Rodion Belkovich has for the first time publicly responded to the appearance of the electronic version of his “Blood of Patriots”. It is clearly evident from this: Rodion Belkovich and I could live within the framework of one republic, since we agree on legal issues (authorship is unconditional; copyright is doubtful, however, restrictions on copying can be introduced by contract; and, of course, appealing to gangsters for help in resolving conflicts that did not arise from the use of violence is unacceptable) and share common interests (we want as many people as possible to read the smart books we like).
Where Rodion and I diverge is in our perceptions of aesthetics and propriety. For Belkovich, paper books possess aesthetic value; they represent respectability and respect for tradition. For me, paper is dust and mustiness, a synonym for stagnation and one of the inherent attributes of Putin, with his famous folders. For Rodion, it is improper, while providing a free service to an indefinitely wide circle of people, to remind the public of the possibility of expressing their gratitude in monetary form. For me, the ancient Soviet tradition of selling a product as a bundle is improper, requiring those who wish to buy the market-demanded Belkovich to also pay for the publication of an unsellable Ficino (though it is quite proper to advertise Ficino’s book right on the paper pages of one’s own bestseller).
That is exactly why I meticulously listed: pay here to support the author, here to support the paper publisher, and here to support the electronic publisher. For me, this is a truly important ethical issue—to ensure maximum transparency of conditions for the consumer. For these same reasons, I, for example, will not place “джинса” (sponsored content) in the channel, I will indicate which donations I received for answers to certain questions, how much the contract for content placement with Bitarch costs, and even how much referral commission I will receive from your transactions in the btc_banker bot. Speaking more broadly, the spheres of what is permitted and appropriate for me, as a fairly typical libertarian, are of course very different.
So, although Rodion Belkovich and I can live within one res publica, it will be more comfortable for us to live further apart and clearly define the boundaries of our res privata. Perhaps then we won’t fight.
Books are lying on the floor. Just imagine if they tried to do that in a mosque!
Some time ago, Rodion Belkovich visited Novosibirsk to present his book “Blood of Patriots.” When I asked if there were plans to publish the text in electronic form, he replied that there weren’t, because “I know you libertarians—you’ll buy one copy and put it in the public domain.” Well, if that’s how it is, so be it. I had to get a paper copy, scan it, format it—and now I am putting it in the public domain. Considering how many footnotes are in the book, it was quite an adventure. The text contains my donation link, in case you decide to thank me for the publication. A link to the author himself could have been included, but he does not keep his details in the public domain, and that is his choice.
I suggest watching the lecture where Rodion explained his views more clearly and fully. Much of it overlaps with what you considered in the video from St. Petersburg.
How to find balance?
Although I wasn’t asked, I will allow myself to answer.
From the perspective of republicans, anarchism in itself is not an end value; it is not the final goal, because anarchism is merely a teaching that denies the legitimacy of the state based on certain grounds, simply because the state is an organized crime group (To see/recall the arguments of Spooner and Rothbard on why the state is an OCG. There is no point in retelling them in polite society). That is, in political philosophy, the state as an internally contradictory concept has been dismantled and is dead, but as a phenomenon of political reality, it continues to exist by inertia as a misunderstanding. From this point of view, statists in political philosophy are something like followers of the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and anarchists who today engage exclusively in the negation of the state are reinventing the wheel and solving a problem already solved before them in the 19th century, adding nothing new.
In practice, however, we see that anarchists do not simply remain anarchists, but study how a free society functions and propose all sorts of improvements: Rothbard writes about private security companies as insurers oriented toward natural law, understood as the inalienable right of private property; David Friedman talks about the development of competing legal systems in a free market; our youth in well-known public pages discuss panarchism and create the concept of contractual jurisdictions without appealing to the ideas of natural law; Russian libertarians create a party, call for participation in politics, infiltration into government bodies and an “anti-state dictatorship” with lustration and deregulation. In other words, all these people are engaged in designing and building a republic. While remaining anarchists, they become republicans. For example, agreement between people on the existence of natural law as an inalienable right of private property is a special case of agreement on legal issues upon which a republic is built. Voluntarily concluded contracts are, again, explicitly expressed agreement on legal issues. But, from the perspective of republicans, agreement on legal issues and a commonality of interests may not be expressed explicitly. The main thing is that they exist and you are engaged in a common cause (res publica).
Thus, the balance in fact lies in the fact that anarchists are actually republicans. The only question is what this res publica is, what this common cause is, what it looks like, with which legal norms you agree, and what the commonality of interests consists of, and with whom you share this commonality. Communists also have their own republic and their own agreement on legal issues and commonality of interests. It’s just that their agreement on legal issues differs greatly from the agreement on legal issues of, for example, libertarians.
A few more words on the differences between libertarianism and right-wing republicanism. Our libertarians usually start either from the Rothbardian idea of natural property rights or say that the source of rights and obligations is a contract, and until there is a contract, there are only absolute freedoms. Further, everything depends on how “corrupt” you are and how you understand the word “freedom.” For libertarians, freedom is freedom from violence and robbery. For non-libertarians, freedom is the freedom to commit violence and rob. Further, the issue is resolved, for example, through the physical removal of some by others. That is, in libertarianism, freedom is ontologically primary in political philosophy; it is a natural order, whatever that means. In republicanism, however, judging by what Rodion says in his lectures, un-freedom is ontologically primary: there is no freedom in nature, freedom is a cultural phenomenon, and it is not found in all civilizations, not all people are familiar with freedom, we are not born free, but become so. That is, as I understand it, the initial premises in libertarianism and republicanism are fundamentally different. A possible resolution to the contradiction here is not to mix the “phenomenal world of natural necessity” and the “noumenal world of human freedom,” to use Kantian language. Freedom and good will are exclusively human things in the sense that Rodion speaks of man. The individual as a representative of the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens is part of nature, an animal. If, however, we perceive a human as a project, as a personality, then they must be designed, they must be chosen, they must become: for example, a free person of a free society. And, as is known, man is a free being in the sense that he is capable of acting not only according to nature, but also contrary to it. We do many unnatural things. Sometimes these are actions for the better, sometimes for the worse. So, it is important not to be barbarians and to act for the better: to build a society of free, prosperous people. In answering the question of how such a society is possible, I believe libertarians and right-wing republicans agree, and that is the main thing.
In it, the speaker presented his views on political philosophy in a clear and coherent manner (and one must acknowledge their depth).
As I understand it, the main contradiction between the republic proposed by Mr. Belkovich and the market anarchism of the AES lies in the fact that the economists (a conventional term) are concerned with contemptible personal enrichment, while the stern knights of republicanism consider the public, rather than the private, to be the cornerstone of a true citizen’s life. How can balance be achieved?
Stepan Pavlov
There are practically no contradictions between republicanism and market anarchism, as long as both are implemented according to their principles. A republican recognizes the citizen’s right to res privata and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how that citizen asserts themselves in their private sphere. An AnCap recognizes the freedom of association, that is, the right of people to res publica, and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how they assert themselves in the public sphere.
Personal enrichment is not contemptible to a republican; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is gloria — the result of their activities for the sake of res publica. Political activity is not contemptible to an AnCap; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is how well they satisfy his own market demands.
As soon as the public sphere intrudes into the private, both the republican and the AnCap will rise up. Neither agreed to this. And both will demand respect for their rights.
Is it necessary to try to find some balance between these doctrines? It will be established naturally if you consistently defend the values of either republicanism or AnCap. Someone who is poor and incompetent will not earn much fame, which means they should invest more in the development of their private sphere to claim something in politics and thereby achieve gloria. Someone who is wealthy and market-successful will change the world around them, because entrepreneurial success is based on constant vigilance regarding how to better satisfy customers. This means they will bring innovations into the world that will also affect the public sphere, and that is immortal fame. After all, we revere Edison, and even Gates, although in the public sphere he is quite the leftist.
The well-known Russian Orthodox republican Rodion Belkovich has appeared in my channel twice so far.
The first time was when I was answering the question of whether we are already living under ancap. The question was obviously inspired by Belkovich’s speech at last year’s Adam Smith Readings, where he thoroughly trolled the audience with this paradoxical assertion.
And then suddenly, a rumor reaches me that Belkovich is traveling across the country presenting this very book of his, like Svetov in the pre-covid era, and intends to visit Novosibirsk on October 4th. By today’s standards, any kind of public lectures are quite exotic; I’ve completely grown out of the habit. In short, for those who wish to drop by, here is the Timepad address for lecture registration. The book presentation will take place on October 4th from 14:00 to 15:00 at Voskhod 28, 4th floor. And from 15:00, he will be debating republicanism with local colleagues. I don’t know how reluctantly the organizers will be forced to set up chairs and, accordingly, what the capacity of the hall will be, but I hope everyone will fit comfortably. Because I remember almost fainting from the stuffiness at Svetov’s, and I don’t want that again.
In the lecturer’s gaze, one can clearly see a desire to water some tree…
Every state is a community with its own voluntary hierarchy and structure, in which all basic libertarian principles are recognized and could even be formalized as contracts, but they are simply ignored by the majority; if some maniac with his own private army terrorizes people, the lack of resistance is the responsibility of the latter, for their hands are completely untied.
Belkovich
Ancap can be viewed as an ideal construction in which all goods and services are supplied only on a free competitive market. Such a construction serves as an analytical tool, but is unimplementable in real life. At the very least, because kinship ties, friendship, love, dislike, and the like have no direct relation to the market; and to claim otherwise, describing how, for example, the marriage market should be organized or the mechanism of selling oneself into slavery—this may, of course, be a way of exploring the limits of the model’s applicability, but it looks more like a way of pushing principles to the point of absurdity, only to then say: I don’t like where this logic has led me—so I choose to change nothing in life.
Conversely, one could postulate that since we consider ancap to be the natural and most suitable state for society, then we must say that we live under ancap and can reason about it in ancap terms. Namely, that a person’s relationship with the state is a contract, a sort of poorly drafted open offer where people checked the “I agree” box without even reading the text, and that the state is a corporation and its territory is the private property of the corporation. Such a vision can help one look at the world differently, but it can also function as a path of self-deception. That is, ancap is already all around us, why fuss, we have already arrived. We relax and, once again, do nothing.
The same reality can indeed be described in different ways, depending on how a person intends to interact with it. One can think in terms of “in office 202 sits the department head, he must sign the permit if the application is submitted in the correct form and the state fee is paid.” One can think in terms of “Petrovich will sign for ten thousand, but one could invite him fishing, which is even more useful in the long run.” Finally, one can think in terms of “enter, clear out the secretary, then the boss, exit through the window.” One can think “Vasya is so sweet,” or one can think “perhaps I’ll string him along for one more dinner, and then I need to bail.”
The difference between descriptions of the declared, the actual, and the ideal is also quite obvious. It is one thing to describe how the state looks according to official documents: the Constitution, separation of powers, legislative mechanisms, and so on. It is another thing how it looks in reality: the mutual influence of political actors, corrupt ties, the monitoring and formation of public sentiment, and all that. And it is a completely third thing to describe how one would like society to be. There, the state may be present in a completely different form, or be absent entirely. Private property may be revered as the highest form of manifestation of human freedom, or condemned as the highest form of exploitation. Power may be viewed as violence, or as fatherly care.
Anarcho-capitalism today, in most cases, is only suitable for describing the ideal order of things. The actual can be described in political science terms—and then one can try to devise separate descriptions for the transition from the actual to the ideal. Alternatively, one can describe the actual as a corrupted ancap, and then it becomes seemingly obvious what to do: simply eliminate all differences between the current state of affairs and the ideal model. The trouble is that while such an approach answers the question of what to do magnificently, it says nothing about how to do it. That is precisely where its main problem lies.
