Now let’s take our compass and protractor and discern the “middle.” With my ideological tools, I see it as a largely aboveground business, accepting incorporation but only as a camouflage, afraid to deal with the Counter-Economy but equally in fear of the consequences of following regulations which will weaken or destroy the business. A highly unstable position, to be sure, as it should be. Tilting to the Right decreases risk but leads to a weaker business and less profit and thus the incentive to go ever-further right, begging, bribing and cajoling more and more statist intervention to assist the market-alienated firm, until finally it becomes indistinguishable from a branch of the State.

Tilting to the Left increases risk, but also profit and fitting supply to demand. As the company becomes more Counter-Economic, it prospers accordingly and has more capital to re-invest (since it’s paying little or no taxes) but if “outed” by the State, it can suffer ever-greater penalties. Finally, it goes completely underground and is a major Enemy of the State and essentially a key part of the Agorist Revolutionary strategy.

What keeps most entrepreneurs hovering between semi-agorist and semi-bureaucratic are the countervailing vectors of Fear of Risk/Failure vs Fear of Violence and Coercion. A few break free in one direction, embracing the risk and enjoying the freedom for however long they can succeed, and a few go the other way, embracing the State and reveling in whatever power they are granted over others.

Accepting money or any favours whatsoever is always wrong. Seizing property in the State’s sphere is always right. And what about those who fear for their families, that they will not be able to support their spouse or have their children seized and taken away? Where does cowardice fit on the political spectrum?

– “Deep Agorist Theory”, Samuel Edward Konkin III, 22 November 1999, LeftLibertarian mailing list

One can only hope...

The sound of adding machines chattering away in the Oval Office is the sound of empire in decline. The ship of the imperial state lacks fuel for its boiler and powder for its cannon … but its captain and crew dare not take it into port for maintenance. They’ve convinced themselves — and they may very well be right — that the barnacles infesting its hull are the only thing holding it together, and that it (and their jobs with it) will disintegrate if the fouling organisms are removed. And so they limp it along toward its next target, nursing as much mischief out of it as they can and hoping it holds together until they’re retired and it becomes someone else’s problem.

Read the whole thing over at c4ss.org.

More than anything else, Keith pushes a sort of meta-strategy for anarchism which aims at pluralism and ecumenicalism and which suggests that all anti-state tendencies ought to unite against the principal enemy of liberty, the state itself, in preference to choosing lesser targets of activist action such as sexism, racism, homophobia and so on. The biggest tent possible, in other words, for the advance of anarchism as anti-statism, absent the baggage of a myriad of other issues.

Of itself, I believe this has great strategic value.

In his posting yesterday, though, Keith unambiguously betrays his own ugly prejudices in a bilious piece entitled “Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?“:

Do we really attract more people into our ranks by having so many self-hating whites, bearded ladies, cock-ringed queers, or persons of one or another surgically altered “gender identity” in our midst? Is this really something the average rebellious young person wants to be associated with? Could we not actually attract more young rebels into our ranks if all of this stuff was absent? I believe we could.

Suffice it to say this I find this offensive on many levels.

Now, I’m all for Keith’s right to free speech. But I find that I don’t really care about Keith’s strategy.

The anarchist tent may, indeed, need to be bigger in order to achieve strategic goals. But here I see one arguing for a big-tent strategy giddily pushing marginalized groups out of the tent and encouraging others to do the same.

Not only is this a contradiction of the big-tent strategy itself, but it also pushes away all those who sympathize with those marginalized, traditionally hated out-groups. I, for one, am not going to be found standing up for the rights of bigoted assholes to be bigoted assholes, let alone lending them whatever credibility might attach in a given reader’s mind to finding such linked to at my own website.

And so today Keith disappears from my blogroll, and good riddance. For the moment he remains in my RSS reader, since I recognize that there is a fine mind at work in Keith, and one often worth reading, despite what I view as a clear deficit of empathy.

Without substantial work at repentance, Keith will not be welcome at my table, nor in my tent.

[E]ven if agorism never achieves the ends, it is an effective way to live a defiant life.

If this is “order”, how bad can “chaos” be? Seriously…

Just because it’s “anarchy” doesn’t mean people will start smashing guitars and snorting coke off dead babies.

Statists don’t want you to know this, but power is the problem, not the solution.

An image of a portion of a screenshot of the article in question, featuring the item to which I desire to call attention.

Every issue in today’s press from Bosnia to Oklahoma City has an overlooked Counter-Economic component that AI [the Agorist Institute] can explore, compile and publish. Other areas can be excavated from the underground that will become issues once exposed and explained, an then there is the new battleground for agorists and statists: cyberspace, where cypherpunk agorist road warriors have an early lead over the Gore statist superhighwaymen.

You, ladies and gentlemen, are the new Agorist Institute.

Now quit goofing off, and get back to work.

Arthur Silber on the nature of the modern American terrorist state in “Terrorist State, Abroad and At Home“:

“Freedom isn’t free,” our viciously stupid propagandists announced to the dead, maimed and displaced Iraqis, neglecting to note that it was beneath our lofty status to inquire whether the gift was desired in the smallest degree, especially when acquired by these methods and with the associated costs. (This assumes that “freedom” was, in fact, the goal, which of course it was not. All of this is propaganda, remember.)

The fundamental lesson is unmistakable, and unmistakably evil in intent and execution (a word made horribly appropriate in more than one sense by our government’s actions): you will do exactly as we say — or else.

It is now critical to note a further implication of this murderous method of dealing with others. Just as it is not possible for an individual to restrict what constitutes a fundamental psychological methodology to only one area of his life, so a ruling class will not employ one approach in foreign policy while dealing with matters of domestic politics in a radically different manner. In any case, the U.S. ruling class never had such a desire: in one way or another, other nations would be made to submit to the demands of the U.S. government — and the same is true for U.S. citizens. The citizens of America will do exactly as the ruling class demands — or else. As far as the ruling class is concerned, you have as little reason to complain as the murdered Iraqis do: the ruling class only wishes to improve your life. The ruling class acts only on your behalf, and “for your own good.”

You’d think there are limits and ways to break people out of insanity and things they’ve gotten used to being normal because of everything they’ve been through, but if even your own crying child can’t do it, what can?

Unfortunately, when it comes to the evils we’ve been indoctrinated with and inured to — be it by parents, religion, society, culture or states — breaking out of insanity is something that precious few of us manage to do.

He is right, of course. That the largest American organized political entity in favor of freedom as opposed to institutionalized slavery is in the process of being sold out should be of the greatest concern to everyone, globally, who cares about the direction in which this miserable planet is headed.

Please, do what he suggests, it may be the last chance.

Bob Barr - talkradionews@flickr

According to a different analysis, however, the last chances have already come and gone. Certainly since the Steve Kubby-related party fiascoes and the infighting that has characterized the party’s public face for more than a decade, nevermind the recent Cato-vs-Lew Rockwell split, the Libertarian Party has, already, diligently consigned itself to irrelevancy.

That the party of “liberty” would conscion an institutional statist like Bob Barr as a candidate for office ought to be a sign to anyone with a clue. While in office, Barr paid lip service to some of the causes of freedom, while gleefully trouncing the rest. Barr might find one or several dimensions of freedom acceptable, but when the distortions of the funhouse mirror are untangled one will find that a powerful urge to control and direct the affairs of his fellow human beings lies at the heart of his being.

Barr’s positions, while curious for their inconsistency, might or might not, perhaps, add up today to something worthy of the adulation of all those critical of the State. Or, perhaps, they might point to the personal conflicts within a man who, perhaps, has finally recognized the face of the evil that he served for so long, and which he still longs to serve.

Bob Barr isn’t going to be elected President of the “Free” World, in his lifetime or mine. Knapp’s plea that you “join with your fellow Libertarians in preserving the party as ‘a libertarian political entity separate and distinct from all other political parties or movements’” resounds loudly in the deadening echo chamber that is the inherent contradiction of libertarian politics. Will you listen? Will it matter?

So, if you’re one of the less than 2% who dutifully cast their ballots for the party of “liberty” in America, or one of the small fraction of those involved in Libertarian Party politics, do yourself a favor: save yourself the time. Supporting Bob Barr for Fürher isn’t going to improve your life one goddamned bit. When you face the voting question, in fact, the only thing that can possibly improve things is that you denounce the entire exercise as a fraud, and renounce the vote. It is, in fact, the only moral decision you can make.