By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I don’t believe in taxes. I know that’s not exactly the trendiest take on the left these days, but I just can’t justify giving any institution that kind of power. I would love nothing better than to play Robinhood and jam a pistol in the gut of some corporate welfare thief like Jeff Bezos, but anarchy just doesn’t work that way. The moment the ends start justifying the means is the moment the revolution dies. I oppose taxes because I believe that class is the basis of all tyranny and that by creating a group of people who are afforded a monopoly on the use of violent behavior like theft, you are creating a class that degrades the position of the proletariat.

As strange as it may sound to partisan ears, it is my Marxist values that have led me to embrace some of the more radical aspects of libertarianism. This doesn’t mean that it’s always easy. Voluntaryism can feel like a form of monasticism amidst the most violent society in civilization’s malignant existence and in no place is this more true than on the hot button issue of reparations which I remain an unapologetic supporter of.

If you wanna talk about theft, let’s talk about 400 years of theft. That’s how long this savage empire used slavery to build the foundation for the wealthiest nation in human history and these people never saw a fucking dime for their forced labor and all the bloodthirsty barbarism that went with it. This would be evil enough if that was the end of the story, but this story has no end.

The sick truth is that America’s enslavement of African people didn’t end with emancipation, it just changed shape. Chattel slavery was simply swapped out for more politically correct forms of subjugation like sharecropping and mass incarceration. 400 years of slavery gave way to 90 years of Jim Crow which gave way to 60 years of separate but equal which gave way to our current apartheid state of law and order embraced by both major parties to this day.

Reparations are needed, not to save this wretched nation that continues to thrive on white power but to empower its victims to rise above the damage its done to help us destroy it. But how do we achieve this goal without empowering the same kind of authoritarian structures that made sins like slavery possible? This is the primary problem with traditional monetary reparations. By relying on the same forces that have thrived on white supremacy to forcibly extract compensation, even from the guilty beneficiaries of just such a system, you are only empowering its continued existence and doing nothing to repair the systemic racial power imbalance it created.

These kinds of reparations amount to little more than charity at best and imperial hush money at worst. The government has been paying poor people for years not to hold it accountable for making them poor and this has done nothing to empower us. So how do we ensure compensation from a corrupt government without perpetuating its hostile existence? Simple, we gut it like a carp and give the spoils to those it has wronged the worst. My suggestion for totally stateless reparations essentially amounts to a sentence pretty much designed to give pigs gastric distress. Give Black people land and arm them to the fucking teeth.

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