Silk Road forums
Discussion => Philosophy, Economics and Justice => Topic started by: middleBiggy on November 30, 2012, 12:26 am
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Konkin ends the New Libertarian Manifesto with a revolution strategy divided into 5 phases:
0- Zero-Density Agorist Society
1- Low-Density Agorist Society
2- Mid-Density, Small Condensation Agorist Society
3- High-Density, Large Condensation Agorist Society
4- Agorist Society with Statist Impurities
These are basically a phased transition from a single individual's action to a triumph of freedom for all, and they are worth a closer look in the context of SR.
Phase 1 is described as
"The first counter-economic libertarians appear in this phase" and notes "deviationism will run rife and tend to overwhelm activism"
sound familiar?
Phase 2:
"At this point the statists take notice of agorism."
we know this too well.
"they will start to be perceived as a a threat. Pogroms (mass arrests) may even occur, although that is unlikely.
Remember, most agorists are embedded in the rest of society and associating with them are partially-converted libertarians and counter- economists. In order to reach this phase, the entire society has been contaminated by agorism to a degree."
growth has its benefits. Thus it is now possible for the first "ghettos" or districts of agorists to appear and count on the sympathy of the rest of society to restrain the State from a mass attack."
While its clear we still have most of our toes in Phase 1 the second phase is a realistic aspiration for our own "ghetto". Given the growing worldwide distaste for the drug war and the accelerating legalization of marijuana, some public sympathy for a cartel-less and otherwise admirably behaved community can not be dismissed out of hand anymore. Certainly the entire "rest of society" can not be "counted on" but progress in this direction is not only possible but probable if the Silk Road is a demonstrably civil and enlightened agora.
Alternatively if we are an "unsympatehtic" place it won't only be in manifested in the hatred of outsiders but also in discontinuity, and ultimately demise from our own inability to defend ourselves. Phase 1 has another prophetic quote, stating that nascent agoras can't usually be expected to start a wider movement:
"Mass conversion is impossible. There is one exception - radicalization by statist attack against a collective. Even so, it requires entrepreneurs of Liberty to have sufficiently informed the persecuted collective so that they lase coherently libertarian-ward rather than scatter randomly or worse, flow into out-of-power statism."
This raises the question of how well informed we "entrepreneurs of liberty" are. The panic resulting from the last outage surely attests to a "random scatter" that would follow a real attack on SR rather than us remaining together, newly emboldened from the attack. But certainly is it possible if, like DPR, we take inspiration from the minds that foresaw what we are now living.