In the first part of this series, I discussed such things as the nature of outcome based risk as the primary reason for public skepticism about prospects for future revolutions and also speculated a bit about strategy. Before revisiting the matter of revolutionary strategy, I want to discuss patriotism.

One of the themes I’ve pounded on is that words can have multiple definitions. Careful analysis is required in order to really use words as tools for clear thinking, instead of letting the words of others manipulate your thinking.

One of those words fraught with semantic peril is “patriotism”. Throughout most of human history, being a virtuous patriot has meant loyalty to the existing rulers. The etymological kinship of the word “patriotism” to the often overused but nonetheless valid concept of “patriarchy” from feminism should be obvious. The roles of heads of families, clans and tribes morphed into those of barons, kings and emperors as humanity multiplied.

The most immediately obvious drawback to this concept of patriotism as a virtue is that it requires good men to kill each other. In the Middle Ages, a good Saxon and a good Celt would commonly strive to do each other in through un-neighborly use of cutting implements at the whims of their political leaders. Clearly, that sort of patriotism is a fundamentally flawed notion — for if patriotism of that sort is a virtue, then a universally patriotic world would be a charnel house of slaughter and misery.

America, though, was supposed to be different. The America conceived in the Revolution of 1776 was supposed to be about Liberty, and American patriotism was supposed to be loyalty to that ideal. The alternately tragic and glorious, contemptible and heroic, American political and social experience over the time since has seen the struggle to adhere to, clarify and realize that ideal.

It has been clarified significantly. As the Nineteenth century American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker said:

“The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.”

In that sense, I see no contradiction between being an anarchist and an American patriot. I am the former because I am the latter.

More specifically, genuine loyalty to that ideal of Liberty demands the fortitude to honestly examine what has gone wrong in the struggle to realize it. In contemporary times, Joseph Sobran has noted:

“There can be no such thing as ‘limited government,’ because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power…”

In other words, the broad sweep of American history since the Revolution of 1776 has definitively shown that government will gradually undermine Constitutional limits on its power. Indeed, current events rub our noses in that painful lesson on a daily basis.

For example, a New York Times story yesterday revealed widespread spying on Americans by the US government without even the procedural hurdle of obtaining a warrant. Congressional leaders expressed shock, but then President Bush acknowledged authorizing the spying (in direct contravention of his sworn oath to uphold and defend the US Constitution — which he reportedly sees as “just a goddamned piece of paper“). He also says he briefed Congressional leaders, implying their shock isn’t particularly genuine. I believe him on that point.

Indeed, many find this state of affairs remarkable, without necessarily realizing that the Bush administration is not an aberration, but rather the culmination of the trends of the past several decades in American political life — the same ones libertarians have been desperately trying to warn the American people about over that course of time.

If you would consider yourself an American patriot, then with clear and sober determination one must acknowledge that there is unfinished business left over from 1776. The quirky environmentalist and so-called “desert anarchist” Edward Abbey might have said it best when he said:

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

Perhaps the quintessential American patriot of the Revolutionary era was Samuel Adams. His life could largely be described by Abbey’s maxim, rather than comformity to the prevailing attitudes of loyalty to the “legitimate government” of his time — the British Crown. Samuel Adams was a guy who did not play well with others. He had a definite attitude problem.

Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty carried out destruction of the “private property” of mercantile interests in league with the British regime. We recall this today as The Boston Tea Party. It was considered a treasonable, terroristic act punishable by death under the government of that time.

The Sons of Liberty were violent. In acts of resistance to the Stamp Act in New York, they burned the royal governor’s gilded carriage and broke into his wine cellar to help themselves to its contents. They used boiling hot tar when they tarred and feathered Loyalists. Sounds painful to me.

I believe that if he were alive today, Samuel Adams would be not merely calling for impeachment, but agitating for a revolutionary tribunal to bring forth manila hemp articles of impeachment, tied with several coils in the loop.

The problem with violence, of course, is that it’s a big and risky pain in the ass for everybody involved and, for that matter, bad for business. After all, we wouldn’t be talking along these lines if we didn’t have a problem with the unilateral violence of the State in the first place. While ethically justifiable, strategically defensive (even if tactically offensive…) violence against the State is problematic, as I explained carefully in the first part of this series.

We can presume the political class will never peacefully give up on its strategy of oppression and banditry, and that therefore violent episodes in the revolution will occur just as surely as the unilateral violence of the State continues on a day to day basis right now. That, however, in no way removes the burden of the revolutionary to minimize violence. As a true anarchist revolution would be best understood as the triumph of a new anarchist system of polycentric law over the criminal banditry of the State, that burden is the natural burden of the civilized when confronted with the barbarism of statism. As Nietzsche pointed out:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Clearly then, while a revolutionary strategy can not realistically completely foreswear violence, violence can not be the primary thrust of revolutionary activity. It then behooves the revolutionary to examine, critique and improve on strategies for mostly nonviolent revolution.

Perhaps one of the most optimistic and inspiring is outlined by Jim Davies in “The Power of One“. In that essay, Davies applies the logic of compound interest to the growth of anarchist revolutionary sentiment, advocating an “each one, teach one” strategy that culminates with widespread withdrawal of public consent to government, resulting in a (thankfully) ungovernable public.

Not particularly incompatible with that is Samuel Edward Konkins doctrine of revolutionary Agorism. Konkin observed that hypothetical market anarchist institutions of law and security were market institutions, rather than political institutions and that they thus could not be arrived at through political reformism.

To Konkin, the problem of revolution was as much, or more so, a problem of market development for systems of providing law and security independently of the state — and that “victory” in revolution would be the triumph of those markets for private law and private security over the criminal banditry of the State. Thus, the initial and ongoing steps for the revolutionaries are both anti-state propaganda and counter-establishment economic activity, or counter-economics.

One of the things that strike me as most interesting about Konkin’s concept of counter-economics is the importance he placed on profitable black market activities in defiance of the state, with counter-economic entrepreneurs trading risk for profit. The counter-economic revolution would be a revolution of the black market expanding to include the entire economy of a society, in other words. The necessity of developing means for cooperation that explicitly shun state involvement are what would lead to the eventual development of an entire private law and private security industry.

One of the implications of that is market specialization amongst revolutionaries. Because of the illegal nature of much (but not all) counter-economic activity, a natural crude division of labor immediately suggests itself, with public advocates of agorism being those least likely to personally engage in the sort of prohibited black market business activites that carry the most risk — or to even have knowledge of them. As a slightly less unhinged Tyler Durden might say, “The first rule of the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre is - you do not talk about the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre.”

Libertarian Class Theory and a proper understanding of the nature of property rights suggest other potential avenues. As I’ve noted before, the true state is the entire political class, the parasitic net beneficiaries of the coercive apparatus of government. One of the most often overlooked aspects of Rothbards thought is that Lockean property rights exist independently of their recognition by government and that, as a bandit gang, the state can not rightfully own anything. While corrupt government “privatization” schemes that benefit large corporations are thus seen as mere transfer of assets to a different arm of the political class, genuine privatization, or people’s privatization, would consist of extra-legal and decentralized asset seizure from all parts of the political class — cooperation in such seizure resulting not from direction by a Bolshevist vanguard party, but by an interlocking network of private arbitrators recognizing the legitimacy of the new “homesteaders” claims to the formerly unowned parcels of property.

Because of the above, a market anarchist revolution could include some anarcho-syndicalist aspects — direct seizure of corporate assets by the workers themselves. This allows us to tap into an already highly developed set of ideas about peaceful or minimally violent revolution that our anarcho-syndicalist cousins have developed over the years.

This is the part where I should come up with some profound summary of the things I’ve talked about, but none comes to mind at present. This article is just there. Read, think and discuss.