DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

Libertarianism™ is another word for ‘the social and political practice of purposefully ignoring class’

You know that much of the libertarian ethos is that “we” have evolved to work in a much more privileged economy with a liberal and spontaneous social order that is only hindered by regulation, that “we” can afford to export other labor because we have earned that privilege, and that “the third world” has to endure the harsher and poorly rewarded labor the result of shitty conditions and contracts because they, too, must evolve.

Capitalism will insure their evolution like it did ours because NATURE.

So much for individualism.

What so many young libertarians in the US can’t seem to understand is that a good result from the regulated “spontaneous social order” (Hayek on liberal capitalism) of the free market can also be a racist result.

Results can be positive and racist at the same time. Just because something works, ideally should work better, doesn’t make it right.

This shouldn’t be mind-blowing. Everyday, it’s staring us all in the face. It’s clear, for example, that, in the US, the gradualism associated with capitalist activity—4% or so growth over the last 150 years, if you believe the historiography—is good for many people. Many people, that is, except black people who have suffered what can only be called structurally imposed underdevelopment under capitalism. Let’s not forget indigenous peoples either: those dispossessed owners we ignore. An entire ownership class capitalism and its composed market-citizens refuses to honor in its own made-up ownership society. It’s a very cruel revisionism. (How insulting is it to call this capitalism natural?)

To embrace pragmatic democracy, its policies, and utilitarian ethics to excuse the underdevelopment of entire classes of people is not ever going to be a satisfying solution to a structural problem. To claim that only as individuals can we experience liberty and freedom is fine for detached white citizens of privilege but can only be an oppressive demand for obedience to a racist order for everyone else. And anyway, we don’t simply ignore the underdevelopment in black communities, do we? We use community policing, schools, and prisons to keep them quiet about their unearned oppression.

Get your shit straight before you start encouraging activist communities to embrace individualism and capitalism. It’s clear the structure is coded with kinds of ideal individuals that most people cannot ever hope to live up to. 

Testing: You’re not special; you’re privileged.

Scoring high on tests is not merely a matter of individual students successfully studying long enough, precisely enough to achieve higher scores. It is not “that easy”.

Standardized tests are designed to reward students of privilege and in a way that forgives and forgets unearned ambition. It’s true in the US and it’s true in Korea.

Just off the top of my head, as a teacher with experience working with under-privileged students, here are questions I have for the people who claim it’s just a matter of studying:

• Did you have to work to support your family and education after school?
• Could you afford materials with which to study?
• Could you afford tutoring?
• Where did you learn English? —In the US, in Europe, or in Korea?
• Could your parents help you study, even if they wanted to?
• What was the environment like in the school you attended?
• Did you struggle with learning disabilities or anxiety?
• Did you eat well while attending school and before or after school?

I can continue, but these are some of the important considerations. It’s annoying to read about how easy it is to study for and to achieve high or higher scores on SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests.

In most cases, people who shamelessly brag about how easy it is to study are merely throwing their ambition around as if the scores and grades actually describe a legacy they earned rather than inherited. And the braggarts are usually children of wealthy parents.

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

dagseoul:

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

"Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use it in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand."

Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (via notsoterriblymisanthropic)

(via class-struggle-anarchism)

dagNotes: The Old White Stand By…Blame It On The Blacks.

Thinking about Rick Santorum’s racist dog whistle to the Iowa Republican voters. He claims he doesn’t want to use other people’s money to enrich black people. Overtly racist language, of course. I’d not expect anything less from the Catholic conservative. I’m surprised and dismayed to have heard from more than one white friend that there’s an excuse for Rick Santorum’s statement, or that it’s politics as usual. I’m learning that many of my liberal white friends are not willing to betray their whiteness. Something about calling out white supremacy in everyday life seems inappropriate to many of them. It’s ok to attack nationalists and fascists, but everyday white folks and “respected” leaders is not nice. I hate that racist civility.

That white people continue to color wealth-distribution is a problem insisting that black America is so corrupted that they cost “us” too much. An argument implying black people are a financial drain on US wealth (thus potential for equality, i.e. white people like to say, “it’s their fault,”) is crazy considering how many black men we purposefully and willfully incarcerate each year, at great cost, and our inhumane sentencing policies that are unjustly applied in states nationwide. That sort of grand expense is cool, but the small amount of revenue spent on useful and successful, necessary welfare-programs is supposed to be unfair.

That’s white supremacy. It’s not veiled, it’s public policy, it’s explicit and obscene.

On Class Warfare in the United States

5%, in the US, consume 80% of the capital gains income. That income is taxed at 50% of what it would taxed at if it were normal income. 1% control 40% of that capital gains income. In other words, most US citizens don’t have any access to the wealth their labor produces and a few take advantage of all that labor for their own benefit without having earned it.

When you hear a conservative or libertarian talk about personal responsibility, you’re listening to somebody fighting for the cause of the wealthiest and whitest citizens and against the well-being of the majority of citizens who have no access to it now, nor historically ever have. Personal responsibility really means work that others should do so I can continue to benefit from it and it only applies to privileged individuals who can afford to profit from others’ labor.

If you don’t see the class warfare against the poor, you’re an asshole and an idiot.

On Free Market & Market Discipline

A cultural term, “Free Market” has a specific use in contemporary capitalist societies.

Free Market is used to remind people of the principles of freedom and liberty that are supposed to be a significant foundation for our most free and ideally-open democratic societies.

Free Market is used to comfort people, intends to allay the anxiety and dread citizens commonly experience as they encounter very precise and accurate market actions. The oppression citizens experience as a result of the real results of technical market actions is often referred to as “market discipline”. A free market cannot/has not exist/existed without market discipline.

Market discipline oppresses because it disciplines a specific part of the citizenry: the poor and defenseless. Market discipline disrupts attempts to achieve equality, disrupts attempts to achieve civil rights. Market discipline promotes the sense that the wealthy have a basic right to their wealth. Market discipline is consistently oppressive.

Market discipline is oppressive because its disciplinary action directed against the poor and defenseless provides, nae produces, space for the protection of freedom and liberty for the wealthiest and most privileged to conduct business, make profits in the short term, and guard wealth and property over the long term regardless of the results of their business practices. In other words, for the wealthy to maintain and (re)produce wealth, the poorest and most defenseless citizens must be oppressed.

Market discipline is a sine qua non of free-market capitalism.

A quick comment on my recent engagement with Tumblr Libertarians and Neoliberals: When libertarians address the ideals of a free market—how beneficial it could be for all of us should we actually embrace free market capitalism—we should remind them that we disagree and know how to address why we disagree.

The Why is that the word free in free market does not correspond to the free in freedom and liberty. It refers to those who can afford to be free from the oppressive effects of market discipline; it refers to those who are more free from care, more free from the dread and anxiety that is a result of market discipline.

Libertarians are not class conscious. Many appear to be privileged and educated enough to be able to afford to be free from the results of market discipline. In this way, they are disingenuous at best.

On the other hand, many libertarians and neoliberals are victims of market discipline. And all I can say about that is some citizens are willing to accept a bargain with the Capitalists. The bargain struck results in a promise: “You promise to fight for our cause, our Privilege, then we will give you a shot at one day becoming one of us.” I feel that these libertarians and neoliberals ignore the well-established foundations of modern thought regarding markets, capitalism and economics in order to embrace a highly suspicious structure/framework for an ideal society that simply cannot ever exist for them.