Тег: Agorism

Agorism in four steps

My favorite Telegram channel, Libertarian State, published a brief set of principles they promote in two parts. Part 1. Part 2. I have read them. Short, clear, and concise; I find much of what is presented to be useful, but there is only one serious problem: the channel’s target audience is incapable of implementing these principles.

In this regard, I believe it is useful to outline my own approach to building a libertarian future, which is something every one of my readers is actually capable of implementing. This is, of course, agorism. Even before I became acquainted with Konkin’s ideas on counter-economics, I called this approach counter-cultural, contrasting it with the political one. What is wrong with the political approach?

There is no point in spending effort trying to change the political course of the state. First, you would have to start with the support of a negligible minority. Second, politics is a path of inevitable compromises, and in the best case, your ideas about reducing the state will be implemented only partially. Third, just as it shrinks, it will grow back: there is not a single example where liberal reforms were not followed by a reversal, and in general, the trend is toward further strengthening the role of the state. And finally, for successful political activity, you need to build complex associations, but any organization united by a simple interest is incredibly easy to destroy. You will endlessly bog down in internal conflicts over whose version of Rothbard is truer, and who violated which point of the charter at what moment.

Instead, it is proposed: first, remove the state from your head; second, remove it from your life; third, remove it from the lives of your loved ones; and fourth, expand the circle of these loved ones.

The most important is the first. At this stage, you firmly understand that there are no tasks for which a decent person would need the state. You have to turn to it out of necessity, for some silly permit, but you certainly should not expect to succeed by cooperating with it.

After serious progress in the first stage, you will inevitably begin to progress in the second. You will always wonder: can it be done under the table? Can it be done without a permit? Can it be done without reporting? Your competencies will develop in this specific area, rather than, for example, in the area of collecting certificates to receive social benefits.

If you are successful in bypassing state hurdles, you will inevitably help your loved ones do the same. Thus, you will become a useful person for a small circle of people. And, naturally, this circle will expand over time, and you will acquire interesting connections and influence.

At some stage, you might, for example, be imprisoned. An activist acquaintance might also be imprisoned. So might an honest state loyalist. Or a security official who lost an internal power struggle. The state devours everyone; you will not be its priority target. But it will have fewer chances of reaching you. You know the detours. You will flee abroad, change your identity, lie low, or in the worst case, dismantle the case.

Admit it, this prospect is more interesting than spending several years becoming, for example, a municipal deputy, sitting in meetings as part of a minority, and managing to achieve nothing during your term of office.

Belarus 3

This is already my third post about Belarus. In the first one, I gave obvious recommendations that turned out to be practically a forecast. In the second, I gave non-obvious recommendations, and, naturally, reality diverged from those recommendations. Therefore, instead of giving my own advice now, I want to express my happiness for the recommendations that Belarusians themselves are exchanging.

I am talking about a text on Telegraph with the proud title Victory Plan. It proposes a continuation of Sharp’s non-violent transformation from a dictatorship into a freer society. In brief, the plan includes:

  • organizing the main directions of resistance (fronts): protest actions, economic strangulation of the state, propaganda, political pressure, including at the international level, and moral and legal pressure on specific executors.
  • building parallel coordination structures (ministries): non-state economic services, insurance funds to compensate for the costs of state violence, the collapse of state social services, and strikes.

This is a very good plan because, during its implementation, society will receive a practical course in agorism, and there is a great chance that it will get a taste for it. When it turns out that non-state coordination is more efficient and the dictatorship eventually withers away, there is a chance that the new state, which will inevitably be built in place of the old one, will acquire the best traits of liberal laxity and will avoid meddling in things that are not its business for quite a long time. And if it does start to meddle, people will have ready-made recipes on exactly how to put the state in its place.

Is there a chance that after the old regime leaves, a new one will not be built in its place? It is very small, because libertarian ideas are not yet widely distributed in society, and the thought that everyone is better off without a state does not seem obvious to people. They are more likely to repeat the mistake of thinking, “this was a bad state, it’s gone now, now we will build a good one.”

Navalny and Leviathan

When I read about Navalny’s poisoning, I felt completely hopeless. This year, ruling regimes all over the world have finally gone off the rails and have already managed to cause an unimaginable amount of damage to people. And it’s only August! And there is no reason to believe that 2020 is just an anomaly and that things will settle down later. In short, I wanted to fully retreat into internal emigration. To a place where there are no political news, where you have no idea what new orders the disposers of other people’s lives are giving, where there is only a market around—peaceful, cozy, and benevolent. To the place where all decent people actually belong.

I beg you: please, do not feed yourselves to the Leviathan. Stop with these pickets of yours, for which you will be fined—one; jailed for a day—two; given a criminal case—three. Stop the performances with Putin dolls and other risky nonsense. This will not shame the bandits in power. This does not help the victims of the bandits. It simply forces the security forces to turn their extremely unfriendly attention toward you, with a predictable result. You cannot be proud of being a victim of the regime. You should be proud of causing damage to the regime with impunity. But be proud in silence, otherwise, the impunity will turn into a failure.

One should act openly only when backed by power. Until then, we are partisans in this war declared upon us by the state. We must not be visible. Only grotesque rumors should be known about us—that we are everywhere, that 90% of the country’s economy is in the shadows, that no one follows the regime’s orders except for completely naive weirdos, that only suckers keep their money in fiat while the right people keep it exclusively in crypto, that official employment for a normal person is just a smokescreen for shadow earnings, that a normal person has contacts for every occasion, and it is thanks to them, not the state, that he peacefully prospers.

Of course, it is not like that now. But such rumors and beliefs have the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is why it is useful for us to broadcast them. This is a far more effective struggle against the regime than rallies or, Lord forgive me, anti-corruption investigations. Against any regime, not necessarily Putin’s. Against the phenomenon of political power as such.

The Fate of a Hero

Election Commission Strike. New video on Libertarian Band.

A video of atypical content has been released on Libertarian band. One of the team members, Alexei Nefedov, also works in a precinct election commission. He decided to join the strike of election commission members and briefly explains the motives why other members of election commissions should follow his example.

For my part, I will add that on one hand, it is useful for as many election commission members as possible to strike, and on the other — it is useful to create as much workload as possible for those remaining, so that they curse everything and regret not joining the strikers. Call the commission to your home; for once, this is allowed for everyone, so we should take advantage of it and let them run around. Are we agorists or what?

The Stylistics of Protest

I heard an interesting thought from Ekaterina Schulmann last night—that the difference in the style of protests in the US and Russia is not related to some special “slave mentality” of Russians, but simply to what is customary. Russia, in her words, is more similar to Scandinavia in this sense: in both places, people protest modestly, expressing a gloomy silent reproach, without all your outbursts of anger, shouting, and arson. If you go out to protest against injustice, you are a decent person, and decent people do not scream on the street, and they do not beat people.

Similarly, rallies in Russia are not intended for listening to whoever is rambling on stage. The speakers talk for YouTube, meaning for those who didn’t come to the rally, but want to feel the atmosphere and leave a like. But the people came to socialize with one another and to be happy that many like-minded people share their position. They certainly understand that, formally, they have formulated demands, and that pressure must be put on the authority to make them fulfill these demands, but they will not go storm the Kremlin, because decent people do not do things that way. They would rather sign a resolution.

This is precisely why Russian agorism takes on some characteristics of AUE. Agorism is not so much about the state dying of starvation, but about a moral choice. By avoiding interaction with the state and especially avoiding payments to it, a person simply feels morally cleaner.

That is exactly why any calls to chip in to help people pay their finesy are so infuriating to me. How can you consciously call upon people to get dirty by making payments to the state, and moreover, voluntarily act as the state’s tax agents? You go out to the street to express your reproach to the state, you unfurl a banner, you get detained, you get a summons to court, the court imposes a fine. Well, express your reproach once more and refuse to pay right there in court. Let them replace it with arrest or carry a wardrobe out of your house. They will wreck your house at any moment anyway, as soon as they want to, especially if you choose the tactic of open confrontation with the regime.

Russian libertarians are now pushing the hashtag and holding single-person pickets against the extrajudicial killings committed by Russian security forces. I support this hype. But when in a week they start collecting donations for the fines of detained activists, I will be spitting in their direction. Just warning you in advance.

I will not condemn liberals who value the institution of the state itself, as something that brings law and order, for paying their fines. For them, this is an element of law and order. They will legally challenge this fine in court, hoping to fix a bad state. These are their rituals for maintaining purity, and this can be respected, although one can still hope for their enlightenment.

The downsides of agorism

I have promoted agorism quite a bit here, and you may have gotten the impression that it is the only worthy way to fight the state: minarchism quickly stalls, panarchism also bogs down in the very first stages of implementation, and only agorism is indestructible, actually helps many people live, and forms useful qualities in them, meaning it strengthens itself. Nevertheless, it has its downsides. Today I will try to bring them together, but, of course, I will provide a counter-thesis for every thesis, because the goal of the post is not to induce gloom.

As a reminder, by agorism I mean any non-violent entrepreneurship that is either directly prohibited by the state or, at the very least, not regulated by it in any way.

Thesis 1. Due to state opposition, the agorist must spend effort on disguising their activities or other ways to stay out of harm’s way. The costs for this are not zero even for micro-businesses, and they grow rapidly as the scale of the enterprise increases.

Counter-thesis. Russians, as well as subjects of other natural states, might object that for white businesses in their jurisdictions, the costs of opposing state raiding also grow rapidly with the success of the enterprise; therefore, it is important to hide turnover and profit not only to avoid taxes, but also so that the security forces do not seize the enterprise itself.

Thesis 2. Speaking of raiders. Besides state ones, there are also private ones. Black businesses cannot use state protection from such raiding and are forced to defend themselves with their own resources, and the costs for this also grow rapidly as the scale of activity increases.

Counter-thesis. Russians or subjects of other natural states will pat you, you naive soul, on the head upon hearing the words “state protection,” and then tell you many grim tales. De facto, the forceful seizure of business in such jurisdictions is a public-private partnership, where the state seizes and a private person buys for pennies, or where a private person seizes and the state confirms their right through its court, or, finally, where the state pressures lawlessly until the business is rewritten to a private individual.

Thesis 3. It is difficult for an agorist to maintain their libertarian purity—on the black market, they will quite quickly be forced to engage in forceful entrepreneurship themselves, or cooperate with forceful entrepreneurs, or fall into a vassal dependency on them. Legal activity will not make the question of deals with conscience so acute.

Counter-thesis. Yes, this is not ruled out; much depends on the situation. In some places, every street vendor is forced to pay off the mafia, while in others, every government employee may be sent to a pro-government rally or forced to vote according to their boss’s instructions. So legality or illegality itself guarantees nothing, and one will still have to defend their principles, simply out of self-respect.

Thesis 4. The idea of starving the state through agorism could work in the USA, where small business constitutes a significant share of the economy, but in Russia, it languishes on the brink of extinction, and its share of taxes in the state budget is small. Therefore, in Russia, with its gigantomania, agorism will not be able to fulfill its declared task.

Counter-thesis. It is precisely the small business operating “in the white” that languishes on the brink of extinction, which only increases the attractiveness of agorist practices. Nevertheless, I am forced to agree: as long as agorists fundamentally fly below the radar, they will not have a significant influence on the state; for the failure to pay money to the state from scattered individual secret practices to turn into a powerful campaign of civil disobedience, the legitimacy of the state must be seriously undermined by its own failures. The Russian state is currently handling this task confidently; we must seize the moment.

And in conclusion, I will reinforce the message given at the beginning of the article. The main task of agorism in today’s Russia is educational. Nothing rid one of paternalism in their own consciousness better than crude practice. And without eradicating paternalism, you cannot abolish the state.

The condition for the success of agorism

Principles of Agorism

My channel has a VK mirror run by one of the readers. I don’t monitor it myself, so if anything interesting appears in the comments, let me know in private messages. In particular, the description of a business idea for an agorist prompted Alexander Tatarkov, whose YouTube channel I have already recommended here once, to provide a detailed supplement, which I decided to put into a separate post.

I will allow myself to generalize a bit and formulate the main principles of agorism.

1. Work with a private client, not an organization. A private individual doesn’t care whether you paid taxes or not.
2. Work for cash. Only cash can be “black.” (a reminder from Ancap-chan: Bitcoin is cash)
3. Do not underestimate barter. On paper, no money passes through at all, yet each party gets what they wanted.
4. Corruption is not bad, but good. You have an agent in the enemy’s camp (the state). You are not giving money to the enemy (the state). You reduce the official’s dependence on the state by providing them with an alternative income. He is your accomplice. He will cover for you because you are the compromising material on him. And he is more interested than you are in ensuring your scheme is not exposed.
5. Sell things that are impossible to account for or count. For example, portions of lunches, or booklets, or business cards (printing).
6. The purchase of materials should also be in “black” cash.
7. Avoid cashless payments, even to a personal card. Let the client transfer money to someone you owe. My clients even paid for my daughter’s music school! This way, it’s as if you did nothing. Your creditor doesn’t care who paid your debts. And the state only collects taxes from one transaction.
8. A wonderful scheme involving the gifts of nature. No purchasing needed. The money is “clean,” completely black and untraceable. For example, in the 90s, we harvested cedar nuts. Sold them under the table for cash. It’s impossible to prove how much was sold.
9. Working with things that cannot be touched. For example, design. You create a design, you receive money. From whom, for what—try and figure it out. You might not have even seen this person! They sent you the order via WhatsApp, received the sketch by email. They topped up your phone balance for payment.
10. And various on-site or at-home services. Like computer repair, manicures, apartment renovations, dog training/walking. Even if the tax office comes to you via an advertisement, you say that there have been no clients yet. When the first one appears, I’ll get a patent. Proving that half the city is served by you can only be done through an informant. Well, you just have to work properly so that no one informs on you…

Something like that. This is the first thing that came to mind. Much of it is from personal experience in the 90s. I consciously discarded criminal schemes. Perhaps I missed a lot. The main thing here is to outline the direction of thought.

Learned helplessness, the illusion of control, and agorism

Mikhail Pozharsky has released a very good video about the illusion of control. Be sure to watch it in full if you haven’t already, and I, as usual, will provide the key points as I understand them.

  1. The experience of falling into a hopeless situation (one in which the subject’s position does not depend on their efforts) triggers the development of learned helplessness.
  2. Learned helplessness sharply reduces the subject’s competitive potential in situations where their actions actually do make a difference.
  3. An important psychological defense against learned helplessness is the illusion of control. In a hopeless situation, one can believe that something still depends on them, and thus learned helplessness will not arise.
  4. However, the rituals of psychological defense designed to create an illusion of control can themselves worsen the hopeless situation.
  5. Therefore, the skill of reflection is more effective, where the subject analyzes what they can actually control and what they cannot, and does not waste strength on the illusion of control, accepting force majeure as it is.
  6. Such a skill is formed through the experience of independently finding a way out of difficult situations, and in no other way.
  7. Therefore, creating cumbersome centralized structures and shifting the responsibility for everything onto them is an illusion of control, whereas a real fight against difficulties implies a decentralized approach based on personal responsibility. Period.

This is why, having outlined three main paths toward ancap — minarchism, panarchism, and agorism — I pay special attention specifically to agorism.

One can start a political party, like the big shots do, hold rallies, like the big shots do, and believe that through political pressure you are somehow influencing the policies pursued by the authorities — and when asked why life isn’t getting better, answer that the efforts undertaken are insufficient, and not a hundred thousand, but a million people must take to the streets.

One can propose reforms to create functional competing jurisdictions, dream of Facebook citizenship or the Bitnation project, and when asked why none of this is being implemented, answer that everything is heading that way anyway, but it would be good to double the propaganda efforts.

Or one can simply make a deal and not pay a tax. Or bypass an inconvenient ban. Or invent a service that is useful to people but invisible to the state’s servants. This is no longer an illusion of control. This is control itself. Through such things, a person learns to independently find a way out of difficult situations. And if they find themselves in conditions where they cannot control the possibility of getting out of the situation, they will already be resistant to learned helplessness, and will not fall back on rituals for the sake of an illusion of control.

One can remain an atheist in the trenches under fire. While one is shitting their pants and another is praying, the agorist digs the trench deeper.

https://youtu.be/pJuUbGwYH1Q

How to be an agorist and engage in ordinary business with the minimum possible payment of taxes?

For example, I want to open a cafe. Opening a cafe in the city center, I run a high risk of losing money to the state. How can I avoid this, and is it even worth risking opening an illegal business in modern Russia with a physical space and people inside? It feels like agorism right now is only about selling substances, but I don’t want to sell substances on Tor; I want to run, for example, a cafe, and there is absolutely not that kind of anonymity—you need people to know about it, and it needs to be out in the open. That is completely different from the substances market, for instance, where you can do business via Tor. Furthermore, if some problems with the authorities arise, the courts and law enforcement are monopolized, and no one will protect me from the arbitrary actions of tax officials. What should I do? Wait until avoiding taxes becomes the norm? Grease palms with bribes? Then the money will go to government officials and increase their interest in creating problems (so there would be more bribes). It’s some kind of vicious circle.

The question is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.0001985 btc

Agorist practices always imply a certain solidarity between counterparties against the state; this is what you should focus on when figuring out how to build your shadow business. For instance, if you set up a tax-free establishment in an open square in the city center, you have only one chance to avoid repressive pressure from the state: if, in response to such attempts, your customers immediately shoot the state representatives to hell, and the state knows this in advance. Outside the Chechen Republic, you cannot count on this, so let’s move on.

Since we are talking about the catering sector, I would suggest a different business model. Find a business center that isn’t too posh, with a lax access regime, visit every office, and present your simple commercial proposal—that every working day during the lunch break, you are ready to deliver a hot set meal at a fixed low price, with payment in cash. Here is a link to a Telegram bot; every morning until 11:00, an order can be placed by choosing one of three set meals, and from 13:45 to 14:15, the order will be delivered to the office. That, essentially, is the whole model. You will need to rent a kitchen space as a private individual, hire staff under the table—and get to work. You don’t even have to introduce yourself by any name; your name is the Telegram bot. Oh, and you’ll also need to spend some money on writing the bot. Alternatively, the bot can be replaced by a website, but that depends only on how widespread Telegram is in your city.

By the way, to avoid walking around with your advertisements in vain, when you promote your hot lunch service, bring some tasty pastries with you; they’ll go down great in offices whether it’s closer to lunch or closer to five o’clock. Then you won’t just be “some guy who came by with brochures,” but “those people with the buns who can also bring hot lunches.”

Of course, this model works better when there is some life in the offices, so the period of total self-isolation is not the best time to start such a business. On the other hand, right now you can organize free meals for doctors in hospitals, funded by donations. Some NGOs are already doing this; nothing stops you from starting to hone your organizational skills right now. Any charitable organization spends part of the collected funds on its own needs, so, as long as you aren’t greedy, you will at least be able to provide a minimal income for yourself and your employees, plus earn a reputation and visibility, and the object of charity will be grateful to you and, if necessary, will provide a ventilator out of turn.

Of course, this idea is not new, but there will be space for agorism in this sphere for a long time, especially outside the capitals

Autoimmune Damage to the State, or How the Power of the State Itself Can Be Used for Its Destruction

Bitarch’s Column

In medicine, there is a class of diseases known as autoimmune. These include muscle weakness (myasthenia gravis), type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and others. The essence of these diseases is that antibodies (killer cells) begin to recognize the host’s tissues (human, animal) as harmful and attack them. Most often, this happens after infection by a specific virus that, in terms of recognition by the host’s immunity, resembles healthy tissues (to put it simply). The antibodies simply fail to see the difference between whom to attack—the virus or healthy tissues—and kill everyone.

Autoimmune damage can be observed in any complex system, not just biological ones. For example, many users of computer antivirus software are familiar with the problem of the deletion of normal files that the antivirus mistook for malicious. Those who use browser extensions for ad blocking (AdBlock) know well that they often disrupt the normal operation of a website. This happens precisely because the blocker takes normal website code for an advertisement—and removes it.

The state also represents a complex system and can easily be subjected to an autoimmune attack. An interesting situation arises here—the more security forces and various services a state has, the more effective the autoimmune strike will be. This strategy bypasses the well-known assertion that “the state is stronger, it can easily crush you, therefore a forceful struggle is useless,” since for the forceful struggle against the state, it uses the state’s own force.

How can an autoimmune strike against the state be implemented? There are many ways; the main thing is to understand the general meaning. Here are some examples:

1) Realistic silicone masks of the faces of officials, security personnel, and other enemies of freedom (hereinafter – etatists). In them, we do whatever it takes to set up the etatists to be targeted by other security forces.

2) Imitation of the fingerprints of well-known etatists. Throw a bottle through an FSB window, and they “bottle” whoever we want.

3) Planting Trojan horses on the computers of etatists to proxy traffic. From there, one could, for example, engage in carding, stealing money from state banks and other organizations linked to bandits, and spending it on the promotion of libertarianism. They will “come” specifically for the etatists (or they won’t come, deciding that these etatists have the right to steal money from the state—the main thing here is that another Magnitsky or even Navalny does not suffer from this—note by Ancap-chan).

4) Ordering drugs from the darknet to the addresses of etatists and reporting it to the proper authorities.

5) Not hesitating to send anonymous tips for any reason against etatists: smoking in a prohibited place, parking under a sign, cruel treatment of their own children, walking a dog without a muzzle, meetings with girls under 16, non-compliance with fire safety/labor protection/health and safety regulations/taxes/illegal immigrants, and other violations at enterprises owned by etatists.

6) Registering a SIM card in the name of an etatist and committing several victimless “crimes” using a smartphone that has never been used before.

Ancap-chan’s Comment

The tactic considered above is another tool from the agorist toolbox against the state, alongside the uber-retribution that you perceived so ambiguously, for agorism is not reduced to counter-economics alone. Counter-economics is its most important part, as those claiming a life without a state must be able to demonstrate that they can provide themselves with all the most important benefits of civilization without the state. However, the state must not only be undermined but also tamed, otherwise the home-tormentor will not perish.

Hello, government, we have illegal migrants on our roof!