Автор: Анкап-тян

Is anarcho-capitalism based not on libertarian principles possible?

The concept of ancap emerged within the framework of libertarian philosophy. However, besides libertarianism, there are other philosophies of freedom, such as objectivism or classical liberalism. It seems that any intellectual tradition aimed at achieving freedom has its own version close to ancap.

Question from Dmitry

I am currently translating an interesting article that traces the anarchist roots of ancap (funny, but many consider ancaps to be fake anarchists) from Proudhon, who, in fact, was the first to declare himself an anarchist. But there are still a few days until the work is finished, so for now, I’ll reflect on how fundamental it is for an anarcho-capitalist society to have specifically libertarian principles at its foundation—self-ownership and all that other NAP stuff.

Let’s replace self-ownership with “we are all instruments of the Lord” or “we are but a third theme in the music of Ainur.” This is simply a shift in the locus of control. Well, okay, now it’s external. Will this shift hinder the construction of ancap? Not particularly. The Lord, in His mercy, gave people commandments. The elves left humans their powerful epic, filled with moral messages. Take it, use it. In songs, you read about loyalty to oaths, or a commandment requires you not to bear false witness—one way or another, you learn the idea of a contract and the obligations under it, which means we have the basis for capitalism.

Can we do without the non-aggression principle? That no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity? No, someone does. Will this hinder the construction of ancap? Well, it depends on exactly who turned out to be the lucky exception to this principle. For example, if we declare that holy fools, small children, and women with PMS can initiate violence with impunity, this will not hinder us in building an anarcho-capitalist society. But if we declare that a certain special knightly order, sworn to maintain peace and tranquility in the Galaxy, possesses the right to initiate violence with impunity—it will be harder, although even then the situation is not hopeless, but we will be critically dependent on the procedures regulating entry into and expulsion from this order.

To what extent can ancap be built on the principles of classical liberalism? Gustave de Molinari described this very clearly. He didn’t know any of the clattering libertarian technical terms like NAP and self-ownership; he simply described how a competitive market for security services would yield better results than a monopolistic one.

What about objectivism? Egoism is a virtue. Reason is a virtue. Demanding that people sacrifice themselves for you is yuck. How is this not a basis for ancap? The principles sound as unfamiliar as appealing to the Silmarillion instead of the Bible as a source of morality, but essentially, by implementing the principles of objectivism, we get the same ancap, only with intellectual property. And yes, the state will not exist, regardless of what Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, because collecting taxes by force is to demand sacrifice from taxpayers, and forcing government officials to work for free is to demand sacrifice from them. But, of course, if voluntary self-governance coordinated by volunteers at their own expense or via donations is “the state,” then okay, let it be the state, but for us libertarians, this is simply ancap.

Your opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict?

To be more specific, do you agree with the opinion that in modern history Israel defended itself against the aggression of its neighbors and was more of a victim than an aggressor (insofar as a state can be considered a victim at all)? What is the most optimal and politically feasible solution capable of stopping the conflict in the region, and what prevents its implementation?

Question from Zigoter

Having started writing a book on the libertarian theory of war, I realized with some bewilderment that, despite all my methodological individualism, I cannot construct correct descriptions without operating with fictitious entities such as collective subjects. These speculative subjects were named by me as spirits.

The Jewish people are very ancient and managed to survive over millennia because they possessed and diligently preserved a very strong spirit of the people’s divine election. Nothing could shake the Jews’ loyalty to their spirit, but the 19th century brought them a strong temptation: the spirits of nationalism were born—a phenomenon known as the Spring of Nations. From the connection between the spirit of divine election and the spirit of nationalism, the spirit of Zionism was born. Those possessed by this spirit made efforts to create a national Jewish state that could become a home for any representative of the divinely elected Jewish people.

In the early period of its existence, the State of Israel represented a very peculiar combination on the spiritual plane: the old Jewish spirit of divine election, the new Jewish spirit of Zionism, the new global spirit of socialism, the mature European spirit of individual freedom, and additionally, the spirit of a victim-people born during the Holocaust. These spirits supported each other in some ways, but in many ways they were at odds. The result was a dynamic, expansive state that not only habitually survived in a hostile environment, as the Jewish people had survived in a hostile environment for many centuries, but also actively expanded its borders, creating a zone of quite decent security within the assimilated space.

Currently in Israel, the spirit of the victim-people has completely exhausted its potential, and the positions of the spirit of socialism have weakened somewhat; otherwise, the picture remains the same. As long as Israel’s environment remains hostile, abandoning expansion is fraught with destruction for it: passive defense in conditions of technological progress does not allow for the effective containment of enemies.

And why, exactly, is Israel’s environment so hostile to it? Initially, Israel faced the spirits of nationalism, and these are quite weak in the Arab world. Therefore, it was sufficient for Israel to achieve a decisive military victory over one coalition of states or another for the situation to calm down noticeably. It was only the spirit of Islam, which gained significant strength at the end of the 20th century, that made the situation truly complex, because this spirit has strong grassroots support, which is precisely what makes it a real spirit and not a propaganda facade, like Orthodoxy in the RF.

Having finished with history, let us move to libertarian recipes. First of all, the rhetoric of “we are launching preemptive strikes because otherwise we will be destroyed” is already being received with difficulty by consumers of propaganda, even if it is true. On the other hand, it is precisely now that the rhetoric of “freedom is coming” is on the rise; it would be a sin not to take advantage of it. Externally, Israel needs to appeal not to the spirit of its divine election—it will only work on the Jewish diaspora, and even then poorly. Nor to the Holocaust, which as a news hook no longer sells (now October 7th must be used instead). And certainly not to socialism; it is sinful to be proud of one’s internal illnesses. However, the slogan “We are expanding the space of freedom” is not only dignified but also effective. “We are not destroying terrorist regimes in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran because they are against Israel, but because they are terrorist regimes. They are directed against all free people, whether inside the countries they control or outside. Islam is not a religion of slavery. It is quite compatible with the ideas of free trade. And those political regimes that are ready for trade rather than war, and in which their own citizens enjoy freedom, are welcomed by Israel.”

Of course, one should not confuse freedom with democracy; this mistake cost the USA dearly, there is no need to repeat it. What matters is not how a political leader took office, or if there even is one, but how free people are within that political regime, period. But, of course, such rhetoric imposes restrictions on Israel’s internal policy as well, which, however, is only for the better.

The meaning of life as the cherry on top of neural network glitches

In the comments of my previous post, I was asked to tell more about the speech given by the esteemed Atomic Cherry during a Sunday conversation with Kirill Grebnev at the Educational Resort.

Kirill brought up the question of the meaning of life. For me, the concept of meaning is by definition retrospective: the past is always what is given meaning, through reflection on what was planned, what was achieved, by what means, and, accordingly, whether there was meaning and what it was. Therefore, talking about meaning in the future can only be done hypothetically. For instance, practice shows that doing certain things is meaningful, therefore in the current situation it makes sense to apply a certain tactic. Whether there will actually be meaning in its application will be known in fact. The same applies to the meaning of life. Only the already lived segment of it is given meaning. Boring, instrumental, nothing to argue about.

As for Cherry, he didn’t interfere in the conversation for a long time; then, after a powerful puff of his pipe, he broke into a half-hour lecture, delivered at a very brisk pace so as not to be interrupted. I reproduce this to the extent that I managed to grasp.

Many animals are capable of advanced group interaction. Monkeys possess a highly developed intelligence that allows them to use tools, diversionary maneuvers, attack from ambushes, and enter into alliances. The genus Homo is capable of the same. However, all these wonders of social behavior hit the limit of Dunbar’s number. For larger collectives, the brain’s neural network resources are no longer sufficient, and emotional attachment weakens.

Cro-Magnon solved this problem through emotional attachment to fetishes and the construction of conceptual subjects, including collective ones (see my piece on spirits in the Libertarian Theory of War). Now, for him, “his own” are not only those with whom he has spent his whole life hanging out and hitting strangers over the head, but also anyone who is a descendant of the same totem animal, who believes in the same gods, and cracks an egg from the same end. It was precisely this ability to abstract attachments that allowed humans to assemble alliances of tribes, thanks to which they wiped out the Neanderthals completely. And after that came states, world religions, conspiracy theories, and other neural trash.

The thing is, a human cannot arbitrarily switch off this ability to abstract. He looks for patterns and finds them, always. Every neural network hallucinates. We see this most clearly in the example of large language models, but we ourselves are no better. Our consciousness, with all its searches for a higher meaning, is exactly those neural network hallucinations. If you want abstract thinking, accept the abstract glitches.

Abstract thinking has a practical value — it serves the biological need of humans to assert themselves by dominating large collectives. If we remove the ability to abstract, we simply return humans to the level of interaction of primitive tribes. And if we remove the drive to assert oneself over others, we get a pure hallucinating neural network, devoid of practical application, and therefore bogged down in fruitless spiritual quests.

Yes, the need to assert oneself over other people can be sublimated through creativity, asserting oneself over the forces of nature, and similar challenges. But without respect and recognition from other people, these activities lose their meaning for the human.

Anarchist Practice of Pedagogy

A link to a lecture on the anarchist theory of pedagogy appeared in the Ogurism channel, which I found very interesting. It tells the story of the teachings of a very wise Croat who served as a Catholic priest and, as befits a normal Catholic saint, regularly shamed the devil, played by various education officials.

Beyond the banal criticism of the dominant education system, which almost everyone has slammed for the insane ritualization of the process and the disregard for the opinions of those who should formally be the customers of education, our Catholic paid considerable attention to constructive solutions, and the lecturer recounted some of this construct, supplementing it with their own thoughts. In many ways, this construct echoes Friedman’s reasonings on how to prepare children (throw books at them and see which ones stick), although it devotes slightly more attention to the actual teaching technology.

Meanwhile, this weekend we took a private kindergarten, which I help out with small things from time to time, to an educational resort. The owner of the site specializes in inventing puzzles and, for fun, created an inspiring environment around himself. In addition to monetary donations, he took payment from me and my companions in the form of conversations about the meaning of life, libertarianism, Freud and Frankl, neural networks, and evolutionary biology; he was satisfied. The children, in the breaks between the pool and watching peacocks, steadily poked at the puzzles and various cool crafts piled everywhere, thus inevitably exercising their brains.

Let’s consider this somewhat disjointed story to be a toast, and drink to the hope that theory does not diverge from practice!

Stefan Molynieux, The Practical Anarchy, translation of chapter 23

Today’s chapter of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinari is, unlike the previous one, long and thorough. Not surprisingly, as it is dedicated to a topic that has inspired many memes — roads under ancap.

First, the author explains that the best way to understand why on earth someone would suddenly want to pay money to build and maintain a road in a free market is to imagine yourself as a developer approaching investors. Then, he analyzes various typical scare tactics. And in conclusion, he delivers a finishing blow from a related field, which also pertains to public goods.

War under ancap

I recently came across an interview of Evgeny Volnov by Mark Solonin.

Briefly: it describes the organization of a business process for the decentralized volunteer production of consumables to supply the army. Toward the end, Solonin inevitably reflects on libertarianism, so it’s worth me reflecting a bit as well.

The question that concerns me is: can an ancap community already provide all the necessary ingredients for conducting a full-scale war?

Volunteers are capable of mass-purchasing everything necessary for logistics, nutrition, and daily living on the free market and delivering it to the combat zone. The production of small arms and explosives are developed civilian industries. In the absence of government orders, they will not wither away, and in conditions where the state is not getting in the way, they are capable of responding to increased demand by increasing production. Distributed production, similar to what was described in the interview, is capable of saturating the army with light combat mechanisms. Heavier specialized mechanisms can also be produced by volunteers; it’s just that 3D printers on a balcony will no longer suffice—small workshops will be needed instead. The Ukrainian war demonstrates to us that this is also not a problem. Such mechanisms also include long-range drones, including high-speed ones.

Private entities already know how to provide communications and satellite intelligence data excellently.

What about people? Volunteer units are performing excellently at the front and, compared to their state counterparts, demonstrate far fewer problems finding people willing to join them. The better the unit’s reputation, the higher the competition.

Coordination between units is also showing results at least as good as state chains of command, and authoritative commanders are capable of rapidly expanding their sphere of influence, taking responsibility for increasingly larger areas of work.

What private suppliers are not ready to provide today is manned combat aviation. However, today a combat aircraft is de facto a platform to lift a radar and missiles into the sky, and then to ensure that the pilot sees the radar data and launches missiles accordingly. A pilot is no longer needed to perform high-level aerobatics during an aerial dogfight between planes. Given a stable communication channel, the pilot can actually be on the ground, and a stable communication channel can be ensured if there are many planes in the air forming a relay network. A plane’s radar is something comparable in complexity to a Starlink terminal—it also needs to track multiple satellites and somehow make sense of a jumble of signals. That is, a private entity can produce it without an exorbitant price tag. Consequently, under ancap, a combat aircraft looks like a plump propeller-driven carrier of several missiles and many drones, flying in swarms that hover in the air around the clock, analyze the situation a couple of hundred kilometers from the swarm’s perimeter, and clear out everything interesting they find—and as fuel and/or ammunition are exhausted, they fly back to base in automatic mode, calling for a replacement in advance. However, this is still an unrealized fantasy.

Two questions remain.

First, motivation. States are breeding grounds for patriotism, and patriots are precisely the fuel of war. Will an ancap community be patriotic enough to organize large-scale resistance against a state? The example of the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine shows that the chances are quite high: the primary resistance to the sudden attack in areas where hostilities had not occurred since 2014 was mainly volunteer-based, and at the very least, it thwarted the blitzkrieg.

Second, economic sanctions. Sanctions are an insult to the element of the free market. They are imposed by states, and states monitor their compliance, while the market ensures that sanctions work poorly. It can be stated with considerable confidence that sanctions as a tool for influencing an opponent under ancap will have an extremely weak effect, representing isolated examples of refusing deals for moral reasons. Simply put, some will be actively donated to and worked for out of conviction, while others will be provided services only for good money. Since each side may have a quite diverse composition, there will be both volunteers and mercenaries on both sides. And victory will go to the side that is more effective in this resource confrontation. But in the long run, efficiency will be determined by how many ideological and talented people work for the victory of one side or another. And this, in turn, will depend on whose side the majority believes justice lies.

How would private military companies act under anarcho-capitalism?

Mauser

Anarcho-capitalism is a free market plus the decentralization of power. A private military company under ancap is a company operating in a free market to solve military tasks—that is, tasks arising from conflicts where people are willing to kill.

It is very easy to imagine the activities of private military companies during a society’s war of liberation against the state. Something similar to how this looks could be observed in the initial stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in those areas where the state was practically inactive, yet defense tasks were nonetheless being solved. What is characteristic of such a war? The emergence and decentralized coordination of numerous startups focused on three types of tasks: direct combat operations, supplying those on the front line, and crowdfunding to finance the first two. If the war drags on, the supply task becomes more complex, and a separate industry emerges for the development of new means of warfare.

But once ancap dominates the world, all this flourishing complexity is a heroic past. The grandfathers fought their wars. Military tasks become much more local; the duration and frequency of military conflicts decrease. Thus, private military companies under ancap will operate in survival mode. They will have to exert significant marketing efforts just to justify why they still exist at all, and many will prefer to liquidate instead, since there are many peaceful tasks on the market that will bring a much more significant income with far less effort.

Believe me, you wouldn’t want to work as a PMC employee under ancap. No romanticism, no heroism, very few actual tasks, existing merely as a formality, in conditions where people look at you askance and wonder why you even exist, and if you wouldn’t accidentally like to create a new state, because you seem kind of aggressive—maybe you need a little injection. So, I fully admit that almost no military companies will remain at all under ancap. There will be gamers. There will be reenactors. There will be some kind of brutal sport. There will be fans organizing into teams to vent aggression on one another under the pretext of supporting sports teams. There will be various book theorists imagining what war could be like under current material and technical conditions.

The production of specialized military equipment will inevitably be shut down. Old stocks will be gradually disposed of, and those that make no sense to dispose of will eventually become obsolete anyway. Cheap mass-market items for the civilian market can be adapted for war using blue electrical tape if necessary, but engaging in this—and especially starting to produce more serious military tools—will only happen in the event of a real war whose duration exceeds at least a couple of months. And where would this real war come from?

A mass war under ancap would require a combination of two factors. First, the appearance of a sufficient number of sweet summer children convinced that war is a fun festival of courage. Is this possible under ancap? Of course it is, and it is even inevitable. And second, a talented psychopath is needed who can convince them that the world is rotten to the core, society has lost its purpose, and it is time to shake up these bloated pigs so they scream in terror. Is this possible under ancap? Of course it is; you can’t assign a Bitarch to every psychopath.

As for what happens next, that is also generally clear. There will be bewilderment. There will be distrust of news channels, claiming they are creating hype out of nothing. There will be helpless attempts to counteract this by service agencies involved in maintaining order and security. Then, more and more people will begin to realize that they are actually being fought against. Mostly, they will simply flee far away from the danger zone after receiving insurance payouts (if policies still imply coverage for civil unrest risks). But entrepreneurs will emerge who begin to solve the arising problem. And then the market will do its work, and it will be the hour of glory for private military companies. They will emerge from nowhere, attract all the necessary resources, deal with the war, and disappear again.

Such a boring story.

Stefan Molynieux, Practical Anarchy, translation of chapter 22

Today, a very short chapter from Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molignu has been translated. The chapter is titled Tank Control and quickly addresses a couple of topics: how the prevention of behavior potentially dangerous to neighbors on one’s own private property will be handled in a stateless society, and how gun control will work, given that people’s opinions on this subject are polar opposites—some believe that widespread gun ownership increases safety, others that it decreases it.

No mega-revelations or grounds for flame wars; the author is simply tying up loose ends, concluding the second part of the book.

I suggest investing in Nostria

In brief

Sondre Bjellos, an activist in two communities, the Norwegian Liberstad and the Montenegrin Montelibero, with extensive experience in building decentralized systems, is launching a startup called Nostria. Until May 31, anyone interested can invest in it at the pre-seed stage on quite favorable terms. For participants of the Montelibero tokenomics, there is an opportunity to form an investor pool to gain greater control over the project.

Now in more detail

Nostr is a decentralized protocol for exchanging “notes and other things” via relays. I have been using it for quite a while now to publish my notes; I see great potential in it and am always glad when someone takes it upon themselves to develop it.

The idea of the Nostr protocol is that relays store their users’ content in JSON format and provide it to other relays upon request. Such content can also be a Bitcoin payment transaction via the Lightning protocol; thus, Bitcoin payments are natively integrated into Nostr, allowing for the decentralized provision of both content monetization and storage monetization (it is precisely in the area of monetization, for example, where the nearest analog to Nostr, the ActivityPub protocol, has its weak point).

The startup Nostria intends to:

  1. Develop its own client for the Nostr protocol
  2. Create a network of several relays in different parts of the world to ensure fast ping and wide bandwidth for its users (performance speed is the bane of decentralized systems)
  3. Promote, at the protocol level, the idea of specialized relays for storing only user metadata, which will offload large relays by distributing users more evenly across relays, and drastically speed up the collection of all messages related to a particular account and their delivery to clients.
  4. Monetize its service through premium services, offering users dedicated relays, a connection to a dedicated Lightning node, a human-readable name tied to a public key, media content storage, and other perks.
  5. Keep all code open on GitHub, as is proper for decentralized systems.

In this video, Sondre talks about his plans:

Those who prefer text over video can check out the pdf.

For now, Nostria’s medium-term goal is to catch up and surpass the struggling Bluesky. In the longer perspective, it should result in a decentralized solution that one wouldn’t be ashamed to migrate to from Telegram, once Durov finally declares that state security is incomparably more important than user convenience and security.

To launch the MVP, a pre-seed investment round is taking place until May 31. Putting it in plain language: Sondre wants to raise 30 thousand dollars by the end of May, and then spend ten thousand a month throughout the summer to bring the project into commercial operation. First month – hardware deployment. Second – software refinement. Third – marketing. In the autumn, when the project is ready to be shown to more serious investors, fundraising for global expansion will continue, and those who invested at the preliminary stage will have a preferential right to reinvest to maintain their share in the project, and their preliminary investments will be credited to the share capital with a coefficient of 1.15.

By default, investments are attracted in Bitcoin using the decentralized crowdfunding service Angor. Sondre has also released a separate video showing how the investing process works.

Important: the project founder can only unlock the collected funds after confirming the completion of the stated development stage. Until that moment, an investor can request their investment back at any time. All these features are implemented through the relatively simple smart contract mechanism that exists in Bitcoin and do not require the interference of a third trusted party.

However, the entry threshold for these investments is currently quite high: the minimum amount to receive any bonuses is 1000 dollars. Therefore, a solution suggests itself: participants of the Montelibero tokenomics can gather a pool of small investments and invest jointly as a large entity. I want to organize such a pool. My benefits: I will receive various non-monetary bonuses such as a premium account subscription. The benefits for co-investors, besides the financial return on investment: through me (or directly, if agreed upon), they will have convenient feedback with the developers, which means influence over the future functionality of both Nostria and, indirectly, the entire Nostr protocol.

Therefore, I have created a pristine Stellar account, issued the NostriaPre token on it, and created an order to sell it for EURMTL. You have until the end of May to buy this token; then I will also buy as much as possible, close the sell order, and transfer all collected EURMTL to Sondre. In the autumn, Sondre will set up an official Stellar account for his startup and create an order to sell official tokens for NostriaPre tokens at a rate of 1.15. When the startup begins to generate income from premium account services, the distributable profit for token holders will be accrued monthly proportional to the number of tokens.

To purchase the NostriaPre token, you must first open a trust line to it. Your Stellar wallet should have this capability. Token name: NostriaPre. Issuer’s public key: GABAZTSE4DOD4JKFPWQYK5QPUSW57QNZBJBREU2K2UFSGWPHBHNYF46A

This is, for example, how the trust line opening dialog looks in the Sunce
wallet.

Soon, the trust line will also be possible to open via a direct link.

I don’t want to overload the post with detailed instructions on using various types of Stellar wallets, as I assume the pool will be joined by those who already participate in the Montelibero tokenomics (an instruction is even posted on my website, but it is very outdated and I haven’t gotten around to updating it). But if you want to jump in from scratch in “Shut up and take my money” mode, please ask questions in the comments or via DM.

Libertarian Theory of War. Chapter 2.5. Summing Up the War.

Writing a new chapter of my book about war happened to coincide by pure chance with another anniversary of the end of the European phase of World War II, as well as with the vibes in the air regarding the conclusion of the current Russian-Ukrainian one. The chapter turned out to be somewhat pensive and lyrical. Also, while creating it, I was occasionally plagued by imposter syndrome: what right do I have to write about such matters without having military experience? May those who do have it forgive me, or better yet—comment on my amateur fantasies from their expert perspective.

This concludes the main, theoretical, second part of the book. The third part is expected to feature the practical applications of the theory.