All power to the dictatarship of the proletariat! The means of production must be seized from the capitalist oppressors! Smash the corporate pig-dogs and the lackeys of the bourgeoisie with the hammer and the sickle! The world will be flooded with the blood of counter-revolutionaries! Heed to my call, comrades!
[:P]
Geoff, you can do better than argue semantically (I hope). This isn’t grad school, the biggest nerd doesn’t win. I’d really like to see the discussion stay on a practical track, where we deal with what are real challenges to Agorism.
And if Max is being a boor (I didn’t read all of your posts), then I hope he stops and we get back on track.
Full marks for trying to be funny. Care to explain why you have a SDS graphic in your sig?
OK, well just wanted to say I’m happy to have been able to get some good info on agorism from this thread before it devolved again into sniping. I do appreciate it…
I also found some amazing blogs through links that people provided - nothirdsolution kicks ass and ‘once upon a time’ is absolutely amazing, and I’m digging nostate also. Great insight, powerful.
Hey! It’s not just ‘lackeys’, it’s ‘imperialist lackeys’ - the qualifier is there for a reason, dammit! This is your last warning…
Mike from NoState is a real inspiration for me. David @ No Third Solution is good too.
If you like opinion delivered like a two by four to your face, FSK’s blog is also stimulating.
Actually I haven’t gotten around to reading the book yet, but guerrilla warfare (a form of 4th gen warfare) and 4th gen warfare are intellectual hobbies of mine. I have several books on the subject and am familiar with it. As I mentioned earlier, I was trained as a military intel analyst in the army national guard. The purpose of my MOS was to figure out what the enemy was up to and would do and brief my commander on it. I think 4th gen warfare is very applicable to agorism. 3rd gen warfare not so much, at least not until the last stages of a revolution, and even then the typical statist highly hierarchical and bureaucratic army model should be avoided. We don’t want to set up the conditions for another state after all.
Yes, it has applications outside of combat as well. I have Mao’s and Che’s books on guerrilla warfare as well as the special forces manual and Major Von Dach’s Swiss Army Guide to GW and Underground Operations. I also have one of Mao’s Little Red Book of Quotations. I picked it up in China a number of summers ago.
Rothbard made numerous favorable remarks about SDS - saw some common ground where some common work might be done, IIRC. His ‘Betrayal of the American Right’ includes this bit of history.
You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s not a merely semantic distinction. There’s an important difference there. Really, I shouldn’t have to point this out. Max made an uninformed and false claim. I pointed out his error. He can’t keep his formulations of the agorist position straight, and one was right while the other was wrong. And the formulation that was right isn’t vulnerable to his objection.
Well, shoot, I wish you would. It might help you to maintain some objectivity here.
Agreed. The latest iteration of the SDS is even better, from a libertarian standpoint, than the original ever was. It is explicitly anarchist and anti-authority, and leaders of the SDS have openly asked for support from libertarians and anti-state rightists.
BTW, I differ from plumb-line Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism in only a few ways. I can’t actually call myself a Rothbardian, technically, as I derive rights from the capacity for rationality (a la Rasmussen, Den Uyl, Long, and Plauche) rather than axiomatic self-ownership. I just think that the mutualists and individualist anarchists have several insights that are usually missed by libertarians.
Now really… you have a lot of gall criticizing me for calling Max out on his bad behavior when you pull stunts like this. Moreover, Wombatron is not to my knowledge a Marxist.
You do know that the New Left back in the '60s, of which the SDS was a part, was fairly libertarian, right? They weren’t perfect, but then again neither was the Old Right, nor are many contemporary libertarians. You might read some of Rothbard’s articles in the journal Left and Right (online at mises.org in pdf).
Can you either be more specific (maybe start another thread) or provide links?
Pull a stunt? Womby started it with his fast and loose “vulgar libertarian” reference. No one likes to be called vulgar anything, it’s clearly used in a pejorative sense, and he was baiting for someone to call him a Marxist, so I did.
“Fairly libertarian”? Does that mean they are vulgar libertarians? This is not the 1960’s movement.
I looked into SDS before I asked. It looks like a slightly radical left organization, that appeals to sentiments that I would think anarchists would reject, like trading warfare for welfare (education). They also seemed to be obsessed with equality, and with the collectivism of the left that comes with that.
They are pro-environmentalism, pro-labour. From where I sit, they appear to be another anti-war left movement, with a socialistic agenda.
Things are not quite as simple as this, LS. You are thinking in conventional terms: left = socialist = bad. The actualities were - are are - far more complex. Here’s a snippet from Rothbard’s Betrayal of the American Right - download and read chapter 14 - which discusses the New Left - for more details on why an accomodation was never really achieved:
The SDS march inaugurated the great
anti-Vietnam War movement, which undoubtedly constituted the
deepest and most widespread opposition in the midst of war since
the conflict with Mexico in the 1840s. The opposition during
World War I was strong, but isolated and brutally suppressed by
the government; the isolationist movement of World War II collapsed
completely as soon as we entered the war; and the Korean
War never generated a powerful mass opposition. But here at last
was an exciting, massive opposition to the war proceeding during
the war itself! Another point that cheered Leonard and myself was
that here at last was not a namby-pamby “peace” group like SANE,
which always carefully balanced its criticism of the U.S. and of
Russia, and which also took pains to exclude “undesirables” from
antiwar activity; here was a truly antiwar movement which zeroed
in on the evils of American war-making; and here was a movement
that excluded no one, that baited neither reds nor rightists, that
welcomed all Americans willing to join in struggle against the
immoral and aggressive war that we were waging in Vietnam. Here
at last was an antiwar Left that we could be happy about!
It is true that SDS, the unquestioned leader of this new antiwar
movement, had been born in unfortunate circumstances; for it was
originally and was then still officially the student arm of the social
democratic League for Industrial Democracy, an old-line socialist
and red-baiting organization that represented the worst of Old
Left liberalism. But SDS was clearly in the process of breaking
with its parentage. Not only was it militant on the war, but it was
also no longer doctrinaire socialist—a pleasant change indeed from
the Old Left. On the contrary, its ideology was vague enough to
encompass even “right-wing libertarians.” In fact, there was a good
deal of instinctive libertarian sentiment in that early SDS which
was to intensify for the next several years. There was a new hunger
for individual freedom, for self-development, and a new concern
about bureaucracy and technocratic statism that boded well for
SDS’s future.
Thus, SDS was shaping up as instinctively quasi-libertarian
even on “domestic” issues. This libertarianism was reinforced by
the campus movement generated by the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement. For hadn’t conservatives and libertarians for decades
been bitterly critical of our state-ridden educational system—its
public schools, compulsory attendance laws, and giant, impersonal
bureaucratic training factories replacing genuine education?
Hadn’t we long been critical of the influence of John Dewey, the
emphasis on vocational training, the giant tie-ins of education
with government and the military-industrial complex? And here
was the New Left which, while admittedly inchoate and lacking a
constructive theory, was at least arising to zero in on many of the
educational evils that we had been denouncing unheeded for over
a generation.
…
The emergence of the New Left persuaded Leonard and me
that the time had come to act, to break out of our ideological and
political isolation. Hence we founded, in the spring of 1965, the
three-times-a-year journal Left and Right. The purpose of founding
L&R was twofold: to influence libertarians throughout the
country to break with the right wing and to ally themselves with
the emerging New Left and try to push that left further in a libertarian
direction; and second, to “find” the New Left ourselves as a
group to ally with and possibly influence.
…
The high point of SDS and New Left interest in the “left-right”
libertarian position came in the work of former SDS President
Carl Oglesby. In 1967, Oglesby published Containment and Change,
a critique of the Vietnam War and the American Empire. In his
concluding pages on strategy, Oglesby called for an alliance with
the Old Right. He called upon the libertarian, laissez-faire wing of
the Right to abandon the conservative movement which held the
libertarians in thrall by convincing them of the existence of a “foreign
threat.” Oglesby cited my article in Continuum, and quoted
from the Old Right view on war and peace of General MacArthur,
Buffett, Garrett, Chodorov, and Dean Russell. In particular,
Oglesby cited Garrett at length, stating that his “analysis of the
totalitarian impulse of imperialism” had been verified repeatedly
over the intervening years.
Oglesby concluded that libertarian right-wing thought, along
with the black power movement and the anti-imperialist student
movement, were all “rootedly American” and were
of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic
associational action; and it is only through them that
the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong
sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically
coordinate.
Also, not sure you are aware of this, but Rothbard considered today’s Republicans to be far more of a threat to liberty that today’s Democrats. He also held that the Cold War was a product of American aggression against the Soviets, rather than the other way around. As he puts it (emphasis mine):
we began to rethink the origins of the Cold
War that we had opposed for so long; …and we concluded that
our older isolationism had suffered from a fatal weakness: the
implicit acceptance of the basic Cold War premise that there was a
Russian “threat,” that Stalin had been partly responsible for the
Cold War by engaging in aggressive expansion in Europe and Asia,
and that Roosevelt had engaged in an evil “sellout” at Yalta. We
concluded that all this was a tissue of myth; that on the contrary
Russia had not expanded aggressively at all, its only “expansion”
having been the inevitable and desirable result of rolling back the
German invasion. That, indeed, the United States (with the aid of
_Britain) was solely responsible for the Cold Wa_r, in a continuing
harassment and aggression against a Soviet Union whose foreign
policy had been almost pathetic in its yearning for peace with the
West at virtually any price. We began to realize that, even in Eastern
Europe, Stalin had not imposed Communist regimes until the
United States had been pressing it there and had launched the
Cold War for several years. We also began to see that, far from
Roosevelt “selling out” to Stalin at Yalta and the other wartime
conferences,9 that the “sellout” was the other way around: as
Stalin, in the vain hope of seeking peace with an implacably
aggressive and imperialistic United States, repeatedly sold out the
world Communist movement: scuttling the Communists of
Greece in a sellout deal with Churchill; preventing the Communist
partisans of Italy and France from taking power at the end of
the war; and trying his mightiest to scuttle the Communist movements
of Yugoslavia and China. In the latter cases, Stalin tried to
force Tito and Mao into coalition regimes under their enemies;
and it was only the fact that they had come to power by their own
arms and not in the wake of the Soviet Army that permitted them
to take over by telling Stalin to go to hell.
In short, we had come to the conclusion that the most astute
analysis of the events of World War II and of the Communist
movement was that of the Trotskyites; far from expanding vigorously
in Europe and Asia, Stalin, devoted only to the national security
of the Soviet Union, had tried his best to scuttle the world
Communist movements in a vain attempt to appease the American
aggressor. That Stalin had wanted only national security and the
absence of anti-Soviet regimes on his borders was shown by the
contrasting developments in Poland and Finland; in Poland,
aggressive anti-Sovietism had forced Stalin to take full control; in
Finland, in contrast, there had emerged the great statesman
Paasikivi, who pushed a policy of conservative agrarianism at home
and peace and friendship with the Soviet Union in foreign affairs;
at which point Stalin was perfectly content to leave Finland at
peace and to withdraw the Soviet army.
In contrast to the uniformly peaceful and victimized policies of
the Soviet Union, we saw the United States using World War II to
replace and go beyond Great Britain as the world’s great imperial
power; stationing its troops everywhere, presuming to control and
dominate nations and governments throughout the world. For
years, the U.S. tried also to roll back Soviet power in Eastern
Europe; and its foreign policy was particularly devoted to suppressing
revolutionary and pro-Communist movements in every country
in the underdeveloped world. We saw too that the Soviet Union
had always pushed for disarmament, and that it was the U.S. that
resisted it, particularly in the menacing mass-slaughter weapons of
the nuclear age. There was no Russian “threat”; the threat to the
peace of the world, in Europe, in Asia, and throughout the globe
was the United States Leviathan. For years, conservatives and libertarians
had argued about the “external” (Russian) and the “internal”
(Washington) threats to individual liberty, with libertarians
and isolationists focusing on the latter and conservatives on the
former. But now we—Leonard and I—were truly liberated; the
scales had fallen from our eyes; and we saw that the “external
threat,” too, emanated from Washington, D.C.
In other words, there is nothing wrong per se with a ‘radical left’ organization. Now, the fact that many radical left organizations reject property rights is a problem - but not all do or did. The devil, it is said correctly, is always in the details. But as a general rule, you would be better off allying with radical left, than radical right, organizations. You will find Marxists less of a threat than Throne and Altar conservatives, in the end.
This is of course exactly the opposite of what most Americans have been conditioned to believe. There is a reason for that.
Sure. The main things are:
How the state changes the fundamental structure of the economy, including subsidising transportation, IP laws, and giving the upper hand to capital owners against labor, to the advantage of large, capital-intensive, vertically-integrated corporations.
How the “lasseiz-faire” period was really statism and corporatism is disguise.
How welfare and similar programs are secondary instances of statism, rather than primary.
Links:
Instead of a Book, by Benjamin Tucker
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Studies in the Anarchist Theory of Organizational Behavior by Kevin Carson (as well as other articles and essays on Mutualist.org)
We could start a new thread, if there is any interest.
Ok, but the 1960’s SDS is not today’s SDS. What is being advertised, is today’s SDS, which is decidely socialist IMO. It’s like when Carsonoid the Mutualist links to the IWW on his blog. Chomsky is in the IWW. It’s a marxist organization IMO. Why are libertarians getting tied up with socialists over fascists? Sounds a lot like a false choice to me. I’d rather be shoulder to shoulder with a corporatist than a socialist. A lot of right wingers are coming to libertarianism, while the libertarians continue to romance a left that could take or leave them.
Well, I think you are throwing around terms which are far more complex than the meaning they seem to have in your context. For example, why do you fail to make a distinction between State socialism and Stateless socialism?
Let’s take SDS: are they ‘decidedly socialist’? What do you mean by that and what makes you say that? Are they calling for the US government to take over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy? Are they calling for nationalization of major industries? If so, I would certainly oppose that.
I just checked - briefly - the Wiki page and found almost every single one of their public activities have been anti-Iraq War events - I don’t see anything about nationalizing industries or about outlawing private property, which are the calling cards of socialism. They’re doing all sorts of highly commendable actions to protest this monstrosity - including getting arrested. I think that’s terrific. Wombatron has said, in regard to the new SDS: “It is explicitly anarchist and anti-authority, and leaders of the SDS have openly asked for support from libertarians and anti-state rightists.”
That sounds reasonable to me. In fact, this sounds precisely like what Rothbard was hoping for.
As for Chomsky, yeah, he’s a syndicalist, and I don’t think that is a workable ideology when it comes to implementation (though to be honest, I have not given this the level of attention and thought it deserves - he is a pretty bright guy), but the guy is brilliant in his critique of the State and he is staunch in his opposition to State violence and coercion. So there are pieces of Chomsky that fit perfectly with what ancaps think - he is a hardcore anti-Statist, at least. In other words, while he is a socialist, he is an ANTI-STATE socialist. Massive difference between that and a Marxist if by Marxist we mean State socialist, IMO.
When you make this assertion: " I’d rather be shoulder to shoulder with a corporatist than a socialist" - you are rejecting Rothbardian libertarianism - are you aware of this?
When you say “A lot of right wingers are coming to libertarianism” do you perceive this as an unalloyed good?? This has happened before, and it’s what gave us Cato, and Reason, and all those other bogus “libertarian” organs which are actually quasi-Statists, and in fact which represent Republicanism-lite, and reject absolutely the fundamental notion of anarchy, which, from my standpoint, is that the State is the absolute enemy of liberty. Minarchists and anarchists are different in a fundamental respect - they accept and desire the State, I reject it utterly and unalterably.
So I think we just disagree here, which is fine, of course - I am in agreement with Rothbard that corporatism is vastly more to be feared by anarchists than socialism. Because the former has proven itself a stable and extremely oppressive Statist system which can last for centuries, while State socialism has always been an unstable Statist system which cannot last more than a few decades. So of the two, why would you pick the former over the latter? And whyever would you pick corporatism (Statism) over Stateless socialism (anti-Statism)? Isn’t the State the main thing? Our Enemy, the State??
In fact, let me suggest what I think is a more reasonable and reality-based criteria upon which to judge organizations and people: are they for a State in any form, or are they against the very concept? If the latter, we can work with them. If the former, we can’t. That means we have a lot more in common with Noam Chomsky than we do with “libertarian leaning” Republicans, at least at this stage of the game. That’s the way it looks to me anyway.
BTW, for what it’s worth, I used to see things very much as you do: socialism was THE ENEMY, and I thought the Republicans were much to be preferred over the Democrats (aka GDDAMN SOCIALISTS) - but I read, and I thought, and I exposed myself to more Rothbard and to dozens and dozens of other thinkers, some of whom made good sense, and others who were full of horsesht, and I got to where I am now, and I am not standing still, but I do know that my old, simplistic view was not aligned with reality, and so it had to change. It may be that yours will also.
What the agorists have consistently said is that agorist counter-economic activity is different from regular counter-economic activity and that this difference is the only way the state can be undermined. There is nothing contradictory about using those words in the same sentence.
What agorists can not answer is why the activity has a different impact and how this can be measurably shown or shown in any real world example that agorists do things that counter-economic actors will not do. So if a difference can not be demonstrated between agorist activity and counter-economic activity then we only need to consider the effects of current counter-economic activity with regard to eliminating the state. We have real examples of counter-economic activity and real examples of its effect on the state. What we do know is that all counter-economic activity weakens the state and that when states do collapse they are replaced by other states. Here is the only point that agorists have that makes any sense. That there needs to be an alternative to the institutions of the state so that people have an option to move towards a free society.
So agorists focusing on growing the counter-economy for the purpose of undermining the state is a waste of time because the project is simply far too enormous to be taken seriously as a strategy to undermine the state. For example in the US agorists would have to create from scratch several trillion dollars worth of economic activity to begin to have any sort of impact. For more personal freedom and to make some money then counter-economic activity is fine.
What is left is creating institutions that can facilitate counter-economic activity. The difficulty lies in that without a counter-economic market large enough to support the institution it will not be viable. This is where market selection matters. Agorists should be focusing on where counter-economic activity is the strongest and therefore the state is the weakest. This doesn’t describe America very well. It does describe the developing world. So strategically the best places for agorists to operate are areas where the state is already significantly undermined by widespread counter-economic activity. Many developing nations are in fact completely propped up by outside aid as there is no economic market that the state has control of.
So agorists are completely misguided in trying to grow the counter-economy and are unwilling to leave Fort Living Room and the creature comforts they have grown accustomed too in order to pursue the one part of agorism that may have some impact in the optimal locations.
Since you love to bring up the Liberty Colony, I will point out the obvious, that the Liberty Colony is in fact pursuing what is the optimal strategy for agorists if they were serious about what they believed in.