A Revolution Not Worth Having
Tonight I saw a google ad for “anarchocapitalist revolution.” I thought “whoa, anarchocapitalists have a theory of revolution?” Unlike us market anarchists who use market forces against the state, anarchocapitalists seem pretty unimaginative when it comes to abolishing state power.
The link goes to a page advocating asymmetric warfare to destroy the state. It includes the following gem:
Is it ethical to kill children brought by government employees to their workplace, as Timothy McVeigh did in 1995?
Yes. In many cases, the only alternative would be to forgo targeting the government building, which would mean allowing the government’s violent aggression to continue. Moreover, avoiding such targets would create incentives to use children as human shields. The situation is similar to one in which a bank robber holds his child in one arm as he points a gun at the teller with the other. If the child perishes in the crossfire, it is the robber’s fault for bringing him. Similarly, it is the fault of the parent and of the government if a child dies in a terrorist attack on a government facility. It is worth noting that in the long run, allowing the government to continue operating will likely result in the death of more children than would be lost in anarcho-capitalist revolution. Noncombatants have borne the brunt of most wars waged by the U.S. Government, with killed children being dismissed as acceptable collateral damage.
Personally I am not against the use of violence, in fact I am strongly pro self-defense. I do not believe in a revolution that swears off violence, but a revolution that allows violence is far different from one that focuses on violence. The former yields a world where people are willing to defend themselves individually and collectively, with arms if necessary. The latter, a revolution focused on bombs and assassination, will yield little besides bombs and assassination.
One must also recognize that any time violence is used, an innocent person can die, but it is the duty of the fighter to do whatever he can to prevent it. Should an armed man break into your apartment, a few .40 caliber bullets at his body is an acceptable response. Firing a heavy machine gun at him is not. Neither is blowing up the block that he came from.
Blowing up the government will do nothing when there is nothing to take its place. Screw you government wannabes, I’ll take counter-culture and counter-economics. The market holds more useful power than all the ammonium nitrate in the world. I’ll be building freedom while you decide who is guilty of supporting the rival gang.
There is of course, the possibility that this site is set up by the feds, but I think it’s just a desperate man with bad ideas. Admittedly I didn’t look at it much, don’t plan to look at it anymore, and I’m too tired to be writing with great coherence.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
This sounds like bate. Ideas are what make the revolution not violence. Violence just breeds more of the same.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Yeah, I knew how this was going to turn out when I saw the section on Timothy McVeigh in the table of contents.
You would think author(s) so clearly attuned to the State’s Orwellian doublespeak over mass murder would hesitate just a little bit before rushing to justify collateral damage when it suits their goals.
You would also think that radical individualists would tend to put human lives and safety before the success of “The Cause.” It feels like the author into the Blockian lunacy that treats personal rights as one minor and disposable form of property rights. It really is too much to ask for a little compassionate restraint.
Callous inhumanity aside, the problem with his perspective isn’t the use of violence, but the fact that it glorifies violence to the exclusion of all other tactics and values necessary for creating a libertarian counter-culture. Like you, I don’t disavow the use of force, but having a terroristic obsession with it is missing the point. We fight to protect other things that are intrinsically valuable; life, its property, and the open society that allows both to flourish. Values like liberality, tolerance, feminism and anti-racism are just as important to a libertarian society as the right to organized self-defense (not to be confused with this guy’s strategy). It’s important to actually promote these positive aspects of libertarianism in addition to undermining or destroying the tools of aggression, and that definitely means a conscious attempt to cultivate a counter-culture.
Even beyond that, defining ourselves as simply the opposite of what exists now is letting our enemies set our agenda for us. That’s another benefit to counter-economics; it focuses on creating something positively libertarian to show the world what it can be. It doesn’t just make decontextualized attacks on the State.
August 29th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Been waiting to reply to this, and now I see I don’t have to.
What Soviet Onion said. Times a hundred.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:05 am
There is room in the anarcho-capitalist movement both for terrorists and for those who pursue more peaceful methods of persuasion. However, if some innocents should happen to be killed because they got in the way of efforts to destroy the state, my response is that their lives were less important than implementing anarcho-capitalism. Not everyone will agree with this prioritization and be willing to act accordingly, but fortunately, it doesn’t take many.