Statecraft 101

The otherwise benign site How Stuff Works recently published a tutorial on a more unsavory topic than usual: How do I start my own country?

Generally, my interests run in quite literally the precisely opposite direction. Even so, I’m taking it upon myself to produce a more straightforward tutorial, solely for purposes of clarifying some of the issues involved.

How do you start your own country?

Generally, it begins by bullying people around, extorting money from them and then having the nerve to call it a “tax” and pretend they “owe” it to you.

Claim and attempt to exercise a territorial monopoly on violence.

Do this well enough to destroy or suppress any similar criminal outfits within your area of operations.

To confuse matters, assert special rights that ordinary folks don’t have, including a unilateral ability to determine what “law” is.

Marginalize your critics. Fight especially dirty on this one. Your options run the gamut from extermination to slander and everything in between.

Announce special programs to give the people a tiny portion of their wealth back — on your terms, and never as much as you took from them in the first place. Hire paid liars to assert this proves how necessary you are.

Design a flag.

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On leaving the United States

Wendy MCElroy makes the case, on her blog and elsewhere, that it’s time to GTFO and flee this fascist Mickey Mouse land — Leave The United States If You Can.

If I had a lick of sense, I’d listen to her.

I don’t.

In crisis and desperation, all things are fluid. Make no mistake, we are indeed in a Crisis with a capital “C”. Until that crisis is resolved — one way or another — my place is here.

UPDATE: Digg Wendy’s article here.

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Marx in the morning

Many reading this will be well aware that the word “commune“, from which the word communist is derived, originally referred to simply what we might call a “municipality” or “township”. Yet Marx named the oppressor class holding market power via violently accumulated capital “bourgouisie“, regarding the etymology of which we can say the following:

The French word bourgeois evolved from the Old French word burgeis, meaning “an inhabitant of a town” (cf. Middle English burgeis, Middle Dutch burgher and German Bürger). The Old French word burgeis is derived from bourg, meaning a market town or medieval village, itself derived from Late Latin burgus, meaning “fortress”

So, the communist ideal revolves around the city or town and supposedly would be achieved by casting off the yoke of the city-dwellers? Not quite, but my sense of humor tempts me to say that. The seeming incongruity is resolved through the understanding that (among other things) cities could be considered geographically concentrated capital. Thus, any system of thought that concerns itself with the production, distribution, use and control of capital would tend to have some things to say about cities, city-dwellers and city-life — some of it positive and some negative.

Which reminds me…

Not far into The Communist Manifesto we find this passage that practically jumps off the page at the left-Rothbardian reader (emphasis added):

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

While anyone can read implications of any sort into anything if they want to see them badly enough, I must say that this certainly seems to leave the door open to some truly extraordinary creative deviationism.

UPDATE: Note carefully that the insurrectionary “National Guard” units during the Paris Commune of 1871 were de facto private (i.e. non-state) militias and their seizure of cannon was justifiable in their view as reclaiming their own property.

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That inconvenient heat shimmer effect when moving…

In the context of notes for a potential sci-fi project…

If I were 8 or 9 feet tall and using an advanced adaptive optical camouflage suit, what would be the best way to compensate for the inability to completely camouflage the wearer when moving? Maybe fake fur?

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Carson: Labor Struggle in a Free Market

Another great new article by Kevin Carson — Labor Struggle in a Free Market.

Excerpt:

“Present-day labor law limits the bargaining power of labor at least as much as it reinforces it. That ’s especially true of reactionary legislation like Taft-Hartley and state right-to-work laws. Both are clearly abhorrent to free market principles.”

You can, by voting for it, help promote this article to both the general public on Digg and to Ron Paul fans on Break the Matrix.

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All you need to know about Bob Barr

Bob Barr recently said he’s running for the office of US president in order to “rekindle peoples faith in government”. That is an anti-libertarian agenda.

Agorists, in particular among libertarians, recognize that perhaps the most crucial task in the process of building a revolutionary libertarian class consciousness is attacking and destroying faith in government. Only a fool or a villain would want to restore people’s faith in government — because both the supposed moral legitimacy and the supposed practical utility of government are lies. Myths. Tall tales. Whoppers. Bullshit.

Those falsehoods are not merely lies, though. They are the lies that form the foundation the entire system of oppression known as “government” rests upon. Reference La Boétie’s centuries old Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Furthermore, note William Lind’s observation that Fourth Generation Warfare is fundamentally about “a universal crisis of legitimacy of the state”.

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Deleted post

UPDATE 2: I don’t usually delete posts, but in this case I’ve learned enough about the views of the maker of the video I previously had embedded here (a few hours ago) to now say that I don’t want to promote their work or associate with them in any way.

UPDATE: Message sent as a result of discussion in comments…

Thanks for your friend request. I recognize it as a compliment that someone would select me, out of all of the other people they could have picked, to send a friend request to. So, thanks for that. There was one video of yours about anarchism that I enjoyed quite a bit and posted about on my blog. It now seems there are some other videos that seem a bit more against my own grain personally in that they touch on or flirt with topics & views which I don’t want to be associated with and generally advocate actively opposing via non-aggressive social sanctions. I do recognize that people evolve intellectually, sometimes quite rapidly. Would you like to discuss where you’re at now ideologically and where you’ve come from?

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Note to self about LP members…

Libertarian Party members, in aggregate, may actually be the worst possible prospects for libertarian outreach, on average. What they have right is often outweighed by a firm commitment to what they have wrong. To paraphrase Reagan(?), I believe — it’s not what they don’t know, but what they do know (100%) that just isn’t so.

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Because I’m just your puppet…

…and I haven’t put up a poll in a while.

Which one of these two topics should be my next post?

  • Mortgage crisis (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Responding to link bait on MA theory (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 0

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All you need to know about Obama

Let’s temporarily set aside, solely for purposes of discussion, my own view that electoral politics is a wrong-headed approach for anarchists to use (regardless of the particular flavor of reformism one might prefer). One could easily say, after all, that we first need to get some slack back on civil liberties (and the so-called GWOT that provides the context for that set of issues) in order for non-electoral approaches to then have a chance to succeed. One could continue arguing that this conception of civil liberties reform as prerequisite for radicalism in the US, in turn, demands putting the right people in government office to create that “breathing room”. While I don’t agree with that view, this blog post isn’t a critique of it. Rather, I’m turning my attention to one of the more frequently cited undeserved beneficiaries of illusory progressive hope — Obama.
(more…)

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