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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.
Rightfully so the destruction of identities is a Marxist project.
To quote https://europeanconservative.com/reviews/the-great-awakening-vs-the-great-reset/
¿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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