New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III

Samuel Edward Konkin III's New Libertarian Manifesto, first published in 1980, argues that a stateless society must be reached through the voluntary conduct it would consist of. Konkin rejects party politics and proposes counter-economics: peaceful trade that evades, avoids or defies state controls, such as prohibited or unreported voluntary exchange, pursued as part of a conscious shared project he calls agorism. Fully compliant lawful commerce is his white market. We read the edited transcription at The Anarchist Library, derived from the 2006 fourth edition; it contains the 1980, 1983 and 2006 prefaces and all five chapters and omits the printed edition's critiques and replies. The book suits readers who accept non-aggression and want its institutional consequences worked out. Its value lies in making the middle step explicit, linking trader incentives to restorative justice and collective capacity, while the final transition remains a forecast.

Consistency of means and ends is, for Konkin, the principle by which libertarianism was discovered and must advance, so pursuing its ends through statist means, above all a party seeking office, reproduces what the goal excludes; he calls that error partyarchy. The strategy chapter carries the rule into its tactics, forbidding any initiated violence however likely a libertarian result looks. The rule supplies a test for any transition plan: how participants acquire and exercise authority. His case against parties applies a normative premise to 1970s movement politics; it does not prove every reform futile.

For theft and disputed title, Konkin adopts a restoration model he credits to Rothbard and the Tannehills and presents as improvable. A customer reports stolen property to her insurer, which replaces it promptly and investigates, because recoveries keep premiums competitive. If the goods turn up with someone claiming title, his insurer may contest the finding, and the two companies, each holding defensive capital a fight would destroy, pay an arbitrator. Enforcement comes only after a judgment the possessor still refuses. The liable party then owes restitution, interest on the insurer's outlay and the costs of investigation, detection, arbitration and enforcement, so delay enlarges the debt. The model separates functions that state justice bundles and shows which firms must cooperate for private law to work. Its incentive argument rests on a stated condition: Konkin expects firms investing in offense to lose customers in a predominantly libertarian society. On our reading, without those established preferences the incentive weakens, and even with them nothing guarantees that conflict ends.

The counter-economics chapter explains where those firms would find customers. Konkin's fundamental principle is trading risk for profit: people defy a control when expected gain exceeds expected loss. He separates this nonviolent black and grey market from a red market of theft and murder, and notes that many black marketeers hope to rejoin conventional society, so evasion alone builds no alternative. Traders lower risk by dealing with fewer, more trustworthy partners, which favors fellow agorists and rewards recruitment. Entrepreneurs begin by screening customers and suppliers for one another; as the industry grows, it can insure traders against losses from enforcement and arbitrate their contracts, and the protection firms of the restoration model develop from that demand. Here Konkin makes his heaviest conjecture. A profitable trade justifies itself to the trader. A network expanding until the state weakens needs those private incentives to keep sustaining a conscious, durable institution. Konkin forecasts that fit; individual profits do not establish it.

Konkin's five phases track how many agorists exist and how far their exchange sustains itself, and strategy follows density: education and recruitment suit sparse phases, and an alliance needs condensed communities to pay for it. He rules out confrontation with state enforcers until market protection agencies are strong enough, and defines revolution as successful resistance to a final wave of state suppression; the plan therefore includes defensive force, and its sequence remains a hypothesis. His New Libertarian Alliance replaces officers with tacticians and strategists whose plans allies buy with their own resources and drop for better ones, and he expects it to dissolve once protection firms face no state. Readers can ask any movement what capacity it has, who pays its specialists and when its coordinators would become unnecessary. Konkin calls the third phase reversible, and his 1980 placement of North America in Phase 1 records a judgment of that date.

Expect dated polemics against factions of the 1970s libertarian movement. The manifesto serves a reader with a specific question: if initiating force is wrong, which institutions would a voluntary order need for theft and disputed title, and could profit-seeking traders build and sustain them before any state gives way?