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Anti-Politics
The 20th Century was a time of state-sponsored conflict, genocide, & pilfering. From 1914 to the present, politicians induced a state of constant terror & bloodshed. Over 100 million people and counting have been slaughtered in their disputes. From Germany & Kosovo, to Rwanda & beyond - even more have died in their ethnic, religious & tribal cleansings. In that same time, central banks have orchestrated the largest redistribution of wealth in mankind’s history - taking virtually everything from the middle class and enslaving them in the process - and handing it all to the political elite.
Why then do anti-State theories struggle to take hold? If oppression is so obvious, and the libertarian solution so clear - why do so many remain chained by so few? In this book we’ll examine revolutionary tactics. Find out which strategies have been successful, which have failed, and why. It should be no surprise, that in the end, the only cure for politics is anti-politics.
Why then do anti-State theories struggle to take hold? If oppression is so obvious, and the libertarian solution so clear - why do so many remain chained by so few? In this book we’ll examine revolutionary tactics. Find out which strategies have been successful, which have failed, and why. It should be no surprise, that in the end, the only cure for politics is anti-politics.
165 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 19, 2021
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68 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 23, 2021
This appears to be a print-on-demand collection of essay excerpts by agorist / counter-economics / anarchist / pro-non-violence thinkers. I assume reviewing it will get me put on a list somewhere. "David, you are already on all the lists." Oh... nevermind then. :). Three quick things to say:
1. Americans should read more political philosophy like this. Dare I say Americans should even read more BAD political philosophy, because I don't think most Americans actually HAVE a conscious political philosophy at all. What they have is thinking that barely moves past "if I personally think something is a good idea, it should be legal and possibly mandated, and if I personally think something is a bad idea, it should probably be banned". We need to do better than that as a people. I think that these days when I read "two thirds of Americans favor vaccine mandates"... right, because two thirds of Americans favor mandating EVERYTHING they like. Whatever.
2. You could read this book, not because you have any particular interest in the ideas, but just as a "what do these agorist people think anyway?". Read that way, I would say the book is helpful.
3. Finally, but do *I* believe the ideas shared in the book? Well it is an interesting read. Near the beginning of the book I did have more of an attitude that it was sort of pie-in-the-sky, "imagine how wonderful things would be if we all just ignored the state and stopped voting and just lived our lives". Yeah OK, but I'm still going to vote for the best candidate in the next election. But then in perhaps the last third of the book it gets into historical successes of the counter-economics mindset, and that was more convincing. There is a great comment that surely the state would have rather had Satoshi Nakamoto manning the telephones at the Libertarian Party instead of writing his white paper - that is certainly the truth! There is another good essay about the success of smuggling Western films into communist Romania and translating them within the country and how seeing the affluence of the West in film help lead to the downfall of communism there. And there is a nice essay excerpt from "Christian anarchist" Leo Tolstoy to an Indian revolutionary... I didn't know that about Tolstoy.
So a recommended read. If you find yourself rolling your eyes a little bit near the beginning of the book I did think it got better as you went.
1. Americans should read more political philosophy like this. Dare I say Americans should even read more BAD political philosophy, because I don't think most Americans actually HAVE a conscious political philosophy at all. What they have is thinking that barely moves past "if I personally think something is a good idea, it should be legal and possibly mandated, and if I personally think something is a bad idea, it should probably be banned". We need to do better than that as a people. I think that these days when I read "two thirds of Americans favor vaccine mandates"... right, because two thirds of Americans favor mandating EVERYTHING they like. Whatever.
2. You could read this book, not because you have any particular interest in the ideas, but just as a "what do these agorist people think anyway?". Read that way, I would say the book is helpful.
3. Finally, but do *I* believe the ideas shared in the book? Well it is an interesting read. Near the beginning of the book I did have more of an attitude that it was sort of pie-in-the-sky, "imagine how wonderful things would be if we all just ignored the state and stopped voting and just lived our lives". Yeah OK, but I'm still going to vote for the best candidate in the next election. But then in perhaps the last third of the book it gets into historical successes of the counter-economics mindset, and that was more convincing. There is a great comment that surely the state would have rather had Satoshi Nakamoto manning the telephones at the Libertarian Party instead of writing his white paper - that is certainly the truth! There is another good essay about the success of smuggling Western films into communist Romania and translating them within the country and how seeing the affluence of the West in film help lead to the downfall of communism there. And there is a nice essay excerpt from "Christian anarchist" Leo Tolstoy to an Indian revolutionary... I didn't know that about Tolstoy.
So a recommended read. If you find yourself rolling your eyes a little bit near the beginning of the book I did think it got better as you went.
October 6, 2021
Overall, this is a great collection of essays. Some of them could use a little editing, but they're apparently all reprinted faithfully from other sources, so perhaps it's better as it is. The organization in four parts doesn't seem to quite as neatly divide the subject matter as one might expect; to some extent, it felt like the main purpose of the books content organization might, in practice, just be to provide natural "stopping points" when it's time to go to bed or get back to work (or whatever you have pending).
It's an easy read, packed with differing -- but generally agreeing -- perspectives on economic and individual liberty, effective strategies for improving life both narrowly and broadly, and asserting an ethical worldview and policy for living. Some of the arguments are a little on the facile side and, while I believe there are deeply important and extremely well-supported arguments against participating in a significant way in the mainstream political electoral process, the argument that seems to get the most play in this book's various essays is perhaps the weakest: the claim that it is somehow unethical to vote at all. Arguments to that effect always feel a bit lacking in substance, and I suspect the attempt to divert resources away from electoral politics and toward actually making the world a better place would be greatly enhanced by ceasing to harp on the supposed unethicality of voting per se. If there's some strong argument for that position, I haven't yet seen it, unfortunately -- but stronger arguments against bothering with the electoral process as a voter are legion, and a fair number of them do managed to get a little bit of page space in this book.
Amusingly, it wasn't long ago that I (re)read Civil Disobedience, part of which got excerpted for this book. Henry David Thoreau was a bit of a genius of political philosophy and, among people with surviving written works on the subject, he seems to stand alone in his insights. I'm glad he got some space in this book.
Overall, it's definitely worth a read. I tend to nitpick the annoyances in some of the best books I read, because they're so good overall that it's easier to identify the negatives than choose a small enough number of positives to bother elaborating on them.
Read this book. While you're at it, read An Agorist Primer and The Second Realm: Book on Strategy.
It's an easy read, packed with differing -- but generally agreeing -- perspectives on economic and individual liberty, effective strategies for improving life both narrowly and broadly, and asserting an ethical worldview and policy for living. Some of the arguments are a little on the facile side and, while I believe there are deeply important and extremely well-supported arguments against participating in a significant way in the mainstream political electoral process, the argument that seems to get the most play in this book's various essays is perhaps the weakest: the claim that it is somehow unethical to vote at all. Arguments to that effect always feel a bit lacking in substance, and I suspect the attempt to divert resources away from electoral politics and toward actually making the world a better place would be greatly enhanced by ceasing to harp on the supposed unethicality of voting per se. If there's some strong argument for that position, I haven't yet seen it, unfortunately -- but stronger arguments against bothering with the electoral process as a voter are legion, and a fair number of them do managed to get a little bit of page space in this book.
Amusingly, it wasn't long ago that I (re)read Civil Disobedience, part of which got excerpted for this book. Henry David Thoreau was a bit of a genius of political philosophy and, among people with surviving written works on the subject, he seems to stand alone in his insights. I'm glad he got some space in this book.
Overall, it's definitely worth a read. I tend to nitpick the annoyances in some of the best books I read, because they're so good overall that it's easier to identify the negatives than choose a small enough number of positives to bother elaborating on them.
Read this book. While you're at it, read An Agorist Primer and The Second Realm: Book on Strategy.
October 18, 2021
If you’re still waiting for your masters for permission to live after nearly two years of “two weeks to flatten the curve”, don’t bother reading further. This isn’t your kind of book, and it won’t be your kind of review. Sal Mayweather is principally writing to political libertarians, those who believe in using existing parties, particularly the Libertarian Party, to effect positive change (reduced government, an end to state bullying, interventionism, etc). He marshals a host of allies to bid his reader — stop. It’s pointless. Any energy poured into the existing system is energy lost, energy that could have been used to subvert the system and create real change, instead. Mayweather, as host of the Agorist Podcast, contributes some of his own writings here, and leans heavily on Samuel E. Konkin III, whose theories on agorism and countereconomics organized anti-political thought in the 1960s, but his contributors include writers as diverse as Emma Goldman, Henry David Thoreau, and Gandhi. The ultimate lesson: don’t vote, do.
Although this agorist/voluntaryist/ant-political view has been making regular orbits in my thinking since at least 2019, it took the last year and a half of collective insanity for my remnant of faith in civil society to be destroyed completely. The world has taken a dark turn, somehow becoming infinitely less humane than it already was, a turn initiated by governments but continually fueled by the masses’ docility. Napoleon said that religion was excellent stuff for keeping common folk quiet, but politics is even better — politics keeps people agitated against one another, and the ritual of voting makes them think they’re going to change things even as the state goes its own way regardless. No election in the history of American elections has reversed the growth of government; at times it has slowed, and at times its energy has been been ineptly used, but by and large it grows.
The issue is not that the power of the government is being used incorrectly, Mayweather and other authors write; the issue is that such power exists. Even if someone wants it for good reasons, it will still corrupt them; they mean to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. It is power over others, the will to dominate others, that is the issue, and libertarians and anarchists cannot be taken seriously for wanting to destroy the devil with the devil’s own tools. Beyond arguing that seeking power is immoral in principle, and self-defeating in practice, Mayweather and others also point to how much more effective countereconomics, direct action, civil disobedience, and the like are. Even against the Nazis, civil disobedience was proven to work, as evidenced by the Rosenstrasse triumph, in which a mass protest of German wives forced Hitler and Goebbels to release the wives’ Jewish husbands from a deportment staging area — saving their lives. Oppressive states always generate a counter-economy through their abuses: in Iran, for instance, media that is officially banned once passed from hand to hand via cassette tapes; now it moves through USB drives. In our modern time, Mayweather asks, who broke the hotel and taxi monopolies — was it voting, or was it the free actions of creative visionaries who gave consumers options (AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, etc) around the law-cushioned corporations? What prompted the state to finally begin yielding on the drug war? Was it lobbyists, or widespread disobedience? Hope lies in action, not following the state’s script.
These are not new ideas; Mayweather opens with an Enlightenment-era summary condemnation of the state that’s worth reading just for its language, and moves to our present age through authors like Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. I was particularly please to see Gandhi, for its was his commitment to nonviolence that made me recognize that coercion is immoral even when conducted by the government for 'good reasons'. Although the book is chiefly an argument against political participation, it also presents occasional ideas for building a counter-economy — working under the table, dropping out of the money economy by becoming more self-sufficient, shifting to cryptocurrency, etc. In 2021, there’s never been a better time to become ungovernable
Although this agorist/voluntaryist/ant-political view has been making regular orbits in my thinking since at least 2019, it took the last year and a half of collective insanity for my remnant of faith in civil society to be destroyed completely. The world has taken a dark turn, somehow becoming infinitely less humane than it already was, a turn initiated by governments but continually fueled by the masses’ docility. Napoleon said that religion was excellent stuff for keeping common folk quiet, but politics is even better — politics keeps people agitated against one another, and the ritual of voting makes them think they’re going to change things even as the state goes its own way regardless. No election in the history of American elections has reversed the growth of government; at times it has slowed, and at times its energy has been been ineptly used, but by and large it grows.
The issue is not that the power of the government is being used incorrectly, Mayweather and other authors write; the issue is that such power exists. Even if someone wants it for good reasons, it will still corrupt them; they mean to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. It is power over others, the will to dominate others, that is the issue, and libertarians and anarchists cannot be taken seriously for wanting to destroy the devil with the devil’s own tools. Beyond arguing that seeking power is immoral in principle, and self-defeating in practice, Mayweather and others also point to how much more effective countereconomics, direct action, civil disobedience, and the like are. Even against the Nazis, civil disobedience was proven to work, as evidenced by the Rosenstrasse triumph, in which a mass protest of German wives forced Hitler and Goebbels to release the wives’ Jewish husbands from a deportment staging area — saving their lives. Oppressive states always generate a counter-economy through their abuses: in Iran, for instance, media that is officially banned once passed from hand to hand via cassette tapes; now it moves through USB drives. In our modern time, Mayweather asks, who broke the hotel and taxi monopolies — was it voting, or was it the free actions of creative visionaries who gave consumers options (AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, etc) around the law-cushioned corporations? What prompted the state to finally begin yielding on the drug war? Was it lobbyists, or widespread disobedience? Hope lies in action, not following the state’s script.
These are not new ideas; Mayweather opens with an Enlightenment-era summary condemnation of the state that’s worth reading just for its language, and moves to our present age through authors like Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. I was particularly please to see Gandhi, for its was his commitment to nonviolence that made me recognize that coercion is immoral even when conducted by the government for 'good reasons'. Although the book is chiefly an argument against political participation, it also presents occasional ideas for building a counter-economy — working under the table, dropping out of the money economy by becoming more self-sufficient, shifting to cryptocurrency, etc. In 2021, there’s never been a better time to become ungovernable
September 14, 2021
Shows An Alternative
We beat our heads against the walls of power, never realizing that, within our individual talents and abilities, we are capable of powerful acts that can make life better for us and for others.
We beat our heads against the walls of power, never realizing that, within our individual talents and abilities, we are capable of powerful acts that can make life better for us and for others.
February 3, 2022
This book makes me want to grow my own food, 3D print my own guns and live in some cabin deep in the forest like Ted kaczynski.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews