A year? Are you shitting me?

Yes in-fucking-deed. Well I sort of slept through the anniversary of this blog but it's Independence Day in the United States today (4 July) and the token remarks have begun to pop up a little across the blogoverse. And I was thinking about what I said last year today. I'm not going to go read it, but I think it was something about how the founding of the United States didn't solve a lot of problems and we shouldn't celebrate it like that even if it had some positive points..
When I was listening to all those Robert LeFevre recordings[
Oh I see there are actually several of these (audio - mp3 warning):
The Declaration of Independence
The Beginning of American Independence
The American Revolution
]I think he sort of convinced me that that war was, in fact, revolutionary in some sense of the word that is worth celebrating but that was a while ago.
Well, one year later, I'm even further gone.

I don't think I'm ready to tackle the topic here right now but this is closely tied up with the idea of American Exceptionalism (read please, this isn't just about the idea that the United States should be excepted from international law and stuff) and the larger concept of Culture which was mentioned in that last post thing..

As far as I can tell, I mean, based on my history education, the ruling class in those areas that were colonies of Great Britain didn't change with that war.


And, see, I hate to call it a revolution because I don't think it was very revolutionary.



So what is this a celebration of? That ruling class's independence from Great Britain? The triumph of liberalism?
My criticism of liberalism will come at some later time, that is I don't feel like doing it now, but, suffice to say, I don't think it's worth celebrating.


zzzzzz back to hiatus

The Mountain Goats @ The Natural History Museum

picture by youngthousands on Flickr
Best I've seen them. Definitely. Amazing. Played lots of stuff they don't usually play live
Jenny
Game Shows Touch Our Lives
Orange Ball of Hate
First Few Desperate Hours
Alpha Omega
Alphonse Mambo
River Song

Ambivalent Seascape Y [Extra Glenns song]

Transjordanian Blues
So Desperate
Young Caesar 2000
San Bernadino
Woke Up New
Wizard Buys A Hat
Going to Cleveland
Nine Black Poppies
—
Going to Georgia
No Children

Still sort of recovering... coming down. Great show.

JuneJuneJuneJuneJune

I was reading the newspaper this morning and thinking about history and such and about assassination and such
(just as a concept... as a strategy I don't see it as being particularly effective for our ends... qua anarchists)
And I was thinking about how much Barack Obama is an embodiment of the idea that if we just have the right person in charge things will work out fine
then we can have real change
I guess something like

“The right man in charge can change the whole world”

And then I came back to this quote which I attributed to some Communist leader (Mao or Lenin or Che Guevara, etc.)

“One man can change the whole world with a bullet in the right place”

[Now that I try to figure out who actually said this, it may have originated in this film I saw a few months ago: if... starring Malcolm McDowell. On the whole not a great film.. I mean Malcolm is Malcolm and I enjoyed it as far as he was concerned but it didn't really stand on its own very well, I didn't think..]


The idea that both these quotes have in common is that what's wrong with things right now is that the person in charge is just fucking things up.
Now, granted the second quote is mostly negative, i.e., it doesn't say that the person that that bullet kills should be replaced by anybody, but I don't think that anyone who has ever said that meant that the problem with the world today is the people in charge
I think that the problem is much larger... it concerns the concept of systems and such... the way society works..
The problems with the world today are not dependent upon the person in charge.
Changing who is in charge will not change the system.

Hm this needs more thought... how do systems change?
that sort of thing

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More truth

Writes Aster:

The reason this is a disaster is not because the Libertarian Party was ever the perfect embodiment of libertarian ideas, but because the treason of the ‘party of Principle’ is symbolic of everything wrong with libertarianism, which itself has a great deal to do with everything which has become wrong with America.

I.

Look from Bob Barr to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell- the spokescreatures for the libertarian movement are everywhere conservative monstrosities. This is not a question of a Party/non-party split, extreme/moderate split, or minarchist/anarchist split. Some of the libertarians most alienated from the LP are among the worst (and some of the individualists remaining within the movement are Party members, minarchists, and political moderates),

The problem is with libertarianism, the idea and the concept- with an idea of liberty with has come to coalesce not around individualism and the completion of the Enlightenment project but around an anti-contextual hatred of the modern nation-state which simply begs for cooptation by reaction and obscurantism. Those calling themselves libertarians today do not foremost cry out for the human spirit to be able to think for itself and create its own life; they have united instead on a negative, *against* one recent and narrow form of tyranny and allied themselves with those who seek a return of earlier and more awful forms. Libertarianism as an ideology no longer works on balance as a force for liberation of the individual mind and spirit in today’s world- partially, it never did. This should have been expected given that ‘libertarianism’ as *anti-statism* rather that a positive affirmation of the cultural institutions of individualism is not much more of a coherent philosophy than ‘anti-Communism’ or anti-fascism, and similarly utterly vulnerable to use by vicious people for horrific purposes.

Ditching the Party is not enough. What has happened to the Party is the symptom. The Party did not betray libertarianism; the Party and libertarianism have both betrayed the Enlightenment, and both were set up without any structural safeguards which could prevent such a betrayal. The word ‘libertarianism’ does not mean freedom for living, breathing individuals if the mind and spirit of individual liberty becomes absent, and there was never anything in libertarianism to ensure that it was present.

II.

The trouble is that libertarianism was always the Archamerican Philosophy, and the corruption of libertarianism has a great deal to do with the changes which have come to America in the last thirty years. From 1776 to the counterculture, America once really did, despite its faults, at least to some relative degree embody the ideals of Enlightenment and individualism of which libertarianism was supposed to be an expression. But America is being thoroughly taken over by the other heritage which distinquished in from the Old Country- its violence, miltarism, bigotry, provincial ignorance, anti-intellectualism. and religious fanaticism. In an almost perfect morality play, America’s original sin of slavery has indeed at last destroyed it, for as Kevin Phillips’s _American Theocracy_ well observes, it is the Southern cultural patterns orginally produced by a slave society (and the worst and oldest of Cavalier British classism, before that) which have now spread to a working plurality if not simple majority of America. When the ideals of modernity started unvoidably hitting everyday culture in the 60s and 70s, a good part of America decided the deal wasn’t worth it, and what Leanprd Peikoff called the ‘nation of the Enlightenment’ is the headquarters of the most dangerous court of church and altar and (badly) storied pomp in the West. In 1929, *any* party which considered itself the embodiment of the German spirit would be in deep trouble, even if the German spirit it originally held in mind was that of Lessing, Schiller, and Beethoven.

Libertarianism has always been both explicitly and implicitly tied to a specifically American social system, culture, and mentality. If America fails, libertarianism will either have to recreate itself according to the grammar and rhythms of different traditions or perish ignomiously, tied in what remains of educated world opinion to a derided and discredited system which by all evidence is going to crash brutally with immense harm to all sorts of innocent (and less-than-innocent) bystanders. In New Zealand, the Libertarianz and ACT parties are far less devoted to liberty than to Americanism and are for all practical purposes aligned with more mainstream forces which, if successful, will see what is happening to America (and the UK and elsewhere) also come here. As for those mainstream forces, the same Kiwis who have expressed to be they would like New Zealand to imitate America simulatenously believe in ‘modernising’ in the manner of Singapore and China- for that is what America means to the world; wealth and efficiency by any means necessary (torture, for instance. Meanwhile those who practise liberty (along with many who don’t) rightly see America as the most *relevant* symbol of threatening authoritarism.

Libertarianism would have to de-Americanise itself to survive. but I doubt it can; libertarian theory is so caught up in unconscious American parochialism that it has little appeal outside the United States for both fairly good and pretty lousy reasons (just as ‘anti-Americanism’ has always been both a rational if preoccupied judgement *and* a resentful bigotry of ignorant and cynical premodernists). Even if libertarianism did fully de-Americanise, the perception that libertarianism=capitalism=America is going to make life difficult for libertarians in much the way as the existence of the Soviet Union once made life very difficult for anti-authoritarians who still held to pre-Soviet notions of communism.

Personally, I think it is more likely that many wonderful things- things like individualism, the market economy. high standards of living, the counterculture, modernity itself- will, as with 1929, be unjustly blamed for a failure which resulted precisely from their betrayal. I think the eclipse of America will do immense and very possibly fatal damage to libertarianism and to far, far more than libertarianism. The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it. Every illiberal force in the entire world will work to make that happen- to convince the world that Imperial America rose and fell *because* of the Statue of Liberty- and sociobiology and 10,000 years of patriarchal tyranny will make it very easy for a world full of ignorant and brutalised people to believe them.

* * *

I put my money with the European Union, statist and badly flawed as it is. If the individualist way of life has any future it is there. India, I don’t know much of. But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink. Get me six drinks and a glass of blue acid to wash it down with. I’ll be considerate, but probably not kind, and wash the glass.

Wonderful job we’ve done with this world of ours. If there are gods, they probably long ago disowned the human race in disgust.

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Dead?

So Bob Barr is the Libertarian Party's nominee for president. I don't know what to think about that.. it's just the latest step in a long lasting trend that began when the party was founded. Radicalism does not blesh well with electoral politics. Obviously not. Inevitable.
I got a kick out of Radley Balko's reaction:

It’s the first time the LP has nominated a serious candidate in a long time. I’ve become rather fond of Barr over his 5-year conversion to libertarianism. Second place went to nutjob Mary Ruwart, who would have continued the party’s long history of kook-ism.

Barr has the potential to win more votes than any LP nominee in history. If he helps the GOP learn that it’s time to boot the neocons and pay more attention to its limited government wing, all the better.

This is a good thing.

Recall Brad Spangler's post from a few weeks ago

The point is not merely that the libertarian movement is currently going down a wrong path, but that it has been going down the wrong path since the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. It’s not just that YOU, Mr. & Mrs. Partyarch (you anarcho-wretches) are somehow doing something wrong. As the Liberty poll results show, the libertarian movement as it existed 20 years ago was doing something wrong. Rather than libertarians gradually winning over mainstream society to our way of seeing things, mainstream society is gradually winning over libertarians to their way of seeing things.

Writes Brad, once again the voice of reason, in comments on Roderick Long's blog:

You all ought to buck up and quit whining. You made yourselves vulnerable to this disappointment by refusing to listen to those who tried to tell you electoral politics was the wrong approach. So now you want to whine and moan because you lost a game you insisted on playing? Even though you should have known it was expensive entertainment, indeed? You’re a bunch of fools.
No, Spangler didn’t get his wish. In order for me to convince you of the error of your electoral ways, you would have first had to get your way (a Ruwart nomination) and then watched it fail. Now you insufferable idiots are talking about the Boston Tea Party, the Constitution Party and assorted other ballot-related abominations.

Goodbye's too good a word, babe

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Adam Green

Last night at the Troubadour
Amazing shit

More pictures (not mine)

Some comments on Single Payer Health Care worth noting

These comments on Shagya Blog came on my radar last night and then today Werner has a post up with some interesting points that just give me more to think about, more to be confused by
Well let's see if I can sort it out


My position on this sort of thing thus far has basically been “I don't fucking know, the way things work right now is just a fucking mess, any sort of solution proposed based on current conditions is going to have serious problems, won't be radical because it's just based on existing conditions”
I dunno, well the 2 extremes are individuals should provide for their own health care OR society should provide health care.
I mean, right now that means The Government
but I hearken back to an idea remember from last summer, both in Nock's Our Enemy The State and Kropotkin's Mutual Aid... well Mutual Aid (what Nock called Social Power). And how that was replaced by State Power..
I don't know, I never finished Our Enemy The State and I don't remember every little detail from Mutual Aid but that idea stuck with me. I may have misinterpreted though. I should try reading both of those again.

Anyway, supposing I'm not horribly misinterpreting what the premise of both their arguments was... I'll run with this concept..

Social Power replaced with State Power
No, in fact, I recall Nock talking about it being converted into State Power..
Obviously as anarchists we ought to work to convert that State Power back into Social Power...
But what of existing State Power? Can it be used for good? Surely it can... but ought anarchists seek to use it for such purposes?

I see 3 options
1) Actively oppose a Single Payer system
2) Actively support a Single Payer system
3) Abstain from such a discussion

I've taken that third option because to me, principled anti-statism (regardless on the economic organisation of proposed society) means not saying “The Government should do this” or “The Government shouldn't do this”
I don't know that position just makes things less complicated
Werner's post today makes that position less attractive when you look at other factors.. I mean, I guess I haven't covered my changing views on Liberty (it's not just the absence of coercion) but health care is important.

Okay, I think that if you're going to take option 1, you really need to be talking just as much, if not more, about why the current Health Care Crisis exists and what should be done to fix it. You've put your foot in the arena and you can't just say “No, I don't think that more government control is a good thing”. Surely, in the current system, corporate control is no better.

Well, part of all this rests on the question of whether health care should be provided through a market or provided by society free of charge.

The other part of the question is “how can you be an anarchist and advocate the growth of government”
I suspect that any question about the size of government is largely, if not solely, a question for Libertarians, radical or not. The question of the size of government traditionally seems to be irrelevant to the anarchist concerned with the many heads of Authority and not just Government.

The point in this whole argument that I think is a valid one: how would you like your coercion?
And as Werner points out, the traditional anarchist critique of Government is more sophisticated that just a critique of coercion in the form of taxation.

Writes Werner:

The reason why social anarchists assert the need for positive freedoms is that in the real world we can't wait around until the perfect stateless – and therefore classless - society comes into being. In the real world people have needs and these must be met, if they cannot be not through mutual aid due through state-enforced economic inequality, then through government. To destroy social welfare – as well as protective legislation like the 8 hour day, or vacation time – and leave the rest of the state – and therefore class society with all its vast inequalities intact is to condemn the vast majority of the people to Third World misery. It needs to be pointed out as well, that [mutualist] Kevin Carson sees the need for a selective or top-down dismantling of the state with those aspects which benefit the capitalists and state bureaucracy going down first. The social welfare measures last, being converted into mutual aid systems or stakeholder coops. Thus, there is no real difference between communist or syndicalist anarchists and mutualists on this issue. The real bone of contention lies between capitalist libertarians and traditional anarchists. Social welfare – those aspects that actually help the people in some manner are a state-perverted form of the social aspect that lies at the root of our humanness. It is thus something good that has been twisted or has a contradictory aspect. Leaving people to die in the street because they have been denied by state-enforced inequality the resources to help themselves, is simply evil through and through. It also needs to be pointed out that even in an anarchist society a significant minority of the population will have to be subsidized or supported in some manner think of the aged, sick, those with mental health problems etc. In a free society – and therefore one without the present vast inequality of wealth, and the resulting culture of narcissism and sociopathology – this could be done by mutual aid. In the meantime, and I have been discussing this for years, we can work to democratize, mutualize (de-state) existing social welfare measures. For example, Unemployment insurance should be run not by the state but be set up as a cooperative along the lines of a credit union. All workers become members of this coop and elect a board of directors for their city or region. Hospitals should be taken back by the community and run by elected boards representing the user population and the work force etc.

I really should (re-)read both of those books..

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Do mutualists want to reform capitalism?

From An Anarchist FAQ, Section J.3.2, What are “synthesis” federations?

Of course, there are problems involved in most forms of organisation, and the "synthesis" federation is no exception. While diversity can strengthen an organisation by provoking debate, a diverse grouping can often make it difficult to get things done. Platformist and other critics of the "synthesis" federation argue that it can be turned into a talking shop and any common programme difficult to agree, never mind apply. For example, how can mutualists and communists agree on the ends, never mind the means, their organisation supports? One believes in co-operation within a (modified) market system and reforming capitalism and statism away, while the other believes in the abolition of commodity production and money and revolution as the means of so doing. Ultimately, all they could do would be to agree to disagree and thus any joint programmes and activity would be somewhat limited.

What is reform? Improvement, right? But there's definitely a connotation of gradualism. The theory of mutualism places a great deal of emphasis on “building a new world in the shell of the old” but this idea isn't unique to mutualism. I mean, mutualism doesn't reject revolution does it? I don't mean violence, I mean revolution in a general sense. There was a previous section about Social Revolution and that seemed pretty consistent with the ideas of mutualism to me. And there was a section about how anarchists reject the idea that capitalism can be reformed. So what does that sentence mean? Is this a contradiction within the FAQ?
Am I forgetting something about the nature of mutualism? Or am I interpreting that part incorrectly?
Obviously “reform” here does not mean reform by political means.
According to the FAQ, anarchists are not against reform, (J.1.2), but they are against reformism (J.1.3)

When you get down to the nitty-gritty issue of strategies for change it starts getting kind of weird when this almighty FAQ dictates what anarchists believe on some subject, but it definitely has good points. Even if some of these things are a bit confusing. But these later sections are logical extensions of ideas expressed in previous ones, and when the ideas are controversial (such as the debate over organisation) the authors make that clear.
And the introduction of the whole FAQ states that the authors don't claim to speak for all anarchists, but that doesn't really blesh with a lot of the FAQ.

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Paultown sounds better

Paulchiks.. Paulsheviks...

Hm? Oh, just thinking of more names for supporters of Ron Paul


Anyways, look! It's Paulville!

The goal of Paulville.org it to establish gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty.

This is one of those things that has bugged me a lot about Libertarianism lately. Something that is so unappealing to me about it. The idea of “dropping out” is just the antithesis of genuine liberty. Do you not want liberty for everyone? Not that you care about anything Bakunin ever said... he consorted with Marx, after all
[hm can't seem to find the source for this quote but Eugene attributes it to Bakunin and that's good enough for me, I mean if Bakunin didn't really say it, it doesn't matter]
No man can emancipate himself, except by emancipating with him all the men around him. My liberty is the liberty of everyone, for I am not truly free, free not only in thought but in deed, except when my liberty and my rights find their confirmation, their sanction, in the liberty and the rights of all men, my equals.

“dropping out” is a bit like “Socialism In One Country”

Okay but this is the really funny part:

The process is forming a co-op of people buying shares in the community and these people would be granted land use at a minimum of 1 acre per share, for as long as they homesteaded the land. The community would be privately held by the co-op to establish private property for the general community thus preserving the community is 100% freedom and liberty lovers.

A co-op? What? Co-op implies democracy. I thought Libertarians weren't big on the whole democracy thing. Additionally, as is admitted, the land is only granted to the members of the co-op, it isn't actually owned by the individuals, it's just granted by the community. This is like those geoist communities except you to keep your economic rent. I think that's what goes on here..

The community votes on all community efforts, such as utilities etc. However no one is forced to consume these utilities and or pay for them, AKA people can be off grid on their share of land. This is in line with the ideals that you're free to live your life the way you want and not be forced to do or pay for other people's life styles you may not agree with.

No one is forced to consume these utilities and or pay for them

No, I have better things to do than to make fun of these people..

No what was my interest here:

1. Genuine liberty of the individual is dependent on the liberty of others

2. Collective decision making is important... or something I don't know where I was going with that

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Update: Ron Paul does not support Paulville, says his supporters should “spread out and be as pervasive as possible”
Update again: aaaaand paulville.org is dead. Ashamed of Glorious Leader's reaction? Hrm...

Is exchange natural?

First of all, X is natural, therefore X is good is fallacious. So it's inadmissible as evidence as far as I'm concerned. I mean if you want to convince me of the value of something you have to do more than just show me that it's natural.
If you look back into the archives I previously talked used the term market where I meant interaction. This was a mistake. Markets are about exchange. There are lots of types of markets but that's the only necessary quality, I think. However, interaction does not necessitate exchange.
The thing that I'm thinking about right now, and doesn't blesh with the market anarchist argument is that this ignores the potentials of a gift economy.
Gifting does not involve any exchange. So how does that fit into The Market?

Anyways how would we decide whether or not something is natural?
Maybe because it has always existed in lots of different environments?
Is slavery natural?
Is war natural?
Is religion natural?
Is government (I use this term with some reservation) natural?

I am using that same fallacy in reverse, by which because X is undesirable, X cannot be natural, but I guess my point is that this is all pointless. I don't see how you can really show that something is Natural.
Well the only thing that I can think of is language.
But is that natural or socially constructed?

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is already on my reading list.

Previously:
Abandoned attempt to figure out exchange and markets and stuff
Market anarchism and communism

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Clarification: I'm not saying whether or not exchange is natural or not, just that it can't really be proven based on observations of human behaviour..