Samuel Edward Konkin III (July 8, 1947 – February 23, 2004), also known as SEK3, was a Canadian-American libertarian writer. As the author of the publication New Libertarian Manifesto, he was a proponent of a political philosophy he named agorism.
Personal life
Konkin was born on July 8, 1947, in Edmonton, Alberta, to Samuel Edward Konkin II and Helen Konkin. He had one brother named Alan. He married Sheila Wymer in 1990 and had one son named James Eaton-Konkin. The marriage ended soon afterward. Konkin was an atheist.
On February 23, 2004, Konkin died of natural causes in his apartment in West Los Angeles, California. He was buried alongside his father in Edmonton, Alberta. In a 1976 issue of Alarums and Excursions, Konkin published a drawing depicting Dungeons & Dragons writers Gary Gygax, Len Lakofka and Tim Kask being hanged by a group of women. This came in the wake of community backlash after Lakofka had suggested new rules for women that would have rated their "beauty" and made them weaker in combat against male characters.
Konkin himself attempted to propose a new character archetype, the damsel, which he depicted as a chaste character in search of love, in the vein of a Disney Princess. intellectual property, imperialism and interventionism.
Agorism
Konkin proposed a social political philosophy known as agorism, which advocates for a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, engaging with aspects of nonviolent revolution. Most agorists strictly oppose voting as a strategy for achieving their desired outcomes.
Accusations of historical revisionism
In her book Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green, political theorist and anarcho-syndicalist Ulrike Heider accused Konkin of endorsing historical negationism in his dealing with the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), and writing a positive review of James J. Martin's book on Raphael Lemkin, which was published by the IHR. Konkin personally rejected Holocaust denial, but defended the IHR because he believed its freedom of speech was being suppressed. However, Konkin's appraisal of Martin's book, specifically the second chapter (in which Martin labelled the claims of the mass murder of Jews as "a well coordinated and orchestrated propaganda assault") as "a summary of Martin's libertarian-revisionist views of the Second World War" and "the highlight of the book and a valuable booklet on its own" for "the libertarian and the hard-core revisionist",