I am still far from finishing the editing of Friedman’s translation, yet two more long-term projects have appeared in the Translations section of the website. I haven’t read either book yet and will do so only during the editing process of the translations; that is when I will form my own opinion about them.
Eric Mack, Libertarianism. The book itself was recommended for reading by Mikhail Pozharsky. No free access to the English text was found, so I had to buy it on Amazon and then pirate it almost as in the era of paper books: take screenshots of the screen and perform OCR on the images. Therefore, the English text cannot boast good formatting; we will polish the translation itself.
To speed up the work on the translations, your donations to the wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo will be a great help
Yesterday David Friedman turned 75. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to prepare the entire translation for the anniversary, so I am publishing the next three chapters.
Chapter 35. When Prediction Amounts to Speculation. Here, Friedman admits to us that he described only one of many options for an anarcho-capitalist society—the agoric one, which is equally alien to both communes and corporations, but tends toward self-employment and small agencies of freelancers (cute!). At the same time, it turned out that the word agorism was coined not by Konkin, but by Robert LeFevre, about whom I, unfortunately, know nothing.
Chapter 36. Why Exactly Anarchy? In this chapter, Friedman has to explain why the idea of a limited state is so unsatisfactory to him, and why he so stubbornly defends the idea of anarchy specifically. Unfortunately, the author answers: we have already tried the limited state; it doesn’t fit into any boundaries and stubbornly moves to sit right on your face.
Chapter 37. Revolution is the Worst Choice. Here, Friedman polemicizes not so much with ancaps as with classical anarchists who are convinced that the state can only be abolished through revolutionary means. The argumentation is not brilliant in its originality, but it is clear enough.
Chapter 31. Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian? In this chapter, Friedman raises the question in a phrasing that is quite unusual for many. We have grown accustomed to believing that anarcho-capitalism is the most radical and consistent form of libertarianism, but for Friedman, it is not quite so. For him, libertarianism is based on self-ownership and the non-aggression principle, while anarcho-capitalism is based on the decentralization of law and the free market. Therefore, he requires additional argumentation to show that an anarcho-capitalist society is indeed libertarian.
Chapter 32. And, as a free bonus. This is a short chapter where the electoral process is compared to the market process, in favor of the latter, of course.
Chapter 33. Socialism, Limited Government, Anarchy, and Bikinis. Here, Friedman wittily explains that socialism is like the desire to force all girls to wear only bikinis, because the weather, under threat of execution, must be sunny.
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.
Chapter 3.2, Police, Courts, and Laws in a Free Market, was translated a long time ago by Elena Makeeva by order of the LPR. I have finally edited it; in time, the same fate awaits the other four chapters translated for the LPR.
This chapter examines a central piece of Friedman’s picture of society under anarcho-capitalism: the concept of private competing law enforcement agencies, which will take on the role of police and partially insurance companies. It also describes the interaction of such agencies with private arbitration courts.
Chapter 3.3, The Stability Problem, concerns the question of whether this beautiful system of private law enforcement agencies will be stable, or whether they will inevitably form a state. Naturally, Friedman argues that everything is stable—otherwise, there would be no point in building such a complex system—and then provides the justifications for this thesis.
I have also reworked the table of contents in accordance with Friedman’s internal chapter numbering, as he numbers them here, doesn’t number them there, and does something completely random elsewhere…
Usually, when I start working on the translation of another part of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, I stall for a long time. He precedes each part with a poetic opus of his own composition, where the wit of the content is compensated for by the clunkiness of the form. Fortunately, this time I managed to deal with the poems relatively quickly. In them, David naively wonders how the world order manages to exist in such harmony despite the government’s disregard for these things, and how government services themselves only provoke a smirk: as if this public good is not very much of a good.
What is anarchy? What is the state? In this chapter, Friedman defines what he intends to rail against throughout the rest of the part, while leaving the clarification of all the philosophical murk to Lysander Spooner.
Pollution. This section discusses what measures to reduce government regulation of harmful emissions could lead to an improved environmental situation and certainly to a fairer system of responsibility for pollution.
Fending off the friends of socialism. In this final chapter of the book’s second part, Friedman fires off several arguments demonstrating the fairer nature of capitalism as opposed to socialism. None of them are extensive enough for a separate chapter, which is likely why they were collected this way. The text examines arguments regarding which distribution mechanism ensures greater equality, which society is less prone to corruption, where working conditions are better, and which system is less critically dependent on ideal people.
In honor of the US-Iran war that never actually started, which for some reason was predicted to have the status of a world war, I am publishing an extraordinary translation of two chapters from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, dedicated to the problem of the army and defense in a stateless society.
National Defense: A Serious Problem. In this chapter, written shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, national defense is considered from the perspective of the economics of public goods; much attention is paid to why the free-rider effect is so pronounced in this sector, and the conclusion is drawn that although there are some prerequisites for a stateless society to be able to defend itself, if it turns out in practice that this is impossible without some minimal state concerned exclusively with defense issues, the “witcher” is ready to accept this lesser evil.
A Serious Problem, Part II. Forty years later, Friedman returned to this topic, and this time he is far more optimistic. The chapter advocates for the “haven’t served, aren’t a man” approach (which girls should also exhibit) and other totalitarian trinkets, because totalitarianism is when everything is done voluntarily, for free, and with songs. At the curtain, the author also skeptically smirked regarding Iran’s military potential, which formally aligns the topic with the agenda of early 2020.
Creeping Capitalism. The author notes the success of the socialists’ tactic of stealing a well-sounding word, liberalism__, and calling themselves liberals. He then suggests using the same tactic: to stop fighting socialism and start improving it, to the point where it becomes completely indistinguishable from true classical liberalism.
If you need it, just buy it. Here, Friedman provides simple calculations showing that there are no reasons why workers, within the existing order in the USA, could not provide themselves with full socialist worker self-management if they actually needed it—simply by buying their companies using their own salaries. This would require far fewer resources than a bloody socialist revolution.
Scarce means exhaustible. In this chapter, Friedman notes that one should not confuse the economic term “scarce resources” with the everyday understanding of the word “rare.” He examines in detail why, in an era of full automation, the prerequisites for the disappearance of the institution of property will nevertheless not arise, regardless of how much our left-anarchist friends might wish otherwise.
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
