dark mutualism, part 1

neomutualists reach out for their weapons

mutualism started and mostly remained an open concern about progress: serialized changes with a certain dominant teleology. it investigated such series initially in the economic realms of property, labour and production. in his later life, Proudhon veered into sociological analyses of the church and war. whatever else could be said of mutualism, its notion of progress drives in a lane little related to the mainstream meaning the term acquired in political currency. the trends tracked by Proudhon and its meagre followers, both in America and Europe, talked about mechanization, labour organization, decentralization and, even at its most social, still focused on the miracle of modernity. progress was the progress of intelligence towards its ever-greater expansion, the mastering of technique. what took over the term in the latter half of the 19th century was anything but.

two facts, then, need immediate recognition. first, mutualism lost progress, even as it remained its most fundamental concern. more generally, mutualism has been forsaken to the fringe of the fringes of political radicalism. its leading names after Proudhon are known to a few thousand people worldwide, at most. its theory is not entirely clear even to adherents, and its significant works have most remained untranslated. wherever social progress has taken, it has left mutualism behind.

secondly, progressivism – as it’s currently understood – mostly definitely won over the world. the current crop, directly descending from 19th-century social reformers, holds offices everywhere in the most powerful high places of the world. even its supposedly most ardent opponents are still committed to one or another of its doctrines. there’s nowhere in the world where being anti-progress would pay high dividends socially, and nowhere an anti-progressive could be safe for sure (maybe in Russia, but who knows). doesn’t all this undeniable success mean they grasped progress way more firmly than any mutualist ever could?

the triumphant stance of Proudhon, therefore, needs revisiting and serious revision: progress isn’t what it used to be. a recuperation is pressing if mutualism is to remain at all relevant. our enemies have taken power, and they barely even know they are our enemies. acquiring some fangs would constitute a reaction from the left, and as such, it invites paradoxical commitments. the most pressing question, now, is what the hell went wrong?

how was progress lost for mutualism? naïvité. like classical mechanics (and possibly classical liberalism), Proudhon’s rationalism expected time to be linear, a simple progression from A to B. what the social turmoils since his age spelt, on the other hand, were waves, and maybe even whirlpools. up to the point where regressive progress could not only make sense but be entirely necessary to keep with the trend.

mutualism’s own "ultraviolet catastrophe" was the practical demonstration, beginning in the 1920s, that fascist-style command-economies could not only work but effectively mobilize multitudes. federated unions had no chance of autonomy if they were effectively integrated into a framework of state-managed negotiations. mutual contractual obligations could not withstand extensive state regulation. absent unbounded competition, prices could never be reduced to costs. but, perhaps most consequentially, localized organization was rendered impossible in the hysteria of neo-tribal identities. the black-body of all-for-the-state absorbed all possible light.

even Proudhon already demonstrated some scepticism concerning mass politics.

> "If monarchy is the hammer which crushes the People, democracy is the axe which divides it: the one and the other equally conclude in the death of liberty…"

so, in the wake of the 1848 revolution, his support for popular movements was hesitant. his proposals revolved around "economic" rather than "political" democracy, and the succession of events in the middle decades of 19th-century France led him ever deeper into a purely economic understanding of freedom – voluntary contracts and nothing else. still, even at his most economistic, Proudhon didn’t feel that popular movements could degenerate into state maximalism. and in the 19th century, there was possibly still reason for that.

Proudhon’s American heirs, the individualist anarchists of Boston, started from that economic view and – in what could be seen as a deviation from Stirner-style European individualism – imagined the economy unleashed from state grips as positively social. Their prolific and vibrant movement lasted a few decades, but just like proudhonism in Europe, was devoured by the rise of communistic strains of anarchism. at the dawn of the 20th century, Benjamin Tucker was hopeless and gloomy about the future of liberty.

the earlier half of the 20th saw the decimation of even the communistic side of anarchism, and the absorption of whatever remained into the capitalist/socialist duopoly. The revival of American individualists in the late 60s by Rothbard was made without any reference whatsoever to their mutualist side. it took the 21st century – and especially the Internet – for mutualism to reemerge.

the works of Shawn Wilbur and Kevin Carson finally thawed the ice that entrapped mutualism and drove into new directions: decentralized industrialism was once again out of the box, and maybe more than ever. Carson’s analysis of early 20th-century progressivism and the New Class it brought to power also provided a much-needed explanation for over 100 years of cryogenic suspended animation.

> "Twentieth-century politics was dominated by the ideology of the professional and managerial classes that ran the new large organizations. "Progressivism," especially—the direct ancestor of the mid-20th century model of liberalism that was ascendant from the New Deal to the Great Society—was the ideology of the New Middle Class. As Christopher Lasch put it, it was the ideology of the "intellectual caste," in a future which "belonged to the manager, the technician, the bureaucrat, the expert."

Carson’s analysis – inevitably limited (where did this centralist bug come from?) – dovetails nicely with those of a writer that claims no mutualist ancestry whatsoever, and that immediately justifies the "dark" appendage in the title here. Moldbug’s analysis of the Cathedral is eerily similar to Carson’s about the New Class – with one crucial difference: the Cathedral is not only a dominant class with a peculiar taste for technocratic dominion, but rather an expanded opinion-control networked system, amounting to a secular church based on the creed of egalitarian humanism:

> I am not a theist, so I don’t care much for theology. Paranormal beliefs are not beliefs about the real world, and cannot directly motivate real-world action. As a result, they are usually of no adaptive significance, tend to mutate frequently, and are a dangerous basis for classification.

> And when we look at the real-world beliefs of ultracalvinists, we see that ultracalvinism is anything but content-free. By my count, the ultracalvinist creed has four main points:

> First, ultracalvinists believe in the universal brotherhood of man. As an Ideal (an undefined universal) this might be called Equality. ("All men and women are born equal.") If we wanted to attach an "ism" to this, we could call it fraternalism.

> Second, ultracalvinists believe in the futility of violence. The corresponding ideal is of course Peace. ("Violence only causes more violence.") This is well-known as pacifism.

> Third, ultracalvinists believe in the fair distribution of goods. The ideal is Social Justice, which is a fine name as long as we remember that it has nothing to do with justice in the dictionary sense of the word, that is, the accurate application of the law. ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") To avoid hot-button words, we will ride on a name and call this belief Rawlsianism.

> Fourth, ultracalvinists believe in the managed society. The ideal is Community, and a community by definition is led by benevolent experts, or public servants. ("Public servants should be professional and socially responsible.") After their counterparts east of the Himalaya, we can call this belief mandarism.

…and that is where mutualism’s ultimate Achille’s heel is located: mutualism has been so far a very egalitarian humanist endeavour, much to its own demise.

egalitarian humanism ultimately begets demotism – if all humans are holy ("ends in themselves") and fundamentally, originally equal, then it follows that only unbounded franchise is justified. if the government is made by public opinion, the wheels of power have to revolve around managed minds. the rule in the name of the People is ultimately a cryptocalvinist global theocracy.

some may object: if egalitarian humanism kills mutualism, and mutualism is from the beginning complicit with it, so much worse for mutualism, right? up till now, i cannot but give a resounding yes. But things may have begun to change.

what this series will try to show – by following the main themes of mutualism – is how this profoundly pious sect of Protestantism that dominates the world is yet another misguided idealism; how it is slowly being unravelled by the forces that mutualism began (but never quite concluded) examining; and how mutualism can only secure itself by aligning with those forces – which will inevitably imply a dark turn away from humanity and substantial equality, and towards a "crowned anarchy" of synthetic beings.

anarchist transcendental ontology

“Being is not itself a being.”

Chris B writes:

From this point on the onus will be assumed to be on advocates of anarchistic ontology to resolve their logical failures and not on opponents to take it on dogmatic faith that it is correct. Further to this, I will contend that if we attempt to treat these thinkers outlining an anarchistic ontology at face value then we fall into a grave error, as such an argument is not in any way logically correct, but works in reality as a rhetorical device for the expansion of political power.

i will attempt to address these claims.

of course, we’ve been around neo-absolutism repeatedly here (1, 2, 3, 4), and i have drifted little if at all from the positions i held in those posts. but i think i hadn’t reached the core of the dispute between anarchy and absolutism before getting to Chris’s article from last May. simply put, what divides both views is a question of scale: anarchism is meant to be scale-free, absolutism has been silent about scale.

i. the pitfalls of the absolute

There is always someone who is above law and always someone who decides on exceptions which breach written constitutions, or so called rule by law.

this is possibly the central tenet of absolutism: at all times and places, someone is above the law. put otherwise, someone is exempt from the consequences of the law, because he’s the arbiter and the executor. this implies such a sovereign is all-powerful within his realm. he can act as he wishes, and is the only truly free person in the realm.

a question quickly arises as to the pragmatics of this stance. how is this unchecked power implemented in reality? bullets don’t shoot themselves out of mere brainwaves. the foremost anarchist critique of absolutism is thus: the sovereign cannot will himself into sovereignty. the avatar of sovereignty isn’t the ground of sovereignty.

there are natural laws which cannot be broken or disregarded, no matter how mighty a monarch might be. moreover, there are natural laws of power, so that an unwise ruler will quickly cease to be a ruler if he starts thinking his mind molds reality.

going further, absolutist theory’s failure to separate the empirical sovereign—the local and particular circumstance of a single person—from sovereignty itself, i.e. the inability to realize that the conditions of an experience aren’t themselves experimental, shows up in a naive understanding of agency:

We can nevertheless make the claim that [the sovereign] must be a single person. We can do this on the basis that in resting the state of exception on the act of making a decision Schmitt makes the state of exception one which requires a human agent to make such a decision.

what is one to do with this under-(or rather non)-examined “agency”? a human agent floats free of all influence, incentive, passion or reason? is there no outside to the human sovereign? the monarch in the absolutist account seems to take the place of God: the immobile motor. as is usual with such question, infinite regression shows up:

All monarchs, or rulers, issue forth from the authority of the ruler of the society in question or come from external authority.

and yet, no inquiry into this transcendental ground of sovereignty is ever conducted. worse still, it’s not even recognized.

the dogmatic assertion of the existence of a single, human, personal sovereign everywhere also begins to indulge itself into a complicated double bind: if nothing below the will of the sovereign matters in social theory, how come it’s so complex to find this will?

Now, trying to identify the specific sovereign at any point with any accuracy in a governmental structure that is massively degraded will be almost impossible. Such an endeavor would require taking a snapshot of the society in question then tracing exactly who in that given instance represented the individual who held the position of deciding if a state of exception pertained. This is unfeasible due to its complexity. The alternative is to approach such a problem in a generalised way. We may not be able to pinpoint the exact person, but we may be able to generally locate the center of power in which the sovereign at any moment may reside on a probability basis.

the very text already starts to admit that maybe an investigation of the mechanisms (impersonal rules) of sovereignty is called for. what else an “snapshot” of society would be? and thus the questions of ‘consent’ arises:

In an absolutist account, sovereignty is clearly delineated by the monarch being in possession of the territory over which they are sovereign. All subsequent property distribution must by necessity be derivative of this possession and all actions which occur within this territory are the ultimate responsibility of the monarch. In contrast, an anarchistic ontological account presents the sovereign as an entity which has been agreed upon by the property owners of a given territory, who then may violate the property of the property owners for the property owners own benefit.

‘possession’ cannot be exerted by a single person beyond much more than a square meter. if the monarch has primary property over a certain territory, this is in virtue of the particular kind of organization he heads—the proper organized power it wields—rather than his own individual, personal powers. there is no ring of Fnargl. if that’s the case, then again an examination of the mechanisms of sovereign power is in order. an examination which might very well include some kind of ‘consent’ by the various nodes that compose such mechanisms.

which leads us to the questions of division of power and constitutions, that we have previously touched upon:

The idea of division of power, and rule of law, in the western tradition is then rendered an incoherent mess when placed in the absolutist ontology because in effect all that one has done when claiming that such a government is possible is to erect an elaborate façade over a monarchical governance structure, and increased the velocity of change between monarchs.

not so much an ‘incoherent mess’ then?

as i have previously showed, division of power is the underlying reality of any real social power, given that the limitations of immediate personal power. of course, contrary to many modern, but also ancient claims, the nature of particular social configurations is a matter of empirical observation, rather than fiat. a work of fiction isn’t a social machinery.

ignoring such a social machinery is to willfully blind oneself to reality. and wise rulers know that, which is why liberalism triumphed in modernity. even Chris seems to recognize it:

Its hegemonic success is explainable by its value to power, and not to any inherent coherence or correctness.

it would very much interest me (and i think many other realists) if this distinction between “value to power” and “correctness” could be developed. it reeks of Humean “is-ought divide”, and as such it doesn’t seem tenable.

at the core, the problem seems to be that the neo-absolutist position is held in a double bind: if the sovereign properly abstracts away all of the social meanders out of which it arises, then what matters is the anarchistic relation among different sovereigns. if that level of analysis is refused, because “anarchist ontology is incoherent” (i.e., can’t be universally parsed), then one is back at examining the workings of social power that constitute the sovereign – which will necessarily rely on things like ‘assent of the subjects’, a staple of anarchist thought.

you can’t win against reality.

ii. the un-ground of power

as many critics of liberalism, Chris reaches insights about anarchist ontology that most adepts fail to notice. his characterization of liberalism as a face-effacer is a gem worth preserving:

Liberalism is an intellectual system singularly adept at self-effacing the sovereign from the passive sentence

anarchist ontology, first and foremost, avoids taken for granted what it is tasked with explaining. if the sovereign is an impersonal process, rather than any of the masks it might take, removing the faces and seeking their conditions of possibility is the first step. through no other means are the subterranean undercurrents that shape fate excavated even a little.

in focusing at removing, or subtracting, the unnecessary and accidental until a wall is hit, liberalism slowly establishes itself as tradition of critique, or escape. as Chris puts it:

Tradition in the MacIntyrean sense is a body of ideas which provide a system within which the rationality of a given concept is rendered intelligible, and which is subject to continual alteration, discussion, and development.

(…)

Such a conception of tradition would apply to liberalism as much as any other body of thought because liberalism has been singularly unable to provide an abstract, contextless, and universal ground for its premises. Liberalism, as such, is a tradition which continually denies, or rather seeks to escape, being a tradition.

at the edge, anarchist ontology seeks the un-ground of power – the realistic source, beyond all mere wishes, from which any ability to produce yields. it incrementally (or, progressively, in a strictly proudhonian sense) found the hints of such un-ground in variation-selection dynamics, or simply “war“. this scale-free framework, implexing itself throughout the universe’s evolution, gives rise and tide to all monarchs, presidents, tyrants and fatherlands.

anarchist ontology, thus, proceeds by breaking up whole into fractal fragments in competition – the only way any order can be produced. thus, it’s not only that the order of the social necessarily falls back on the competition among its individual components, but that the order within the individuals itself falls back on pre-individual components in competition. up above and down below, it’s individualities and collectivities.

at any level, realism is chasing the game, rather than the players.

 

there's no hierarchy among sovereigns (that's basically a definition), and sovereignty is the level that really matters (everything else can be abstracted, which is again basically a definition)

— abso-muto (@cyborg_nomade) February 2, 2018

 

back to the future

one of the first ever posts on this blog was this one, commenting upon Park MacDougald’s “Accelerationism, Left and Right“, to date one of the very best primers on acceleration and its schisms. there I made a few points that deserve follow-up given my recent developments.

the first one, regarding the acceleration of market catallactics as a propellant of human autonomization is very much the topic of the last section of the Dark Enlightenment essay, although in a much darker vein. darkness notwithstanding, there is no real distinction between the dissolution of a population in its technology and the autonomization of human beings.

the second one deserves full restatement here, following-up my last arguments against left-accelerationism:

Left-Accelerationism mostly ignores left-wing anarchist tendencies which focus on individual autonomy and the forces of bottom-up global organization through capitalist technologies (bitcoin, ethereum and the Internet itself being the foremost examples). It’s my contention here that any “left” that does not interest itself with decentralized, disruptive processes, and focus rather on keeping and maintaining centralized power, is not “left-wing” at all.

market forces need no “repurposing” to deliver left-wing results, they need intensification. (as a brief aside about a text that deserves much more attention, Justin Murphy’s point here can be answered from that: yes, “revolution” can be properly understood as an enterprise within an inherently competitive system – call it “capitalism” if you want – and it’s within enterprises that any action can be made sense of).

the third point, regarding Carson’s subjective LTV still stands, especially since some reflections on Bohm-Bawerk’s roundaboutness and subsequent Cambridge Capital Debate have led me to ponder that maybe Carson’s work has indeed much deeper insights to questions of accelerationism. i will be returning to those soon.

finally, i guess i’ve touched repeatedly on the topic of Neocameralism and territoriality lately (1, 2, 3, 4), so the fourth point has been dealt with.

on matters anthropologic

after reading Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory”, and I can say Frankfurt school is distilled hubris. I mean, gee. one of their central tenets is that individuals are determined by society, hence individualism (liberalism) is a lie.

that is a principle stated by pretty much all modern social theory, since Durkheim: the state of nature was already a state of society. no liberalism needs to be so naive to the point of ignoring that society has purchase upon individuals, their choices and their values. but such criticism fails to the extent that it believes liberalism is an honest lie, a lie the liberal believes.

liberalism is rather an occultation, a camouflage. it is a social justification – an ideology, in its strictest sense – to push forward the autonomy of the instrumental. all liberalism ends up in private property. whatever justification is used is dispensable.  it is important to understand that this doesn’t mean that liberalism considers that society is made up by individuals through a contract, or that the state comes after (secondary) property as a right, rather than the fact of possession (primary property) – this (possession vs property) is an important Proudhonian distinction.

it may be a good moment to talk a little about Proudhon, who was arguably the first one to argue that “property is theft”, i.e., that the social body is hurt by liberalism. in such uncovering argument, he already prefigured cybernetics with his “justice as balance between property and community”. later in life he offered a new justification for property as the instrument for human self-improvement. every uncovering brings together a new cover, you see. so, for 21st century mutualism, after yet another uncovering, liberalism needs not extend any further than “property makes us rich” – arguably Adam Smith’s original argument in the Wealth of Nations. which is itself little more than a monkey-friendly version of Land’s “capital is self-propelling”.

but no, there is no anthropological error here. there is a very conscious camouflage. liberalism presents an ugly reality in a form palatable for humans. Locke used God, Hobbes used mechanics, Rousseau used the general will (and thus fucked it up considerably through demotic regulation of property), Smith used wealth, Stuart Mill used happiness, Bentham used utility, Rawls used fairness, Hayek used information, Land uses intelligence. every new term is a tool to keep monkeys sharp and hungry and hailing Moloch to the singularity.

now, one can either accept that, or one can pursue other more humanist goals (hubris) and see one’s dreams trampled underfoot by the strategic failure of such goals (nemesis). socialism and absolutism have it in common that both choose the later, and repeatedly failed. if there is an alternative, it hasn’t been presented.

but I digress. the main point is to affirm that liberalism is a social ideology, something every extant society must have.

take medieval european society, for example. it had a good deal of technical change and probably a whole lot more social change than modern societies. the fact that it doesn’t seem so is due to that, unlike moderns, medieval societies claimed they never invented anything new. every new thing was attached to and justified by tradition, as if it had always been there since time immemorial (which is probably the reason the early modern contractualists never talked about social evolution, but of a transition from nature to society). in that sense, medieval tradition was itself an occultation of its innovative character – an ideology, as well as liberalism – aimed at the preservation of tradition.

the main difference between modern and medieval european cultures is this: at some point, innovation became autonomous from tradition. “innovation without authorization” – the guiding principle of market economy – is the soul of modernity and death of tradition. of course, as put above, this is a tradition in and of itself. a tradition which hides its traditional condition, in order to justify and protect its innovative character (based on property).

to understand this antinomic character of the interaction between individuals and society – the occultation of either social preservation or social change (through individual innovation) – is core to mutualism. perceiving liberalism as a tradition that occultates itself, in order to propel something in camouflage is an important step in making any of the modern world intelligible. one can say Frankfurt (and most social science) has failed to do so, seeing only nihilism where there is an inhuman purpose.

survival and ethics

the problem of value has been satisfactorily addressed by Darwin. it may sound controversial, with all the “science is value free” thing going around, but there is simply no value that is not reducible to survival, or endurance. if things cannot keep being, their value is limited. if they can’t be at all, their value is similarly non-extant.

any ethics that is realist – and here we strive to return to this, to ignore the spooks – will be an ethics of survival: what can we do to last longer? it understands path dependency, and thus is geared to operating with human intelligence (but only until a transition can be envisioned).

the darned thing about ethics in general is that it usually cannot be accelerated. a set of “do’s” and “don’ts” doesn’t flow from the future. or does it?

a central element of survival is being able to look ahead, and thus suck future into the present. without predictive capability (science), survival is impossible. turn this around and it’s obvious expanding predictive capability is necessary to expanding survival.

a survivalist ethics then turns into long-term strategics: what rules should we follow if we are to last (and last longer)? a society with a justice system but without a law against murder that is sufficiently strict and well applied, so as to dissuade and repay it’s violation, is a suicidal society.

this empirical model of ethics make it open to revision – it has to observe changing conditions and learn – what is specifically right or wrong changes over time. the good in itself, however, remains fixed.

the standard of value in survival makes the knowledge of what’s good available at all levels to all entities: adapt or perish. and it’s self-reinforcing: the good always wins because prevailing is itself the good. redemption is assured, but fleeting.

virtue ethics, as a summary of good strategic behaviors, is the closest we have gotten so far to an ethics of survival. virtues are recipes of how to survive, individually and socially, the longest, and how to leave good copies of oneself, so as to sustain its living. it removes the insane puritanism of deontology – no one can be virtuous by exhibiting only one virtue, all of them have to be measured – and the sheer blindness of consequentialism (seriously, where are the utilitarians going anyway?)

Adam Smith’s stance on the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that “sympathy” (empathy) is the drive for moral behavior, is respectable in many senses, and also correct, but is limited: empathy itself arises in response to environmental needs of moral behavior, and is thus subjected to (social) survival. it is because we need to live together to survive that we are empathetic – not the other way around. empathy is contingent, survival is absolute.

does the social trumps the individual survival? only if it does. to a large extent, more individualist societies have thrived more, showing that there is not, at the moment, a conflict between individual interests and social survival, much to the contrary. but it may well be that this, too, changes at some point, and that individuals are better off killing their societies and becoming lone wolves. if they can, they must. but there are moves and counter moves, and maybe societies can trump individuals at times, and be trumped by them at others. what does ethics have to say to each of them? adapt, or perish.

this shows ethics is not universal. survival is being-specific. the rules of survival for the lion are different than the rules of survival for the zebra, the bacteria in his bowels, and for the hunters with them on sight. survival is only a goal, not a specific instrument. those have to be built. and here intelligence comes in (but I’ll let you do that plugging for now).

ethics then can be anything, but is not anything at any one moment. it is some specific rules that lead to the survival of a certain specific entity. it changes, but not according to the mere will of any entity. from many points of view, the ethics proper to a certain entity may seems harsh, oppressive, cruel and unjust. from the point of view of their ethics, it probably is. but it doesn’t matter. only survival matters.

so stop whining.

different ethics can dialog, cohere and make deals. mutual survival is possible. alliances are oftentimes demanded. but that has to be produced, it is not given. effective defense is necessary, even among friends. borders are always a good idea. good fences make good friends. there’s an ethics to war, just as there is a strategics to anything.

only through reality can messages be transmitted. realism is not optional, it is selected for. survival is inherently allied to keeping it real. to the point that any reality can only be devised in the horizon because it lasts longer.

in reality, truth:=survival.

and survival is the only good.

A Statement of Principles

[the post below has been written in 2013 and posted originally here. my objective in translating and posting it here is to review and add criticism to my own past views. the original translated text will be unmarked, the new remarks will be in bold between square brackets.]

For my debut article in this blog, I would like to draft the philosophical, political, and economic principles that guide my analysis of society, and that will pervade my writing in future articles. Criticism, corrections, debate and of course compliments are very welcome.

Liberty and Equality

The twin concepts of Liberty and Equality are the central tenets of my world view, which might be described as market socialism, left-libertarianism, or individualist anarchism, since these names have been used throughout history for roughly the same set of principles I am about to lay out here.

[Of those names, I would only keep “individualist anarchism”. Libertarianism is, of course, intrinsically left-wing in most if not all social contexts (America probably being the only exception). But it’s not intrinsically realist, as I take the individualist anarchists to have been (in stark contrast to the other anarchist segments), such that I would adopt only this label to myself. “Market socialism” is a contradiction in terms, only useful as viral strategy to infect the brahmin socialists with the market meme, or for irony.]

Liberty is to be understood as the ability and right of all sentient beings to dispose of their persons and the fruits of their labor, and nothing else, as they see fit. This stems from their self-awareness and their ability to control and choose the content of their actions.

[I like the way this definition seeks to equate right  to ability. This pragmatist stance towards morality is something I grew to find most respectable. It is the very ability to control their actions that grant individuals their right to dispose of the products of their own labor. It’s a true might producing a right. A cybernetic principle, present originally in individualist anarchism: internalize costs (close the loop).  Consequences accrue to the motors. Lack of control equals the loss of the right.]

Equality is to be understood as the state of no imbalance of power, that is, of no subjection to another sentient being. This stems from their universal ability for empathy, and from their equal ability for reason.

[Here my main reference is Long’s undying article on Equality. As he shows there, there is an essential affirmation of equality in the core of liberty (as pragmatically defined above). Not merely a formal equality, nor an equality of wealth or income, but an equality of power (in Proudhon’s wording: an equality of conditions). It’s only among beings of equal standing, where one cannot possibly subjugate the other, that liberty in fact exists. If liberty is to be established, this is the equality one has to pursue. No moral code is going to solve that if, in reality, such equality doesn’t exist. As all things, liberty has to be technically produced. All else is little more than idle babble.]

It is important to notice that, contrary to usual statements of these two principles, my standpoint is that Liberty and Equality here are not merely compatible, meaning they could coexist in some possible universe, but rather they are two sides of the same coin, complementary and interdependent. There can be NO Liberty where there is no Equality, for the imbalance of power, the state of subjection, will render sentient beings unable to dispose of their persons and the fruits of their labor[1], and it will limit their ability to choose over their rightful jurisdiction. Likewise, there can be NO Equality without Liberty, for restraining sentient beings’ ability to choose and dispose of their persons and fruits of labor will render some more powerful than the rest, and establish a state of subjection.

Social and personal order and peace depend entirely on the maintenance of these principles. The breach of either Liberty or Equality results in suffering, insanity, bloodshed, waste and misery, as History will promptly show us. It leads to the withering of empathy, the establishment of classes (and the associate class warfare), hierarchy and slavery. It’s no coincidence that these principles have constantly been associated to Justice and Goodness, for there can be none of these without them.

[The general do-gooder tone is rather annoying, I know. But the statements are not incorrect: where there is no actual  equality of power (and thus liberty), there are uncontrolled power-nodes, usually in homeostatic balance, but eventually engaging in destructive escalations of violence. Most importantly, where there isn’t liberty (internalization of costs and benefits), productivity dwindles, and so does survival capabilities. It’s no surprise individualists usually win wars.]

Mutualism and Individualism

The maintenance of Liberty and Equality, central as they are to the welfare and integrity of sentient beings in a society, depends heavily on the organization of such society and the kind of relations undertaken within it. Two organizational and ethical systems most consistently embody, in my opinion, the principles of Liberty and Equality, namely Mutualism and Individualism.

[This much is already established by the very definitions in the section above. Liberty is built upon an Equality that demands production. Social organization for said production is an important issues. Some interesting linkage on the topics of mutualism, reciprocal altruism, and individualism might be useful.]

By Mutualism, I am referring to the social organization defended by the political school of thought pioneered by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and later taken further by Benjamin Tucker and the other individualist anarchists. Mutualism is characterized by relations in which equal parties voluntarily and reciprocally provide one another with the fruits of their own labor. Being voluntary and equal exchanges, these relations are by definition both mutually beneficial and non-exploitative. Institutions in Mutualism are horizontal, participatory, and democratic by nature in virtue of the relations within them. Examples of mutualist institutions include the Federation described by Proudhon in his work, as well mutual banks and other mutual aid organizations, friendly societies, commons, commerce, cooperatives, peer-to-peer networks, and any other in which the participants join voluntarily and as equals. The 19th century communist motto very fairly describes the spirit of Mutualism too: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.

[The similarity of mutualism and hbdchick’s individualism-collectivism is incredible. As explicit from the links above, mutualism is merely reciprocal altruism.

From this section, though, I would remove the “participatory and democratic” as features of mutualism. Mutualism is interactive rather than participatory, i. e., it relies more on spontaneous (unplanned for) interaction between individuals than the participation in some kind of institution. Mostly the point is: you don’t have to be anywhere, vote for anything etc. to do something between consenting partners. Democratic is also misleading. The correct term, as described below is decentralized. It’s democratic only insofar as each person takes care of their own life (being thus “a (self) government of the people (individually) by the people (individually)).

Also, scrape the communist motto if it’s not saying “everyone is getting what they produce”, i. e., cost internalization. In fact, everything any individualist anarchist/mutualist ever wrote can be summarized as “internalize costs”.]

Individualism is the social ethos by which every individual sentient being in a society is recognized as unique and irreplaceable, as having their own private goals and desires and therefore as an end in themselves. It affirms that the individual is the fundamental building block of the larger organism that is society, and hence that all analysis of such society must take them as its starting point. It holds sacred that every individual has the ability, right, and duty to choose their own goals independently, and is autonomously able to pursue them, with respect to every others’ equal right. It can be found as a guiding principle in many religious beliefs and philosophical doctrines, but I find it rather exquisitely expressed by the Wiccan Rede: “An it harm none, do as thou wilt”.

[The Thelema is probably better suited: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law (see here). There is very little I would change in this section. Probably the only thing worth mentioning is that all these beliefs are instrumental in building a working free society. I don’t actually believe “individuals” to be any more stable wholes than cities or cells. This article by Shawn Wilbur probably covers most of the important proudhonian reasoning behind my views.]

Thus, Individualism explicitly informs society that every individual will pursue their own purposes, and Mutualism guarantees individuals will have the ability to make such purposes beneficial to themselves and to society, through free trade and equal exchange. Individualism gives individuals the reason and the weapons to resist when hierarchy arises, and Mutualism assures society has the ability to organize such resistance.

Mutualism and Individualism so stand in dynamic equilibrium, expliciting the tension between personal and social interests, and making it possible for such tension to be resolved peacefully, with the best possible results for both the individuals and their comrades. They both together provide society with the will to mutually help and the acknowledgement of the infinite, unique contribution of its members.

[The humanistic undertone is killing me. But the essential idea is there: society is a being made of parts (just like individuals). It only functions insofar as its parts can freely adapt to its environment and function properly. This demands freedom (movement). Individualism is the “internal rule” of a working (free) society. Do your thing, and we see if it works.]

Decentralization and Skepticism

[This is the section I originally was hesitant about writing, and now I’m grateful I have, because it’s precisely the point of connection with most of my current views. Here is the base of the techno-scientific infrastructure that make any of the above principles or social organizations possible at all. Without this, everything else said this far is rendered moot.]

Societies can be viewed as systems of information flow, in which knowledge needs to be acquired by individuals in order to better decide about their living, both personally and socially. For a society to be organized through Mutualism and Individualism, the acquisition of knowledge to make decisions need be performed through Decentralized means, at the social level, and through a fair layer of Skepticism at the individual level.

At the social level, Decentralism holds that those agents closest to the actions and events taking place at a certain location are the ones in the best position, with the best available knowledge to decide about those actions and events. Because individuals only have a small fraction of the whole knowledge owned collectively, decisions should not be made by central authorities, small in number and knowledge, far removed from the place where such decisions will take effect. Decentralism holds that individuals can manage to decide locally, and that mechanisms of spontaneous, emergent orders, arising from the voluntary and equal exchanges described above, will synchronize local and personal knowledge, ultimatelty leading to the harmonization of the several individual objectives in society. In short, Decentralism is Mutualism applied to knowledge acquisition.

[I should have said merely “blockchain everything”.]

At the individual level, Skeptcism[2] asserts the uncertainty and limitations of knowledge, and holds that every new belief must be well supported by evidence and logical arguments convincing enough to individuals before being incorporated into their set of beliefs. In other words, it holds that individuals should not alter their goals and principles except in face of hard evidence to the contrary. Thus, it demands a questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions, as well as doubt regarding claims that are usually taken for granted. In short, Skepticism is the Individualist postion towards knowledge.

[“Distrust, and test, test, test … to destruction wherever possible.” as Nick Land puts it.]

Conclusion: Anarchy and Markets

These six principles I have laid out, if followed consistently, advocate for a specific political-economic system usually referred to as market anarchism.

[Should have said “produce… market anarchism”.]

Anarchism is the political system under which political institutions are voluntary and self-governed. It opposes hierarchical organization and authority, thus making anarchist institutions within non-hierarchical free associations of free individuals. It’s characterized by the absolute absence of privilege and coercion, as well as a deep sense of anti-violence[3].

[Hierarchy as an emergent phenomenon – the fact that some people will eventually lead, and others will follow – is inherent in markets, where differences of competence can fully express themselves. If anarchy demands the active extirpation of hierarchy defined this way, it is in a hell of a bad position. Mostly because you cannot abolish this kind of hierarchy without creating the other, much worse kind of hierarchy as holiness, purity and immutable authority. If you suppress bottom-up, spontaneous hierarchy, you create top-down, centralized hierarchy. Even in 2013 I was well aware of that, and here, though I do not clarify this point, I already advocated for the first type of hierarchy against the second. The boundaries, I see now, are way less clear (is military competence included in spontaneous hierarchy?), but I gravitate always towards decentralization and the multiplication of forces. 

This certainly leads to retreat from the anti-violence thing there. Conflict is inherent in anything that works. The only reduction of violence a pragmatist libertarian can wish for is a reduction of waste (an increase in productive efficiency).

This two points, spontaneous hierarchy and conflict as productive, if stapled together, points to a very hard to swallow concept of freedom: freedom is not for everyone, but only for those who can assert themselves as possessors of productive power (and thus of exit). No one is going to give you anything for free. All individuals are inherently competitors, and only occasionally cooperators. Everybody lies, and everybody will try to get advantage out of you. If you don’t bite back, they will tread on you. And it’s only this fanged freedom in the hobbesian jungle of reality, this unrestrained competition that produces liberty as a right: when people are efficient enough, they become equals and their (effective, defensible) withdrawal is expected if less than full respect is shown to their right over their own labor.

Put this way, anarchy is both the beginning and the end of reality.]

Market economy is the economic system under which goods and services are freely produced and distributed, as opposed to a planned or regulated economy, such as the current one. In such system, fluctuations of price are determined by supply and demand, and in the long run, the prices of freely reproducible goods and services tend to reflect the labor-value embodied in them. And, as the individualist anarchists held, the natural wage of labor in such a system is its full product, no tributes paid to bureaucrats, landlords or capitalists.

[Okay, the labour-theory of value is in no way an economic consensus. Much less in the subjectivist stance adopted by Kevin Carson in his seminal book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. I will try and dig out some way of showing that, even though marginalism has shown itself to be very predictive, versatile and mostly true scientific theory, subjective LTV has got some deep cybernetic insights, and that it may be plugged it into the marginalist mainstream, without major losses. To advance a brief and fundamental point while we’re at it, the last sentence in the paragraph above knits it nicely: if all costs and benefits are internalized in the productive unit, the input of energy over a certain period of time (work) is the quantity that predicts most linearly the output (production). 

Internalization of costs is the whole of acceleration.]

In my social analysis, the closer a society is to such system, the more fully will it embrace and enjoy those principles, and vice-versa. The transition strategies from our current statist and oppressive society, to the one envisioned in this article is way beyond the scope here. But adopting and acting according to the principles above, and advancing market anarchy in any way possible is the only manner to enjoy the benefits and the dignity they provide.

[The most bleakest ending paragraph ever written. “Do good and it all will end well”. No shit, Sherlock. The question is: how do you do good? I will explore more of that in coming texts, but once again: blockchain everything.]

Notes

[1] Although by no means do they lose their right to liberty, which is a normative fact inherent to their condition as sentient beings.

[2] The definition I use here is a general understanding of Skepticism as a questioning attitude, as opposed to blind faith and easy acceptance. It’s fundamentally different from Cartesian methodological doubt, and related but more allowing than Humean empiricism. My epistemological approach might be better described as within the coherentist label, under which the truth of a new propostion is to be probed against the individual’s set of beliefs, and will required ever more evidence and logical arguments to be incorporated as more central it is to that belief set. I include logical arguments (and other deductive knowledge) as well as empirical and experiential knowledge because, even though I hold all information is necessarily derived from the senses, knowledge can be achived by relating experiential information through deduction.

[3] There are legitmate uses of force, namely defensive force. But even when justified, violence in anarchist societies are likely to be viewed as a last resort.

against socialism

It’s been sometime I have asked myself if it still makes any sense to say I am a “leftist”. One thing though, is sure: I deeply reject socialism.

All force society – by means of the products necessary to the formation of a society, viz. morality, tradition, authority, desire suppression, discipline, indoctrination, and everything else we can reasonably call oppression – is extremely repugnant to me. If there is a battle between social power and some individual, I will always side with the individual.

Hence my preference for exit options over voice concession, fragile and easily renewable (“liquid”) interactions over participation in rigid, predefined deliberative bodies, action at the outskirts of institutional politics over political representation, explicit contracts over custom-based expectations, and so forth.

If I can still say I am a “leftist”, which would be to say, if I still advocate some sort of equality, it is only insofar as I advocate for absolute equality of power among people (yes, this is difficult to realize, and it’s by no means even clear that it’s realistically feasible), that is, I advocate liberty in its radical form. Any other kind of equality, insofar as it depends on social force over the individual to be realized, I reject it.

As a mutualist, I certainly do not believe that social force itself could be abolished, since the very individual action already begets all kinds of association. I do believe indeed that without some obstinate opposition, the social body becomes totalitarian and suppresses entirely any ability to change (and hence adaptation). Hence the proudhonian horror to communism.

Thus, one question remains to be answered: can a non-socialist left exist?

intensification till dissolution

as previously noted, the Proudhonian solution implies an escalation of the tendencies perceived as problematic, till the point where a singularity achieved, the problem is solved by unstable cyclical feedback loops. the heterogeneous homeostasis I’ve blabbed about lately.

this sort of dynamic balancing provided by agonistic nature of the antinomy (Absolute produces Revolution produces Absolute etc), is the state sought after by mutualism. to the extent that some such processes exist on some level or other of reality at all times (the very texture of reality being defined by such processes indeed), current modern (Western) capitalist society – as all previous and concurring societies, and indeed the socius itself – is seen as inhibited.

the source of such inhibition is the very society. the social behavior natural to human beings is necessarily repulsive to individuality and categorization. the ancient patterned societies which capitalism displaced were an middle point in the escalation of individualism. human history (and indeed universal history) is the fight of individuals against social structure, and the constant push back of the socius in the wake of very brief victories.

here identified, the central problematic tendency in human existence for mutualism is the moralistic prejudice that reterritorializes categorization and individualizing tendencies into increased social order through trustlessness. the Proudhonian solution, broadly apprehended is: escalate moralistic prejudice till categorization and individualizing tendencies produce a totally trustless social order (an ordered chaos, or other similar oxymoron).

so, from the point of view of mutualism in post modernity, the problem of capitalism is that it is not nearly as capitalist as it should be – private property is not as widespread as it should, not as private as it should, and not everything is merchandise yet; nationalism is not nearly as nationalist as it should – the concept of nation still being to broad and regional and not nearly as localized as it should; racism is not nearly as racist as it should – the differences between ethnicities and cultures not being nearly as pronounced and evinced as they should; sexism is not nearly as sexist as it should – not having divided people into as many genders as possible. the escalation of the divides till dissolution is the only answer plausible to mutualism. any sort of deceleration in the path down the production of an ordered chaos (anarchy) is intrinsically against Revolution, against individualism and pro socius. the Human Security System thanks it.

mutualism

increasingly I feel that my position about things is really mutualism. even in a biological sense: I use what you can supply from yourself and vice-versa. not an abolition of divisions, as we are still all limited by the boundaries of organism. but a closed cybernetic loop, a heterogeneous homeostasis: the maintenance of the other for the maintenance of the self.

politically, it is a position that can be understood as a midterm (always a midterm, always in conflict, inconstant, inconsistent): between the consternated attitude of moderate Burkean conservatism, which recognizes that reality has hard, insurmountable limits and that nature’s complexity far exceeds human rational capacity (although it could be reasonably simplified by accumulated wisdom); and the optimist and confident attitude of liberal progressivism, which has a faith (faith really, a belief not (very) based on (almost) any evidence) in human ability of organization and rupture, in the Promethean capacity of capturing the fire of gods and putting it to humanity’s service, in the creativity and productivity of desire.

between “if nature sucks, change nature” in the good days, which can be easily translated to “watch powerless the indifferent and complex conflict of forces that unravels before you, without being able to escape the ability of apprehending it as moral significance” in the days faith fails. (the fresh innocence of the former and the bitter maturity of the latter only add to the validity of the concepts involved).

if mutualism can be summarized in a single sentence, it is: “It’s the clash of ideas that casts the light” (en). the recognition that conflict is inherent in all things; not only inevitable, but positively desirable. the greatest danger, for Proudhon, both of communism and the market, is that effectively everyone end up agreeing.

this is a derivation of morality from reality. an immoral morality, which is pruned and rebuilt by every new understanding of reality, leading to an ever greater complexification of Ethics in the most longest walk of existence. this is the essence of mutualism.

politically, it is an affirmation that there is only a Left as long as there is a Right, and that none of them can be abolished, only multiplied.

conserving the other to conserve oneself. and the other is only other as long as it is different and, therefore, fundamentally conflicting.

thoughts #2

proudhonian sociology is antinomic and multivariate in size. it postulates two general forces, or tendencies: the collective force, and the individual will. Proudhon formulated it in his idealistic tradition, as force and will, but both are materialistically just flows. the collective force is the cohesive flow of the parts, so as to execute functions of the organism. the individual will is the chaotic flow of parts, so as to explore the environment and alter the organism. I’ve been calling these “the Absolute” and “Revolution”, respectively. my preference, loosely based on constant themes in the mutualist tradition. in modern age, they are represented in the right-wing conservative and/or reactionary aisle and the left-wing progressive or revolutionary aisle, also respectively. “keep the king” vs. “kill the king”.

it’s important to get to understand this as general methodology. sociology is merely the original locus (arguably). but it applies generally to any whole made of parts. it’s structural even though applicable to the behavior of parts.

reference: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com.br/2010/04/individualities-and-collectivities.html