academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X HumectressInterestingly, Carson may despise me personally but he seems to agree with me on most substantive topics. I could have written this myself. Most of what Carson says in this essay from 2015 directly contradicts his public embrace of the totalitarian humanist paradigm.
By Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society
Schematic designs for a new society seem to be really popular among self-described anarchists of all stripes. On the Right, we have Rothbard’s model for an entire society modelled whole-cloth on a “libertarian law code” deduced from axioms like self-ownership and the non-aggression principle. Within the historic anarchist movement of the Left, we have uniform templates like syndicalism or Kropotkinist communism. And the same tendency can be found among quasi-anarchistic libertarian socialist models like De Leonism and the World Socialist Movement; the latter assumes the creation of a communist society by persuading all the countries in the world to vote in their precise model of social organization through the political process, within a short time frame. And if all this isn’t bad enough there’s Parecon, for god’s sake.
The “anarchism without adjectives” position was a reaction to this kind of doctrinaire model-building, and the resulting conflicts between the proponents of various totalizing blueprints for society — most notably the late-19th century conflict between individualists, represented by Benjamin Tucker, and communists, represented by Johann Most. Although the term was first used by a couple of Spanish anarchists, Ricardo Mella and Fernando Terrida del Marmol (whom Voltairine de Cleyre met in London in 1897). Errico Malatesta and Max Nettlau adopted the position, and de Cleyre and Dyer Lum became its most visible American proponents. The basic idea was that anarchists should stop feuding over the specific economic model of a future anarchist society, and leave that for people to work out for themselves as they saw fit. Economic ideas like Proudhon’s mutualism, Tucker’s individualist free enterprise and Kropotkin’s communism were complementary, and in a post-state society a hundred flowers would bloom from one locality, one social grouping, to the next.
Attack the System
Categories: Anarchism/Anti-State
The world needs a Kevin Carson vs Keith Preston debate
I don’t know that there are that many things I disagree with Carson on other than the woke jihad/progressive caliphate.
http://bellamyfitzpatrick.com/index.php/2020/01/22/decentralist-anarchy-versus-world-domination-anarchism/
I added him on Facebook recently. I was hoping to read anarchist economic theories and applications of them to current events, instead I got him bitching about Trump 24/7, with the occasional interesting post about unions and landlords. A particularly depressing, milquetoast snippet from last week:
“So we’re apparently at a juncture where any undermining of faith in the centrist establishment, or criticism of it from the left, is objectively aiding the fascists”.
Pretty demoralizing. By the way, if you want to debate a left-anarchist on PC/totalitarian humanism, maybe try Brenton Lengel again, debates are pretty much the focus of his channel right now. The previous debate you had with him wasn’t structured very well I don’t think in terms of specific topics of disagreement.
Yeah, the main disagreement that I have with both Kevin and Brenton is that both of them seem to embrace the “anarcho-Democratic Party” or “anarcho-social democratic” paradigm to a much greater degree than I would (although to any degree at all would be more than me), and they obviously buy into the “social justice” religious/moral paradigm in a way that I couldn’t possibly care less about. I don’t think either of them is as bad as Alexander Reid-Ross or Spencer Sunshine, both of whom have essentially created a Protocols of the Learned Elders of Thule mythology, or Goofy Gillis, who is a cartoon character parody of left-anarchism. I think Bellamy Fitzpatrick’s critique of “World Domination Anarchism” summarizes pretty well what is problematic about that perspective, at least on a basic level.
For me, the fight begins with the recognition of the global capitalist empire as the primary enemy. Hardt’s and Negri’s analyis of this from 20 years ago still holds up pretty well, although I think it needs to be supplemented with Van Creveld’s and Lind’s analysis of the decline of the state and the emergence of fourth-generation warfare. Additionally, the techno-oligarcy/new clerisy/financier alliance described by Kotkin is the rising ruling class of the developed nations in a way that is eclisping the traditional industrial bourgeoise and even the 20th century managerial elite to some degree. We’ve moved from Henry Ford to Jack Welch to Bill Gates. This rising ruling class is the equivalent of the industrial bourgeoisie of the 18th and 19th century. Totalitarian humanism is the self-legitimating ideology of this new rising ruling class, not anachronisms like “white supremacy,” traditional religion, old-fashioned social conservatism, or conventional bourgeois patriotism. In its more benign forms, totalitarian humanism is the social purity movement or moral majoritarianism of our time. In it’s more malevolent forms, it’s the new Bolshevism/fascism/Khomeinism. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this is out of the game before it begins.
The real alternative to all of this is not to vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump but the real dispersal of power, which in turn means real diversity, not only in the usual ways but in terms of ideologies, philosophies, lifestyles, value systems, cultural norms, etc. (like the many, many thousands of indigenous tribes that existed before the world came to be dominanted by imperial systems). That’s going to include plenty of “non-wokeness.”
I have a correspondent who I think recently summarized this problem fairly well.