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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.
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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The biggest and most obvious one is the adoption of French as a national language and the requirement that it be taught in all Canadian schools. I don't think that would have flown back when Canada was still a British dominion.
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Official countrywide bilingualism among other things.
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