From “Miles,” a poster on Chris George’s blog:

“The Deacons for Defense and the Black Panthers, in my eyes, were legitimate anti-racists who acted against racist governments for self-determination. But then again, most of the members of these groups (esp. the Panthers) were involved in community movements and not co-opted by corporate state diversity programs.

When Black Panthers helped the Young Patriots to organize Urban Appalachians in Chicago against police brutality and typical urban problems, the Panthers were successful because of their non-moral-supremacist approach as opposed to the SPLC’s force-fed diversity nazi way of trying to promote tolerance. A lot of the Patriots had relatives in the KKK and whatnot, but steadfast community organizers like Bobby Lee ignored these dilemma to help launch a united working class war against oppression that would be co-opted by a common enemy, Cointelpro. ”

And from “Kulak,” a poster at AlternativeRight.Com:

“Our proper ally here is NOT “middle class” blacks who abandon their own and whose grandchildren are not an asset to our neighborhoods. Our proper ally here is “lower class” blacks.”

Interesting how two posters, one from the anti-racist far left and one from the racist far right, essentially reach the same conclusion. I agree with much of the paleoconservative analysis of America’s class structure, but one way where I think it errors is in its tendency to regard the left-wing of the upper-middle class (the “New Class”) as allies of the so-called “underclass” (meaning the urban poor and/or lumpenproletariat, often but certainly not always comprised of racial minorities). I would argue that the role of the New Class is to regulate and control the urban lower classes, which is the primary function of the whole therapeutic-welfare-managerial public sector bureaucracy in the first place. It is this New Class that staffs the entire bureaucratic apparatus that regulates the lower classes,  including Child Protective Services, social welfare systems, child support enforcement, family courts, so-called “criminal justice,” public housing, mental health professions, public schools, the myriad of busy body “case workers,” and so forth. There is no class more committed to the totalitarian humanist ideology than these public sector professional types.

Some insightful leftists actually recognize this. One of Howard Zinn’s books (I forget which one) included a chapter called “Revolt of the Guards” where he was calling on these public sector professional bureaucrats to renounce the plutocratic capitalist upper class and take up the cause of the poor whom they are charged with supervising. Implicit in the use of Zinn’s use of the term “guards” is that he understood that these sectors are agents of state control and not so-called “helping professionals.” He understood that the social bureaucracy is to ordinary society what guards are to jails and prisons. Of course, Zinn’s challenge was sheer fantasy. When have guards ever siding with prisoners in a prison uprising?

It is ironic that the New Class that the paleo-populist-traditionalist-racialist right-wing hates the most is the same class that administers the day to day oppression of the urban poor.

The U.S. now has its highest poverty rate since 1965. We’ve got to get this class struggle thing moving.

Great interview with Dennis Steele of the Second Vermont Republic. We need a Dennis Steele in every state and locality in the U.S.A.

When even an arch-imperialist like Thomas Friedman says the Empire is on its way down due to financial ruin, it must be true. Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires,” is apparently going to be the empire’s last hurrah. So what’s next on our hitlist?

New essay from Michael Parish.

The basic tenants of liberalism are not, ironically, arrived at through deductive logic but through an arduous process of mental abstraction. What is presented to us by rationalists as a realist assessment of the world is in truth a vague conceptualization produced by a reductionist thought process. By abstracting thoroughly all essential properties from particulars it reduces them all objects in the world to mere mental concepts. These concepts are then presented to us as objective facts to be factored into account when it comes to socio-political organization. When reality negates these supposed facts the rationalist has no answer sufficient to negate reality.

See Michael’s “The Agony of the American Right” as well:

Now, all this drivel would in a perfect world would dissipate in mid-air. Sadly for us, we live not in the perfect world but in the modern world, where it gets beamed into Middle-American ears by the fluorescence of Faux News. That it spills from the mouth of an adult convert to Mormonism who indulges in played up tears on air apparently puts no dent in its credibility.

An interesting discussion between Robert Higgs and Kevin Carson at C4SS. I throw in my own two cents worth as well. Read it all here.

From Lila Rajiva’s blog. Hess really was one of the all-time greats.

“I am in total opposition to any institutional power. I favor a world of neighborhoods in which all social organization is voluntary and the ways of life are
established in small, consenting groups. These groups could cooperate with other groups as they saw fit. But all cooperation would be on a voluntary basis. As the French anarchist Proudhon said, “Liberty is not the daughter but the Mother of Order.” The precedents I look to are the participatory democracies of the Greek city-states, many Irish cities up until the British occupation, some Indian villages under Mahatma Gandhi and the town meetings right here in America. Each of those
anarchist societies produced great and honorable cultures. There is no way to achieve a free society that is national. The concept of a nation requires the subordination of the citizen because you must let someone else represent you. So your freedom is being exercised by another person. In a truly free society, there is no subordination of any citizen. Every citizen represents himself. The
nation-state is an abomination.”

–    Karl Hess 1976

The IRS story:

“Karl was a speech writer for Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign and was
credited with the famous, “Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of freedom is no virtue”, from Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 convention. Actually it was given to him by Harry Jaffa and although he thought it was provocative, he did not expect
it would induce the spontaneous hemorrhaging in the body politic it did.

After Johnson was elected Karl was slapped with an IRS audit. When he asked the auditor/robber who was handling his case/theft if a certain perfectly legitimate deduction was right, he replied it didn’t matter if it was right because it was the law. Karl said he had never before met an American who thought there was a difference between right and law. The perfect Nazi soldier. He then notified them he wasn’t going to pay taxes anymore–ever and by way of explanation enclosed a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The IRS confiscated all his property except tools and clothing and
slapped a 100 percent government lien on all future earnings. He and his wife moved to West Virginia where he became a non union welder and sculptor living on barter.

Karl said, “It is curious to note that when, for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently the state takes money more seriously than life”.

Good stuff from our friend Raven Warrior.

Some thoughtful comments from David Heleniak:

I don’t think “our side” should give up on trying a counter-infiltration of the key institutions taken over by the PC Left. Many lawyers, for example, are committed to civil liberties, ye olde English traditions, etc.
They can be allies in someone’s bid to get a significant spot in the American Bar Association. I’m sure I’ve told you that the commission on domestic violence of the ABA is completely controlled by the PC feminists: http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-Myths-of-ABA-Commission-on-DV-Summary.pdf A coup attempt for that ABA section might be in order, or for some other key position, from which the DV section can be discredited and marginalized. Another area is the Catholic Church. There’s been some infiltration by the PC left, but it is not complete by any means. It probably is a waste of time to try to take over the mainline Methodist church, but with the Catholics you have the natural law tradition, an anti-government streak which I observed while in Catholic high school, splinter groups like Tom Woods and the Latin Mass crowd, homeschoolers. This is off the top of my head–there are other reasons too I think the Catholic Church is promising.

Imagine the Pope making a speech in which he denounces Cultural Marxism, or the family courts, or local dioceses’ support of local battered women’s shelters (this is common, in part because battered women’s shelters superficially seem like a good cause). That would set some gears in motion for sure. Of course, “our side” should join Mens Rights organizations. Check out the main writer at Spearhead’s story:

http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/09/03/coming-out-of-the-closet/

I really do believe that when middle to upper-middle class men get
screwed by the State and their illusions of a just State are shattered,
they can cause the State more problems than screwed over members of the underclass, who (1) are used to getting screwed over, so don’t get as outraged by the treatment of the PC State; (2) tend to be dumb; and (3) have few resources.

On the issue of the masses, there’s a group that are between contented masses and the enlightened few, and they are the conspiracy Alex Jones types. One thing I’ve noticed, and this was pointed out at Lew Rockwell’s blog, is that these guys have a naive faith in the rule of law. They think the State is a demon that can be controlled by magical incantations. If only they can chant the right spell, the State will be compelled to do their bidding. E.g., some tax avoiders really think that with the right legal argument argument, the State, as manifested in the form of a tax judge, will see the light and agree they don’t have to pay taxes (wait, that sounds like me with my challenges of the DV system). Some birthers think that if they can just prove Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, he’ll have to be removed from office (fat chance). Anyway, these guys, also as pointed out at Lew Rockwell’s site, are despite their flaws closer to our brand of enlightenment than is the typical sheeple.

Getting back to your article on legal theory, I’m guessing you probably
have this, but if not, be sure to get Paul Craig Robert’s The Tyranny of
Good Intentions. On your efforts to discredit democracy, a book I’ve been leafing through that looks promising–not dead on, mind you–is The Trouble With Democracy, by William Gairdner.

Here are some points we need to be thinking about:

-Past partisan cycles indicate that the Democratic Party will be the dominant political party for the next few decades.

-Research on public opinion regarding controversial issues along with prevailing cultural, demographic, economic, and generational trends indicates that the Left will be the winning side in the “culture war” conflict.

-Past times in American history where the gap between socio-economic classes has been extremely wide have been followed by subsequent periods of intensified class struggle resulting in a new settlement and altering of relations between the social classes. Therefore, given the present economic situation, class issues should soon enough surpass culture war issues as the dominant conflict in American society.

-Major conflicts in American society are usually played out within the context of the dominant party, e.g. the civil rights conflict within the Democratic Party during the 1950s and 60s. That means conflict over class issues should emerge not only within the wider society but especially within the Democratic Party at some point in the future.

I’m not a historical determinist, and any number of variables could alter these trends or cycles. But this seems to be as good a model as any to base future predictions on, so long as the model remains flexible and subject to modification or re-evaluation. The question: What does this mean for the future of alternative anarchism?

This guy is fairly impressive. He’s a young guy as well, and seems much less doctrinaire that previous generations of libertarians. Yet he retains the radical flavor of libertarianism. Check out his articles here.