Table Of Content“The libertarian quest for ‘land no one is using’ inevitably
finds ‘land that is used by all,’ and the ugly conflation
of the two sends the champions of personal liberty in
search of guns, indentured servants, and death squads.”
—Cory Doctorow
“They don’t like hobbles and they can’t stand fences, and so
today’s libertarian frontiersmen are looking for land, lots
of land, perhaps in New Zealand. Or maybe they’ll jet to
Mars, build cities in the thick of Honduras or string barges
together and create a floating republic, anything to avoid
regulations, laws, and oversights. Ray Craib’s brilliant
Adventure Capitalism is a fascinating story of some spectacular
fiascos, but it also makes a more profound point: there does
exist a class of super-billionaires so rich they’d rather leave
the world in ruins than admit humans are social beings and
our survival requires recognition that we need each other.”
—Greg Grandin
“Of the many fine histories of the rise of neoliberalism and class
war from above, this is the most remarkable—an astonishing
story of the global misadventures of Michael Oliver and
other modern freebooters as they seek to establish their own
Fantasy Islands from the Caribbean to the South Seas. The
book tracks a half-century of disaffected capitalists seeking
exit from civilized society, from Old Money in revolt against
the 1960s to Silicon Valley’s Seasteading Institute. Along
the way, it makes the malignant ideas of today’s libertarians
manifest in a way that no exegesis of von Hayek or Ayn
Rand can do, unpacking a gruesome geography of land
grabs, mercenary uprisings and secessionist plots where the
dreams of billionaire investors become the nightmares of
postcolonial people and places. If you don’t care for libertarian
ideas before you read this book, you will surely despise them
by the end, while gaining a better grasp of the fundamental
misanthropy that animates the right wing of the capitalist class.”
—Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and
the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area
“Some want to change the world, others to flee it. Raymond
Craib has written a rich, fascinating account of the libertarians,
gold hoarders, soldiers of fortune, coup plotters, and tech bros
who’ve sought to realize free-market fantasies by seceding to
small islands. It’s an offbeat, quirky history—until you realize
how many of the hyper-rich share this escapist dream, and
what that means for those of us without our own islands.”
—Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empires
“Adventure Capitalism is a masterpiece of historical excavation
into libertarian dreams of a brave new unfree world. Raymond
Craib brilliantly combines the historian’s craft with the
seductive imaginative force of sci-fi, minting the genre of
history noir. His vivid prose takes us on a chilling journey
where anarchists, libertarians, conmen, CIA agents, marine
biologists, and economists come together in their ragtag efforts
to exit state regulation through a spurious subversion of the
idea of freedom. Starting with the New Deal, we hop from
private archipelagoes, floating sea condos, and rafts in the high
seas and end up in the harsh reality of Innovation Zones. These
fantastical stories—the stuff of sci-fi that Craib unearths—reveal
the modern American state for what it is: the nightwatchman
serving capitalist adventurers on the brink of colonizing Mars.”
—Debjani Bhattacharyya, author of Empire and Ecology
in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
“To leave behind the ‘system’ and build independent
societies based on your own convictions—which radicals
aren’t enticed by the idea? Yet, as Raymond Craib shows
in this highly informative and entertaining work, it is far
from glorious when the driving force is a narrow-minded
concept of individual liberty rather than the well-being of
the people. The ‘exit strategies’ collected here are equally
fascinating and frightening. They also help us understand
how free-market secessionists and gung-ho libertarians are
only the most extreme expressions of neoliberal hegemony.”
—Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly
Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy
“Adventure Capitalism is an engaging and exciting book that
explores contentious ideals of individualism and concepts
of freedom in the most illuminating ways. Craib stunningly
shows how ‘exit libertarians,’ while striving for ultimate
liberation, offer a particularly constrained version of liberty.
This study brings together a look at how autonomy is forged
in the context of the welfare state, neoliberalism, sovereignty,
engineering, political ecology, political economy, geopolitics,
colonialism and decolonization in Oceania and the Caribbean—
all presented as global history. The book is a major feat!”
—J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian
Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
“In this highly readable, well-researched, and original book
Raymond Craib deftly maps the pathological history of the
far-right libertarian imagination of escape. His character
sketches and intellectual history keep the reader grounded
even as the crackpot protagonists drift away into fantasy. Their
anti-statist, anti-social, anti-ecological quest for ‘exit’ mirrors
the logic of cancer or mental illness. Their experiments grow
only to die. In these tales of delusion, we see a truly despicable
cast of class elites and free market fanatics attempt to live the
logic of value in motion: all barriers—physical, political, and
social—must give way. And when they do, failure awaits.”
—Christian Parenti, professor of economics, John Jay
College, CUNY; author of Radical Hamilton
“Ray Craib offers a rare glimpse into a dystopic and experimented
future in which the capitalist nation-state born of chaos, conflict
and centralized control is gutted not of its oligarchies, enclosures,
and colonization schemes, but of its spectrum of popular
resistance and utopias of collective emancipation. His nuanced
global mapping of libertarian escape fantasies and models of
privatized fiefdom follows a plethora of wealthy iconoclasts,
political castaways, and wayward idealists whose convoluted
exit strategies and sovereignty schemes are enabled by the very
powers of empire, disenfranchisement, and military force that
their libertarian designs of individual freedom claim to abhor.”
—Geoffroy de Laforcade
Adventure Capitalism
Editor: Sasha Lilley
Spectre is a series of penetrating and indispensable works of, and about,
radical political economy. Spectre lays bare the dark underbelly of politics
and economics, publishing outstanding and contrarian perspectives on the
maelstrom of capital—and emancipatory alternatives—in crisis. The com-
panion Spectre Classics imprint unearths essential works of radical history,
political economy, theory and practice, to illuminate the present with brilliant,
yet unjustly neglected, ideas from the past.
Spectre
Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global
Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and
Resistance
Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in
a Time of Tumult
Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, Catastrophism:
The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth
Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of
May Day
Richard A. Walker, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity
in the San Francisco Bay Area
Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism
Raymond B. Craib, Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from
the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age
Spectre Classics
E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Victor Serge, Men in Prison
Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
Adventure Capitalism
A History of Libertarian Exit,
from the Era of Decolonization
to the Digital Age
Raymond B. Craib
Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital
Age
© Raymond Craib
This edition © PM Press 2022
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for the permission to reproduce
previously published material:
Excerpt from The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion, copyright © 1996 by Joan Didion.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Who Am I?” by former Prime Minister of Vanuatu and Permanent Representative to the
United Nations Donald Kalpokas, copyright © 1974 by Donald Kalpokas. Used by kind
permission of Jennifer Kalpokas Doan.
“The Last Viking of the Sunrise” by Epeli Hau‘ofa, copyright © 1979 by Epeli Hau‘ofa.
Used by kind permission of Epeli Hau‘ofa.
Excerpt from “Custom” by Grace Mera Molisa, copyright © 1983 by Grace Mera Molisa.
Used by kind permission of Viran Molisa Trief.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission
for the use of copyright material. The author and publisher apologize for any errors or
omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated
in future reprints or editions of this book.
Cover art: “Traveler Sweeps” by Stiller Zusman. Used by kind permission of the artist.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–917–8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978–1–62963–917–8 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936591
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Contents
List of figures xi
Introduction 1
Part I Any Distant Archipelago
(1960s–1980s)
chapter one Libertarian Exit: Fear and Loathing USA 15
~ A declaration of purpose ~ Libertarians rising
~ Trinities ~ Fear and loathing (i): The masses ~
Escape from freedom ~ Fear and loathing (ii): Ecology,
economy, and crisis ~ A suitable place
chapter two The Lure of Atlantis: Ocean, Empire, and the
Minerva Reefs 49
~ Exit geographies ~ The lure of Atlantis ~ Dreams
must perish ~ Revelation ~ In ruin over the tides
~ Genesis ~ An empire on the doorstep ~ A sea of
islands ~ Derelicts becalmed
chapter three Libertarian Noir: Free-Market Mercenaries of
the Caribbean 87
~ Duty free ~ White oligarchs ~ The Wizard of
Whispering Death ~ Bored since Vietnam ~ Not
another banana republic ~ An opaque world ~ A little
skullduggery
