Agorist by Necessity, or, Hope Lies in the Proles

Many of you have probably heard by now of the Texas woman who was fined $700 and threatened with arrest for selling tamales to her neighbors without a food permit. Her comments reflect how any reasonable person would feel about this bizarre situation: "Never would have I thought, tamales. To know that somebody can be arrested over that, that to me is unbelievable. It’s just so common. That’s why to me, I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal.”

In my own neighborhood in Southern California, one sees signs outside of houses advertising tamales, pupusas, tacos, and more. It's simply part of the landscape. If you frequent a local lavanderia, you're likely to see ladies walk in loudly announcing "Tamales!", and any interested party can follow her to her van in the parking lot where she will have steaming piles of fresh tamales of many varieties. My husband recently bought a pineapple and cream tamale from just such a lady, and found it delightful.

It's not just tamales. Several men make daily rounds throughout the neighborhood pushing ice cream or snack carts. People set up shop outside the local church with just a simple folding table to sell food to churchgoers when Mass ends. Yard sales are not just for the weekends; they are set up daily and some are even permanent. Huge arrays of tools and appliances for sale are often arranged on grassy strips on the roadside. Freshly cut flowers, or bags of fruit from someone's own backyard fruit tree are sold on street corners.

My neighborhood is a lively, bustling ecosystem of market activity. How many of these people obtain permits for their activities? The answer to that is obvious. So is there an epidemic of food-borne illness where I live? I see no evidence of it. These grey market vendors seem to take pride in their wares. The food is freshly made, piping hot, and carefully packaged. It's food that they would give to their own families. If I were afraid to eat it, I would logically have to also be afraid of eating dinner over at a neighbor's house. The only reason that one activity (serving a meal to a neighbor for free) is legal, and the other (selling a meal to a neighbor) is not is because the State insists on getting their cut of any transaction involving money.

An interesting lesson can be derived from the case of the Texas woman's illegal tamales, and I think it's well summed up in her comments, "It's just so common." Indeed, it is common. I see it every day in my own neighborhood, as I said. The reason why this woman's story is a story at all is because, although the activity itself is technically illegal, people are rarely arrested or fined for it. On the contrary, it seems that in many locales the relevant enforcement agencies turn a blind eye.

This phenomenon puts me in mind of a Cato paper I recently read, entitled "Understanding Riots" (http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/5/cj14n1-13.pdf). The authors explain that, in the case of riots, the risk of facing repercussion for criminal action is reduced when large numbers of people are engaging in the same behavior at the same time, as police forces are unable to identify, chase down and arrest every single rioter. Similarly, in the case of many people in a given area engaging in grey market activity, there is safety in numbers. The cost of tracking down each participant is too great to justify the effort. That's not to say that no one ever gets caught and made an example of, but the risk of being caught is greatly lessened. Whereas, if one were living in an area where almost no one else openly engaged in unregulated market activity (say, an upper middle class neighborhood) the risk of being charged with selling tacos without a permit outside the local library would be relatively high.

Another point made in the Cato paper is that people respond to signaling during riots. One or more initial risk-takers (entrepreneurs, if you will) must be able to "read" the crowd to determine if others will join in if only someone else will "cast the first stone". If those first actors are accurate in their interpretation of the environment of the crowd, then their initial acts of violence (breaking a window, lighting something on fire, etc) will signal to others that a riot is imminent, and therefor it is safer than before to join in the carnage. If the riot entrepreneurs did not read the crowd correctly, they will likely suffer the consequences of arrest. So again, to draw a correlation here, one should not expect a thriving grey market to ensue in his quiet, polite, middle class neighborhood if only he takes the first step to show others the way. He needs to accurately read his environment.

This leads me to the subject of intentional, ideologically-driven agorism. Many anarchists hold out hope that widespread agorist activity has the potential to drive out the state by making it irrelevant, or starving it out. I agree that agorism must be an essential component in the fight against state oppression, but I think many people make a fundamental mistake in imagining what this must look like.

Although anarchists and libertarians may well be the innovators who develop technologies which facilitate agorist activity (cryptocurrencies, the sharing economy, etc), widespread agorism will probably not be ideologically driven. The people who advertise their foodstuffs in lavanderias and sell from the backs of their vans are doing so out of economic necessity. People act in their self interest (or try to, anyways). The cost of complying with state regulations is high. The cost of being arrested or fined is also high, but if that cost, or risk of incurring it, is lowered, then the risk of ignoring the regulations may come to be seen as worth it, on the margin.

Note those last three words: "on the margin." There are many different kinds of costs that people take into consideration when determining their course of action, many of which are subconscious. Those who are more financially secure are more able to comply with state regulations, and might be more willing to pay that cost rather than suffer the social stigma of being charged with a crime. Many people are emotionally tied to the identity of being a "law abiding citizen", and so the cost of violating state mandates includes not only the risk of incurring financial costs and social stigma, but also the psychological trauma of violating their own perceived identity. But those on the margin, (1) who cannot afford to comply with regulations, (2) who live among people for whom run-ins with the authorities is not a black mark on their social worth, (3) for whom being a "law abiding citizen" is not the defining feature of their self identity, and (4) who live in an area where grey market activity is already going on, may find it in their own self interest to engage in agorism themselves.

One of the things that anarchists/libertarians have on our side is the practical realism of our worldview. We say that the state cannot deliver on its promises of bringing peace and prosperity to mankind. This has proven out time and again, and we can rest assured that it will follow suit in the future. The more it tries to provide for people (to make of them dependent, loyal supporters), the more impoverished, desperate people it will produce. The pool of the aforementioned people "on the margin" will increase. More people will find it in their interest to ignore the state. The growing number of Agorists By Necessity will signal to others that it is safer to engage in agorism themselves, just as the growing number of rioters signals to others that it is safer to riot.

This is why I don't fully put my faith in intentional agorism or counter-economics, as practiced by anarchists themselves. As anarchists, we recognize the failings of attempts to centrally plan society or culture. If those who find the ideas of libertarianism appealing are by and large middle class white males (yes, I realize there are exceptions, and I myself am an exception, but let's be real), then the lessons of the Cato paper should be taken into account: a large scale, ideologically driven agorist movement is unlikely to take hold. Our efforts can be useful, no doubt, but will not make up the bulk of agorist activity as envisioned by some. It will be made up of those who find it economically necessary, and are not likely to be mobilized by ideology.

An ideological movement is not necessary for this component of the overall goals of anarchism to be realized. It happens spontaneously. Socialist countries have always had thriving black markets for toilet paper, soap, meat, etc. But this is an illustration of why agorism is not the magic bullet that will bring an end to the state. The inevitable deterioration of peoples' dependence on the state will give way to agorist activity, and this is a good thing; a natural thing, which smooths the transition from dependence to independence. The ideological component must happen on the marketplace of ideas, which is a wholly separate sphere.

While I say that the ideological component is unnecessary for the spread of agorism overall, I do not believe it is unimportant. Winning hearts and minds is, I believe, the fundamental aspect of furthering our goal of a free society. So whenever you see an instance such as the woman in Texas facing arrest for illegal tamales, by all means bring attention to it. Take these examples and use them to expose the ridiculousness and injustice of the state. She said, "I don't see why it's such a big deal." Most people will share her sentiment. It's cases like these that bring into reality the ad absurdum argument, and gets people thinking about the legitimacy of the law itself. Ideas are spread both through theory and through experience. The success of spontaneous agorism speaks to the legitimacy of the theory. We need both to convince society that they don't need the state. And to the extent that anarchists can bring about innovations that circumvent the state (such as neighborhood watch apps, private policing companies, etc), we can further our goal only by creating systems that are better, cheaper, and more accessible than the services provided by the state. Don't rely on people buying into a new technology purely for ideological reasons. The ones that catch on are the ones that will appeal to anarchists and non-anarchists alike.

There is a line in George Orwell's 1984 that sums up what I want to say:

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. .... But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?"

No, they have no need to conspire. The state itself gives them their own impetus for eschewing it, sooner or later. The job of the middle class, white male anarchists is simply to persuade their fellow Party members to never institute a new state over them once the old one has been got rid of.

(postscript: If anyone should accuse me of looking down on, or patronizing, the poor working class, the "proletariat", please note that I myself am a member of this very class; I have an inside look, if you will, and I don't consider anything that I've said to be denigrating to my own class. On the contrary, I have much worse to say of the middle class, on which I hold my tongue.)