Tag: Agora! Anarchy! Action!

The Problem with Anarchy

Critics of anarchism always claim that anarchy results in lawless chaos where survival of the fittest becomes the law of the land. That isn’t the problem with anarchy. The problem with anarchy is that it sneaks up on your and blindsides your ass:

As Detroit’s call-it-anything-but-bankruptcy budget crisis drags on and the city government is unable to provide the most basic of services, residents have discovered an alternative to lawless anarchy: cooperative anarchy!

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On the wealthier side, the philanthropic Krege Foundation coordinated with automakers and local businesses to purchase 23 new ambulances and 100 new police cars. Okay, perhaps providing equipment to the municipal government doesn’t fall under cooperative anarchy. But at the rate the city’s going, they’ll probably all be driven by volunteers any day now.

The chaos of ever dwindling statism hasn’t stopped at a handful of crazy philanthropic individuals buying ambulances:

Dale Brown and his organization, the Threat Management Center (TMC), have helped fill in the void left by the corrupt and incompetent city government. Brown started TMC in 1995 as a way to help his fellow Detroit citizens in the midst of a rise in home invasions and murders. While attempting to assist law enforcement, he found little but uninterested officers more concerned with extracting revenue through traffic tickets and terrorizing private homes with SWAT raids than protecting person and property.

In an interview with Copblock.org, Brown explains how and why his private, free market policing organization has been so successful. The key to effective protection and security is love, says Brown, not weapons, violence, or law. It sounds a bit corny, yes, but the results speak for themselves.

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The reasons TMC has been so successful is because they take the complete opposite approach that government agencies, in this case law enforcement, do. Brown’s philosophy is that he would rather hire people who see violence as a last resort, and the handful of Detroit police officers who actually worked with Brown in the earlier years and have an interest in genuine protection now work for TMC. While governments threaten their citizens with compulsion, fines, and jail if they don’t hand over their money, TMC’s funding is voluntary and subject to the profit-loss test; if Brown doesn’t provide the services his customers want, he goes out of business.

A security group that’s more concerned about protecting its customers than expropriating wealth through traffic citations? Is there no end to the insanity anarchy is bringing? What’s next, efficient bus services?

Law enforcement isn’t the only “essential government service” that the private sector is taking over and flourishing in. The Detroit Bus Company (DBC) is a private bus service that began last year and truly shows a stark contrast in how the market and government operates. Founded by 25-year-old Andy Didorosi, the company avoids the traditionally stuffy, cagey government buses and uses beautiful vehicles with graffiti-laden exterior designs that match the heart of the Motor City. There are no standard bus routes; a live-tracking app, a call or a text is all you need to get picked up in one of their buses run on soy-based biofuel. All the buses feature wi-fi, music, and you can even drink your own alcohol on board! The payment system is, of course, far cheaper and fairer.

As you can see, anarchy really sneaks up on a society suffering collapsing statism. At one moment people are enjoying the rampant crime and wealth expropriation taking places as the state begins to collapse and its employees strive to expropriate whatever wealth they can manage before the inevitable end then, out of nowhere, people get sick of that shit and begin to bring a cooperative attitude that raises civilization from the ashes.

Johnny Cannabis Seed

Repeat after me, prohibitions never work. The simpler the thing being prohibited is to do or create the more miserably the prohibition will fail. Cannabis, being a weed, is very easy to grow and therefore the prohibition against growing, using, and selling cannabis was doomed to fail. Supporters of cannabis legalization in Gottingen, Germany demonstrated the futility of banning the weed:

Cannabis plants are sprouting up all over a German town after pro-marijuana supporters planted tens of thousands of seeds last month.

Supporters of the group A Few Autonomous Flower Children spread several kilograms of seeds around the university town of Gottingen last month.

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Scores of the plants have sprouted all over the town this week to the fury of the local police and council.

A website shows dozens of photos of the cannabis plants blooming in public parks, allotments, gardens and window boxes all over town – with some even growing outside the local police station.

Police have been ripping out the illegal plants on sight but the sheer number of blossoming plants became noticeable in the past week.

The act of planting cannabis seeds throughout a territory has been a form of civil disobedience discussed by many but executed so effectively by few. Hopefully the success experienced by A Few Autonomous Flower Children will encourage individuals in other cities to perform similar facts. Nothing would demonstrate the futility of cannabis prohibitions so succinctly as millions of plants growing in every major city. If nothing else, such actions sap resources from the state by forcing it to redirect police resources from writing citations and shooting dogs to ripping up cannabis plants. The more time the police waste ripping up weeds the less time they have to cause actual harm to people.

Things are Looking Up in Spain

Spain has been suffering a great deal of economic distress. Fortunately, there is a silver lining to the country’s storm clouds. While the “legitimate” economy is floundering the “underground” economy is flourishing:

Spain’s illicit economy–all that is unaccounted for because it’s illegal or unreported–is worth an unseemly 20% of the country’s GDP, according to a new report by Spain’s Foundation for Financial Studies (FEF). That’s higher than every other country in the European Union except Italy, with 21%.

Spain only has a little catching up to do before it overtakes the current leader of the European Union, Italy.

While a Keynesian would look at such news in despair, an agorist, such as myself, would point out the fact that a country’s economy isn’t in the toilet simply because the state says it is. In the eyes of the state an economy’s health is measured by the rate rate of expropriation. If the state is able to expropriate a great amount of wealth from the general populace then, in its eyes, the economy is health. On the other hand, if the state is unable to expropriate a great amount of wealth from the general populace then it believes the economy is failing.

Markets don’t cease operating because participants are unable to fulfill the state’s demands. When the state begins to demand more than market participants can or are willing to surrender then those markets move underground. The state sees such “underground” markets as its enemy because they are its death knell; they are the the result of the people finally standing up a saying “Enough! Go bad to Hell from whence you came you evil plunderers!” As we can see by the estimated size of Spain’s “underground” economy, the people there have finally grown so sick of their rulers that they are refusing to surrender any of their hard earned wealth even under the threat of being thrown into a cage or murdered by costume clad thugs with badges.

I only hope that Spain’s overall disgust in rulers will eventually spread here to the United States.

Breaking the Law, It’s More Valuable than Most People Realize

One of the most annoying claims I hear people make is, “I’m a law abiding citizen!” No, you’re not, nobody is. In fact everybody in the United States, on average, commits three felonies a day. Considering there are approximately 27,000 pages of federal statutes it shouldn’t surprise anybody that obeying the law is impossible.

When I discuss civil disobedience and agorism as an alternative to politics the most common rebuttal I hear is that both are illegal. What critics often fail to realize is that those methods are illegal by design. Breaking the law is critical if one wants to change society:

What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

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The more fundamental problem, however, is that living in an existing social structure creates a specific set of desires and motivations in a way that merely talking about other social structures never can. The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn’t able to. Any teenager can tell you that life’s most meaningful experiences aren’t the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible. This is why same sex relationships, in violation of sodomy laws, were a necessary precondition for the legalization of same sex marriage. This is also why those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.

Why would anybody advocate for legalizing homosexuality if they didn’t partake in it or know somebody who partook in it? The same goes for cannabis, strong cryptography, and standard capacity magazines. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

The whole point of civil disobedience is to partake in an illegal activity to raise awareness of its prohibition, demonstrate that there are people who derive enjoyment from the prohibited act, and demonstrate that the prohibited act’s practice isn’t harmful to others. Cannabis would have almost certainly remained illegal in Colorado and Washington if it wasn’t for disobedient individuals demonstrating that smoking the plant is enjoyable to many and harmless to everybody else. The same goes for homosexuality. It took individuals participating in same-sex relationships to demonstrate that same-sex relationships are enjoyable to many and harmless to everybody else.

Agorism, in my opinion, is, in part, meant to demonstrate that a functioning society is possible without the state. The only way to demonstrate such a thing is to participate in actions outside of the rules established by the state. Commerce, being the area of our lives the state attempts to control the most, is a prime candidate for demonstration purposes. When you think about it, almost everything we do in our lives is made possible through commerce. The simple act of eating food is made possible, for most people in the United States, by farmers selling their goods to wholesalers, who hire truckers to haul food to trains, which haul the food to barges, which transport the food to a packaging plant, which packages up the food and gives it to more truckers, who transport the food to distribution centers, which put the food on their trucks, which transport the food to grocery stores, which sell the food to consumers.

The state claims that each and ever step along that path must be tightly regulated in order to ensure consumer safety. Agorists can prove the state wrong by providing food, transportation, or packaging outside of the state’s regulations. Doing so in a manner that satisfies customers’ demands demonstrates the viability of commerce that isn’t tightly regulated by the state.

Just as you have to break eggs to make omelets you also have to break laws to make societal changes.

Five Reasons to Abandon Politics

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that I’ve moved away from the political means to attain my goals. Instead of begging politicians and destroying my soul by working within the political machinery I’ve decided to rely on civil disobedience and agorism. Oftentimes people still working within the political machinery ask why I can’t participate in politics and perform acts of civil disobedience and participate in agorism. Well, here are five good reasons:

  • It eats up a horrifying amount of time and energy
  • It’s an addiction
  • It doesn’t change anything
  • In the end, it’s about violence
  • Politics is a relic of a barbaric past

Details about each reason are provided at the link but suffice it to say each reason is an inescapable reality of participating in politics. If I still participated in politics I wouldn’t have time to perform acts of civil disobedience or participate in agorism. When I did involve myself in the political system I was constantly bombarded with demands to phone bank, drop literature, march in parades, attend meetings, donate money to candidates, and other activities I refused to do. Every campaign wanted my time and money and, in the end, they failed to change anything. Some of the candidates won, some of them lost, but the country is still a shit hole.

I don’t believe civil disobedience and agorism are strategies guaranteed to win but they are fun to do and radically different, which is necessary because their alternative, politics, has failed to achieve anything other than tyranny since its inception. When one strategy has failed miserably the need to do something radically different arises.

Independence Day

It’s July 4th, which means millions of people across the United States are waving red, white, and blue flags; launching off fireworks; and feeling patriotic. I will be partaking in the ritual of blowing shit up because such a ritual should be practiced every day but I will not be celebrating my patriotism as I have none.

But in the spirit of Independence Day I will take a moment to reflect on how I’ve made myself more independent. Years ago I moved my cloud services to my personal cloud. I am no longer reliant in Google for my e-mail, calendaring, and address book as I host all of those services on my own system. When I say my own system I mean my own system. My server is sitting in my dwelling, not on a rack in a data center located somewhere I’ve never heard of. I’m still living within my means, which means I have no debt and can declare myself independent of the banking cartel. Although I’m no model of physical perfection I do exercise regularly and try to eat healthy so I’ve been able to keep myself independent of the pharmaceutical industry that grips this nation with an iron fist. I carry a firearm, which allows me to protect myself and those I care about instead of relying on, and hoping that, the police to keep me and mine safe.

Waiving flags and declaring your love for Big Brother is no way to celebrate a holiday called Independence Day. If you want to do the holiday justice celebrate by making yourself more independent. Even little things like learning to brew beer or repair your means of transportation can make you a more independent person.

Have a great Independence Day and try not to blow yourself up.

Rebellion Exists Everywhere

New York City, which is ruled be the despotic dictator Michael Bloomberg, is generally ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing a complete police state. To paraphrase a Star Wars quote, the more you tighten your grip, the more people will slip through your fingers. While New York City has a prohibition against gatherings larger than 50 people, unless the group buys a permit, people have decided to give the oligarchy of that city a giant middle finger and hold massive illegal gatherings underground:

In the distance, beyond the bend in the trackbed, a weird chanting began to ripple out and echo through the space. I saw the glow of candles, and as I approached I saw that everyone had been drawn to the end of the line. On what would have been part of a subway platform, a few people were leading the group in some sort of wild incantation. By the time I got there it reached a euphoric crescendo, and one of the performers overlooking the crowd yelled something like, “Bring your candles to the Echo Vault!”

By the time I drifted back to the vault with the others, a woman on “stage” (Jessica Delfino) was singing a hypnotic a cappella ballad about New York. Then a drummer, Joel Saladino, joined her, bashing away at the kit in a series of increasingly ferocious drum solos.

I climbed the stairs up another two stories and carefully tiptoed across one of the crossbeams extending the width of the Vault, trying not to think about how I’d probably break an ankle or worse if I fell. The view from back there was incredible, and when the stage at the opposite end filled with the Extra Action Marching Band, I could see the party was really getting started. It was like the Zion dance party in Matrix Reloaded, but with fewer douchebags. The music was thunderous and suddenly the mood was exultant—everyone danced, because that was the only way to deal with the inexplicable joy that was exploding down there.

If we’d gotten caught, the organizers would no doubt have faced some serious criminal charges. But if it was up to me, I’d give them the keys to the city for raising such an audacious middle finger to the notion that New York City’s underground is dead and gone.

What Stark and Austin and the musicians managed to create, almost miraculously, was a Temporary Autonomous Zone to remind us that this is still a city worth living in, despite the creeping feeling that New York’s being bled dry by an ever-expanding corporate vampire real estate army.

No matter how tight the rulers of New York City, or anywhere else, clamp down the people will always find a way to bypass the authorities. This is why human progress, which is only possible thanks to anarchy, can continue. The state tries to prevent change from occurring by passing laws but laws are meaningless when they can’t be enforced.

Knowing that illegal underground gatherings like the one mentioned in the story, albeit on a much smaller scale, occur here in the Twin Cities puts a smile on my face. Rebellion is everywhere and it’s a beautiful thing.

Dismissing Criticisms You Can’t Counter

A couple of weeks ago Michael Lind, an writer for Salon, thought he had the ultimate trump card against libertarianism. He asked why no libertarian countries exist. As I, and many other libertarians explained, libertarianism is a philosophy built upon the idea of non-aggression, which is ultimately incompatible with statism. Mr. Lind, looking to generate more page hits from outraged libertarians, decided he would attempt to rebut that argument:

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

The caricature created by Mr. Lind is that everybody who advocates anti-statism is a utopian anarchist and therefore can be dismissed without argument. It’s a classic straw man fallacy. Apparently Mr. Lind is not able to argue against the claim so he has created a much easier caricature to argue against.

Most anarchists, myself included, are not utopian. We don’t claim that a stateless society will be perfect. There will always been some amount of theft, rape, murder, and other acts of violence. Likewise, fraud and other nonviolent transgressions will almost certainly be ever present in human society.

What we do argue is that statism, being a system based on violence, is worse than a system based on mutual cooperation. In my previous post I provided several examples of societies that succeeded without a state, one of which still exists today. The fact that such societies have existed and continue to exist today demonstrates that statelessness isn’t an impossible reality that can be dismissed without argument. If Mr. Lind doesn’t believe anarchism can succeed he needs to provide some argumentation to backup his claim. Simply labeling anarchists as utopians doesn’t count since most of us aren’t utopians.

Seeing Mr. Lind’s dismissal of anarchism also raises a question, why does he think statism is the best foundation to base a society on? Why is a society that has one group of individuals ruling over everybody else better than a society where nobody rules of anybody else better? I could never find a satisfactory answer to those questions, which is why I eventually became an anarchist.

I May Have to Begin Learning Icelandic

Now that we know the identify of the person who leaked the National Security Agency’s (NSA) PowerPoint presentation on their surveillance operations the only question that remains is, what will happen to him? Hong Kong was likely the best option out of a series of bad options for Mr. Snowden to flee to but, being a country that signed an extradition treaty with the United States, it’s not a viable long-term solution.

Where could Mr. Snowden possibly run? As it turns out, he may be able to find asylum in Iceland:

On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to the Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.

“Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” their statement reads. “We are already working on detailing the legal protocols required to apply for asylum, and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

A couple of years ago Iceland passed laws to protect investigative journalists from other states. Normally I would be very skeptical about such laws but WikiLeaks was involved in the drafting and Iceland told the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to go fuck itself when it was investigating WikiLeaks so the island’s actions do backup its claims. Couple its journalist protection laws with its willingness to persecute corrupt bankers and you have a place that sounds like a great destination to expatriate to.

As far as I’m concerned the United States is a lost cause. The only salvation this police state has is a reset, which can only be accomplished by a complete collapse. After a collapse the nation could be rebuilt into a beacon of liberty but I believe that time is a long ways off and, frankly, I don’t want to be here when the worst of the economic and state collapse hit. I’ve been looking for nations to flee to and Iceland is sounding pretty nice. You have to love a nation that elects a self-proclaimed anarchic clown as the mayor of its capital city.