Drug Prohibition, Alice in Wonderland, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons
Interesting stuff from Hammer of Truth: Drug Prohibition, Alice in Wonderland, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons
MLL: Let’s get some Harass the Brass endorsements
As a followup to my post on the upcoming SDS Harass the Brass direct action campaign to end the war [PDF version here], I’m specifically asking self-identified MLL members to endorse this SDS proposal in direct accordance with agorist teachings.
I would like to collect such MLL endorsements through comments on this blog post to be delivered as a bundle. Please leave one to indicate so. I would like to go further, though, and ask MLL members to consider joining SDS/MDS. Even if you’re not a student, you can choose the non-student option of MDS or “Movement for a Democratic Society”. For those with reservations I would say that, quite simply, one doesn’t have to go along with any potentially statist SDS actions that one therefore disagrees with. Where there is overlap between MLL and SDS/MDS, we can act as an ultra-radical caucus and spokespeople for abolition of the state.
Collected Endorsements:
Brad Spangler, MLL/MDS
J. Freeman Smith, MLL/SDS
Roderick T. Long, MLL/MDS
Adem Kupi, MLL/MDS
Wally Conger, MLL/MDS
Kevin Carson, MLL/MDS
Jeremy Weiland, MLL/MDS
Diane Warth, MLL/MDS
Jorge Codina, MLL
David Reynolds, MLL/MDS
Scott Bieser, MLL
Bruce Hobbs, MLL
Lady Aster Francesca, MLL/MDS
Titanium Girl, MLL
M. D. MacKenzie, MLL
Nick Manley, MLL
Note: Please indicate in your endorsement comment if you are an SDS or MDS member.
Three avenues of revolutionary action
Wally Conger has posted an excellent excerpt from The Agorist Institute Report to Supporters, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1996 he titled “What is Agorism?”
I should note here that this is a good opportunity to illustrate where my current views might diverge ever so slightly from those of SEK3.
That libertarian philosophy which rejects aboveground political activity as inescapably statist and defends the Counter-Economy is agorism.
That depends on what you mean by political. Agorists reject political reformism. Clearly, though, SEK3 recognized the need for revolutionary propaganda. He spent his life creating a great deal of it. He also explicitly condoned traditional anarchist direct action in time of war. Most people would call those political activities even though they take place outside the statist framework of electioneering and offering of policy proposals for the state to follow.
As one will note by reading New Libertarian Manifesto, agorists do not reject armed struggle but do condemn premature attempts at it as counter-revolutionary — up until the phase transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 of Konkin’s strategy. Even then, armed struggle may or may not occur and the matter won’t really be in the hands of agorists to decide. It will depend on how violent the State’s attempt at counter-revolution at that point is. While I personally am pessimistic about the prospects for avoiding the necessity of armed struggle at that point, I have to concede that the State could theoretically be brought down without it.
What we’re left with for the interim is what I’m labeling the Three Avenues of Revolutionary Action that I’m hoping will become accepted as a clearer default statement of what agorists do in lieu of political reformist activity such as electioneering and lobbying of the state.
- Counter-economics
- Propaganda
- Direct Action
We can not abandon counter-economics. It is our hope for the future and the very essence of our revolutionary message and means. Agorism needs to be promoted as an ideology by revolutionary propaganda, though, and that’s primarily what I’ve decided to concentrate on personally. Finally, non-violent direct action can be viewed as an extension of the propaganda struggle as well as an opportunity to engage, network with and cooperate with the broader left. For those reasons, I would argue for broader agorist acceptance of direct action beyond primarily just opposition to war as SEK3 preferred.
MLL: Community site needed?
If certain trends continue, we’re going to need a Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL) community site, built using software such as CivicSpace or Scoop. Take a look at these stats:
Agorism.info pages served in March so far, by country
United States 1301
Unknown 41
Australia 40
Great Britain 33
Canada 27
European Union (unspecified) 26
Sweden 23
Switzerland 8
Greece 7
Mexico 7
Russian Federation 6
Spain 4
Hong Kong 4
Italy 4
China 3
India 3
Thailand 2
Netherlands 2
Germany 2
Belgium 2
Portugal 1
Norway 1
South Korea 1
France 1
Ireland 1
Who wants to step up to the plate and deliver such a site? Don’t be afraid to take some initiative, folks. There are no MLL gatekeepers. One “joins” the MLL by asserting one’s membership. That assertion is only as credible as your adherence to and/or consistency with existing agorist ideas, though.
Rothbard on the French uprising of 1968
From Roderick Long in March of 2004: Rothbard on 68
Rothbard celebrates the French student revolt as a refutation of “the widespread myth that revolutions, whether or not desirable, are simply impossible in the modern, complex, highly technological world.” He describes the revolt as an instance of “that famous revolutionary weapon never until now successfully used: the general strike,” which he thinks has become more viable now that “complex technology requires skilled people to work it.”
Wally Conger wins Chauntecleer Award!
Wally Conger has been awarded the Chauntecleer Award from the Karl Hess Club.
The Chauntecleer was first awarded ten years ago to Chauntecleer Michael Greene to honor him for his many years of inspired work as, among other things, facilitator of the Albert J. Nock and H. L. Mencken Fora. The award, created by Samuel Edward Konkin III, was intended to be a one-time presentation.
When SEK3 passed away (on February 23, 2004), the three remaining KHC founders decided to resurrect an rename the award in Sam’s memory.
The Chauntecleer Award acknowledges “meritorious service in the Cause of Freedom and advancement of Agorism.” The Chauntecleer (another name for rooster) is a fitting symbol to honor those whose work wakes up a sleeping populace and introduces them to a new day full of the promise of Freedom and prosperity through agorism.
The Chauntecleer will be presented annually every March, provided the three members of the KHC’s award committee agree unanimously on a recipient.
On March 20, 2006, the KHC awarded the 2006 Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer to Wally Conger. Conger is the first recipient, after Greene, of this honor.
Congratulations, Wally! You might want to tell him so yourself in a comment on his post. With SEK3 gone, these Karl Hess Club luminaries could fairly be described as the respected elders of agorism.
SDS: Harass the Brass
In reference to Wally Conger’s post on left libertarian monkeywrenching the state in time of war, I’ll post here Kyle Taylor’s message to the SDS Announcements list on a proposal SDS chapters and individuals are considering, dubbed Harass the Brass.
Some of you may be familiar with Harass the Brass, others may not. It began during a brain-storming session between SDSers and other activists in the Michigan community. Many of us have been trying to develop a program to challenge the anti-war movement to move past protesting and towards a platform of radical action. Harass the Brass is what we came up with. I’ve been passing this campaign proposal around to SDSers all over the Midwest for about a day or so, and I wanted to submit it to all chapters around the country for consideration and endorsement.
Thus far, we’ve heard SDS endorsements from Kansas, and individual member of Chicago and Ohio.
- Kyle T.
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SDS, The “Harass the Brass” Campaign
Spring/Summer of 2006, SDS Declares war on the war
Starting this summer, SDS chapters, standing in solidarity with other community groups, will be conducting a campaign of fly-by sit-ins and lock-downs on military recruitment centers, private military companies, military research facilities, congressional offices, and pro-war, corporate media outlets all across the nation.
For three years now, we’ve been carrying signs and attending peaceful rallies and marches, desperately trying to vocalize our discontent through whatever channels we may in an attempt to show the administration that they are fighting an unpopular war and that we want it to end. Three years later, we’re still here holding the same signs, shouting the same slogans, and raising the same demands. What we are left with after our pleading and symbolic opposition is another peace rally and the delusional notion that a few more signs might finally convince the Bush administration to change its mind about Iraq. We’ve been past due for a very serious reality check.
We are not going to end the war by politely asking the administration to stop. Our marches and discontent alone have been proven ineffective as it has become plainly obvious that the discontent raised by the American people is of no concern at all to the powers-that-be in Washington. President Bush has indicated that he plans to keep troops in Iraq throughout the remainder of his presidency and is working with both Democrats and Republicans to keep troops there through the administration that proceeds him. In doing so, he has made clear that their is no other way to end the war than for Americans to step in and end it themselves. Mario Savio once said, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Compañeros, that time is now.
We are standing at a cross-roads. The antiwar movement is caught under the weight of liberal tactics, fighting to end a war that can only be stopped through radical action. For three years, we have marched under the banner of UFPJ, International ANSWER, Troops Out Now, World Can’t Wait, and we have yet to see how any of our efforts have brought us closer to ending the war. Its time for a change. If the administration won’t end the war, we must end it for them.
SDS will be directly confronting those aspects of our communities that are allowing the war to continue:
* Sticking a monkey wrench in the industries tied to the military apparatus (Private Military Companies and military research companies), through high-profile boycotts, sit-ins, and lock-downs.
* Sitting-in on the offices of congressional representatives that either support the war, or are doing nothing to stop it.
* Initiating a counter-recruitment campaign that targets the most heavily recruited areas of our community for fly-by sit-ins, periodically locking down recruiting stations across the country.
* Seeking out dishonest military recruiters and recruitment operations by teaming up with teachers and community groups targeted by military recruiters and developing programs for phasing out recruitment in schools and homeless shelters.
* Confront corporate media outfits that act as propaganda outlets for a pro-war agenda in a campaign of counter-propaganda, while simultaneously promoting free and independent media alternatives.The following SDS locals have ratified the call to join radical communities around the country to link-up for a summer campaign of direct-action and civil disobedience against the war:
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I wanted to get feedback from other chapters, especially in the midwest, to see if others would be interested in joining in on the Harass the Brass campaign. Any thoughts? Feedback? Something that people would want to see added to a press release? … Anything?
- Kyle T., SDS Ann Arbor
CPE and MLL letter of libertarian solidarity
In France, more riots and protests over the CPE.
For those not familiar with it, the CPE is a new French law that allows employers to fire young workers without cause if they have been on the job less than two years.
On the face of it, that initially might not sound so unreasonable to us as Americans and market-oriented libertarians. The French are fighting mad about it, though, and with good reason. The overall economic environment in France is so thoroughly statist that they quite reasonably expect no tangible benefit from this one small so-called market reform — and quite probably a fair amount of pain.
Young people in France currently often have to live at home for several *years* while job hunting. The consolation that sustains them is that once they’re in, at least they have job security. We ought to be able to express sympathy for their plight and point towards a better way — a revolutionary way.
The CPE is technically market liberalization — but representative of perhaps the worst possible choice of priorities, I would counter. Such is the nature of political reformism — to subvert the market toward the interests of the political class and bring it into unjustified disrepute. It’s up to agorists to put forward the alternative — counter-economic revolution.
I’ve composed a letter of solidarity to the students and workers of France and have some initial signatories. We are presenting ourselves as a sample of self-identified MLL affiliated people.
Please sign by indicating you wish to be added as a signatory in the comments of this blog post.
Students and Workers of France,
Professor Roderick Long once wrote:
“When Marx called the French government ‘a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France�s national wealth’ on behalf of the bourgeois elite and at the expense of production and commerce (’Class Struggles in France’), he was only echoing what libertarians had been saying for decades.”
France and all other nation-states remain so today. You and we live in a world where freedom and economic opportunity exist only at the sufferance of a political class that allows us only some small amount of them for sake of their own convenience and take the rest from us by force and coercion for sake of their own parasitism.
Under such circumstances, state-sponsored market liberalization is a cruel joke. The legislation you protest and rebel against seeks only to increase the latitude given your overseers, while maintaining the overall restrictions on your own liberty that, if abolished, would empower you to seek your own prosperity. We believe you and we would be very good at that, mixing both cooperation and peaceful competition, if we were not slaves.
For those reasons, the signers of this letter offer their solidarity to you and present themselves as a sample of a small tendency known as the Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL), advocates of revolutionary market anarchism or “agorism”.
It is not the place of others to tell you how to wage your own revolution against tyranny. We have some suggestions, though — a version of dual power strategy called “counter-economics”. We humbly recommend MLL founder Samuel Edward Konkin III’s small book on agorism, counter-economics, and revolution “The New Libertarian Manifesto” in hopes you may find it useful or inspirational. It is available free online at:
http://agorism.info/NewLibertarianManifesto.pdfSigned,
The Movement of the Libertarian Left
Agora! Anarchy! Action!Brad Spangler
Diane Warth
Thomas L. Knapp
Adem Kupi
Wally Conger
J. Freeman Smith
Kevin Carson
M.D. MacKenzie
Roderick T. Long
Jeremy Weiland
M.R. Jarrell
Lady Aster Francesca
Per Bylund
Bruce Hobbs
Jeff Murphy
Matthew Claxton
Jorge Codina
William Gillis
Update: Next Left Notes is the unofficial news zine of the new SDS. NLN yesterday published the MLL solidarity lettter to French students and workers along with the English and French versions of the SDS solidarity letter.
Update II: Important followups to this post in blog posts and comments here, here, here, here, here, here (Spanish), here and here (as well as below).
Update III: In the interest of getting a more or less final version of this letter posted to Agorism.info, I plan to stop acting as a volunteer registrant of signatories for it after today. Comments for this blog post will remain open, though.
Klafta and left libertarian reconciliation
Definitions are important when discussing complex concepts. I’ve mentioned before the ambiguity of terms like socialism and capitalism in that each can have both a libertarian and an authoritarian meaning. Back in 1993, in Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed no. 34, Lance Klafta laid blame for this state of affairs squarely at the feet of Rand in his article “Ayn Rand and the Perversion of Libertarianism“.
Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism’ for the libertarian meaning of the word “socialism.”
Or, as B.K. Marcus wrote:
“Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society? From what I’ve been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any PREscription about how the society SHOULD work.
By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists — even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.
But obviously, if by Socialism you mean any sort of State-centralization of authority, then anarchists never were and still aren’t Socialists — not even, theoretically, the Anarcho-Communists.”
That ought to cause a few light bulbs to pop up over libertarian heads. I would say that I agree with the Klafta statement, but only with an extremely important qualifier. If we accept that Rand mismatched those terms and their definitions, that ought not to cause us to disregard an important clarification associated with her — that “capitalism” or “libertarian socialism” is the economic system resulting from widespread acceptance of the Zero Aggression Principle — the doctrine of non-initiation of force, fraud or coercion.
Klafta was aware of the ZAP, at least through its contradictory incarnation as the Libertarian Party Pledge, but unfortunately he only showed a shallow or “vulgar” understanding of it, that it is supposedly a blanket condemnation of violence. It’s not. It’s a very philosophically precise understanding of what defines tyranny - the initiation of force. If I weild a club and take a wallet out of your hand, this may or may not be an initiation of force. It all depends on whether its rightfully your wallet, or mine which you stole from me and that I want back.
The ZAP is crucial to understanding the exploitation of the productive class by the political class. Aggression, the initiation of force, is what creates privilege and unequal exchange. If we do not disavow the initiation of force, we are embracing the foundation of tyranny. The ZAP doesn’t preclude the use of defensive or retributive violence — it justifies it.
To put it in more Marxian, and therefore imprecise, terms — the capitalists have been ripping off the workers. Kevin Carson’s blog is practically dedicated to exposing how they do this through aggression-backed subsidies and regulations that have nothing to do with a genuinely free market.. The workers should take back what’s rightfully theirs, their rightful private property under a radical Lockean view, and the only reason this hasn’t been mentioned more prominetly is Rothbard’s failure to reject political reformism, which Konkin saw past and remedied. The ZAP clarifies the line between ethical use of violence in such a workers revolution and the violence of, for example, Leninist state socialism.
Klafta did grasp that state capitalism is not a free market:
The terms of “free agreements” under law are titled in favor of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over employees, in a way which would not exist in a “free market.” This leveraging of power is not `objective’ at all.
Just as many Libertarian Party members don’t really understand the ZAP, neither did Klafta, though:
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members must sign is taken directly from her admonition, “I hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.” In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommodate them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Again, it is a fallacy to mistake the Zero Aggression Principle for a blanket rejection of all violence. Rather, it is a tool for determining whether violence is just or unjust.
Violence can be categorized one of three ways:
- Aggression — initiatory violence
- Defensive violence — a simultaneous or near simultaneous response to aggression.
- Retributive violence - response to aggression after the fact.
Aggression is always unjust. Defensive violence is always just, so long as it is proportional to the aggression. Retributive violence is justified only when moderated through a system of law that provides neutral arbitrators. As the state subsists on aggression, justice demands the rise of a polycentric system of law that can lay the state low like the predatory bandits they are while not becoming a new state itself — anarchy.
Where Leninism and variants propose wholesale nationalization of both stolen goods and rightful property as a fake remedy for statist banditry, Agorists would instead tend to believe that when revolutionary redistribution of property occurs, it should be handled through a de-centralized, market-based security apparatus on an individual case-by-case basis, using a polycentric, market-based system of law to determine whether any particular property is truly stolen or not. This is in accordance with Agorist Class Theory’s assertion that individual moral choices are involved in how one goes about acquiring wealth and that the sum total of these individual moral choices are what makes one a member of the productive class, the political (parasitic) class or the confused middle class (members of which are destined to eventually gravitate to one of the other classes in the face of growing agorist class consciousness among the productive class and society as a whole).
Samuel Edward Konkin III was fond of inventing new terms, largely because he found existing language inadequate to communicate a lot of the concepts he was trying to convey. One of these is the term “minarchist” — designed to highlight the ironyof a libertarian embracing so-called minimal government. Limited taxation is still theft, limited war is still murder and a limited state is still tyranny — and it contains within it the seeds of even greater tyranny, as constitutional restraints on government power eventually and inevitably become undermined.
A related “linguistic Konkinism” is partyarch, defined as:
“term coined by SEK3 in 1972 to denote “anarchists” who had rejected the State (head of the octopus) only to embrace its tentacle, a political party.”
Dallas Accord style cooperation between partyarchs and minarchists is objectively counter-revolutionary (i.e. — anti-liberty) in that it obscures the real problem — government itself, institutionalized aggression. To reform the state is to attempt to build a state better able to continue its mission of theft, slavery and murder indefinitely. Reformists (both minarchists and partyarchs) attempt to extend the lifespan of the state. The properly libertarian path would instead be to seek the end of the state — revolution.
As I wrote before in Agorist Revolution in a Nutshell:
In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform.
A partyarch might object, as I once did when I was a partyarch, that they are not just trying to reform the state but build a responsible transition program to result in its gradual abolition. As Klafta points out in his remarks on the potential rise of an “Objectivist Lenin” and later, we’ve seen what a government-sponsored transition program to a stateless society looks like already — the Soviet Union.
