C4SS Fundraiser and Much More!

Dear Supporters of the Center for a Stateless Society,

I’ve got a variety of news items about C4SS to update you on and then it’s time to kick off our fundraiser for September and October expenses.

We’ve had some staffing changes. Please congratulate Stacy Litz on her new role as our Social Media Specialist. Likewise, Ross Kenyon is now a Research Assistant for the Center. In November, David D’Amato became our newest News Analyst. Please also welcome James Tuttle as our new Development Specialist.

One of the things Stacy has been working on is that C4SS is adopting a previously independent project many of us were involved in anyway. Cultivating this project will be just one of several social media channels Stacy will use to promote our content. The project of which I’m speaking is the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left, which has a new home page on our site:

http://c4ss.org/web-ring

C4SS was well represented at the Libertopia conference in October. While I enjoyed the breakout session I presented, the real star among the C4SS folks there was Advisory Panel member Gary Chartier. Gary gave a really amazing talk on Sunday morning entitled “A Revolution of the Imagination: Statism is Failure of Imagination”. During the conference, C4SS had a professional looking conference display table set up where we gave out a variety of printed versions of our content to promote the organization. We also sold a few copies of Kevin Carson’s new book “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto”. Notably, a free copy was given to billionaire Paypal founder and libertarian movement celebrity Peter Thiel.

We get published all over the place and now, thanks to C4SS Web Admin Mike Gogulski, we have a software tool to log instances of our content getting published elsewhere. You can see the results here:

http://c4ss.org/we-get-published

I’d also like to announce that we will be putting together a C4SS activist and supporters network, to be called Black Vanguard. The web site for this org will feature some key software (CiviCRM) that will not only provide us with a better fundraising platform than what we have previously used, it also does a lot more in the way of database stuff that political campaigns do.

That software and web site are now ready. While much of the content has yet to be developed, the functionality is there and we’re ready to switch over to it for fundraising and gradually start putting the actual organization together.

Many of you are familiar with Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty. Imagine a Campaign for Anarchy and you’ll have the basic idea behind Black Vanguard.

But let me let Tom Knapp tell you about it here:

==========

We all have our favorite fictional depictions of revolution. We all
have our favorite moments within those depictions.

My favorite novel of revolution is Robert A. Heinlein’s _The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress_. My favorite moment in that novel, the moment I find
most exciting, isn’t when the the Loonies take down the immediate
presence of the Lunar Authority, or when rebels issue their formal
Declaration of Independence, or even when they bring a Terran ship
down using computer-guided mining lasers. It’s this simple little
sequence:

—–
Prof topped our glasses, held his high and announced with great
dignity: “Comrades … we declare the Revolution!”

That got us both kissed. But sobered me, as Prof sat down and said,
“The Emergency Committee of Free Luna is in session. We must plan
action.”

I said, “Wait, Prof! I didn’t agree to anything. What’s this ‘Action’ stuff?”

“We will now overthrow the Authority,” he said blandly.

“How? Going to throw rocks at ’em?”

“That remains to be worked out. This is the planning stage.”
—–

With the launch of BlackVanguard.Net, we declare the Revolution.

We will now overthrow the state.

All that remains is to work out the details.

The thing about details, of course, is that the devil’s always in them.

Fortunately, we possess a secret weapon for working the details out
that Heinlein’s fictional Emergency Committee of Free Luna and
Schulman’s Revolutionary Agorist Cadre didn’t have at their disposal
in those seminal novels of anarchist revolution.

The technical term for that weapon is “you.”

In traditional theories of revolution, the vanguard is a small,
hierarchal organization operating in a constrained communications
environment for security purposes.

The Black Vanguard is a new kind of vanguard.

It will be as large as the number of people wanting to belong to it.

Its “leadership” will consist of those who have an idea, run out front
with it, and find themselves followed in it — there’s no “top” to
rise to, from which one can expect issue unquestioned orders.

Its general operations will take place in plain view rather than in
secret. Open source! Crowd-sourced! Networked!

That’s not to say there won’t be any secrets. There may very well be
small, hierarchal organizations that form within the vanguard. They
may be needed for this purpose or that, and if YOU think they are,
nobody’s going to stop you from putting them together (if you can find
people to join you in them).

Hell, if nothing else I recommend sending a lot of encrypted email,
just to keep the boys at Fort Meade busy trying to crack those LOLcat pictures and
dirty jokes, right?

But the general framework of this revolutionary vanguard must be open
and non-hierarchal … just like the society we propose to build.

The revolution starts here, and we’re all its leaders. So let’s get to work.

==========

You can look over and register at the web site here:

http://blackvanguard.net/

With those words of inspiration from Tom out of the way, it’s now time to pay some bills. Here are expenses we don’t have the money to pay right now. Unlisted expenses have already been paid and our yearly web hosting bill due in November has already been paid.

September
Research Associate: Carson — $425
Media Coordinator: Knapp — $640

October
Research Associate: Carson — $425
News Analyst: Worden — $260
Social Media Specialist: Litz — $200
Research Assistant: Kenyon — $300
Feature Editor: Morgenstern — $100
Web Administrator: Gogulski — $215
Media Coordinator: Knapp — $640

That totals $3,205 that we need to raise before the end of November. Please donate to support our work.

To donate, and to optionally join Black Vanguard if you want to be on board from the very beginning, go here:

http://www.blackvanguard.net/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=4

That’s it for now but I’ll have some more for you tomorrow on Black Vanguard organizing and projects.

Please support our work.

Regards,

Brad Spangler,
Director, Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS)