Agora Caliente by Robbie Revenant

Agora Caliente

by Robbie Revenant

Most people come to agorism through some form of libertarian or voluntaryist background. Awakened to the corporatocracy that oppresses them, they begin to search for a better way to organize society. Eventually, they realize that the only just way to organize society is to let it organize itself. The "right" kind of society, a free and just society, is one in which all human interactions are voluntary. Having found this truth, they naturally want to know how to achieve such a society. Agorism, the practice of counter-economics guided by the principles of radical libertarianism, provides that answer.

But what if you are already practicing counter-economics without libertarian principles as a guide? That is to say, without the ethics of liberty? No doubt, the vast majority of people participating in the grey, black, pink and red markets do so without explicit ethical guidance.

Now let us suppose for a moment that there are tens of millions of such people in the United States alone. And let us further posit that many of them have reason to hate the State. Imagine that a whole host of people with a similar cultural background are being relegated to second-class status by the laws of this nation. Afraid to step too far out of line lest they be apprehended, abused, or deported, they tend to band together to protect one another's anonymity from the State. This isolates them somewhat culturally, but also creates a close-knit community. They tend to prefer not to call on the police, the State's thuggish enforcers, so they often find ways of handling disputes themselves. They typically work at far lower than average wages due to their precarious status—which automatically puts them in the grey market, but also gives them incentive to operate in other markets to make ends meet.

Of course, I am talking about "undocumented workers", 81% of which come from Mexico and other Latin American countries. With the rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, even greater pressure will be put to bear on them to engage in counter-economic activity just to survive. But such communities also have an opportunity: to band together to form the largest agorist network ever! All they lack is a libertarian ethos to guide their market activities away from the pink and red markets, and toward a voluntary freed market which will strangle and replace the State.

We must, therefore, reach out to this subset of the population and educate them about agorism. They have the least to risk by embracing libertarian counter-economics over the counter-economics they are already practicing, and can have a huge impact on the demise of the State and the rise of a free-market stateless society.