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Re The Swamp and The Fire Urgent Warning to the West
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2017 07:59:12 +0000
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Thomas Lord <lord () basiscraft com> Date: Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 12:16 AM Subject: Re: [IP] The Swamp and The Fire Urgent Warning to the West To: <dave () farber net> Cc: ip <ip () listbox com> djf, I have read the other (so far) IP list responses to the "The Swamp ...". I think that the others have misunderstood and underestimated it. I could be mistaken, but here: 1. The author is completely serious and literal in advocating a return to mercantilism. An idealized mercantile society comprises regions that are culturally homogeneous internally, engaged in both war and de-monetized trade between them. Historic mercantilism gave rise to capitalism, but was not itself capitalism. The author is, in part, an anti- capitalist. He envisions a return to mercantilism followed by an avoidance of capitalism. 2. The author recognizes that liberal projects are encountering hard limits. There is no apparent reformist way out of lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis. There is no apparent reformist way out of chaotic and perpetual warfare. I find it hard to disagree with him on this one narrow point. 3. The author recognizes that liberal ideologues used to dominate the command positions of US power. US foreign policy and war conduct were, heretofore, guided by liberal ideology (including traditional "conservatives" counted as liberal ideologues). Trump's election (allegedly) helps to show that now, liberal ideology no longer orders the activity of the US. This is taken to be an extreme, portentous, central example of how liberal projects are encountering hard limits everywhere. (Looking at the emerging cabinet, especially in security, defense, and state roles -- I think there is something to the author's claim about Trump.) So what is to be done, according to this author? Well... 4. The author is (or writes as) an idealist who resembles "The Young Hegelians" in Marx's "German Ideology". Marx wrote: "Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations." The author senses that liberal consciousness can no longer lock nature into an out of control misery ("the swamp"), and so there is once again an opportunity for pure spirit to go on a violent rampage and express an "idealist phase" of society -- a phase in which spirit savagely reshapes material reality and society. "Let's you and him fight," says the author. 5. What shall emerge in such all-on-all war? What are we supposed to fight for? The author envisions that the strong groups will emerge as culturally homogeneous and mutually reinforcing harmonized, homogeneous societies -- each able to hold territory against the others. Ideal mercantilism, in other words, is a kind of separatism, with separate societies experiencing both trade and war at their geographic boundaries. To the victors the spoils. 6. Globalism on one hand, and on the other hand the concept of civil rights (like "LGB..." projects) are all only sensible in the context of liberal ideology. If liberalism is dead, so are those. What do "equal employment rights" mean if "employment" is no longer an ordering concept in society, for example. The author must be read carefully here. I don't think he has any complaint (in this essay) about homosexuality. His attack on LGBQT projects is an attack on the legalistic and capitalist social engineering projects. (Perhaps he is also separately a homophobe, but that is not part of his argument in that essay.) If the author is correct that globalism is dying under its won weight then liberal projects are, indeed, dead. Capitalism is dying and nobody knows how to fix it. To me, this much seems pretty plausible. In response, the author lays out a generic recipe for fascism: totally internally ordered societies fighting over territory. He hopes to get to fascism by inciting all-on-all warfare, using abstract reason. The alternative -- disordered societies cooperating over communal territory, unable any longer to use capitalism -- would be communism. In conclusion: I think the essay is written from the perspective of fairly sophisticated theorist of fascism. The author is trying to lay out a blueprint -- a social project -- meant to bring about a pre-fascist era of all-on-all war. Hopefully Marx was right, and the author's idealism -- the idea that Spirit can dominate Nature -- is drek. The project to bring about pre-fascism can't work. Of course, in that case, global communism is apparently what happens instead. -t ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125 Unsubscribe Now: https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170211025931:023406F6-F030-11E6-AE27-A0DBF60DE5A5 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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