Автор: Анкап-тян

Forced Protest

The friendly channel Anarchy+ is publishing a multi-part longread about how the presence of a radical wing, ready for violent action, affects the course of protests. Five parts have been released so far, and more are coming. The series explores various subtleties, such as how the effects differ when the radical wing is friendly with the moderate one, and when there is no coordination between them—and so on. Two or three more episodes are expected, which will then be collected into a single post, but I preferred not to wait for the end because an interesting practical example has come along.

The most notable protest of last year was, of course, Belarus. In its aftermath, political scientists either gently lamented that a regime relying on a compact, loyal security core remains stable regardless of the dissatisfaction of the rest of the population—as confirmed by two examples, Venezuela and Belarus—or they expressed indignation toward the protesters, arguing that by taking off their slippers before standing on benches, they demonstrate their complete toothlessness to the regime’s dogs and give a carte blanche for repressions, the severity of which is directly proportional to the size of the demonstrations.

And then I am handed a link to an extremely curious channel, which is used to promote specifically violent actions in Belarus, and in an extremely harsh form. Read it carefully; it is quite young, so you can manage its entire content. In short: the channel intends to launch a full-scale guerrilla war against the regime. The tactics proposed make it clear: the authors of the channel, whoever they may be, know very well how courts work under ancap, and they also perfectly understand that very influence of a radical wing on the protest as a whole.

I have attempted to roughly formulate what these anonymous organizers of decentralized violent protest are guided by:

  1. Today, the overwhelming majority of those dissatisfied with the regime are indeed not ready for an open armed rebellion, but many are extremely irritated by the complete lack of concessions from the regime in response to peaceful actions.
  2. The lack of readiness for open rebellion in some is caused by a principled unwillingness to escalate violence, while in others, it is an unwillingness to bear serious costs.
  3. A person is capable of developing habits and skills. Starting small, they get drawn in, and then can gradually train for serious violence.
  4. Violence must not be heroized. Heroes take off their slippers before standing on benches. Terror is carried out by scum. And society has a demand for the appearance of these loathsome characters who will fight the regime out of the lowest motivations.
  5. For a socialist country, the textbook lowest motivation is money. It is best if servants of the regime are killed by other servants of the regime for the sake of money. But any other lumpen will do.
  6. How much to pay for which actions? Who will pay? Let the “market” decide that; the channel’s job is to describe the business model, which anyone wishing to do so can then adopt.

What can we extract from these materials?

Firstly, keeping in mind that Belarus is something of a testing ground for the Russian regime, one can assume that something similar may await us in the RF, so why not keep a closer eye on the underside of the protest as well, trying it on for size in advance.

Secondly, the channel provides a number of practical tips on anonymization that will also be useful for peaceful agorists.

Thirdly, we see vivid confirmation that market relations work perfectly even when fighting the state, which means the market will survive without the state. Not that this is exactly some discovery, but we’ll add this to the pile of evidence.

Nothing special, just an open registry of targets

Will there be a New Year under ancap?

Libertarian Band suddenly delighted us with a bonus New Year’s video, in which they examine the question mentioned in the title. Someone in the team is clearly a fan of Bazhenov, because the analysis is conducted from the perspective of economic mainstream. Thus, most of the video consists of discussions on how profitable holidays are for the state economy, which has a very indirect relation to ancap. However, in any case, such a video is clearly better than my dismal year-end review yesterday, and the conclusions drawn in the video are quite correct.

Happy New Year, if you so desire!

2020, results

The year was terrible. The channel barely gained any subscribers, posts became less frequent, and generally, a crisis of genre began to be felt. The video course on libertarianism on the Libertarian Band channel stalled back in the spring and soon broke off mid-sentence. I am now answering questions quite reluctantly because, in essence, I have already answered everything, and I don’t want to repeat myself. Commenting on current events from my own perspective is the only outlet, but it is a rather secondary product, and I wouldn’t want to focus on it entirely. Translations remain, but overfeeding the subscriber with them is also harmful.

In such a situation, of course, it is necessary to start some new project, if possible while preserving existing developments.

The most obvious thing is the systematization of what has already been written, in the form of a single coherent text about libertarianism. The project has a clear downside. Many such books have already been written; none of them are perfect, and mine clearly will not be.

Another direction is to create a wiki instead of a book, so that for any term or concept, a person can be referred to a specific address, thereby cutting off most disputes over definitions. The downside is that such activity is not very convenient to cover in the channel. Another downside is that a wiki is an engine for decentralized content creation, so it will either happen slowly and gloomily as a solo effort, or this prank will quickly spiral out of control.

Many also complain about a serious lack of libertarian fiction, and this is potentially a very rich field. Truth be told, I fear that I will be even more stilted than Ayn Rand. I have to try.

In short, I am ending this year in complete creative turmoil, and what surprises me most is that there are still some crazy people who donate to me. It really is much more cheerful to work with donations, but it is very strange when someone believes in you more than you believe in yourself.

Erik Mack. Libertarianism. Chapter on Mill.

About a month ago, I received a small donation for the translation of Eric Mack. It’s not that I was in a great rush with this translation, but I didn’t want to completely ignore the fact that someone felt it was important to encourage the process a bit. So here is a fresh chapter, the penultimate one in the part dedicated to the philosophical prerequisites for the emergence of libertarianism. The translation took some effort: John Stuart Mill wrote quite convolutedly.

The chapter is dedicated to utilitarian arguments in favor of freedom—in other words, attempts to justify its necessity not only by so-called natural rights (which is not a justification at all, but a simple postulate, as if there is such a right, and that’s that), but also by social utility. Of course, with the transition to methodological subjectivism, straightforward reasoning about the common good began to look somewhat like an anachronism, though not entirely, which surprised me a little. In essence, in his utilitarian arguments, from which any totalitarian doctrine can be easily derived if desired, Mill arrives at our old acquaintance, self-ownership, the primacy of individual security, and other liberal attributes.

From our current perspective, this, of course, looks like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Mill was a priori convinced of the value of individual freedom, and thereafter his task was reduced to selecting arguments as to why it is necessary to ensure the highest common good. Had he been a priori convinced of the value of Sharia norms or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, he could have constructed arguments in exactly the same way, proving that these very crucial things were needed to achieve the highest common good.

Don’t forget to encourage the translation process with your donations.

Who Benefits from the Fight Against Violence. A New Video from Libertarian Band.

Towards the end of the year, Libertarian Band finally put out the final video of the cycle on violence. It turned out to be somewhat relaxed and encouraging, just what is needed at the end of December. The idea is that yes, violence is certainly a problem, but it is a problem for many, and many stand to benefit from solving it. And since it looks technically solvable, and since both the goal and the means exist, it will, of course, be solved.

I have two main grievances with the entire cycle. First, it is quite abstract. The problem of violence in general is like the problem of poverty in general. People are more concerned with their personal safety and personal well-being, and discussing macro-parameters significantly reduces engagement. Second, the postulated division between self-defense and revenge is largely artificial. Accordingly, arguing that the former is virtuous while the latter is not will inevitably spark disputes: why exactly is it not, and where is the line? For instance, I am hit, I hit back, and I am told that I am wrong, that revenge is bad, and that I should use non-violent methods. I claim it was self-defense, and I am told that it cannot be self-defense if I have already been hit. Why is a one-second difference in the exchange of blows acceptable, but a one-day difference is not?

Nevertheless, personal safety correlates with the overall level of violence, just as personal well-being correlates with the overall level of poverty, and non-violent methods of conflict resolution are very effective in a vast number of cases. So, for the time being, the adepts of the approach promoted in this cycle remain my allies. Specifically, exactly until the general obsession with this approach reduces my own personal safety, and that is still a long way off.

Can corporations create their own army, police, and so on, thereby subjugating the people?

анонимный вопрос

Of course they can. The most vivid example of this is the British East India Company. Therefore, the question one must actually answer is “how to prevent corporations from doing this?”

Political philosophers have long been chewing over a related question about how to prevent a government from descending into tyranny. The proposed solutions can be divided into two categories. The first is technological. These are various schemes for the separation of powers and other types of institution-building. The second is ideological. This is the promotion of a readiness to resist any attempts to slide into tyranny.

It is roughly the same with corporations. One can build schemes for exactly how conflicts will be resolved in a distributed mode under ancap. For example, I am quite fond of the Friedmanite, or the related Molinieu scheme. Or one can simply postulate that, firstly, it is always the individual who decides whether to abide by a particular contract or leave it, and secondly, that man is the measure of all things, and if he believes he sees an injustice, it is up to him to decide whether to help eliminate it. There is no magic non-aggression pact that is mandatory for universal compliance; there are only private notions of what is right. Has a corporation crossed the line? The corporation should be punished.

Anarchy is not viable without the constant readiness of people to take direct action to uphold justice. Certain structures, such as dispute resolution organizations, simply allow for the division of labor. A small and tight-knit corporation of evil is capable of terrorizing a small territory and squeezing it dry. But under conditions of anarchy, it has little chance of building on that success and expanding beyond a certain limit: the accumulation of a critical mass of coordinated adversaries will drain all the corporation’s strength into containing them.

So, if I wished to assert myself under ancap through coercion and the seizure of others’ property, I would do so with a small group, anonymously, and vanish into the night as soon as the opponent regained their senses. In a developed information world, this would most likely mean hacking attacks—it is harder to cover one’s tracks after raids on physical objects. Yes, this kind of criminality is entirely possible and even viable under ancap. But all those speculative cases in the vein of “your grandfather installed a pirated version of Windows half a century ago, interest on the penalty has accrued since then, and therefore by the decision of our pocket court, you are consigned to contract slavery for thirty years”—these are attempts to imagine an anarchy in which everyone remains afflicted by statist brain rot. As long as they are afflicted, there will simply be no anarchy, and once the disease is overcome, such cases will become impossible.

A little bit about neoreaction

I was contacted by the owner of a small Telegram channel Neo-Anarchism who asked me to take a look at his article on neo-reaction and promote it if possible. Perhaps he will even be so kind as to donate some “non-money” for this)))

In principle, the article provides a sufficiently balanced representation of the subject for those who are not particularly familiar with it (for me, for example). The author concludes that neo-reaction is an eclectic complex of views that emerged as a result of disappointment in democratic institutions, while maintaining strong approval of market institutions. Moreover, since the movement originated in the USA, conservative cultural views inevitably attached themselves to the market, but not very firmly, hence the eclecticism. And while ancap suggests a transition to decentralized systems of social coordination, neo-reaction rather expresses a belief in authoritarian models.

In my view, the only worthy application of this ideology is to feed it to existing authoritarian leaders so that, standing at the crossroads between Putin and Lee Kuan Yew, they would have more arguments in favor of preferring the latter. But since it is easier to be Putin, and few people think about the long-term consequences of this decision at the start of a dictator’s career, the expected effect is doubtful.

Besides the article on neo-reaction, other useful things appear in the channel from time to time; the author of the channel himself, having firmly decided on his anarchic worldview, is apparently still thoughtfully looking around, glancing sometimes to the left, towards communes, and sometimes to the right, towards nimble entrepreneurs. All the better, then, as we can expect the appearance of materials dedicated to the comparison of different directions of anarchism.

Good news from Navalny

I listened to the latest Navalny today, and I am very glad. By all appearances, he does intend to remain abroad, because it is much more convenient for him to throw a wrench in the regime’s works from there. Here he has the GDR archives, or wherever he is digging through the excavations of Putin’s German past. Here he has a Bulgarian colleague from Bellingcat. Here he has quick access to the EU establishment. As for the fieldwork in Russia, there are people to handle that. So, Alexei will live on.

For those who, for some reason, are still not aware of what this is about: Navalny pulled off a cool prank. Almost immediately after publishing his video investigation into the poisoning, he started calling the subjects of the investigation, introducing himself as an advisor to the Secretary of the Security Council and shaking them down for materials for a briefing note addressed to the first person. Only one operative fell for the trick, but what was heard perfectly complements the investigation materials, and now Navalny’s evidence is becoming absolutely ironclad.

Now we should expect obvious movement at the international level. If it is possible to file a lawsuit in one international court or another—good. If we have to settle for some situationally issued sanctions against Putin—well, that will also do. But it is far more interesting to watch the reaction in Russia.

To be more specific, I am talking about dormant institutions. During the transformation of hybrid regimes, they have a tendency to wake up and suddenly start working; there is a chance that this will happen in our case as well. We have already seen an appeal from several Tomsk municipal deputies demanding the opening of a criminal case regarding the poisoning. They were joined by colleagues from several other regions. But our state has too many nannies, which is why it’s always running around like a blind foal. So, besides a deputy’s appeal to the Investigative Committee, one could imagine the possibility of raising the issue of a parliamentary investigation at the State Duma level, some movements from the prosecutor’s office, or finally, an impeachment attempt. Of course, this will not get the support of the majority, but the news hook is loud, and there will surely be public politicians who find it possible to use this for PR.

It seems to me that a flash mob involving writing letters to one’s deputies, as well as to the heads of Duma factions, could work well right now. Something along the lines of: “I have received information from open sources regarding the illegal activities of the FSB. The explanations given by the president during the press conference are clearly insufficient. Could you initiate a parliamentary investigation into this matter, which has already gained significant international resonance and therefore should not be hushed up in the State Duma.”

I won’t provide precise wording; I am not very competent in that. I hope Ekaterina Mikhailovna will formulate a plan of action more clearly in her program tomorrow, with a specific link on where to search and where to write. Something in the final days of 2020 has triggered such a flurry of activity that I’ve completely rebranded myself as a political scientist—ugh, I shouldn’t do that, that’s not why you read me. But it’s also impossible not to share this funny prank, please bear with me)

To the moon

A little over two weeks ago, Bitcoin came very close to its historical all-time highs in US dollars. It reached the mark on some exchanges and began to hesitate near the peak. And today, it has finally confidently captured this height. So, we can officially congratulate each other on the end of the three-year decline. To everyone holding bitcoins, you have my respect. To everyone who isn’t, you have my pity. To everyone trying to halt its adoption, you have my disdain.

Nonviolent State. A new video from Libertarian Band.

The team I previously had the honor of representing has released their latest video, partially based on my script, which in turn was based on Bitarch’s article of the same name. On boosty, I posted a whole series of iterations showing how the script evolved. The next video is already terra incognita; my work is not involved there, and I am curious to see what they come up with. If it turns out well, who knows, perhaps I will be able to hand over my main text channel to someone over time.

Readers are wondering why Bitarch’s share on my channel has grown so sharply. It’s quite simple: he purchased a subscription for such publications for 5,000 rubles per month. These terms turned out to be more convenient for me than pondering every time whether or not to post a particular piece of material he suggested for free. Similarly, I guaranteed to answer questions accompanied by donations, while all others will be answered as I can.

By the way, speaking of questions. I want to test a certain model. I have created a separate subscription level on boosty for 50 rubles a month. Subscribers will see all the questions I receive and will be able to mark in the comments which ones they would be interested in seeing answered. In this way, even if a question was not accompanied by a donation, a paid subscriber can promote it (Of course, subscribers of more expensive plans will also have this capability). As we know from economic theory, it is through the pricing structure that real human needs are determined. Let’s see how this works in our case.