Samuel Edward Konkin’s great insight was that smashing the state is not a prerequisite to achieving freedom, but is a consequence of it. The usual political formulation is this:
Choose freedom -> Get a lot of people together -> smash the state -> have free markets -> build wealth
Konkin saw that it could instead go like this:
Choose freedom -> have free markets -> get a lot of people together -> build wealth -> smash the state
He saw that the key difficulty is the stages “have free markets” and “build wealth.” The problem with waiting to do that until the state is smashed is that it leaves us no means to actually smash the state. Parties and activists have tried numerous methods to do so: asking the state to smash itself via protesting and voting, violent demonstrations, sabotage, withdrawing from commerce altogether to deprive the state of resources, and hiding one’s resources from the state’s grasp.
A lot of agorist discussion I see focuses on the economics of the state in counter-economics, and looks at the “counter” as merely depriving the state of our resources. While this is an important concept, it fails to get at the heart of what Konkin’s insight really reveals. It still places free markets and wealth building as something to come only after the state is smashed.
What this analysis fails to understand is that without resources, any attempt to smash the state is futile, and that small token progress is merely a speed bump that can easily be adjusted to. Achieving these speed-bump victories expends resources and leaves no way to replenish them aside from going back to work for the state’s institutions, feeding their accumulation of resources, and saving a meager pittance to be squandered on the next effort.
It is widely assumed that free markets and wealth building cannot be done under the states omniscient eye and overarching resources. It is that assumption that Konkin challenged. Its true that the purity of free markets cannot be achieved while the state still exerts its influence. But that does not mean that free markets are unavailable to us entirely, only that they carry risk. Even a little bit of free market activity builds resources. Building resources provides the means to expand those nascent markets. And it provides the means to further act against the state, to deprive it of resources, to bring more and more people into the circle of free markets.
“Counter” economics does not just mean anti- the state’s economics, it also means other than the state’s economics. And while we are building resources to smash the state, we are also building the social and market structures that will prevail once the state is gone.
If we wait to build those structures only after the state is gone, we risk opening the door to opportunists ready and willing to impose their own social and market structures, from the top down. By having those structures already in place, having been tested and honed to be resilient against the most powerful enemy we know, we leave no chaotic and dangerous transition period in which our newly found freedom can be usurped by late-comers.
In fact, with those structures in place, and having grown to the point where they trump the state’s reach and power, there might not even be a need to smash the state. Prior to WWII, the French built their ultimate defensive wall, the Maginot Line, against an anticipated invasion from the Nazi regime. They thought it impenetrable, or at least strong enough that smashing it would come at so high a cost as to make it a Pyrrhic victory.
They were right. But they made an assumption that was fatal to their defenses, and ultimately fatal to tens of thousands of their people. They assumed that the Ardennes forest was equally impenetrable, and left it mostly open as a “natural” defensive obstacle. The German generals, however, knew better. With their modern equipment and knowledge, the forest might as well have been a paved superhighway. The Germans never attacked the Maginot Line, except later, from the rear, as a mopping up operation. They knew that they would have been slaughtered in a frontal assault on it, but also that such an assault was entirely unnecessary.
I suggest we go through the forest.
Kyle is 44 year old computer programmer and wannabe writer currently living in Tucson, AZ. He has been a libertarian for nearly half of his years, though the political expression of that has evolved from Newt Gingrich Republican to the Libertarian Party to market anarchy to 
Instead of smashing the State, perhaps it is better to ignore it and let it wither. The State is more of an idea than an entity.
Aggressing against an aggressive idea replaces one violent institution with another. One cannot achieve a peaceful end through violent means.
Building free markets within the State requires an educated population who understands the difference between freedom and State, and spends its energy toward the former and not the latter.
When no more supplies can be sent to the Maginot, the posts will be abandoned. Starve them out. Then walk on in.
Not Smash, but Wither the State.
“Aggressing against an aggressive idea”
You can’t aggress against an aggressor, you can only defend. And defense is always good. That’s Liberty 101 my friend.
Correct. Better said is:
“Violent overthrow of the aggressive idea that is called government replaces one violent institution with another. An idea cannot be attacked or changed through violence. …”
Self-defense against ideas is education.
Overthrow leaves the structure of aggression in place, just in different hands. Undermining collapses it entirely. Force used to take power over others is never defense, defense is limited to retaining power over one’s self.
By re-ordering the steps, Konkin reminds us that we can withdraw consent from the thugs who call themselves government.
To quote Etienne de la Boetie,
And to quote from one of my favorite songs,
The thugs who call themselves government are not important enough to be my enemies. I prefer focus my activism on inspiring people around me to embrace the power that is their own.
“The thugs who call themselves government are not important enough to be my enemies. I prefer focus my activism on inspiring people around me to embrace the power that is their own.”
Yup, that pretty much sums it up. That de la Boetie quote is quite apropos as well. In one of my profiles somewhere, I say “I don’t seek to overthrow the state, but to undermine it.”
Very interesting concept & one I believe the Islamic Shariah is working to do by creating the “Shariah Index” on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They are working to independently build their wealth prior to the collapse of all governments.
We need to move & grow together. USA was formed just short of anarchy, designed with limited government merely to protect our freedoms from being abused. If we expect to start over, after governments collapse, we must have assets – land, industry, etc. Unless we prefer to return to the horse & buggy, growing our own foods, making our own clothes, killing and processing animals for food. You get the idea, basically a feudal life.
Ok, Kyle, now … how do we do it?
btw here’s an idea:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/01/journal-growing-an-open-source-war.html
What areas show the most promise for being a Liberty TAZ? NEW HAMPSHIRE. Thoughts?
George, that’s an excellent article, I hadn’t seen that one before, probably was just before I started following Robb.
Anyway, it mirrors the thinking I’ve done on the process. The thing about Robb’s work on insurgencies is that it does not map directly to Agorism. Agorism and insurgencies share many of the same principles, but those principles have to be abstracted out from the concrete methods he describes for insurgency. Insurgencies aim at taking over, agorism aims at secession (personal and societal, bottom up, not state-based). Very different end goals that require different concrete methods, even though they are based on the same abstract ideas.
For insurgencies, the TAZ is a geographical region, because geography is the contested ground. In Agorism, the contested ground is not ground, but market space. Trying to establish a geographical TAZ prematurely would be a mistake, would leave us unecessarily vulnerable, and not match the methods we need to use to succeed.
Later on, when things get to a certain point, geography comes into play. Until then, our TAZ’s are more abstract. Immediately, there is one TAZ that is unassailable, that is the core of all freedom. It’s your own mind. Next is your own financial health and how you manage your time and personal resources. As you identified as “Step 0″ in your “Peaceful evolution” post, ridding yourself of debt and wage slavery and taking control of your own financial life is expanding that TAZ. Next is expanding it into the sphere of trade with others. Then expanding that to secondary services such as payment clearing, security, transportation, etc. Then expanding that….
I have been assembling my thoughts on this process, identifying key relationships, prerequisites, milestones and points of significant transition. I’m planning more on that in the immediate future, but the problem is that it is all speculative, all a-priori logic, with little testing against reality. I would like to find some examples of aspects of this that have been tried. Robb is one source for some of it, but there’s still a lot of abstracting necessary to glean useful data from it.
Kyle, you’re still hung up on this. It doesn’t matter that the concept of insurgency you have in your head is about “taking over”. Robb’s ideas still apply, with minor modifications. Expand your concept of insurgency already please.
Can you define “market space”?
“Trying to establish a geographical TAZ prematurely would be a mistake”
How about establishing a strong “market space” inside a given geographical area?
We need a Liberty Autonomous Zone for the same reason that Silicon Valley became the hot spot for tech stuff earlier in this century. We need geographical proximity. We need a critical mass of buyers and sellers who aren’t afraid to participate in the underground economy, who *need* the underground economy because they’re already working on Step 0 and have either dropped out of wage slavery or need to see what comes after it before doing so.
Life is short. At what point do we stop dithering over vulnerabilities and actually get to work here?
“We need geographical proximity. We need a critical mass of buyers and sellers”
No, and No.
That’s the single most important thing I wish I could get across to people: forget geography, forget critical mass. The whole thing falls into place when you toss those two away.
Geography and critical mass are *effects*, not causes.
We don’t have them, and we have no way of getting them… *until* we’ve succeeded. So take that as a given, and the question is not “how do we get critical mass?”, but “how do we succeed without critical mass?” That’s going to require a very careful definition of “succeed”, and one that is not binary, but a continuum. And it requires a definition that is not collective, but individual. Only from that success can the collective, geographical, critical mass success that you’re thinking of arise.
The main thing holding up agorism for so many agorists is that so many agorists have cause and effect backward.
“Life is short. At what point do we stop dithering over vulnerabilities and actually get to work here?”
Believe me, this arguing is having no effect on my getting to work. Nor on yours, I hope. A variety of other things are standing in my way, and I’m figuring out how to deal with them, but waiting for you or anyone else to be convinced is not among of them. I’d like to convince you, I think we could do good work together, but I’m moving forward as best I can given my other constraints regardless.
You’ll notice that at the very beginning of my article, “have free markets” comes *before* “get a lot of people together”. That’s no accident.
Kyle, I’m intrigued by this, but I’m not following you very well.
What definition of “succeed” do you think works here? Possibly related to that, what resources do you think we should be building?
And you seem to be saying that the “critical mass” for a market is the individual, but how is one person any sort of market? Or am I misunderstanding you on that point?
And if we do not have geographical proximity, how do you build resources without expending a lot of them on transportation of goods?
A concrete example of what you are proposing might be helpful here.
Kirsten,
Yeah, I need to explain all this better. The problem is that I’m trying to describe a whole new way of looking at the problem, from the ground up, but every explanation I offer, people naturally try to fit it into their model of how they look at the problem.
That’s not a criticism, or saying anyone is too stupid to see it. On the contrary, its what smart people do, they have a well-thought out model, and look to integrate new information into it. I’m also not claiming to be some kind of genius that can see things others can’t, only that I’ve picked a particular aspect of the problem to look at, and have found a solution that others don’t *yet* see.
I see critical mass as the same general thing George and you seem to see it as: a group of people large enough so that the effort sustains itself without anyone consciously trying to steer it. I think that can be achieved, but as a result of smaller successes, not as a prerequsite for beginning. It’s an emergent property that then becomes a cause of further growth, like an inflection point where the graph of progress goes from a little above horizontal to something more vertical.
The smallest, most fundamental unit of an Agora is an individual. The smallest, most fundamental unit of a market in the Agora is two people engaging in a single voluntary, unregulated, uncoerced trade. Every single one of those trades is a success. Larger successes have to be built from those basic units. That basic unit does not require critical mass, it does not require any infrastructure at all, it only requires two people interacting honestly and in good faith.
As those two people become three, then five, then twenty, comprising a trading network, they will begin to require some kind of infrastructure for support. That could be some kind of token currency, perhaps a primitive warehouse banking facility, maybe transportation and communications, maybe some basic security, dispute resolution, or even geography in the form of somebody’s garage where they can meet to trade. But there is no need to build any more infrastructure than is needed to support those twenty people and their trades. And once the need is there, there is no need to convince people to participate in a new aspect of infrastructure, they will do so because it provides an immediate benefit.
Later, that small, local network connects to another small, local network to make a larger network that is a little less local. Then they need more infrastructure, but only a little more. Then they connect to more networks, and more, and so more sophisticated infrastructure is both necessary and supportable.
The other important aspect is that it is not necessary for any one person to be entirely agoric or entirely within the pink market. Just as networks grow, so can the extent to which a person’s activity is in the free market vs the unfree market. A network of twenty, or even hundreds or thousands of people might have no-one, or only a very few people, whose entire economic life is within the free market.
The paradigm I’m trying to express is that we do not need to create an Agora for people to trade in, we need to start trading. As soon as we do, even one single trade, we’ve got a small fledgling Agora. There are thousands, tens of thousands of them popping in and out of existence, like quantum particles in a particle accelerator, at any given moment around the world. The thing we need to try to do is to preserve them once they pop into existence, and prevent them from popping back out. Then we need to nurture them and grow them until they reach a critical size where they sustain themselves.
That sustenance and nurturing comes from being conscious of what it is we are doing – call it “class consciousness” if you like that term – and acting to not only consummate the trade, but to do so in such a way that it becomes a building block of something larger. It’s what makes the difference between black markets and counter-economics.
Well then, I think maybe why it’s a little confusing what you are getting at is perhaps because some of us are already doing this and have been for quite some time. Maybe we’re trying to figure out what you want us to do that we’re not already doing.
For example, tomorrow I’m stopping in Seattle on my way home from Portland to trade homemade peach butter for homemade freezer jam with a friend. I don’t necessarily see this as building resources or wealth, though. I plan to start depleting my newly acquired resource as soon as I get home or maybe sooner.
So Kirsten, here’s the thing, you and I and George, we’re not going to be able to trade with each other effectively. Too much geographical separation right now. Though there may be occasional opportunities here and there, they are not significant.
What we can do is to each start trying to trade locally, and then share information about what works. How do we find potential trading partners? How do we approach them with minimal risk? What kinds of goods and services work well for initial agorist activity? How do we get the word out to others to start doing the same? Or get the word out within our local communities of the benefits of agoric trading? What ways can we best leverage our nascent personal and local agoras for the most growth? What are the aspects of infrastructure that are generally needed, and at what stages?
These are all questions that need to be answered. Right now we can develop theory to try to predict some of the answers, but those hypotheses have to be tested against the real world. Some will succeed, some will fail, and some will get somebody put in prison. We have to share that information and all learn from it, so that we maximize the successful behaviors and minimize the failures or the dangerous behaviors.
Someday, if we make this work, our individual networks will grow large enough to intersect with the others. Then you and I and George will be in a position to take the lead on making those connections, and making them work. We’ll be in a position to be the ones that provide and profit from building that next bit of infrastructure.
I can guarantee there are already such networks out there, but they are not advertising themselves for obvious reasons. And in the broader sense of class-ignorant black markets, there is a huge pool of potential agorist trading partners. Among our goals should be to try to connect to the existing networks, and to bring those black markets into the circle of counter-economic trading networks. That requires that we already have proven practices that work, and networks of our own that provide and incentive to join us.
Kirsten, sorry I wrote my last reply before seeing your last.
Trading with your friend is a start. It’s a tiny little success. You’re travelling cross country, and trading along the way. Is this a trip you make often? How could you turn that from an ad-hoc trade into a primitive network? For instance, are there others where you live that would like this homemade freezer jam your friend makes? Could you buy extra to sell to them? Could you purchase things from them that your friend would like in exchange for making more jam than what she made for you? Could you in effect create a little homemade freezer jam distribution enterprise that benefits all of your friends and yourself? Could you convince your friend to do this counter-economically in a deliberate way? Could you build that into trading other things than just peaches and jam? Could you facilitate, for instance, a trade between two of your friends of some hand-loaded ammo for some freezer jam?
Can you preserve this little micro-agora and grow it?
I’m not saying that any of that is going to be practical in your specific circumstance, or that you should go out and do just that. But those are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves. We should be looking for those kind of opportunities whenever a chance to trade comes up. Is this a micro-agora that can be built upon? Is there any way to keep it from popping out of existence once this particular trade is done?
Kyle, I agree that those networks already exist. I think a lot of us probably already are a part of those sorts of things, but as you pointed out, that is not widely advertised.
I’ll go ahead and answer some of your questions just based on my own experience:
How do we find potential trading partners? How do we approach them with minimal risk? What kinds of goods and services work well for initial agorist activity? How do we get the word out to others to start doing the same?
I found potential trading partners by participating in some pro-freedomish internet forums, getting to know people at a distance, and then organizing and attending in-person meetups to further develop those relationships.
We approached each other with minimal risk by (a) initiating relationships over the internet without necessarily having a primary goal of trading,
(b) meeting in person and strengthening those relationships without necessarily having a primary goal of trading, and
(c) bringing the idea of trade into the picture at whatever point each of us felt comfortable with in our particular relationships.
For me, trading locally was not the beginning. For the past several years, I have been traveling around the country meeting others on road trips and hosting people in my home. I’ve made some great friends, and ultimately it is friends or those referred by friends with whom I’m most comfortable trading. And based on relationships I have formed (and continue to form) through these excursions and meetups, I have found a place in both a local and semi-local/regional very informal network which is becoming more geographically convenient for me at least.
The goods and services I’ve traded primarily include labor, lodging, storage space, transportation and courier services, caretaking, and homegrown or homemade canned food.
How I’ve gotten the word out or received word is primarily by being social and trading. I’ve noticed a strong correlation between how social someone is or how much they reach out to others and how successful they are in these sorts of activities. If one is too much of an ass or a hermit, one is likely to have problems finding one’s place in a friendship-based network.
Here’s something that just struck me as a possible misunderstanding about “building resources”. At first, the resource that needs to be built is not the things that are traded, but the trading network itself. That *is* the resource, and it is a huge one, more valuable than all the goods put together. That’s what needs to be built, the peach butter and jam are just a bonus, and should be enjoyed in the full knowledge that they were honestly acquired.
Once it becomes necessary to start building actual infrastructure, then it will be necessary to accumulate material resources to do it with. But initially, the network, the relationships, the friends, and the trust, are invaluable resources.
What sorts of things do you mean by infrastructure in this case?
Kirsten, that’s awesome. You’re way ahead of me. Your experience can be a huge help to the rest of us who aren’t so far along. The only aspect of it I would add from all of this then, is to bring a conscious effort at building it as a counter-economic force instead of just a black market. Maybe you’re already doing that as well, I don’t know, but that’s the piece that ties it all together.
Your travelling means that your network is more geographically dispersed than others will be. I think that only adds to my point that a specific place is not a pre-requisite. To answer one of George’s questions, you’ve created a “market space” that is not tied to a geographical space. Market space is just a network of trading relationships. That is the space that is contested, we are fighting to keep it private and free of coercion, while the state is trying to co-opt it and drain resources from it for its own benefit.
I look forward to hearing whatever else you are willing to share. I think one of the first infrastructure resources that will be needed is some way to privately share this kind of information without compromising the security of what we are doing.
Infrastructure, in theis context, is anything that supports agoric trading. They can physical resources, services, or even just a set of established best practices or protocols. The main categories are: communication, transportation, currency, security, dispute resolution, and land.
Within each category is a wide range of possible things. Security could be anything from a secret handshake to a standing army. Communication could be anything from a hand-delivered letter to a complete alternate internet.
This is my point. This is why I ask if we shouldn’t focus on creating TAZ’s.
That’s real HARD. Either the liberty population is tiny and so it’s not sustainable or they’re too timid to buy black market.
It’s like a starved fire. It never takes off.
However, a TAZ could be a shining example to the rest of the world, and convince the scared, lazy and disbelieving of the world into trying out our strategy.
Of course getting people to move is hard as well, as evidence by the progress of the Free State Project.
A TAZ is expensive, it requires people to uproot themselves, and provides no immediate individual benefit. It also requires a collective decision, moving there only makes sense if a lot of other people do too, but it only makes sense for them if you and a lot of other people do. It’s hard to bootstrap from where we’re at. It’s easy to do later, when the system has grown enough to demand it.
To me, the first is the deal-breaker, it’s expensive. That means it doesn’t scale, it can’t sustain itself. You expend those resources and now you don’t have them to keep building. Trade that begins organically provides its own resources for expansion.
Kirsten has shown that it can be done, though she travels to do it. But she lives in a pretty remote area. You and I live in urban/suburban areas of millions of people. I work with three other people who are all for it, and I’m sure I can find more when I start looking around.
You know how many immigrants are here doing odd jobs for cash? I get at least one knock on my door every Saturday. It’s just a little hard to explain agorism to them, due to the language barrier. I had one guy, who spoke like three words of English, convinced to take silver, until I decided to be honest enough to explain to him that he cannot actually go to the store and spend it. He thought you could in America.
It’s not easy, but none of the methods are.
I’m not against anyone going to NH, or trying to start their own community. I just don’t think that that is an approach that is going to provide the kind of scalability, sustainability, and growth that is needed, particularly at the beginning. Once it grows to the point where lack of secure geography begins to be a constraint, those places will be a huge boon. But if we all pursue that method as primary from the start, I doubt we’ll ever get to that point.
At first, I’d rather co-opt geography as infrastructure, and wait till later to build our own.
Tell that to me again after you use whatever violent means is necessary to prevent your wife and child from being murdered and raped. The peaceful end is the end of that threat, hopefully with the death of the aggressor so others do not have to face the same terror.
Or you could TALK to him and try to convince him that HIS violence is unnecessary… good luck with that.
I am the survivor of a violent attack. I had to shoot that man to save my life. He was not interested in my words.
Peace will never be reached by the INITIATION of force – aggression – but that is a whole different thing than the violence required for self defense.
One cannot achieve a peaceful end through violent means.
I refer to the interaction between human beings and government here. Of course violence in the form of self-defense is justified when human beings are aggressing against you.
Government is an idea. One cannot utilize violence against an idea. Government does not aggress. Human beings use the idea of government in an attempt to justify aggression. Until enough human beings realize that this is an illusion—that all aggression is nothing more than aggression—then progress will not be made.
The idea that aggression can be justified must be smashed. That requires education. Smashing the human beings who believe this false idea will not solve the problem, as there will be a long line of others waiting to take their place.
So the context of the statement is humans vs government, not human vs human.
One problem of using force against the state is that the state is very strong already. Using force to topple the state would require something stronger than the state.
For example, the Greeks put together a coalition to defeat Xerxes. They succeeded, but only by building the Hellenic alliance, which subsequently broke down into the Delian League and Peloponnesian League. So the victories over Xerxes led, almost inevitably, to the conflicts of the Peloponnesian War.
To defeat the British, the Americans built a Continental Army and Navy. So the spirit of the revolution was destroyed in the counter-revolutionary writing of the constitution.
Texans regained their independence in 1861 by voting to ratify the ordinance of secession, and by a bigger margin than voted for annexation in 1845. Yet they immediately joined a new federation in a feckless attempt to defeat the Union forces. As Sam Houston asked, “Why leave one failed union only to form another?” If independence is better, and I believe it is, why not seek it and stick to it?
And I don’t mean for states or collectives. If your individual sovereignty is the best expression and defense of your freedom, why not seek it and stick with it? Why join a new collective?
Not to throw down the state. What you build to overcome the state will have to be, or become, stronger than the state, or it will fail. And given how much you have suffered at the hands of something that is as strong as the state, why do you want anything stronger?
Strength alone doesn’t guarantee success. The state needs resources – money, power, eyes, ears, spies, finks, arms, fists, pigs, screws. It is not mobile, but fixed; it is not flexible, but rigid; it is not innovative, but hidebound. Best of all, for us, it owes its existence to the power groups (death merchants, big oil, big pharma, big banks) that demand it use its power to sustain.
So, begin by withdrawing your money from the banks. Convert to silver and gold except for as much as you need to pay bills. Withdraw from big pharma by considering alternatives to drugs – read “Healing Our World” by Mary Ruwart for some thoughts on this point. Withdraw from death merchants by divesting yourself and your pension funds from them, and by avoiding their products. Withdraw from the airline industry by not using it to fly, or by not flying at all. Find alternative power sources to big oil (natural gas, methane from other sources, wood, methanol, etc.). By making the clients of the state miserable, you make the state work harder for its support.
Most of all, remove yourself from the state, its identity papers, its grid of compliance and information and control. Adopt privacy measures to safeguard your self, your home, your property, and your family.
Shooting an attacker is a violent end, though, is it not?
It is indeed. I wouldn’t claim that self defense is an attempt to achieve peace through violence. It is a violent means to a violent end.
It is the only ethical use of violence that exists.
No, it is a peaceful *end*. The *means* are violent, but the *end* is peaceful. IOW, violent self-defense is used to end the aggression and return the situation to peace.
I find nothing inherently wrong with violence, per se. It is aggression I have a problem with. We libertarians must be very precise in our language on this issue lest we confuse folks. Violence, coercion and force are not inherently evil unless you are a pacifist. Aggression and the initiation of force *are* inherently evil.
Well then allowing one’s wife and child to be raped and murdered (using MamaLiberty’s scenario) without interceding is a peaceful end as well, is it not?
I’m not seeing that, no.
Who cares? It is an ending condition with wife and child raped and murdered. The ending condition with the wife and child not raped and not murdered, and the assailant killed (not murdered, because such killing is justified homicide) is better.
Who cares if it is violent or peaceful? The results that I care about are the people that I care about continuing to live. If that means that 865,000 pigs have to die, so what? If that means that one, or a dozen, violent criminals have to die, so what?
Life liberty and property are worth defending. If you don’t agree, go from me in peace. May your chains set heavily upon you, may they chafe and bind, and may history never record that you were once called human.
There are some difficulties here, but I agree with Konkin, with Teresa, and with Kyle’s suggestions. And have a few of my own.
First, the Ardennes was not conceived of as an impenetrable zone, and the Maginot was extended to the Strait of Dover after 1934. What the Ardennes was, though, was Belgian. And Belgium was neutral. So attacking through Belgium was regarded as less likely, because of the potential outrage of the many other neutral countries. It turns out the Nazis did not mind attacking a neutral country.
The Ardennes was not impenetrable, the Alps are not impenetrable, the Himalayas are not impenetrable. Since armies can move over enormous natural obstacles (mountain ranges, oceans) it is obvious (as Patton noted) that fixed fortifications are a monument to the foolishness of mankind. The Germans did no better with their Siegfried Line in 1944.
But fixed fortifications and “holding posts” has always been unwise, at least since the invention of the counter-weight trebuchet circa AD 1097. It was foolhardy to hold the Alamo. Sam Houston chose to withdraw his troops, pulling Santa Anna onto better ground, using small troop movements to get Santa Anna to divide his forces, and ultimately chose the time and place of battle and the rules of engagement for a decisive victory at San Jacinto. George Washington refused to defend cities and forts and ultimately kept his army alive long enough to win the victory at Yorktown.
So, I agree with the suggestion to go through the forest. Also, let’s not build a huge Maginot Line, or Siegfried Line, nor Alamo of our own. Put all your eggs in one basket if you have few choices, perhaps, but remember that spreading out and remaining mobile are key elements in fourth generation warfare. Having fewer units, smaller ones, and more mobile ones makes it harder to find us, harder to engage us, and therefore much harder to destroy us.
A suggestion that relates to the Belgian aspect of Kyle’s analogy: jurisdictional arbitrage can be your friend. Wyoming has no income tax, Montana has no sales tax. There may be advantages to operating along the border. Fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts, which is not alone in banning them. So there are many opportunities.
Another suggestion: power flows from the provinces into the cities. Power is rarely generated in the cities, which depend on surrounding areas for food, water, electricity, and many other necessities.
Smashing the state, as Etienne de la Boetie noted many centuries ago, is not necessary to ultimate agorist victory. It is also likely to be counter-productive, since whatever you resist may grow stronger. Indeed, the state is generally eager to demand more power, more money, in order to stifle resistance. (Resistance training in exercise physiology shows similar results. We don’t want to build the state’s muscles.) Instead of smashing into the state, laying hands on the tyrant to topple him, it is more important to cut off his sources of support. Starting with your own support, however, minimal, of the state.
If the agorism revolution is successful, as I expect it will be, the state will wither. It is very much like a hothouse flower in a cold climate.
Consider, for example, how much money the state has seized and printed up out of nothing in order to sustain its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (upwards of three trillion) and either distributed directly or through the Federal Reserve to sustain the giant enormous banks (upwards of two trillion). The system is bankrupt, both morally and financially.
If all these ideas don’t suffice to encourage you to tend your own garden, build your own off-the-grid business, and mind your business, let me offer one further thought. The state, in its vexation, may choose to unleash chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. Doing so would not help it survive, but would do a lot of damage. Maybe to friends of yours. Kicking a nuclear state in the crotch might not be your best choice.
Jim, Thanks, now these are applications of concepts.
1. Let’s not build a huge Maginot Line
2. Spreading out & remaining mobile-key elements in 4G warfare.
3. Smaller mobile units are harder to find, harder to engage & harder to destroy.
4. Cut off the tyrants sources of support (food, utilities, etc.)
(Sorry had to summarize to make certain I had your key points – let me know if I missed something)
But I fear the problem we have at hand is what I mentioned above.. the Islamic Shariah is moving concepts of TAZ into reality with the creation of the “Shariah Index” on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They are working to “independently” build their wealth prior to the collapse of all governments. I fear our list is not sufficient.
Your list tells how to disrupt, whatever tyrant is at hand but how is it sustained with no food (for they will surly come and destroy our food plots) or money (for while much can be bartered for only a fool would believe you need no gold/silver – if only for guns & fuel) or shelter (for while some may sympathize, even the slaves had an underground railroad for shelter.)
Hey, maybe I’m just being a fatalist and reading too much into the above article and what I know about our economy and Muslims. Maybe I’m thinking too big and planning for a different war than you. Maybe I’m merely wishing, but once right is centered we have our freedoms. Right? or will we merely trade one tyrant for another?
Okay, now I’m rambling.. wrote this post 6 times..and lost focus.. hope you can understand me…
Anything you build that is big enough and strong enough to overwhelm tyranny is itself a danger to your liberties.
A Sharia index is not a new idea, it is similar to other “social justice” indexes, the apartheid divestment project, the Jim Crow divestment project, my own death divestment project at divestfromdeath dot wordpress dot com.
There is no hope. Hope is a waste of time. You cannot fix the system by working within it because from the point of view of those who run the system, it isn’t broken. The system provides patronage from politicians who are corrupted by campaign “contributions” and lobbyist funds to do the bidding of vested economic interests in banking, war, pharmaceuticals, agribiz, etc., who seek that patronage, and get it. That system will go on stomping a human face forever.
What mechanism do you suppose exists that can eradicate all the private marijuana grow houses and closets and such? If pot growing has been decentralised and diversified and made impossible to end, why not food growing? Why is your garden plot entirely outdoors?
When you think a bit about how satellites work, and what they can do, you can also see what they cannot do. They have ground penetrating radar that can see through a kilometer of sand, but not a single inch of granite. They can look at heat signatures, but infrared light can be hidden by any number of opaque materials. It simply isn’t that hard for 307.5 million Americans to hide all kinds of stuff.
But, of course, you have to be working with people who respect dissent and privacy. Not everyone does.
Regarding “Anything you build that is big enough and strong enough to overwhelm tyranny is itself a danger to your liberties.” Your correct, anyone that has studied the founding of our country understand that. Our forefathers so hated government that the first constitution was a mirror of anarchy. But they created a limited government to protect liberties. I believe it failed due to the lack of understanding by the people and not from lack of being a great plan.
I already practice much of what you promote on Divest from Death..and have for many years (and only wish more people would starve companies like GE, CSC-affiliate of Equifax, Halliburton by REFUSING to buy their products or provide them services or materials but that is another story.) Working with people who think different from oneself is paramount.. who wants to be surrounded with same mind thinking or yes men. One can only sharpen a sword by heat and pounding. But ‘no plan’ or ’self plan’ for overcoming what is about to occur doesn’t work.
Yeah, I guess we could plan for a Mad Max type of existence where only the strong survive or maybe flee the land like the Jews in Nazi Germany. But personally, dont like either.. for neither is a plan.
The article above says is best “without resources, any attempt to smash the state is futile.” Now, I read that as “access to resources.” An unformed nomadic group lacks that on any scale.
It went on to say ““Counter” economics does not just mean anti- the state’s economics, it also means other than the state’s economics. And while we are building resources to smash the state, we are also building the social and market structures that will prevail once the state is gone.” What is the plan to building the social and market structures?
Bartering or growing a garden inside under granite (though I didnt know that) isn’t enough.
Maybe a group who is advocating the legalization of hemp for the benefit of mankind.. like it was before Dupont, Hearst & Rothchild(?) plotted against Ford. But if that is the plan to ‘create resources for the group,’ then what is the plan? A plan, with goals – objectives…
It would be folly to believe that 307.5 million Americans will be willing participants in anything… most are sheep. We’d be lucky to have 1% of those over 18 with us. But this I do know, if there isn’t some group, with some plan, some where, those 307 million +/- will turn into savages against everyone..in the battle for food, water and shelter.
I had never heard of Konkin until this article. Does anyone know if Konkin had a protege or someone that continued in his life studies? His article is one of the best, if not the best, I’ve ever read about what is needed…
And Yes, Leo if you are reading this… it’s me.
Okay, I just joined this group and am perusing the other articles… maybe I need to connect a few more dots to understand what all may be here…
Cathy,
We’re all trying to connect the dots. We’re in uncharted territory here, trying to figure out the way through it.
As to a Konkin protege… not a protege so much as a co-”founder” if that is what you want to call it, of Agorism is J Neil Schulman. He’s still blogging, and is also on Twitter and Facebook. Not on fr33 though, unless it’s stealthy. Read his book “Alongside Night”, it’s considered the seminal Agorist fictional work. Though it is short on real advice, and not, in my opinion, a model that can be emulated in the early stages, its a good read and a good way to get a feel for the kind of things Agorism aims at.
All we have to work with are people. If the constitution failed because people were not sufficient to the plan, then the plan sucked. Show me “angels in the shape of kings” and we can talk more about this great plan.
The constitution has authorised every single vestige of tyranny, or has been utterly powerless to prevent any of it. If you are seeking to restore the republic to its constitutional limits, I’m game. Doing so would reduce government by a huge amount, and that would be a blessing. But if you propose to shove the government back into the limits of power listed in the constitution, and then take a nap, I cannot agree to sleep. More needs to be done, because the system didn’t work. You know that you are living under tyranny now, and you know that the constitution didn’t prevent it.
Your idea of starving GE is a good one. I stopped buying their light bulbs when I learned that they were trying to force through these laws to ban incandescent bulbs.
Since 1986, I have been a professional business plan writer. I’ve written plans in many industries on many types of businesses at many different stages. No plan is not a good idea. Self plan is a very good idea. Not only should each person plan for herself, she should keep her plan to herself. Americans talk too much for their own good.
I don’t understand your Mad Max comment. You must be aware that the films “Mad Max” and its sequels take place in a post-apocalyptic world. If you have no plans for surviving nuclear war, then I won’t see you on the other side.
Running away is a plan. Hiding is a plan. Many Jews not only fled Nazi Germany, but participated in the war effort, designing nuclear weapons, developing better radar and sonar, etc.
You with scorn for other people’s plans, Cathy, what is your plan?
Actually, a few inches of reinforced concrete are about as good as granite. Rebar itself is opaque in many parts of the spectrum, and neutrino surveillance systems have notoriously poor resolution.
Who are you to say that bartering isn’t enough? Who are you to say that growing a garden inside isn’t a good part of a diversified plan? Again, what is your plan?
A plan which is centralised is weak. I want plans that are robust. Put very much in the hands of a few, and then the government simply kills off those few individuals. Decapitation is the end of many governments around the world throughout history, and the end of many revolutionary movements. The agorism revolution is necessarily decentralised. A plan that cannot survive my death is not much of a plan. If you were hit tomorrow by a Mack truck, would your plan survive? If not, it isn’t a robust plan.
A nuclear war can take out 200 cities in the USA and the Internet would survive. The design is that robust. Where is the central planning committee for the Internet? There isn’t one. There is a TCP/IP protocol sheet, but that isn’t a plan, it is a protocol.
There is a German red shield in Rothschild. Roth = red, schild = shield. I think. Anyway, that’s how I remember to misspell it. lol
I have no plan to create resources for the group. I think that has elements of centralising power and control which I don’t like. I plan to create resources for me, when I’m confident that doing so won’t promptly result in those resources being confiscated by the state.
Maybe we should work on your plan. What are your goals? Objectives? Tactics? Strategies? What operations would serve these goals and objectives best?
Every human being is a willing participant in life. Or they are dead. I guess suicides are unwilling participants, until they succeed.
What do you have against persons under 18? A sixteen year old can be a marksman. A twelve year old can re-load for a markswoman. I’m baffled why you think they don’t care about their freedom.
There are many groups with many plans. The idea that the war of all against all will start up just as soon as there is no plan is silly. The state is in a war against everyone, and most people ignore it, go about their business, trade with each other, and get along. In fact, the war of all against all is Thomas Hobbes, writing his essay Leviathan and lying, over and over again, to justify monarchy.
For more Konkin ideas, by Konkin and others, check out agorism.info and cadre.ag and ar.to and nostate.com and google up agorism and Konkin by name.
For an amusing plan about making a film and online game out of Alongside Night, check out houstonspacesociety dot org slash alongside but don’t expect anything to come of it. Schulman is a nut who doesn’t keep his agreements.
Jim, Thanks for all the thoughts, I will ponder and respond. I too am a planner.
Please tell me, how do you interpret key aspects of the above article, specifically:
“Without resources, any attempt to smash the state is futile.” Now, I read that as “access to resources.” I believe, maybe wrongly, that an unformed nomadic group lacks that on any scale. But what does that say to you and are they in place?
It went on to say ““Counter” economics does not just mean anti- the state’s economics, it also means other than the state’s economics. And while we are building resources to smash the state, we are also building the social and market structures that will prevail once the state is gone.” What does this mean to you? What structures are being considered?
P.S. I’m am 100% for the Republic. I really liked the book 5000 Year Leap. It spoke of how much our founding father disliked government. Their first constitution was rejected because it was too close to anarchy.
Cathy
Nice to have you, Cathy. We argue a lot but we’re (mostly) on the same page.
Thanks J Nick, I look forward to getting to know you all (F33) and what we can do/accomplish together. It’s good to know that arguing is acceptable, because I do like to challenge myself and others. Together, side by side in battle, we grow wise & grow strong… Thanks Again, Cathy
Kyle,
Alongside Night outlines the practical prerequisites for an effective Agorist strategy, with Elliot Vreeland as the student of Agorism.
For extra-state markets to grow so investment will be attracted to the counter-economic market sector, law and order must be brought to extra-legal marketplaces. There must be a means of dispute settlement other than gang warfare. The way this is handled in Alongside Night is all parties agreeing in advance to a General Submission to Arbitration. This becomes the substitute for the State’s legal structure for the “legitimization” of property claims, resolution of breaches of contract, and torts.
The primary enforcement mechanism is the Agorist market shunning those who refuse to accept arbitors’ judgments against them.
I show additional means of protecting marketplaces, traders, and property owners in the novel, but property rights and contracts enforceable without gang violence is the key.
Neil
Oh, thank you for telling me about the book… That has been a continual question of mine — How do you settle disputes without a court?
Have you ever read “Common Law” by Oliver Wendell Holmes? If one merely follows that, our world of property claims, resolution of breaches of contract, and torts would once again make sense.
I vote that the only law is Common Law and that nothing be added or taken away….
P.S. There can be NO attorneys!!