You know how U.S. presidents deliver State of the Union addresses and governors give State of the State addresses?

My old friend Samuel Edward Konkin III would rise from his grave to haunt me if I were to deliver a State of the Movement address so this address is guaranteed to be state-free. But movements presumably move in one direction or another so my very personal report on This Movement of Ours is My Movement of the Movement Address.

I’ve been in the libertarian movement as an activist, writer, and entrepreneur since 1971. My own movement within the Movement has been cause for a lot of people to question just how faithful I’ve been to core principles, and I don’t think there’s any time in the past 38 years when I wasn’t pissing someone off because of where I was at the moment.

When I was hanging around with Sam (SEK3 for the rest of this address) I was unpopular among supporters of the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, because SEK3 was loudly critical of those institutions. Never mind that it was because I — among other of his fellow travelers — had joined the Libertarian Party that SEK3, himself, joined, and nearly took over running the Free Libertarian Party of New York with his Radical Caucus … or that I would have accepted either employment or a grant from CATO without losing a moment’s sleep. Not that either organization ever had very much use for guys like me who wrote novels rather than economics or history books. The only novel many of them had ever read was by a Russian expatriate babushka who once told me “I despise all libertarians … including you.”

When I was one of the three founders of 1976’s Vote for Nobody! Campaign (along with SEK3 and Victor Koman) I pissed off LPers who that year were supporting Roger MacBride for president. From all I’ve heard Roger MacBride was a swell fellow. But even he knew he was never going to be elected president.

When in the early 90’s I decided if I could apply for a license to carry a concealed handgun I could also register to vote, I pissed off SEK3 and a lot of LeFevre-oriented non-voters.

When as a voter I decided not to vote for unelectable candidates for president (although I voted the Libertarian Party ballot line for other offices many times) but instead began supporting what I perceived as the lesser of two evils between the two major parties I was regarded as a sell-out by many hard-core libertarians including SEK3. For the record, in 1992 I voted for Ross Perot (who was polling at 19%) over George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in 1996 Bob Dole over Bill Clinton, in 2000 George W. Bush over Al Gore, in 2004 George W. Bush over John Kerry, and in 2008 Barack Obama over John McCain. I am acutely aware that the lesser of two evils is still evil — but as Robert A. Heinlein taught me and Brad Linaweaver expressed pithily, the lesser of two evils is less evil.

When I decided to out myself as a believer in God — though as opposed to religion and dogmatic scriptures as I had previously been as an atheist into my 30’s — I pissed off all my friends who are arch skeptics regarding anything they can’t confirm through scientific methodology.

And after al Qaeda’s Day of Infamy, when I resolved for myself a conditional truce with the government of the United States for the common goal of fighting a radical Muslim cadre who thought nothing of crashing commercial jetliners into office buildings filled with innocent Dilberts, SEK3, Wally Conger, Jeff Riggenbach, Brad Spangler, Lew Rockwell, and many other fine libertarians regarded me as a war dog. But while I was being attacked by the hard-core for selling out to the State, I was also publishing numerous articles rebuking the government for destroying the natural defense against future terrorist attacks — an awakened and armed public such as those heroes of United Flight 93 who outperformed the entire military, police, and other governmental apparatus of the United States by effecting the sole successful counter-action against al Qaeda on September 11, 2001.

To the best of my knowledge, I may be the only person who questions whether the recent financial meltdown of the United States economy was due to the death of some conscientious financial genius working in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and some unsung military genius killed at the Pentagon that day, who might have successfully fought against the disastrous investment and military policies that led to it.

Osama bin Laden’s plan to destroy the United States of America might have succeeded far better than even he imagined.

The reason I make My Movement of the Movement address today is this.

Recently I have been focusing my attention on taking my 1979 novel of American economic meltdown and consequent libertarian revolution, Alongside Night, off the backlist shelf where it has been sitting for many years. By expanding its story into new media — in particular a new screenplay intended to be my second outing as a film director — I intend to launch Alongside Night into the mass pop culture, where its expanded audience can decide if they want the world to continue in the direction of one-world fascism, or make a break with the current trends and declare themselves for individual liberty.

Money is needed to make these things happen. Money can come to the project either through non-profit or for-profit channels … or from sales of various products at various stages of development.

The reactions I have been getting to Alongside Night have been a Rorschach Inkblot Test of where individuals calling themselves libertarian are on the movement map today.

There are those libertarians who aren’t interested in the project because Alongside Night doesn’t use the specific jargon in their pamphlet or website.

There are those wealthy libertarian investors who have given up on any possibility of having a positive effect on society and are moving both themselves and their assets offshore.

There are those libertarians who don’t bother reading the script — which is faithful to SEK3’s vision of pure laissez-faire revolution through economics rather than politics — because, after all, J. Neil Schulman is a sell-out and a war-dog.

There are those libertarians who have no interest in Alongside Night injecting libertarian concepts and strategies into the popular culture because, after all, we’ve captured the public’s imagination already with our books on economics and investing in gold — haven’t we?

There are those libertarians who want to micromanage the writing of the script so that it exactly reflects their particular ideology and personal fetishes — as if any writer could satisfy a mass audience by attempting to address every single individual’s story points.

Finally and most distressingly, there are those libertarians who tell me the script would be easier to get produced — and would reach a wider audience — if I were to cut out the explicit libertarian terminology which is the background to the story.

SEK3 once wrote an article titled “Agorism Contra Marxism,” putting agorism into juxtaposition with the most influential political movement of the last century and a half. SEK3 did not think agorist ideas could only be marketed to the existing libertarian movement but was convinced that agorism could become a movement as influential and far-reaching as Karl Marx’s. He spent his life’s work attempting to do just that.

Arguing that libertarian ideas are only of interest to libertarians, and agorist ideas are only of interest to agorists, is expressing the belief that these ideas are not market-worthy, not worthy of being spread — not worthy of believing. Objections that the explicit libertarian content of Alongside Night must make it unappealing to non-libertarians is a confession that one has no confidence in libertarianism as a practical philosophy, and the movement is nothing more than a cult. I have often enough received criticism for the libertarian content of Alongside Night from liberal and conservative ideologues; but when I get it from someone claiming to be a libertarian I smell a rat.

Additionally, just because a movie expresses the viewpoint of a particular smaller group or sect does not mean it can’t have a wide appeal outside that group.

Was The Ten Commandments only of interest to Jews? Was Ben Hur only of interest to Christians? Was Exodus only of interest to Zionists?

I’ve never been a Christian but C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles (and the two movies made from them so far) have always been favorites. Should C.S. Lewis have cut all the Christian imagery out of the Narnia books because it was only of interest to church-goers?

The exposition of agorism I put into Alongside Night was the minimum necessary for the story elements to be understood by the audience. Two non-libertarian producers asked me to put more explicit libertarian philosophy than was in the first draft I sent them — and to explain the ideological nuances separating Dr. Martin Vreeland and the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre — because they couldn’t understand the character motivations without additional explanation.

Alongside Night — which is generally regarded as a competent piece of storytelling — is without doubt the purest literary or dramatic expression of pure anti-state free-market libertarian ideas ever written. It stands alone as a non-utopian work of dramatic fiction which successfully projected the consequences of central banking and government control over the American people’s economic life but which – in describing ethical and natural-lawful counter-economics — offers a practically achievable path back towards macro-scale liberty.

Atlas Shrugged is a great novel, but Ayn Rand hated the libertarian movement and her novel’s final hope is a return to a Constitution which has proved a failure at restraining virulent statism.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is another great libertarian novel — but Robert A. Heinlein’s belief that any libertarian revolution is doomed to a return to statism mars the ending.

L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach is as hard core as any libertarian work of fiction and is great storytelling … but it takes place in an alternate history we can’t get to from our own and provides no practical advice on how to get from here to there.

Though a libertarian anthology rather than a novel, Free Space edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, received fulsome praise from mass-market mainstream magazines and newspapers while being trivialized by Martin Morse Wooster in Liberty Magazine. This constant rear-echelon sniping at its own frontline troops is a mistake the left rarely makes. It’s a deviationist tendency so dangerous to This Movement of Ours we should tag it Woosterism.

The Movement of the Movement is this.

The Libertarian Party has had close to four decades to make an impact on reversing our slide toward tyranny but through non-stop infighting about whether its goals should be practical politics or education — and pushing a political boulder up a Sisyphean hill in which the two major parties own campaign funds, ballot access, and debate access — it has failed.

All future third-party efforts face the same fate, and insanity is defined as repeating the same behavior with expectation that there will be a different outcome.

Libertarian education and policy institutes — CATO, Reason, Institute for Humane Studies, FEE — do a fine job within their spheres of influence, but they rarely succeed in reaching into the mass culture where the populist consensus needed to achieve real change is won.

Demonstrations are great at getting attention, but dissipate energy if they’re not focused on achieving specific goals … and individual policy questions like whether gays should marry or medical marijuana should be legal don’t address the generic problem of ever-expanding government control over everyone’s private decision-making.

Ron Paul went further in popularizing libertarian ideas in his run for the Republican presidential nomination than any candidate since Barry Goldwater, but both candidates were trampled under by centrist power blocs … and the idea that Ron Paul could take over the Republican party was sent out by Richard Viguerie’s Conservativehq.com as a self-flagellating April Fool’s joke. Of course partisan LP’ers chose this moment in history to attack Ron Paul for not running on their ballot line — another clear example of Woosterism.

Can a novel make a difference?

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged did propel an Objectivist movement … until cultism and personality clashes destroyed it.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo — and his movie expression of it, Destination Moon — did inspire a generation of kids to grow up to become rocket scientists and astronauts … and some of them walked on the moon and worked in space laboratories.

Utopian novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and issue-novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, inspired socialist and liberal activists. Dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have acted as cautionary tales that have inspired civil-libertarian activism.

And a novel named Uncle Tom’s Cabin did create a revulsion against chattel slavery of blacks on the North American continent so great that it pulled the trigger on the bloodiest war this continent ever saw.

Can a mere book move a movement back from the brink of historical irrelevancy to being a focal point for its place on the world stage?

Evil non-fiction books did it in Russia and Germany last century. Why shouldn’t this Movement of Ours try it with a pretty decent novel and screenplay adaptation written by Yours Truly here and now?

At your service,
J. Neil Schulman