Thursday, November 22, 2007

Meta-Agorism?

Reading back through various blogs and such, I think I'd have to say that Adem Kupi's definitions of liberty and anarchy are really on the money:
"Liberty, in my opinion, is merely the absence of Crime. Crime, not as defined by legislature, which is another form of fraud, but the normal, everyday intuitive sense of crime. Murder, assault, theft, rape, swindles, that sort of thing.
A perfect Liberty is a situation where such things do not exist at all. This is probably not an achievable situation, but it constitutes an asymptote, a limit towards which true libertarians wish to carry society above all else. And I reserve the right to use the phrase "true libertarians" because I mean people who are libertarian by the definition of the word, not people who identify as libertarians. This is not a "no true scotsman" argument.

Anarchy on the other hand is a situation where no one is given the authority to commit crimes. They might still get away with it, but by and large people don't believe they are entitled to."


This points the way toward a possible meta-agorism:
People pursuing their own interest, regardless of "the state" or any other organization. Treating it the way they would any other mafia.
This meta-agorism would include agorist counter-economics of course, but also more than that, a realignment toward spontaneous culture and social interaction. Because it implies the idea of following your own conscience without regard to ideas of "rank" or "authority". If you think techno music is awesome, well fine, then it is. If you prefer Beethoven, ok that's fine too.
It would include a severe sort of moralism, but one in which the primary precept would be to develop a moral sense of your own. Or to keep it focused inward pointing outward, it would mean not to accept anyone else's moral sense as any better than your own. Let your conscience be your guide.

In this way, meta-agorism of this sort is more "realistic" and practical than any sort of particular political agitation or movement. The main way of spreading it is just to encourage people to question all authority, and to come to their own conclusions. Criticize everything that exists ruthlessly.
If people ask what your positive program is, tell them "I'm not a revolutionary, I'm a destroyer". This is the connection by the way to buddhist anarchism as mentioned by William Gillis. Buddha was considered a destroyer of illusion.
I'm a Daoist, not a Buddhist, but I respect that idea, that the path to liberation is to destroy that which holds you back from reality.
It's also a connection to the sort of super anarchism of Allan Thornton, who was a big influence on Adem Kupi. Thornton said "What will happen under Anarchy? EVERYTHING."

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Kevin Carson says it so I don't have to.

"I am no social democrat. I'm under no illusions about the central role of big business in formulating the New Deal. I don't like statism of any kind. In my opinion, New Deal liberalism and the Reagan-Thatcher model of neoliberalism are like two farmers. The first farmer thinks he can get more work out of his livestock, in the long run, if he feeds them well and gives them comfortable shelter and sufficient rest. The second farmer thinks he can get more work out of them if he works them to death and then replaces them. There's no question that both "farmers" view us as "livestock," and that their prime concern is with their own profit. But I know which farm I'd rather live on.

Quite frankly, if my only choices are corporate liberalism and social democracy, and a banana republic on the neoliberal model, I'll take the former any day. If I get to choose between the paternalism of Brave New World and the jackboot in my face of 1984, it won't take me long to decide. I'm not ashamed to say that if my only choices are the welfare statist and neoliberal versions of statism, I'll take the kind of statism whose yoke weighs less heavily on my own back."
(emphasis mine)

In my view, that's a big "if" though. Given the advanced instability of modern production and finance, and the increasing growth of global black and grey markets, I suspect that neither form of farming will be sustainable for much longer, and it's long past time for the livestock to take over. That said, we must beware of any doctrine of "some animals are more equal than others".

I'd also like to point out an interesting thought by "Bunty" in the comments section:
"There could lie root of the problem, in the vulgar view, the market seems to be something external, a strict ruleset/framework in which people have to participate competitively (even those up the ladder have to keep fighting for market share; or fall, meaning that any means justify that end). It is an old skool religion, with banks as churches and and priests and sacrifice and Greed itself as a god."

This is why I don't trust minarchists, to an extent. But either way, it is an EXTREMELY GRAVE error to view "markets" as anything at all. The word is an abstraction to describe the sum of exchanges among people. In this sense a "free market" means a situation in which all of these exchanges are voluntary.