Agorism and Nazism: A Study in Polar
Opposites
In the Gorilla
Experiment episode of the Big Bang
Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper attempts to teach Penny some rudimentary
physics. True to his pedantic nature, Sheldon begins his sketch of the history
of physics by mentioning the agora,
from which we get the modern term agorism.
Following Samuel Edward Konkin III’s (SEK III’s) An Agorist Primer, the word “agora” is still used to this day to mean
simply the “open marketplace.”
To the modern agorist, the agora or uncorrupted free marketplace
is the goal; the means of going from the current statism to the agora is called
“counter-economics.” “All non-coercive human action committed in defiance of
the State constitutes the Counter-Economy,” according to SEK III in his book An Agorist Primer. He mentions some specific
examples of what is meant by non-coercive action in defiance of the State:
- Tax evasion
- Inflation avoidance
- Smuggling
- Free production
- Illegal distribution
- The free flow of both labor (“illegal aliens”) and capital across borders
- Information and secrecy of that information
- And many more
The general idea of counter-economics is very similar to
what Robert Neuwirth calls System D
as reported in an interview called Why
Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy. Neuwirth says that
there’s a French word for someone
who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard…the street economy…l’économie de
la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy if you will. I
decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less
pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal
economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the
term to refer to all the economic
activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered,
unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include
gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that. (bold emphasis
mine)
I suppose that one could object slightly to Neuwirth’s
definition because he excludes gun-running and drugs, which I think falls under
SEK III’s definition of counter-economic behavior. Since the State is the one
wanting to regulate guns to death and the State is the one trying to enforce
its War on Drugs, then bringing in guns and drugs would be classified, I think,
as non-coercive acts in defiance of the State’s will.
Nevertheless, the reason why I want to mention System D is
because it helps me starkly illustrate that in the final analysis what is being
discussed here is simply human survival.
This is a discussion that, without being hyperbolic, does touch upon life-and-death issues. To make this
unexceptionable point crystal clear, Neuwirth, in his book The Stealth of Nations, mentions how System D has helped people
survive the financial crisis:
A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the
huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries
with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and
unregulated—in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust
System D—fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in
centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.
He further illustrates the survival issue with an example from Latin America:
Studies of countries throughout
Latin America have shown that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial
crisis. This spontaneous system,
ruled by the spirit of organized
improvisation, will be crucial for the development of cities in the
twenty-first century. (bold emphasis mine)
Perhaps one of the most impressive examples of the
counter-economics idea in action is that of what businesspeople did in order to
evade the price control laws of Nazi Germany. It also gives me the opportunity
to bring to light an issue that seems to be neglected; nevertheless, it does
play an important role in undermining the establishment of state sovereignty.
In a truly brilliant passage found in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia, James C. Scott mentions that shifting
of linguistic practices is vital for state evasion and for state
prevention:
State rulers find it well nigh
impossible to install an effective sovereignty over people who are constantly in motion, who have no permanent pattern of organization,
no permanent address, whose leadership is ephemeral, whose subsistence patterns
are pliable and fugitive, who have
few permanent allegiances, and who are liable, over time, to shift their linguistic practices and their ethnic identity.
And this is just the point! The economic, political, and cultural organization
of such people is, in large part, a strategic adaptation to avoid incorporation in state structures. (all
emphasis is mine)
With that prologue now out of the way, let me get to my main
point: that the behavior of some businesspeople (I cannot say all because it is
fairly easy to demonstrate that some businesspeople wanted fascism or even
created it) acted as perfect textbook examples of agorists evading the Nazi
price controls introduced in 1936.
In his book The Vampire
Economy: Doing Business under Fascism, Günter Reimann, much like James C.
Scott, emphasizes the importance of permanent change—or subversion of
“standardization”—as a key method for evading the will of the State. Conformity
truly is the jailer of the world. Reimann notes that
manufacturers may introduce changes
in standardized products which result in making the finished article more
complicated, solely for the purpose of
enabling the manufacturer to claim that the finished product is a “new
article,” which will not be subject
to the old price restrictions. The State is enforcing more standardization
of production in order to save raw materials; manufacturers must do exactly the
reverse in order to defend their private interests. (bold emphasis mine)
To further evade the State’s price control system, buyers
and sellers would set up these “combination deals” that amounted to selling
scarce resources for a higher price while “tricking” the State into thinking
that one was following the prescribed price orders. I want to reproduce in full
Reimann’s story about how the buyers and sellers executed this legerdemain because
it illustrates an actual way of
appearing to be “legitimate” while actually being the complete opposite:
A peasant was arrested and put on
trial for having repeatedly sold his old dog together with a pig. When a
private buyer of pigs came to him, a
sale was staged according to the official rules. The buyer would ask the
peasant: “How much is the pig?” The cunning peasant would answer: “I cannot ask
you for more than the official price. But how much will you pay for my dog
which I also want to sell?” Then the peasant and the buyer of the pig would no
longer discuss the price of the pig, but only the price of the dog. They would
come to an understanding about the price of the dog, and when an agreement was
reached, the buyer got the pig too. The
price for the pig was quite correct, strictly according to the rules, but the
buyer had paid a high price for the dog. Afterward, the buyer, wanting to
get rid of the useless dog, released
him, and he ran back to his old master for whom he was indeed a treasure.
In the end, the peasant never actually sells his dog since
the buyer effectively gives the dog back to him by releasing the dog. The buyer
gets the pig, which is the official side of this transaction, but the seller
gets to keep the official price for the pig plus the phantom dog sale price, thus the seller gets a price above the State mandated price for
selling his pig.
Naturally, the State is going to try to crackdown on such
prestidigitation, a fancy word for any sneaky sleight of hand behavior. Being
Nazi Germany, the State’s response was quite predictable. According to Reimann,
the State used “control purchases”
in order to catch people for audaciously circumventing its price rules. What
exactly were Nazi “control purchases”? They consisted of the following:
- Secret police agents
- The secret police agents would be plainclothes officers and would pose as harmless buyers, but willing to offer a higher price than the official price
- The secret police agents would then try to induce businesspeople to make an illegal transaction with them
To me this sounds like a drug sting operation but for such
prosaic items as selling pigs! A pig sting! (That has double entendre written
all over it.)
In order to avoid getting caught, the idea of shifting one’s linguistic practices comes
into play among those engaged in productive activity. Reimann points out
explicitly that when applying agorism, one
must learn to speak a new language:
In order to discuss illegal
business transactions in a manner that makes them seem legal, businessmen in fascist countries learn to
speak the language of experienced underground adversaries of the regime. They
are often uncertain as to whether a prospective buyer is “reliable” and
therefore talk in terms which are innocent and the meaning of which can be
interpreted in different ways. (bold emphasis mine)
In conclusion, I think that one possible way to “market”
agorism to people who are currently not agorists is to show that the underlying
ideas have a long and honorable history. I have tried to illustrate this by
using both a recent and a historical example. In the recent example, i.e., the
current financial crisis, agorism and System D have helped desperate people on
multiple continents earn a living and stay alive. Agorism and System D thus are
helping people survive. The compare and contrast is blatantly obvious: the
greedy ruling class caused the problem through their central bank monetary
policies but the agorists provided the solution and it is working in practice. The
Nazi example demonstrates that agorism is a tool for undermining a totalitarian
regime. Once again, agorism can position itself as being on the side of
humanity against some of its most monstrous enemies. And how did our pig buyer
and pig seller do it: through a negotiated exchange in which both parties came
to an acceptable agreement. In other words, voluntary exchange subverts
totalitarianism once again.
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