New Libertarian Manifesto

Samuel Edward Konkin III

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Chapter Index

Page numbers appear in blue: 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73

My notes appear in pale yellow.

[68] V.  ACTION! OUR TACTICS

NLM.5.1		The previous chapter discussed some tactics in passing.  A few that have been found productive for radical libertarians and the Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL) include infiltration of less radical groups and sparking splits by presenting alternatives; confrontation of coercion (or deviation) with visible protest and rejection; day-to-day personal salesmanship among friends; libertarian social groups such as supper clubs to exchange information, goods, and support and act as a proto-agora; and, of course, publication, public speaking, writing fiction with agorist messages,44 and educational activities in many forms: teacher, business consultant, entertainer, revisionist historian, agorist economist, etc.
NLM.5.2		Successful tactics can only be discovered and used and passed on.  Those who perceive sufficiently similar conditions in time and place to those of another where a tactic worked can use it.  But it is all a risk; that is what activism is, a type of entrepreneurship, of guessing the market and supplying the demand.  One can become better and better at making good guesses; that’s what makes a successful entrepreneur.  It’s all in Human Action by von Mises if you can apply it.
NLM.5.3		[69] To find out what has been tried and worked or failed, communication is necessary.  If you have reached this page and agreed, and have a desire to support resistance or a burning need to resist coercion, you are ready for the MLL or New Libertarian Alliance (NLA) in existence, depending on the phase we are currently in (Chapter IV).  Free yourself.  Get active.
NLM.5.4		What phase are we in?  In October 1980 (first edition) most of the planet Earth is in Phase 0.  The British Isles, Australia, and Canada have moved substantially towards Phase 1; North America is in Phase 1.  Only in the highest concentration of libertarians today, in Southern California, are the first signs of Phase 2.  Assuming the situation is not reversed, the first few droplets of actual agorist societies—anarchovillages—are nucleating a viable subsociety.
NLM.5.5		The Movement of the Libertarian Left exists only in California with a few scattered nuclei—agents and cells—in Alliance.  The New Libertarian Alliance previously proclaimed was found premature and NLA remains in embryo (or nucleus) until objective conditions arrive to sustain it.
NLM.5.6		The MLL has its work cut out for it.  Externally, the worldwide collapse of the “Left”45 [70] has weakened restraints on the competitive segments of the State who are rushing toward war to remystify their restive victims with patriotism.  Seizing the abandoned leadership of the anti-imperialism, anti-war, and anti-conscription movement with a fresh, invigorating, ideological backing has become an opportunity for libertarians to become the Left.  MLL has to compete with partyarch and monocentrist elements for this preeminence.46
NLM.5.7		The lurching of American plutocracy from the brink of runaway inflation to depression and back again—in ever wilder swings—has panicked large numbers of complacent businessmen and raised their consciousness beyond conservative assurances of restoring stability to consider radical and even revolutionary alternatives.  Only the Libertarian Left can steer these entrepreneurs towards an “ideological,” non-pragmatic position.  Therein lie our opportunities.
NLM.5.8		Internally, the “Libertarian” Party has reached a crisis with the 1980 American Presidential election.  The premature unmasking of the statism inherent in partyarchy by Crane–Clark’s blatant opportunism has managed to generated not only Left opposition but Right and Center opposition.47  Major defections mount [71] daily.48
NLM.5.9		The failure of some reformist element to oust the Kochtopus by the Denver Convention (August 1981) and lull the unradicalized back in line would set the U.S. “Libertarian” Party back dramatically and generate thousands of disillusioned recruits for the MLL and anti-party educational and counter-economic activities.
NLM.5.10		With this manifesto as a manual and inspiration, New Libertarian strategists and tacticians can research, develop, correct and enact the New Libertarian Strategy and the tactics appropriate to the conditions met.  Much work is needed but the projects have consequences [72] no mundane work can provide: an end to politics, to taxation, to conscription, to economic catastrophe, to involuntary poverty, and to the mass murder of warfare in the final war: society against Our Enemy, The State.
NLM.5.11		Counter-economics provides immediate gratification for those who abandon statist restraint.  Libertarianism rewards the practitioner who follows it with more self-liberation and personal fulfillment than any alternative yet conceived.  But only New Libertarianism offers reformation of society into a moral, working way of life without changing the nature of Man.  Utopias may be discarded; at last we have a glimpse of how to remold society to fit Man rather than Man to fit some society.  What more rewarding challenge could be offered?
NLM.5.12		Should you now have chosen the New Libertarian path, you may wish to join us in our “Triple A” oath and battle cry—or something similar—and renew yourself with it regularly:
NLM.5.13		“We witness to the efficacy of freedom and exult in the intricate beauty of complex voluntary exchange.  We demand the right of every ego to maximize its value without limit save that of another ego.  We proclaim the age of the Market unbound, the natural and proper condition for humanity, wealth in abundance, goals without end or limit, and self-determined meaning for all: Agora.
NLM.5.14		“We challenge all who would bind us to show cause; failing proof of our aggression we shatter our fetters.  We bring to justice all who have aggressed against [73] any, ever.  We restore all who have suffered oppression to their rightful condition.  And we destroy forever the Monster of the Ages, the pseudo-legitimized monopoly of coercion, from our minds and from our society, the protector of aggressors and thwarter of justice.  That is, we smash the State: Anarchy.
NLM.5.15		“We exert our wills to our personal limits, restrained only by consistent morality.  We struggle against anti-principles that would sap our wills and combat all who physically challenge us.  We rest not nor waste resource until the State is smashed and humanity has reached its agorist home.  Burning with unflagging desire for Justice now and Liberty forever, we win: Action!
NLM.5.16		“Agora.  Anarchy.  Action!”
		—Samuel Edward Konkin III October 12, 1980 AnarchoVillage (Long Beach)

Back to Chapter Four

Forward to the Critiques

^__________

⁴⁴ E.g., Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman (Crown, 1979; Ace, 1982; Avon, 1987; SoftServ, 1990; Pulpless, 1999) and expected sequels.

⁴⁵ The Left was originally proto-Libertarian, as revisionist historians such as Leonard Liggio point out.  In the French Assembly, free marketeer Frédéric Bastiat sat next to anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.  Even today Marxists refer to anarchists as “ultraleft” elements.  The libertarian and Marxist elements were about equal at the close of the First Workingman’s International.  The Marxists and their sellout imitators have been in ascendancy since the 1890s, finally losing belief in themselves with the New Left collapse, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan by the U.S.S.R. and Vietnam by China—the “impossible” war between two Marxist States.

⁴⁶ Currently, “Libertarian” Party “Radical” Caucus and Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS) respectively.

⁴⁷ The “Right” of current libertarianism is fairly principled, but many of the principles hewed to are anti-principles: gradualism, conservatism, reformism, and minarchy.  Reason magazine and its Frontlines newsletter are its main organs.  The “Center” includes Murray Rothbard and his following, now organized in the LP “Radical” Caucus, which supports Clark “critically,” i.e., externally, but not internally.  The Rothbard Centrists have moved Left by abandoning monocentrism.

Right-libertarianism is oxymoronic.  The free market is inherently leftist.

⁴⁸ Murray Rothbard, as mentioned; the Southern California party Council Director, Dyanne Petersen, others informing this writer of their imminent defection should more “selling-out” occur.  It will.

Special Note to Second Edition:  It did.

A steady trickle of LP defectors have added to the ranks of MLL month by month since then.  At least one new Left Libertarian group, the Voluntaryists, have arisen to compete for the ex-partyarchs.  And Murray Rothbard is organizing, at this time, a last-ditch showdown for control of the LP with the Kochtopus remnant at the LP presidential nominating convention to be held in September 1983 in New York City.

Special Note to Third Edition:  It persists to this very day.

The LP continues to co-opt idealistic young radicals, suck out their enthusiasm, disillusion them, and either drive them into pessimistic apathy or deliver them—radicalised and re-energised by their disappointment—to the welcoming arms of agorism.

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