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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.
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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