Fixing the clock at the center of the world
Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Brad Spangler
Via fourth generation warfare scholar, and throughly interesting fellow, John Robb’s weblog we learn that Robert Deniro’s agorist repairman character from the movie Brazil, Harry Tuttle, has real world counterparts in Paris: the UnterGunther.
From the Guardian news article:
Share This“We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent,” said Klausmann. “But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s so much to do in Paris that we won’t manage in our lifetime.”
Regarding all your recent posts on anti-electoralism, and this minor reference for Agorism, I though I should take this opportunity to voice some questions on the latter that I’ve been harboring for a while. It seems like a promising strategy, but I observe a few contradictions that I haven’t seen answered anywhere. You seem like the best person to ask. Who knows, maybe it’ll yield some material for future posts.
1. For one, there’s the moral quandary implicit in profiteering off the effects of government regulation. For example, drug trafficking nets a high profit due to government induced shortage. Is this morally distinct from, say, the scarcity rents that pharmaceuticals derive from IP priveleges?
You could say that involvement in the crafting of that policy is the dividing line; that it’s not wrong to profiteer within the context of those conditions so long as you had no part in instituting them. And I know that the chance of profit is the incentive that draws people into the counter-economy in the first place.
Suppose also that a government buddied up to certain elements of the underground economy and started using it’s force to collude with them just like it does with white market businesses. I’ve read some things to suggest that Burma takes this stance toward the heroin trade.
2. What’s the stance on engaging in peaceful trade with groups that engage in other, more violent red market activities, like the FARC or organized crime?
2. Does Agorism focus primarily on creating a consciously libertarian counter-economy, or introducing libertarian elements into the existing one? In other words, to what extent is it new, and to what extent is it simply a reform and development on existing relations?
3. This ties into the matter of security agencies. An Agorist strategy would clearly have to make a conscious and deliberate attempt to displace protection rackets by organized crime, probably long before it can take on the state. How do we prevent new ones from arising before a particular market achieves a critical mass of protection firms? And what is the proper reaction to other coercive activities, like human trafficking?
3. What about relatively inhuman activities that are sometimes associated with the underground economy? Going back to human trafficking, there’s a fine line between coerced travel and voluntary smuggling rings that charge arbitrarily high fees, which the clients must work off in sweatshop conditions upon arrival (who’s owners are often in cahoots with transporters). This results in a kind of de facto indentured servitude.
Now, there may be nothing rights violating about such arrangements (at least not to the extent that it’s straight-up slavery), and you could argue that they will eventually dissipate in the long run, but I still can’t see supporting poverty-driven indentured servitude as an altogether good and revolutionary action. Any ideas on how to mitigate such conditions in the short term, and how that could fit into an Agorist strategy?
3. If competitive security service really is a sustainable system, with greater economic incentives to conflict, then why hasn’t it arisen spontaneously in at least some cases where black markets are present? I don’t know about you, but I’d feel a lot more confident if there was at least a detectable tendency toward that. The real world situations all tend the other way, toward extortion and self-perpetuating protection rackets that are only ever replaced by another protection racket.
3. Why didn’t this happen to the Soviet counter-economy specifically? What actions would people need to have taken to steer it in the proper direction?
P.S. Please ignore my lack of proper numbering. I really must remember to postread