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Title: Toward a Cooperative Agorism
Author: Eric Fleischmann
Date: March 8th, 2022
Language: en
Topics: agorism, cooperatives, worker cooperatives, taxes, profit, crypto, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism
Source: Retrieved on 3/8/22 from https://c4ss.org/content/56170

Eric Fleischmann

Toward a Cooperative Agorism

I have a saying that goes something like: ‘I don’t trust anybody who

thinks taxation is theft but profit isn’t.’ The former is a common

sentiment among libertarians left and right, who argue, like Michael

Huemer, that “[w]hen the government ‘taxes’ citizens, what this means is

that the government demands money from each citizen, under a threat of

force: if you do not pay, armed agents hired by the government will take

you away and lock you in a cage.”[1] The affirmative of the latter is a

less well known sentiment but is rooted in Marxist exploitation theory.

Richard Wolff explains in Democracy at Work: A Cure For Capitalismhow

profit…

is the excess of the value added by workers’ labor—and taken by the

employer—over the value paid in wages to them. To pay a worker $10 per

hour, an employer must receive more than $10 worth of extra output per

hour to sell. Surplus is capitalists’ revenue net of direct input and

labor costs to produce output.

This argument is based in the labor theory of value, which is rejected

by most right-libertarians. Kevin Carson, in Studies in Mutualist

Political Economy, rehabilitates it as the tendency of prices fall to

the cost of production in the absence of artificial restrictions like

state-sanctioned monopolies, but even if one rejects this, the logic of

the LTV actually comes very close to the Lockean principle of ownership

acquisition via mixing one’s labor. Cory Massimino explains:

For 19th century anarchists, the labor theory of value, or “cost limit

of price,” was the natural extension of the individual’s absolute

sovereignty over themselves. Labor was seen as the source for all

wealth, and the laborer naturally owns the fruits of their labor as an

extension of their self-ownership. Tucker’s theory of value was

intimately related to his ethical views based on each individual having

sole dominion over their body and their justly acquired property, which

required labor mixing.

By this logic, profit could be considered theft from the same

libertarian principles that outline taxation as such. And this has

already more-or-less been done by proto-libertarians like Dyer Lum, who

decries “taxation, profits, and rent” as “superimposed burdens” on

“Labor.”

Most right-libertarians would argue, however, that profit is earned from

the voluntary exchange between employer and employee based on the

former’s ownership of the means of production. But one can take a

libertarian position to as extreme a point as Karl Hess didand suggest

that much of what people call private property is actually…

stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with

an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and

profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and

aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold

the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic

power concentrations.

One can also look at the primitive accumulation, subsidies, regulatory

capture, and monopoly privileges that have favored capitalists over the

entire course of U.S. and global history. As such, Carson proposes that,

from the dialectical libertarian perspective outlined by Chris Matthew

Sciabarra, “the corporate economy is so closely bound up with the power

of the state, that it makes more sense to think of the corporate ruling

class as a component of the state.” This would ultimately mean that,

like Logan Glitterbomb explains, because all large-scale private

ownership of the means of production is “the result of theft, coercion,

enclosure, corporate subsidies, state licensing regimes, zoning laws,

government bailouts, tax breaks, intellectual property laws, and other

political favors,” it is therefore “illegitimate,” and capitalists have

less of a claim to its ownership than the worker. Glitterbomb allows

“while, yes, if the original owner can be found, the property should

revert back to their control and the decisions about what to do with it

should rest with the original legitimate owner, as [Murray] Rothbard and

many others have pointed out, finding the original or ‘legitimate’ owner

can sometimes prove to be difficult or even impossible. It was in such a

case that Rothbard claimed that the next best option was to turn such

property over to those who have put the most labor into it recently, the

workers.” By this analysis, workers generally have a greater claim over

the means of production than capitalists, thereby making the extraction

of surplus value a form of theft.

[]

If one accepts this argument, what then is next in terms of praxis? The

immediate solution to the taxation problem according to many

libertarians is agorism. Agorism, as a refresher, is a left-libertarian

anarchist strategy developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III that, as

Derrick Broze explains,

seeks to create a society free of coercion and force by using black and

gray markets in the underground or “illegal” economy to siphon power

away from the state. Konkin termed this strategy “counter-economics”,

which he considered to be all peaceful economic activity that takes

place outside the purview and control of the state. This includes

competing currencies, community gardening schemes, tax resistance and

operating a business without licenses. Agorism also extends to the

creation of alternative education programs, free schools or skill

shares, and independent media ventures that counter the establishment

narratives.

It is important to note, however, that not all agorism must take place

in the grey or black market—only horizontal agorism must meet this

criteria. Broze describes alternatively a vertical agorism that includes

things like “participating in and creating community exchange networks,

urban farming, backyard gardening, farmers market, supporting

alternatives to the police, and supporting peer to peer decentralized

technologies.” These practices “can be considered agorist in the sense

that they are aimed at building self and community reliance rather than

dependence on external forces, but they are not explicitly

counter-economic because they do not involve black and grey markets.”[2]

This is not only about taxes as it runs deeper toward avoiding as much

state intervention as possible, but the movement toward black, grey, and

informal markets is generally avoidant of taxation in one way or

another.

This covers taxation, but what about profit? Interestingly, while

‘taxation is theft’ appears to be a more well known slogan than ‘profit

is theft,’ the solution to the latter is perhaps more well known:

cooperatives. Based on the assertion that the primary problem of

capitalism is the exploitation of surplus, Wolff advances that

worker-owned businesses should replace “the current capitalist

organization of production inside offices, factories, stores, and other

workplaces in modern societies. In short, exploitation—the production of

a surplus appropriated and distributed by those.” In such an enterprise,

profit as it exists in capitalist businesses does not appear even when

the profit motive is utilized because the surplus value is controlled

democratically as opposed to being appropriated by capitalists. And

worker-owned cooperatives, as with all cooperatives, function under

seven central principles:

Voluntary and Open Membership

Democratic Member Control

Member Economic Participation

Autonomy and Independence Education

Training and Information

Co-operation among Co-operatives

Concern for Community

These principles define not just individual cooperatives but the

cooperative movement as a whole, which whether explicitly or not, is

attempting to shift the primary mode of production to a cooperative one.

For example, Cooperation Jackson outlines their “basic theory of change”

as being “centered on the position that organizing and empowering the

structurally under and unemployed sectors of the working class,

particularly from Black and Latino communities, to build worker

organized and owned cooperatives will be a catalyst for the

democratization of our economy and society overall.”

What I propose then is that principled opposition to both taxation and

profit be combined into a ‘cooperative agorism.’ Admittedly this term is

already in use by the subreddit r/cooperativeagorism, who describe it as

“a social strategy, that consists of influencing the political landscape

by means of peacefully improving and strengthening civil society in

critical ways.” These include things like a Farm-To-Consumer Defense

Fund or the mafia distributing food to those in need in Italy. And what

I’m talking about is certainly not mutually exclusive from this but

rather more specifically the practice of agorism using cooperative

principles. Let’s say Emma is selling x, where x is a (non-violent)

illegal or off-the-books product or service. Instead of selling x as an

individual, Emma could pool her resources with other interested parties

and establish an informal cooperative outside of the taxable wage labor

economy. Emma could start an off-the-grid, farm-to-consumer herbalist

commune or get all the kids in the neighborhood into an equal-shares

babysitting business or team up with IT nerd friends to undersell big

tech corporations in their city with a DIY computer co-op. In all these

scenarios, profits would be pooled and distributed democratically,

resources and knowledge would be shared with other informal (and

sometimes formal) co-ops, and concern for the local community would be a

high priority.

A fairly new and innovative example of this type of project is—despite

my strong misgivings about blockchain and cryptocurrency—the DAO

(decentralized autonomous organization).[3] These organizations are

“designed to be automated and decentralized” and act primarily “as a

form of [cryptocurrency] venture capital fund, based on open-source code

and without a typical management structure or board of directors.” A

post on Comrade Cooperation accounts how “[t]he switch from a 9–5 job to

becoming a part of a DAO gave me an entirely new vision of work”

because…

I have become the manager of my own work. I track hours on the tasks I

complete. I review my peers’ work and we all vote on the next steps of

the two big projects we are building. This allows us to keep everything

transparent, and each member’s contribution is rewarded with a share of

the profits. The system is fair, and all the rules and decision[s] we

make are recorded on the Blockchain.

These function through the blockchain, which—though not as decentralized

as many would have you think—allow them to stay out of the reach of the

state in many instances. And because of its use of blockchain and

cryptocurrency, this follows the classic style by which, according to

Glitterbomb, “many libertarians advocate [cryptocurrency] specifically

along with the agorist tactic of avoiding taxes. The idea is that by not

paying taxes one will ‘starve the state.’” And not only are, as Emmi

Bevensee, Jahed Momand, and Frank Miroslav point out, “a handful of

projects . . . now focusing on these innovations in stewardship from an

Ostromian point of view, even going so far as adopting Ostrom’s

Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) wholly into the goals of

their projects,” but there are numerous groups “working to build tools

to enable cooperation across DAOs and protocols. All of them are

ostensibly, in their outward-facing messaging and their daily practice,

collectively governed projects that are trying to build open-source,

freely available tools and components for cooperative economies to scale

themselves on blockchains” [4]. DAOs can also be put toward funding

broader community projects such as “Indigenous land back,” “BIPoC artist

collectives,” community workshops, and free medical clinics. All of

these factors together—workplace democracy, cryptocurrency, open-source

code, etc.—make DAOs an ideal template from which to elaborate a

cooperative agorism.

Admittedly, in large part because of their small scale in what Konkin

calls the current “Low-Density Agorist Society” in the New Libertarian

Manifesto, most agorists entrepreneurs already circumvent the capitalist

business structure entirely. The independent carpenter working through

Craigslist, the mom selling vegetables from her backyard garden to her

neighbors, the basement cryptocurrency investor, and the ‘humanitarian’

entrepreneur smuggling needed medical supplies into countries in crisis

are obviously already operating to some degree outside of anything like

the wage labor economy. As such, one of Rothbard’s main critiques of

agorism is that…

Konkin’s entire theory speaks only to the interests and concerns of the

marginal classes who are self-employed. The great bulk of the people are

full-time wage workers; they are people with steady jobs. Konkinism has

nothing whatsoever to say to these people.

And while Konkin describes agorism as “profitable civil disobedience”

and proclaims in the New Libertarian Manifesto that “[t]he fundamental

principle of counter-economics is to trade risk for profit [emphases

added],” Glitterbomb points out in her article “Toward an

Agorist-Syndicalist Alliance” that “[e]ven Konkin couldn’t help but

notice the exploitative nature of corporate hierarchy, believing it to

be some of the lasting remains of feudalism and that if the individual

were truly respected, bosses would slowly become a thing of the past.”

Additionally, many of the practices that full under the term agorism

like “alternative education programs, free schools or skill shares” are

already inherently communitarian. The purpose of this piece then is not

entirely to propose a new approach but to render an existing one more

explicit. This is similar to what agorists are already doing by trying

to transform existing counter-economic behavior into conscious agorist

action. Broze explainshow “[it] is important to distinguish

counter-economic activity from full on Agorist activity,” and, as such,

agorists like Jesse Baldwin insist “[w]e should practice the right to

disregard the law, . . . but we have to do it in a way that is conscious

rather than opportunistic.” But even further, we should seek to imbue

agorism with cooperative principles as we work to raise the

counter-economy up as explicitly agorist.

This is particularly important because of the attempt by

anarcho-capitalists to co-opt agorism. This process is already underway,

as the movement—despite Konkin’s explicit anti-capitalism—is continually

branded with the black and yellow of anarcho-capitalism. Of course,

there is nothing wrong with individual ancaps practicing agorism. Konkin

openly admits in a 2002 interview that “[i]n theory, those calling

themselves anarcho-capitalists do not differ drastically from agorists;

both claim to want anarchy (statelessness, and we pretty much agree on

the definition of the State as a monopoly of legitimized coercion,

borrowed from Rand and reinforced by Rothbard).” However, “the moment we

apply the ideology to the real world (as the Marxoids say, ‘Actually

Existing Capitalism’) we diverge on several points immediately.” This

applicational failure is a kind of vulgar libertarianism, where an

actually free market is haphazardly and inconsistently conflated with

capitalism, and the result is, as Konkin explains in the aforementioned

interview, that “the ‘Anarcho-capitalists’ tend to conflate the

Innovator (Entrepreneur) and Capitalist” and, furthermore, end up with

no genuine theory of class and class struggle like agorists have. And it

is these failures that lead pseudo-agorist ancaps to advocate neo-feudal

projects like private cities and seasteading where private companies

would rule over micronations in a real-world version of the city of

Rapture from Bioshock or a throwback to the rule of India by the East

India Company. These are rather extreme examples and it can be assumed

that most ancaps practicing agorism are not attempting to build their

own cities. But the truth is that ancaps like Rothbard, as Peter

Sabatini argues, allow for “countless private states” and see “nothing

at all wrong with the amassing of wealth, therefore those with more

capital will inevitably have greater coercive force at their disposal.”

And while folks like Anna Morgenstern and David Graeber make compelling

cases that without the state nothing like wage labor could exist in a

stateless society, as we—if Konkin’s theory of social change outlined in

the New Libertarian Manifesto proves correct—move toward an agorist

society of greater density and “the statists take notice of agorism,” it

must be made clear that this is not meant to build a refuge for

advocates of child labor and sweatshops from the minimal state

protections for workers or to create some sort of anarchs-capitalist

Panama Papers situation, but rather the beginnings of a new

anti-capitalist, cooperative mode of production and exchange.

[]

This cooperative agorism can be linked to the practice that Wesley

Morgan (disapprovingly) calls “market syndicalism,” where anarchists

look “to create ‘dual power’ through the creation of cooperatives.”

Morgan asserts that “[w]hile these cooperatives are internally

self-managing, they exist as units in a market economy, they still rely

upon access to the market.” I will not go into a full rebuttal of

Morgan’s point but rather point out the assumption that there is only

one unified market—a claim that agorists contest. Certainly the formal,

white market economy is riddled with statist privileges that render a

lot of cooperative efforts sterile. Glitterbomb maintains, in “Bullshit

Jobs and the End of Work (As We Know It),” that “to give worker

cooperatives a real fighting chance, we have to abolish the web of state

subsidies, occupational licensing, and corporatist regulations that all

work together to limit market competition and disproportionately

advantage capitalist business models.” But this presents the possibility

that by avoiding restrictions of the capitalist economy, cooperatives in

the counter-economy have an even greater chance of success. However,

integral to this project is continued cooperative and syndicalist work

within the unfree capitalist market—despite its restrictions—but with

the ultimate goal of unifying it with the cooperative agorist projects.

In “Toward an Agorist-Syndicalist Alliance,” Glitterbomb proposes that…

[w]hile agorists build alternatives to the white market within the black

and grey markets, syndicalists could focus on challenging existing white

market entities from the inside, eventually taking them over as Rothbard

advocated. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Agorists should indeed

advocate that syndicalists go even further. Once a white market business

is successfully syndicalized, agorist-syndicalists should help

transition the business into the agora. The newly collectivized business

should eventually do what all good agorist businesses do: ignore state

licensing regimes, refuse to pay taxes, engage in the use of alternative

currencies, and generally disregard statist interference with their

business dealings.

And if the goal is to generate an anti-capitalist, cooperative economy,

the combination of cooperative agorism and agorist-syndicalism can be

considered forms of venture communism, the scheme, as described by

Glitterbomb in “Bullshit Jobs and the End of Work (As We Know It),”

“which seeks to invest in cooperatives and outcompete capitalist firms”

and ultimately use “worker cooperatives as a means to achieve communist

outcomes via market means.” This communist end goal is twofold: Karl

Marx explains that “[i]f co-operative production is not to remain a sham

and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united

co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common

plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the

constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of

capitalist production – what else . . . would it be but communism,

‘possible’ communism?” But even when that “common plan” must necessarily

be spontaneous and decentralized for Hayekian reasons, Carson asserts

that removing barriers to production and allowing “free market

competition in socializing progress,” as would be the case in the agora,

“would result in a society resembling not the anarcho-capitalist vision

of a world owned by the Koch brothers and Halliburton, so much as Marx’s

vision of a communist society.”

[1] A nuanced libertarian position on taxation can be found in my piece

“An Anti-Statist Beginner’s Guide to (Taxation, Public Budgets, and)

Participatory Budgeting.”

[2] While Broze believes that vertical agorism does not qualify as

counter-economics, Glitterbomb contends that “if these tactics directly

challenge state and corporate power how are they not counter-economic?”

[3] For critical opinions on blockchain and related technologies, see my

pieces “NFTs Suck for Labor” and “Crypto Will Not Save Us From the

Workplace.”

[4] See Wikipedia for a diagram of the IAD framework.