The Libertarian Band team, with whom I collaborated a long time ago on creating videos with an introduction to libertarianism (this experience later proved useful to me when writing the book), has after a long break produced an excellent video about the Free State Project.
This is their second video dedicated to libertarian communities (the first, released at the end of 2021, was about Monte libero.
The screenwriter who replaced me works in a completely different style: where I preferred my own, as original as possible, reflections, his focus is on much richer factual detail. In my opinion, it turned out quite entertaining; it’s great that the guys are still active and continue to deliver the basics.
Now, of course, a video about Liberland is overdue; I hope it won’t be more than a year before they enrich their playlist with a corresponding episode.
When I was writing the book on ancap, you could observe the results of the creative search process in real-time. After publication, the material was restructured; as a result of discussions in the comments, personal communication, and simply rereading the text, serious revisions to the wording were introduced, and a couple of chapters were discarded entirely, after which the second part of the book started over in a different vein. And this was while I was navigating relatively familiar territory: libertarian doctrine has long been and repeatedly laid out, and all that was required of me was its reimagining and a brief retelling.
As for the libertarian theory of war, this is uncharted territory, so I am not attempting to write a book right away, but am simply recording separate considerations for now. The only support I currently have are the questions laid out in the first part of the sketches that a libertarian theory of war should answer. These are the points I will go through.
How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
As a reminder, I define war as a class of conflicts in which, for at least one side, the survival of the opponent is not a deterrent factor. That is, to be strictly precise, the party to a conflict that is prepared to kill is waging war, while the party to a conflict that is not prepared to kill is not waging war, even if they are currently being attempted to be killed. Thus, even if someone is attacked with the intent to kill, they do not automatically find themselves in a state of war, but are free to choose for themselves whether to wage war or to evade it in some way.
Evasion can be direct: using passive defense, fleeing, hiding—something along those lines. Or it can be indirect: resorting to someone else’s protection. This immediately raises the problem of fuzzy boundaries. On one hand, even if a subject feeds and equips their protector, as well as pays them a salary and promises to recognize their ownership of captured trophies, they themselves are still not directly fighting. On the other hand, take a drone operator: they might be sitting a thousand kilometers from the target, sipping coffee and having nothing against the target of liquidation in general: should this operator be considered the one waging war—or their client, who feels enough antipathy toward the target of liquidation to shell out for the hire of an operator? How, fundamentally, does a drone operator differ from the drone itself? By the fact that they make the decision to kill? And what if the drone is controlled by AI and makes that decision itself?
In short, in conditions where there is a deep division of labor everywhere, finding someone who wages war completely independently is as easy as finding someone who lives entirely on subsistence farming.
By the way, this circumstance also complicates the precise determination of who started the war and, consequently, who the aggressor—that is, the initiator of violence—is. Parties can spend a long time inventively doing nasty things to each other, primarily through other people’s hands, and then some particular nasty act, for some reason, begins to be interpreted by observers as the start of a war and a legitimate reason to respond to aggression with all their military power.
What is my point in all this? That in the libertarian theory of war, it is not enough to simply say “NAP.” This is an abstract principle that can be applied to any interpersonal interaction to decide: in this specific elementary action, Vasya is the aggressor and Petya is the victim of aggression. And before that was an action in which Petya was the aggressor and Vasya the victim. And even earlier… and so on, until one grows tired. The aggressive IDF bombs Hamas. Well, yes, it bombs. If we take October 8, 2023, as the starting point, then the IDF is the aggressor. If October 7, 2023, then Hamas is the aggressor. Let’s wind further back into the past—and we slide into questions about land property rights, the content of sacred texts, and so on. In other words, the NAP as a criterion for when to start a war is inapplicable, at least in its pure form. At least when it comes to collective conflicts, rather than elementary situations like “you are just walking, someone lunges at you with a knife, and how to determine at what moment to shoot the attacker.”
With that, I conclude the second part of the notes; I didn’t even manage to fully analyze the first question, but it is better for me to post small notes more often, as the overall speed of work will be higher. In addition to sequential numbering and links to previous pieces of text, I will also use the tag LTV (libertarian theory of war) for these notes.
My Monday began with the news of Javier Milei’s victory in the presidential elections in Argentina. There happened to be a little prosecco left in the bottle on the table, enough for a symbolic toast to commemorate a bright future. And that is why I want to say a few words about the future.
Some look at Milei with hope: they say that Argentina is about to dismantle a significant part of the state, Argentines will start living like human beings, and then, perhaps, others will want the same, and maybe we will get something too.
Others look at him with suspicion: they say that a populist has finally grabbed power; Zelensky also called himself a libertarian, and now he is preparing to become a military dictator, so this one won’t do anything meaningful in the economy, will only ban abortions, and will discredit our beloved libertarianism before the broad masses of the people.
Both points of view focus excessively on Argentina itself. Meanwhile, for most of us, Argentina is a distant fairytale land in another hemisphere, and the libertarians there will either succeed or screw up on their own, without our participation. We, at least those who intend to maintain their own agency, must not only follow the news from across the ocean as if it were a sports match, but also analyze it, draw lessons for ourselves, and popularize the experience being developed by the Argentines—in short, we need to take full advantage of such a gift of fate as the appearance of libertarianism, in its most radical anarcho-capitalist form, on the big political stage.
Of course, it is clear that libertarian reforms are only taken up as a banner by the majority when the state has managed to fail completely, and the utter hopelessness of further attempts to rigidly steer society is resolutely visible to everyone. Therefore, even in the most favorable scenario, Argentines will in the near future only be crawling out of the poverty and chaos into which the previous regime drove them. When society becomes more prosperous, ideas of active redistribution of wealth as a vital state function will emerge from the shadows again. Therefore, it is very important that many other peoples manage to catch the Argentine spirit and embrace the ideas of reducing the state. And for this, we will have to work quite hard.
The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. The translation process was very, very tedious. After all, this tradition of meticulously chewing over the material is somewhat foreign to me. There is too much factual detail and too few thoughts in the text; I would have packed such things into appendices, as that is where factual detail belongs.
One might assume the problem is that the facts here are American, and much of what is mentioned is not particularly close to us. But no, if he were to chew over Chinese or Russian material, it’s unlikely I would find it any more interesting.
In general, the summary of this chapter is fully exhausted by its title, but your tastes may differ from mine. After all, from time to time, I am also asked to tell specific historical anecdotes to support my thoughts, so I fully admit that many people need exactly such anecdotes to be convinced. There are some here.
Not long ago, I was listening to one of Vladimir Zolotorev’s Saturday sermons on the Libertarian.site channel (I’m too lazy to search for the specific sermon—the channel’s navigation is very mediocre), and he noted that the theory of war is poorly developed within libertarianism. This observation seemed fair to me, which means it is worth thinking in this direction.
War is a type of conflict in which the necessity of the opponent’s survival is not a deterrent factor for at least one party. If one of the parties to the conflict is destroyed, it means that the conflict, for all intents and purposes, has been resolved. Granted, this may give rise to new conflicts—with those who consider such a manner of resolving conflicts by the winner as a reason to assert claims against them.
To minimize such claims, humanity has developed certain customs of war. For instance, if a reliable casus belli is presented before entering a war, and collateral damage is minimized during the war by attempting to destroy only legitimate military targets, then according to these customs, such a manner of conducting war should not entail any sanctions, and may even help in acquiring allies.
However, this is all empiricism operating with collective subjects such as states, armies, peoples, and so on. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is about methodological subjectivism and individual responsibility. The fact that some collective imaginary entities are in a state of war does not create any moral obligations for a specific person to enter the war on either side. At the same time, libertarian morality suggests entering conflicts on the just side, which means that libertarians may not be foreign to wars, even those where they are not the party subjected to a direct attack.
Vladimir Zolotorev proposes using the standard legal approach of peacetime to describe war within libertarianism: a lawsuit is filed against the party that caused the damage; in the case of collective actions, the lawsuit extends to the entire collective proportionally to their contribution; courts make decisions, the assets of the party that caused the damage are seized and sold on the market, and the proceeds are transferred to the plaintiff—and so on. Unfortunately, this model, which would have worked perfectly for a tribal society from the Icelandic sagas or, adjusted for capitalist realities, in some conditional Wild West, begins to stall heavily in a society where the system of kinship ties and personal obligations has been replaced by a system of formal hierarchy and various group identities, such as religion or nation.
Obviously, in this situation, an obvious solution suggests itself to a libertarian—to simplify the task. In other words, let’s abolish states and all other imaginary collective entities, and then the analysis of conflicts will elegantly be reduced to a simple and clear basis of property disputes. Abolishing these mental parasites in reality is, undoubtedly, a boon for all humanity; however, if we close our eyes to their existence right now and analyze reality as if these entities did not exist, they will not instantly disappear because of it.
This was simply a pointer to some difficulties in considering such a phenomenon as war; naturally, it is far from exhaustive.
A viable theory of war in libertarianism must answer several diverse questions:
How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
How to determine the just side in a war?
How to determine the appropriate degree of one’s own participation in a war?
How to determine that a war is being waged against you?
How to determine who is waging war against you?
How to determine what collateral damage is permissible?
How to determine appropriate compensation for direct and collateral damage?
How to determine when it is time to end the war?
How to determine on what terms the war should be ended?
I do not yet have the sought-after theory; I want to think about the necessary formulations in my spare time. Your comments may prove to be very useful. I hope to be able to share the results of these reflections soon.
The translation of the new chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is complete. In it, he develops the theme touched upon in the previous chapter, showing how Leviathans interact using the example of modern society in the USA. To be honest, it wasn’t the most interesting chapter. In short, the author points out that while conflicts in American society were previously mainly between the right and the left, now, from the perspective of the well-known two-dimensional political compass metaphor, the conflict is between the top and the bottom, authoritarians and libertarians.
In principle, we observe roughly the same thing in our own community. Both right-wing and left-wing anarchists integrate easily into the people of Montellibero, but statists have a much harder time.
I was recently sitting in a cafe with one of my subscribers, and the standard conversation came up about how tiresome Bitarch’s monotonous posts have become—about the violence inhibitor, psychopaths, and the urge to bet a million on human behavior during a face-to-face meeting without revealing one’s incognito. It seems I managed to construct a certain line of reasoning as to why all this is necessary; I will present it here in an expanded form.
The first thesis will essentially be an off-topic, concerning the fact that Bitarch is willing to pay 5,000 rubles a month in Bitcoin equivalent for the right to post in my channel, yet not a single one of his critics is willing to outbid this price to ensure his posts do not appear in the channel. Although, it would seem, it would be easy and inexpensive for a cooperative of Bitarch-haters to do so. This refers us back to David Friedman and his economic analysis of law.
However, this thesis says nothing in substance, so let us leave it and move on to Bitarch’s concepts.
In Pozharsky’s recent post, where he discusses how democracies deftly crush indigenous Hitlers, it is mentioned at the end that intra-human war is ultimately some kind of garbage, and that to unite humanity, it would be a good idea to acquire a cosmic beetle to fight against. In a recent conversation between Latynina and Arestovich, a similar thesis arises that humanity needs an external unifying factor; and while Latynina echoes Pozharsky by stating the desirability of an attack on Earth by cosmic beetles, Arestovich expands the thesis, arguing that hypothetical beetles, being intelligent creatures, are still our brothers, and fighting them is undignified—our mission is the transformation of nature.
Libertarianism, in the version presented in my book, prescribes peaceful cooperation—and entering conflicts on the side of justice. Without this moral norm, a libertarian society is unstable in the face of that very external threat, because it provides no way to cooperate in self-defense.
For a libertarian to enter a conflict, it is important to understand why they care about it. But a sufficiently developed sense of justice tells a person to intervene in practically any conflict, as long as it is clear which side justice is on. What is it to them? Indeed, they might, like some Arestovich, consider fights between intelligent beings a waste of scarce resources needed for the transformation of nature and the exploration of Space. And therefore, they should suppress them with the full power of their nature-transformation technologies. Including—the transformation of human nature.
I should note, however, that any statist construction can be derived from libertarian premises. This is very evident in the example of Karl Franco, who, calling himself an Orthodox libertarian, justifies taxes and similar state interventions in the economy, as well as other forms of coercion. Indeed, all left-libertarians to varying degrees sin of something similar. The secret is simple: it is enough to forget for a minute that values are subjective. Then you declare your own values to be of the utmost importance for everyone, meaning that to impose them, it is permissible to trample over others’ values. (This is why it is very useful to supplement knowledge of libertarian doctrine with knowledge of economic theory, rather than trying to replace it with some kind of analytical philosophy)
Bitarch sometimes sins of this as well, but fortunately, not as uncompromisingly. Therefore, although he might be glad to rid all of humanity at once of the harmful brain-virus that destroys the violence inhibitor, he mostly works quite consistently on a new type of self-defense weapon—one designed not to kill the aggressor, but merely to strengthen the violence inhibitor within them.
I am also glad that lately he has left alone his hypothesis about the possibility of solving the problem through genetic correction and has switched to the hormonal level. I look forward to the time when he moves from mice to humans in his experiments. Especially since there are currently enough psychos with PTSD roaming around the RF. On one hand, some of them might agree to participate in the trial of an experimental drug voluntarily. On the other hand, many such guys will easily provide a reason to test violence inhibitor enhancement means on them, already in the form-factor of a self-defense weapon.
What Bitarch and Voluntarist lack is a more careful and appealing presentation of their theses to the public. Alas, my help here can only be very limited: we’ve already been through this—when attempting to coordinate the text, we start arguing. It is important for me to remove the cringe; it is important for him to keep the main takes unchanged. Therefore, we have what we have.
I hope I have succeeded in conveying my vision of the situation, and that you will be able to treat his work with a deeper understanding. Any fool can post a clown emoji.
Mikhail Svetov is a well-known blogger from the heyday of LiveJournal and a longtime activist of the Libertarian Party of the Russian Federation. Gradually, he gained more media influence than the party itself, after which he decided to implement reforms according to his own taste, leading to a split of the LPR into two. Subsequently, he attempted to promote an umbrella organization called Civil Society instead of the LPR, but he did not succeed. He then opened the “New Sincerity” club in Moscow, but the Russian authorities closed it fairly quickly, which was damn expected. He now lives in Rio and is primarily engaged in his media project, SVTV.
Throughout the lifetime of Montelibero, our activists periodically reached out to Mikhail during his streams with paid comments and asked about his attitude toward Montelibero. At first, Mikhail replied that he viewed it negatively (I analyzed his take in one of the Montelibero news episodes), but after the start of mobilization, he said that people should leave the RF even if it’s to the middle of nowhere, or even to Montelibero—anything is better than staying. In short, I was somewhat surprised when our guys said that Svetov immediately agreed to come to the fest. True, he wanted to simultaneously organize a large tour of the concentration centers of the anti-war Russian diaspora; however, a criminal case was then opened against him, it became unclear which countries he could safely visit, and his arrival at the fest became questionable.
Only when a targeted donation for Svetov’s ticket to Montenegro occurred did he give final consent. It was necessary to recoup the money as much as possible, so Mikhail was scheduled for two presentations at once, plus a bonus interview in the Montelibero podcast studio. Nevertheless, none of this guaranteed a decent media output: for example, I predicted that following the fest, Svetov would mention on his channel: “gave a cool lecture in Montenegro, definitely listen to it”—and not a word about the fest or Montelibero. Fortunately, the prediction did not come true.
The final version of the presentation is still not posted; I am providing a timestamp for the general broadcast from the point where the sound starts.
The main theses of both of Svetov’s presentations were as follows:
I don’t want to say anything bad about Montelibero, you’ve done well, but generally, trying to run away from the state and build your own little ancap on the fringes is a failing idea; you need to get into politics, not be afraid of populism, and come to power. I recall that the topic of the presentation was “what a Russian libertarian should do in emigration,” so an idea relevant to some Argentines or even Montenegrins was completely irrelevant specifically for Russians.
Libertarians are natural individualists who have no clue what is happening beyond their own fence, and we need a libertarian international. Here, there are essentially no objections—it is needed, so we are doing it. The fest is, among other things, about this very international. Now, within the framework of the international, we will be able to demand that Svetov cover the problems and successes not only of the “busty laborites” but ours as well.
You need to speak to people in the language of love; put away your logic, it gets in the way. And in general, read more leftists; they understand politics, don’t obsess over this economics of yours, the public finds it boring. He said this and then went to give an interview to Rabfak, to the leftists—commendable consistency. Unfortunately, by following leftist recipes, Mikhail managed to alienate quite a few like-minded people during his political career, and this slightly demotivates one from studying what those guys advise. At the same time, one really shouldn’t alienate sane leftists; cooperation with them is established perfectly. The criterion for sanity is that the leftist’s dislike for the state must be stronger than their dislike for inequality, private property, and similar leftist bugbears.
So, my prediction did not come true: Svetov was not just satisfied with the organization of the fest and the project participants he managed to talk to—he changed his opinion about the project as a whole and declared it publicly on several platforms: that he was wrong, they are good people, it’s a good project, and he feared for nothing. Respect. He worked off his ticket by about one hundred and twenty percent.
Of course, we would very much like to have a speaker of such a level in our ranks, but generally, our path is decentralization. Therefore, it makes more sense to strive for the emergence of a dozen speakers of Soz’s level and a hundred of my level than to look for a single champion.
I don’t think there is a clear typology anywhere, but the question is interesting; let’s reason through it.
The Rothbardian version: it is derived from natural rights, and therefore presupposes a certain unified ethical-legal system described in “The Ethics of Liberty,” or derived in some other way on the same methodological basis (for example, Molliqneux expresses his views in this same vein in his Practical Anarchy). Consequently, questions arise regarding it: who will force everyone to be guided by a single legal system?
The Friedmanite version is based on the economic analysis of law, specifically on the basis of the Chicago School of Economics, which implies the possibility of engaging in interpersonal utility comparisons to a certain extent. Accordingly, in the Friedmanite version of anarcho-capitalism, different legal systems are traded on the market, capturing those segments where they prove to be the most efficient.
Nevertheless, both versions of social organization imply, as a kind of successor to the key state function of enforcing its own decisions, certain law enforcement agencies, as in the case of Friedman and the Tannahills, or strictly non-violent dispute resolution agencies, as with Molliqneux, which nevertheless possess truly totalitarian regulatory power—in short, some “larvae” of the state, about which one must somehow explain what reasons will prevent these larvae from growing into full-fledged states.
Following Vladimir Zolotorev, I adhere to a praxeological approach to the analysis of law and, quite independently of him, predict that in an anarchic society with developed market relations, the effect of the division of labor will push cumbersome monsters—those attempting to gather completely diverse functions, which are currently appropriated by the state, under one roof—out of the market. There are no grounds to believe that the services of detectives, forensic experts, or blockchain analysts must necessarily be provided by the same firms that offer security services, debt collection, resolve economic disputes, maintain cadasters, insure life and property, or issue certificates stating that a person knows how to drive a car or, for instance, shoot a pistol.
The practice of living in the libertarian community of MonteLibero further strengthens me in my originally purely theoretical views that people do not need detailed, written-out legal institutions all that much. On the contrary, in an anarchic society, people tend to resolve conflicts on the spot, forming situational coalitions if necessary. The need for complex specialized services in the field of legal protection arises quite rarely; therefore, in a free market, this need will likely be met by relatively small companies that nevertheless have a wide geographical reach—otherwise, a sufficient client base cannot be gathered.
Returning to the question, we see that different descriptions of ancap mainly boil down to how conflicts will be resolved in such a society—because regarding issues such as the functioning of a free market, libertarian theorists have no particular disagreements. Accordingly, if some previously undeveloped idea occurs to you about how law could otherwise function—congratulations, you will add another version of ancap to the collection of existing ones.
War is war, but the book won’t translate itself. I am posting the next chapter of The Network State: God, State, Network. In it, the author develops Hobbes’ definition of the Leviathan as an artificial subject standing above the human community, and points out that this metaphor actually fits not only the State, but also the artificial subject that preceded it, namely God, as well as the artificial subject that succeeds it, namely the Network.
The metaphor turned out to be concise, and the author develops this theme in quite some detail, describing in the tone of a naturalist how little leviathans crossbreed. In my opinion, the chapter turned out to be quite fresh and interesting; I love a skillful packaging of meanings.
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