Comments on: Flavors of Reaction

By: admin

admin — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:17:57 +0000

Thanks. The freaky fascists at Counter Currents are probably too high-brow to be very dangerous, unlike -- for instance -- this guy.

By: Steven Hickman

Steven Hickman — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 18:02:16 +0000

True… even Rothbard admitted amiability toward Chomsky back in the sixties, even though Chomsky distanced himself as far as possible from Rothbard. The only difference obviously is ‘capitalism’ itself; not the big C capitalism, but the day to day managerial to public and private life. What’s even stranger than people like Moldbug – who still aligns with the typical moralism and religious fundamentalism (even if atheistic) – is the mad dogs of the new right both European and American: http://www.counter-currents.com

Benjamin Noys put together and interesting ensemble on Communist trends:

http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=299

Glad to see you’ve built a new blog site…

By: admin

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:09:32 +0000

It was meant in the "wrong but romantic" sense, i.e. as near-tautological -- but I'll open up some 'non-romantic royalist' head-space if pressed.

By: AnomalyUK

AnomalyUK — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:17:15 +0000

Oh – I didn’t realise I was supposed to be the “romantic royalist”. The romance of royalty is a useful asset, and I am unromantically in favour of maintaining it, but I’m not romantic about it myself http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2010/11/royal-engagement.html

By: vimothy

vimothy — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:14:37 +0000

Completely OT, but the new layout reminds me of my favourite color-theme in Emacs (Comidia)!

By: admin

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:34:01 +0000

@Erich
Your first paragraph outlines some communist rationalizations (or explanations for the necessity) of total coercion in a collectivist social order, if I’m understanding you correctly, so we can perhaps agree that the collectivist left is basically, and even by definition, ‘the ideology of total coercion’ with some wiggle room for how it justifies that ‘to the people’. Given the (Mises) calculation problem in the socialist commonwealth,and the spontaneous emergence of micro-capitalism even inside concentration and labor camps, the reality is always going to be considerably more intrusively brutal than even the steeliest utopians envisage. And it will still fail.

On your second paragraph, I entirely agree: to consider libertarianism a left-wing phenomenon seems sophistical (equivalent to the usage of ‘capitalism’ to mean anything other than the market order) — it’s typically the symptom of a confused political strategy. Moldbug makes the best case for doing so, which is a critical (negative) one, but to conclude that hyper-capitalism is leftist still seems a little odd.

Fukuyama is a neo-con, using that expression neutrally rather than abusively, with an extreme evangelical confidence in liberal democracy as an optimum socio-political solution. The reasons to doubt that he is correct in this are too manifold to detail here (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Hoppe, Moldbug and others do the work).

As for the thinkers you link at the end, the more ‘relevant’ their approaches are, the more thoroughly screwed we’re going to be. Sadly, I expect they’re going to be plenty relevant.

By: Erich

Erich — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:37:00 +0000

Thanks for your quick answer.

It is interesting the thesis that communism cannot take place without absolute coercion. I was wondering what are your main reasons to justify that. Because I think that it could be necessary based on two facts: (1) kinship is not that easy to break, so it is necessary to force collectivization of society (Fukuyama’s thesis based on biologists and social anthropologists) and (2) antagonism and dissent are inevitable so you need always to guarantee social order. I could add to that leftists never think that a group of people might not give a shit about emancipation. So coercion is necessary in order to make the understand what is historically neccesary.

As for thinking libertarianism with the left, it is ok to take into account an historical origin. But nowadays things are very different. I know that the definitions of “right” and “left” can be a pain, but I was associating the left with social redistribution, with social and economic rights.

Finally, I maintain too that skepticism of a left that defend a different order that of global capitalism. My question here is if it is possible to think that as the same as Fukuyama’s thesis on “The End of History”. Maybe not a strong interpretation (too metaphysical) but a pragmatic one (you commit to the thesis unless you defend concrete reforms to organize production in a different way).

Anyway, what I wanted to asked you here, in relation to communism, is your opinion on the Marxists intellectuals that are devotedly studied in critical theory programs (for example, Badiou, Žižek, Rancière, Hardt, Negri). How relevant do you think their approaches to capitalism are or their radical “solutions” in the name of communism and emancipation?

By: admin

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:54:52 +0000

@ Erich
Communism without total coercion is a concept that doesn’t compute for me, but I’d be interested in hosting a discussion on the subject.
As for the ‘left’ more generally, it’s easy to slip into a merely linguistic morass. SEK3 (Samuel Edward Konkin III) follows Rothbard, with even greater vehemence, in insisting that libertarianism is essentially leftist (based on the original distribution with the pre-revolutionary French National Assembly). That anticipates the positioning of Bastiat as an ‘ultra-leftist’ — not a situation readily harmonized with present political conceptions. Moldbug actually rehearses this from the other side (check out his Why I am Not a Libertarian — you can google it faster than I can serve up a link).
Is the ‘left’ as understood today imaginable in abstraction from a political program to suppress ‘capitalist acts between consenting adults’ (Nozick’s sweet turn of phrase)? I’m seriously skeptical …

By: Erich

Erich — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:46:48 +0000

Hey Nick

When you say “The tradition of spontaneous order is our heritage” I wanted to ask you, because I am not yet familiar with much of your work (I just got Fanged Noumena a while ago), if the idea of a social organization without politics can only be possible for you within a capitalist or libertarian frame? (I ask this because of the link). Does communism or another possible “mode of production”, or anything propposed by the left, could be sided with Outside in?

By: admin

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:29:11 +0000

The characterization of politics as “a particularly obscure branch of macroeconomics” certainly captures something important, but that’s probably because macroeconomics is simply politicized economics — hence its essential ghastliness and structural dishonesty.

Do ‘political’ reactionaries really think they will ever see a politics that doesn’t in fact disgust them? That’s a genuine question. My sense of it is that there are certain recurrent examples — Singapore being the outstanding one — that figure as acceptable compromises, but that such cases give no less comfort to libertarians (e.g. Hong Kong). The idea that statist variants of reaction are intrinsically more realistic than anarcho-capitalism / libertarianism — once they proceed beyond giving libertarians a(n entirely justifiable) hard time — strikes me as yet unproven. The reaction serves to shake up models of free society, but when it comes to a positive vision of a workable regime we’re still in unconstrained science fiction.

Any or all of (Non-royalist) Neocameralism, (Patri Friedman-style) dynamic geography / experimental government, or (Hoppean) Private Law Society would be a superb outcome IMHO, but I know a gripping SF yarn when I see one (or many) …