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gravitascivics · 2 years

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JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XXV

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting continues a report on the expectation of schools that people share as an element of the commonplace, the milieu, in curriculum development.[2] Central to this milieu in twenty-first century America is the importance these Americans ascribe to individualism which effectively sways the expectations they have of civics instruction.

Anil Ananthaswamy comments on how individualism stacks up against other concerns. This researcher writes,

There’s actually a lot of agreement on the things that are considered to be most essential such as respecting America’s political institutions and laws and believing in individualism. There’s also considerable agreement on things that are considered less essential, such as the language one speaks, or whether someone was born in the US or has European ancestry.[3]

Seymour M. Lipset provides an extensive study of this American character trait. He writes that Americans are exceptionally supportive of individualism and anti-statism. Using comparative data, he demonstrates how, compared to the other modern industrial nations, the US ranks lower in taxes in such state-sponsored programs as welfare.[4] More recent studies continue to support these claims.[5]

In short, Americans are highly suspicious of governmental efforts to solve maladies and prefer private-for-profit approaches to dealing with communal concerns. Even public schools, some would argue, should shift to private-school arrangements.[6] In turn, these biases are not isolated but are associated with many other views and concerns.

For example, Americans have a very pragmatic view of education. Some have called this pragmatism as being anti-intellectual. Americans are wary of schools attempting to introduce academic subject matter that they – the public – do not understand. This was exemplified all the way back to the nation’s reaction to Sputnik in the late 1950s and 1960s and the reforms that ensued which were unintelligible to the public in general. Those reforms enjoyed a short longevity and were mostly dismissed within a decade.[7]

Americans believe education should be purposeful, for the most part, toward practical career goals. While this has resulted in different approaches used in schools over this century, a consistent antagonism toward highly academic bias has pervaded American campuses. Robert Maranto and Jonathan Wai share an interesting overview of American education. In their abstract introducing their study, they write,

Rooted in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as “Taylorist” factories with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence, prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist.[8]

The natural rights perspective matches closely to this seemingly consistent desire of the American public. For one, it treats government as a neutral institution. This blends with the anti-statist position of most Americans. While the systems approach recognizes the necessity of some government presence, it does not advocate any particular form for that presence nor for it to be extensive.

It leaves those types of decisions to the political interplay of the American public through the expression of demands and supports, mostly voting behavior. The instructional approach it favors does address from whence existing political pressures originate, but it does so in order for the student to gather explanations of the conditions that exist without projecting political biases for policy alternatives.

The natural rights perspective, with its reliance on political systems, is a fairly straightforward construct avoiding difficult incursions into philosophic arguments of political theory. The natural rights perspective most closely meets the expectations of American parents, i.e., that it should teach their youngsters what constitutes the government structure and give them a straightforward explanation of why the government is organized the way it is.

In doing so, it definitely avoids such messaging as was associated with federalist notions of communal, cooperative, and collaborative aims or goals that government should pursue. In its stead, one finds language that describes – and to a certain extent promotes – a transactional national stage in which the various parties go about competing for political favor from either government or other private parties.

This completes this blog’s review of Americans’ expectations of their schools’ civics instruction. Still to be covered are schools’ economic base and youth culture. With that, this blog will complete its report on the commonplaces of curriculum development as seen through the “eyes” of the natural rights construct.

[Note: As regular and ongoing readers of this blog might know, this blogger takes a break every four hundred postings. He did so after 400, 800, and now will do so after 1200 postings. As of his counting, this posting is number 1198. That leaves two more postings before the next break. He anticipates the break will last, at least, two months, maybe three. He has other projects, e.g., finishing his preparation of the re-edited collection of the blog’s second hundred postings. He looks forward to the break and getting back from it to resume producing this blog’s postings.]

[1] This presentation continues with this posting. The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present. This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Joseph Schwab presents his conception of the commonplaces of curriculum development – they are subject matter, students, teachers, and milieu. See William H. Schubert, Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] Anil Ananthaswamy, “American Individualism and Our Collective Crisis,” Knowable Magazine, December 1, 2020, accessed October 23, 2022, https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2020/american-individualism-and-our-collective-crisis.

[4] Seymour M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996).

[5] See for example, “How Do US Taxes Compare Internationally?,” Briefing Book, The Tax Policy Center, 2018, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally AND Robert Rector, “Poverty and the Social Welfare State in the United States and Other Nations,” The Heritage Foundation, September 16, 2015, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/poverty-and-the-social-welfare-state-the-united-states-and-other-nations#:~:text=As%20a%20share%20of%20GDP,5%5D%20Ibid.%2C%20p..

[6] For example, see “Top Benefits of Private School vs. Public School,” Hotchkiss (n.d.), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.hotchkiss.org/top-benefits-of-private-school.

[7] For a short, but interesting, history, see Dave Roos, “How the Cold War Space Race Led to US Students Doing Tons of Homework,” History [Channel], August 13, 2019, accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/homework-cold-war-sputnik#:~:text=The%20response%20from%20the%20U.S.,science%2C%20mathematics%20and%20foreign%20languages.

[8] Robert Maranto and Jonathan Wai, “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done about It,” Journal of Intelligence, 8, 1 (March 2020), accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151121/. “Taylorist” refers to the work of Frederick Taylor on how production facilities, such as factories, should be run. Central to his view was the incorporation of mechanical and engineering principles to the management of labor and other production elements.

#curricular development #school milieu #school expectations #intelligence #privatisation #practical education expectations #civics education #social studies

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retentionalfinitude2 · 3 years

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“First, as we have seen in relation to the question of subjectivity, Foucault found certain features in the ideal or programmatic form of the neoliberalism of the Chicago School attractive, in particular that it envisages a kind of regulation outside sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical forms, and that it regulates without the fabrication of subjectivities while optimizing differences and tolerating minority groups and practices. Strangely, he would find in the Islamic Orient and in ancient Greece a similar point of attraction: forms of sexual conduct between males subject to forms of ritualized austerity, but not connected to the production of subjectivities. Second, Foucault showed a certain acceptance of the neoliberal diagnosis of the current problems of the welfare state as creating dependency, as unresponsive or not ‘active’, and as expensive, while also perceiving the benefits for the autonomy of the subject that would follow from a negative tax system. Finally, with regard to concrete political alignments, he displayed an affinity with the Second Left – those factions of French social democracy that opposed the ‘social-statism’ of the old political formations – and displayed a willingness to adopt neoliberal ideas and solutions. As we have stressed throughout, Foucault was caught in the paradox that his anti-formal politics actually found a place relatively easily in the conventional political spectrum.” --Mitchell Dean & Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution

#Michel Foucault

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naturalgasnow · 5 years

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#welfare #energy statism #green new deal #free markets #dead end

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blackwolfmanx2 · 23 days

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The TRUTH about reparations...

youtube

“Free” money straight from the taxpayers and the unborn.

#blackwolfmanx2 #ancap #libertarian #youngrippa59 #eric july #reparations #welfare state #statism #authoritarianism #abolish the government #abolish the state #true punks hate the government #Youtube

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yngwrthr · 3 years

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Despite the Dems “advanced” U.S. capitalist state wanting to mask its more effective, insidious oppression — for me — ending racism is not even “theoretically” imaginable within the horizons of capitalist society; it is on the other hand much more imaginable ending the “class relations” of capitalism. But, by and large, the “whole business” — including racism, the racial formation process, labeling others “us” or “them” etc., etc. — first develops when different groups begin to enter social relations wherein they economically struggle with one another and when different communities come into contact in exchange relations with each other…!. That is, the concept of race/ racism is embedded intrinsically within specific organizations of social and economic relations, within class societies. Racism in class society has always been constructed to achieve some sort of economic objective. Moreover, it has always been a tool of the ruling class; and, I think, can basically subsume into “class”.

In specifically capitalist class societies, the placement of people into racial categories initially stemmed from the interests of the capitalist class. The raison d’etat of racism in capitalist societies is the interest in increasing surplus value, capital, and profit. Competition between workers based on racial and ethnic differences is determined in the final analysis by an interest in managing and maintaining relations of production of surplus value; the impetus of accumulation in capitalism. Racism helps capitalists realize their rewards and develops fully only in capitalist societies, but has basically always been defined by markets and commodity exchange. Therefore, (at this moment!): racism is, indeed, associated with the emergence of class society and commodity exchange. This is why talk of abolishing racism in capitalism, with liberal welfare statism and radlib idpol/ intersectionality has little or no meaning/ significance in terms of producing results and completely misses the point.

Consequently, where there is no exchange, buying, or selling; if there is no value, money, or profit; no rich or poor classes — “post capitalism” — it is unlikely for racism to be a thing. There would be no reason for it. The Marxist way we see race/ ism is that it is only transposed by the economic struggle of unstable social orders. These economic factors have always determined the content of racism. And, putting that to the side, to the extent that communism does not directly address racism, I would argue humanity would then be in a much better position to begin coping with related ills. The idea is that when capitalist competition ends, so will competition between races/ workers. But the only way to cure modern society of racism is to eradicate its systemic roots in capitalist economy. In a socialist society, where there are no super-ordinate or subordinate positions, if such radical transformations are to take place, there will be no capacity to preserve white privilege.

#Marxism #Marx #socialism #communism #class #class society #class struggle #value theory #value #exchange #commodity #commodity production #capitalism #race #racism #identity politics #intersectionality

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nicklloydnow · 3 years

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“A fundamental change in the relationship between the state, natural elites, and intellectuals only occurred with the transition from monarchical to democratic rule. It was the inflated price of justice and the perversions of ancient law by kings as monopolistic judges and peacekeepers that motivated the historical opposition against monarchy. But confusion as to the causes of this phenomenon prevailed. There were those who recognized correctly that the problem was with monopoly, not with elites or nobility. However, they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed the elitist character of the ruler for the problem, and who advocated maintaining the monopoly of law and law enforcement and merely replacing the king and the highly visible royal pomp with the "people" and the presumed decency of the "common man." Hence the historic success of democracy.

How ironic that monarchism was destroyed by the same social forces that kings had first stimulated and enlisted when they began to exclude competing natural authorities from acting as judges: the envy of the common men against their betters, and the desire of the intellectuals for their allegedly deserved place in society. When the king's promises of better and cheaper justice turned out to be empty, intellectuals turned the egalitarian sentiments the kings had previously courted against the monarchical rulers themselves. Accordingly, it appeared logical that kings, too, should be brought down and that the egalitarian policies, which monarchs had initiated, should be carried through to their ultimate conclusion: the monopolistic control of the judiciary by the common man. To the intellectuals, this meant by them, as the people's spokesmen.

As elementary economic theory could predict, with the transition from monarchical to democratic one-man-one-vote rule and the substitution of the people for the king, matters became worse. The price of justice rose astronomically while the quality of law constantly deteriorated. For what this transition boiled down to was a system of private government ownership — a private monopoly — being replaced by a system of public government ownership — a publicly owned monopoly.

A "tragedy of the commons" was created. Everyone, not just the king, was now entitled to try to grab everyone else's private property. The consequences were more government exploitation (taxation); the deterioration of law to the point where the idea of a body of universal and immutable principles of justice disappeared and was replaced by the idea of law as legislation (made, rather than found and eternally "given" law); and an increase in the social rate of time preference (increased present-orientation).

A king owned the territory and could hand it on to his son, and thus tried to preserve its value. A democratic ruler was and is a temporary caretaker and thus tries to maximize current government income of all sorts at the expense of capital values, and thus wastes.

(...)

While the state fared much better under democratic rule, and while the "people" have fared much worse since they began to rule "themselves," what about the natural elites and the intellectuals? As regards the former, democratization has succeeded where kings made only a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elite and nobility. The fortunes of the great families have dissipated through confiscatory taxes, during life and at the time of death. These families' tradition of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership have been lost and forgotten.

Rich men exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortunes directly or indirectly to the state. Hence, they are often more dependent on the state's continued favors than many people of far-lesser wealth. They are typically no longer the heads of long-established leading families, but "nouveaux riches." Their conduct is not characterized by virtue, wisdom, dignity, or taste, but is a reflection of the same proletarian mass-culture of present-orientation, opportunism, and hedonism that the rich and famous now share with everyone else. Consequently — and thank goodness — their opinions carry no more weight in public opinion than most other people's.

Democracy has achieved what Keynes only dreamt of: the "euthanasia of the rentier class." Keynes's statement that "in the long run we are all dead" accurately expresses the democratic spirit of our times: present-oriented hedonism. Although it is perverse not to think beyond one's own life, such thinking has become typical. Instead of ennobling the proletarians, democracy has proletarianized the elites and has systematically perverted the thinking and judgment of the masses.

On the other hand, while the natural elites were being destroyed, intellectuals assumed a more prominent and powerful position in society. Indeed, to a large extent they have achieved their goal and have become the ruling class, controlling the state and functioning as monopolistic judge.

This is not to say that democratically elected politicians are all intellectuals (although there are certainly more intellectuals nowadays who become president than there were intellectuals who became king.) After all, it requires somewhat different skills and talents to be an intellectual than it does to have mass-appeal and be a successful fundraiser. But even the non-intellectuals are the products of indoctrination by tax-funded schools, universities, and publicly employed intellectuals, and almost all of their advisors are drawn from this pool.

There are almost no economists, philosophers, historians, or social theorists of rank employed privately by members of the natural elite. And those few of the old elite who remain and who might have purchased their services can no longer afford intellectuals financially. Instead, intellectuals are now typically public employees, even if they work for nominally private institutions or foundations. Almost completely protected from the vagaries of consumer demand ("tenured"), their number has dramatically increased and their compensation is on average far above their genuine market value. At the same time the quality of their intellectual output has constantly fallen.

What you will discover is mostly irrelevance and incomprehensibility. Worse, insofar as today's intellectual output is at all relevant and comprehensible, it is viciously statist. There are exceptions, but if practically all intellectuals are employed in the multiple branches of the state, then it should hardly come as a surprise that most of their ever-more voluminous output will, either by commission or omission, be statist propaganda. There are more propagandists of democratic rule around today than there were ever propagandists of monarchical rule in all of human history.

This seemingly unstoppable drift toward statism is illustrated by the fate of the so-called Chicago School: Milton Friedman, his predecessors, and his followers. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago School was still considered left-fringe, and justly so, considering that Friedman, for instance, advocated a central bank and paper money instead of a gold standard. He wholeheartedly endorsed the principle of the welfare state with his proposal of a guaranteed minimum income (negative income tax) on which he could not set a limit. He advocated a progressive income tax to achieve his explicitly egalitarian goals (and he personally helped implement the withholding tax). Friedman endorsed the idea that the State could impose taxes to fund the production of all goods that had a positive neighborhood effect or which he thought would have such an effect. This implies, of course, that there is almost nothing that the state can not tax-fund!

In addition, Friedman and his followers were proponents of the shallowest of all shallow philosophies: ethical and epistemological relativism. There is no such thing as ultimate moral truths and all of our factual, empirical knowledge is at best only hypothetically true. Yet they never doubted that there must be a state, and that the state must be democratic.

Today, half a century later, the Chicago-Friedman school, without having essentially changed any of its positions, is regarded as right-wing and free-market. Indeed, the school defines the borderline of respectable opinion on the political Right, which only extremists cross. Such is the magnitude of the change in public opinion that public employees have brought about.

Consider further indicators of the statist deformation brought about by the intellectuals. If one takes a look at election statistics, one will by and large find the following picture: the longer a person spends in educational institutions, someone with a PhD, for instance, as compared to someone with only a BA, the more likely it is that this person will be ideologically statist and vote Democrat. Moreover, the higher the amount of taxes used to fund education, the lower SAT scores and similar measurements of intellectual performance will fall, and I suspect even further will the traditional standards of moral behavior and civil conduct decline.

Or consider the following indicator: in 1994 it was called a "revolution" and Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was called a "revolutionary" when he endorsed the New Deal and Social Security, and praised civil rights legislation, i.e., the affirmative action and forced integration which is responsible for the almost complete destruction of private property rights, and the erosion of freedom of contract, association, and disassociation. What kind of a revolution is it where the revolutionaries have wholeheartedly accepted the statist premises and causes of the present disaster? Obviously, this can only be labeled a revolution in an intellectual environment that is statist to the core.

(...)

The situation appears hopeless, but it is not so. First, it must be recognized that the situation can hardly continue forever. The democratic age can hardly be "the end of history," as the neoconservatives want us to believe, for there is also an economic side to the process.

Market interventions will inevitably cause more of the problems they are supposed to cure, which leads to more and more controls and regulations until we finally reach full-blown socialism. If the current trend continues, it can safely be predicted that the democratic welfare state of the West will eventually collapse as did the "people's republics" of the East in the late 1980s. For decades, real incomes in the West have stagnated or even fallen. Government debt and the cost of the "social insurance" schemes have brought on the prospect of an economic meltdown. At the same time, social conflict has risen to dangerous heights.

Perhaps one will have to wait for an economic collapse before the current statist trend changes. But even in the case of a collapse, something else is necessary. A breakdown would not automatically result in a roll-back of the State. Matters could become worse.

In fact, in recent Western history, there are only two clear-cut instances where the powers of the central government were actually reduced, even if only temporarily, as the result of a catastrophe: in West Germany after World War II under Ludwig Erhard, and in Chile under General Pinochet. What is necessary, besides a crisis, is ideas — correct ideas — and men capable of understanding and implementing them once the opportunity arises.

But if the course of history is not inevitable (and it is not) then a catastrophe is neither necessary nor unavoidable. Ultimately, the course of history is determined by ideas, be they true or false, and by men acting upon and being inspired by true or false ideas. Only so long as false ideas rule is a catastrophe unavoidable. On the other hand, once correct ideas are adopted and prevail in public opinion — and ideas can, in principle, be changed almost instantaneously — a catastrophe will not have to occur at all.

This brings me to the role intellectuals must play in the necessary radical and fundamental change in public opinion, and the role that members of the natural elites, or whatever is left of them, will also have to play. The demands on both sides are high, yet as high as they are, to prevent a catastrophe or to emerge successfully from it, these demands will have to be accepted by both as their natural duty.

Even if most intellectuals have been corrupted and are largely responsible for the present perversities, it is impossible to achieve an ideological revolution without their help. The rule of the public intellectuals can only be broken by anti-intellectual intellectuals. Fortunately, the ideas of individual liberty, private property, freedom of contract and association, personal responsibility and liability, and government power as the primary enemy of liberty and property, will not die out as long as there is a human race, simply because they are true and the truth supports itself. Moreover, the books of past thinkers who expressed these ideas will not disappear. However, it is also necessary that there be living thinkers who read such books and who can remember, restate, reapply, sharpen, and advance these ideas, and who are capable and willing to give them personal expression and openly oppose, attack, and refute their fellow intellectuals.

Of these two requirements — intellectual competency and character — the second is the more important, especially in these times. From a purely intellectual point of view, matters are comparatively easy. Most of the statist arguments that we hear day in and out are easily refuted as more or less economic nonsense. It is also not rare to encounter intellectuals who in private do not believe what they proclaim with great fanfare in public. They do not simply err. They deliberately say and write things they know to be untrue. They do not lack intellect; they lack morals. This in turn implies that one must be prepared not only to fight falsehood but also evil — and this is a much more difficult and daring task. In addition to better knowledge, it requires courage.

As an anti-intellectual intellectual, one can expect bribes to be offered — and it is amazing how easily some people can be corrupted: a few hundred dollars, a nice trip, a photo-op with the mighty and powerful are all too often sufficient to make people sell out. Such temptations must be rejected as contemptible. Moreover, in fighting evil, one must be willing to accept that one will probably never be "successful." There are no riches in store, no magnificent promotions, no professional prestige. In fact, intellectual "fame" should be regarded with utmost suspicion.

Indeed, not only does one have to accept that he will be marginalized by the academic establishment, but he will have to expect that his colleagues will try almost anything to ruin him. Just look at Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. The two greatest economists and social philosophers of the 20th century were both essentially unacceptable and unemployable by the academic establishment. Yet throughout their lives, they never gave in, not one inch. They never lost their dignity or even succumbed to pessimism. On the contrary, in the face of constant adversity, they remained undaunted and even cheerful, and worked at a mind-boggling level of productivity. They were satisfied in being devoted to the truth and nothing but the truth.

It is here that what is left of the natural elites comes into play. True intellectuals, like Mises and Rothbard, can not do what they need to do without the natural elites. Despite all obstacles, it was possible for Mises and Rothbard to make themselves heard. They were not condemned to silence. They still taught and published. They still addressed audiences and inspired people with their insights and ideas. This would not have been possible without the support of others. Mises had Lawrence Fertig and the William Volker Fund, which paid his salary at NYU, and Rothbard had The Ludwig von Mises Institute, which supported him, helped publish and promote his books, and provided the institutional framework that allowed him to say and write what needed to be said and written, and that can no longer be said and written inside academia and the official, statist establishment media.

Once upon a time, in the pre-democratic age, when the spirit of egalitarianism had not yet destroyed most men of independent wealth and independent minds and judgments, this task of supporting unpopular intellectuals was taken on by individuals. But who can nowadays afford, single-handedly, to employ an intellectual privately, as his personal secretary, advisor, or teacher of his children? And those who still can are more often than not deeply involved in the ever more corrupt big government-big business alliance, and they promote the very same intellectual cretins who dominate statist academia. Just think of Rockefeller and Kissinger, for instance.

Hence, the task of supporting and keeping alive the truths of private property, freedom of contract and association and disassociation, personal responsibility, and of fighting falsehoods, lies, and the evil of statism, relativism, moral corruption, and irresponsibility can nowadays only be taken on collectively by pooling resources and supporting organizations like the Mises Institute , an independent organization dedicated to the values underlying Western civilization, uncompromising and far removed even physically from the corridors of power. Its program of scholarships, teaching, publications, and conferences is nothing less than an island of moral and intellectual decency in a sea of perversion.

To be sure, the first obligation of any decent person is to himself and his family. He should — in the free market — make as much money as he possibly can, because the more money he makes, the more beneficial he has been to his fellow man.

But that is not enough. An intellectual must be committed to the truth, whether or not it pays off in the short run. Similarly, the natural elite have obligations that extend far beyond themselves and their families.

The more successful they are as businessmen and professionals, and the more others recognize them as successful, the more important it is that they set an example: that they strive to live up to the highest standards of ethical conduct. This means accepting as their duty, indeed as their noble duty, to support openly, proudly, and as generously as they possibly can the values that they have recognized as right and true.”

#hans hermann hoppe #hoppe #libertarianism #liberty #anarchocapitalism #anarchism #rothbard #mises #state #elites #intellectuals #milton friedman #newt gingrich #monarchy #democracy

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years

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Arendt’s critique of the social differs significantly from Hayek’s. Modernity’s most damaging bequest to political life, society is the theater for production, welfare, needs, and satisfactions, rather than action, deeds, and immortality. For Hayek, society is the product of hubristic do-gooders, rationalists, and despots, those with ambitions to design and direct society, rather than honor the freedom and tradition that permit its spontaneous order and evolution. Arendt wants to save political life from the encroachment of bodies and needs, economics and behaviorism, which is worlds apart from Hayek’s desire to save markets and morals from social justice schemes. Arendt idealizes deliberate action in the public sphere; Hayek idealizes morally disciplined individuals tending their own interests. Arendt worries that freedom has been lost to behavior; Hayek worries about its restriction by state power and dissolution in political cultures of dependence. For Hayek, the social is a toxic fiction animating the freedom- destroying monster of an invasive state. For Arendt, the social itself is the devouring force, one Hanna Pitkin compares to the figure of “an evil monster . . . intent on debilitating, absorbing, and ultimately destroying us, gobbling up our distinct individuality and turning us into robots that mechanically serve its purposes.” Yet for all of their differences, something connects the hatred of the social shared by Arendt and Hayek, something beyond their alertness to the emergence of fascism from projects of national socialism and repressive state regimes from proletarian revolutions. Both Arendt and Hayek revile states dedicated to provisioning human needs and revile political life, including democracy, addressed to human welfare. Both dread the conquest or occupation of the political by the demands of the teeming masses, demands they view as imperiling freedom and even civilization. Above all, both reject the Left’s critical understanding of the social as the essential modern site of emancipation, justice, and democracy. For both, freedom meets its death in the rise of the social. Social democracy and state communism are thus but points on a spectrum of what Tocqueville termed the “regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude” resulting from an administrative statism tending the needs and sculpting the aims of a people. Though Hayek affirms ontological individualism and liberal privatism and Arendt dreams of citizens “acting in concert” to make a world in common, they nonetheless share a conviction that the social question has overtaken modern political life and society has overtaken the individual. Freedom rests in demonizing and ultimately vanquishing the social. Society must be dismantled.

wendy davis, in the ruins of neoliberalism

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niconiconwo · 4 years

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Reaganist/libertarian/anarchist tricks are basically how most people think we should have a state and it’s job is protecting and ensuring the welfare of the people etc, then absolutely crippling it to the point of absurdity and saying “well maybe statism just doesn’t work”.

Ya, when you cunts are around to sabotage it at every possible opportunity, no it don’t work so good.

#stateposting #polposting

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 4 years

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Anarchy Vs. Communalism: Bookchin, 'Lifestylism', Ideology & Greenwashing

Blasted Lifestylists!

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, long identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed 'lifestylist' anarchists and socialists, denouncing 'lifestylists' as being beneath him.

Even though he eventually abandoned anarchism in favor of his communalist ideology, this elitist divide he created between 'lifestylism' and socialism continues to reverberate today, with some social-anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchists into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.

He lobbed the accusation of 'lifestylism' against anarchists who live a life that, to them, embodies the spirit of anarchy but, in his view, do not work hard enough to achieve revolutionary social organization and the overthrow of capitalism. He also used it as an insult towards anarchists he saw as promoting what he termed "anti-rationalism".

In reality, Bookchin was creating a false dichotomy; something he did often in his writings so he could then promote his patented solutions to problems that were often non-existent... Individualist anarchists are perfectly capable of both living anarchically in the current moment, as well as organizing for a future beyond capitalism.

A lot of the most successful anarchist movements in the world today stem from individualist tendencies. These movements are then aided by the social-anarchist concept of 'prefiguration' to create movements within the current system that replicate the conditions that would exist in an anarchist society. This allows the people exposed to these movements to see that anarchy works, and become comfortable with the idea of a post-capitalist world. Food Not Bombs is a great example of this.

Bookchin on anarchism:

[Anarchism] represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.

Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.

He penned this attack against anarchy late in his life while he was working to build communalism into his final legacy, perhaps hoping he would go down in history with Marx as the father of a powerful socialist ideology that could outlive him and impact the world for centuries. He even warned that if his communalist ideology was not adopted by the world at large, it would result in the destruction of everything.

Equating anarchism with liberalism, when he spent years of his life identifying as an anarchist is a rather shameless attempt at rewriting history in order to sell his new vanity project. It's a true shame that he ended his long history in radical politics on such a sour and self-defeating note.

Communalism: Murray's Prescribed Cure for Lifestylism

Bookchin's politics evolved greatly throughout his life, starting with Stalinism and then Trotskyism in his youth, before he found anarcho-communism. In the 1970s, disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of the Leninism that dominated the worldwide socialist scene, he stated that he felt closer to free-market libertarians; who unlike the totalitarian Marxist-Leninists, will readily defend the rights of the individual. Later, he developed a series of interrelated ideologies; anarchist social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism and libertarian municipalism. He increasingly spoke out against the innate individualism of the anarchist movement, and finally broke with anarchism completely to form communalism. He was a professor and taught students his political theories.

This is a description of communalism in his own words (while also managing to disparage both anarchism and Marxism in the same breath, in true Bookchin fashion):

The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state.

Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”

Communalism brings production and certain property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be best distributed to meet the needs of the confederation.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since the political process is strictly localized), municipal assemblies could still be described as a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, attempting to curtail and decentralize the power structures we are governed by, but it's not anarchy.

Localized power structures are still very corruptible. They still create hierarchy. They can still grow out of control. Similarly to ancient Greece's democracy; communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority). This limitation should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy, as voter-hierarchies can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that encourages the majority to force their will on a minority (thus creating a clear hierarchy) can't honestly be described as anarchist in nature. Bookchin reinforces this further:

The anarcho-communist notion of a very loose ‘federation of autonomous communes’ is replaced with a confederation from which its components, functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.

So, according to Bookchin, a community which joins a confederation “may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.” This is probably the worst aspect of his majority-rule fetishization, as it locks entire communities into his system forever, whether those who didn't want the system like it or not. Any organization that forbids you from withdrawing from it is clearly at odds with libertarian ideals and the right to freedom of association, so it's really dishonest of him to talk about 'libertarian' municipalism when it's anything but:

[Libertarian municipalism's goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.

Put into practice, I believe communalism can initially be a successful departure from the unwieldy nation-state monolith that plagues the world today and a reversion to the city-states that were once prevalent in ancient Greece at the dawn of civilization. Bookchin writes fondly of classical Athenian democracy, which he uses to glorify his romantic view of Western civilization.

But does simply returning to an earlier state of civilization go far enough? Will an effective micro-state not morph back into a super-state as it grows and faces both internal and external pressures? Decentralization is admirable, but is it enough to successfully safeguard us from statism? And are Athenian democracy and Western civilization even things we want to reproduce, when both allow for the brutal oppression of minorities, were both built on slavery, and institutionalized the denial of human rights to anyone that wasn't a member of the privileged class?

Bookchin's ideas for 'libertarian' majority-rule democracy are deeply flawed and really can't be described as being anything other than authoritarian:

The minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice... Municipal minorities [must] defer to the majority wishes of participating communities.

Any anarchist reading this should immediately be alarmed at the unjust hierarchical implications it presents. White people putting their priorities ahead of black people, men forcing their will on women, Christians excluding Muslims, polluters shutting down environmentalists, heterosexuals subjugating homosexuals... Whichever voting body has the highest numbers (or best propaganda) can effectively rule over the minority. It's almost as if Bookchin came full circle, returning to the Stalinism of his youth after his flirtation with individualism and anarchy.

While direct democracy is one of several decision-making mechanisms anarchists may utilize, communalism doesn't simply allow for direct democracy; it requires it. Enshrines it in law. In making his case for direct democracy, Bookchin asserts that the only other option anarchists have at our disposal is consensus democracy. He then proceeds to brutally attack the consensus decision-making method, associating it with anarcho-primitivism (which he vocally loathes, even equating it to Nazism) and deems it 'authoritarian'. This allows him to offer an exact prescription to the 'problem' of multi-layered anarchist decision making in the form of his definitive, structured ideology and its rules.

Organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in the 1990s is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was attempted lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn't fit.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being 'vague' and lacking in exact instruction. I'd argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless; reinventing itself with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever changing, multi-cultural world. Especially while we're experiencing unprecedented worldwide social and ecological collapses. The greatest strength of anarchy is its flexibility. Anarchists have long laughed in the face of those who would have us live by their rigid rules.

A Green Anarchist Perspective

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin's ideas because of his concept of 'post-scarcity'; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we're in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don't cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there's no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a 'post-scarcity' economy is intrinsically flawed.

Bookchin and other socialists imagine a society where regular people, rather than states, have the power to determine policy. And they imagine this society will somehow be spared the same destructive pitfalls of capitalist society. But there's no reason to assume that.

We have centuries of history showing us that people will not altruistically opt for policies that will put the ecosystem or minority groups (especially indigenous and immigrant groups) ahead of their immediate personal interests.

Just as people now vote for politicians that loudly promote disastrous environmental and social policies in order to safeguard their own privileges in society, history shows us they would continue to make damaging decisions if the system moved from representative democracy to direct democracy. To imagine that everyone in a society is capable of acting unselfishly and putting other people and other lifeforms ahead of their own families is foolhardy. They will use their voting power to protect their own immediate interests at the expense of everything else. That's how power works. It corrupts everything in its path absolutely, whether its wielded by a politician or a private citizen is irrelevant.

Bookchin saw technology as a mode of revolution, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical. A position Bookchin scoffs at.

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially 'rule by machine'. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual's self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software. The programmers effectively govern the governor.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:

Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.

Advanced technologies can forever alter the way we live our lives, detach us from our ecosystems and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It's easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use the technology it produces to escape from the reality of our situation... At least until the ecosystems become so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives and we're forced to look up from our digital sanctuaries to gasp for air.

Bookchin's emphasis on the modern urban city in his theories will give pause to anyone who has studied the history of civilization and its disastrous effect on every ecosystem it comes into contact with. City life has always alienated us from the land and what it produces for us, creating the depressing situation where most urban dwellers raised in vast concrete deserts have little respect for the natural world or want of preserving it. When the repercussions of our actions towards the ecosystem are completely hidden from us, it's unlikely we'll change our behavior and act to preserve whatever ecological diversity the planet has left on the fringes of the grim industrial wastelands we call civilization.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It's easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world's ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote:

The development of giant factory complexes and the use of single or dual-energy sources are responsible for atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrial units and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use of clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it be possible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change are now at hand.

Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.

While it is true that 'green' fuels can be less destructive than 'dirty' fuels, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.

The machines Bookchin speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap (or slave) labor.

Solar panels and wind turbines depend on dirty mining to acquire the minerals needed for their construction, and massive energy use (usually coal) during manufacturing. Mining the quartz that solar panels are made from causes the lung disease silicosis in the impoverished miners. Then, once the quartz is transported to the factories, the manufacturing process creates vats of toxic waste (silicon tetrachloride) that is disposed of in random fields near the factories in China, contaminating the soil and water, and making entire rural populations sick.

From "China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse" by Richard Smith, Real-World Economics Review no. 71:

When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing difficulties. Ren Bingyan, a professor of material sciences at Hebei Industrial University, contacted by the Post, told the paper that “the land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in its place… It is… Poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.” When the dumping began, crops wilted from the white dust, which sometimes rose in clouds several feet off the ground and spread over the fields as the liquid dried. Village farmers began to faint and became ill. And at night, villagers said “the factory’s chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath.”

Solar panel, wind turbine and battery production fuels colonialism, slavery, war, hunger, fossil fuel burning and ecocide. Calling these energies "green" is really a bold-faced lie and just the latest example of industrialism giving itself a skip-deep makeover that will quickly fall apart when the evidence piles up too high for the media to ignore. By promoting these destructive industries, Bookchin aids their shameless greenwashing.

Bookchin:

The absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology— a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people (which they would need to be if we care at all about preventing power-hierarchies and inequality from forming), or that all people would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood aimed at selling books and "Institute for Social Ecology" certificates at worst.

Bookchin's insistence that industry is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under (decentralized) socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he romanticizes remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place. They also require resources that simply cannot be sourced from a single locale. This fact alone greatly diminishes his theory.

Bookchin:

The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry "Black is beautiful" or "Make love, not war" marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.

Bookchin's plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21st century, as the Earth's ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren't something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry.

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more practical ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in western Kurdistan, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision.

His attacks on individualist anarchists (especially of the anti-civ flavor), have provided decades of fuel for collectivist anarchist ideologues to villainize and purge non-collectivists from our spaces. A lot of these people soon follow in Bookchin's footsteps and abandon anarchy altogether in favor of various structured ideologies including Marxism-Leninism, transhumanism and communalism.

#ziq #anti civ #communalism #green anarchism #industrial civilization #libertarian municipalism #lifestylism #lifestyle anarchism #murray bookchin #social ecology

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