Anarchoblogs

I think the legacy and effect of capitalism is two fold, first involving rising economic inequality and the creation of a class system, second the destruction of values and the replacement of a cohesive understanding of life with a vacuous one based on greed and materialism. The two are interrelated.

Looking out at the world today, the meaning of life as a whole is not paid much attention to. The big concerns that used to motivate people, the idealism of the past, both moral, ethical, and personal, is consigned to the history books. Instead, we have a vacuum that's filled by self interest and the pursuit of money, where all that exists is a dead world where individualistic atoms bump up against each other.

We don't even have a proper meritocracy, one of the great improvements over the feudal system that preceded all this. Instead, you're rewarded most especially if you decided to go into business yourself.

Along with the rise of class society has come the destruction of any sense of personal purpose in the world.

What's needed is both a socialist economic solution to what's going on, where there won't be massive classes of people, but a commonwealth where a true meritocracy can exist within, and a revival of meaning and idealism in the cultural sphere, where the vacuum of apathy is replaced by a richer understanding of the personal and social world. 

Here. I can't say that I agree with the reason given, but the article is a good general overview of the topic of the sort of instant outrage that's out there, and the linked article Outrage Porn: How the Need for Perpetual Indignation Manufactures Phony Offense, is good as well, if less philosophical and somewhat shrill itself. 

Instant outrage, I would argue, dulls critical thinking by encouraging snap judgements taken without actually looking at what's being talked about. You just point someone to something and say go. A culture of constant accusation also tends to intimidate people into not saying anything, in that if they buckle into the concept, or buy into it, they're afraid that they might incidentally call down the wrath of someone.

I remember at Evergreen there was a twice weekly seminar in a large, integrated, class on politics, where there were two self appointed guardians of correctness, who no matter what was being discussed would first of all lay into anyone who they perceived was making a comment that might have had some implication that might have slighted in some way some group....and how once when they were both absent one of the other participants remarked at the end of the discussion how we got so much more productively done without them there.

Free discussion needs the potential for the participants to say something that might either be misunderstood easily or go against the grain, otherwise stagnation happens. In Japanese corporate culture, where obedience and deference to authority is highly entrenched, when they have brain storming sessions between members that are more senior and less senior they preface it with everyone having a drink of sake. That way they can criticize the ideas of a senior person, breaking the tradition of always being deferent and speaking correctly, because they're theoretically 'drunk' or intoxicated.

Anyways, both outrage porn and easy and often stupid offense miss the forest for the trees.

The canonization of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War is an interesting event...not because of the aspirations of those involved but because the reality itself was somewhat different. First of all, in terms of organization, despite being against Leninism, you had the leadership of the movement by the CNT-FAI, with the CNT being the labor union and the FAI, or Federation of Iberian Anarchists, organized to keep the CNT anarchist....despite what the CNT might actually have wanted. The FAI in this case played the same role as the Bolshevik party in Russia with regards to the unions. More radical factions in the FAI, such as the Friends of Durruti, went further by wanting a 'Revolutionary Junta' to organize a dictatorship over Spain at the higher levels while having democracy on the lower ones. Of course, the Friends of Durruti portrayed themselves as the ultra-anarchists, who were seeking to do that to preserve the anarchist content of the movement.

Putting aside for a second the question of why if a group is in favor of the working class they need to appoint themselves the ideological police of that group to ensure that they follow the right line, there's also the anti-Clerical actions of the Spanish anarchists, which were the scandal of Europe after they happened.

They took the idea of hanging the last capitalist from the light pole with the guts of the last priest seriously, and thereby came into towns and committed summary executions of Priests, raped nuns, forced Priests to rape nuns, organized Coliseum like events to put them on trial.

Now, try to put yourself in the feet of a regular guy in Spain, who's a worker but not quite committed to the cause of the anarchists. You have these people come in and take your village priest, who was a decent enough guy, even though you weren't particularly religious, put him up against a wall in a public square and shoot him without trial. What's your response going to be?

Not everyone opposed the anarchists because they were hot on the idea of the oligarchy that had been running the country getting more power, part of it, I would gather, was because they opposed the actions that the anarchists, in implementing their ideology, committed.

Because looking through the stats I saw that a previous post mentioning the movie was getting some traffic, but I hadn't really made this connection then. In 'Twins' with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a group of Nobel winning scientists come together to create the perfect man, donating their sperm. But there's a problem, instead of one they get two, with all of the goodness going into one and 'All the shit', as the movie calls it, going into the other.

Now, Danny DeVito plays a short corrupt alcoholic Italian private detective with his trademark Brooklyn accent, while Schwarzenegger plays the ideal man with his Austrian accent. I would submit that if instead of a curly haired, dark, short, Italian the character DeVito plays had been cast as a curly haired, dark, short, hook nosed, person of Jewish descent there would have been protests in the streets. The film would have been labeled as a second coming of "Der Stumer", with all the vile anti-semitic stereotypes that that embodied. But because it featured an Italian, ah, well, it's just humor, come on, why are you so sensitive?

We have interesting blind spots for sensitivity in this country. On the one hand, having too much of an interest in things German such as German philosophy or music, without there being any reference whatsoever to people who are Jewish, Judaism in general, Nazism, or racism, can get one suspected of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite, particularly if you like Nietzsche and talk about him a lot. On the other, actually portraying people who are Italian as being corrupt, vulgar, alcoholics is something that people shouldn't be so sensitive about.   Besides, those Italians, they're all emotional, it's just the way they are, they don't really think things through rationally, they always complain about these things.

I could go on, but, yeah, with all of our political correctness and hyper tolerance for anyone, anywhere, making any objection whatsoever about something being offensive, nevertheless, people who raise the flag of derogatory stereotypes in the media about Italians are routinely dismissed.

Which people are falling for. Although the Svoboda party is in fact far right, it looks to be a small part of the movement as a whole. Instead, the rhetoric goes back to days when the Berlin Wall was described as an Anti-Fascist device to protect East Germany from the West. Soviet rhetoric talked about 'social fascism', but it looks like most people ignored that because of,you know, Stalin.  Now Stalin's gone but the righteous fight against capitalist fascism remains, and people are ready to buy it because they don't know that it's a piece of rhetoric that was consistently used in the past.

* on edit: here's a link to Wikipedia's page on the Berlin Wall, where it was described as the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" Here

That's a question to ask. The response of many people on the Left to the crisis in the Ukraine is to look at it purely through the lens of covert economic motivations, which must, must be the cause of the conflict. It has to be a secret gas pipeline deal, or NATO expansion that no doubt will lead to an extension of European influence in the Ukraine. While I'm no fan of NATO, what these explanations don't take into account is the possibility that ideas, particularly the idea of self determination, believed in by the people at large, could be a motivating factor in the protests.

The tendency to reflexively always look for a material cause for whatever conflict is going on is not borne out by history, and the complexity of the interrelationship between material causes and ideal ones poses a big threat to the orthodox historical materialist worldview that implicitly motivates much of the thought of those on the left and progressive side of things. A great example of it not being borne out in reality is the American Civil War.

A sizable number of people on the Left firmly believe that the Civil War was fought not about slavery, but about the north maintaining supplies of cotton that it needed for its textile mills. The idea is that the north was completely industrial, the south was completely agrarian, and the north had no other option in powering its textile mills than to keep control of the South...which would increase the price of cotton if it seceded.

Slavery and moral objections to slavery, the entire abolitionist movement, Abraham Lincoln's opposition to slavery and the triggering of secession largely by his election as President, doesn't enter into this history at all. It's like the decade or so of pro and anti-slavery argument, as well as any moral factor that might have motivated people, simply doesn't exist.

 No doubt it's much easier to live in a world like that, because it doesn't require as much critical thought as taking on the real complexities of history. Whatever's going on, just look for a potential economic explanation and voila--you don't have to trouble yourself over looking into the issue any further. Interestingly enough, the argument of the Civil War being fought over economic causes is enthusiastically embraced by Neo-Confederates in the South itself.

One of the sources for this idea is Charles Beard, a historian who published several influential volumes in the first decades of the 20th century. His "Economic Origins of the Constitution" is cited repeatedly by progressive historians, however if you actually read it and look at the evidence he presents that the writers of the Constitution were motivated by having bonds they'd bought not default, the evidence is really flimsy. This is not to deny that there were economic interests at work---they're right there in the Federalist Papers, where the authors specifically cite the potential for the rich to be threatened as one of the reasons why a central government over the states is necessary. But obviously that is not enough.

All of this relates back to the Ukraine in that if reflexively appealing to material motivations no longer works, the position that many progressives have carefully cultivated falls like a house of cards. They've put so much faith in this that they haven't really done the work to create a counter-argument.

Yeah, watching the head of NATO condemning the invasion of the Crimea was almost like seeing someone gloating about what a great opportunity was being handed to them, but what sort of person trusts their ideology and ignores the actual people on the ground? Isn't that, in itself, a much more Ideal position, not really material at all, while the opposite is in fact more in touch with concrete reality?

In that most of what's known as vulgar Marxism or associated with the more Stalinist trends in Marxism arguably owes more to Engels than to Marx himself. He survived Marx by a number of years and served as his interpreter. Unfortunately, Engels wasn't that smart, and also didn't really have a deep understanding of his friend's work, and so hashed out a bunch of lower level writings that put much of what Marx was trying to eliminate, unscientific Hegelian speculation, back into it.

It's Engels, more so than Marx, who really put in the kind of 19th century teleological and progressive view of history inevitably leading to socialism into it. Marx believed that too, but not in the caricatured way that later Marxists would cast it.

I've said basically the same thing before, but here it goes again in a new context. First of all, although I respect Marx a great deal, I view him as a philosopher, a social scientist, and an economist, not as the founder of an 'ism'. Others might view him that way, and I once did, but at this point describing someone as an adherent of Marx-ism is sort of like saying that a fan of Max Weber is an adherent of Weber-ism. Marx had many great analyses, but like anyone else wasn't perfect in his ideas, nor should he have been.

I believe that the economy structures society to a great extent, but that the cultural sphere, although influenced by the economic structure of society, retains some autonomy, and has its own timeline and ways of doing things. Everything is contextualized within the society in which we live, but this doesn't mean that there's any sort of a one to one correlation between economics and culture in the sense of a base-superstructure relationship. The truth is more complex, and in any case naked economics itself is rarely directly translated into culture, the indirect route being much more common.

Because of the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere, different ideas and explanations apply there, and culture comes to include some of the more abstract aspects of life, as opposed to the concrete, things which are psychologically important to people, that even influence ideas of alienation or social integration, but that aren't directly tie-able to any particular economic feature.

A while ago, actually almost ten years ago....sometime in the summer of  2004, I summed this up by saying that economic prosperity deals with the material while the cultural integration or disintegration deals with the psychological, with the more personal sense of alienation or functioning, that complements whether or not someone has physical needs, or is being fairly compensated in a monetary fashion for their work. Both spheres need to function properly for a person to really be healthy.

Without healthy functioning on the more abstract cultural level, a person has enough to eat but experiences profound personal distress, and the opposite is just a joke....having plenty of social integration while in reality starving.

*on edit: it's interesting to note that the very things that Marx, at least in his later writings, ignored, have become staples of sociology, with alienation being treated by Durkheim extensively, as well as by Weber and others. 

It's been a long time coming. It's ebbed and flowed, but always in response to particular disillusionments with left with activism in practice, as opposed to theory. The first time this happened was in late 2002, in response to a particularly bad experience regarding a protest in Chicago. Being a philosophically minded person, trying to make sense out of it, I eventually looked to Hume's critique of authority, and of leaders in general, as being fallible beings in whom power shouldn't be vested as an explanation. I somewhat dropped out of the activism scene in Florida for a while after that, and instead pursued studying the strain of conservative thought associated with Wendell Berry and the Southern Agrarians, who were anti-capitalist from a somewhat aristocratic perspective, and anti-modern as well.

Although I lived in the South, and was reading these folks, I took it on face value that they weren't defending segregation, and so straight out Neo-Confederate thought was never part of the deal, and neither was a defense of slavery, or racism. To understand how that would be possible, you really have to have lived in one of the more liberal areas of the South, which includes north Florida, where the difference in philosophy of life isn't simply conservative vs. liberal...and where there are still people of the old guard who, while being socially progressive regarding race and potentially other things, still like the idea of decentralized government and the preservation of a pre-industrial way of life.

But, I went back to left politics, keeping much of this to myself, and gave things another chance. When I went to Evergreen to finish up my degree I pretty much forgot about it altogether. It was only bad experiences there that resurrected interest in these things. The first full year at Evergreen, that was spent in a 16 credit interdisciplinary program that studied activism, local politics, and local history, was horrid. Every bad stereotype of the left that you can think of manifested itself there, and at the end I was almost ready to give the whole thing up, but the next year proved to be much better.

However, at the end of that year, again, some things happened that caused disillusionment, but this was much more situational than necessarily the result of particular people's actions. In response, I became mostly a-political, and although still writing about politics, pretty much withdrew from active involvement for several years.

I won't go into the drama or details, but the experience with Occupy, in which I was an observer and by no means a core participant, was really the final nail in the coffin.

But what exactly is the coffin?

At every stage of the way, there was good and bad, having a disillusioning experience with the Left and then going back and having a positive experience....which is why my politics are a synthesis instead of a rejection.

I couldn't, and wouldn't, in good faith pretend that all of the people that I knew who were doing positive things to make the world better were somehow evil or corrupt, or that the core ideas of the Left, which I whole heartedly believe in, were wrong. That's not what this is about.

I'm not disowning my past but instead pointing out ways to fix the many problems that in my opinion exist along with the positive work that people do. To do that I've over the years gone back to the foundations of political philosophy, looking not just at Marx and folks but at the philosophical origins of socialism, as well as those of conservatism and liberalism of various sorts, from what's looked at as welfare state liberalism to classical liberalism, and created something based on a reinterpretation of first principles regarding ideas of what the good society is like.

The solution, however, may not be appetizing to everyone, but personally speaking the more nuanced view that's come out of it, that doesn't exist in a vacuum, has proven good for making sense out of what's happening in Syria, and now the Ukraine, while not abandoning core principles of social justice. I have no problem supporting the folks in the Ukraine, or calling for intervention in Syria, while also supporting the nationalization of corporations, universal healthcare, and unions. It's other folks who can't seem to reconcile doing what the rest of the international community mostly feels is right with left wing values.

The absurdities of supporting Putin's Russia while ignoring a popular revolt in the Ukraine over hypothetical gas lines and NATO expansion......while criticizing Russia just a few weeks ago in relation to the Olympics and their anti-gay policies, are a prime example to me of how the traditional Left paradigm is inadequate to really grapple with and understand, and put forward proposals about, the political reality that we face today.

What you're seeing isn't a bitter, disillusioned 'ex-communist'. Instead, what I'd like to do is to create an alternative space for a more realistic politics based on Left-Right fusion....one that doesn't sanction atrocities, racism, or any other things that commonly clash with core liberal values....which I still also believe are fundamentally correct, even though their application in practice has often been somewhat wanting.