Counter-Economics and Political Reformism
In his blog post “maximize the contradictions“, B.K. Marcus writes:
Why, in the late 1960s and early 1970s did American Maoists support Richard Nixon for president?
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Believe it or not, the Reds thought Nixon represented the epitome of capitalist evil. They claimed that only by “maximizing the contradictions” of the capitalist system, would the West finally progress to glorious revolution.
In the West, on the Left, this was the central controversy: did half-measures move The People closer to or further away from real socialism?
Marcus correctly determines that this question is just as applicable to the libertarian movement:
As with the socialists, libertarian controversy seems greatest on questions of strategy.
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Rothbard made it clear where he stood on [the libertarian version of] the Maoist question. Don’t promote present suffering in the name of future liberty… On the other hand, don’t accept half-measures that only appear to increase individual liberty while actually growing the State.
That’s easier said than done, though. While Rothbard in my opinion has been the greatest modern theoretician whose work involved defining the goal of a free society, I have a much more negative view of his approach to strategy.
For convenience, I refer to such a theoretical libertarian version of the Maoists for Nixon approach as a Machiavellian strategy — even if that’s not an entirely accurate label.
Rothbard was correct to foreswear Machiavellian strategies. Why do I say that?
First, such an approach does nothing to build the anti-state counter-institutions of a free society. Thus, the instability and eventual meltdown of the state resulting from increasing statism leads only to bloodshed, poverty, turmoil, destruction and — if you make it through all of that alive — the birth of a new state, and one likely to be more despotic than the previous one.
The second practical drawback to such an approach, of course, is that by advocating liberty while working for tyranny, one brings discredit on one’s ideas.
Rothbard was incorrect in my opinion to see the only alternative as being political reformism — political action aimed at whittling the state down to size.
Rothbard, to the best of my knowledge, never made a positive case for political reformism as the route to a stateless society. He apparently just assumed (prior to Konkin, anyway) that no other approach was possible, given the problems with both revolution in the sense of coup d’etat and the Machiavellian approach. Thus, while Rothbard rejected the State on theoretical and moral grounds, he could not purge himself of politics, in the sense of politics as a struggle to control the state.
Rothbard’s failure to see past a reformist strategy set the stage for the debut of the Libertarian Party and the damage this would do to the libertarian movement. I say damage because there is less agreement and more misinformation today about what the word “libertarian” even means than when the Libertarian Party was founded — and that this is a natural result of the poor match between a political party and the task of educating the populace about why rationales for even the mere existence of the State are mythological. It is far easier to teach someone the correct meaning of “libertarianism” if incorrect or overly imprecise meanings don’t have to be unlearned first.
It fell to Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), rather than Rothbard, to develop a strategy that was methodologically and ethically consistent with Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalist goal of a stateless society. That strategy is counter-economics and the result of its fusion with Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is a revolutionary creed — Agorism. I’ll go into greater detail about counter-economics and the Agorist conception of revolution in part two.
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[...] This is quite obviously bad news for Liberty, as Alito has indicated a personal bias in favor of executive power at the expense of constitutional restraint. I don’t, however, think that one one has to embrace a truly Hegelian position of the “Maoists for Nixon” sort to draw the right lessons from this, though. [...]
[...] To put it in more Marxian, and therefore imprecise, terms — the capitalists have been ripping off the workers. Kevin Carson’s blog is practically dedicated to exposing how they do this through aggression-backed subsidies and regulations that have nothing to do with a genuinely free market.. The workers should take back what’s rightfully theirs, their rightful private property under a radical Lockean view, and the only reason this hasn’t been mentioned more prominetly is Rothbard’s failure to reject political reformism, which Konkin saw past and remedied. The ZAP clarifies the line between ethical use of violence in such a workers revolution and the violence of, for example, Leninist state socialism. [...]