A criminal case was initiated against Mikhail Svetov over an Instagram post from 2012. Given how keen the interest in him has been from Russian security forces, it is completely obvious that the case was opened when they decided the moment was most appropriate.
I can assume that the moment was deemed appropriate for one simple reason: at the recently held LPR congress, Mikhail Svetov stepped down from the party’s governing bodies. The security forces may have reasonably decided in connection with this that Mikhail had lost public support, and it would be possible to settle scores with him without much of a scandal. They will have to be made to understand that they were seriously mistaken.
The LPR calls for holding solo pickets in support of Mikhail at the building of the Moscow Investigative Committee. This is a good step, but more can be done. Quite recently, Mikhail Svetov visited 30 cities across the western and central parts of Russia with lectures. Thus, literally every attendee of a lecture (or those who wanted to attend but could not fit into the hall due to the zeal of local security forces) now has an excellent reason to also hold a picket at the Investigative Committee building in their own city, with a poster saying, for instance, that they know Svetov personally, consider him a decent person, the case is being fabricated, enough of the embarrassment, stop this farce.
People registered for the lectures via Timepad, leaving their contact details. It would make sense for the lecture organizers to send a mailing to the collected data and suggest expressing support for Mikhail. After all, during the lectures themselves, Mikhail said that he travels to cities not so much so that people would listen to him—they can listen on YouTube. His main goal was for people in the regions to look at each other and realize how they are not alone in their distrust of the state. Well, here is a new excellent reason to gather and look at each other.
Enough people should come out, and then let the worried security forces urgently inform the head of the IC, Bastrykin, that a mistake was made, he shouldn’t have been touched, and it’s better to hush up this scandal before it flares up.
A certain anonymous organization with the nondescript name “Cell of Anarchic Action” is distributing the following manifesto across various near-libertarian resources (sorry guys, I corrected the spelling for you, otherwise it was impossible to read):
Revolutionary Ancap, or r-ancap
The ideology behind the active participation of anarchists in the revolutionary struggle against the state and the police.
R-ANCAP proclaims the following ideas:
1) Active NAP. If a person becomes an ancap and is ready to accept the NAP as a non-aggression pact, they must recognize that once they have accepted the NAP as an idea, they must abide by it. However, the state obstructs this, as it is the greatest violator of the NAP; therefore, after acceptance, any violent action directed from the state can be regarded as a manifestation of clear disagreement with the observance of this pact. This means that violent actions can be taken against the state, and its property can be seized and made private, as well as resistance offered to laws, police, officials, etc.
2) Agorism. Revolutionary anarcho-capitalism recognizes agorism as the basis of resistance to the state. Resistance and ignorance of it; a shadow market instead of a legal market, unions of squats forming districts that are their own closed system with an economy and rules in the form of contracts. Also, the creation of one’s own currency or method of exchange.
3) To achieve their goals, it is sometimes necessary to enter into alliances with other anarchists, creating solidarity and tolerance among anarchists, and sometimes full-fledged unions where the economic agenda is currently ignored, focusing only on the political and social—namely, the destruction of the state and opposition to coercion by other people.
4) Active Armament. Our goal is to demonstrate readiness and to arm ourselves actively to justify our capabilities for our own protection and that of other people in any case. This means only one thing: the creation of militias to protect demonstrators and private property that the state encroaches upon.
5) Instead of rights. Utilitarian ethics are also called teleological (from the Ancient Greek “teleos” – goal). Besides immediate pleasure, any utility can serve as the goal of a morally correct choice. The greater the utility, the more correct the action. But in striving for utility for oneself or one’s loved ones, a person may harm others. Therefore, one should act in a way that brings the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. And moral principles? They should be followed, but where they conflict with practical considerations, their conventionality must be recognized. We can protect our capabilities by guaranteeing them through alliances, contracts, and our own strength, both physical and intellectual.
6) Direct Action. Actions undertaken by individuals or groups to achieve political, economic, or social goals by means that exclude the need for intermediaries. In other words, actions aimed at solving a problem directly by one’s own efforts.
The ideal example of organization is a communitarian confederation, where communes are united into a confederation.
The NAP refers only to attack, and only to violent attack, or one that led to suicide. The latter only in the presence of substantial evidence.
Attitude toward parties. For the complete rejection of political parties, even libertarian ones, considering them traitors and advocating only for associations and political clubs of interest.
Commentary by Ancap-chan
As Mikhail Svetov has repeatedly mentioned in his speeches, if the authorities do not hear those who speak from relatively moderate positions, they are replaced by real radicals. And when these radicals seize the agenda, it will be too late to talk about lustration; defenestrations will come into fashion. In the example of the aforementioned manifesto, we see one of the early examples of the changing rhetoric of protest.
Yes, it could very well turn out that another “New Greatness” stands behind this manifesto, and after some time, the security forces will simply chop off another branch. Or maybe not.
Now, a bit about what is wrong with the ideas presented. I will not argue that the NAP is not a contract, because that is unimportant. I will not say that one cannot offer forceful resistance to any attempts at state aggression. Of course, one can. I will not argue about which way of organizing society is ideal. Of course, everyone has their own; ancap simply implies non-violence when entering associations, and from there, let the market decide. I’d rather talk about utilitarianism.
The logic of human activity suggests that if there is a goal, a means should be selected for it. If the goal is the destruction of the state, the solution suggests itself: create an organization for the destruction of the state. Hence the ideas about revolutionary cells and so on. The problem is that an organization is easy to create, but difficult to dissolve. First, you carry out an Islamic revolution, then you have an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The stronger the regime, the stronger the organization needed to overthrow it must be, the less likely this organization will be to dissolve, and the more likely it will be to terrorize peaceful citizens after its victory.
Therefore, the whole point of tactics for achieving ancap is to weaken the state, not to break it immediately. Minarchists reduce its powers. Panarchists carefully cut the state along the grain so that it begins to bend and satisfy various private requests. Agorists gnaw at the roots, starving the state, and this parasite dies from neglect. But if you start breaking it by force, then instead of the absence of a state, in the best case, you get a failed state. We’ve been there.
I will start by noting that this is a thought experiment and a test of a philosophical concept, not a discussion of technological implementation.
The essence of the idea is very simple. There is a potential aggressor in the form of a group of people (a criminal organization). You probably already guess who is being referred to. Although besides a Westphalian state, this could also be an aggressive ECU or a territorial community. A lone individual possessing a technology, which we will conventionally call MinMAD, opposes the criminal organization.
This technology ensures mutual assured destruction (MAD) of only two individuals—if the victim of aggression dies, one person from the criminal organization dies immediately (for example, a random government official, regardless of their relationship to the specific case). The victim of aggression may use conventional weapons to oppose the criminal organization (for example, firing a machine gun at a police squad sent to detain them) and remain alive as long as the aggressor does not destroy them. But if a cruise missile is then launched at their house and they perish, a random member of the criminal organization will die instantly. They can also activate MinMAD independently, for example, if they are taken prisoner. In that case, both they and one random member of the criminal organization will die immediately.
From the conditions of the problem, it is clear that both the criminal organization and the victim are not anonymous. Suppose that in a certain territory, at least 10-20% of the residents have MinMAD. Question: is it possible to maintain institutionalized coercion (the state) in this territory?
My assumption is an absolute “no”: no one will want to participate in the criminal organization (the state), knowing that there is a very high probability they could die. Accordingly, the necessary deterrent effect is achieved, forcing government officials to abandon coercion and seek other ways of making a living that are not based on robbery (which is what “taxes” actually are).
Ancap-chan’s Comment
Bitarch and I disagreed on the prospects of such a doctrine, and now we are submitting the discussion for your judgment.
I believe that we already live in a society where this experiment was conducted and led to results that differ significantly from those intended. In the past, the state was relatively compact, and those who opposed it were executed. This led to the emergence of tactics of individual terror by the resistance, which strongly demotivated government employees from performing their duties. But since then, the state has adapted to this threat, and, firstly, it has exponentially expanded the number of government employees, budget workers, and other beneficiaries of the existing system, and secondly, it has stopped killing its opponents, preferring more “vegetarian” methods, such as short prison sentences and fines. Thus, on the one hand, the resistor is demotivated from self-sacrifice, since they only face temporary inconvenience—and on the other hand, the risk of death for government employees has become significantly lower, since there are now millions of them.
So—no. A modern deterrence doctrine should imply the elimination of specifically the person who gives the order to initiate violence, and the higher their position in the state hierarchy, the better. Also, a modern deterrence doctrine should, whenever possible, remove the person practicing it from the line of fire, rather than relying on proud self-sacrifice. A “minimal” deterrence doctrine is like a vaccination against a disease for the state, rather than the disease itself.
P.S. By the way, since the deterrence doctrine is so prominent in Bitarch’s work, he created a separate VKontakte public page, where he puts all materials on this topic to make access to them more convenient.
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!
First, the state could have collected taxes from citizens, spent less on citizens’ needs than was collected (or borrowed money, or printed new money) — and bought a profitable enterprise. Thus, this results in a misappropriation of funds: money was collected under the pretext of providing services to citizens, but instead was spent on running a business. Legal logic dictates the solution: sell the enterprise, divide the proceeds among the citizens — and henceforth, do not acquire enterprises at the expense of the budget.
Second, the state could have provided the state-owned company with preferences, thanks to which it prospers. For example, the state enterprise fulfills government orders, or trades duty-free, or has preferential loans, or uses insider information, or is simply a monopoly. Thus, we have unfair competition, as a result of which the competitors of the state enterprise receive less profit or even incur losses. Legal logic requires eliminating this conflict of interest and removing the referee from the field of play.
Third, the state could have bought out a loss-making private enterprise in a pre-bankruptcy state, and then the market conditions changed, and that same activity began to yield a profit. In other words, the state took a significant entrepreneurial risk, which in this particular case paid off — but how many cases were there where the purchased loss-making enterprise continued to suck money from the budget, or eventually went bankrupt! Thus, taxpayers are exposed to the risk of serious economic losses without their consent. Legal logic requires coordinating investment policy with shareholders, and if the management of an investment fund behaved this way, it would lead to their removal.
In short, any attempt by the state to engage in entrepreneurial activity one way or another violates the rights of citizens, and therefore consistent libertarian reforms must inevitably include the full privatization of state property.
Deterrence doctrine? Yes, yes, hilarious — 25 people against one. He’ll stop them with a deterrence doctrine, uh-huh. He’ll blow up his own house with a “dead hand” system so the bastards get nothing. Sounds like nonsense. It’s like saying: if I have a weapon, 25 people with the same weapon won’t stop me because they’ll miss.
Gangs and organized crime under ancap cannot be stopped by any means whatsoever. Self-organization? Sure, look at the protests — there’s your free and voluntary self-organization for you.
The market will sort it out, so they can only be stopped by a PDA (Private Defense Agency) or another gang — that is self-organization, just for money — everything according to the market.
Consequently, panarchy is the future structure of society, and ancap is a fantasy about what would happen if people didn’t organize into gangs, just like in ancient times.
анонимный вопрос
When making predictions about what society will look like, a person holds a certain image of society in their head. Following Laksi Katal (and perhaps for the same reasons, namely the experience of the nineties, which I myself didn’t have enough time to fully drink in), you see society as a collection of people who are eager to unite for joint looting, but extremely reluctant to unite for mutual assistance in defending against looting.
I am constantly asked how ancaps can withstand millions of Chinese hordes and other collectivist bullshit — behind all these questions lies the same fear of being alone in the face of an aggressive crowd.
So here it is. The dominance of anarcho-capitalist (i.e., free market) relations in society is possible only when being part of an aggressive crowd is far less profitable than not being part of it. Just as in South Korea any schoolchild knows that while you sleep, your competitor is studying, under ancap it should be a fairly common belief that while you are risking your life snatching phones behind garages, your competitor is launching a startup — and you’ll be lucky if it’s not a startup for delivering remote kicks to those who snatch phones.
As a salvation from gangs, you suggest PDAs or other gangs (meaning something like the insurance rackets described by the aforementioned Laksi Katal). This truly is capable of reducing organized systematic aggressive violence in society, if there is a lot of it. The other thing is that the reduction of violence will quickly reduce the demand for expensive insurance services against violence. For instance, in earthquake-safe areas, people are unlikely to insure against earthquakes. For this very reason, I am quite ready to consider the PDA system as a transitional stage to ancap, but I find it hard to believe that they would have a noticeable influence for long enough. Right now, the most profitable business in the world is running your own state. But competition will quickly lower the margin, and the lack of sacred reverence for this field of earnings will do its part. Protection rackets in a society with a developed free market will be about as significant as pest control companies are today. Yes, someone suffers from harmful rodents and uses the services of specialists to exterminate them. And someone had their phone snatched, and they also turn to specialists to eliminate this inconvenience.
Rats, cockroaches, the state, and other problems that can arise in society are the result of poor hygiene. Assuring people that the only way to get rid of rats is to bring out the rat king, and the only way to eliminate armed gangs is to hire other armed gangs, looks like a quite reasonable idea, but only when society is very poor and the mentioned plagues are literally at every step. Wealth and social hygiene skills provide a greater variety of methods to prevent all this nonsense.
The state from the perspective of a rich and developed society
Among libertarians, there is a firm belief that the existence of freedom of speech in a country based on the principle of the American First Amendment to the Constitution is an unambiguous benefit that helps us fight statism. But is this actually the case, or is it a cleverly planned trap that has helped the US ruling elites avoid revolutions for almost two and a half centuries?
Let’s look at the fate of well-known anti-statists in the US who began to pose any significant threat to the state. Jim Bell, the creator and evangelist of the “assassination market” idea, was imprisoned for “tax evasion.” Larken Rose, a well-known ancap, also ended up behind bars for taxes. I think there is no need to remind everyone of the story with Julian Assange and the sexual allegations; everyone knows it already.
What conclusion can be drawn from this? If your words pose a real danger to the stationary bandit, a pretext for repression will always be found; it is not necessary for him to repress specifically for words. What do you think will happen if a full-page advertisement is printed in the New York Times with the text “The State is a stationary bandit! Panarchy is the primary path to freedom!”? I am willing to bet that the next day the FBI will find child pornography or drugs in the possession of the activist who ordered such an ad. Or it will turn out that he likes to abuse his dog and is generally not opposed to eating it. Unfortunately, most active fighters against the state in the US do not understand this.
In Russia, the situation is completely different. The authorities repress directly for politics, and they don’t even disguise it particularly well. We have convenient “extremism” articles with extremely vague content, allowing anyone to be imprisoned for anything, so there is no need to bother planting child pornography on an activist. Because of this, all active fighters against the state use VPNs, burner SIMs, encryption, and intermediaries from the very beginning of their activities, and they never show their faces. As a result, in terms of the difficulty of capture, such an activist is equal to a professional hacker, so it is easier to earn medals by searching for extremism on VKontakte. The investigator is not concerned with the fact that a real fighter against the state can indeed be dangerous to the state: that is not his level of responsibility. The more pressure the authorities apply, the more anonymization methods the fighters against the state will use, and the faster its territorial monopoly will be destroyed. The same cannot be said for countries where people still believe in freedom of speech.
Ancap-chan’s Commentary
Yesterday, Ved Neuman released an article in which he responded to a comment by Laksi Katal regarding the deadlock of the “butt-end”: the lighter the power, the more willingly people surrender to it.
As we can see, opinions are divided on what is more beneficial for supporters of the total abolition of the state—an openly repressive state that discredits itself, or its liberalization, with a potential increase in the level of trust in it. Bitarch and Laksi Katal believe that the principle of “the worse, the better” works: the worse the state, the easier it is to convince people that it is not needed at all. Following Ved, I believe that appetite comes with eating, and once one starts pushing back the state, one will not want to stop, especially if life actually improves at every stage of the reforms. This is especially relevant in countries that lack a developed culture of respect for the opposition, where the custom is to finish off the opponent. Once the state begins to bend, they will finish it off.
So it seems strange to me to consider it a bad thing if the state has to seek indirect paths for repression because the direct path is blocked. On the contrary, this is merely a reason to block those very indirect paths. Freedom of speech exists—it must be used to stop persecution for victimless crimes, such as possession of child pornography or drug use, and any flailing of the state in this regard should be used to incite hatred toward the institution itself, which, instead of trying to justify its existence with whatever useful things, continues to insist on its right to repress a wide circle of persons on its own initiative, without a request from victims.
Yesterday, the state carried out another act of violence against its citizens, raiding Navalny’s headquarters, as well as the homes and apartments of his staff, former staff, relatives of staff, and people who simply happened to be caught in the crossfire.
In general, political life in the country has become very lively. If I were watching this in a series, it would be clear that things are heading toward a climax and then a resolution. And, of course, I would find the series very strange if, after showing events like yesterday’s, I were then told that this had finally broken the spirit of resistance, the leaders had dispersed, the volunteers had returned to their everyday peaceful activities, and the tyrant ruled peacefully until his death, passing the throne to his growing son and leaving his loyal henchman Ramzan as regent. Instead, I would expect that in 2021, highly competitive elections for the State Duma would take place, preceded by a fierce struggle over the admission of non-systemic single-mandate candidates, and as a result, the parliament would acquire a rather diverse look, and with it, a certain agency; then there would be clashes over the repeal of the article in the election law banning Navalny from running for president, it would not be possible to repeal it, and quite unexpectedly for themselves in 2024, with Navalny’s support and to the outrage of the libertarians, Roizman would be elected. Now that would be a plot! Everyone would be eagerly awaiting the new season, which would certainly not be inferior to the previous one in terms of dramatic tension.
And although no one writes scripts for Russia, nevertheless, without satiety and the resolution of major internal problems, there will be no dull police stability here, no matter how much you raid Navalny’s headquarters or declare Open Russia an undesirable organization. Not the century, not the people, not the trends.
Smart Voting showed people that they are not just many, but very many. This means that it is possible to step out of the shadows. So now is the time for the visual capture of space. There is no need for extremist slogans, for it is enough to simply state a position rather than explain it; for explanations, there are internet resources protected from pressure. For example, Professor Solovey suggested mass-producing and selling cheap silicone bracelets with a simple inscription “help political prisoners,” and directing the proceeds toward that very help. Firstly, this benefits the prisoners, and secondly, such a thing is not shameful to wear, but it is shameful to demand its removal, as it is proof that a person personally donated a couple of hundred rubles to help those whom the state persecutes for their political views. Moreover, there is nothing extremist in the inscription. There is no need to try to invent a single symbol of protest—why do we need an alphabet of one symbol? After all, we live in a consumer society, which means there will be competition and a wide choice.
Of course, there will be street protests—how could there not be—but these are one-off promotional protest actions; however, for the “fronde” to become fashionable, people must also wear these conditional neck scarves a la fronde.
Thus, I envision the outlines of the next political season roughly as follows:
A continuation of the trend toward the normalization of protest, the everyday demonstration of one’s moods to everyone around in the form of wearable symbols. Protest becomes, if not prestigious, then at least mass-approved.
Close attention to the numerous ghouls and few decent people newly elected through Smart Voting. Public support for any correct gestures on the part of the elected, even if they were previously in the “ghoul” category: training implies positive reinforcement.
The departure abroad of a number of well-known opposition figures and the formation of permanent teams among them for the information support of “rocking the boat.” This is required by banal tactical considerations. The host of a popular YouTube channel must always be online, not sitting uselessly in a detention center. The studio must work, not be endlessly restored after raids by security forces. The coordination of the network must happen continuously. And so on. There is no longer any need to fear that this will negatively affect the image of the protesters: the myth about the State Department has gone stale. No one cares that something like Meduza is based in Riga, so why shouldn’t Navalny.Live, MBX.Media, and SVTV establish themselves there? One cannot be a generalist in an age of division of labor; street politics and media propaganda must be separated. The street politician should remain a guest on a stream, not a regular host of a show.
Media shaming of deanonymized security personnel is bearing its first fruits—rank-and-file employees are starting to resign, superiors are starting to apologize, and orders for the violent suppression of street actions occasionally begin to be executed without enthusiasm.
Ukraine demonstrates significant economic growth against the backdrop of Russian stagnation. Russian citizens begin to want things to be like in Ukraine.
The long-awaited global economic crisis hits. The regime takes a step that is correct from the point of view of self-preservation, opening the rainy-day fund and lowering taxes—but this looks like concessions to the demands of the opposition and only continues to weaken the regime.
As they say, remember this tweet.
The government always tends to do its manicure with an angle grinder
In Tyumen, three schoolchildren decided to distribute leaflets advertising panarchy. They ordered a print run from a printing house; the printing house tipped off the police, the print run was seized, and the leaflet is now being checked for extremism. If it is found, a criminal case will be opened. If not, it is presumed they will return the people’s property and leave them alone.
Let’s help the experts make the right decision and explain to as wide a circle of people as possible that:
The stationary bandit theory is scientific mainstream
Panarchy is a fully academic direction of political thought
The transition to panarchy can only be peaceful
So far, only znak.com has written about the incident. If anyone has contacts in the media, please use them to spread this information. I would also be happy to talk about panarchy to any publication that decides to educate its readers on this matter.
As for those who wish to use such a tool as leaflets to educate the public, I recommend using a printer; furthermore, it is better to distribute materials not by pasting them on bulletin boards or putting them in mailboxes, but by handing them out person-to-person at political events.
Supporters of authoritarian power sometimes frighten libertarians with artificial intelligence (AI) systems. They try to prove to us that after their implementation, all our struggle will become meaningless, because the state will be able to instantaneously detect and nip any oppositional activity in the bud.
However, AI, like any other technology, is a double-edged sword — just as a stationary bandit can use it against us, we can use it against the authorities. The use of AI for the deanonymization of security forces by projects like “Scanner” and “Russian Elephant” is only one possible example.
Also, such systems are prone to false positives. This insurmountable property of AI can be used intentionally by introducing false targets to overload the system. Not the neural network itself, but the investigative bodies and security forces, who will have to spend effort investigating fake cases, overlooking real oppositionists. And if politicians are substituted as false targets, the entire system of the stationary bandit will fall apart.
