Why did I, a libertarian anarchist, support the Örebro Party (ÖP), which is neither, with a donation?

Why indeed support anything having to do with party politics? At root, a state is some people using violence and threats to coerce others into obedience without consent. Because they can and it suits their purposes. Is it not immoral to involve oneself in that?

This is a dilemma. Suppose someone attacks you by shooting at you from behind innocent people. Should you shoot back to defend yourself and thereby kill innocent people? Or should you passively let yourself be killed and not only die but also reward murder and hostage taking? Voting and other types of participation in government are analogous.

This is not easy. For years I leaned towards pacifism. To not participate in government or other types of violence with collateral damage. Eventually the importance of incentives won me over to the other side. Such pacifism creates a world where the most ruthless and violent win, the ones who do not even hesitate to exploit others’ reluctance to see hostages harmed. When such behavior is the winning behavior there will be ever more of it.

But why ÖP in particular? What’s special about them? Well, in the beginning there were Markus Allard and Malcom Kyeyune. They were active in the Left (formerly Communist) Party in Sweden. In 2014 there was a power struggle and they were ousted, officially for supporting the Revolutionära Fronten organization.

Together with others in their political circle Allard started ÖP – a local party for the Örebro municipality – while Kyeyune pursued a career as a writer.

Around the same time they also started the podcast Markus and Malcom. For over a decade, they have used this podcast to explore, develop and promulgate their political positions. One of the major themes has been their concept of the ”transferiat”.

Being marxists, they had had the standard marxist class analysis. Capital owners control the means of production. Wage laborers are employed by the capital owners to produce goods. This ends up resulting in exploitation and extraction by the capital owners from the wage laborers, enriching the capital owners and impoverishing the wage laborers.

Looking at the society of today that is not what they saw. The totally dominating extractive dynamic is from both business owners and wage workers by taxation, to various sections of society living on these resources. The scale of this extraction is historically unprecedented, with the tax burden somewhere between 40% and 50% of GDP, compared to historically normal levels of around 7%. Allard and Kyeyune coined a term for the latter group, calling them the ”transferiat”.

Who are the transferiat? It consists of two major groups. One has a big overlap with the professional-managerial class. A very large section of the middle classes who directly or indirectly are supported by the public sector. Directly, those who simply work in all these public sector institutions. Indirectly, a vast ecosystem of nominally private sector businesses and consultants who through maneuvering, connections, bribing and regulatory capture (and, occasionally, honest bidding) redirect a share of the proceeds to themselves.

The other group is the underclass, who live on welfare subsidies as a lifestyle or are doing subsidized low end jobs. Without the resource transfers some of these would instead be in the marxist working class and others in the marxist lumpenproletariat.

The members of the socially higher subgroup of the transferiat are not numerous enough to win elections by themselves. They need the lower transferiat and they have a strong self-interest in it being large.

Most of the commanding heights in society are comprised of and controlled by the higher transferiat, including the government institutions, the universities and the bulk of mass media. And outcomes tend to align with incentives.

There has been no shortage of policies that result in large parts of the voting population being poor and dependent. Welfare systems with lock-in effects, taxation, exclusionary labor law, regulation and government housing projects. And immigration policies that in numerous ways make sure lots of immigrants end up in the lower transferiat, but still limit the number of immigrants sufficiently to not cause a breakdown of the system. And then relaxing the requirements for granting citizenship to nothing more than staying in the country for less than one parliamentary term period, and not requiring citizenship at all to vote in local and regional elections.

The mechanisms of the transferiat suffocate society. They stifle innovation and entrepreneurship, transform society from a high-trust to a low-trust one, cause de-industrialization and economic contraction and drastically increase social problems and criminality. Sweden is a very different country now compared to a generation ago. Many who have not seen it unfold are shocked by the decline.

Sweden is pretty far gone, but this is happening to some extent in most Western societies and risks handing the opportunity to grab world domination to China on a silver platter.

Yet, few are even talking about these mechanisms. ÖP is the only political party in Sweden that does. The analysis is not unique, but they put a name on it and have been raising the issue for many years. That deserves encouragement.

And some encouragement for being the only party to react to abuse perpetrated by the local government. Such as the rape of a four year old girl, the torture and humiliation of elderly people under municipal care, or social services taking children from their parents and not returning them even when they knew there was no reason to take them.

There also ought to be some counterweight to how they have been treated very dishonestly by the news media. And to how they have been illegally counteracted by the incumbents, for instance by manipulation of signatures in order to stop a referendum that the direct democracy championing ÖP called for. (On an unpopular public transit bus system.)

That being said, partnering with political parties is dancing with the devil. Do I like most of ÖP’s policies? No. Are they fit to run a country? No. (Neither are the other parties.) Do I want ÖP to get a lot of power? No. Will giving them a leg up in the competition with the other parties, given the local political circumstances, be a net positive? Maybe. Probably. Hopefully.

(Disclaimer, that the views in this text, while partially inspired by Kyeyune and Allard, are mine and not theirs or ÖP’s.)