Self-Liberation Notes, edited by Jim Stumm

Self-Liberation Notes collects essays and letters from people who wanted to depend less on the state and argued about what that would cost. Jim Stumm edited the collection and answers contributors in editorial replies, so Adam Reed, Roger Kenmore, a correspondent signing as Rogue and Frieda Linkbetter speak alongside him. The digital reprint from Liberty Under Attack Publications is freely offered as an undated file, with a foreword dated September 2017 by Shane Radliff, who transcribed and corrected the text. The original issue date goes unstated, and the pieces come from different years.

Stumm's opening essay starts from supplier control of necessities: whoever can cut off a household's supply can control it. His remedy pairs home production of most necessities with storage of the rest, though stored reserves run down and ownership still leaves a producer within reach of coercion. The ultimate goal is a fully closed, fully recycling system, which Stumm admits may remain unbuilt and would be harder still at household scale. Feasible designs are partial and site-dependent, and the Prince Edward Island Ark still traded electricity with the island utility, buying on calm days and selling surplus in strong wind.

Freedom to do what one wants, Reed argues, depends on the size and technical level of one's society as well as on the absence of government interference. A ban on Wagner keeps one from Wagner, while a society too small for an opera company keeps one from opera altogether, and a primitive society denies a scientist the sophisticated equipment his research needs. The reckoning reaches the kitchen, where Reed doubts that escaping taxes repays the hours spent washing dishes by hand. His objection concerns lost cooperation, and he limits his verdict to the present stage of the game, allowing a few individual exceptions.

Kenmore presses from the opposite side, reading a landowner's property tax as an acknowledgement of state power and asking whether such freedom is taken or granted. Stumm acknowledges the power while refusing to accept any right behind it. He also separates freedom from reflex: someone who automatically refuses whatever the state wants is as driven by the state as someone who always complies, so freedom means pursuing self-chosen aims regardless of state approval. Because people want freedom for different activities, he calls his suggestions limited hints and denies that any single way of living is best.

Rogue asks how a woods-dweller would reach a hospital or pay for one, and doubts that solitude rewards anyone who likes people. Stumm answers that a woods-dweller with a vehicle can be as close to care as any rural resident, and that some young, healthy people accept distance from medical care as a calculated risk. A household in the woods can live on savings and investments or on location-independent work such as writing, and insurance is an option for those who can afford it. Each answer turns on health, vehicle, location or income, so Rogue's medical and isolation costs enter each person's subjective valuation of withdrawal.

Rogue calls Freetown wonderful, and Stumm's sketch of it professes tolerant diversity yet promises that its juries would be hanging juries to coercers and that a coercer's life there would be brutal and short. Juries supply a procedure, though this short sketch says little about how they would identify a coercer, and a hanging leaves a mistaken identification beyond correction. A town that welcomes divergent aims will also host disputes over who coerced whom, so this severity sits uneasily beside its tolerance. That troubling promise is Stumm's, and another piece judges coercing broadcasters into granting access unsuited to people building noncoercive networks.

Those networks need suppliers and correspondents, and each contact that enables a service also exposes a relationship. Stumm disputes the blanket claim that all mail is read, yet treats his own mail as insecure and runs his publication openly, with no guarantee of anonymity. Correspondents swap homemade concealment and cipher ideas whose security claims remain historical and unverified. Linkbetter's late essay theorizes about limited surveillance resources and decentralization in assertions dated to its own period, and from them it derives a case for limiting a group's exposure by appearing unimportant and by keeping trust within a core of closely involved collaborators. That trusted core stays small, yet distant dealings with a specialty-store clerk seen once a year or a fellow airline passenger carry on outside it. Reed's price of withdrawal, counted in opera seats and laboratory equipment, is a personal reckoning, while Linkbetter asks which close contacts could expose a project to monitors or infiltrators.