “a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy.” And it found that Somalia, when subjected to an honest comparison — “between Somalia when it had a functioning government, and Somalia now” — is less poor, has higher life expectancy, and has experienced a drastic increase in telephone lines.

I’d also add, parenthetically, that while Somalia is often celebrated by anarcho-capitalist types, in reality it hardly fits the anarcho-capitalist stereotype (especially in those areas away from Mogadishu). For example, there’s widespread communal ownership of land by extended families and clans, with only possessory or usufructory rights by individuals.

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with David Bollier about his latest book, VIRAL SPIRAL. It’s about how the Internet is building a new digital republic. And Cory Doctorow tells us about his science fiction novel, MAKERS. It imagines the birth pangs of a new remix culture.

I found the interviewees’ use of the term “market” to be a bit misapplied from a market-anarchist perspective, but since they are neither anarchists nor market-anarchists, that’s to be expected. They seemed to use it in the sense of any transaction involving money; when, of course, market-anarchists typically use the term to include all forms of voluntary interaction and transaction — whether money is involved or not — and exclude any non-voluntary forms, such as state-granted monopoly privilege (e.g., copyright itself, discussed but not conceptually dismissed in the interviews).

If, however, you can understand that the “market,” as referred to in the recording, means all monetary transaction (state-supported and not), then there is much to be gained from listening. The interviewees make fantastic points about non-monetary motivation, the emergence of a new free-culture, Creative Commons licensing, the IP monopoly, ignoring unenforceable state mandates, the downfall of dinosaur media companies with the rise of filesharing and instant worldwide distribution online, and more.

The idea of the commons is an ancient one. Peasants of medieval Europe seldom owned their own land. Legally, it was held by the nobles, the king or the Church. But they did have the right to use certain lands in common to grow crops, cut wood, or graze livestock. As capitalism took over from feudalism, the commons began to be privatized. First, land and forests were enclosed. As commodity relations spread, more natural resources, like water, followed suit. In our own era privatization has gobbled up a huge new arena of the commons as intellectual property, from the patenting of traditional plant varieties and the copywrighting of traditional folk tales to the human genome and biodiversity itself. [...]

I also dislike the conflation of intellectual “property” with physical property that occurs in the interviews. They speak to the idea that IP law is certainly overbearing and weighted in favor of state-tied industries and corporations, but they don’t dismiss the idea of IP altogether. Personally, I’d like to see the two subjects discussed as separate concepts, but unfortunately the prevailing view does not lend itself to this dichotomy.

In this vein, the interviewer makes reference to copyright as having been created to protect the rights of the artist, when in fact it was (and is) a monopoly system designed to protect the interests of publishers — artists be damned. This is touched on slightly, but Doctorow puts forward a watered-down version of his usual argument, referring instead to the intent of the US Constitution.

Despite these quibbles, I quite enjoyed the interviews, and they serve to reenforce the notion that the Internet is indeed a bastion of freedom and alternative interaction previously unimaginable. Long may it live!

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You don’t know SEK3 and call yourself a Libertarian? Well, actually and unfortunately Sam needs an introduction. While he’s well known among all those Libertarians form Class of ‘69 who were there back in the day, he is virtually unknown among those who were to young to participate in early Movement. To a degree he is to blame for this. During the early 90s when most of young activist were introduced to Libertarianism Sam took a short break from the libertarian Movement. But now he’s back and kicking.

So who the hell is Samuel E. Konkin III? What is John Guilt? It took a whole book to answer that question… As for Sam – Original Libertarian, who earned his Capital L in the streets of the Battle of St. Louis. Editor of “The Agorist Quarterly”, “New Isolationist”, “Frefanzine” and many, many other Libertarian, Agorist, Anarchist, and anti-interventionist publications, the best known of which is “New Libertarian” published since 1970 and acclaimed by Mr. Libertarian (aka Murray N. Rothbard) as the leading “in-reach” magazine in This Movement of Ours. In 1980 he made big splash with his “New Libertarian Manifesto” applauded by Robert LeFevre for its “position respecting consistency, objective and method” (you can read it on-line [here]). To promote Libertarianism he co-funded Movement of the Libertarian Left, The Agorist Institute and Karl Hess Club. He organized academic conferences, classes, seminars and meetings… No wonder, he become a role model for fictional libertarian heroes created by L. Neil Smith (“The American Zone”), Victor Koman (“Kings of the High Frontier”) and J. Neil Schulman (“Alongside Night”).

O.K. so now you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg, don’t let me stop you any longer. Go for it.

Necessary background

Q: Before we start the interview I would like to ask you to define a term that will pop up many times during this discussion and as many people think is synonymous. What is Libertarianism for you?

SEK3: Libertarian is another term for Free-Market Anarchist, though it often includes softer-core fellow travelers such as minarchists. The word originally was used by free-thinkers in relation to religion to mean those who believed in free-will over determinism (which is not all that bad an association for us) and then became a euphemism for anarchist in Europe in the 19th Century. It was revived by Leonard Read in the 1940s to mean those Classical Liberals who refused to join the rest of the Liberal Movement into becoming soft-Left statists, and who had largely joined the U.S. Old Right coalition against that kind of Liberal, bordering on fascist, New Deal. With the election of Eisenhower and death of Robert Taft, the Old Right coalition disintegrated. Buckley pulled the pro-State conservatives into his New Right while Murray Rothbard rallied the Isolationist (non-interventionist in foreign policy) Libertarians into alliance with the New Left. New York-based Rothbard became an anarchist in 1950 and defined the hard-core position accordingly. Robert LeFevre accomplished the same in the Western U.S.

Q: Unfortunately many people associate Libertarianism with Libertarian Party. Some people even believe that it was the first organization that defined libertarianism. Could you straight that out?

SEK3: In 1969, both the SDS and the Young Americans for Freedom split at their respective conventions. The “right” Libertarians from YAF joined the free-market anarchists from SDS at a historic conference in New York over Columbus Day weekend, called by Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess. In February of 1970, several activists working for Robert LeFevre organized an even bigger conference in Los Angeles at USC, which included Hess, SDS ex-president Carl Oglesby, and just about every big name in the Movement up to that point. I attended both, as well as the YAF Convention in St. Louis before.

After L.A.’s conference, campus Libertarian Alliances sprung up around the country. I personally organized five in Wisconsin during 1970 and a dozen in downstate New York (New York City and environs) from 1971-73. The Libertarian Party’s first “real” campaign was Fran Youngstein for Mayor (of New York City) in 1973, and was the only campaign in which anti-political (what Europeans would call anti-parliamentarian) Libertarians worked with anarchist who embraced political office-seekin (whom I named partyarchs).

By that time, the Libertarian Movement had grown from “Murray’s living room” (and LeFevre’s Freedom School, later Rampart College) into thousands in 1970, tens of thousands in 1971, and hundreds of thousands (some abroad, as in Britain and Australia) in 1972. The steep rate of Movement growth leveled off with the rise in visibility of the Party.

Q: Is it true that few activists started the first chapter of LP as a joke?

SEK3: Ed Butler, editor of the 1960s Westwood Village Square, became a Libertarian in 1970. Along with anti-political Libertarians Gabriel Aguilar (a Galambosian) and Chris Shaefer (LeFevrian), they registered the name “Libertarian Party” in California to use for making fun of the electoral process a full year before David Nolan had his Christmas 1971 party where he announced the creation of the LP, seriously.

By the way, Murray Rothbard and many others refused to take Nolan’s party seriously during the Hospers-Nathan campaign. It would have vanished without a trace had not Nixon Presidential Elector Roger MacBride not jumped the fence and voted for Hospers instead of Nixon in the Electoral College (which actually decides the president in the United States). Walter Block, who was a rare LP candidate for lower office in New York in 1972, ran his campaign humorously for the State Assembly by putting out bumper stickers calling for “Block for Disassembly.”

Q: When France was under occupation there was a custom of shaving the heads of women that collaborated with Germans. Which ‘libertarians’, except LP, do you think should have the same treatment?

SEK3: Seriously, I do like your metaphor of Libertarians as maquis, or Resistance. Nonetheless, there are two big differences, and I don’t mean how we treat our enemies. First, we are not parasitically living off the enemy’s economy but building a better one “underground”; second, we are allowed by the State (occupation force) to discuss and recruit publicly (at least for now). I suspect the latter case will cease to exist the moment they take us as a serious threat.

Q: Some people become Libertarians after reading Ayn Rand novels; a book by Hainlein or Rothbard converts some. How did you discover that you were a Libertarian?

SEK3: Heinlein in Moon is a Harsh Mistress first gave me the concept (“Rational Anarchist”). When I found out that Bernardo de la Paz was based on a real person (Robert LeFevre), I took it seriously. I progressed through the Canadian and then U.S. Right via Frank Meyer (who, until his death in 1970, attempted a synthesis of conservative and Libertarian, called “Fusionism”) and Ludwig von Mises (who called himself a Liberal right up to his death in 1973 at the age of 92; I knew him for his last three years). Both led in different ways to Rothbard but he was being smeared as pro-communist in those Viet Nam War days for his militant isolationism. The final step was provided by an anti-communist free-market anarchist named Dana Rohrabacher at the St. Louis YAF Convention. He was a charismatic campus activist, radicalized by Robert LeFevre who provided him with small funding to travel the country with his instrument and folk songs from campus to campus, converting YAF chapters into Libertarian Alliances and SIL chapters. Alas, later he fell into politics, but not the LP. The Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch supported him in two failed Republicans primary campaigns, and after Rohrabacher put in time as Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, he got his reward of a safe seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Orange County. He is still in office today, with growing seniority. There are few issues on which he is still Libertarian, certainly fewer than, say, Ron Paul holds.

But in 1969-71, Dana Rohrabacher was the most successful and most beloved Libertarian activist, and, in my opinion, there would not have been a Movement without him. And he was a close friend of mine until he crossed the line with his campaign for Congress.

Q: By the way, what do you think about Ron Paul? Many partyarchs confronted with voluntaryist arguments against electoral politics point at him and ask: “Look at Ron, do you really think that he ’s destroying the Libertarian movement?” How would you answer that question?

SEK3: Ron Paul in many ways belongs to another era. His closest ideological ancestor was the Iowa Congressman H.R. Gross in the 1960s and 1970s, and Rothbard’s favorite, Congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska in the 1950s. One can go all the way back to the Original who split with Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans in the early 1800s, John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia. The 435-member U.S. House of Representatives seems to be able to tolerate about one at any time, perhaps as a court jester, or maybe a lone example of what the House was supposed to do in theory. Note that there are never two at the same time. Note also that they have to operate within the two-party oligopoly. And, finally, note that Paul did NOT have the guts to join African-American Left-Reform Democrat Barbara Lee in voting against the enabling resolution of the U.S. House allowing George III (Bush II) to circumvent a Declaration of War (against whom? what enemy State?), although he has been a more consistent defender of both civil and economic liberties after that vote than Lee has.

Finally, Paul is too independent to even travel in a pack with the “Republican Liberty Caucus,” the latest of four attempts to build a soft-core, conservative voting bloc in the Republican Party as an alternative to third-party futility.

From history to theory…

Q: Many Libertarians seek the birth of the Libertarian movement during the Young Americans for Freedom convention in St. Louis. You were one of the participants, could you tell me what happened there?

SEK3: The major issues of the 1960s for American youth were the Viet Nam War and conscription for it, drugs legalization, and freedom to protest. Libertarians agreed with the New Left (SDS, etc.) on all these issues and the traditional conservatives (“trads”) who controlled YAF were opposed. YAF’s first chairman, Bob Schuchman, was a Libertarian, which is why it was called the Young Americans for Freedom and not, say, “Young Conservatives” even though most members identified with William F. Buckley and National Review. Thus, many young libertarians were attracted to YAF. In early 1969, the Trads initiated purges against other Rightists, not just Libertarians; Objectivist, racists, closet Nazis, Wallacites, and Roman Catholic radical traditionalists, “Rad Trads” were all ousted wherever they had control. On the East Coast and California, these were mainly Libertarian chapters and they showed up in St. Louis at the National Convention to fight for their credentials. The Trads dropped their “Conservatism with a Libertarian Face” approach and allowed only about 200 Libertarian delegates (out of nearly 1000 before the purges, maybe 500 would have been Libertarian or other opponents of the National Office). Some, like me, had been selected by the National Chairman-to-be David Keene as a loyal supporter, but then switched sides when approached by Rohrabacher and Don Ernsberger of Pennsylvania YAF (later founder of SIL) with the stories of what was going on.

Jared Lobdell (still a close friend of mine) tried to forge a compromise on the key draft (conscription) issue. However, during the proceedings after his committee reported, a Rothbardian anarchist delegate (one of a very few, less than 20) lit what appeared to be to be a Xerox copy of his draft card.

The National Office (David A. Keene and Jim Farley leading the vote) won easily and Libertarians were purged from YAF. But there were variations from state to state. For example in Wisconsin (where I was then based), I was somewhat protected from the purge by my closeness to Keene and Lobdell. And Dana Rohrabacher came to Wisconsin to campaign for David for State Senate (Keene lost), but actually subverted the Madison UW chapter. Three of us left on our own and joined with three YIPpies in late 1969 to form the University of Wisconsin Libertarian Alliance. But there were dozens, if not hundreds, of stories like this on campuses across North America. Every college had a Libertarian Alliance (or SIL chapter) by the Fall of 1970; for the next four years, there were two or more major Libertarian Conferences a year on the East Coast (New York or Philadelphia) or West Coast (Los Angeles), all preceding the “libertarian” Party.

Q: In one of the first issues of New Libertarian Notes you had a discussion with David Nolan about the morals behind running for the office accusing him of betraying the Libertarian ideals, but a few months later you joined the Free Libertarian Party of New York. Was it a sudden change of views or did you just try do destroy the party from the inside?

SEK3: Actually, it wasn’t THAT early in our publication. It was in issue 17, in 1972, and it got NLN kicked out of Laissez Faire Books because I “dared” to compare our exchange to that of Lysander Spooner and Senator Thomas Bayard in the 1870s.

Ed Clark, the founding chair of the New York LP (before he moved to California) turned over the Free Libertarian Party (it was called because the New York Liberal Party threatened to sue the LP for confusing the ballot) to Jerry Klasman. Jerry invited me to join the FLP Executive Board. When I told him I didn’t believe in the Party and would work for its demise, he said “That’s O.K.” In 1973 I was re-elected with the highest vote of any candidate, but was unable to bring any of the rest of the slate of the Radical Caucus into office. (The closest second was my then-girlfriend and later briefly my first fiancee, Nona Aguilar.) By 1974 we were, in alliance with Upstate Reformers against the “Anarchocentrist” Manhattan machine, poised to win control of the FLP. The last thing we wanted (in the RC) was to take political power, so I and a few of the hardest core (I admit, some of my comrades were tempted to stay in and try for power) refused to enter the convention hall and vote. We sat outside and sold NLNs.

Basically, I had expressed the internal contradictions of partyarchy. I simply demanded that the LP apply the same tactics of decentralization and weakening of authority to its own structure as it wish to do to the State. Rothbard and Gary Greenberg led the Centralists who argued that the LP had to have disciplined cadre and a minimum of internal bickering (i.e. debate and dissent). Strangely enough, my approach seemed to appeal more to libertarians than their Leninoid tactic.

Murray Rothbard, viewing the chaos he could no longer control with frustration, pointed to me through the open door of the convention hall and said, “Is he the only other person who understands what’s going on here?”

Before we left the FLP we had won ourselves Delegate Status to the Dallas National Convention so we decided to try out tactics there. I allied our Radical Caucus delegates with challenger Eric Scott Royce’s delegates (whom we called the Reform caucus), against the Nolan Machine. But Nolan had already lost control to Ed Crane, who won easily. At that point, the Radical Caucus (minus two turncoats) walked out of the LP forever, and we took quite a few of the Reformers with us, including Royce who has written for my publications to this day.

Q: In 1971 you co-hosted “Freedom Conspiracy’s Columbia Libertarian Conference” during which you had an argument with Milton Friedman. What was the reason for the argument?

SEK3: Uncle Miltie took questions, but only written ones. So I wrote on a card 1. Did you have anything to do with the passage of withholding of income tax? 2. If so, do you regret it? 3. If so, would you do it again?

To my astonishment (and I give him credit here), he read the card and answered it straightforwardly. To the astonishment of his audience (he apparently thought they were conservative, not growingly radical libertarians), Friedman answered . . .

1. Yes, it was during World War II when he came up with the idea, in order to raise money for the State faster on behalf of the war effort. 2. No, he didn’t regret it, since the war was justified. 3. Yes, for the same reason, he would do it again.

Friedman lost nearly everyone in the audience after that, and Friedmanism was smashed for good in the Libertarian Movement of 1971. Ludwig von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard, and the Austrian School reign unchallenged until this day.

Q: Since that conference many Libertarians often reject the Chicago school and neoclassical economics as impossible to reconcile with libertarian ideas. Some people affiliated with it are still anarchists (i.e. D. Friedman or B. Caplan). Don’t you think that they are being a little too harsh?

SEK3: No. Rothbard proved that the Chicago School economists are simply efficiency experts for the State. The worst cases were the Chilean “Chicago Boys” who served Augusto Pinochet and the Israeli ones who worked for Revisionist Zionist (i.e., fascist) Menachem Begin.

Q: When you lived in New York in the 70s did you have an occasion to participate in the discussion evenings in Ms and Mr Rothbard’s house?

SEK3: Indeed, and enjoyed them immensely. Though the Movement had already expanded out of “Murray Rothbard’s Living Room,” it was still the most “in” place to be in the early Movement.

Q: As we know Rothbard’s nature was a bit rowdy and he said many things that caused a split in the Libertarian movement. How was your collaboration with him?

SEK3: Actually, Rothbard was seldom responsible for personal splits; he was quite affable. His speaking manner was, I described it in NLN, like Woody Allen but with a grasp of economics. (Allen, by the way, is an Anarchist, though not free-market.) Originally, he refused to take the LP seriously, so when I did, I largely drew on LeFevre’s principled attacks on politics. Rothbard had written anti-political essays before, so I was surprised that he embraced the LP during the Fran Youngstein campaign. Perhaps he thought it was a new method to bring in young professionals, especially attractive female ones like Fran and her friends. (Youngstein worked for IBM.) At that point, we split ideologically, though it never got as personal as, say, Rand and Branden, LeFevre and Sy Leon, or Galambos and Jay Snelson. Rothbard actively opposed a personality cult developing. He continued to write for me when I requested, and we got together in an anti-Kochtopus alliance in 1980 after the disastrous Clark campaign. I supported him when Crane pulled Murray’s share in the Cato Institute, effectively purging him, by my offering him shares of stock in New Libertarian magazine. And, as I mentioned before, became a Founding Advisor to the Agorist Institute in 1985.

We corresponded right up through the 1990 election (he had broken permanently with the LP in 1988, pursuing a new Paleoconservative alliance) and then again, after my divorce in 1992 up until his death in 1995.

Q: There are some who claim that late Rothbard abandoned not only the Libertarian movement but the Libertarian theory itself. Could you straight that out?

SEK3: Murray Newton Rothbard, Ph.D., always left himself maximum latitude in both strategy and tactics, while hewing to what he called “The Plumb Line” of orthodox libertarianism. It’s true he ended his life trying to reconstruct the Old Right alliance of his youth from Paleoconservative and “paleolibertarians,” but he insisted he gave no ground on libertarian principles. From his accepting of anarchy in 1950 until his purge from National Review in 1957 he was part of the Right. But he was purged for joining the anti-nuclear popular fronts largely run by the Left, and he accused the “New Right” of abandoning anti-imperialism and accepting Big Government as necessary to fighting Communism (evil because it was . . . Big Government). He was purged from the Objectivists, though he himself was an atheist, for refusing to pressure his wife into giving up her Protestant Christianity.

He worked enthusiastically for the New Left through the 1960s, leaving only when it became obvious the anarchists had been ousted from the SDS and all important organizations, leaving variants of Maoism and Stalinism battling over control of ever-smaller grouplets. He considered supporting a Liberal Republican (usually anathema to both Libertarians and Conservatives), Mark Hatfield, for President in 1972, until Hatfield pulled out. Though he had worked with anti-war Democrats preferentially until then, he ended up supporting Nixon over McGovern.

He opposed the Libertarian Party from its founding but mainly on strategic grounds: he considered the LP “premature” at this stage of Movement history. When he embraced it after seeing a superficial popularity for it among many of his activist friends, he attempted to mold it into his concept of a Libertarian Party: highly disciplined cadre on the Leninist model. That model was unattractive to 90% of LP members (and an even higher percentage of those outside the Party, of course) and when his candidate was rejected in 1988 (after losing), he noticed Tom Fleming organizing the Paleoconservatives and threw in his lot with them, going so far as to become the economics advisor of their candidate, Pat Buchanan, in 1992. He died before the 1996 election, and without Rothbard, Buchanan abandoned the market for rampant protectionism and almost selected a socialist (black, female) running mate.

Q: In 1975 you decided to move from New York to California, preceding that was a three-week journey. There are legends going around about that trip. Can you tell me something about it?

SEK3: It was right out of Jack Kerouac, and anything but in a straight line. Four of us and what belongings we could take were stuffed in a Toyota. Although I don’t like to drive, by the time we hit Oregon (I told you it was not in a straight line), the rest were so tired they all agreed I should take a turn. So I crossed the entire length of Oregon in about three hours and they never asked me to drive again.

We stopped in Louisville, Kentucky, for the first Rivercon (a science fiction convention) and visited the best-known libertarian science-fiction fan back then, Richard E. Geis, in Portland, Oregon. We got lost in Marin County during its most flaky period (captured in the novel and film, Serial, perfectly) and drove the entire West Coast down to L.A. where Dana Rohrabacher found us apartments.

None of us would ever go through that again, but we all remember it as a Rite of Passage and, at least for me, the defining moment of leaving the ’60s mentality and finally entering that long amorphous period from 1975 until the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

Q: After you arrived on the west coast you moved with a group of people into the so called Anarchovillage. Can you explain what’s hiding under that name?

SEK3: Different people had different aims. Primarily, it was a “labour resource” for putting New Libertarian out weekly (yes, you heard it right, every damned week except two for 101 issues) from December 1975 through January 1978. There were 10 apartments and a house, and at our peak we had 8 of them and the house occupied by Libertarians. Two conservative sf writers also lived there, one moving in deliberately to be with us. An old Quaker SDS activist who had holed up there to write SF discovered we had moved in and joined us.

No women had their own apartments, but some visited a lot and a few moved in with different men, sometimes sequentially. One in particular worked her way through 90% of us before moving on.

And we even had a token gay guy, though we didn’t find out about it for several years (the most promiscuous female, mentioned above, outed him); he was the apartment manager and friend of Dana Rohrabacher’s who originally got us the apartment.

Q: Contemporary Libertarianism seems to be very loosely attached to the counter-culture. Something tells me that it wasn’t always like that…

SEK3: Hmm. I’m not sure how to answer that. As far as I can tell, what remains of the Counter-Culture is almost entirely libertarian. The latest “alternative culture” of cyberspace geeks is not just libertarian but outright agorist. The hippie counter-culture had unacknowledged libertarian principles (see Jeff Riggenbach’s In Praise of Decadence) and Libertarian activists from Kerry Thornley, perhaps the first conscious “Left Libertarian” (editor of the Liberal Innovator) to always-Right Dana Rohrabacher embraced it gladly. Science-fiction fandom, another large alternative culture, has moved from unacknowledged Libertarianism (Heinlein, Anderson) to accepting or criticising it explicitly as too dominant.

Maybe you are implying the current Libertarian Movement is not entirely counter-cultural and that it used to be more so? Actually, it’s about the same split between those who largely embrace the existing culture (such as Rothbard, as straight as you can imagine) and those who embrace alternatives, though the alternative offerings have expanded considerably. If anything, I would say that rejection of the predominant culture is greater than it was in the 1960s but less overt. Guys (and now gals) in suits who work in a corporate office, then come home to smoke dope, chat on-line with subversives, attend their “alternative lifestyle” conventions on weekends, and flip over those suit lapels to show a black flag button pinned there, are common. This “swing both ways” attitude is certainly post-60s and quite common among our younger people.

…and from theory to practice

Q: During the 60s and 70s many Libertarians cooperated with groups from radical left, Karl Hess was a member of the Black Panthers and the Students for Democratic Society, Rothbard cooperated with M. Bookchin in New York’s Left-Right anarchist supper club. Contacts between these people broke pretty fast, why?

SEK3: Very different cases. Rothbard and Bookchin fell out over rivalry for young new recruits, but emphasized ideological differences. The Black Panthers and SDS basically fell apart leaving Hess behind, but Karl continued to work with the Left long after the 1969 conventions and was affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) until his demise. But in the late 1980s he reactivated his Libertarian connections, and we invited him in 1985 to join the Founding Board of Directors of The Agorist Institute (along with Rothbard, LeFevre, Doug Casey, John Pugsley and Robert Kephart). Later, he became conservative enough (alas) to do a stint as editor of the Libertarian Party’s national newspaper, which ended only as he became too ill to continue.

Q: People who describe themselves, as Libertarians often don’t want to be associated with left-wing. Leftists look at Libertarians with unwillingness. Where did you get the idea to call your organization the Movement of Libertarian Left?

SEK3: Rothbard decided that we (the original LP radical caucus, who left the LP as the New Libertarian Alliance, and then promptly went Underground to build the Counter-Economy) were, using Marxist terminology, the Ultra-Left Adventurists and Left Sectarians. Some who remained close to him called me the Trotsky of the Movement. So it became natural to refer to us as the Libertarian Left in that context.

Secondly, we interested in continuing Rothbard’s 1960-69 alliance with the anti-nuke, then anti-war New Left, so when we decided to project a presence aboveground again, it made sense to use a label that would appeal to those remnants.

Thirdly, we didn’t want NLA members who were building successful counter-economic enterprises to feel compelled to return to anti-political activism so we made it clear it was a different group who were willing to soil themselves working with non-agorists.

Finally, I had been reading for years the politics of Europe, Australia and Asia, and in 1978 I was fascinated with a group in France.

Recall that in France then there were two large parliamentary alliances, and, unlike American political coalitions, these were highly ideological. But in the Union of the Left AND the Center-Right alliance, there were members of the once-dominant party of France known as the Radicals. They had a largely free-market position on economics, though in neither coalition was even an old laissez-faire liberal position dominant. The Radical Partie proper remained allied with the Gaullists and Independent Republicans of Giscard d’Estaing, but there “left wing” had split off and joined the Union de Gauche as “The Movement of the Radicals of the Left” (literal translation of Mouvement des radicaux de gauche, or MRG). I liked the sound and implication of that so, with a slight bow to English grammar, our new aboveground activist group, to join forces with the “old” New Left to fight the imminent War in Central America, became the Movement of the Libertarian Left, or MLL.

Q: What are the main differences between left-libertarianism/agorism and anarcho-capitalism?

SEK3: There are several ways of looking at this, from a theoretical view, from a strategic view, with left jargon, with right terminology, etc., but it’s a fair question.

In theory, those calling themselves anarcho-capitalists (I believe Jarrett Wollstein, in his defection from Objectivism, coined the term back in early 1968) 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.

First and foremost, agorists stress the Entrepreneur, see non-statist Capitalists (in the sense of holders of capital, not necessary ideologically aware) as relatively neutral drone-like non-innovators, and pro-statist Capitalists as the main Evil in the political realm. Hence our favorable outlook toward “conspiracy theory” fans, even when we think they’re misled or confused. As for the Workers and Peasants, we find them 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 (hence my phrase, deliberately tweaking the Marxoids, “liquidation of the Proletariat”). One can sum that up in the vulgar phrase, “If the State had been abolished a century ago, we’d all have robots and summer homes in the Asteroid belt.”

The “Anarcho-capitalists” tend to conflate the Innovator (Entrepreneur) and Capitalist, much as the Marxoids and cruder collectivists do. (It’s interesting that the gradual victory of Austrian Economics, particularly in Europe, has led to some New Leftists at least to take our claim seriously that the Capitalist and Entrepreneur are very different classes requiring different analyses, and attempt to grapple with the problem [from their point of view] that creates for them.)

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. But he was Misesian, and Mises made the original distinction between Innovators/Arbitrageurs and Capital-holders (i.e., mortgage-holders, coupon-clippers, financiers, worthless heirs, landlords, etc.). With the Market largely moving to the ‘net, it is becoming ever-more pure entrepreneurial, leaving the brick ‘n’ mortar “capitalist” behind.

But it is dealing with current politics and current defence where Agorists most strongly differ from “anarcho-capitalists.” A-caps generally (and they have lots of individual variation) believe in involvement with existing political parties (libertarian, Republican, even Democrat and Socialist, such as the Canadian NDP), and, in the extreme case, even support the Pentagon and U.S. Defense complex to fight communism (I wonder what their excuse is now?) until we somehow get to abolishing the State. Agorists, as you have undoubtedly picked up, are revolutionary; we don’t see the market triumphing without the collapse of the State and its ruling caste, and, as I point out in New Libertarian Manifesto, historically, they just don’t go without unleashing senseless violence on the usually peaceful revolutionaries who then defend themseelves.

Q: The manifesto of MLL was a pamphlet “New Libertarian Manifesto“. What kind of reaction did it receive?

SEK3: Strictly speaking, NLM was a manifesto of the New Libertarian Alliance, not just MLL. It was supposed to have been published in 1975. But by the time the first edition came out, MLL had been organized so we included mention of it and ads for it as well.

NLM had an amazing reaction. The initial press run of 1,000 ran out, and Victor Koman undertook to print a “deluxe” version, slick black cover with gold leaf lettering. The second 1,500 are now sold out except for about 10 copies in my possession and Victor’s. So a hard-core, purist booklet, densely typeset to save money (it’s really a small book but we used small tightly-leaded type to save printing costs), addressed only to those Libertarian activists at the time who were highly immersed ideologically and thus a very limited market, became an Underground Best-Seller. It was never registered with the Library of Congress or even mentioned aboveground. Laissez-Faire Books refused to carry it. Only foreign Libertarian bookstores like the one in Toronto and, of course, Chris Tame’s Alternative Bookshop in London would carry it. Eventually Laissez Faire and San Francisco’s Freedom Forum Books would sell it under the table.

Murray Rothbard immediately agreed to write a critical response to it, and Robert LeFevre wrote a largely laudatory one. I found the now-obscure Erwin “Filthy Pierre” Strauss to criticize it as not radical enough and put them together, with my rebuttals, in a new journal, Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance #1 (SNLA1 for short). It sold out, too. We still have a few copies of SNLA#2 left, but SNLA was absorbed into the Agorist Quarterly in 1995.

Q: In that text you suggest that counter-economics is the only way to be conformable with Libertarianism and in the same way an efficient way to fight with the government. Can you say a little more about it?

SEK3: Counter-Economics in the sense of actively building and expediting what was later called “infrastructure” of the Counter-Economy is the only strategy guaranteed to bring about a Libertarian Society. As the market passes from under the control of the State, the free society grows accordingly. At a certain point, so much of the market is free of the State, and I mean completely free, no subjugation to any form of State control including its judicial and enforcement arms, history’s most successful parasitical social entity will finally perish from malnutrition. Of course, it will lash out with unfocused violence to save itself in the final stages, as all collapsing States do, and the Agorists successful self-defense will be the Final Revolution.

Q: 20 years passed since the publishing of “NLM” do you think that since then we’re closer or further to accomplishing its goals?

SEK3: The Counter-Economy grows, the statist White Market shrinks and chokes on its own dysfunctional regulation and creativity-draining tax plunder, throughout the West. In the East, the nalevo brought down the Soviet state, no matter what absurd claims for credit the Reagan neoconservatives make. That is, with limited understanding, the people themselves brought down the worst tyranny known to man through almost unconscious agorism. But conscious awareness of the process is growing. The one weapon the State has still going for it is that most people who participate in Counter-Economics feel guilty about it, as if they were doing something wrong, and the institutional bandit gangs are morally superior. This is what Ayn Rand brilliantly understood and called the Sanction of the Victim. The task of Libertarian activists, while it is still possible to speak freely aboveground, is to prove convincingly to the masses, especially the young enterprising masses in the global economy linked by the free-market anarchist haven known as the Internet, that resistance and disobedience in economic activity is the MOST moral human action possible. Not just on website, but in the arts, science-fiction novels and now films, stage, and the new forms emerging from home computer technology with easily comprehended interfaces.

Q: Lately many Libertarians follow a new strategy promoted by Free Nation Foundation. They want to build a Libertarian nation from the base. Cypherpunks have their hope in the Internet and cryptography. What do you think about these methods of achieving freedom?

SEK3: The Cypherpunks provide a useful tool/weapon for the Counter-Economy, but there is a lot more to an Economy than that. No one single advance for freedom will achieve the Anarchist Agora, but none should be discarded or belittled, either. Kent Hastings has pointed out the value of nanotechnology, spread-spectrum radio, and small, unmanned, flying vehicles (I forget the term for them) combined with Net privacy to expand the counter-economic infrastructure spectacularly.

I have nothing against “free country” activists, but I think they are just setting up an easy target for the State to use its traditional mass-destruction weaponry to destroy. They rely on the State having a certain level of moral restraint in all of their plans to defend themselves, and I think they are wrong. It has none. It would gladly sacrifice a few million of its subjects to crush a visible beacon of a functional free society, let alone a bit of bad press. I call these attempts to build free countries in today’s statist environment, Anarcho-Zionism, “The Search for the Promised Gulch.”

Q: As a long-time activist I’m sure you follow action of the younger generation of radicals. Do you think that there is a chance that Libertarian thought will get to the demonstrators in Seattle or Prague?

I listened rather than preached to the anti-globalist anarchists in Los Angeles (after Seattle, Washington, Prague, etc.) in 2000 but they, including the Black Bloc, had their hearts in the right place. They were being used by the Old Left apparatchiki through hyperfeminization and other guilt trips. When former anarchist Jello Biafra (of the great old punk group, The Dead Kennedys) called for support of Ralph Nader for president, I started a call for Nobody for President and was immediately and eagerly joined by the Black Bloc kids. They had less trouble grasping the contradiction of an anarchist supporting a presidential candidate than the “libertarian” partyarchs.

Interview conducted by dek & michal

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From Spaz.org, via the now-defunct Individualist-Anarchist.net