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Notes -
Free market capitalism and identity
Today I spent some time reading about Georgia Meloni and watching some of her speeches, such as this one. She’s charismatic, but being a rootless global laissez-faire capitalist I am of course not thrilled; anyway, I’d like to offer my perspective on some of the issues raised in her speeches.
It is a natural state of affairs that the governments, by leveraging their capacity for violence, have an enormous power over their citizens and by extension on their businesses; all private organizations are by default subservient to the State.
"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" — Benito Mussolini
Diverting from such an arrangement is not trivial. Indeed, how do you stop the people who have, pretty much by definition, overwhelming firepower from using it to take your stuff? One way are the democratic institutions — things like the separation of powers, checks and balances, key positions being elected and therefore held at least somewhat accountable, and so on. All of that works to an extent, but these things are fragile and often not really sufficient.
The other pillar of limiting the power of the govts to control and loot private enterprise, is the competition between different countries. The states themselves can be seen as providers of a certain service — you pay the taxes, and in return get useful things like personal asset protection, arbitrage, infrastructure and so on. As such they are also subject to the market forces. If there are multiple independent offers, and you are free to choose any of them, then in fact you are likely to find a fair deal.
Therefore, in order for the free world to exist it must be possible to change your country at will. It’s easy to see that nationalism runs contrary to this goal. If you only ever can be accepted in one country, if you can only be permitted to run important businesses or organisations in the country of your birth; and doomed to be an irrelevant outsider in all others — well, then your government has you by the balls — you have no real negotiating position with the state.
This reasoning can be extrapolated to other kinds of identity Meloni mentions, to an extent, although of course the most important one of them by far is the national identity. But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities. It is only necessary for them to be made interchangeable.
If anything capitalism served to amplify and increase the adoption of certain cultural elements, think the Italian cuisine or the Japanese animation. I know what you’re going to say — that it’s not real, it’s superficial, it’s commoditized and the real national identity is something else entirely. Well, it is. The real national idea, the one you’re left with when the music stops, is always to force you to surrender everything you have to the state and to go die in the trenches for no good reason, ostensibly as a sacrifice to your country. Perhaps it’s for the best if we abandon that.
It is absolutely possible to change your country at will. There are very few that don't have any naturalization process and even they usually have some form of permanent residence permit.
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You've talked about exit rights, but what about entrance rights? That is, what happens if no nation wants a person? There are international agreements about not rendering people stateless, but I wonder how you would intend to handle that. Do you envision a global government that will grant stateless individuals some minimum rights or freedoms?
No man is free until he can unilaterally homestead his own O'Neil cylinder in the Oort cloud.
Home, home on Lagrange...
Where the space debris always collects
We posess, so it seems
Two of man's greatest dreams
Solar power, and zero-G sex....
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Rightfully so the destruction of identities is a Marxist project.
To quote https://europeanconservative.com/reviews/the-great-awakening-vs-the-great-reset/
Oh god, this entire comment chain is me driving to the darkest depths of despair.
If corporate capitalists, and academic Marxists managed to do a Le Epic Handshake to agree to rid our society of everything that makes us human, can we deplorable capitalists, Marxists, and everything between, agree to drive a stake through their heart, burn them to ash, and scatter them to the four winds, and only argue about whether they are more Marxist or more capitalist after we finish the job?
Yes and if you read "INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE" by the UNABOMBER you'll move to a cabin in the woods sending off bombs to Meta, Alphabet and Twitter.
But on a more serious note, no there is no Le Epic Handshake, but we have bad ideas that deny reality permeating our societal structures and we need to tell the truth more to combat them.
The truth is impotent against the power of coordinated and enforced lies.
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Yes.... yeeeees...
I disagree. We have a ton of bad ideas, right now, and historically.
It takes a Le Epic Handshake for the kind of enforcement of this particular set of bad ideas, that we see today.
I'm trying to stay true to my username and avoid the conspiracy theory and call it incompetence. The people perpetuating the ideas don't know the origin and the future of the ideas. So if there is an agreement one of the agreeing parties don't know what they agreed to.
Been there, done that. They don't even give t-shirts.
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¿Por que no los dos?
Marx’s opinion on identity doesn’t exactly preclude capitalism from expressing the same. They are competing theories on the intersection of morality and resource allocation; identity only comes into it as a tool if at all.
The way eradication of identity has manifested itself in capitalism is through ESG. It inserts the neomarxist ideas in the profit maximization function. So true they don’t exclude each other, but the eradication of identity does not emerge from capitalist principles.
This is ... really confused, capitalism and capitalists has long had goals other than profit maximization, you can see that in the extensive philanthropy many do (whether explicitly left-wing or initially right-wing). the 'profit maximization function' has had ... components ... you'd call left wing long before 'ESG'. I mean, the civil rights act was decades before ESG, and that's also supposed to be neo-marxism, right?
Also, what on earth does ESG have to do with ... whatever an 'identity' is?
Also, how is 'marxism / leftism erases identity' meaningful at all? I could just as well say 'neo-marxism creates identities - gay, lesbian, black, oppressed, minority, disabled, feminist'. This is actually a common claim, remember "identity politics"?
You could, and in the most technical sense it does, but those identities are not legit. Real OG sex/national identities, ethnic deeply cultural of the people identities are true identities. These new manufactured identities are only identities in the same sense a Stalker is a person.
ok. imagine i said the opposite. identity is the most important thing ever, but the real identities are black/gay/trans/woman and the fake ones are french/white/western. how would you argue against this?
Essentially, the term 'identity' has nothing to do with your actual objections. Being gay is an identity in the sense that it's ... something people do, some characteristics, etc. Similarly, being white also is. Each actually refers to many different things. What makes gay/trans bad and french/western good? That's the actual issue here.
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I answered netstack and I might as well give you slightly different text. ESG is just a Trojan Horse, it is the vehicle that delivers good and bad ideas but it doesn't care about the ideas. So if a society is heading in a certain direction with laws or even opinions it tries to anticipate that in to making the highest possible profit.
So the comment earlier is that eradication of gender identity end goal Marxism as observed by Leo Strauss in 1960s. And if you look at the "gender studies" today with the likes of Judit Butler and others you find heavy influences by postmodern thinkers who most of them are Marxists thinkers. The specific example is that Butler was influenced by Althusser(a french marxist philosopher), but proving that to someone else would require me to read way more postmodern shit that I have the time or energy for. So I'm just going to assume that Leo Strauss did a good job of thinking the thought to its logical end and I'm taking the trail of crumbs to Butler/Althussers as circumstantial evidence that it was correct. Then you don't have to take my word for it. You can go and read it yourself and I'm ready to be disproved if you have the time and energy for it.
That is a question that is pondered on New Discources podcast, James Lindsay did a commentary reading of 'An Essay on Liberation' by Marcuse that touched on the end game of it. I don't think I can do fairness to the argument in this comment.
I think you misunderstood my claim - if ESG is a trojan horse, it is trojan horse number twelve million, and the trojans are just the accepted and beloved leaders and owners of your city. The trojan horse is just the horse the king's messenger rides down to your city every three months to hand out edicts, it's not a secret. If the marxists have already - successfully - ""subverted"" you several hundred times (given lindsay's arguments, critical race theory is literally law! since 1964!) - you're not "fighting subversion", you've already lost, and need to stop getting mad at random, small demonstrations of that loss and ineffectively voting and posting about it and actually understand the loss
I have no idea what this means, precise language really is useful. If you mean 'eradication of gender identity is the end goal of marxism' ... I'd expect it to be explicitly a stateless, classless society for the many - the poor and tired and beaten down given life anew, wants satisfied, labor used for the laborers, not the exploiters. While communists were generally 'progressive' on gender issues, to call that 'the end goal' of marxism is just wrong.
I'm not mad. I post and discuss and throw in slightly provocative statements to increase my understanding of issues at hand. The thing that I really want to understand is that how the ideas from the current cultural center of the western world(US) is influencing and distorting the discussions in Sweden where I live. The Motte is the place to test ideas. Maybe I have a bad idea but I'm allowed to test it?
How do you eradicate class to create classless society? What is class? How do we denote class? If you ever answer like the poststructuralist marxist jammed through that people denote their class through their identity then you eradicate class by allowing anyone becoming what identity they want to become any class they want, and class loses its meaning because identity lacks meaning if you can change it. It is the most succinct way I can put forward the argument.
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Is ESG (neo)Marxist? I think that relies on a really wide definition, and that aping social movements for profit is a pretty generic capitalist method.
ESG is the vehicle which propagates ideas good or bad by having the externalities of those ideas go in decision making for corporations. One of those bad ideas is the eradication of gender identity. Much of the basis of ideas of eradication of gender is actual academic scholarship by the likes of Judit Butler influenced by postmodernist thinkers like Althusser who are all out Marxists, so Leo Strauss in the 1960s observed the logical end of the train of thought. Now I'm not about to read a bunch of Butlers shitty prose and read other postmodern thinkers to have definite proof that Leo Strauss was right, it has to be one of my articles of faith. And if you don't believe it, so be it!
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Marxism believes that capitalism is a necessary prerequisite to full communism. In that sense, anything capitalism does to destroy tradition is something leftists should welcome with open arms and in fact rush to bring about, even if it means a temporary increase in inequality. Leftist collaboration with corporations is therefore not hypocritical at all.
This doesn't actually rebut the claim that ESG isn't 'neomarxist' - it just says that 'interacting with capitalists isn't anathema to leftism or marxism'
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Ok I guess I'll do my thing and ask the dumb question - how exactly do you have a free world when nobody is allowed to be a nationalist?
Of course you are allowed to be a nationalist, in fact I think you should be allowed to subscribe to any worldview, however wrong or extreme it might be. Freedom of speech and all that
It’s just that I won’t support you in doing so, and will back up people who work in opposition to these ideas.
Perhaps my self depreciating joke confused you, I apologise. I know I am not outlawed from being a nationalist now. I actually live on Earth too, if you can believe it. Trying again, you are saying you will back up people who work in opposition to the idea of freedom of speech and all that? For a free world?
In what way would your nationalist free utopia be free? You don't believe in freedom. You believe in suspending freedom to achieve and enforce your ideology, which is the long-winded way of saying you don't believe in freedom.
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I think a less controversial way of saying this would be "exit rights are fundamental to any sort of free society", then going on to argue that nationalism and nativism in one country damages exit rights in all the others - leaving a crappy situation is great, but doesnt help if every scrap of land is occupied & no-one will let you immigrate an anything like fair terms.
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I'd agree that Japanese animation is actually a part of Japanese culture (and if anything, popular culture gets ignored as "real" culture). I'd also say that Japanese animation gets watered down when it becomes less Japanese because it is sold internationally--editing it for global audiences, or outright making Japanese for global audiences in the first place. Or making things using overseas creators and overseas properties and pretending that it's Japanese animation.
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If the recent trans thing has shown anything, it's that turning identities into mere markers for self-expression that can be donned and doffed at will can functionally destroy them and the goods they provided.
There too, they first came to us with honeyed words about how this posed no threat and simply increased "freedom" for everyone. Turns out: you can't just endlessly extend "freedom" without costs. That is just a liberal fallacy.
My identity is not fully chosen, and that's partly what makes it powerful. That's what roots me. Why would I trust anyone who was a countryman today and not tomorrow, a family member today and a member of someone else's family tomorrow?
I mean, sincere religious conversion is one thing. But the market logic you're using basically presumes mercenary attitudes.
And global capital's form of "identity" uproots everything stable and important to the human psyche in favor of endless consumption that is simultaneously diverse and homogenized (food court diversity I believe it's called - you can eat whatever you want but it's still shitty fast food).
All of the things that root people - to a history, to a culture, to a set of people you owe things to are dissolved in the name of turning you into an atomized (and thus unprotected) "individual. After which you are left to expect not your local community to protect you (since you left) nor even your state (which at least theoretically answers to you) but some collection of foreign nation states and, even more laughably, major corporations and the agents of global capital. They'll have your interests at heart!
It's not hard to come up with a harsh story about an ideology/position. I'm sure you feel that the above is an unjust framing of the costs and benefits of globalization.
Putting that aside: I think this entire conception of the nation is just based on a conflation between "nation", "country" and "nation-state" and presents a very narrow view of history. The concept of the nation is broader than a tool of fascists or whoever to feed you into a meat grinder.
For many places national identity is useful precisely as a form of resistance to overweening state power . This is obvious in colonial regions. Even "nations" without states use this; Quebec has won concessions due to the unity that they've managed to cobble together in the name of their "nation". Meanwhile French-Canadians elsewhere? Shit out of luck. Move to Quebec or assimilate.
You can also see this pattern in my native Belgium. When the Belgian revolution happened the Francophone elite envisioned a unitary monolangual French country. In the south they succeeded in exterminating the Walloon language, almost nobody speaks it today and I haven't heard of any serious movement to revive it. Here in the north the Flemish movement was largely succesful in fighting back against this, and we've managed to perserve our language and wrestle back certain political competences from the central state. Education for example is fully in the hands of the liguistic communities.
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Interesting point. What concessions?
Quebec gets special recognition as a distinct nation within Canada. While it probably doean't mean all that much in a strict legal manner, they tend to go their own in a lot of ways that other provinces don't. Quebec mamages their own Old Age Security plan seperate from CPP, they have their own tax collectors instead of letting CRA do it, Quebec practices civil code instead of common law at the Provincial level.
Quebec also gets privilidges such as extra Senators and nice carve outs from equilization schemes (power generation revenue not counting being a big one). Quebec also doesn't get shamed when it uses the Notwithstanding Act to compromise what are seen as core freedoms. The Official Languages Act bans English on signs in Quebec, an unconstitutional law that Quebec that Quebec maintaimed with the Notwithstanding clause amd the Federal Government turned a blind eye to. Alberta tried the same trick with an abortion ban but drew the ire of the Federal Government and was forced to back down.
If anything criticizing Quebec for things that would easily be called racist if any anglophone province did it is hazardous for you because every major politician will throw you under the bus to avoid the Quebecois voting for a nationalist next election.
That poor anchor thought she was doing the right thing by standing up for minorities slamming white racists and probably thought she'd be celebrated. She didn't realize that some minorities matter more than others.
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Official countrywide bilingualism among other things.
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You are following the free-market fallacy.
In the ideal world where the market of the ideas is completely free and inefficient, that would be a great idea; join the nation that you want to live in depending on what you believe.
But, as in academia and in the economy, real life is different; the result of demolition of nationalism and national belonging in the upper-middle class and intellighenzia had the effect of ensuring monopolism.
There are no tens or hundreds of states with different ideas, but an overbearing assimilation to a stronger ideology who does not tolerate deviation from the standard, and assimilate everything in her path.
We have a world under a Monopoly of ideas, not freedom.
Your thesis would be compelling if we ignore the natural tendency of the human to create conflict and to have a sense of belonging.
Precisely why I am greatly distrustful of people who benefit from the cultural and military monopoly of the US/West arguing for their free trade/globalist policies on the grounds of "let a thousand flowers bloom".
I simply cannot reconcile takes for more integration unless I view them making the implicit assumption that the hegemon will be there to keep one hand on the steering wheel and impose ideological conformity.
Because it beggars belief that globalists in France or New York would actually want to live under the imported norms of Pakistan (people aren't just economic units, they bring their baggage with them). The most psychologically intuitive theory is that they actually don't expect to; they expect to impose their will not only on immigrants to their country but even to foreign countries with differing histories and institutions.
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I don't think the policies you mention are inherent to nationalism. What's to stop me from saying "it's simple, we just have a nationalist state without those specific dysfunctional policies"?
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I don’t think Meloni is for America. America is (D)iffetent in its own way. And our identity is different than Italys identity. Italy has a traditional identity. A great people in their own right. Some of the interchangeable comes to America as the country with the identity of immigrant.
That being said America itself needs to have its community with their identity and not the overall what people like to call globo-homo. People do need their families. Their neighbors. Their community.
I don’t see any reason why nationalism and neoliberalism can’t coexists. The Italians can be Italians and trade with the French who are French or the Persians in Iran. And neoliberalism has its role that these places get along. And some places become like America as melting parts.
Neoliberalism shouldn’t mean that you don’t have your culture, your people, your god, your nation, your family. They can coexists.
Meloni is a special politician. She’s going to change the world. She’s everything people wanted from Trump when he was really just about owning the libs.
The World is a lost place right now. I’ve long thought the world was on the brink of a religious rebirth. And I was correct. GameStop religion was born. Bitcoin religion was born. Maga religion was born. Wokeism was born. People trying to cling to whatever cult or identity they can find. Searching for community.
And, in theory, the state can stay tiny and please libertarians. Doesn't seem to happen though.
An ideology that encourages limited government interference in the market (which cannot be separated from culture and life) + free movement of goods and peoples + seeing them as fungible inputs militates against nationalism
Look at the EU; a neoliberal and anti-national body. When Britain tried to push for more nationalism how did that go?
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Its enough to start deporting "immigrants".
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every leadership, regime that has severely impugned on this right has failed or collapsed, so there is that. There is a balance.
Not really. nationalism does not imply you cannot pick your stuff up and move elsewhere and even be accepted in your new country (like how Russian Jews assimilated well in the US)
The Soviet Union certainly did not respect people's right to property, including their own labor. But it did not collapse because of that. There are methods of governance that are correlated with disrespecting this right - no rule of law, military power as a domestic political force, and others. It's more likely that those others are why the nation collapses.
Of course it collapsed because of that.
Not respecting property caused the economy to tank. And that made it collapse.
What's your proof?
You're asking for proof for something that's really well known.
(And I can't help but wonder, if you really don't believe it, what you think caused the collapse of the Soviet Union instead. Or if you think nobody knows why it collapsed at all.)
Put simply, I think the Soviet Union failed for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest, if not the primary reason, is that it ran on a command economy and the Soviet planners were certainly not smart enough to plan well enough. But consider the following from Scott:
Suppose Kantorovich was right and the USSR followed his equations. In that world, they've solved the economic problems while still not respecting the idea of property. What are we to say in that case?
If the argument being made is actually "regimes that historically didn't respect property rights also tend to have other problems which lead to their collapse", then I would tentatively agree. But the phrasing of "regimes that don't respect property collapse" implies that it is because they didn't respect property that they collapsed.
"Running on a command economy" is a subset of "didn't respect property".
You're ignoring the hypothetical I posed. If the Soviets had solved the economic planning problem but retained the resolve and ability to disrespect property, then their economy would not have tanked. Between "incapable of efficient allocation of resources" and "taking people's stuff without consent", I think it makes much more sense to attribute their failure to the first, not the second.
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Not directly, though. The Soviet central planners made worse decisions for the use of other people’s property than those people would have made for the use of their own property, so the economy hit limits to growth prematurely.
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That’s correct, but it’s of little comfort to you personally, if you have no plausible option to walk away from it — which is exactly my point
US is not an ethnostate, and ethnonationalism is a different thing compared to the US nationalism — in this post I’m arguing mostly against the former.
Then again, nationalism of any sort is antithetical to the paradigm of shopping for countries that offer the best terms for you and your businesses.
That is only assessment of your worth given by the other countries.
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There's a third pillar of Sovereign accountability, and that's intra-national political competition. The nationalist conception of the high and the low versus the middle paints a more historical picture of balance of power than Enlightenment morality and constitutionalism:
In other words, the rhetoric of Free Market Capitalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-racism, are not some morla enlightenment brought about by Progress. They are the managerial tact of American empire. The move to strike nationalist sentiment is not moral enlightenment reached by individuals freely entering a social contract. It's a political strategy being employed by power actors.
Separate question, but:
What’s going on with that website?
It’s an online journal affiliated with UCLA. There’s an apparent interest in, or at least tolerance for, “other contemporary writers thinking outside of liberal terms.” This particular article was determined to parrot various reactionary talking points. I sampled a few previous issues, most of which were less strident (though it was interesting seeing the phrase “sexual market” in 2012). Each and every article I checked cited one or more works by Eric Gans, the editor.
A brief trawl of Wikipedia suggests that Anthropoetics seems to be the vehicle for “generative anthropology,” the editor’s pet field of postmodernism. The specifics of this theory blur the lines between historical speculation and Christian apologetics. I find it challenging to tell where the rhetorical flourishes end and the actual arguments begin.
Academia truly is a foreign country.
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Accountability via internecine conflict strikes me as historically accurate but inherently unstable. If defecting is the corrective mechanism, such a society is going to find itself in a defect-defect equilibrium. Presumably, at that point, the other two pillars of accountability come in and clean up. That’s cold comfort.
The second issue is removal of this pillar. There’s no guarantee that a cohesive opposition forms to a “final” power center. Modern China is perhaps a good example. Xi certainly gets things done; one wonders how accountable or constrained he actually is.
Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns. Voting out the government is a coop-coop resolution to a given dilemma and imposes fewer costs than the defect-defect option. And substituting “consent of the governed” for “consent of the nobles” changes the dynamics of the alternate power centers.
That's the key insight. That liberalism has had a competitive advantage in the centralization of power is the reason it is dominant. Not because of flimsy moral premises, like the notion that the individual precedes the web of social obligations, or that there are inalienable "human rights." Those notions and self-justifications are themselves byproducts of these power struggles; such as the colonial subsidiary struggle against the former centers of Power.
We can move from a Whig view of history, from the view of Liberalism as an emergent moral enlightenment in which primordial truths were discovered, to a post-liberal model which recognizes that liberalism was an innovation in the centralization and organization of power.
Understanding liberal ideology as a set of competitive advantages is fundamentally different than understanding it as a moral Enlightenment. It's true that those are not mutually exclusive, but with this model the former is all that matters. Liberal moral presuppositions, like individual will preceding social order, are flimsy and ahistorical.
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