Militiaman

I would rather speak not of a plan, but of a strategy of action. A plan is good when there is certainty: a specific achievable measurable goal, the ability to clearly specify means, break actions into stages, and so on. For example, Navalny’s campaign headquarters acted according to a plan when starting his presidential campaign: open so many headquarters by such-and-such date, distribute so many newspapers, collect so much money. Strategy differs in that only the goal is known, along with certain characteristics of the environment and some restrictions on the means used—and one must understand how the goal can be achieved at all under these conditions. An example of a strategy is “smart voting,” a recent initiative from the same Navalny headquarters. The goal is to bring down the Putin regime. The strategy at this stage is to break the monopoly of United Russia in elections. And to this are added various justifications and explanations of details.

So, the goal is anarcho-capitalism, that is, a society based on voluntary market relations, respect for private property, decentralized contract law, recognizing the value of cooperation and the disadvantage of aggressive violence.

The starting position is the state, meaning a situation in which there are categories of persons capable of committing aggressive violence with impunity through the silent acquiescence of the majority, and although it is assumed that the boundaries of this violence are defined, they are quite vague and volatile.

The strategy consists in undermining the legitimacy of the state as an institution. In relatively prosperous countries, people have to start by justifying why the state is a bandit rather than a provider of benefits. In Russia, this is already obvious to many, but it is still important to make the idea a commonplace that trying to replace a bad state with a good one is either a dead end or, at the very least, cannot be the ultimate goal.

In order for the perception of the state as a desirable or, at least, inevitable state of civilized society to cease being mainstream, one can work in several directions, according to one’s tastes and competencies:

• developing and popularizing tools that allow one to get by without the state in spheres where it claims dominance;
• constantly demonstrating the failures of the state and the victories of private initiative—the state must look like a total loser;
• mass discredit of the main myths of state propaganda—from the efficiency of democracy to the efficiency of propaganda itself;
• demonstrating the invulnerability of society before the state, or, at least, the extremely low efficiency of the state’s struggle against ancap ideologues;
• undermining the resource base of the state by evading plunder and through the direct privatization of state property;
• demonstrating the moral unacceptability of working for the state, from “don’t get ahead of the locomotive” to universal condemnation.