I just slapped up a listserv to clear up communications between those of us looking into and planning some sort of anarchist presence in Low Earth Orbit. I’ve fired off invites to most of the folks involved in the email discussion so far, but if you’re even tangentially interested in building a microsatellite for hactivist uses we’d love to have you sign on. Right now we’re just testing the waters in a very preliminary fashion.
This is very, very, very pre-alpha — but at the very least it’ll be a fun and challenging exercise in project planning.
The New SDS, by Christopher Phelps, writing in The Nation:
Angry at the Iraq debacle, emboldened by the Bush-Cheney tailspin, a new student radicalism is emerging whose concerns include immigrants’ rights, global warming and the uncertainties facing debt-ridden graduates. Such considerations distinguish the new SDS from its historical namesake, which took shape in a very different context of economic affluence and establishment liberalism.
News flash for libertarians — we’re all left-wingers now, whether you’re personally down with that or not. Why? The neo-conservatives have so thoroughly turned the right toward authoritarianism that any political outlook even remotely describable as “libertarian” is fundamentally alienated from the right at a foundational level. Small government conservatism is officially dead, and with it libertarian right-fusionism.
David Brooks’ column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks’ central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with — it is in fact overtly hostile to — the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today’s so-called “conservatives” exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don’t believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis [emphasis added — Brad] of those principles.
Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of “conservatism” to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: “Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they’re not models for the future.”
Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time — namely, that so-called “conservatives” (meaning the contemporary political “Right”) no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire — for expanded government power on every front.
The arguably bright side of this is that left and right are becoming more like what principled radical libertarians like Karl Hess envisioned those terms ought to mean in the first place — re-alignment as clarification, as it were. For more in depth material along these lines, let me refer you to the web site of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
The article cites the destructive nature of the most violent parts of the underground economy, not distinguishing between black and red market activity as Konkin did, and explains the violence as a matter of alleged business necessity.
There is a pseudo-political necessity for agorist revolutionaries to work on promoting a libertarian class consciousness [purchase paperback or free download] among the productive class and counter-economic entrepreneurs in particular.
As a consequence of such growing class consciousness and awareness of the possibilities it brings, market demand and the profit motive will bring about a black or grey market proliferation of arbitration services.
Not all violence associated with the underground economy is bad from an agorist perspective. Where purely defensive and in accordance with theNon-Aggression Principle, such violence is virtuous — even, or perhaps especially, when defending against the agents of the State (the wisdom of such being a seperate concern). Explaining this in ongoing agorist propaganda efforts pertaining to current events offers the opportunity to work on the development of that class consciousness.
Edward Stringham discusses[mp3 download] his recently published book, Anarchy and the Law. Professor Roderick Long described this book as “…quite simply the definitive collection on free-market anarchism.“
Speaking of Stringham, his article Market Chosen Law was posted to the Mises.org web site back on March 17th and is well worth the read.
Wally Conger edits, quotes, summarizes and explains Samuel Edward Konkin III on his radical, libertarian / market anarchist class theory — a primary tenet of Konkin’s revolutionary agorism. Foreword by yours truly.
A senior US Justice Department official will refuse to testify at upcoming Senate hearings, citing the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
Let’s say it aloud…
A senior US Justice(?) Department official is refusing to testify on grounds that it may incriminate(!) her.
It has come to my attention that Michelle Malkin and company have their panties all in a bunch over an anti-war demonstration by reported anarchists in Portland where an effigy of a US soldier was burned along with a US flag.
Let’s watch the video, and I’ll then share my thoughts on the matter with you below.
First, while it’s not what I would have chosen to do or choose to advocate be done in the future, I do at least nominally support the action. The simple fact is that there is a complacency in the US with ongoing slaughter of real, live human beings in a criminal war of aggression. Activists need to be experimenting with a diversity of non-violent tactics to address that complacency. I have no sympathy for the pro-war armchair bombardiers and keyboard commandoes out there who think everything is peachy until their personal symbolic ox is gored. Homo sapiens trump any particular bundle of fabric you care to mention — end of story.
That said, I also believe the small group of young activists in question showed poor judgement in choosing to burn a soldier in effigy. Personally, I’d like to see every US soldier in Iraq get back home safely ASAP — ideally by deserting. I’m not the one that put them there in the first place, though, and their own personal decisions to enlist were, to one degree or another, shaped by a parasitic elite ruling class that sculpts the milieu prospective enlistees mentally and economically operate in. That’s why burning effigies of political leaders would be a more strategically savvy tactic in my opinion.
My perception, in fact, is that not taking into consideration the likely effects on public opinion of an action only plays into the hands of the warmongers and ruling class. I urge a more thoughtful approach in the future — unless you like making Malkin wet herself with glee.
