Praxeology is indeed simply a set of deductive inferences from the axiom of action: “humans set goals and choose means to achieve them.” To the extent that real people satisfy this axiom, praxeology works for them. Similarly, for example, Euclidean geometry is a set of deductive inferences from five axioms, and to the extent that real physical space and the objects within it correspond to these ideal geometric shapes, this geometry will work for them. Replace the axioms—and you get, for example, Riemannian geometry, which will differ from Euclidean geometry and be better suited for describing real objects in a space with different properties.
Similarly, if we replace the axiom of action, for example, with “man is an instrument for the realization of divine will,” then we would have to derive a different praxeology for it, and to the extent that real people satisfy this new axiom, the praxeology we derived will work for them. Although, of course, given such starting data, a researcher would find it far more interesting to study theology rather than praxeology.
We can conventionally say that the leftists (more precisely, proponents of social engineering) build their praxeology on something like “human action is a phenomenon of the influence of the forces of the material world upon them, obeying the objective laws of physics and biology.” Deductive inferences from this axiom form the set of approaches that the left apply to people. And this also works in some way.
Thus, praxeology indeed does not rely on empiricism. It is verified by empiricism. I hope this clarified things.
Russia is considered a fairly left-wing country; however, for some reason, the phenomenon of left-libertarianism has not taken root there very well.
What makes it interesting? For a classical libertarian, the values of freedom and, consequently, voluntary interaction with other members of society have absolute priority, and if someone chooses social Darwinism, that is their right. For left-libertarians, the desire to ensure that other people do not end up in a desperate situation is a powerful moral imperative. Yes, it contradicts the values of total freedom, but there is no problem with having moral imperatives that occasionally conflict with one another (by the way, I will mention this in passing in my new video—stay tuned for announcements). Realizing that their legitimate pursuit of self-actualization might significantly hinder someone else, a left-libertarian will limit their own freedom and will not even consider it some extraordinary feat. After all, when healthy young people voluntarily self-isolate for the safety of the elderly, that is precisely an example of the behavior of a normal left-libertarian.
So why is this school of thought doing so poorly in Russia? Quite simply, we are a very poor and over-regulated country, and in order to sacrifice something, you first need to have that something. Russians mostly suffer from a critical shortage of both money and freedom.
Mikhail Pozharsky began introducing us to the doctrines of left-libertarianism in Russian, but for him, this is a side activity, as it is for me. Therefore, I would like to recommend several specialized Russian-language resources for those wishing to explore this topic more closely.
Alliance of Left-Libertarians. A tiny Telegram channel (40 subscribers at the time of my publication) with a grand description listing the movements it unites—and the list is so long that it feels as though there is only one person from each movement. Nevertheless, they have developed a very productive activity and translated a vast number of articles on the subject, so you should not only subscribe to the channel but also thoroughly scour its history; there is a lot of interesting material there.
Libertarian Social Justice. These are the most poignant leftists among all libertarians, supporters of UBI and other redistributive extravaganzas. Consume with caution. Knowledge of this discourse is especially useful in debates with communists—determined communists will find migrating here quite comfortable. The channel has 41 subscribers at the time of my publication.
The Agorist’s Cookbook. A slightly less tiny channel (68 subscribers at the time of my publication) dedicated to agorism—a branch of libertarianism that, for some mysterious reason, is classified as left-wing but stands completely on its own. I intend to dig deep into agorism myself—the next cycle of Libertarian Band videos will be dedicated specifically to it. So, I wholeheartedly recommend subscribing.
All three channels partially overlap in content and possibly in editorial staff, but they prefer to maintain autonomy, which is completely natural and convenient for libertarians.
On February 1, the Tea Club held a conference with the elegant title “Keep to the Right” in Moscow. Among others, speaking was Mikhail Pozharsky, whom I have quoted many times, who used simple examples from the First World War to explain why you don’t need to fight the left to defeat them.
Today, the state handed down huge sentences in a flimsy case regarding the preparation of terrorist attacks, the so-called “Network” case. But this case was preceded by a real terrorist attack by anarchist Mikhail Zlobitsky, after which security services employees smirked with joy, having received new powers, budgets, and quotas for fabricating extremists. History has known cases where liberal reforms were rolled back or bloody wars were unleashed as a result of terrorist attacks, but I cannot recall a single instance where a terrorist attack prompted the state to loosen its grip on society. At best, the state limits itself to increased security measures for top officials, as happens in the USA, with its traditions of shooting presidents.
The other day, a second round of debates on anarchy took place between a team of ancaps and a team of left-wing anarchists. This was preceded by a long period of personal negotiations and attempts to find common ground; now, they managed to organize a civilized conversation in a public forum. And this is bearing fruit—for example, this review in an anarcho-channel. Each side is discovering the other, searching for conciliatory language, avoiding escalation during the debates themselves—and realizing that the main common enemy is not the left or the right, but the state.
Perhaps, over time, it will be possible to sway the brave left-wing anarchists away from revolutionary rhetoric toward something more moderate, so they stop their meaningless self-sacrifice for the benefit of provocateurs from the security services.
Indeed, I myself have significantly reduced the degree of approval for purely military tactics in my articles. I was quite rightly reprimanded during the discussion of my article on the doctrine of deterrence for the example of eliminating the King of Thailand. Truly, the will of one person does not decide so much that one can expect to solve a problem by eliminating that person or creating a deadly threat to them. It is far more useful if the idea of an attack by state representatives is viewed as ethically unacceptable, and this is achieved through the softening of manners.
So, let us continue our activity of education and persuasion, continue peaceful protest and the creation of a mass feeling of the state’s uselessness—and under no circumstances let us give it a reason to claim its necessity for the sake of fighting various dangerous extremists. The slogan that extremism in the defense of justice is not a vice is false.
As for those innocently imprisoned, they must, of course, be fought for against the state. This means taking to the streets, public appeals from celebrities, and other boring but effective political practices.
P.S. I was immediately written to saying that I confused cause and effect, and that Zlobitsky’s bombing happened precisely as a reaction to the “Network” case. Please forgive the blurred take; however, in such a scenario, the situation only becomes even more tragic.
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.
In these days of epic collapse, as the established order rapidly disintegrates before our very eyes, humanity seems to be tearing itself apart, gravitating more and more toward the far right or the far left. And why the hell not? Poor people across the world are tired of the lying promises and blatant lies of the so-called moderates. The only thing the warring extreme camps seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is a grand scam. A fraudulent gambling game where only the house wins. But now, the house itself is on fire.
Thus, we are witnessing a spectacle of populism from both the left and the right. A record number of young people are adopting the once-tainted label of socialism, but at the same time, various forms of caveman xenophobia, which once whispered only in backwater church parishes, are now becoming mainstream, brandished openly like Hermann Göring with his revolver. This is the time we live in now, but it has happened before. Whenever empires crumble, the well-oiled markets of state capitalism are put in danger. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves in opposite corners of the ring. Stalinists and Nazis. Antifa and alt-rights. It is in these moments that the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, the prophetic DJ from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a classic analysis of urban unrest, rings in my ears. “Can we live together?! Can we live together?!!” I have spent my entire life searching for the answer to this existential question. I feel I am getting closer to it.
I always found myself in the far left corner, even when the proletariat was still drunk on illusions of progress that came with the first black president and the commodity fetishism of the Apple Store. As a child, I discovered Marx, and shortly after, Chomsky. The lion’s share of my youth was spent flirting with the carousel of libertarian socialist ideologies: Chomsky’s syndicalism, Rosa Luxemburg’s council communism, the zapatismo of Subcomandante Marcos. All of this to the hard soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer, and Zack de la Rocha.
In late youth, I fell under the influence of more statist forms of leftism, triggered by the unexpected revival of Bolivarianism in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Evo Morales’s Bolivia. Eventually, I fell into the arms of Third World communism as a bastion of democratic social experiments against attacks from North America. I came to the conclusion that Fidel Castro’s harsh non-democratic measures to protect the Cuban Revolution after Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against it were the only solution to the problem of imperialism. But my taste for history would not allow me to hold onto this illusion for long. After further research, I concluded that the state itself is a cancerous tumor, and it doesn’t matter how benevolent its leaders are. It has always been a malevolent device designed to oppress others and eventually devour itself. I returned to anarchism, but contradictions continued to haunt me.
The biggest problem with almost every school of leftism is its almost messianic assumption that humanity can be united in internationalist harmony under the banner of a single path. No matter how strongly I believed that my own post-Marxist syndicalism was the ideal model for a truly democratic society, it was hard to convince myself that humanity would ever reach a special collective consciousness and merge into a single union. Honestly, as an anti-imperialist, I always felt awkward about these kinds of notions of internationalism.
The assumption that some 19th-century factory workers in industrial Western Europe had all the recipes for my friendly primitivist neighbors from the Amish community, let alone the tribes of Borneo or the Kalahari, simply reeks of colonialism. When the world is so beautiful in its complexity, how can there be only one path? It felt like the same trap that led our Founding Fathers to pave the way for the neoliberal hell of global capitalism, only our trap was tied to the Manifesto of Equality. I believed strongly in the ideals of Murray Bookchin and Rudolf Rocker, but because of these contradictions, I could view even my own anarchism as nothing more than a distant, unattainable dream. Until I discovered the philosophy of panarchy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about anarchism is that it is defined by the absence of government. Such a notion is clearly absurd. Governments have always existed, exist now, and will continue to exist. Government is any assembly of people who come together to make collective decisions. Technically, three stoned roommates discussing pizza toppings are a government. Anarchy is defined by the absence of the State—a permanent government run by a class of professional politicians, whether they be corporate board members, congressmen, or monarchs. The very existence of this managerial class turns a simple government into a State. Anarchy in all its forms seeks to destroy this hierarchy and replace it with a fully civilian government. Panarchy, then, is the recognition that in our world, in this diverse cultural landscape known as humanity, there is no single answer to a disaster like the State. Anarchy can only exist beyond manifestos and punk-rock venues when it is free to take any form, with any adjectives attached to the word “anarchy,” as long as it happens voluntarily and without coercion.
Globalism has brought nothing but colossal superpowers. The tyranny of large sizes: big government, big business, big people, big religion. This problem cannot be solved by seizing these systems and rebranding them in the key of internationalism. The only correct antidote to this tyranny of the masses is localism, and that is exactly what panarchy is: the idea that government should be based only on the same foundations as any other relationship—through voluntary contracts with the possibility of termination, with voluntarism and non-aggression toward all others as the core ideas. These could be mutual aid societies, autonomous communes, democratic syndicates, tribal structures, a patchwork quilt of endless utopian experiments peacefully competing for the right to patronize their citizens—while preserving the right of individuals to opt out of these services and the right of new collectives to enter the competition at any time. Ideally, these governments would exist as social clubs providing certain benefits, completely untethered from geography. This makes the existence of six stateless nations on one landing entirely possible.
What’s the catch, you ask? There is always a catch. The catch is that the freedom of society exists on the same principles as freedom of speech. Panarchy protects not only the societies you like, but also those you hate. According to the main contract of the Confederation Constitution, people will be free to build societies based on any ideology, as long as they remain peaceful and voluntary. This means societies based on mutualism, syndicalism, capitalism, and communism. But it also more than likely means peaceful nations governed by ideologies such as religious fundamentalism, geographic unity, and even racial separatism. Allowing such societies to exist does not mean accepting them any more than freedom of speech means accepting hate speech. We will have to accept the reality that true freedom means respecting the decisions of others, however mistaken, to live voluntarily as they see fit, provided they do so peacefully—much like my Amish neighbors with their kinship society, who peacefully coexist with sinful English trans people like me.
This philosophy anathematizes the current culture of both the far left and the far right, whose essence seems to be reduced to loud protest against the very existence of everyone else. But I view the catch described above as the solution to the problem of the proletariat, which will always be torn apart by the cultural agenda. When right-wing fascists lack the elegant shield of the persecuted victim, they tend to lose their appeal to the masses. Every time one of these little shits gets beaten up by Antifa, their book sales skyrocket to fucking heaven. I believe in the Kropotkin theory that free mutual aid will evolutionarily lead the left to a society of equality. Under conditions of peaceful competition, more aggressive cultures based on fear will shrink, while those open to cooperation will thrive. The beauty is that the ultrarights are free to believe the same thing about my tribe of queer syndicalists. They get the chance to prove me wrong, just as I do to them, but we will all be too small to spend our energy on fighting. For micro-nations, any prolonged war means mutually assured destruction. Coexistence becomes the only sustainable way of existence.
And I believe that this is exactly how we can live together: communists and nationalists, melting-pot ideologues and isolationists—together we can live. Behind every apocalypse hides an opportunity for a utopia. The panarchist asks: why not a thousand? Indeed, why not? After all, now is the perfect time…
Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania
