Agorist Class Theory

I read the second edition of Wally Conger’s “Agorist Class Theory” and found it highly accessible and enlightening: http://wconger.blogspot.com/2006/04/agorist-class-theory-2nd-edition.html
It is admirably brief and to the point.

In a nutshell, the agorist recognizes two classes: the political class and the productive class. The former is a parasite and a thief, deriving his living through force and fraud by political means; the latter lives through his own labor and/or voluntary transactions in the market.

I had heard something a little like this theory before, a version so twisted as to be all but unrecognizable and put to use to obscure the very reality that agorist class theory seeks to illuminate. It was the Idiot Brother in Law (IBIL) who held forth on a theory he had gotten from listening to some right wing talk radio goon. Back then, right wingers used libertarian ideas to sell their statist agenda. He said the world was divided into taxpayers and tax eaters, the latter being welfare recipients and the former people with jobs and businesses. IBIL was at the time working in a phoney baloney county job and did not for a moment reckon that he was a tax eater. Moreover, he certainly didn’t consider big government contractors to be tax eaters. The only people in the tax eater class were the poor slobs on welfare.

I can see how agorist class theory puts the state in contrast to productive activities, but I reckon that it wants some tuning up for use as a rallying tool. The local schoolteacher in the public schools is not really a thief and parasite on par with the management of Haliburton. The single mother buying food with food stamps is not nearly as problematic as government contractors and powerful men who raid the treasury of billions. Almost every ordinary person has a schoolteacher, fireman, policeman or civil servant in the family, and they may be so offended by characterization of their loved ones as parasites that the message of the agorist will not be given a hearing. Almost everybody has children or nephews of acquaintances in public schools, and focus on the schools as theft may not be the best way to sell the masses on freedom.

Start with Haliburton and the power elites, not welfare mothers or local civil servants. Shine the light on corporate welfare and show the world the real parasites and thieves. We’re still going to want schoolteachers and firemen; we’re just going to finance and organize things differently. We expect that a free people will be generous to the needy and that a free society will open up opportunities to the poor. The needy and schoolteachers and firemen didn’t make the state; they just have to work for it or depend on it. We want the Haliburtons of the world and those who direct states for their own ends to disappear forever.

I would not necessarily put people who work for government in pursuits over which governments have substantial control in the political class. Nor would I include the impoverished recipients of government aide.