I find theories of revolution interesting because so much often goes so wrong with even “successful” revolutions. There is much room for refinement. It’s wide open territory, so to speak.

Since any government is, ethically speaking, only a group of bandits with delusions of legitimacy, no revolution per se is ever “unjustified” — at least, not in terms of lacking sufficient cause. Yet the populace of any given locale is seldom overcome with revolutionary fervor. I believe this is because of a widespread, nigh instinctual grasp of one thing Jefferson wrote in the US Declaration of Independence — that:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Jefferson’s statement above, and the pre-existing wisdom it distilled, has apparently been an influential yardstick. Up until now, at least within the realm of my own experience, people have generally spoken in terms of “how bad things have to get” before a revolutionary situation might develop (if they ever talk about revolution at all). The unspoken understanding is that it has to get really bad in order for the populace to overcome their natural prudence and embrace the risk inherent in revolution.

It occurs to me that the impact of Jefferson’s words might have been vastly greater if only he had had the presence of mind to be only a tiny bit more accurate. It seems to me that he ought to have written:

“… Governments … should not be EXchanged for light and transient causes.”

That would have, perhaps, made the revolutionary dilemma a bit more clear. One primarily runs the risk of exchanging a tyranny for an even greater tyranny because you are typically replacing one state with yet another state. We can then see that Jefferson’s standard, that the revolutionary rationale be based on the terrible abuses of the current regime, has only been an inadequate rule of thumb for managing the unconfronted real issue of risk in outcome. Why, indeed, run the risk that a new state might be even worse than the old state, unless it has become apparent to nearly all that anything worse than the current regime is unimaginable?

Ever since nearly three quarters of a century after Jefferson was writing, with Molinari’s essay “The Production of Security” in 1849, it could be said that it has been known that “to provide new Guards for their future security” need NOT involve creation of a new state. Yet that is precisely the model for most modern revolutions — the creation of a parallel government and the defense of it against the prior regime through any means, including civil war if necessary, until the old regime has been displaced by the new one. To say it more conveniently, if less precisely, the model for most modern revolutions is coup d’etat.

Naturally, coup d’etat is a poor politico-military paradigm for an anarchist revolutionary movement. If that is your only model, you will either fail to successfully replace the current regime through your own principled refusal to create the replacement state, or you will cease to be anarchists and will have betrayed your principles by creating a new state (regardless of whether you call it a state or not). Instead, a different model is needed.

Choosing a new model or framework for revolution has enormous implications in terms of not only politics, but strategy and tactics of revolutionary military forces. As the Bolsheviks showed, the way you fight is the way you will rule.

I propose a fusion of two distinct models for anarchist revolution, instead of statist coup d’etat — secession and piracy.

SECESSION

Libertarians are fond of examining the American Revolution and imagining it as a grim yet glorious destiny that the cycles of history will eventually force us to repeat. This is understandable in that its results were arguably libertarian, even if doomed to only set the stage for what would eventually become the greatest threat to human liberty worldwide — the modern US government.

The American Revolution was also not completely within the realm of the coup d’etat type of revolution. George Washington never set sail for the British Isles to lay siege to Windsor Castle. The American Revolution was, actually, a war of secession. True, the colonists did exchange one government for another — but they had the luxury of not having to bloodily conquer and rule the entire British Empire.

I have two major concerns about secession.

First, secession only becomes viable if the political secession is itself merely a finalization of a cultural and economic secession that has long been developing previously. With regard to economic secession in particular, note the widespread historical mentions of smuggling in the pre-Revolutionary American Colonies.

Secondly, secession within the context of anarchism requires having the intellectual honesty to admit that if a major political sub-division can ethically secede, so can a minor one — all the way down to towns, neighborhoods, family households and each individual person. In short, the only legitimate polities are strictly voluntary ones resting on 100% unanimous consent.

I examine these concerns and find them addressed by Konkin’s agorism. Konkin demanded the same individual autonomy for all that made me a market anarchist in the first place. He also understood the need for early revolutionary activity both in the forms of propaganda aimed at thwarting statist “false consciousness” and counter-economics — individualized economic secession through “black market” defiance of the State and a building of economic resources outside of State control.

PIRACY

What is inadequate about the American Revolution as historical harbinger of the inevitable anarchist revolution to come is that the American Colonies had a long tradition of relative freedom, which they already regarded as more or less adequate, and which they were defending against the threat of expanding royal control. That freedom evolved mainly because they were building their new society on what was a remote frontier at the time. Royal micro-management simply wasn’t practical.

That’s not the situation future anarchist revolutionaries are likely to find themselves in until the advent of heavy duty space colonization. Instead, we must look elsewhere for examples of revolutions against regimes so corrupt that even the institution of property, the basis of the market anarchist conception of a lawful social order, has been coopted by the State — as it has today.

A historical revolutionary period more closely resembling our own and near future circumstances is the Russian Revolution of 1917. The well-off then typically had gained possession of their wealth not through their own productive activity or voluntary exchange, as Lockean/Rothbardian natural law theory would dictate, but through alliance with the State to unjustly steal wealth from the oppressed. They were the political class.

When revolting against an order that routinely steals on behalf of a political class and commits the gross moral fraud of saying the recipients are the rightful “owners” of such wealth, redistribution to the rightful owners is demanded by conscience. Yet because the Bolsheviks attempted to address the need for redistribution using the statist model of revolution as coup d’etat, the manner of their revolution produced a bloodthirsty and bureaucratic State that itself claimed ownership of all — everything and everyone.

Instead, military affairs amongst anarchist revolutionaries need to be consistent with the conception of law, security and defense in the future society one is fighting for in the first place. As the provision of those services will be through non-state means after the fall of the state, so must the broad swath of all military affairs, from strategy to logistics, be consistent with it. Jefferson’s standard of why revolution will not be as important to keep in mind as how to wage genuinely revolutionary warfare in order for outcome-based risk to be mitigated. That is to say, the revolution ought to consist of the new stateless society asserting itself until occasional attempts by any government to rule can be dealt with as they ought to be — as run of the mill criminal banditry. That is the point at which the revolutionaries will have “won.”

One alternative to coup d’etat is a natural outgrowth of Konkin’s counter-economics — piracy.

Libertarians are often said to be in favor of “privatizing everything.” But privatization through state-conducted initiatives is in reality often just the fencing of stolen goods. The state says to its political class supporters, “hang on to this asset, so it can be nominally privatized” — without the original theft or the issue of inability of a bandit gang to legitimately own or trade anything being addressed.

If state and political class assets are to both be privatized, then the only ethical way to do it is to acknowledge, as Rothbard did, that state-owned resources are in actuality unowned resources — and thus, open to homesteading by those who are capable of being legitimate owners.

This creates interesting possibilities for decentralized and autonomous military units seeking to thwart the state. Unit logistics, resupply and even profit can potentially be covered by ownership of seized state assets. Black market venture capital investors could even, theoretically, bankroll military units based on considerations such as business plan and so forth. Anti-state underground markets could potentially arise for transferable restitution claims, the value of which would be assets, just like any other account receivable. A large enough aggregate of such documented and evaluated restitution claims could serve as a capitalization base for the largest armies the world has ever seen — such being the magnitude of the crimes of the state and restitution claims created by those crimes. The revolution may end up looking a lot like getting your car repo’d — that is, if you’re the state.

Even that lovable yet reactionary bitch Ayn Rand somewhat understood this potential role for piracy as people’s privatization. If you’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, Google the name “Ragnar Danneskjold.”