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Showing posts from March, 2021

Weathering With You: An Agorist Perspective

If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w

In Defense of Left Libertarianism, Part II

The early anarchists - the first anarchists, were undeniably leftists. In fact, the Father of Anarchy , William Godwin, sought the abolition of the state only insofar as it served as a means of achieving his true end, the elimination of private property. Godwin’s immediate ideological successors largely agreed. Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau & Ben Tucker - all rejected the idea of private property to a greater or lesser extent. Under the influence of these thinkers, several attempts at more "equitable" communal living were made; all of which now litter the dustbin of history. Some, like the New Harmony colony, Brook Farm, the Oneida colony, or the Amana colonies, were lucky & either closed or converted to market-friendly models. Other communes like Jamestown, tell a much darker tale. But how much blame can we assign to these early anarchists for their economic shortcomings? If it’s true contemporary anarchists can see f

In Defense of Left Libertarianism

Marx was right, but Marxism is stupid. Let me explain… Marx’s fundamental critique that the working class is being exploited by the upper class is true. This is so inherently obvious in the modern political climate that I find it bewildering the notion even needs defending. In fact, today, the working class has been so thoroughly exploited that they can now be more accurately termed the working poor . Go to Manhattan, the neoliberal shithole from whence I came - and try to find a worker who both lives & resides there. You can’t. There aren’t any. The elites have successfully used a combination of high taxes & a denial of civil liberties to expel the working class from their homes. Trust me, I am among the expelled. The anarcho-capitalist habit of turning a blind eye to class theory is a grave mistake, as it sweeps real concerns under the rug. In doing so they dismiss the plight of an enormous contingent of the public - labor. No, we agorists aren’t seeking an abandonment of met

A Tokambrian Explosion Is Upon Us

A Tokambrian Explosion is unfolding before our very eyes. The NFT craze has captured the public’s attention & finally put tokenization in the mainstream spotlight. As a counter-economic operator, this moment is long overdue. Once again, it seems the agorists were the first to the table. Indeed, readers of The New Libertarian blog & listeners of The Agora podcast, have been aware of the inevitability of the Tokambrian Explosion since 2018-2019. Although the public is finally becoming familiar with tokenization, few have grasped it’s disruptive potential. Non-Fungible Tokens NFT is short for non-fungible token. A token is a digital representation of ownership that exists on a blockchain ledger. For all intents and purposes, it behaves as any other cryptocurrency does. Fungibility refers to the property of having interchangeable & indistinguishable parts. Since one gram of gold is like every other gram of gold, we say that it’s fungible. On the other hand, each diamond is un