Тег: Shulmann

Reflections in connection with the special operation

I am not, of course, talking about what is happening in Ukraine—a war is happening there. I am talking about the special operation carried out by Ekaterina Schulmann for evacuation to Germany “for an internship.”

For a long time, Ekaterina Mikhailovna categorically denied the possibility of her own emigration, because she is a political scientist, a specialist in the Russian legislative process, and leaving would mean leaving the field of research. Of course, these are rather laughable excuses, because she herself has repeatedly stated that she always relies solely on open sources rather than some murky insiders; access to open sources from Berlin is no worse than from Moscow. We have a classic cover story so that the enemy suspects nothing until it is too late.

Now she claims that the internship is not indefinite, it is only for a year, and then either the shah will die, or the donkey will, or as a result of the internship, a new interesting research task will come up, for example, in Latin America—but make no mistake, return to Russia is inevitable, so there is no need to repress the relatives remaining in Russia, dear officers of the authorities.

I strongly urge those who find it difficult to decide to leave to adopt the experience of Ekaterina Schulmann. The main thing: if emigration scares you so much, do not call it emigration. As Schulmann has repeatedly stated, people are not leaving for nowhere now. You can relocate to another country while continuing to maintain communication with those remaining in Russia no less closely than before departure. You can continue to work for Russia remotely. You can choose not to sell off your property, but simply mothball your home or rent it out. You can leave powers of attorney with reliable people, allowing them to carry out any transactions on your behalf if necessary. And most importantly—you can immediately outline an approximate timeframe or conditions for return. That’s it; you are simply going for a change of scenery, not throwing yourself into a whirlpool of uncertainty. Admit it, that sounds much less frightening.

Nevertheless, please do not be overly reckless. Study the experience of the pampered Muscovites who rushed out of the country like they were scalded, only to discover with surprise that while it is, of course, pleasant and peaceful abroad, it’s actually damn hard to break through. Many skills diligently acquired in Russia turn out to be useless, employers are not lining up to hire you, and then there are all those annoying domestic trifles, like an unfamiliar cuisine or an insufficiently rich cultural life.

Far from the familiar business and linguistic environment, far from familiar daily life and old friends, it can be difficult. You will have to prove to a multitude of people, who didn’t know you until now, that you are needed enough for them to pay you. You may have to engage in completely unskilled labor, at least for some time. You may be visited by thoughts that you are using yourself completely irrationally, since in Russia your labor was far more effective than here, in a new place. Yes, it may be so. But there, your labor benefited primarily those who are killing people in Ukraine. Therefore, your departure is a heroic act. It is your feasible contribution to the defeat of the Putin regime. It is not the only possible path, but it is a completely worthy one.

Instead, you can go to prison in Russia. The regime will feed you, and the recruit will get less food. You can engage in propaganda and sabotage. The regime will feed an army of investigators, whom you will provide with work, and the monetary allowance of Russian contractors will be more modest. You can earn money in Russia and donate to the Ukrainian army or other organizations waging war against Russia. All of these are also worthy choices.

Actually, there are only two unworthy choices. This is retreating into internal emigration, when you live in the RF as if nothing had happened, shutting yourself off from external irritants. And this is supporting the Russian regime. In the first case, you are a legitimate target for economic sanctions. In the second, you are also a legitimate target for security actions.

Perhaps I will expand slightly on the last point. Libertarians, after all, advocate for the protection of private property. But if it occurs to you to mark your private property with the same symbols used to mark Russian military equipment—you are marking yourself as a target for guerrilla warfare. Moreover, an easy, poorly guarded target. You are a combatant, a member of an organization that initiated violence against a wide range of people, and your property is now encumbered by demands for reparations. Be glad if they only slash your tires.

In the post about the debates between Svetov and Schulmann, you wrote, as if, that you didn’t notice when Mikhail turned from a libertarian into a fiery revolutionary

Six months ago, Mikhail spoke in Latin America and said that the state has no incentives to “leave you alone and let you live as you wish,” but it does have economic and power-based incentives not to do so.

And at the end of the lecture, he stated directly that libertarianism is a revolutionary ideology. And if you are not an extremist-revolutionary at heart, then you are not a true libertarian.

How do you feel about this statement and the lecture as a whole?

Anonymous question

With a feeling of slight nostalgia, I reread my post about the conversation between Svetov and Shulman. I noted that neither Svetov’s premonition of a civil war nor Shulman’s premonition that the government would continue to lose ground during elections came true. Instead, we have a hecatomb that Putin is orchestrating for his own voters by the hands of the AFU, which, of course, almost no one predicted back in 2018. I suppose this means that these voters are not actually that necessary to him.

In the Latin American lecture you mentioned, Svetov launched an interesting take: that we do not resist the state not because it has the biggest club, but because deep down we actually believe in its legitimacy, even if we position ourselves as ancaps. This corresponds with Belkovich’s well-known take that we already live under ancap; it’s just that all the territories have been divided among bandits, and people mostly endure their subordinate status without complaint, although, in general, they are not obliged to.

As justification for his thesis, Svetov brings onto the stage a poor Afghan with a Kalashnikov, who first drove out the Soviet and then the American “civilizers” because his belief that he alone knew how to live correctly was far stronger.

Since Svetov spent the entire first part of his lecture savoring how he was beaten and humiliated by representatives and henchmen of the state while he was organizing the coolest events in Eastern Europe, it can be concluded that he, too, believes in the legitimacy of the state deep down. After all, a proper, sincere ancap with a bunch of bitcoins would surely have found a way to personally avenge those miserable lackeys who dared to violate the NAP against him, and thus set a good example of how to deal with violators of the non-aggression principle.

As you may have noticed, my tone was always quite extremist even in Russia, and once I left the RF, it became completely unrestrained. In practice, however, my activism very rarely goes beyond tax evasion. Perhaps I am simply waiting for a talented libertarian revolutionary who will raise the people to the barricades for freedom and the market—so that I may stand under his banner. But for now, while the fiery libertarians limit themselves to looking reprovingly at the Latin American audience in search of radicals, I must also limit myself to purely peaceful activities in building my own village ancap.

Unexpected Find

I’ve almost finished formatting The Machinery of Freedom into a single, easy-to-read file, while simultaneously performing final editing (working at a speed almost like Shulman’s when she was proofreading Pinker). In essence, I’ve formatted everything that is already on the website, and now I’m tinkering with the second of three appendices, where he recommends various pleasant and useful literature. And there, I came across this description:

J. Neil Schulman, Alongside Night (New York: Avon, 1987), The Rainbow Cadenza (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). Two clearly libertarian novels. The first describes a libertarian uprising in the near future, the second—a society where the ratio of men to women is ten to one, and where women are drafted into prostitution corps. A movie is currently being filmed based on the first one, in which I am to play a small role.

Oh, I thought, how interesting, the movie has surely been made by now, I should look for it. I found it. It’s a freaking masterpiece! A low-budget production with a very low rating, because of which Neil Schulman decided to give up on trying to sell it—and released it for free on YouTube. The entire film consists almost entirely of memes and easter eggs, so I watched it for a long time, constantly hitting pause. I highly recommend watching it; with the right mindset, you will certainly derive great pleasure from this amateur artistic endeavor.

Friedman plays the very modest role of the King of Sweden in the film.

https://youtu.be/aX6q4qp55Q0?t=507

The Problem of the Frozen Conflict

Voluntarist, Bitarch

In many cases, when discussing the problem of violence, only the use of force by ordinary citizens on their own initiative is taken as an example of this phenomenon. In the same case, if a forceful measure was applied under orders from above and within the framework of state law, it is as if it is not considered violence at all; this measure is already called a form of law enforcement. From such an absurd formulation usually comes the assumption that the problem of violence can be solved simply by pursuing some “correct” state policy. This point of view is actively promoted by supporters of Steven Pinker’s ideas; in the Russian-speaking space, the most active evangelist of these views is Ekaterina Schulmann. But let us look at why this will never work.

Firstly, the very attempt to divide coercive forceful measures into those that can be considered violence and those that cannot encounters a logical contradiction. The difference in when, to whom, and for what reason a coercive forceful measure was applied does not cancel the fact of its application, the involuntary nature of its character, and the intentional physical restriction of a person’s freedom. All of these are constituent factors of such a phenomenon as violence. It cannot be said that the exact same action at one time, for one reason, and toward one person is violence, while at another time, for another reason, and toward another person, it is no longer so. This is merely a subjective assessment of a specific person.

Precisely because of this, all coercive forceful measures entail the same problems and risks, no matter how they are justified. Looking from the point of view of practical results, there is no difference whether violence was applied by a police officer or an ordinary citizen, whether it was applied to a simple passerby or a gangster who has committed many crimes in the past; one can always encounter resistance, especially if the victim of the forceful measure is placed in a hopeless position. And in today’s world with rapidly developing technologies, this threatens the use of very dangerous and destructive means as tools of defense or weapons of revenge, up to weapons of mass destruction, the most accessible of which are viruses. Therefore, from a practical point of view, the use of forceful measures can be justified only in the case of immediate self-defense, since in such a case an act of violence is already being committed and it must be stopped to avoid the subsequent negative externalities. In all other cases, the only optimal strategy of behavior will be the application of methods of influence to the violator that differ from physical violence, such as reputation lowering and ostracism.

Secondly, and this is the most important point—the attempt to get rid of private violence with the help of state violence actually only deters it, but does not eradicate it. A vivid example of this can be the USSR. The intentions regarding private violence among the ideologues of authoritarian communism were very noble; by the method of the “iron fist,” they intended to eradicate interethnic and domestic conflicts. Obviously, parents will not beat a child, and an Azerbaijani will not attack an Armenian, if someone stands over all of them with a club. But no power is eternal. As soon as changes occur within it, all problems come to the surface. The conflict is reborn, and with new strength, given the stressful condition people are in due to years of forceful control over them. We were lucky that after the collapse of the USSR, those same Armenians and Azerbaijanis ended up with only assault rifles and tanks in their hands, rather than nuclear missiles and viruses. However, over time, they, and others as well, may acquire very dangerous means. Then we will face a catastrophic threat endangering the existence of all humanity, due to the problem of violence left unresolved by the “iron fist” method.

A driverless car has arrived for you. Who will get in?

I listened with great pleasure on Ekaterina Schulmann’s channel to a recording of a discussion about the results of the digital revolution, in which she participated, apparently invited to correct the gender imbalance among a group of three representatives from the digital industry.

I especially liked the moment when Andrey Sebrant, answering a question about who would be responsible for a driverless car accident, stated that to answer, one simply needs to wait for a hundred such accidents. He argued that at the dawn of automotive engineering, completely surprising regulatory measures were preemptively proposed, such as boys with flags running in front of cars, but in the end, we got traffic rules, road markings, and so on, which no one could have imagined in advance. The same applies to courts under ancap, which will, of course, answer the question of how they will work. After they start working.

Be sure to watch it; the format of the discussion itself is quite interesting, the experts for once are not overshadowed by Ekaterina Mikhailovna, and the host is simply lovely—I wish I had such charm.

On Fears

I enjoyed listening to Ekaterina Schulmann’s lecture on Pravokon, dedicated to the fears that influence Russian society. The lecturer calls the most important category of fears the fear of some unexpected meanness on the part of the state. This could be repressions, tax increases, some new regulations, or simply a banal economic collapse, which the state illustrated in Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s lecture literally just a few days ago.

Analyzing the nature of this fear, Schulmann notes that it is not a manifestation of darkness and ignorance—on the contrary, it is a deeply justified distrust of both the motives of those in power and their competencies. Later, admittedly, she focuses on how best to coordinate in order to defend one’s political rights, but I think we should forgive the political scientist for her love of her subject of study, which prevents her, despite all her criticality toward the state, from sharing a libertarian worldview.

In such situations, one can react to the environment in different ways. Those who practice agorism will likely gloomily calculate what profit can be derived from the coming expansion of the black market, and how to facilitate this expansion. Those who put effort into regime change are considering where it is best to apply those efforts now, when the regime may be on the verge of faltering. Those looking for a country to flee to are considering whether it makes sense to try to save a little more, or if doing so here is already counterproductive. Moreover, as Bitarch recently correctly noted, relative freedom of movement between states is by no means the norm, and for Russia, it is an anomaly; it is unclear how much longer it will last, as it is already being gradually curtailed. And, of course, there are those who will run right now to buy dollars or household appliances at the old prices. Although, keeping in mind the coronavirus wandering around, perhaps a much larger percentage will actually start stocking up on canned goods: this is both an investment in a relatively hard currency and an opportunity to survive a quarantine.

This year, the Russian oil industry is unlikely to bring significant sums to the budget, which means they will squeeze money out of citizens to the fullest. This means that to minimize losses, one should not only try to earn money “under the table,” but also avoid showing money to banks whenever possible: banks are completely transparent to the state. So, those who have not yet acquired bitcoins should do so now and start practicing settling accounts with each other in this currency.

This is probably one of my most banal posts recently. I simply needed to voice all these fears, if only for myself.

How do you feel about the criticism of E. Schulman by A. Illarionov?

He calls her a “syslib” and effectively accuses her of justifying the regime. What do you think about syslibs in general?

анонимный вопрос

We are talking about last year’s posts (first and second) in Illarionov’s blog, which no one would have remembered if he hadn’t referenced them recently.

I find Illarionov’s meticulousness extremely useful when it comes to the scrupulous comparison of numerous eyewitness accounts of a large-scale event, based on which a consistent picture of what happened is constructed. For example, I was greatly impressed by his investigation into the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. However, when he turns his talent toward analyzing the nuances of one person’s word usage during a live broadcast, it starts to feel like a certain bias—much like vulgar Freudianism, where there is no room for cucumbers or cigars because there are only phalluses.

Illarionov, if I understand correctly, is the creator of the term “syslib,” and he defines it as a person who uses liberal rhetoric to strengthen a non-liberal political regime and justify non-liberal political practices. Like Chubais’s “bow down to the oligarchs; they pulled the country out of poverty.”

What is he incriminating Ekaterina for?

  • Cossacks dispersing a rally in Moscow do not look as organic as they would in Krasnodar. Aha, so it’s okay to disperse them in Krasnodar. Syslib.
  • The army in Turkey is ceasing to be a modernization institution. Aha, so Erdogan, then, is becoming a modernization institution. Syslib.
  • There are many other minor nitpicks, and finally, the most important one. There is a correlation: the less bloody the removal of an authoritarian regime, the higher the probability of democratization. Aha, so the people on the Maidan are to blame for being shot. Syslib.

I have a feeling that Illarionov confuses the approach of a political scientist-researcher with that of a publicist, and every time he sees a statement about certain patterns, he immediately imagines what a person would mean by that phrase if they were a propagandist for the ruling regime.

Now, if Ekaterina were to state directly, for example, that the sovereignty of the individual is impossible or undesirable, and that only the sovereignty of some group entity, like a nation, is possible or desirable, then I myself would decide that this Shulman has gone bad; bring me a new one. But for now, she merely states that without a well-organized state, people feel somehow uncomfortable, which means the state is necessary. But preferably a liberal one, recognizing that very sovereignty of the individual. And as for the fact that this is an internally contradictory construction—well, what can you do, the world is complex, interests need to be reconciled somehow, so let’s build the institutions that allow us to do that.

In general, I would advise avoiding excessive purism. Let Lenin be the one to decisively distance himself before forcibly uniting everyone, while smart people are indeed better off practicing how to coordinate their interests and align them with their values. Ekaterina Mikhailovna is valuable above all as an inexhaustible source of political science memes. My personal favorite is her “all power to—nobody!”

The syslib is looking at you like you’re the system

Work on translations

Recently, Sergey Ankapov contacted me via Facebook direct messages, inquiring about my ability to assist in organizing the translation of Franz Oppenheimer’s book “The State.” Unfortunately, I didn’t know any translators who were free enough to join the project. And just yesterday, I found out that not only is a translation planned, but also a print edition of the book, and fundraising is underway for this. I know that many people value print editions specifically, so I consider it my duty to inform you how you can help the project. Most of the amount has already been collected; all that’s missing is you.

Also, recently, as part of the “Hyde Park Library” project, the book “The New Autocracy,” which thoroughly dissects the modern Russian political machine, was posted. The book is recommended by Ekaterina Schulmann, who participated in its creation. An activist was found who decided to take on the translation of the book, although the idea of translating a book about Russia, written primarily by Russians, from English into Russian seems a bit strange to me. Regardless, he is assembling a team of like-minded people to tackle this work collectively.

And for dessert. I have begun working on the translation of David Friedman’s book “The Machinery of Freedom” — the most fundamental work on the doctrine of anarcho-capitalism. Unfortunately, the pace is quite slow, as time for work on the project is allocated on a residual basis. I think this can be changed. In the near future, I will create a section on the website where I will post the English text by chapter, and as the translation progresses, I will add the translated parts there. Anyone who wishes can take any untranslated fragment, send me the translation, and I will edit it and add it to the site. Your donations will also be very helpful: practice has shown that I work with significantly more enthusiasm when I see that you are willing to pay for what I produce.

The book will be translated based on the text of the second edition released in 1986, with additions published in 2014 that have not yet gained widespread recognition.