The Case for an Evolutionary Market of Conscience
Agorism was originally conceived by Samuel Edward Konkin III as a revolutionary counter economy, a black market rebellion against the State. But over time, it has been misread, diluted, and mixed with ideas that never belonged to it, Marxist class theory, social democratic reformism, and even corporate capitalism masquerading as “free enterprise.”
Neo-Agorism is a necessary course correction, a purification of the original idea. It is not capitalist, not socialist, and certainly not communist. It is the philosophy of the Agora restored to its essence, a society of voluntary exchange, self reliant individuals, and spontaneous evolution, not revolution.
1. Revolution Is a Marxist Myth
Agorists should abandon the term “revolution.” It is a Marxist word, soaked in blood, rooted in the fantasy of central planning and mass upheaval. To revolt is to fight for control of the same machinery you claim to hate. Agorism has nothing to do with that.
We believe in evolution, not revolution. Humanity did not revolt against monkeys to become human beings. We evolved, slowly, freely, through countless small adaptations. Likewise, free societies will not emerge by seizing the State but by outgrowing it.
Marxists divide the world into classes; we see eight billion individuals, each unequal, different, unique. There is no “proletariat,” only people acting in their own interest through voluntary exchange.
Agorism is not a class war. It is a path of personal evolution, a quiet revolution of independence. The future will not be taken by mobs but built by makers.
2. The Ethics of Self Employment
At its core, agorism is not an economic strategy but an ethical lifestyle.
To live agoristically is to take responsibility for your own existence, to work, trade, and create outside the State’s permission slip.
Everyone should be self employed. Not because everyone should run a business, but because everyone should own their life. When you are your own boss, you are part of a voluntary elite, people who build instead of beg, who trade instead of demand.
This does not mean rejecting cooperation. It means cooperating freely, through contracts, exchange, and shared creation, never through compulsion.
The outdated Marxist lexicon, “class struggle,” “worker liberation,” “solidarity,” should be abandoned. Agorism is not a collectivist movement. It is the philosophy of the individualist elite, builders, artists, coders, traders, and creators who live by their own mind and labor.
Freedom is not found in organizing the masses, but in unshackling oneself from the herd.
3. Evolution, Not Progress
Even libertarians have fallen for the trap of progress, a word that hides central planning behind a smile. Progress implies a fixed goal, a collective direction, and often a moral authority to define it. It is the language of technocrats and utopians.
Evolution, by contrast, is not managed. It happens. It’s how species adapt, how markets form, how freedom grows, organically, unpredictably, spontaneously.
Human civilization did not progress from caves to cities; it evolved through millions of voluntary exchanges. What we call progress, longer lives, better tools, higher comfort, was not planned by bureaucrats. It emerged from human action, not human design.
“Progress” is the vocabulary of social engineers, “nudgers,” and moral bureaucrats. They replace natural incentives with manipulation, calling coercion “guidance.” To the Neo-Agorist, this is regression disguised as progress. Real progress is unplanned evolution.
4. Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
The terms capitalism and socialism are worn out relics of nineteenth century ideology. Both depend on centralization and political management.
Capitalism, as it exists today, is not voluntary free exchange but a State protected hierarchy of corporate privileges, central banking, and legal monopolies.
Socialism, in turn, replaces one master with another, trading the capitalist for the commissar, the market for the Ministry.
Both are forms of centralized economics, where power flows downward and freedom upward only by permission.
Neo-Agorism belongs to neither camp. It represents decentralized economics, an order of voluntary, bottom up cooperation. Not capitalism in the corporatist sense, not socialism in the collectivist sense, but a stateless market rooted in mutual exchange.
The proper language of freedom is not “isms” but markets, real, living, spontaneous markets between free individuals.
5. Konkin’s Eclectic Roots, and the Need for Purification
In an interview with the California Libertarian Review (CRNLA), Samuel Edward Konkin III summarized his influences:
CRNLA: Your economic views still seem very much in the Benjamin Tucker tradition (especially on rent and interest.) Have you read any of the “Austrian” economists, such as Von Mises and Rothbard? What do you think of them?
RAW: Tucker is certainly a major influence. My economic ideas are a blend of Tucker, Spooner, Fuller, Pound, Henry George, Rothbard, Douglas, Korzybski, Proudhon and Marx. I always try to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. Read to see what I can learn from every school, rather than condemning any idea in its entirety. “Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time,” as Ez Pound once wrote. Rothbard is, like Marx and Pound, a brilliant closed mind, excellent for stimulation but anybody who gets dragged into a Rothbardian dogmatic trance should take LSD and try looking at the world through another grid. Von Mises is another who is excellent for stimulation, pernicious if erected into dogma. By and large, the Austrians remind me of a parable by Laurance Labadie, in which a certain tribe has the custom of allowing high caste individuals to kick low caste individuals in the butt whenever they pass them in the street. A philosophical school, much like the Austrians, naturally arises to prove rationally that the kicking is not only necessary but just, inevitable, beautiful and altogether glorious. If there were big profits in cancer, there’d undoubtedly be an Austrian school of medicine, proving that carcinoma is good for us.
Konkin’s honesty is refreshing, but his inclusivity blurred the boundaries of agorism. A coherent philosophy cannot draw equally from Tucker, Marx, George, and Douglas without collapsing into contradiction.
Neo-Agorism corrects this by reaffirming first principles and pruning false roots.
6. Philosophical Hygiene, Who Must Be Removed
Certain names in Konkin’s intellectual mix are fundamentally incompatible with agorist ethics and must be philosophically exorcised:
Henry George, His single tax doctrine assumes collective land ownership and a State to enforce it. Taxation, even in the name of justice, is theft.
C. H. Douglas, His “social credit” system replaces voluntary exchange with technocratic redistribution. It is central planning in mathematical disguise.
Karl Marx, His entire dialectic abolishes voluntary exchange and private production, enslaving the individual to historical necessity.
Their inclusion was an intellectual curiosity, not a moral endorsement. Neo-Agorism therefore removes them completely, keeping the Agora free of collectivist contamination.
7. What Remains
What survives this purification are the thinkers compatible with liberty,
Tucker’s individualism, Spooner’s natural law, Proudhon’s anti monopoly, Rothbard’s praxeology, Fuller’s futurism, and Korzybski’s semantics.
Together they form the foundation of a philosophy that is neither capitalist nor socialist, a decentralized ethic of voluntary mastery.
Neo-Agorism is not about organizing masses, redistributing wealth, or managing “progress.”
It is about the self directed evolution of individuals who trade, build, and live freely.
8. Conclusion, The Market of Free Spirits
Capitalism and socialism are the two heads of the same god, authority.
One wears a business suit, the other a red flag, but both demand obedience.
Neo-Agorism rejects both. It is not a compromise between ideologies but a transcendence of them.
It speaks the language of builders, not destroyers, of evolution, not revolution.
The future belongs to those who stop waiting for permission and start building their own Agora,
a marketplace of free spirits, not managed men.
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