An Introduction to Freetown Christiania: Agorism in Real-Life

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Earlier, I wrote about agorism: an anarchist ideology where someone creates a nightwatchman state based around counter-economics where direct action between willing individuals is carried out through a grey market and other behaviors for creating a more unrestrained government without a monopoly on violence. This ideology was created by someone from the United States of America. Still, there is a community that practices this libertarian ideology that proves it can actually work in the real world that is not located in the United States but can be found on the European continent in the nation of Denmark and has been around for years.

Freetown Christiania started back in 1971, so it has been around for fifty-one years or over two generations, making it a pretty decent example of generational anarchism. Currently, Christiania has a population between eight hundred fifty to over one thousand residents, all of them living in a community covering about nineteen acres. It is located in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen on an island named Amager, all to form a self-sufficient libertarian community.

Freetown Christiania has endorsed many principles of the agorist anarchist philosophy in the design of its community. For one, there is a grey economy that allows people to sell cannabis and 'soft drugs' while banning hard drugs like heroin and opioids. Also, long before people had cryptocurrencies, company points, and other forms of alternative currencies became popular in the public consciousness, Freetown Christiania had already created its own alternative currency called the Løn that the community's booming market economy uses in addition to the Danish Krone. On top of all that, like in any functional market, people in Freetown Christiana are able to start functioning businesses with the society having a number of street food stands and two breweries ( Christiania Bryghus and Christiania Bryg). All of this also runs on a nightwatchman state - a government without a monopoly on violence that can still protect the individual rights of citizens without giving volunteers or representatives in the community too much power or privilege.