 Agorism is an increasingly popular form of free market anarchy. Despite being developed at the same time, it is not the same as anarcho-capitalism however, and I'll have to make another video in the future going over the differences. But, depending on who you ask, it is either a more radical or more consistent form of it. I will attempt to explain this as concisely as I can, but if you're totally new to the ideas presented within libertarian anarchy, you might find yourself lost and perhaps need to learn the basics before going forward. Firstly, agorism as a concept was created by Canadian-born activist and man who has an unfortunate resemblance of a stereotypical sexual predator, Samuel Edward Konkin III, which is quite a mouthful and doesn't roll off the tongue, so he's often referred to as S.E.K. III or just Konkin. The name agorism comes from the Greek word agora, which means a market and open meeting place. The market in this sense is the ultimate expression of voluntary action, peaceful exchange, and ultimately anarchy. Konkin wrote a lot in his efforts to flesh out and define his ideas, especially in his books New Libertarian Manifesto and An Agorist Primer. You could read these two pieces of literature and have a full understanding of the topic, but there are other fantastic examples such as agorist class theory by Wally Conga and chaos theory by Robert Murphy, the latter one I particularly love. Onto the nuts and bolts then. Agorism, like many other forms of anarchy, defines all moral action as that which is undertaken consensually and through voluntary means. What sets it apart here though is that it is the most anti-political that this can possibly go. According to Konkin, an agorist must never even vote, as participating in government in any way is contradictory to these aims. It says the initiation of violence or aggression is the method of the state, and to overthrow the state you cannot use the method which keeps it alive in the first place. Only peaceful revolution is desired, not by destroying the state, but by starving it of the taxes which it survives on as much as possible. So tax evasion is totally encouraged and the process of doing so is called counter economics. This concept is the main bulk of agorism and indeed its most famous part. But to go any further into counter economics we need to outline the agorist classifications of markets. The categories are as follow, white markets, the exchange of goods and services which is deemed explicitly legal by the state and which is regulated and taxed. For example, this is most economic activity, all the way from a car dealership to a supermarket, a hair salon and everything in between. Gray markets, goods and services which are legal or not specifically illegal but are exchanged outside of the state's supervision and therefore not taxable. Examples of these are local farmers markets, flea sales or under the counter purchases. Black markets, exchange of goods and services which are deemed illegal by the state but are voluntarily exchanged in any way. For example, in most western countries drugs and prostitution are illegal but are still largely engaged in. And lastly, red markets. Economic activity which is outlawed by the state and initiates violence or coercion and is therefore inherently moral. For example, human trafficking, assassination, extortion and so on. It can be aptly said that red markets are everything the state does daily which it would severely punish you for doing at all. So the activity within counter economics is entirely focused around the gray and black markets as their exchanges are all voluntary and the state takes no part in it nor does it receive any tax revenue from them. For this reason it is defined as counter establishment economics and the practice of all peaceful interaction which is forbidden by the state. All the various kinds of self-sufficient activity are inherently gray market for the reasons previously given like growing your own food, collecting your own rainwater, using solar panels and a battery bank to power your home, even homeschooling children. They are perfect examples which most people can do to remove the influence of the state from their lives and should really be encouraged anyway because they're just really good things to do if at least just because they could save you quite a good bit of money. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are of special importance to agorism because whereas the dollar, pound, euro etc are issued and controlled by the state using any kind of decentralized form of currency to even buy your toothpaste is technically gray market to an extent or at least more so than using fiat currency. To this end it stands to reason that all explicitly gray market activity should use cryptocurrency or some sort of decentralized money as then there is literally no trace of the state encountered at any point. Almost all power that the state wields comes from their own monopoly on money and bitcoin is such a serious threat to that power I'll have to go into quite a long separate video about it. Nonetheless bitcoin itself could be called the agorist primer and has exploded the use of the dark web as a hub of gray and black market exchange yet has also so far remained in the white market and almost serves as a link between the two. Now the black market is where things can get tricky to deal with as I mentioned drugs and prostitution before will continue to use them as examples. They are largely deemed morally reprehensible by mainstream views but when the libertarian principles of voluntary exchange, non-aggression, consent of adults and such are followed there is nothing immoral about them and certainly not in just the purchasing of but regardless on what you think of these topics they do certainly pose a greater risk to pursue due to the state's enforcement against them. The perfect example here is the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht the man who created the dark web network called Silk Road which was used by many vendors to sell drugs directly to buyers all across the world. Despite only creating the website and not even actively participating in this when the FBI busted the Silk Road Ross was given a double life sentence without parole literally for creating a website there has never been a more egregious punishment for a literally victimless crime in history and I urge you to please at least sign the petition for his release which I will link in the video description and before we move on from black markets it should also be noted that when buying such things in person cash is almost exclusively the medium of exchange because even though it's the state currency which was outlined before even the state can't track its own creation and it is incredibly important to distinguish between black and red markets within these definitions as the two really are not to be confused. In mainstream terminology hiring a hitman is called black market activity but is absolutely not in agorist terms. Such things are totally abhorrent and unacceptable and if somebody is arguing with you about counter economics you must never let them control the narrative by claiming that the two are one and the same. The next great contribution of agorism is the first and I believe possibly only class theory within libertarianism. Now don't shudder because this is absolutely nothing like the Marxist class theory and it is not a distinction by purely economic means or even an attempt to classify the whole of society. The three classes of note here are the entrepreneur good the non-status capitalist neutral and the status capitalist bad. This follows a lot of cues which are found abundantly in classical schools of economic study and understanding which acknowledge that the entrepreneur is the innovator of the economy and therefore society as a whole. They take risks to advance human capability, improve life as we know it, in doing so they reduce poverty and produce more wealth available for all. You'll hardly find any scholar who has considered a reliable authority in the realm of economics disagree with this basis. I know this first hand because when I boil down all of my university study of economics so far they all lead back to the innovations that we continue to reap which entrepreneurs have created in the quest for profit. Konkin described the non-status capitalist as something of an economic drone or automaton, the holders of capital and are not ideologically aware, an economic follower and not a pioneer, the ones who strive only to meet competition rather than push it. These are the majority of normal firms, the kind of companies that exist just for the sake of existing and are void of just about anything special. Now the status capitalists are where we can start to get angry. They are the ones who greatly benefit directly from the machinations of the state and attempt to harness and abuse its power to further their own gains at the expense of everybody else's liberty and certainly everybody else's tax money. The two examples I go to most often are the big banks and the military industrial complex. These two industries pour unfathomable amounts of money into the political system to influence it in their favours which see themselves better off at a great cost to us. The big investment banks and hedge funds have an absolute vested interest in monopolized state currency which can completely control all economic activity within its sphere. The biggest culprit of which is monetary inflation, a pestilence that fills the fiat currencies of the state but which gold and bitcoin are hardly affected by. Constant inflation yields consistent returns on the investments and assets of these banks while this inflation destroys the purchasing power of everybody else. Through this apparatus, the banking sector creates disproportionately high costs of housing, creating bubbles, bursting them through incompetence like they did in 2008, then when the economy crumbles and people start defaulting on their mortgage payments to these very same banks, their cronies in government make sure the banks get billions in bailout money which they then use to acquire more houses afterwards making the bubble even bigger next time. So what you get is more and more people who will have to pay rent for the rest of their lives and never be able to own a home because these banks pay out of their arses to keep this government controlled cycle occurring for their own benefit. Now that was quite a rant but yippee we still have to talk about the military industrial complex. I'll just use one example for this and that is the F-35 fighter jet. This jet has been in production for so bloody long it's not even becoming accurate to call it next generation anymore. The stupid thing first took flight in 2006 was 13 years ago, the company that produces it Lockheed Martin lobbied politicians in the states to approve the government contract to produce the jet and in return Lockheed Martin creates manufacturing jobs in the states of these given senators so they can then stand on a podium and claim a triumph for creating jobs for their constituents but one and a half trillion dollars and well over a decade later the thing can't even shoot straight and is constantly failing quality checks and basic guidelines and this is not in the slightest bit an exception it's the rule of military contracts the cycle of politicians and defense companies being beneficiaries to each other is perpetual the politicians want the jobs to exist for as long as possible and the manufacturers want to keep the tax money flowing in for as long as possible so there is literally no incentive for either party to actually have the things work properly it's just a total shitshow well that went on for a bit longer than i expected it feels like it was all really off topic but it wasn't it just makes you realize how undeniably true the agorist class theory is when my totally off the cuff description of just two industries within it can be so incredibly evidenced most of these observations have been around for a very long time by the biggest influencers of modern libertarianism like Ludwig von Mises, Kredwig Bastiat and many more but Konkin and agorism undoubtedly deserve credit for structuring what is an incredibly lengthy analysis of state and market interaction into such a concise and yet eloquent package of a class theory so before we conclude i will summarize the smaller aspects within agorism which i believe are both good and bad firstly as i said before it is entirely anti-political which is certainly consistent but the all or nothing approach to anarchy is often criticized as cutting off your nose despite your face as agorists can often make enemies with lots of other libertarians in an attempt to make friends with a small amount of anarcho-communists and fracture its own wider movement on that note back in its early days agorism was also described by Konkin as the movement of the libertarian left as he believed it was more akin to the original leftist anarchist theories of Proudhon's mutualism and the like rather than it was akin to the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard i for one don't find this to be true and don't equate agorism with any kind of left-wing ideology and can't see evidence of it in its in any of its own given theories however on the plus side agorism does always use the term free market in place of capitalism because as Konkin rightly noticed ever since the term capitalism was invented it was more of a pejorative word intended to describe a state-controlled and oppressive economic system and not just mutual exchange of private property so there you have it agorism anti-state anti-boogaloo pro-markets and pro-drug dealers i hope i've done a good job explaining it but it's a very interesting topic because it's such a niche philosophy yet so expansive i could never make a single video on it and feel satisfied in how much i was able to cover i absolutely encourage you to do your own reading on it which is incredibly easy to find all major works on the topic are available free online and in audiobook form and any of them will do a better justice than i realistically could until next time