Samuel Edward Konkin III

Yesterday was the first anniversary of SEK3's death. I remembered earlier this month that it was coming soon, but Wally Conger jogged my memory. He has a nice memorial post at Out of Step.

Sam was a comrade of Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess back in the days of their abortive alliance with the New Left, during and after the Radical Libertarian Caucus' walkout from the YAF convention in St. Louis. He was a fierce advocate for that alliance long after Rothbard had given it up and gone Paleo. His Movement of the Libertarian Left was (still is) dedicated to pursuing Rothbard's early goal of a libertarian coalition of left and right against the corporate state, in the same spirit as Rothbard's own Left and Right venture and his collaboration with Ronald Radosh on A New History of Leviathan (E.P. Dutton, 1972). Sam was also author of the New Libertarian Manifesto, and founder of the Agorist Institute and the Karl Hess Supper Club. Yet another of his creations, the LeftLibertarian email list at Yahoogroups, is still a venue for productive (and often heated) debate between members of a wide range of free market libertarian and libertarian socialist species. The archives from 2000, for example, contain a months-long free-for-all between Rothbardians and Georgists, with some of the biggest contemporary names in the Geolib milieu dropping in to take a few swings.

There aren't many dyed-in-the-wool Misean subjectivists who'd get caught saying something like this:

...free-market and pro-entrepreneur as we are, MLL supports genuine anarchosyndicalist unions which consistently refuse to collaborate with the State. (In North America, that's the IWW and nothing else I know of.) Second, if you look at the bottom, you'll note the abhorrence of the IWW to politics and party; they split with the nascent U.S. Socialist Party [actually SLP] on the same grounds that MLL split with the formative USLP --- rejecting parliamentarianism for direct action.

If you have to have workers, they ought to be all IWW.... I wouldn't have any other kind.

The SEK3 memorial service from last year can be viewed here; but unless you've got a few hours to wait for it to load, you probably won't want to try it if you've got crappy dial-up service like me.

Wally says:

This afternoon, I've lifted a pint of Guinness in his memory. I hope other comrades will do the same (with their preferred beverage).

Hear, hear!