"Schmitt defined the very essence of politics as by the categories of friend and enemy. Progress to such consciousness makes its own regression to the behavior patterns of the child, which either likes things or fears them. The a priori reduction to the friend-enemy relationship is one of the primal phenomena of the new anthropology. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.'
--Theodor Adorno
“There are strictly speaking, no closed systems within the universe.”
--Thomas Hayek
The discourse has doubled down on the apocalyptic register even as the actual alternatives remain what they have been for a while since the dawn of the postmodern epoch. The end of history has been cancelled, for good reason, but people still fight over the debates of a high modernist moment that has long passed. We cosplay as the 30s or the 60s while the representation of reality inexorably implodes in rich and strange ways. And, like a mantra of madness, the Schmittian critique of liberalism becomes a compensatory refrain of a radically interdependent world evacuated of responsibility. We scapegoat and shun contagion with greater ease than ever was possible for the denizens of the Bronze Age, but the ability of such ritual cleansing to generate the longed-for peace both within and without is more elusive than ever. The sleep of narcissism breeds monsters, though also the magic needed to control the generation of aberrations.
At the surface level of what passes for “official” politics in the developed world, ignorant armies clash by night. The fairly affluent wired millions fight over images and doxa rather than realities and principles. They see world historical contradictions in what amounts to professional wrestling matches, and revelation of fundamental humanity in the sentimental truces between parties of the same pack of proprietors. The more one moves away from this spectacle, a movement that is a constant work in progress under contemporary conditions, constant reaction to this or that twist in the approved of cinematic version of reality gives way to clarity about the motors of history that are the concrete activity, needs, and longings of humanity, in which Totality finds its viceregal mirror. Serene understanding becomes the true ground of the intellect, while tears and laughter, horror and condemnation, though they do not simply rot away on the vine, are no longer at the center of the psyche. The deeper one contemplates the basic realities of labor and desire production, the more the infinite procession of opinions is simplified to a set of finite choices that have the potential to be implemented on this earth. And amongst these essential options fearful and beautiful symmetries exist coextensively, simultaneously affirmed with the sharp distinctions between truly mutually exclusive choices that exceed the facile chumminess of the celebrated “bipartisan” state of mind. In the realm of true adversaries, we see ourselves in each enemy brother, and in that cool recognition find a redoubled commitment to our own project. From this tension of love and antipathy, both the true world order and the true world revolution can be built.
In the fantasies of neoliberalism, and the fantasies of those who oppose it, we can see an illustration of this terrible, in the Biblical sense, antagonistic kinship of true adversaries, and the ultimate trifling nature of what passes for respectable categorizations. In the widespread debates about what the post 70s dispensation that is only now, apparently, coming to an end, market vs. state is the typical way of summarizing what is a stake in opposition to the tribe of Hayek. Reified antinomies abound because of a combined despair in the ability of humanity to move further and a deranged sense of willful omnipotence desperate to hide its own wounds. Neoliberals, it is said, are “market fundamentalists” who want to destroy sovereignty of the public authority. They want to deny collective humanity in favor of the individual. Instead of the dignity of politics, they want to privilege political economy over all political interventions. Neoliberals, in short, are true sons of Mammon, and no one else. We merely have to drive the merchants from the temple and all will be well.
As with all caricatures, this portrait contains some truth, particularly in the Anglo-American context where the neoliberal project at the top was widely packaged among libertarians, classical liberals, and evangelical anti-communist types in terms of traditions of anti-statist individualism. Thatcher’s bit about the unreality of society and Reagan’s ersatz folk distrust of the government certainly speak to how neoliberal programs gained a degree of popular hegemony among key sections of the haute bourgeoisie, middling sort, and labor aristocracy. But this surface phenomena should not distract one from the deeper theoretical and political roots of the post 70s recreation of bourgeois class rule. By the fruits you will know them. And those fruits point to the intellectual seeds in which the neoliberal project was planted. Both in its beginning and its ends, the world counter-revolution was a deeply statist affairs. From the soccer stadiums of Pinochet’s coup to the Patriot Act, from right-wing death squads in Guatemala to the pillaging of Libya by NATO, neoliberal governance has used the power of the public authority to instill fear in targeted populations. And this reflects the predilection for “strong,” even fascist, regimes among leading luminaries of neoliberal thought.
As was discussed brilliantly in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian, one of the major strains of neoliberalism, the Geneva School, was deeply concerned, to the point of fixation, on the issue of global government. It decentered the individual agency by an almost mystical conception of world economy. And instead of abolishing politics, the neoliberals made it a vital auxiliary in shielding the forces of the market from democratic, anti-colonial forces, and all other threats to the “civilization”of property they wanted to preserve.
Hayek and other major neoliberal thinkers viewed the Cold War as ultimately a sideshow. The similarities between post-New Deal/post World War II social democratic capitalism and actually existing socialism were more important for them than their differences. What concerned them most was the rise of international solidarity amongst the peoples of the postcolonial world. The Global South now threatened to use the principle of “one nation, one vote” to agitate for economic measures that protected their own interests as developing countries. They wanted to turn new found political independence into material flourishing and concrete autonomy. This prompted the neoliberals to call for institutions that could insulate the functioning of property and trade from outside forces. Against the “tribalism” of redistribution, the institutionalized cash nexus would enable an international togetherness among all who accepted the ordo of trade. And this defense of free commerce was not without political bite. The imagined global authority of the neoliberal was not mere a debate club or a customs union, but an authority capable of enforcing its decrees albeit a, in theory, “post-imperial” way. Just as the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the lost homeland of many leading lights of neoliberalism, had put a limit on the pretensions of the various ethnic special interests’ groups, the proposed federalist world order would preserve the principles of negative liberty for all, regardless of national background or origin (though with some racial exclusion clauses implied or explicitly stated).
Instead of glorifying the individual, the neoliberal project emphasized the limits and ignorance of all participants in the market. The general lack of information, the partiality of private perspectives, and the reliance of all on the accumulated experience of past generations all put a question mark above the illusion of personal autonomy. But it was also a matter of viewing the human condition as being caught between the infinite greatness and smallness of the cosmos. At either end, from the heights to the depths, the individuality of each agent was open to the profound influence of informational patterns that could transcend the ability of the mind to comprehend. Thus, instead of affirming the independence of the individual, the neoliberals emphasized that whatever freedom one could have was predicated on accepting the sublime of an order on whose forehead was written Mystery.
Instead of deconstructing the state, in other words, neoliberals and their Russian nesting doll of supporters/useful idiots have re-engineered it for the interests of oligarchy. The nurturing, paternalist elements of the public authority have been rolled back to create room for more surveillance, the imperialist war machine, prisons, and the subsidizing of the wealthiest stratas through publicly funded bailouts . The modern society of the United States is objectively in many ways more “totalitarian” than the Soviet Union. But instead of attempting to construct socialism under conditions of external siege and internal social contradictions, America uses the robustness of the state to enforce capitalist discipline at home and imperialist dictatorship abroad. And the election of Trump has not marked the end of that reality, both in the sense that his own agenda doubles down on the punitive nature of the plutocratic regime on vulnerable groups and in the sense that the stable genius’s administration is creating an alibi for the neocolonial reactionary agenda of the Resistance that is preparing to replace him sooner or later. At the same time, the radical right mistakes, consciously or unconsciously, cultural critiques of woke capital with the real engine of exploitation and oppression, while the radical left pretends to recreate a revolutionary modernism which finds no Rhodes in present day circumstances.
Instead of simply posing one as the opponent of the neoliberal order, and thus falling to a Schmittism that perpetuates the worst aspects of the decaying dispensation, if anything is accomplished at all, let us, we people of good will, find ways that will overcome the anarchy of forces we have inherited by building upon what positive content can be found within its wild contradictions In true fashion of previous (e)nlightened thinkers, let the acknowledgment of the reality of limit become the basis for infinite construction. Adjustment instead of Prometheanism; Indifferent love over (but not to exclusion of) factional identity; the extension of rights to the stranger as opposed to a (left or right) Volk protectionist populism; unapologetic globalism; and an appreciation for the value of institutional isonomy: all these element can be translated into a red envelopment of the Hayekian legacy.
Instead of starting from a blue print of what society should be, taken from the past or from utopians of any stripe, let us imitate the Haykeans by pursuing the revolutionary reconstruction of society through constant adjustment to the unfolding of reality itself. Neither the polis nor the Holy Roman Empire, neither the Paris Commune or the welfare state of les trente glorieuses, can offer a guideline for the present: only by following the pattern of change immanent to the present order can something else be drawn out. The compulsion to repeat earlier phases of history can’t simply be willed out of human nature. But we can learn to see this reflex for what it is, and not to mystify it. Gently we can train ourselves to view the old costumes and sets being brought out again and again, and measure their worth by their results, not their own grandiose pretensions. A truly new future is an impossibility, such is the belatedness of our condition. But we can fail to be original in more or less effective ways.
The typical reaction by both the left and the right in the current crisis of legitimacy has been to double down on the friend/enemy distinction. Which is quite fair, since we have not yet superseded the historical point in which the political polarity is necessary. But virtually all the radical factions queuing up to replace the unconscious if not quite dead liberal order imagine their end goal as the fusion of all social realms under one abstract conception of the truth which will either purge or euthanize all opponents. Genuine pluralism remains, as always, unfashionable, even as it is the best worldly hope of human peace. But under the cold, fake, hypocritical neutrality of the post-1989 world order, there lies the saving potentialities of a co-operation which is not hostile to difference or merely apathetic to it, but affirms and delights in all strong contraries out of a higher indifference. What appears to have began as self-serving appropriation of human diversity by the bourgeoisie can become reclaimed as love of each other through, not despite, our alien natures;
Hayek sometimes spoke of the xenos, or “guest friend” as a retrospective historical paradigm for the rightful status of those who come into another country in order to own property and trade. This can be reappropriated by a radical politics by affirming that being a stranger to the community does not preclude absence of rights. But instead of simply attributing economic rights to such alien, we can facilitate their acquiring of political,cultural, and social rights as well. The transpolitical administration of the peoples steps in place of the post-political administration of things. The institutional machinery, or at least the experience of using said institutional machinery, that has been left to us can be put to good use. What the neoliberal phase has undeniably, and unintentionally done is create global governing structures, habits of state behavior, and economic customs that can be made materials for revolutionary detournement. One can very well argue that the EU or WTO are irremediably bourgeois and unable to be undermined internally by mass democratic politics. But they have helped normalize the notion of transnational administration and created the habits of minds among all strata of thinking in terms of collectivities higher than the local state. A revolutionary movement that is practical in its operations will take advantage of such realities.
Pace both (some) left nationalists and all right wing “populists”, internationalism is not the enemy. If we want to transcend neoliberals, we must be even more resolutely globalist than they are. This does not mean that we abandon national and regional particularities. The truly international is merely a living dead abstraction without engagement with the multitude of local identities. But it does mean that we should relativize said ties by reference to the cosmopolis, which is both the name of a transcendental organizing principle whose full import we have yet to see and a material reality of the present, a union of minds and bodies that we only need to tap into to already begin realizing.
What has, in part, hampered alter-mondialisation, whether it be Marxist or Catholic, anarchist or social democratic, is an insufficient attention to the importance of isonomy "equality before the law, equality of civic and political rights"), the sameness of norms across situations, as they rush to cancel each other in the name of fantasies in which they and they alone will be the ones that declare the state of exception. Hence the enduring popularity of Schmitt, who represents the natural, instinctual (and thus never wholly eradicable) reaction to the apolitical pretensions of liberalism. The (last) sovereign whose violence is his charm promises to end the malaise of a society that had grown tired of endless deferral. Indeed, any earnest political project will inspire pleasure through its sharp clarity of purpose, the naming of foes as well as the formation of comrades. But as the love of God is a higher attribute than His justice, the compassion of the sovereign to come is more precious than his power. And the bloodshed that will sooner or later arrive will be worth less than nothing if it doesn’t solidify in the end under the reign of unbounded rights. The moment of political (re)foundation can not be fetishized for its own sake, but must be made the preparation for the setting up of norms that all can abide by. With the notion in its mind, all merely special laws of nation, race, and sect are clearly seen to be inadequate for the task at hand, where goats as well as sheep must be led. Even truths which refuse to be open systems can become their opposites. Under the reign of affirmatively indifferent tolerance, the sweet apatheia of administration will guide all to the place their own individual essence pushes them towards.
When we take seriously, as a sacramental sign, the two headed eagle of authority and revolution that recurs throughout time, the more in vigilant confidence we can await the pacification of this long suffering planet. This event will not be a final unification of all things within history. But it will be at least be a foretaste of the serenity of the beatitude which the order of things and thought call for with inexpressible groaning.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
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Obi-Wan tells Anakin that "Only the Sith deal in absolutes", and uses that as his identification that Anakin had actually turned to the Dark Side.
But it would seem the statement itself "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" would be an absolute statement itself, and that his rash actions based on this single statement is just as 'Sith-like' as Anakin's statement of "Either you're with me or against me" (paraphrased, I forget the exact statement.)
Is this not a very clear indicator that the Dark Side is present in all who use the force, and reinforces Palpatine's assertion that the Jedi are simply blind to the powers of the dark Side instead embracing their full potential?"
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/8067/if-only-the-sith-deal-in-absolutes-why-does-obi-wan-say-it-that-way
only by following the pattern of change immanent to the present order can something else be drawn out.
Everyone here is a scientific socialist who agrees with this. My question to you is what does this imply so as to allow you to describe people on this forum as cosplaying the 1930s or 60s? what is it that we're not grasping? My intuition is that whatever you have to say is going to be a reification of postmodernity against which the truth of marxism has to be affirmed
marlax78 posted:only by following the pattern of change immanent to the present order can something else be drawn out.
Everyone here is a scientific socialist who agrees with this. My question to you is what does this imply so as to allow you to describe people on this forum as cosplaying the 1930s or 60s? what is it that we're not grasping? My intuition is that whatever you have to say is going to be a reification of postmodernity against which the truth of marxism has to be affirmed
I didn’t write this with the intent of attackng people on this forum, who are generally more self-aware and reflective about their politics than the average internet denizen.
When I use the “we”in that first paragraph sentence. I include myself in whatever censure is stated or implied. We all cosplay earlier stages of history. It is part of being a temporal being that has come late to the world. That by itself is not an issue. Not being conscious of this backwards looking instinct is the real problem in so far as it prevents us from reaffirming the truth at a higher state of socio-economic development.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
The Global South now threatened to use the principle of “one nation, one vote” to agitate for economic measures that protected their own interests as developing countries. They wanted to turn new found political independence into material flourishing and concrete autonomy. This prompted the neoliberals to call for institutions that could insulate the functioning of property and trade from outside forces. Against the “tribalism” of redistribution, the institutionalized cash nexus would enable an international togetherness among all who accepted the ordo of trade.
this is really important and desperately underanalyzed though. It Happened, People
littlegreenpills posted:the cool thing about shoving people into the state of exception based on how much money they have is you dont have to kill them you just have to take their money away. i mean if this is a species of angry tribal dragonoid schmittism, im cool with that personally
That is another reason why class is, as should not need an argument around here, a Good way of organizing politics. If your enemy is the Jews (or whatever group fills that part of the social imaginary in your head) genocide sooner or later becomes a logical necessity because there is no real way to separate the people in the hated group from their ontological status as antagonists. But you can, in theory and in practice, disentangle someone's wealth from their life.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
littlegreenpills posted:The Global South now threatened to use the principle of “one nation, one vote” to agitate for economic measures that protected their own interests as developing countries. They wanted to turn new found political independence into material flourishing and concrete autonomy. This prompted the neoliberals to call for institutions that could insulate the functioning of property and trade from outside forces. Against the “tribalism” of redistribution, the institutionalized cash nexus would enable an international togetherness among all who accepted the ordo of trade.
this is really important and desperately underanalyzed though. It Happened, People
Capitalism was really on the ropes in the 60s and 70s because of the anti-colonial moment. And it can be so again in the future, if not in an identical way. So we have room for hope.
RedMaistre posted:The alternative is being suckered into monster hunts against...the WASPs or the boomers
see this is pretty hyperbolic unless you take too much stock in people being loud and performative on the internet, a space where you literally do not exist unless people are paying attention to you
RedMaistre posted:Essential to Nazi mythology is the zero sum notion that there are dragons in the high mountains hoarding all the gold that need to be slayed. When the social relationships surrounding wealth are made the focus, not absolute dollar holdings, the visible trappings of money, or the cultural backgrounds of the proprietors, non-Wagnerian solutions to capitalism become feasible. The alternative is being suckered into monster hunts against the Jews or the WASPs or the boomers or whoever while the bonds of capital are perpetuated in an all the more naked form because we have grown accustomed to viewing certain neighbors as subhuman.
Well one of the "oh so that's how it works" moments I had when thinking about capitalism is how it produces anxiety as a way to keep people consuming commodities. Even if you think you're outside it there's still a gnat in the back of your brain gnawing on you, creating car or phone anxiety. I need the new iPhone because if I don't have it I'm going to be falling behind or whatever. That's bourgeois ideology talking, but I can't just take the phone without paying for it otherwise the cops will beat me up and arrest me. I guess what I'm saying is that this ever-present state of anxiety and antagonism is too unstable when left on its own and needs a regulatory / institutional framework to compartmentalize and naturalize the violence inherent to it. Which is to say that fascism lies inherently within liberalism, but emerges and departs from it -- as a "solution" to the logjams that liberalism finds itself in which also excludes socialists -- by dispensing with the regulatory framework and centering the anxiety and antagonisms (and violence) as its very core, while keeping the property structure intact. Life is competition and "keeping up with the Joneses" in the form of imperial rivalries and building the latest weapons. Like any other commodity, fascism at first appears novel and gives people an identity they can "buy into," promising to overcome their anxieties but in fact intensifying them, and it's obsessed with surface-layer aesthetics, so it's no wonder it tends to finds its base in the terminally anxious petit-bourgeoisie and also manages to periodically reappear over and over again in slightly mutated variations like the recent "alt-right" craze. So, this novelty-as-commodity might mean it can burn out very quickly although it can do a lot of human damage when fascism is "in fashion."
If we are speaking of "systems," we mean "wholes" or "unities" Then it seems paradoxical that, with respect to a whole, the concept of competition between its parts is introduced. In fact, however, these apparently contradictory statements both belong to the essentials of systems. Every whole is based upon the competition of its elements, and presupposes the "struggle between parts" (Roux). The latter is a general principle of organization in simple physico-chemical systems as well as in organisms and social units, and it is, in the last resort, an expression of the coincidentia oppositorum that reality presents.
Sounds pretty dialectic. Notably, in Bertalanffys writings on general systems theory both praise for Marx and Hayek can be found.
Biel however rejects the myth of this kind of laissez faire "Spontaneous order" as (and maybe this is similar to the thinking error made by libertarian "communists") idealistic and disconnected from existing class structures
in entropy of capitalism:
Classic liberal economic theory is reductionist and mechanistic (Newtonian, in a way) in that the overall order, although emergent in the sense of not being sought by individual choices, is nevertheless predictable from them. Its key role in ‘anchoring’ the debate within ruling class interests lies simply in its characteristic statement that any intervention to change the result generated by laissez-faire would necessarily make things worse. With one stroke, social projects are written off.
(...)
In particular, Friedrich von Hayek, the godfather of neo-liberalism, invented a highly fatalistic structuralist reading of the liberal argument, which effectively employs the notion of spontaneous order to sanctify the status quo, (Hayek, 1964) and rule out Pigou-style intervention. This is the most corrupt form of structuralism in the sense that, although like structural anthropology it undervalues agency, unlike the latter it doesn’t at all admit the alienating nature of the established order.
in sustainable food systems:
The argument that spontaneous order equals best order is a neo-liberal one: exactly the argument for laissez-faire proposed by the high priest of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von Hayek (Hayek, 1964). The two linked flaws with this argument are:
(a) it makes abstraction of the overarching dominance of capitalism’s circuits, and more broadly norms, which tends to channel any emergent social phenomena in a direction which reproduces these circuits/norms;
(b) it repudiates the visioning function – embodied in that form of emergence associated with consciousness which is intrinsically human.
lenochodek posted:I was reading up on general systems theory recently, in part because of the extremely alluring thesis on a systems reading of marxism offered by robert biel in his latest two books. roughly speaking, in ludwig von bertalanffy's (interesting pioneer of systems theory who like schmitt must be read with caution due to his relation to the nazi party) conception one way to conceive of a general system is a thermodynamically open system, i.e. one where the second law of thermodynamics does not hold true. even bertalanffy himself notes:
If we are speaking of "systems," we mean "wholes" or "unities" Then it seems paradoxical that, with respect to a whole, the concept of competition between its parts is introduced. In fact, however, these apparently contradictory statements both belong to the essentials of systems. Every whole is based upon the competition of its elements, and presupposes the "struggle between parts" (Roux). The latter is a general principle of organization in simple physico-chemical systems as well as in organisms and social units, and it is, in the last resort, an expression of the coincidentia oppositorum that reality presents.
Sounds pretty dialectic. Notably, in Bertalanffys writings on general systems theory both praise for Marx and Hayek can be found.
Biel however rejects the myth of this kind of laissez faire "Spontaneous order" as (and maybe this is similar to the thinking error made by libertarian "communists") idealistic and disconnected from existing class structures
in entropy of capitalism:Classic liberal economic theory is reductionist and mechanistic (Newtonian, in a way) in that the overall order, although emergent in the sense of not being sought by individual choices, is nevertheless predictable from them. Its key role in ‘anchoring’ the debate within ruling class interests lies simply in its characteristic statement that any intervention to change the result generated by laissez-faire would necessarily make things worse. With one stroke, social projects are written off.
(...)
In particular, Friedrich von Hayek, the godfather of neo-liberalism, invented a highly fatalistic structuralist reading of the liberal argument, which effectively employs the notion of spontaneous order to sanctify the status quo, (Hayek, 1964) and rule out Pigou-style intervention. This is the most corrupt form of structuralism in the sense that, although like structural anthropology it undervalues agency, unlike the latter it doesn’t at all admit the alienating nature of the established order.
in sustainable food systems:The argument that spontaneous order equals best order is a neo-liberal one: exactly the argument for laissez-faire proposed by the high priest of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von Hayek (Hayek, 1964). The two linked flaws with this argument are:
(a) it makes abstraction of the overarching dominance of capitalism’s circuits, and more broadly norms, which tends to channel any emergent social phenomena in a direction which reproduces these circuits/norms;
(b) it repudiates the visioning function – embodied in that form of emergence associated with consciousness which is intrinsically human.
Thank you for sharing this.
My own thoughts about the notion of "spontaneous order" is that it can be used to describe certain systemic states where the individual units form coherent patterns on their own without direct top down imposition. But such social ecosystems are dependent to some degree or other on prior and enduring planned structural conditions, and periodically require interventions to remove bottle necks or threats.
It is significant that not even the neoliberals "really" believed in a world of fully self-generated order, hence their penchant for Pinochet, Mussolini, Thatcher, and other strong men/women.
RedMaistre posted:.
My own thoughts about the notion of "spontaneous order" is that it can be used to describe certain systemic states where the individual units form coherent patterns on their own without direct top down imposition. But such social ecosystems are dependent to some degree or other on prior and enduring planned structural conditions, and periodically require interventions to remove bottle necks or threats.
I think you should be a little cautious in using the term planned, because think of capitalism and the way prices and an average rate of profit form. Constant overshooting and undershooting, which isn't recognized until after the fact when the commodities already produced are brought to the market, and then capital flows to restore a kind of equilibrium correcting the relative overproduction and underproduction. But then there's a generalized overproduction of commodities and the only way profitable accumulation can return is through the devaluation of a crisis, which is the same exact mechanism except on a larger scale. And all the time there's no planning, just the discipline of whether or not profits can be made and capitalists readjusting their investments. I say this of course agreeing with the ideological difference you have noted between the classical invisible hand (Adam Smith never denied the role of the state) and neoliberalism on the other hand
Edited by marlax78 ()