Carl Watner, who has operated voluntyarist.com for long years, provides a definition of what a voluntaryist is, front and center:

Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society.

Carl has done amazing work in collecting and promulgating anarchist literature. The amount of learning I have obtained and that others have benefited from via his work — as writer and archiver — is incalculable. Carl’s one of the good guys. One of the guys, indeed, who I can count on to wind up on the right side of the barricades, come the revolution. I heart Carl Watner.

Image from headsonpikes.blogspot.com -- that guy's dead. Sorry.

However, I can’t but quibble with this definition. I might well prefer non-violent strategies for the attainment of a free society (and the political will certainly never be acceptable). But I am not going to rule out violent, bloody, homicidal strategies to get there, if such turn out to seem essential.

Perhaps this is not what Carl means with his definition. Perhaps the preference, the advocacy for such does not preclude other paths. But I read this definition, and the words of many other self-proclaimed voluntaryists, and see a commitment to non-violence above all other things.

I am not so committed.

I don’t really advocate the strategies as such. I want the end results. Of course I am keenly aware that ends do not justify means. But when one recognizes that the world is ruled by criminal gangs, one ought take into account all legitimate actions for the elimination of crime and criminals.

If the achievement of a free society is to require that a million bleeding heads of torturing tyrants, damnable dictators, pandering politicians, sadistic generals, privileged policemen, criminal soldiers and psychotic, irresponsible “servants” be hoisted on pikes to surround the palisades of the free cities, count me in for the headsman’s role, for I will not dwell in my ice-cream-and-flying-ponies fantasies so long as to preclude my own action toward the attainment thereof.

Would that neither you nor I ever face such choices. But we should be ready, should our realities eventuate as such, to know what we will do.

Do you?

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The original question regards approaching wealthy potential donors who may be interested in funding voluntaryist/anarchist causes.

In my own rather limited experience with activist fundraising, I do know that the key questions these folks are going to ask you is: How much do you need? How are you going to spend it? and How can I measure the value of my investment?

Inasmuch as we are a movement, we are a polycentric one. Each of us may have very different answers to those questions, and each of us would frame the discussion with such prospective donors differently.

The “How are you going to spend it?” question, though, is one which can be reframed a bit, as, “What sorts of activities and organizations do or could donors fund, which could be beneficial vehicles for us?”

I offer here a list of possibilities, in no particular order:

• think tanks
• publications (journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters)
• academic endowments (dubious)
• political parties, candidates and campaigns (distasteful, at best, to many of us)
• grant-making foundations
• public advocacy groups
• conventions and other mass public events
• political action committees
• media awareness projects
• charity organizations with compatible ideological orientation
• businesses to compete with government service provision (agora!)
• seminar series
• roundtable groups

If you can bite down on one of those — or anything else — and create a project or business plan for it, then you will have answered the questions you are likely to get from any serious donor prospect, and will be ready to go out and make the pitch.