While everyone else was honoring dead soldiers by buying things, shooting off fireworks (dear neighbors: why?), and grilling out, I was in bed all weekend with a case of food poisoning. Naturally, I wound up reading books about anarchism and watching documentaries about Chernobyl.

It was accident, really. I was planning on reading Lysander Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority for Independence Day, in honor of the American tradition of telling the state to go boil its head. But when I began sampling Spooner, I found I couldn’t stop. The man’s a menace. A Boston abolitionist, writing two years after the War Between the States, he begins by announcing that the North had not freed the slaves; in contrast, it had made slaves of us all, by declaring that consent is not necessary for political authority; only brute force. Spooner is a marvel, condemning both the North and South in the same breath with the same arguments; he will go on to dismantle claims that Southerners were guilty of treason before arguing against the Constitution as an active contract. He gets a bit into the weeds on what constitutes an active contract, but as a pro-secession anti-Confederate pro-Union anti-Lincoln southerner, I was delighted to find an abolitionist pointing out that the moral horror of compelling men to obey tainted both sides. He gets in a bit of economic argument, too, suggesting that the North went to war more to protect their financial assets than out for moral principle. Definitely going to be reading more Spooner, particularly The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.

What happens when men don’t consent to their government, but they live in a place that would imprison or shoot them if they actively resisted it? Well…they could begin subverting it, denying its control over their lives by shifting economic activity out of its realm Enter counter-economics. Anything outside the state’s purview is countereconomics: if it’s untaxed, black market, illicit, whatever. (‘Aggressive’ activity, like stealing and murder, are not countereconomic.) Bartering, using an unlicensed barber, and buying verboten goods are all counter-economic, and nearly everyone engages in it to some degree throughout the world: the more intrusive the state, the healthier its counter-economy. The command economy, through its own inadequacies, creates the demand for the counter-economy. In Counter-Economics, Samuel Konkin III begins to explore the promise of countereconomics, proposing that if enough people moved enough activity outside the state’s realm, that we could effectively starve the state to death through want of funds and political relevance. Unfortunately, Konkin died not halfway through writing this volume (which was dismissed by six publishers as too dangerous for public consumption), so all that we get is the basic idea, a review of countereconomic activity in states like Soviet Russia and Red China, a chapter on the promise of cryptography, and then an outline of what would have been one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, ever. Alas, mortality.

Konkin’s ideas live, though — and in 1979 , they inspired Alongside Night, a SF title from an author who was a fellow traveler of Konkin. J. Neil Schulman here presents us a vision of an actively failing United States, one beset by crippling inflation, so much so that police and the military are on strike. Konkin’s counter-economy is booming, as people, regardless of political convictions, covertly begin dealing in gold, swapping services, etc. The story begins when a young man’s father disappears, presumably kidnapped or killed by the state for his outspoken criticism of their tyranny and fiscal stupidity, and the teenager is forced to seek the help of ‘the revolutionary agorist cadre’, an underground movement of anarchists/agorists/libertarians who are actively building a counter-society based on free exchange and voluntaryism, who are counting the minutes until DC collapses under its own weight. It’s a thriller doubling as an ideological novel, a bit like The Iron Heel but for a very different audience, given that that dystopia was London’s argument for socialism, using corporatism as his foil. The movie, which I saw before falling into a Chernobyl rabbit hole, had…limitations. A low-budget production, definitely, but with a curious lack of consistency in that regard: there were recognizable actors in it, and the film itself was in high-definition. The editing and writing were weaker, though, and the quality of props was hit and miss. The novel was fun, though, and I’ve got a few more like coming up. It helps that agorists, wanting to spread the word, have made a lot of their reading materials free-to-read online. I also have some…normal (for me) stuff coming up. War, classics, the science of poop…the usual.