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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/
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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