Fall 2009

Issue 3

ALLiance
a journal of theory and strategy
More stencils available at www.libertyactivism.info
 Table of Contents
Title Page Number
A Note From Z's 1

Hermes in the Agora 2

Tax Increases Could Deepen the Recession 8

A Quick Look at Insurgent Political Influence 11

The Cost of Vietnam 16

Mother, Should I Trust the Government? 23

To Tramps 28

The Weird Case for Market Means to Socialist Ends 31

Recommended Reading 32

Online Resources 34

Permission to reprint granted without special request.

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A Note from Z's
Thanks for picking up the ALLiance #3. I'm very excited to announce a
partnership between ALLiance and Corvus Distribution. Hard copies of
ALLiance can now be ordered through Corvus' online store –
http://www.corvusdistribution.org/shop/. This partnership will allow for
the widest distribution at the lowest price.

I'm also very happy to announce that James from the Tulsa Alliance of the
Libertarian Left (http://www.meetup.com/TulsaAnarchy/) has joined the
ALLiance Journal project. His influence is all over this issue. Aside from
writing The Weird Case for Market Means to Socialist Ends, he also
provided the graphics found on pages 1, 13, 18, and 31.

Of course I would also like to thank everyone who has written letters,
donated money, and made suggestions. Veteran zinester James N. Dawson
wrote a letter that made me think a lot. It was posted on my website and
garnered a number of responses. It can be read at
http://chrislempa.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/letter_of_comment_to_allian
ce1/. I encourage everyone to take a look at his letter.

On a closing note, please consider submitting to the next issue. I will

consider anything of any length. Articles, studies, poems, songs, drawings,
pictures are all welcomed. The deadline is November 1, 2009. What do
you have to lose?

Thanks for your support.

Chris Lempa
chris (at) chrislempa.info
www.chrislempa.wordpress.com
PO Box 442353
Lawrence, KS 66044

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Hermes in the Agora
(Communication, Cultural Mediation and the Anarchic Spirit)
By Nick Louras
I.
It is Hermes who concerns us here, god of
language and magic, the subtle, but all-powerful,
spirit of communication, invoked with every act
of social intercourse, embodied in every word
that reaches another’s ear.

At its most simple, Anarchy is Hermes

unfettered.

So long as our modes of communication are

restricted, directed, manipulated and controlled,
there can be no liberty.

II.
But nor do tyrants possess any power except where individuals assent to
use their language.

State is an illusion. Tin stars and six-shooters are real; police are not real.
Flags are magical/demonic sigils imbued with power through fear, false-
pride and consensus belief. In every parliament on earth, powdered whores
enact a dreadful Grand Guignol and the people throw roses, for a moment
believing it all true.

Antique “Movement” tactics drape flesh upon this ghost-State. To march

in the streets is to recognize the authority you march against.

Let us begin to live free by admitting this much: Our enemy is a false
paradigm.

III.
There are no top-down conspiracies. All conspiracies are grassroots. The
average person will insensibly and emotionally defend the status quo.
They will defend it with a tooth-and-nail tenacity in direct inverse
proportion to the challenge of libertarianism. They will do this without
prompt or manipulation because it is their life that is being challenged.

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Whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not, whether by
design, by accident, by weakness, or boredom, most people have thrown
their lot in with the status quo.

IV.
Important Questions that might lead to alternate paradigms are never
asked. Thought has been arrested and made to stagnate by the triumph of
false dichotomies. Ludicrous either/or premises redirect human passion
away from creative imagination into the wasteland of dogmatism.
Fascism vs Communism, Left vs Right, Control vs Bedlam, Theism vs
Materialism, Religion vs Humanism, Pragmatism vs Idealism.

These are tombstones, not choices!

False dichotomies are the product of mediation. There is no discourse

outside The Media. We have delegated all conversation to “big” platforms
that ostensibly put us in universal/instantaneous contact, but in reality
“speak on our behalf.” These media outlets are owned/licensed/controlled
by corporations, advertisers and government. They exist for no purpose
except to reinforce the current paradigm. Purveyors of “news” are
infamous perpetrators, especially when it comes to the false dichotomy,
presenting every “story” as a conflict between
two hyperbolic groups: corporations/labor
unions, warmongers/demonstrators,
Republicans/Democrats.

By limiting the argument to two non-

insurrectionary options, they are assured of the
continued dominance of the culture. All media
therefore functions as an advertisement for the
paradigm. Likewise: individuals who advance
media-generated either/or arguments (see III).

There can be no pure interaction, no spontaneous culture, when everyone

is using identical channels of communication, transmitting corporate logos
and banner ads with their correspondences, or worse, conforming their
identities to a template.

Notwithstanding early cyberpunk fantasy, it was inevitable that the

3
Internet would become ad space – the same way the rest of our culture has
(why wouldn’t it? The same people are using it!).

Indeed, technology has evolved into a means of homogenization and

alienation. Home and personal media devices removed physical proximity
and the shared experience. The forms of art and communication that were
transferred from the public sphere to the domestic/bodily then dried up.
(For example, truly independent cinema died with the drive-in and the
local art-house; now only studios owned by corporations which also own
multiplex chains continue to release films theatrically.)

V.
The government cynically declares itself an arbiter, the citizen’s advocate
against big business. Of course, this uninterrupted sea of commercial
homogeneity and Monolithic Culture is a direct result of government
favoritism and collusion with corporations to subvert truly free
(“Hermetic”) exchange.

Commercial media licenses, subsidies, interstate commerce laws, property

and bartering taxes (i.e. punishment of alternative systems),
nationalization and “public good” have all been employed to force the
spread of Monolithic Culture. The push has been fast and overwhelming,
with holdouts inevitably running afoul of eminent domain, rezoning, and
governing-board fiat.

Even those individuals clever and brave enough to pursue lives outside the
norm are shackled to the system by bureaucracy, taxation, ID/insurance
requirements and monotonous surveillance. The state depends on universal
adherence to one way of life for its revenue, its mandate, and its ability to
act unchecked; thus renegades cannot be tolerated.

And so we watch populations move through the mainstream culture:

irritable, unhappy, dangerous, they stare at the same television shows, eat
the same poisonous food, serve their sentences in some variation on the
same soul-crushing job (cynically antagonistic to those who suggest a
ludic freedom).

VI.
Make no mistake, we are champions of the market: a free exchange of

4
goods and ideas.

Any vital & creative society depends for its life’s blood on the agora.
Exceptional imagination & ingenuity command reward. Those with means
must outfit adventurers seeking their own. We are no self-flagellating
ascetics. There is joy in wealth (and we do not mean the empty
“purchasing power” of the prefabricated consumer, but the abundance of
the pasha. Every man a king! Exceed the nations of the earth in splendor!).
The (specious) argument that corporatism is a natural and inevitable
outgrowth of the free market comes relentlessly from quarters with a
vested interest in different modes of authority, and the most vocal
champions of a so-called “free market” are only too happy to agree. A
most tedious false dichotomy arises: the various Death-Marts on one hand
and the most despicable anti-creative revenge-seekers on the other.

We reject this outright.

Corporate behemoths may borrow the language and (to a lesser extent)
form of market participation. In truth, they are designed to have as little
contact with the market as possible, functioning more like psychic
infrastructure (the machinery of mass production/consumption), funded by
the state and in turn generating enough tax revenue to perpetuate the
state’s business.

Here, now and forever, we stand in opposition to Monolithic Culture,

whether corporate, marxist, theocratic, or scientific-materialist.

VII.
It’s no accident that Hermes is also god of the
marketplace, protector of merchants (and thieves).
Communication can only exist where there is
multiplicity of form, interplay between sovereign
individuals.
Hermes does not care about “identities”: anarcho-
capitalist, mutualist, co-operative, communalist.
Whenever people come together to trade, barter or give
freely, an agora is created.

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 VIII.
But always stifling this “Hermetic” agora, preventing it from taking shape
in the open, is the false-market of the dominant paradigm.
To get anywhere, the state’s stranglehold on services, force and money
must be removed.

Maybe somewhere there’s someone who’d like to employ the government

in… some capacity. Fine. Then let them buy the services they want
piecemeal on an open market. Likewise, if someone wants to carry the
U.S. Dollar as opposed to a currency backed with gold, silver, or seashells,
they should feel free to do that as well.

Competition, if sustained, will inevitably lead to the death of government.

Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company lasted

five years before it was forced out of business for
challenging the (still extant) monopoly of the U.S. Postal
Service. During that time, the company sent mail from
New York to Boston for 5 cents, drastically undercutting
the 18 cents charged by the USPS. Before threats of
imprisonment and endless legal battles shut Spooner
down, he had forced the government’s rate to 3 cents.

In the 1840s, America was less than a hundred years old. Fascism (in the
literal sense of a statist economy) was still being codified into law.
Spooner caught the government by surprise. At first, its courts had no way
of stopping him without putting the last nail in the coffin of
“Constitutional Democracy”. We doubt something of this scale could be
pulled off today. Over a hundred and fifty years of precedence favoring
state monopolies have left neither the timeframe nor the loopholes to
permit it.

We do hope modern-day Spooners will emerge despite this, but real results
can be obtained far less dramatically.

There are whole markets that the government can’t reach, let alone control
– black and grey markets, for instance; cash markets – and these provide
us with the starting place for a free agora.

6
 IX.
There are peaceful individuals everywhere involved in alternative-market
enterprise, small-scale pot farming, under-the-table transactions, and the
like, but few of them view their economies in a political/ontological light,
and fewer still keep their eye on the big picture.

We must do more than create an alternative market; we must create an

alternative reality.

The authoritarian paradigm brands every free man and woman a criminal.
That is the height of nihilism for anyone who accepts it. A new worldview
is the only answer.

This project – Anarchy – is about remaking the shape of culture and

cultural interaction, each of us from our own personal paradigms,
interacting always from a position of physical, intellectual and spiritual
autonomy. The loose consensus reality of those participating must
necessarily change. We’re talking about new “maps,” new aesthetics, new
mores, new language, and this requires a certain magic.

It is up to each of us to reach this place on his/her own, nor is there one

reliable path. Certainly the likeminded will attract one another, and this is
good, wherever we can build our world with friends, we will find the labor
easy, but many will find their convictions, lifestyles, politics, and dreams
incompatible with others, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In the end
we’ll all find our way somehow.

Our hearts will be our compasses, here as in all things.

X.
And looking back, perhaps, we’ll find that we shared, if not a set of
tactics, a loose credo:
1. To subvert the status quo. Our lives are antithetical to the
Monolithic Culture. Our actions should be too. That doesn’t mean
illegal, per se, but it can. The problem with this is that certain acts
appear subversive, but are really status quo. Ultimately all “tactics”
suffer this fate. As soon as enough people become aware of
something it becomes fodder for satire and cannibalism by
advertiser-sorcerers. A good example of this is graffiti, which has

7
 long been used for “guerrilla marketing.” Same goes for protesting
(which is pure cliché now, appearing mostly in state-sponsored
anti-smoking ads). Oddly, sex, whether illicit or not, and drugs,
still maintain a certain sense of danger and taboo. We recommend
using sex wherever it is subversive.
2. To affirm life. We don’t mean antagonistic when we say
subversive. The point isn’t to be against the Monolithic Culture,
it’s to be for a personal and fulfilling Other Culture. Think
positive! Follow every pleasure and turn from every restriction.
Cynicism and martyrdom belong to the death-cults. Abandon any
work that isn’t motivated by joy!
3. To affirm the Romantic. Romance is forbidden by mainstream
society. Anything with a hint of beauty/danger/inspiration is
promptly seized, sterilized and put to work as a reaffirmation of the
Culture (it wasn’t enough to kill the Gnostic Jesus, he had to be
made a symbol of the Abrahamic religion and the Roman state he
had sought to topple).

Artifice and beauty are weapons. Love and art are weapons. Use them to
create a new language; Hermes will aid you. Employ symbols and sigils,
codes and ceremonies, invoke strange gods, practice sex-magic, do
whatever it takes to establish the reality of the personal outside the
normative.
Nick Louras

Tax Increases Could Deepen the Recession

by Fred Foldvary
The worst time to increase taxes is during a severe
recession. Yet that is what the policies of the
Obama administration and Congress are doing.
The proposed federal medical services program
would raise the tax rate paid by the highest
incomes by 5.4 percent. Individuals who do not
have medical insurance would either be required
to obtain it or pay a hefty fine. Congress is also
considering a tax on employer-paid medical
benefits.

In addition, the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003

8
will expire on January 1, 2011. Congress will most likely let the cuts
expire for higher incomes, amounting to a tax rate increase of 4.5 percent.
The top income tax rate will return to 39.6 percent. Add the 5.4 percent
new medical care tax, and we get a tax rate of 45 percent.

The “cap and trade” program passed by Congress amounts to yet another
tax. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the price hikes passed
on by the firms that have to buy the permits would cost the average lower-
income household 3.3% of its after-tax income every year. For the high
incomes, the tax rate increase would be 1.7 percent. Add that to the 45
percent rate for a total of 46.7 percent marginal tax rate, the rate on
additional income.

The states also tax income. In California, the tax rate on the highest
incomes is 10.3 percent. Add that to the 46.7 percent federal rate to get a
total marginal tax rate of 57 percent. To that we need to add the medicare
tax of 3 percent for a total of 60 percent.

The social security tax has an upper limit, so what lower income earners
save, in not paying the highest marginal tax rates, is offset by the total 15.3
percent rate for Social Security and Medicare.

Many politicians think that they can increase taxes on the rich, and the
taxpayers will just reduce their lavish spending. It does not work that way.
One does not become rich by not caring about money. It is well known in
economics that taxes impose an excess burden or deadweight loss, a
reduction in production and investment.

The effect of taxes is based on the tax rate on the next amount of income,
and the deadweight loss generally increases by the square of the tax
increase. Thus if the tax rate doubles, the deadweight loss quadruples. So
the sharply higher marginal tax rates that are coming in the next few years
will impose a substantially greater deadweight loss on the economy. Since
investment is based on the expected gains in the future, the expectation of
higher taxes is already affecting decisions today.

The recession that began in 2007 was decelerating by mid 2009. The
financial crisis was easing, and the economic signals indicated that the
recession would bottom out in late 2009. But now that the tax increases

9
are clearer and imminent, it could switch the change in the rate of decline
from deceleration to another acceleration. Consumers are spending less,
cutting back on debt and increasing savings. Economic investment in new
capital goods has to lead the recovery. But a sharp tax increase will
increase the cost of production and decrease the profits. The increase in
marginal tax rates to 60 percent will surely have a large negative effect.
Nobody knows how big the effect will be, but it could prevent the
recovery and plunge the economy into an even deeper depression.

The goal of cap and trade, to reduce pollution, is worthy, but it should not
be joined to an increase in taxes or revenues. It would be more effective to
levy an explicit tax on pollution, and offset it with a reduction in income
taxes. The total taxes paid would be the same, but the deadweight loss
would be lower. Such a “green tax shift” would benefit both the economy
and the environment.

Welfare statists seek higher taxes on the rich to redistribute to the poor, but
this involves a hidden redistribution going the other way. Public works,
civic services, and subsidies increase the rent and land value of the areas
affected. Since most land value is owned by the rich, they get back much
of what they pay in taxes from the implicit subsidy to their lands. It would
be more efficient to simply tax their land value directly and not tax their
labor and capital. Land having a fixed supply, a tax on land value has no
deadweight loss.

While the great majority of people would have a

net gain from an efficiency tax shift, from income
and sales to land value and pollution, those with
large land-value holdings would lose, and so the
landed interests maintain a strong lobby opposing
such a tax shift. The financial industry is their
strong ally, since bakers like land as collateral for
loans. When land values crash, the government
bails out the banks and depositors, which is an
indirect way of subsidizing real estate mortgages
and thus indirectly land values.

The price society pays for the real estate subsidies is the heavy taxation of
labor and the boom-bust economic cycles. The government passed a

10
stimulus bill, but now is inflicting an anti-stimulus in the form of higher
taxes on productive activity. Evidently, the president and Congress would
rather satisfy the landed interests than let the economy recover.
Fred Foldvary's personal website is www.Foldvary.org.

Don’t Tell Me, Show Me!

A Quick Look at Insurgent Political Influence
By Darian Worden
Political movements gain power when people perceive that the movement
has something to offer them. A government is allowed to exist when a
large number of people perceive it as supplying their needs, especially
security and to a lesser extent infrastructure. To create a broad shift of
allegiance away from the state (the institution of coercion) and towards the
market (the aggregate of voluntary exchange), left libertarians should
build market institutions that displace state services, and actively
participate in them.

Ideology always guides action, so scholarship and debate are of critical

importance. But ideology by itself will not build revolution; people with
diverse needs must be given concrete reasons to be attracted to the
ideology. They must be shown what anarchy can do for them.

This article provides some examples of how

political allegiances are influenced through the
provision of services. The examples describe
violent groups, but they have things to teach
besides violence. Revolutions centered on
violence primarily promote violence. To
replace the state with a voluntary order, left
libertarians should build attractive
www.libertyactivism.info
alternatives.

This article does not attempt to provide exhaustive studies. It highlights

interesting cases that merit further analysis.

The first three examples I found online and discussed on

darianworden.com/blog under the “info share” category. The last example
describes how the most powerful state in history utilizes similar
techniques as one part of Special Forces activities.

11
1. The Taliban, 2008
According to Christian Science Monitor
(www.tinyurl.com/npfm4x) the Taliban is on the rise thanks to
their ability to provide security for the privileged.

In several provinces close to Kabul, the government’s presence is

vanishing or already nonexistent, residents say. In its place, a more
effective – and brutal – Taliban shadow government is spreading
and winning local support.

“The police are just for show,” one local says. “The Taliban are the
real power here.”

Widespread disillusionment with rampant crime, corrupt

government, and lack of jobs has fueled the Taliban’s rise to de
facto power. Independent political analyst Waheed Muzhda says
the Taliban’s advance from the south toward Kabul resembles their
progression when they first took power 12 years ago. In both cases,
he says, they won support by bringing law and order.

2. Fighting Fundamentalism in Pakistan

The Washington Post (www.tinyurl.com/lh6jfb) describes how
fundamentalists are being fought by local militias in Pakistan.

Authorities have tried various methods, first using the army to

attempt to quash the rebels, and more recently negotiating truces
with individual militia groups. Thousands of conflict-zone
inhabitants, terrified by government bombing and insurgent
brutality, have fled their homes. Few local officials dare visit their
constituencies without military escorts.

A few tribal leaders, however, have refused to budge and are

urging others to do the same. One of the first was Anwar Kamal
Marwat, a former member of Parliament, who decided to organize
a self-defense force in 2007 after Taliban militias began
kidnapping and threatening people in his native Lakki Marwat
district, demanding their support for a holy war.

12
 “They kept threatening us, but our tribe is very united and every
village went on alert. We wanted to stop them before the cancer
spread. It took many months, but now all their camps are gone, and
they have not been back.”

Marwat’s success has been both an inspiration to other vulnerable

communities and an embarrassment to the government, whose
police are supposed to keep order and whose army is supposed to
fight extremists.
According to village council head, Fahim ur Rahman, “If our tribe
were not so united, we would have no hope of defending ourselves.
We do not have permission to do this, but we have no choice.”

3. Hamas - “Social influence grew into political influence”

UPI (http://tinyurl.com/nz32e) describes how providing services
helped Hamas grow.

After 1967, a great part of the

success of the Hamas/Muslim
Brotherhood was due to their
activities among the refugees of
the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone
of the Islamic movements
success was an impressive social,
religious, educational and
cultural infrastructure, called
Da’wah, that worked to ease the
hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to
camps, and many who were living on the edge.
“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza
Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who
spoke on condition of anonymity.
A further factor of Hamas’ growth was the fact the PLO moved its
base of operations to Beirut in the ’80s, leaving the Islamic
organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories “as
the court of last resort,” he said.

4. According to Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces (Clancy,

Stiner, Koltz, 2002), unconventional - “special” warfare also has

13
 other facets… Helping people in trouble - with medical aid,
organizational advice and counsel, assistance in building bridges
and roads, and getting clean water - is another.

“Helping people” usually comes under the rubric of civil affairs

(CA), a tool that’s been in the special operations kit nearly as long
as PSYOPs. There are many justifications for CA, including
simple goodness, but its main military one is this: A population that
is friendly to you and has experienced your kindness is not likely
to feel kindly to - or give help and support to - your enemy. [pg 59]

Hopefully nobody reading this thinks libertarians should be more like

fundamentalist terrorists or the US government. The lessons provided by
the above groups can only be applied to the libertarian struggle after being
filtered through libertarian ideology.

The Alliance of the Libertarian Left ought to encourage self-liberation and

individual empowerment. Projects that ALLies involve themselves in
shouldn’t seek monopoly or exclusivity. They should inclusively
demonstrate principles and encourage people to build the institutions they
need. Adherence to the principles of left libertarianism is desired over
allegiance to the group pushing them.

Improving communities in ways that displace state power include the

following:

1. Providing security and stability. This doesn’t need to involve

armed militias (though this will sometimes be appropriate). It can
mean anarchists watching out for and countering actual crimes,
brokering peace between street gangs, monitoring and countering
authoritarian groups by appropriate and proportional means,
building community solidarity, and countering the blue-light gang
through Copwatch type action.

2. Arbitration. The counter-economy described by agorists

encourages the creation of arbitration agencies that can operate for
money or mutual aid. Arbitrators could attract customers by
offering better service than the state court system and by raising
anti-state consciousness. For more on counter economics and

14
 agorist justice systems, see the writings of Samuel Edward Konkin
III.

3. Infrastructure and economic improvement. The myriad ways to

improve communities include sharing of food through networks
like Food Not Bombs, community gardening, litter cleanups (open
firearms carry activists do this), counter-establishment education
(see the ALL zine Liberating Learning), beautification (fixing
decaying walls, painting murals, putting in plants, etc), building
alternate trade networks or bazaars, neighbors pitching in to fix
potholes in roads, and workers organizing into radical unions to
give them a stake in infrastructure.

Note that intentional spreading of left libertarian ideas should be an

essential part of all projects. Contextualizing an action as an advance
toward liberty encourages more actions. The degree to which the ideas
should be pushed depends on the circumstances.

Another consideration is the potential trade-off between publicity and

security. It is sometimes possible to use openness and community ties as
defensive weapons.

Of course, it is usually a good idea to research past or current projects that

are similar to ones you are attempting.

The influence of left libertarians can grow if we effectively help people

prosper, especially during otherwise hard times when the state-capitalist
order fails to provide. Taking action now can show people what anarchy
can do for them, not in calculations or sci-fi, but in their lives.

Endnote:
The concept of “soft power” may be helpful. See
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4290.html

“Everyone is familiar with hard power. We know that military and

economic might often get others to change their position. Hard power can
rest on inducements ("carrots") or threats ("sticks"). But sometimes you
can get the outcomes you want without tangible threats or payoffs. The
indirect way to get what you want has sometimes been called "the second

15
face of power." A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world
politics because other countries admire its values, emulate its example,
aspire to its level of prosperity and openness. This soft power—getting
others to want the outcomes that you want—co-opts people rather than
coerces them.

“Soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others. In the
business world, smart executives know that leadership is not just a matter
of issuing commands, but also involves leading by example and attracting
others to do what you want. Similarly, contemporary practices of
community-based policing rely on making the police sufficiently friendly
and attractive that a community wants to help them achieve shared
objectives.”
Darian Worden is a writer and activist from New Jersey. See his
commentary, fiction, humor, and other work at darianworden.com.

The Cost of Vietnam

By Jim Davidson

Credit to the Libertarian Enterprise www.ncc-1776.org

The Vietnam war had a very high cost in lives, in treasure, and in
loss of individual liberty at home. It also prompted a series of
protests, including many very violent protests, including some where
the government brutally responded with murder. As a result of these
protests and the general pointlessness of the war, some things
changed, for a time.

In my essay about the Vietnamization of Iraq (http://www.ncc-

1776.org/tle2009/tle525-20090628-03.html), I pointed out the difficulty
with the currency that LBJ faced. He had a lot of
money to create out of nothing, so he got rid of the silver in the
coinage. This prompted many banks overseas, including a lot of banks
holding French government money, to redeem dollars for gold. The
price of gold went up, and soon everyone wanted in on the "sure deal"
of selling a hundred ounces of gold for $4,200 and redeeming those
dollars for 120 ounces of gold - to be redeemed again.

To give you some idea of the scale of this insane monetary policy, the

16
USA military was called upon to airlift gold to London to be redeemed
for dollars. So much gold was placed on the weighing floor at
Rothschild's in London at one point that the entire floor collapsed
into the basement. This event closed the London redemptions for about
two weeks. Someone of a cynical frame of mind might suppose that the
event was staged. But the market soon moved to Switzerland when the
gnomes of Zurich began offering redemptions, and so the London market
re-opened. If you want to know more about these events, check out the
London Gold Pool, the name given to the deliberate cartel in restraint of
trade that attempted to limit world gold prices between 1961 and 1968
(when it was abandoned as unworkable).

So why all this focus on monetary policy? It is

important to know why things are so screwed up,
and monetary policy is often the lynch pin for other
government policies - war policy, trade policy,
foreign policy, and fiscal policy. Understanding
Vietnam in the context of other 20th Century wars
that were financed by austerity programs - meatless,
sweetless, and wheatless days among civilians who
purchased war bonds, victory bonds, and had Milton
Friedman withhold their pay as an emergency war
measure - it is important to know that Vietnam was
funded by inflation. All wars since then have, as well.

Why? Because the establishment powers that be are afraid of the

people. Austerity today would mean reduced pensions for the elderly,
reduced medical coverage for the elderly, reduced unemployment
compensation, and rioting in the streets. After all, it has happened
before.

If Vietnam was paid for with inflation, what did that buy? One source
says that "Between 1965 and 1975, the United States spent $111 billion
on the war.(1)" Today, that doesn't seem like a lot of money, really.
So how much was that worth in today's dollars?

Well, the price of gold gives a good comparison. Then the price of
gold averaged about $45 per ounce over the period. Today the price of
gold is about $930 per ounce. That means that the dollar's value has

17
fallen by a factor of about 20.7. Put another way, it would take
about $2.3 trillion today to have the same buying power.

By way of comparison, the direct spending on the Iraq war so far has
been $648 billion for the USA government, with costs extending into
the future of caring for injured veterans, etc., running into the
trillions. By another estimate, the Iraq war has cost the American
economy about $3 trillion (2).

In terms of lives, the figures are staggering. Altogether about 7.9 million
people were killed or injured,
including combat casualties on both
sides, and civilian casualties. USA
military deaths included 58,159
killed in the war (3) about 2,000
missing, and 303,635 wounded (4).
(Considering the life-changing, and
life expectancy reducing nature of
many of these wounds it is important
to include them in the toll of lives
lost or permanently altered. Remind
an injured vet how sorry you are that
the government sent them to war.)

The inflicted toll of lives lost or altered forever is much higher.

Consider the South Vietnamese military, which lost 220,357 dead and
about 1.17 million wounded (3). South Korea sent troops and 4,960
died while 10,962 were wounded; Laos lost about 30,000 killed (5).

Australia sent troops and 520 died (3) while 2,400 were wounded. New
Zealand, 37 dead, 187 wounded; Thailand, 1,351 dead (3).

Civilians in South Vietnam killed in the war - about 1.58 million (3).

Civilians in Cambodia killed - often by USA bombing, about 700,000.

North Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered in very large numbers,

again often by bombing campaigns. Estimates vary up to about two
million dead (8). About fifty thousand civilians in Laos were killed.

18
About 1.2 million North Vietnamese military were killed or missing and
about 600,000 wounded (3, 6). People's Republic of China lost 1,446
military dead, about 4,200 wounded. The Soviet Union had about 16
military dead (7).

So, what did we get out of this bloody mess? Whatever strategic value
Vietnam had to France was lost. Although the USA tried to take over
the war effort after 1954, and spent a
huge amount in lives and
treasure, the war was lost. Whatever
strategic importance it had as a
"domino" in the fight against global
communism - as nonsensical a
hobgoblin as has ever been raised up to
scare people into supporting
the establishment, was also lost.

The war was hugely profitable to death merchants. Evil companies like
Boeing and Lockheed and Bell Helicopter run by blood spattered
homunculi were able to make enormous profits from the war by corruptly
allocated contracts. Depraved politicians like LBJ went to bed every night
of the war a little richer in treasure, a little more damned to perdition.
Bureau-rats had lots of jobs to distribute all this stolen wealth.

But it was basically a scam. There was no strategic interest worthy

of all that killing. There was no need to slaughter all those
civilians. There was only greed and viciousness, corruption, and abuse
of power. The war was never declared, so not authorised by the
constitution, and the escalation in 1964 was based on a lie - the Gulf
of Tonkin incident never happened, and the NSA released documentary
proof of this fact in 2005. LBJ himself said that the sailors were
shooting at "flying fish" and knew, all along, that there had been no
attack on US naval vessels in international waters. LBJ lied and
millions died (10).

The good part is that Americans resisted the war. They resisted the
draft. They refused to serve. They began a campaign of resistance in
the military, with soldiers preferring to serve in the stockade rather
than at a duty station where they would have to kill civilians.

19
Americans rioted. They burned out the ROTC barracks on several
campuses. They protested against the war mongers in the CIA being
allowed to recruit on campus. They ended campus recruitment for the
military for many years.

Journalists, not yet entirely corrupted by the establishment, did some

impressive work ferreting out the Pentagon papers and proving the
facts of the Watergate scandal - felony acts committed with the direct
knowledge of the president. Nixon, a racist, xenophobic, homophobic
bigot war monger and depraved mass murderer was removed from office,
forced to resign in disgrace. That he was not tried for treason,
convicted, and executed is a shame Americans have had to live with.

That his cronies like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were not convicted
of treason, or other crimes, and executed or imprisoned, but, rather,
left free to run further treasonous escapades more recently is also a
lasting shame. That Kissinger has not been deported to the World
Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity is a shame.

Nevertheless, the peace process begun in 1972, the war protest process
begun in the 1960s, and the exposure of corruption and betrayal had
many important and lasting results. Eventually, the Soviet Union's
grip on a vast region was shattered. The hobgoblin of global
communism was revealed to be a hollow threat. And for nearly a
decade, a peace dividend was available - until another hobgoblin, this
time of global Islamism was raised to frighten people out of their
wits.

And so we have had the recruiters come back

to campus to encourage men
and women to go off and slaughter babies in
foreign countries. We
have had the CIA back on campus to recruit
assassins, liars, and
rapists. Another war, with millions more casualties, not only in Iraq but
also in Afghanistan and by proxy in Somalia has interrupted many lives.
And individual liberty is again under assault.

20
It is again nothing but a scam. The slaughter of millions does not
protect American homes and lives. Suicidal terrorists can be
prevented from crashing planes into buildings by armed air crews and
armed passengers, not by mad violations of civil liberties at the
airports.

Most importantly, the death merchants have made billions in revenues,

once again. This time some of the names have changed - consolidation
in the death cartel in restraint of trade is merciless. But
Halliburton, KBR, the mercenaries formerly known as Blackwater, and
Boeing continue to sell death to a government that continues to buy it
with stolen tax dollars.

One of the lasting consequences of the protests over the Vietnam war
was the end of the military draft. We killed the draft through our
protests, including our violent protests. Americans won't be
conscripted, or there will be more rioting, and a revolution. The
powers that be know this fact, and are right to be afraid.

We know where they live. The Internet is a powerful tool for

research. We know where the owners of the death merchant companies
live. We know where the politicians who voted for war live. We know
where many of the senior bureau-rats live. And they should be afraid.

Burning the ROTC barracks on college campuses, confronting the

federalised national guard, sacrificing lives and suffering injuries,
the anti-war protestors and anti-government protestors were able to
end the war, end the draft, and end Nixon. We did it before, we can
do it again. And we should.

Because the cost in lives and treasure is not worth bearing. There is
nothing about slaughtering children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or
anywhere else that makes Americans safer. But the war machine does
it, and loves doing it. The war mongers are covered in the blood of
innocents. It is time, once again, to make them pay.
-----------
References
(1) Daggett, Stephen (24 July 2008), CRS Report to Congress : Costs of
Major U.S. Wars, Foreign press center, US Department of State,

21
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/108054.pdf (Order Code
RS22926, see table on page 2/5).

(2) http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2921527420080302

(3) Ulrich, Aaron (Editor); (2005 & 2006) (Box set, Color, Dolby,
DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC). Heart of Darkness: The Vietnam War
Chronicles 1945-1975. [Documentary]. Koch Vision. Event occurs at 321
minutes. ISBN 1-4172-2920-9.

(4) Vietnam war-eyewitness books; Iraq and Vietnam: Differences,

Similarities and Insights, (2004: Strategic Studies Institute)]

(5) http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx

(6) Soames, John. A History of the World, Routledge, 2005.

(7) Krivosheev G. F., Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th
century: losses of the Armed Forces. A Statistical Study Greenhill
1997 ISBN 1-85367-280-7 (Russian)

(8) Philip Shenon, 20 Years After Victory

(9) The landmark series Vietnam: A Television History, first broadcast

in 1983, is a special presentation of the award-winning PBS history
series, American Experience.

(10) Wiener, Tim, _Legacy of Ashes_, 2007

Jim Davidson is an author and entrepreneur. His current projects include

an agorist cadre, http://www.cadre.ag/ a documentary film
http://www.freewebs.com/11at40/ a feature film alongsidenight.com, a
no-state wedding registry WeRWed.com, a financial newsletter
theGoldenEconomy.com, an individual sovereign university, and Divest
From Death http://divestfromdeath.wordpress.com/. He
works every day to structure his affairs so he takes nothing from the
state, and gives nothing to it.

22
Mother, Should I Trust the Government?
By Kevin Carson
A commentary for the Center for a Stateless Society

Let’s start by getting a few things out of the way. I think the birthers are
nuts, and the “death panel” nonsense is just that–nonsense on stilts. I’ve
got no use at all for the Palin/Joe the Plumber/teabagger wing of the GOP.
I’m alarmed by said wing’s tendencies toward brownshirtism (as
chronicled by David Neiwert among others), and the astroturf mobs
organized by insurance industry stooges like Dick Armey and Rick Scott
to disrupt town hall meetings. And as strongly as I believe in the right to
keep and bear arms, I think anyone who shows up at a public appearance
by the President packing heat is probably missing some attic insulation.
All that being said, Keith Olbermann has really gone over the top with his
sanctimonious attacks on “conspiracy theorists” and people who “actually
fear their own government.” I get the impression he wouldn’t think much
more of Noam Chomsky’s view of the world, or Howard Zinn’s, than he
does of the right-wingers’. Olbmermann’s view of the world doesn’t have
much room for anything but plain old vanilla-flavored managerial
liberalism.
I suppose if you broke down Olbermann’s
view of the question for analysis, it would
probably go something like this: Sure,
horrible things happened under Bush and his
minions, but they were aberrations. They did
not result from the inherent nature of
government, and anyone who suggests
otherwise is a nutcase. The solution is simply
to put the right people in control of government, so government can
perform its default function as a progressive instrument for “all of us
working together.” In soccer mom parlance, the good guys, the “working
families who sit around the kitchen table,” are also the people who “play
by the rules.” And “the rules,” a la “Why Mommy is a Democrat,” are just
the sensible way that “all of us, working together,” come up with to make
the system work in “everybody’s interest” with a minimum of muss and
fuss.
But if you look at the actual history of the state, the “right people” were
apparently never in charge. As I pointed out in an earlier commentary

23
piece at Center for a Stateless Society, “The Democrats: Fake Party of
Compassion,” the Democrats have fully lived up to Nader’s
characterization of them: just the “liberal” head of the two-headed
corporate party.
All the so-called “progressive” regulatory and welfare state policies
created under the “Good Presidents” were made pursuant to government’s
function as (if you’ll pardon the phrase) executive committee of the
corporate capitalist ruling class. The stability of corporate capitalism, the
need for predictable profits and stable markets, the need to counteract
destabilizing tendencies toward overinvestment and underconsumption,
have always been front and center in the consciousness of policymaking
elites. That was the theme of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Progressive” regulatory
state, as recounted by Gabriel Kolko, and of FDR’s New Deal as described
by G.William Domhoff.
The Social Democratic or New Deal wing of those policymaking elites, in
particular, have paid more attention to avoiding destabilizing polarization
of wealth and income, and maintaining high levels of employment.
But the key economic policymaking roles, in Democratic administrations
as well as Republican, have been held by corporate executives, corporate
lawyers, and investment bankers. Ever hear of Bob Rubin or Tim
Geithner? Yeah, a real bunch of fire-eating anticapitalists we got there.
That’s one reason I hold such contempt for “Joe the Plumber” and his
screaming ignoramuses: anyone who can seriously look at Obama’s
economic team and its policies, and suspect him of being a closet
“Marxist,” probably shouldn’t be allowed to use scissors without adult
supervision.
Don’t get me wrong. If my only choices are between two kinds of statism,
I’ll take the one that weighs less heavily on my own neck. If my only
choices are between a German-style SocDem regime and the kind of right-
to-work sweatshop that Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff set up in the
Marianas Islands, I’ll take the former in a heartbeat.
But both models are run primarily in the interests of big business. To
repeat an old illustration I never tire of trotting out, the Democrats are like
a farmer who thinks it’s more profitable in the long run to feed and house
his livestock decently and work them in moderation, while the
Republicans are like a farmer who thinks he’ll come out ahead working
them to death and replacing them. If you’re going to be a plowhorse, it’s

24
better to be owned by a Democrat–but they both clearly think of us as their
livestock. Me, I’d rather the farm be run by the animals (minus the pigs, of
course).
My main objection to “conspiracy theorists,” of the
Schlafly/Smoot/Bircher type, is the weakness of their
explanatory framework. To someone in Hofstadter’s
“paranoid style of American politics,” all the
nefarious acts of those running the state are motivated
by personal cliques and ideological cabals: the
Illuminati, Obama’s secret Marxism or Islamism, the
lizard people, the Royals vs. the Vatican, the
Rothschilds and Rockefellers, etc.
In reality, most of the horrible things government does don’t require a
conspiracy, or secret meetings at the Nazi Saucer Base inside the Hollow
Earth, invoking Adam Weisshaupt and the eye in the pyramid. They follow
of necessity from the institutional and class structures into which our
world is organized.
To be sure, contra Olbermann, there have been conspiracies; they are, in
fact, fairly common. Hitler used SS provocateurs, in Polish uniforms, to
harass ethnic Germans in Danzig and create a pretext for war (and anyone
who doesn’t think American mainstream journalists would have reported
the official story as straight news, in the same situation, must not have
followed CNN coverage of the incident between Russia and Georgia last
August).
If the people who accuse FDR of “foreknowledge” of Pearl Harbor have
overreached themselves, there is nevertheless a preponderance of evidence
that he was trying to goad the Japanese into firing the first shot and
providing a pretext for war, and that his primary motivation was to secure
American corporate control of the resources and markets disappearing into
the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was his intention to
initiate war with Japan, if necessary, if the Empire took over the oilfields
of the Dutch East Indies.
Since then, we’ve had a CIA-engineered coup in Saigon to replace Diem
with someone who would acquiesce to an American invasion of South
Vietnam, and a fake “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin to provide the pretext
for such an invasion. We’ve had Bush I encouraging Kuwaiti slanted
drilling on the Iraqi border, April Glaspie’s assurances to Saddam that the

25
U.S. took no interest in inter-Arab conflicts, and official lies about
Kuwaiti incubator babies and massed Iraqi armor on the Saudi border.
We’ve had massaged intelligence under Bush II to lie the country into
another war with Iraq, clearly motivated by a “Great Game” with Russia
for strategic control of the Persian Gulf and Caspian oil basins.
If anything, the centralized, bureaucratic structure
of the corporate state promotes conspiracies as a
side-effect. When three or four county
commissioners meet informally at a barbecue in
violation of freedom of information laws, and
discuss using county equipment to pave the county
executive’s private access road, it doesn’t take a
crazy “conspiracy theorist” to believe it happens.
Considering the tightness of the good ol’ boy
networks that control most local governments, it’s
almost remarkable when it doesn’t happen.
Likewise, when society is controlled by a few hundred oligopoly
corporations, a bunch of centralized government agencies, and a dozen
giant media corporations, all united in an interlocking directorate with the
same few thousand people shuffling constantly back and forth in a
revolving door of leadership–well, of course conspiracies happen.
But the remarkable thing is just how unnecessary conspiracies are: they’re
just icing on the cake. The crimes of the corporate state, over the past
century or so, have been overwhelmingly carried out, not by Snidely
Whiplashes chortling with glee and twirling their moustaches, but by
bureaucratic functionaries acting in sincere good faith that their policies
were objectively required for the “public good.” Such people spend their
entire careers dutifully shuffling papers from their in-box to their out-box,
ordering the deaths of millions in the process, without ever suspecting that
what’s good for GM really might not be good for America. A world
dominated by a few hundred corporations wedded to the centralized state
is the only, natural, and inevitable way of doing things. And any kind of
“radicalism” that offers an alternative to that natural way of doing things
must be nipped in the bud.
Most of the great evils carried out by the American state over the past
century would have been carried out by such people without any
conspiracies, with absolutely no guilt or shame, in full confidence that it
was warranted by the objective requirements of the situation in light of

26
their duties to the “common good.”
But make no mistake: the kind of world maintained and run by these “little
Eichmanns” is, indeed, evil. Mass-murder has been very much a bipartisan
policy of the American state.
It’s almost comical to see retired CIA officers appearing as pet liberals on
Olbermann and Maddow, solemnly reassuring viewers that the CIA
absolutely never did things like waterboarding before
9-11, because it was “clearly illegal.” Good God, have
you people never heard of Philip Fucking Agee?!!
Maybe people with official GS ratings and paychecks
from Langley never directly pulled any fingernails, true
enough. But God knows enough fingernails were pulled
and enough people waterboarded by monsters put in
power by the CIA, or trained by the Green Berets or
School of the Americas.
There are the hundreds of thousands killed by Suharto (the Jarkarta station
chief helpfully compiled a roundup list for the Indonesian military) and by
Mobutu. And the reason: the sensible realists in American policy circles,
with no malice aforethought, considered a rational world order managed
by giant corporations to be in the general interest for long-term prosperity.
A world in which the giant corporations had to buy oil on terms set by
Sukarno, or copper and uranium on terms set by Lumumba, was simply
unthinkable to them.
In Guatemala, the sensible
realists found it similarly
intolerable for Arbenz to give
the land to its rightful owners
to the detriment of UFC. Since
he was overthrown in 1953,
hundreds of thousands of
people have been massacred
by military governments and
death squads in Guatemala
alone. In Central America as a
whole, the death toll from
death squads fighting to protect the region’s landed oligarchs extends into
the millions. The entire continent of South America, in the 1960s and

27
1970s, was swept by a series of CIA-assisted military coups (just Google
“Kissinger” and “Operation Condor”). The CIA may (or may not) have
assisted with the torture, but God alone knows how many people were
mutilated, murdered and disappeared in basement dungeons run by people
the CIA put in power.
You want ample ground to “fear your own government”? All you have to
do is Google “Palmer Raids,” “COINTELPRO,” “McCarran Internal
Security Act,” or “Garden Plot.” Or read up on the history of federal
strikebreaking in the Pullman Strike, the copper wars and coal wars, and
even under–yes, gasp, him–good ol’ liberal Harry Truman.
C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist
author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in
Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist
Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson
has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs,
including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and
his own Mutualist Blog.

To Tramps
by Lucy E. Parsons

Originally published in Alarm, October 4, 1884.

TO TRAMPS,
The Unemployed, the Disinherited, and Miserable.
A word to the 35,000 now tramping the streets of this
great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about
you at the evidence of wealth and pleasure of which you
own no part, not sufficient even to purchase yourself a
bit of food with which to appease the pangs of hunger
now knawing at your vitals. It is with you and the
hundreds of thousands of others similarly situated in this
great land of plenty, that I wish to have a word.

Have you not worked hard all your life, since you were old enough for
your labor to be of use in the production of wealth? Have you not toiled
long, hard and laboriously in producing wealth? And in all those years of
drudgery do you not know you have produced thousand upon thousands of

28
dollars' worth of wealth, which you did not then, do not now, and unless
you ACT, never will, own any part in? Do you not know that when you
were harnessed to a machine and that machine harnessed to steam, and
thus you toiled your 10, 12 and 16 hours in the 24, that during this time in
all these years you received only enough of your labor product to furnish
yourself the bare, coarse necessaries of life, and that when you wished to
purchase anything for yourself and family it always had to be of the
cheapest quality? If you wanted to go anywhere you had to wait until
Sunday, so little did you receive for your unremitting toil that you dare not
stop for a moment, as it were? And do you not know that with all your
squeezing, pinching and economizing you never were enabled to keep but
a few days ahead of the wolves of want? And that at last when the caprice
of your employer saw fit to create an artificial famine by limiting
production, that the fires in the furnace were extinguished, the iron horse
to which you had been harnessed was stilled; the factory door locked up,
you turned upon the highway a tramp, with hunger in your stomach and
rags upon your back?

Yet your employer told you that it was overproduction which made him
close up. Who cared for the bitter tears and heart-pangs of your loving
wife and helpless children, when you bid them a loving "God bless you"
and turned upon the tramper's road to seek employment elsewhere? I say,
who cared for those heartaches and pains? You were only a tramp now, to
be execrated and denounced as a "worthless tramp and a vagrant" by that
very class who had been engaged all those years in robbing you and yours.
Then can you not see that the "good boss" or the "bad boss" cuts no figure
whatever? that you are the common prey of both, and that their mission is
simply robbery? Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM
and not the "boss" which must be changed?

Now, when all these bright summer and autumn days are going by and you
have no employment, and consequently can save up nothing, and when the
winter's blast sweeps down from the north and all the earth is wrapped in a
shroud of ice, hearken not to the voice of the hyprocrite who will tell you
that it was ordained of God that "the poor ye have always"; or to the
arrogant robber who will say to you that you "drank up all your wages last
summer when you had work, and that is the reason why you have nothing
now, and the workhouse or the workyard is too good for you; that you
ought to be shot." And shoot you they will if you present your petitions in

29
too emphatic a manner. So hearken not to them, but list! Next winter when
the cold blasts are creeping through the rents in your seedy garments,
when the frost is biting your feet through the holes in your worn-out shoes,
and when all wretchedness seems to have centered in and upon you, when
misery has marked you for her own and life has become a burden and
existence a mockery, when you have walked the streets by day and slept
upon hard boards by night, and at last determine by your own hand to take
your life, - for you would rather go out into utter nothingness than to
longer endure an existence which has become such a burden - so,
perchance, you determine to dash yourself into the cold embrace of the
lake rather than longer suffer thus. But halt, before you commit this last
tragic act in the drama of your simple existence. Stop! Is there nothing you
can do to insure those whom you are about to orphan, against a like fate?
The waves will only dash over you in mockery of your rash act; but stroll
you down the avenues of the rich and look through the magnificent plate
windows into their voluptuous homes, and here you will discover the very
identical robbers who have despoiled you and yours. Then let your
tragedy be enacted here! Awaken them from their wanton sport at your
expense! Send forth your petition and let them read it by the red glare of
destruction. Thus when you cast "one long lingering look behind" you can
be assured that you have spoken to these robbers in the only language
which they have ever been able to understand, for they have never yet
deigned to notice any petition from their slaves that they were not
compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannon's mouths, or
that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword. You need no
organization when you make up your mind to present this kind of petition.
In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you; but each of you
hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little
methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor
man, and you will become a power in this or any other land.

Learn the use of explosives!

Dedicated to the tramps by Lucy E. Parsons.

Born in Texas, 1853, probably as a slave, Lucy Parsons was an African-,
Native- and Mexican-American anarchist labor activist who fought
against the injustices of poverty, racism, capitalism and the state her
entire life. Learn more about her at http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org.
Her collected writings can be found at http://www.charleshkerr.net/.

30
Left-Libertarianism and the Weird Case for Market Means to
Socialist Ends.
By James Tuttle, Tulsa Alliance of the Libertarian Left

In the Political Zoo, amongst all the established Political animals,

from right-wing hawks and left-Wing doves, from Democratic donkeys to
Republican elephants, by far the strangest of all the animals, to the
uninitiated, is the left-libertarian. To the other members of the
animal kingdom, the left-libertarian is a zebra with blue and orange
stripes, marked by clashing colors that render its herd-based
camouflage useless. To some skeptics, the clash of colors looks like a
warning: “Poison! Do not ingest!”

In five essays the Tulsa ALL has collected here, Gary Chartier offers
a very clear and introductory case that left-libertarian theory is not
a clash of colors or a source of poison, but a welcome antidote to
tired categories. He argues in the first two essays that
left-libertarianism is authentically libertarian—but, also
authentically leftist. In the third and fourth, he engages in and
offers remedies for apparent tensions between the spirit of socialism
on the one hand and, on the other, socialism as understood by vulgar
libertarians and practiced by state socialists. He offers a way of
understanding socialism as a position that ought to be attractive to
libertarians. In the fifth and final essay, he applies
left-libertarian insights and offers a theoretically sound approach to
the high-volume, low-insight health-care debate. I can’t help but
spoil the ending: to achieve goals, there’s no better strategy than
unleashing the wonders of the freed market.

Gary Chartier is a member of the Center for a Stateless Society's advisory

panel. He blogs at http://www.liberalaw.blogspot.com. Socialist Ends,
Market Means (Five Essays by Gary Chartier) can be downloaded at
http://c4ss.org/content/1007.

31
Some Recommended Reading from the Tulsa ALL
By James Tuttle

I hope to provide food for thought and vindication of general left-

libertarian theory and strategy.
1. The Debates of Liberty by Wendy McElroy, ISBN 0-7391-0473-
X
Wendy McElroy’s “Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881-
1908” is not only a fantastic introduction to individualist
anarchism particularly and anarchism in general, but she presents
fair exposition to those core controversies that have been debated
by anarchists forever.
2. Concerning Women by Suzanne La Follette, ISBN-10:
040504464X
Suzanne Le Follette was a friend of Albert J. Nock and a
contributor and fellow editor of The Freeman. She was libertarian
and a feminist that in the 1920s wrote radical insights like, “The
State always represents the organized interest of a dominant class;
therefore the subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the
State, and their emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the
State.”
3. Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, ISBN (10) 1-58005-154-5
Julia Serano is a scientist, writer, a poet and a transgender activist.
In Whipping Girl she illustrates the difficulties of being a
transgendered woman in a sexist/cisssexist culture and that
activism cannot be an incremental process, for some it’s a decision
between life and death.
4. The Politics of Reality by Marilyn Frye, ISBN 0-89594-099-X
For those that have been around the left-libertarian blogs of
Charles “RadGeek” Johnson or Professor Roderick T. Long’s
Austro-Athenian Empire will be familiar with Marilyn Frye’s essay
Oppression. I am here to formally recommend the book that
contains such a beloved essay. The Politics of Reality will take you
through Marilyn Frye’s process of recognizing, identifying and
coming to terms with sexism. Once we have a target we can take
aim and take it down.
5. Utopia by Sir Thomas More, ISBN 0-393-96145-1
By now it might be requirement to know of Kevin Carson if one is
to claim left-libertarianism and get away with it. For everyone that

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 has read his Studies in Mutualist Political Economy or
Organization Theory and has become aware of, or if your me
daydreamed about, Ralph Borsodi and Peter Kropotkin’s
discussions of the potentials found in the home/factory. The locus
of production in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was also the home. I
think after reading Carson and returning to More you will find that
our little movement has a grander history and might not be so little
as we thought. From Book One: “Simple theft is not so great a
crime that it ought to cost a man his head, yet no punishment
however severe can withhold a man from robbery when he has no
other way to eat.”

Additional Suggestions
Theory/History
• Left Liberty a journal of mutualist anarchist history and theory,
Corvus Distribution.
• Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand by Kevin Carson, Invisible
Molotov Distribution.
• Calculated Chaos by Butler Shaffer
• An Agorist Primer by Samuel Edward Konkin III (aka SEK3)
• Socialist Ends, Market Means (Five Essays by Gary Chartier),
Center for a Stateless Society/Tulsa ALL
• Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey

Strategy
• New Libertarian Manifesto by SEK3
• Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
• Trajectory of Change by Michael Albert
• Liberating Learning by Darian Worden, New Jersey ALL.

DIY
• Toolbox for Sustainable City Living by Scott Kellogg and Stacy
Pettigrew
• Making Shit and Doing Things, Microcosm Publishing.
• Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.

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 Online Resources
Agorist Action Alliance – www.agorism.info/

Alliance of the Libertarian Left – www.libertarianleft.org

Anarchist FAQ – http://www.anarchyfaq.org/

Anarchist News – www.anarchistnews.org

AnarchoBlogs – www.anarchoblogs.org

Association of Libertarian Feminists – www.alf.org

Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left- www.libertarianleft.bravehost.com

Center for a Stateless Society – http://c4ss.org

Feminist Blogs - http://feministblogs.org/

Forums of the Libertarian Left – www.libertarianleft.freeforums.org

Invisible Molotov Distro – http://invisiblemolotov.wordpress.com

Libertarian Enterprise - http://www.ncc-1776.org/

Libertarian Left Aggregator – www.leftlibertarian.org

Liberty Activism Repository - http://libertyactivism.info

Molinari Institute – www.praxeology.net/molinari.htm

Rational Review News Digest – www.rationalreview.com/news

Strike the Root – www.strike-the-root.com

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www.corvusdistribution.org

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