Revolution is self-defense

Why you should be an anarchist

So one of the weird things about the anarchist movement is how few of them actually advocate revolution. Most anarchists believe physical resistance to the tyrants is impossible and that we can win using a combination of nonviolent methods:

The most notable one is called agorism and consists of "counter-economics" - economic practices that undermine the state's control, like cryptocurrency, under-the-table employment, privacy technology and decentralization.

IdeoLogs interviews Agorist Filthy Heretic for 14 minutes

Culture warfare (convincing more people to recognize the state's illegitimacy).

Civil disobedience. The theory being that if enough people peacefully refuse to obey unjust laws, police will be unwilling or unable to use the amount of violence necessary to enforce them, and that will collapse the state.

Secession or seasteading. The Free State Project is an effort to basically concentrate libertarians in New Hampshire for greater political leverage, and seasteading is the rather impractical idea of building floating societies outside of the claimed territory of states.

Free State Project

Unfortunately, no strategy that doesn't end in revolution will work. Agorism and seasteading seem to ignore that governments will use violence against any such movement that constitutes any real threat to them, like they did against Ross Ulbricht. Culture warfare and secession assume that statists can be converted, but the vast majority of them are entirely closed to reason; most statists suffer too much from status quo bias and other intellectual biases to be convertible until they see an anarchist movement succeed. An anarchist movement that depends on converting more than a tiny minority of the population will never succeed.

Free Ross

Thinking civil disobedience will be successful is just silly because of both what we know about the nature of governments and the track record of police brutally attacking peaceful people - do I even need to list examples after 2020? Police don't feel responsible for their actions, and even if they did, most of them are monsters who don't care.

The separation of legislation and enforcement is harmful

None of this is to say the above strategies aren't valuable. Culture warfare and counter-economic activity are obviously important parts of a complete strategy. But they won't be *sufficient*. Defeating a violent criminal organization requires defensive force.

You don't have to be an anarchist to recognize that at least most laws are unjust, and the police regularly arrest or even murder people for victimless acts such as drug use. You also can't raise the "if I didn't take the job, someone else will" defense for them because police don't work that way. They don't have a membership quota that they draft for. People who join *do* increase the number of them and the power of tyrants to enforce their edicts. Politicians are also generally guilty in the same way as someone who orders a thug to attack you - just because they aren't personally the one doing it doesn't exempt them from defensive force. We must avoid the mistakes of the immediate threat doctrine; violence against someone who has committed aggression before and will continue to do so is certainly defensive violence, even if they aren't immediately in the act.

Myopias on violence

Police are stormtroopers. If you think it's ethical to shoot a stormtrooper without being shot at first, but not to do the same to a cop, ask yourself what the difference is.

It wouldn't even be murder to kill a cop you knew had never arrested anyone, because signing up to be an enforcer for unjust laws is a credible threat of violence against anyone they might hurt in doing so. To remove biases, imagine witnessing me sign up for a mercenary organization. The recruiter tells me "you will kidnap people who do things I don't like, kill them if that's what it takes, and I'll pay you" and you hear me agree. Is it murder for you to kill me, given you have no other way to stop me from going on to commit those crimes?

Proportionality of force defenses are weak. Someone doesn't have to be guilty of murder exactly for lethal force to be justified; for example, it would be moral to kill a rapist or kidnapper if it were the only way to stop them. Also, police frequently do commit murder in the enforcement of unjust laws, and life imprisonment sentences can be even crueler and more harmful if less salient to us.

Imprisonment bad

The only real argument against it being morally legitimate to kill police is that not all of them *do* enforce the laws as they promise. Certainly, it would be wrong to harm someone who never committed violent crimes. But that doesn't make a convincing counterargument for the general case, because if you knew that there were a tiny fraction of people in Nazi uniforms who refused to kill Jews, it wouldn't void your justification for shooting at people wearing Nazi uniforms.

This is not an argument that we should all start shooting right now. There are good strategic reasons not to do that. But defensive violence is *at some point* a necessary part of our strategy. No combination of strategies that excludes defensive violence against the enforcers of tyrants can succeed.

One common objection that isn't to the ethical justification of revolution is that it has historically resulted in a new government. This is a poor argument because the people behind most of those revolutions were not anarchists. They never had any intention of freeing their society. It would be nonsense to assume things will play out the same when a revolution is carried out by people with such different intentions from the start.

In general, people vastly underestimate the feasibility of revolution; especially because an anarchist revolution *would have an easier goal* than historical revolutions like the one that led to the foundation of America. It doesn't aim to establish a new authority. It only aims to make oppression impossible. In reality, an anarchist revolution could succeed with an incredibly tiny minority of the population and without killing even most politicians or police. Reducing the number of police to a number insufficient to enforce laws would be a sufficient win condition. If there were only enough cop-killers to make being a cop too dangerous for anyone to want to do it, we would win. Theoretically, we wouldn't even have to kill most of them.

And mass-destructive military means like tanks and bombing wouldn't even be effective against such a revolution, because there would be no targets. Anarchists wouldn't have a capital or military bases. The people posing a fatal threat to the government wouldn't be an army marching on a government bulding, but the ordinary person in the crowd who shoots you when you try to kidnap an innocent.