Anarchism, Marxism and Radical Politics

[Mark^Bastard]

I've told students before that the huge, massive, colossal flaw in the right's claim that there's a left-wing conspiracy, like, everywhere is that actual left-wingers couldn't organize a bar trivia night without falling into pointless factionalism. It'd be kind of neat if the left were as united and purposeful as they exist in the paranoid imagination of the right.

Leftists are like Linux distros. There's so fucking many varieties and a lot of them have the same purpose. They're also all mostly completely inaccessible to a 'normal' person, because the person that invented them was more or less designing their own utopia anyway haha.

This is perhaps the best analogy of leftist factionalism that I've read, lol

I used to use Ubuntu back in the day but have been starting to work with Kali.

I like Elementary OS cause it is made by people that understand the value of UI/UX l. But I haven't really looked into it for 5 years as I just use my work provided MacBook

[Flex]

Just a random bit of thinking here, but I've been following Kevin Carson on Mastadon and he shared a conversation he and Roderick Long had on pandemic safety measure a couple years ago:

Roderick Long: Well, the state has no just authority to exist in the first place. But I think some restrictions on contribution to a pandemic are justified by the non-aggression principle; in a free society they would be enacted by polycentric horizontal associations rather than by a state. What should their exact content be? That's an issue that should be hashed out in consultation with epidemiologists, libertarian legal theorists, and affected businesses.

Me: As opposed to the current more-or-less liberal/atomistic model where there are just individuals and neutral public space, and the Hoppean ancap model where all public squares are the private property of individuals and corporations, I think the appropriate model is something like the precapitalist one where most public spaces are common property of their inhabitants/users. And in this sense, members of a neighborhood or community would likely have the same authority for setting basic safety rules for use of public space that a household would have for its own space. IMO we need alternative models that don't accept the dissolution of the commons and social atomization accomplished by the state and by capitalism as "natural," and simply revert to a "private" atomized model with the state removed.

As it is, the state has dissolved and atomized preexisting communal and organic institutions, inserted itself into the vacant space left by their destruction, and has preempted their functions (albeit performing them very imperfectly). So simply abolishing the state's power to perform these functions, with nothing else to put in place besides just presuming the continued atomization the state itself created but without the state, is like trying to transform a car into a bicycle by taking two wheels off.

And an exchange in reply:

@KevinCarson1 your response basically expands on Chomsky’s criticism of Long that abolishing the state is an incoherent strategy in the here and now, and is a good reminder that the work of folks who actually have interest in bringing about whatever we might think of as “revolution” looks a lot more like the slow, thankless, and arduous work that mutual aid groups, FnB, the EZLN, Freetown Christiania, and others building community and solidarity to create a new and better world within the shell of the old than it does like some nebulous destruction of the state apparatus, or the creation of socialist institutions within the boundaries of state structures.

And Carson's response:

@eboyd32 Yeah, I agree that simply abolishing the state without regard to the background context, the order in which it is dismantled, or what it's being replaced with is a non-starter.
OTOH I think Chomsky is also incoherent for thinking "private governments" could simply take over society without a state to externalize their operating costs -- including the cost of enforcing private property titles -- on the general population.
My primary comment wasn't so much on the order of operations, as on how we conceive of society without the state. We need to stop thinking of a stateless society as just what we have now, with the formal government apparatus removed. The "state" is not just the "gummint," as per right-libertarian usage. It's an entire structure of power into which the government is integrated as enforcement arm.

Full thread: https://mastodon.social/@KevinCarson1@o ... 7933725335

I think this is good thinking, and a breathe of fresh air after (at least what feels like to me) the shift in dominant discourse towards the left promoting a more powerful state and the centralization of authority. Always circling back to sort of foundational stuff seems frustratingly calcifying at times but I think one difference in my mind is that 10 or 15 years ago if someone asked me if the left, broadly, had basically the same first principles and visions I would have said yeah sure but now seeing the resurgence in, particularly, the nostalgia and embrace of soviet-era authoritarian leftism I think Carson's thrust of the need to conceive of how we actually think of society without the state, if we do at all, is probably more important than I used to really think.

On the original post, I admit my conception of how you work through a public health response in a pandemic without a powerful state was sort of an open question to me the last few years, and this is a thought provoking alternative. Certainly, what Carson imagines doesn't seem like it would lead to particularly worse outcomes than what we've seen around most of the world.

[Dr. Medulla]

All that speaks to my fundamental rejection of any leftist labels or ideologies (rather, any ideologies). Abstraction lends itself to critique (a very good thing) and destructive solutions (generally a very bad thing). It's good for identifying problems, but less good for conceiving of going from removing the problem to being in a better place. There is this big blank space where people just buy into better thinking and behaving thanks to, I guess, the removal of the poison from the system. What, in concrete terms, exactly is the better place that we should be striving for? It's a much harder question and one that should backburner enemies … which almost certainly makes it lose practical appeal.

[Silent Majority]

What’s key here in Carson’s model is the direction of travel is built up via communal consent as built up via discussion and debate in a community that actively engages with science and has the common good at the heart of its decision-making. The issue we’re encountering with the right in the pandemic era is that their hyper-individualist agitation can now happen across international organising (albeit astroturfed in many cases by dark money, for whatever reason) and channels the human need for liberty toward anti-social ends.

[Dr. Medulla]

What's perverse about the right's claims of liberty and Gadsden flags and all that is that early national era ideas of liberty were not divorced from an idea of common good or responsibility to the community. Liberty was, in no small part, meant to allow one to not be a burden to their community and also to allow one to aid those that did need assistance. Liberty is not an anti-social principle but one profoundly social in thought and behaviour. It's wrapped up in conscience and duty. Citizenship doesn't mean fuck you, it means being available to help and knowing others will be available to help you.

[Silent Majority]

What's perverse about the right's claims of liberty and Gadsden flags and all that is that early national era ideas of liberty were not divorced from an idea of common good or responsibility to the community. Liberty was, in no small part, meant to allow one to not be a burden to their community and also to allow one to aid those that did need assistance. Liberty is not an anti-social principle but one profoundly social in thought and behaviour. It's wrapped up in conscience and duty. Citizenship doesn't mean fuck you, it means being available to help and knowing others will be available to help you.

Absolutely; and the best of that concept lives on in left-libertarianism, I’d argue. The current American right is what happens when you evolve a political philosophy from a misunderstood Thomas Jefferson quote on an overpriced yellow t-shirt.

[Dr. Medulla]

What's perverse about the right's claims of liberty and Gadsden flags and all that is that early national era ideas of liberty were not divorced from an idea of common good or responsibility to the community. Liberty was, in no small part, meant to allow one to not be a burden to their community and also to allow one to aid those that did need assistance. Liberty is not an anti-social principle but one profoundly social in thought and behaviour. It's wrapped up in conscience and duty. Citizenship doesn't mean fuck you, it means being available to help and knowing others will be available to help you.

Absolutely; and the best of that concept lives on in left-libertarianism, I’d argue. The current American right is what happens when you evolve a political philosophy from a misunderstood Thomas Jefferson quote on an overpriced yellow t-shirt.

A lot of ugly ideas spring forth from the first principle of "amidst my material comfort are parasites."

[Flex]

What's perverse about the right's claims of liberty and Gadsden flags and all that is that early national era ideas of liberty were not divorced from an idea of common good or responsibility to the community. Liberty was, in no small part, meant to allow one to not be a burden to their community and also to allow one to aid those that did need assistance. Liberty is not an anti-social principle but one profoundly social in thought and behaviour. It's wrapped up in conscience and duty. Citizenship doesn't mean fuck you, it means being available to help and knowing others will be available to help you.

Absolutely; and the best of that concept lives on in left-libertarianism, I’d argue. The current American right is what happens when you evolve a political philosophy from a misunderstood Thomas Jefferson quote on an overpriced yellow t-shirt.

A lot of ugly ideas spring forth from the first principle of "amidst my material comfort are parasites."

Great slogan for this board, tho

[Dr. Medulla]

What's perverse about the right's claims of liberty and Gadsden flags and all that is that early national era ideas of liberty were not divorced from an idea of common good or responsibility to the community. Liberty was, in no small part, meant to allow one to not be a burden to their community and also to allow one to aid those that did need assistance. Liberty is not an anti-social principle but one profoundly social in thought and behaviour. It's wrapped up in conscience and duty. Citizenship doesn't mean fuck you, it means being available to help and knowing others will be available to help you.

Absolutely; and the best of that concept lives on in left-libertarianism, I’d argue. The current American right is what happens when you evolve a political philosophy from a misunderstood Thomas Jefferson quote on an overpriced yellow t-shirt.

A lot of ugly ideas spring forth from the first principle of "amidst my material comfort are parasites."

Great slogan for this board, tho

Steve's DNA will always live on here!