roachboy

dunedan:

first thanks for post 74. i'm not sure that i've seen an overview like that from you or anyone else here, but who knows maybe i did and forgot about it.

let me address a few of the snippy side points first before going into the main thing.

1. i dont "despise" right libertarians. i oppose them politically. there's a difference.

2. i reference locke as a heuristic. the separations that run through your post can be found in the second treatise.
i dont remember saying that locke's is the ONLY text you or anyone involved with this politics has read--it just happens that it fits and is a text that a lot of folk have had to read and so i reference it.
this is a messageboard. arguments require certain tactical choices be made, and one of them is in the assumptions concerning what folk may have read so that if you are inclined to reference texts (it's a tick of mine from graduate school that i cant seem to get rid of) this tactical consideration shapes which texts you choose.

hell, if i thought that many folk had read the illuminatus trilogy, i'd use that.

ayn rand? come on, you cannot be serious.

3. it's kinda funny that you would reference morris dees in all this. what's the problem with the splc exactly? i assume you're still pissed off about the "false patriots" study? i read it when it came out--it was interesting enough, but was hardly a depth analysis.
sara diamond is much better.

anyway, that piece came out in the period just before oklahoma city. the cluster of micro-groups that dees outlines includes some of those fine fellows from the christian identity movement, and at the time there was little in the way of discontinuity between christian identity and much militia materials, particularly in their radio emanations. since ok city, i expect that things have changed--i know that there has been an attempt to distance militia groups from the racist zanies. fine: that's certainly preferable to the reverse.

anyway, here goes.
there are three basic areas of disagreement.

first thing is that it makes little sense to frame all positions through the question of "rights"---particularly as you do it---your positions seems to rely on a notion of "natural law" which i take to be little more than a christian fantasy. at best, it is a normative construct that enables a certain type of critique to unfold of existing legal systems. so its a critical device. but it does not exist. so claims that people are endowed naturally with certain rights is arbitrary. i think that human beings have dignity simply because they are human and that if there is a moral a priori it is that the socio-economic order should operate in a way that respects the dignity of all human beings. capitalism is not such an order.

2. i dont think you understand contemporary capitalism at all.
this:
and this

are mostly jibberish.
the term substitutions make no sense.
corporatism is a social order built around a conception of a "natural" division of labor. it was a big part of catholic social philosophy in the 1920s-1930s and is one of the reasons why the church was not at all an outspoken critic of fascism. it has nothing to do with the present state of affairs.
mercantilism is a description of the mode of exchange particular to the british empire of the late 17th-early 18th centuries.
fascism is a political form rooted in a version of radical nationalism. it is not an economic organization: it is a political ideology. some versions of fascism can be tied to corporatist ideology--mussolini's for example--and some were far more amenable to capitalist business as usual, so long as certain ideological conformities were put in place (hitler's)....some were more internally repressive and backward looking (franco)--the list can go on.

the present state of affairs is a mutation of capitalism. there have been a number of mutations in the overall organization of capitalism. what that means is that capitalism is an abstract term which encompasses a series of discrete forms. so it is a particular type of noun, one that designates a series rather than an object. we live under a form of capitalism. that you do not like it does not mean that it is not capitalism. i do not like it either, but not for the same reasons as you do--but at least i can call it what it is. you cant. this is not a tactical advantage for you: it makes much of what you say seem incoherent.

this is one of the central problems. in the interest of full disclosure, i dont know why, but whatever: i come out of a marxist background. while i am not in any strict sense still a marxist, i hold that certain claims developed either by marx or through the tradition are correct. one of them has to do with the relation of a coherent critique of the existing order to any possible radical politics--that the former gives the latter its orientation. that the types of social organization one can advocate will change as the overall situation within capitalism changes. most importantly, if you are incoherent about the critique your politics will necessarily follow suit.

because you do not understand contemporary capitalism at all, it is possible to advocate surreal positions--your hostility to "government"--which i assume means the state, the modern state. well, dunedan, if you oppose the modern state then you oppose modern capitalism. modern capitalism is only functional because of continuous state intervention, direct and indirect.
i could go into how this works, has worked since world war 2, but it'd make this too long. another post, if there is a debate about this.

another way:
when you say for example that you "oppose corporations" what exactly do you mean? that you oppose the curious american legal fiction of the corporate person? that you oppose firms that are organized bureaucratically? that you oppose firms that operate on a scale beyond point x (where is that?)....somewhere lurking it seems there is hayek--hayek opposed MONOPOLY because he understood monopolies as necessarily irrational. are you mapping that onto corporations in general?

fiat money as opposed to what? what money is not fiat money? gold? how is the value of gold not every bit as arbitrary as that of paper? money is a medium of exchange, a social expression. like any other, it is convention-based.

it seems to me that what anarcho-libertarians or right libertarians want really is a system of small producers engaged in face-to-face economic relations. small producers too small to require bureaucratic organization. producers which engage in types of production that do not require amounts of capital that exceed an individual or small group's capacity. i assume that you oppose stock.

i think the main question in thinking about a radical alternative to the existing order has to do with how various types of activities are controlled and who controls them. i think your understanding of democracy is wholly problematic, not only in itself, but more because excluding demoratic forms of control over production (say) leaves you with nothing coherent to propose as and alternative form of self-organization, no way of thinking about hierarchy (for example)--no way of imagining a coherent alternative social arrangement, in short--so you have no choice but to advocate a kind of neo-1790s system. if your natural law conceptions run in this direction (who knows, they could...) then this network of small producers would embody an organic division of labor...because that division of labor is organic, it woudl require no oversight....because it is organic, its outlines would probably have to be written into law--and so it turns out that your position could easily become corporatist, in the sense in which folk who are not of your political context understand the term (see above).

your position on taxation presupposes that it is not legitimate for a group to vote taxes onto itself because it is in itself immoral to redistribute wealth. the ONLY way that makes any sense is in the context of your corporatist shangri-la of little producers. but even that would depend on the far more complex system/situations within which these small producers operate. on that, there is nothing to say--if the division of labor is organic, then the consequences of it are necessary so as to uneven distribution of wealth, you;d have nothing so say. it wouldnt even be a problem. class stratification could easily exist in your fantasy alternative order: but the effects of this would be even harder to address than they are now, because you would assume--like the conventional populist conservative types today do--that the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, blah blah blah. on that basis alone, i hope that you folk never get anywhere near actual power. there's more to say on this, but i'd refer you to host's post above instead, which moves in this direction.

but you say that you oppose collective action. you oppose the idea of the collective. well, to my mind that is just a way of affirming powerlessness. and it is incoherent.

your critique of democracy seems to me absurd.

in general, i see in your position a dangerous alternative to the present order, one in which many of the worst features would be retained--not only that, but they would be transposed away from the political, into a hallucinated "natural order" and there would be no feedback loops that could address this because, well, there's no account made in your post of how such a system would work--only that democracy is bad.

that's a short version (believe it or not) os why i think your position problematic.

that said, though, thanks for taking the time to post an overview.
i'd be interested to see what you make of the response.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite