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!
Briefly, it states that: 1) there is philosophical anarchism, meaning the belief that the state has no moral right to coerce people, and there is political anarchism, meaning the belief that the state should be abolished; 2) political anarchism does not necessarily follow from philosophical anarchism, and one can deny the state the right to coercion without seeking to eliminate the state.
Konstantin claims: principled anarchism requires moral realism—the belief that objectively true moral judgments exist… because otherwise, anarchism itself would be nothing more than a set of someone’s personal desires. Meanwhile, anarchists do not deny the legitimacy of all coercion; they allow it to prevent more terrible coercion. But if coercion is permissible, for example, to prevent even more terrible coercion, then why cannot the state handle this? In other words, if the state behaves well, why should we demand its abolition? And any examples of bad states can always be dismissed as private cases subject to targeted correction.
The article would be incomplete if the author had not taken the trouble to address the obvious question: why does the state suppress its competitors in the matter of legitimate coercion? As a justification, it is argued that a proper state, to which philosophical anarchists should have no complaints, limits competitors for the sake of adhering to uniform, transparent procedural rules—in other words, to exclude vigilantism. That is, self-defense is fine, but dismembering a neutralized offender is not fine (shout out to Alexander Tatarkov and his constant leitmotif “we don’t need state prisons, give me the person who molested my daughter, I’ll sell him for organs”).
In the second part of the article, the author analyzes the question of how one might try to bypass the holes he found in the justification of political anarchism through moral subjectivism. It will not be possible to justify the state’s claim to exercise justified coercion if there is no single and universal standard for the justifiability of coercion. Next, he gallops through Stirner, Svetov, Belkovich, and Hoppe. Konstantin’s objections to the ideas of the aforementioned individuals boil down to the following:
If the individual himself is the final authority in determining good and bad, then why would coercing someone into moral orders to which they did not consent be wrong? Their subjective judgment on this matter cannot carry more weight than the equally subjective judgment of the person exercising the coercion that this coercion is justified.
In other words, in Konstantin’s opinion, if we take the position of moral subjectivism, we leave ideas about the necessity of abolishing the state even more without any support. For some, the state is evil; for others, it is good; everyone is right, let’s move on.
In conclusion, the author states that the most promising direction of work for anarchists is the search for strong practical arguments in favor of the idea that a stateless society will be effective, while any militant rhetoric directed at the state would be better tempered, looking instead at plans for various useful reforms.
I have already summarized Morozov’s previous article on moral realism once, but I never commented on it, and in the meantime, he has written more. In the next post, I do intend to speak out on the interesting questions he has raised.
Right now I am living in Albania in the village of Theth, 50m from a majestic historical monument – Kulla e Nguemit – the tower of conflict resolution.
This unique structure was used by locals to handle legal matters. If a dispute arises – go to the tower, sit there on a rug, and discuss your issue over rakia, in the presence of mediators if necessary.
If you cannot reach an agreement within a reasonable timeframe – they will lock you in there, and you can negotiate as much as you like. Food will be brought to you.
Finally, if someone plotted something evil against you – run to the tower, lock yourself in, and fire back from the top floor, while simultaneously negotiating the terms of reconciliation. Thus, we have an elegant combination of a courthouse and a prison in one package, which is quite economically justified for a small village. Prisons in the ancap sense – that is, a refuge from retribution.
In short, most smart things were already thought of before us. Our task is to comprehend them, provide a theoretical basis, generalize, and then implement them on a new level of understanding.
Mohawks, metal, port wine, speakers, Yegor Letov, Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Yuri Hoy and Viktor Tsoi! And of course, mother-anarchy!
But seriously, do you think there are common grounds between libertarians and anarcho-punks, and is interaction or even cooperation between them possible?
Perhaps the most punk thing I’ve ever seen is the movie “Fight Club.” There, it’s no longer just Tsoi’s “you must be strong, you must be able to say don’t tread on me,” but an aggressive denial of the dominant system as a whole, in which, of course, the distinct contours of some anti-system are visible: how wonderful it is to destroy something beautiful, how wonderful it is to wage guerrilla warfare against the regime by any means from spitting in soup to blowing up buildings, and most importantly—how wonderful self-destruction is. Self-destruction proves the sincerity of one’s views and provides a person with a high platform, even if before that they were nobody and had no name. And here, everyone repeats in chorus—his name is Vladislav Roslyakov! That is impressive.
Of course, the punk movement is a product of the twentieth century with its disregard for individual human life and very large-scale thinking. Punks did not defend their own individual freedom (freedom within the existing system is shit), because it is only possible through a transition to anarchy, and that primarily means the breakdown of the existing system. It is pointless to discuss whether punks have a positive agenda and to make its presence a condition for cooperation with them. It is quite enough that a punk will fight not against every system, but only against the one that spawned him. We are all a bit like virologists now, so I think the analogy of punks as antibodies to the state would be quite appropriate.
I think it’s clear from the above that there are common grounds between anarcho-punks and anarcho-libertarians. But what about interaction and cooperation? Here, I’m afraid, anarcho-libertarians will seem like boring, stifling and useless theorists to anarcho-punks. What is this “respect for private property”? The state holds you as property tighter than it holds your balls; forget about it. As long as you are afraid of living in shit, they will scare you by dipping you in shit, and in the fight against the system, one cannot be distracted by such trivial fears.
Punks are guerrillas. I think they could have quite mutually beneficial and mutually understandable cooperation with sufficiently hardcore agorists, who are also essentially guerrillas. But still, I would like to see a lecture, say, by Pavel Usanov before an audience of anarcho-punks, dedicated to some kind of brutality. Well, for example, a talk on the economics of Mexican cartels from the position of AEL. Naturally, Pavel should be in full dress, with a bow tie, otherwise the picture won’t be right.
The image is very important in terms of influence on society, so there should, of course, also be many carnival punks in a strong subculture, who mostly copy visual images rather than the style of thinking and, most importantly, actions. But please forgive me for not dwelling in detail on the visual component, such as mohawks and studs: that’s for the designers, they understand the language of material culture better.
The Anarchy+ channel, from which I continue to draw ideas from time to time, demonstrated a creative application of game theory to the anti-statist movement. As I have mentioned repeatedly, game theory is used not for proofs, but merely as a tool to illustrate the logic of one’s reasoning.
The reasoning there is roughly as follows. We are constantly presented with someone like Mad Max as an example of anarchy, and we get angry and try to show that we are “white and fluffy” and want something entirely different. The proposed model breaks down the outcomes of the war between anarchists and the state into a simple matrix, where our desired state of anarchy is the outcome “anarchism won, the state lost,” and the amorphousness we are warned about is the outcome “the state lost, anarchism lost as well.”
At the end, the article leaves a question hanging regarding what to put in the “state won, anarchists also won” square. If the state is defined as a system of centralized coercion and anarchism as a system of distributed deterrence, the author interprets the win-win situation as unattainable.
Of course, panarchists respond to this: nothing of the sort. Federalization, the transition to a system of extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions or functional overlapping competing jurisdictions, is precisely what the sought-after win-win means. The state wins because it is preserved as a system of centralized coercion, while its legitimacy increases sharply. Anarchism wins because the state is decentralized, the influence of citizens on politics is strengthened due to the drastic simplification of changing jurisdictions, and the state’s susceptibility to systems of distributed deterrence also increases.
I recently published a post Principles of agorism, in which I included a comment by Alexander Tatarkov made to my post regarding a business idea for an agorist in the catering sector. Now Alexander has released a YouTube video, where he has significantly expanded his text, adding a historical introduction, various motivational inserts, and presenting the principles of agorism in a more detailed manner.
It is intended that he will continue to expand on the topic, so subscribe to the channel; you will be able to learn many interesting things. The author is still excessively wordy, so I listen to him at 1.5x speed.
Popularization of freedom
Vitaly Tizun, whose essay Theory of a Free Society I suggested for your attention in early March, has started a sequel and has already released the first chapter, Popularization of Freedom. In it, he argues the idea that arguments in favor of panarchy are more convincing to the masses because they do not require giving anything up, but on the contrary, boil down to everyone getting what they want, much like what the famous Russian panarchist Vladimir Zhirinovsky also promised, with the only difference being that these promises will be truthful. It is difficult for me to judge the intent of the entire work so far, but the style is generally good, so I will follow the process, although I do not guarantee that I will cover it in detail. Vitaly posts announcements in his Telegram channel, so you can subscribe and track it yourself.
Contagious Libertarianism
Bitarch released an article Contagious Libertarianism, in which he complains about the linear growth rates of the audience for the overwhelming majority of libertarian resources. Likening libertarianism to an infection, Bitarch notes that contagion occurs only through a few passionate individuals, and thereafter, the transmission through the chain of those infected is quite weak. He then uses Greta Thunberg as an example, noting that she managed to make her discourse truly contagious, as illustrated by a graph of her Twitter follower growth, which showed exponential growth until the coronavirus, after which the Thunberg epidemic finally plateaued because humanity went into quarantine.
Indeed, my successes look significantly more modest, and the trend is closer to linear (the major jump was the advertisement by Pozharsky):
So immediately forward this post to ten friends, and let each one subscribe to my channel; only in this way will libertarian ideas acquire the necessary contagiousness. You don’t want to? How dare you!
Seriously though, Bitarch goes on to propose a set of criteria that a sufficiently contagious idea must satisfy, and at the end, as an example of such an idea, he offers his slogan freedom NAP or death! It seems to me that the premise the state does not save from the pandemic, but civil society does. Down with the state, long live civil society! would look much fresher and more relevant today. I am not, of course, referring to the high-society GrOb, which only saves you from boredom.
Conditions for the Stability of Anarchy
The Anarchy+ channel released an analysis of several approaches to researching the conditions for the stability of anarchy. It mentions the published translation by me in early February of Hirschleifer’s work Anarchy and its Decay, but also provides links to some other works. For convenience, all materials have been kindly collected by the author into one archive attached to the post.
The post calls for attention in kitchen discussions of anarchy to be paid not only to the models of society being proposed, but also to their sustainability conditions; and to avoid profanation, to familiarize oneself with various approaches to this topic, to remember the limits of the models’ applicability, to clarify the terminology used, and to observe other basics of civilized discussion.
I am glad to present a new video from Libertarian Band, opening the third section of the cycle on libertarianism. This section will describe how a stateless society works. And today’s video describes the conditions under which a stateless society will remain stable.
First, we touch upon the previously analyzed iterated prisoner’s dilemma, then we chew over Hirschleifer’s conditions for the stability of anarchy, which have been mentioned here several times, but for dessert, we provide our own answer.
Further on, I hope it will only get more exciting, so please subscribe.
If things continue this way, the difference between the libertarian right and the libertarian left will continue to become increasingly blurred, because the very direction of the global economy, as shown in the article, facilitates such convergence. We are simply beginning to describe the exact same society as the desired result, only viewing it from different angles.
Recently, following the lead of Professor Auzan, I began referring to certain mysterious conditions for the stability of anarchy according to Hirshleifer. Since this concept has started to surface frequently in discussions, it would be a good idea to examine it in more detail.
Therefore, Andrey Meshkov undertook the translation (and I edited the translation) of the article by University of California professor Jack Hirshleifer, Anarchy and Its Dissolution, where these conditions are introduced. Those interested may also consult the original article (for instance, they might be interested in the bibliography, which we decided not to include in the translation).
The article describes a mathematical model of an anarchic system, its primary interaction mechanisms, and draws conclusions about the model’s behavior. Of course, these conclusions are applicable to real society only to the extent that the model reflects society, but this applies to any method of mathematical modeling. Hirshleifer’s model is not the only one; it is simply considered the most advanced to date, and yet simple enough to be convenient to use.
As a reminder, all translations in which I have participated are collected in the corresponding section of the website.
I also spent quite a long time trying to figure all this out, but today, it essentially doesn’t matter. All anarchists differ from one another only by shades of their attitude toward private property, and all are more or less equally hostile toward the state. There have been repeated attempts in history to abolish private property first, and the state later. But even when such attempts were successful, it only led to all property ending up in the hands of the state, and in such a state, there remained no room for any kind of anarchist. Therefore, any sane anarchist now, even if they are an anarcho-communist thrice over, would prefer to start with the elimination of the state.
The state is not reducible to the current government, whatever it may be. The state is based on people’s conviction that not all people should be endowed with equal rights. In the view of statists, it is necessary for a certain part of the people to possess rights that others do not have, namely the right to violent coercion. This is needed to lead the mindless herd in the right direction; otherwise, humanity, deprived of guides, will do something bad to itself, such as cause a global catastrophe. A person who believes that humanity needs a guide who forcibly restricts others in their peaceful activities will reproduce the state even after the current government has been abolished. Moreover, such a person may even call themselves an anarchist right now—they might simply believe, for example, that the guide should be collective.
The more an anarchist focuses on how to organize their own life, the more of an anarcho-individualist they are. The more they are concerned with how collective interaction will be organized, the more of an anarcho-communist they are. The more they believe in entrepreneurship as the engine of any development, the more of an anarcho-capitalist they are.
Which specific label a person applies to themselves in addition to anarchism depends mainly on which books they have read, whom they have associated with, and which channels they subscribe to. In reality, the shade of their ideology depends on how much they believe in people. If they believe people are by nature evil and greedy, their anarchism will boil down to ideas about putting together a tough gang that won’t let itself be pushed around. If they believe people are more inclined toward cooperation and entrepreneurship, then their anarchism will lean toward reflections on horizontal interaction and free trade. And if they consider people to be simple and predictable, they will discuss the automation of management and the replacement of bureaucrats with scripts.
I have nothing to fight over with other anarchists. I will try not to let myself be pushed around. I will try not to get lost in the marketplace. I am not afraid of automation. I believe in people, and they mostly bring me joy.
