What is Agorism?

Agorism is a libertarian social philosophy that advocates creating a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging with aspects of peaceful revolution.

Avoiding State Extortion

Everything the government has is stolen, and therefore government is not legitimate. It would be the same as your friend opening a store and everything in that store was stolen off of a Walmart truck. In no way would anyone believe that store to be legitimate. Through many years of indoctrination, propaganda and brainwashing, the majority of the population has come to believe statism to be legitimate on a grand scale. The numerous reasons for deciding not to fund the state can be best summed up by the founder of Agorism himself:

“Such an institution of coercion-centralizing immorality, directing theft and murder, and coordinating oppression on a scale inconceivable by random criminality-exists. It is the Mob of mobs, Gang of gangs, Conspiracy of conspiracies. It has murdered more people in a few recent years than all the deaths in history before that time; it has stolen in a few recent years more than all the wealth produced in history to that time; it has deluded — for its survival — more minds in a few recent years than all the irrationality of history to that time; Our Enemy, The State.”

-Samuel Edward Konkin III New Libertarian Manifesto

Making the Transition

Going full Agorist overnight is not something that is easily achievable. It is something that we should work towards each and every day. Even the Agorists who are self-sufficient end up paying the usual sales tax occasionally. We should try not to have a purist mind set with regard to agorism. Instead of criticizing someone for not being “agorist enough,” we should help to educate in a manner that will attract more to this noble cause. This is a huge problem I see with libertarians: we often hear the phrase “you’re not a real libertarian.”

Agorism and Its Inclusivity

Agorism encompasses a range of political positions. In my opinion, it best complements anarcho-capitalism since anarcho-capitalists want everything to be done voluntarily or not at all, and agorists want voluntary exchanges outside the state’s grasp.

We should try to embrace people who want to join the cause and stand side by side with them knowing they’re trying to accomplish the same goals, so long as everything is voluntary. In doing so, it’s important to be sure the people we embrace really have goals that are compatible with ours. Since agorists want voluntary exchanges between people, anyone who wants to impose any kind of non-voluntary interactions on others are against agorism even if they have some agorist tendencies. In the same way that even though I drive a car, that does not make me a NASCAR driver.

We cannot advocate for voluntary exchanges between people and also say it’s okay to use force in other regards. This notion is hypocritical. To replace use of force, we should be open-minded to discuss ideas.

Keeping with the philosophy that good ideas do not require force, agorists should never try and force their ideas on others. I’ve seen this mistake made even within the Anarchist community. We may not always agree with someone fully, but that does not mean we should toss them aside. They’re just at different points in their liberty journey than you might be. For example, I’ve seen major transformations in someone’s political thinking in a matter of only eight months. If I had written that person off, I would not have seen the beautiful transformation they later made. We all are on our own journey.

Agorist Advantages and Networking

It is the goal of any agorist to avoid the state in any way possible. The best way to do that is to prioritize commerce with other agorists whenever possible. This is one of the best ways to synergize and strengthen the agorist community. When you do business with agorists, you are sidestepping licensing, taxes, and perhaps even fiat currencies. Also, transaction records of buying and selling goods or services will not be reported. This is a great way to hide income and evade extortion. This process builds trust in the agorist community. Additionally, agorists will be able to outcompete others who are supporting a violent state via taxes and other extortion fees. All the fees that would have been given to the state stay with the agorist businesses, or the businesses pass all the savings from these fees to their customers. The customers in turn will see the benefits of counter-economics if they are aware of the fact that the business is in fact engaging in such. Like having less red tape for instance.

We can enlarge the counter-economy through underground networking and marketing. Eventually this will lead to the creation of an economic zone where every transaction excludes force and state intervention from the equation. The people who decide not to get licenses, record sales, use government notes, or follow regulations will save more value than the people who are following said “laws.” Once an agorist is included in every transaction from start to finish, the counter-economy will be in full bloom. With all tax eliminated there would be a drastic decrease in prices. For example, a business that gathers raw materials for other companies has a plethora of taxes and regulations, from property tax to transportation taxes (including fuel taxes) and later sales tax, etc. This goes all the way down the line from those who gather the raw materials, to manufacturers, distributors, vendors and later customers. Wealth is constantly being extorted from one step to another. This is a substantial amount of savings that a business will have, giving smaller businesses the ability to compete in corporatist markets. This is why it is so important to connect the counter-economy.

Aliases and Encryption

“If you’re a famous smuggler, you’re not doing it right.”

-Game Of Thrones quote

Having an alias is important to conceal your identity as much as possible. For the same reason, it’s important to use encrypted email like protonmail, encrypted cloud like degoo and text messaging like signal. As well as VPNs and the Brave web browser.

Decrypt, which is a media outlet for news in the cryptocurrency space, released an article on 04/20/20 titled Bitcoin Cash-powered message system promises unbreakable encryption. Dubbed ‘BCH-encrypt,’ it should work like email encryption. Encrypting and decrypting through e-mails and private keys. Anyone will be able to encrypt their messages with their Bitcoin cash addresses. This is in the wake of the EARN IT ACT that would basically eliminate end-to-end encryption. Jeremiah Harding, an Agorist Nexus writer and journalist, talks more about the EARN IT ACT and government’s attack on encryption in this Agorist Nexus article Easy Privacy – Five Apps for State Evasion and Subterfuge and for more on encryption and other apps see this Nexus article, Hacks for a Modern Day Agorist, by Lily Forester.

Cryptocurrency’s Ever Changing Landscape

While some of the coins mentioned in this article look strong today, have good fundamentals and great communities, the cryptocurrency landscape can change dramatically, and is extremely volatile. Any opinions on these cryptocurrencies today could change at a later date.None of this is to be taken as financial advice.

Crypto-currencies: Voluntary Peer-to-Peer Money

Crypto-currency has revitalized the agorist movement, making it possible to easily exchange value quickly and electronically. All this without having to use a fiat currency stained with blood or carrying many ounces of silver or gold that are not easily divisible. It solves the shortcomings of gold and silver as far as carrying amounts of metal that aren’t easily divisible, not easily verifiable, and avoids use of fiat currency stained with blood. The whole Bitcoin maximalist BTC argument, which is that we should only keep crypto as a store of value, is complete nonsense, along with the argument that they’re saving crypto by using fiat. What we need to do instead is to exchange fiat to crypto and then spend the same amount we would have anyway. Any time someone uses crypto instead of dollars, it is a win against the state. If you earn money in fiat currencies, as most of us do, you can convert the fiat into crypto as needed; this way you’ll avoid massive price volatility for payouts.

It’s also a good idea to hold cryptos as a hedge against collapsing fiat currencies. With the interconnected nature of modern state finance, it’s entirely possible that multiple currencies could collapse at the same time. As agorists, we should all use crypto-currency in our daily lives. This is one of the best ways to fight the state and take away their monopoly on money.  The importance of the state’s control of our money should not be underestimated. Privacy coins will be a huge deal with the counter-economy, reducing even further the state’s visibility into private exchange. Sadly, we are already seeing governments attack privacy coins, and many of them are being delisted from exchanges across the globe. This state attack on privacy coins only proves that the states fear that they do, in fact, work.

This is why decentralized exchanges will be paramount. Just as there is no headquarters for Bitcoin, there is no headquarters for these decentralized exchanges, no place to shut down and rip out servers. It is vitally important that there be somewhere to trade freely with each other without having to provide identification or KYC (know your customer), as with centralized exchanges like Binance. Other alternatives are also available for preserving privacy: one such is local.bitcoin.com, which is a private peer-to-peer platform, offering many different ways to buy and sell bitcoin cash, as well as a marketplace for goods and services.

Cryptocurrency and Privacy

Financial privacy is extremely important in avoiding state extortion, and some of the best ways of doing this are through cryptocurrency privacy features, or pure privacy coins. Some coins are better geared for privacy than others, like monero. In the current times it’s worth really getting an understanding of the projects geared towards increasing privacy. Bitcoin as it stands today isn’t nearly as geared for privacy as other cryptos for a few reasons, relating to things like the fact that the ledger of transactions is public and you can track things like IP address to source transactions.

Monero XMR

Monero XMR is my number one privacy coin at the moment. Monero gives anyone using it plausible deniability. The Monero wallet address of the recipient never appears, nor the amount sent.  The sending address is ambiguous. With the sender, you have something called ring signatures. Essentially, ten other output addresses are pulled into the transaction, one of the eleven being the sender’s one time output address. When looking at this transaction on the public ledger, one would not know which of the eleven sent that transaction. This is programmed right into Monero’s code, without the need for mixers or any collaboration. When reviewing the transaction, that same output address could easily appear in other transactions in the ring signature, making it easy for you to deny that you had ever sent a transaction. It will probably be beneficial later on for the ring signatures to be bigger and have more than eleven addresses.

On Monero, your wallet address will never appear on the blockchain. All transactions on the blockchain are generated one-time addresses and these appear in ring signatures and are signed for. A significant downside to Monero is its ever increasing lack of liquidity, because exchanges are no longer accepting Monero due to it being a regulatory compliance risk. This means that the privacy features work.

Ethereum  ETH

Nightfall is a privacy feature hopefully coming to Ethereum in the near future. Nightfall will let you build a mathematical proof called a Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to make private transactions on the  Ethereum blockchain. ZKP is a cryptographic method in which the sender can prove something without revealing sensitive information, which will still be done on the public Ethereum blockchain.

Bitcoin Cash BCH

The main privacy feature for BCH today is CashShuffle. CashShuffle is a fully decentralized coin-mixing protocol that shuffles your Bitcoin Cash with other network participants, making it extremely difficult for blockchain forensic analysis to decipher transaction history.

BCH CashFusion Upgrade

To explain the upgrade, I first need to explain UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Output). Just think of them as outputs referencing the counterparty’s transaction.

With CashShuffle, the UTXOs are the same. In CashFusion, the input amounts will not equal output amounts. Tracing chain analysis goes from extremely difficult to nearly impossible.

Private Tokenized Stock Markets

Yeah, you heard that right, private tokenized stock markets. On the ETH and BCH blockchains any person can create a token called an ERC20 token on Ethereum and an SLP token (simple ledger protocol) on Bitcoin cash instantly, without regulation or permission that acts like a stock, currency, loyalty points or certificates (Good luck getting that kind of turn-around time filing with the SEC!). They can have fixed amounts or issue new tokens, all of which are transparent on chain, and easy to understand without rummaging for hours through ETF or other investment paperwork. They or a 3rd party can give out dividends, rewarding all holders based on their share of tokens. The possibilities are truly endless, with all sorts of features being developed on a variety of different token chains. Tokens can also be used to track regular assets and who holds possession of each asset.

Decentralized Companies (DAOs)

On the Ethereum blockchain you can have entire companies that are decentralized and none of the employees could know each other. The creators of the company can set up bounty-like rewards to provide incentives for task completion, with smart contracts automatically paying out for those tasks. I definitely foresee some agorists utilizing DAOs in the future.

Seasteading and Agorism

Ultimately, the best way to evade the state of all taxes and licensing will be with Seasteading. Having free sustainable societies on the open ocean will be one of the most satisfying things to see in this lifetime. Different seasteading communities will compete for populace embracing the best set of rules or having a dwindling population for horrible ones. Communities with zero tax and no regulations could develop technologies that could miraculously increase standard of living in every field and category. These communities could set an example for the mainland much as Hong Kong did for China, hopefully loosening the chains for humanity and eventually breaking them completely. The only drawback of seasteading currently is the high cost required to do so even on a small scale, which it looks like Chad and Nadia Elwartowski will solve with Ocean builders.

Proven Track Record of Agorism

Instead of placing emphasis on fighting the system like many get stuck on, it’s more about making the current system obsolete. I want to add that agorism has a proven track record being a major part in the take down of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev blames the downfall on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster — of course he would not give any credit to the black market. While Chernobyl’s devastation had great effect and should not be underestimated, and was the final nail in the coffin, the Soviet shadow economy was mainly responsible. The growth of the shadow economy was so great that the Soviets tried to reform it heavily to gain back massive funds being deprived from the state.

Conclusion

The agorist community must network and gain strength. Support other agorists in their endeavors even if it’s just by word of mouth or a quick click of the button through a share. One of the best ways to spread agorism is to live the lifestyle and share what you do. Create your own food sources and guide others with theirs. Instead of picking something up from Walmart or Amazon, we should first seek agorist alternatives. It’s time to rid any and every theft aka “tax” from our lives. Slowly teach and influence people who you find out have some interest in liberty about agorism. Now is the time to spread the agorist lifestyle in any way possible. While government becomes an increasing technocracy, we must develop and create systems that make them obsolete so we can break and rid ourselves and humanity from the chains of the state.

None of this is to be taken as financial advice.