DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: Notes On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

dagseoul:

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.

This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

(via dagseoul)

dagNotes: Notes On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

dagseoul:

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.

This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

dagNotes: Notes On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.

This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

Popular Jargon: Legalize Freedom

1. Libertarian or American Libertarian?

From now on, I’ll refer to libertarians as American Libertarians. I don’t want my anarchist brothers and sisters to be put off by my anti-libertarian posts. On the other hand, I do want to tease out the capitalists who hang with the left, who pose as anti-capitalists. I want to permit people I’m talking with who like to call themselves libertarians to own or disown capitalist discourse. There are many people I like to call “plants” hanging out in various discourse communities who call themselves libertarians and alternatively “left wing” and “anarchist” and “socialist” who are actually corporatist and statist. For example, Ron Paul is a statist. Anyone supporting Ron Paul is an avid capitalist. If you’re an anti-capitalist, this presents a problem. For me at least, I’ve never been tolerant of my leftist friends who talk up the free market. I won’t let them off the hook.

2. On Freeing Freedom.

Whenever we hear I want to legalize freedom or I want freedom to be free, we should understand we’re listening to traditional American Libertarian discourse. The claim sounds like common sense, sounds like something only an idiot would disagree with, yet it’s meaningless and meant to distract and misdirect. ALs are trying to find a way to filter out words like capitalist, capitalism and corporate form their common usage and the public’s speech about AL itself. It’s a process that implies a plea to excuse their capitalism. (They’d also like to distance themselves from traditional AL discourse about coercion. But coercion is much more difficult and abstract and ALs are opposed to anything abstract nowadays. You’re less likely to hear the word.)

This AL plea erupts into public discourse in discussions about freedom and liberty. If you push an AL to define liberty, you’ll here a lot of cliches and trite expressions. Look at their online forums and the same three or four definitions get passed around. You might be lucky enough to find somebody who has read beyond the popular culture. But it’s safe to say that most AL definitions of freedom are actually definitions of liberty and those definitions of liberty were developed by Friedrich Hayek, first and foremost, and Ludwig von Mises.

If you’ve read Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, you know that Hayek, true to the title of his treatise, does not define liberty instead defining how a capitalist should construct of definition of liberty to appropriately serve the mechanism of the liberal social order of the market. Hayek argues in support of his particular construction. (If you don’t believe me, read the introduction to the book where he admits as much.) Von Mises does something similar. He creates a definition for the social action of a free market that is essentially anti-socialist in that his construction of liberty depends upon a capitalist market. These guys think liberty is good because they defined it to be good when liberty functions as they have defined a free market and they find socialism to be bad because they say so and Stalin was a bad guy.  (What is a catallaxy?  Don’t know?  They’ll define it for you. Disagree with them?  You can’t because it’s their term.)

When we hear freedom needs to be freed, what we should be willing to recognize is that we’re going to hear an apology for capitalism that is anti-federal yet pro-state, that is always opposed to social welfare though sometimes comfortable with corporate welfare. We should understand that the speaker(s) believes all institutions, services and goods should be private. We should be willing to admit that the speaker(s) thinks that citizens and non-citizens in trouble have made poor decisions and should accept responsibility for their poor decisions before they can find self-help and self-improvement. For example, being poor is a reflection of poor habit and character less than poor circumstances.

These axioms are that without which the claim freedom needs to be freed would cease to exist. Of course, such axioms deny critical thought, nae, all debate. They are terms of capitalist common sense and as such deny contradiction and paradox. They are what ALs might call concrete universals. To disagree with a concrete universal can only be seen as an attempt to be abstract, to be misleading, to be difficult. 

3. Freeing Freedom is American Libertarian jargon that oversimplifies the AL project to free the capitalist from the social contract.

4. Ron Paul’s Legalize Freedom actually means Legalize Exploitation.

Notes on The Constitution of Liberty: Hayek would hate the Tea Party as much he hated the left

Notes from my reading of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty:

Hayek would be outraged at the Tea Party and its constituents.

• One of his chief critiques of liberalism is that progressives fostered a transition of defining liberty as individual liberty to liberty as power. In other words, infringements on liberty became more about people being prevented from doing things rather than being made to do things. Hayek would need look no further than the contemporary conservative movement for proof of a movement that is super-focused on restraint over constraint. The Tea Party was initially about being taxed enough already, supposedly about the constraints the current tax code places upon citizens. But look at the language of most Tea Party protests and we can easily see that taxes are viewed not as a constraint but a restraint.
• I don’t think it’s too difficult to recognize that Tea Party members are more than willing to accept specific constraints, being made to do things, in order to receive fewer restraints. White conservatives, in particular, are power obsessed. It’s an old bargain they make with Capitalists.

I’m not at all comfortable with Hayek’s introduction to the book, which reads like he set-up the discussion to prove liberalism flawed rather than to honestly explore liberty and freedom.

In particular, I don’t like the transition between points 4 and 5 in Chapter One, “Liberty and Liberties”. He writes:

4.  … Such recognized intellectual leaders of the “progressives” as J.R. Commons and John Dewey have spread an ideology in which “liberty is power, effective power to do specific things” and the “demand of liberty is the demand for power,” while the absence of coercion is merely “the negative side of freedom” and “is to be prized only as a means to Freedom which is power.”

5. This confusion of liberty as power with liberty in its original meaning inevitably leads to the identification of liberty with wealth; and this makes it possible to exploit all the appeal which the word “liberty” carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth.

This transition permits him to assign left wing association of liberty and power to a desire to accumulate wealth. In my opinion, this is Hayek at his least self-critical, least self-aware. His desire to denigrate the left wing (often hidden as a critique of liberalism and/or progressives) is apparent as he implements insipid anti-progressive propaganda in the important foundations of his argument. Built-in to his definitions is the implicature that liberalism is wealth obsessed, that what the left actually wants is the wealth, that what progressives do is radically redistribute wealth, that what liberals will do, if liberalism is heeded, is to come for your money.

When I go on about how libertarianism is horseshit, this is what I’m talking about. I find Hayek to be utterly insincere here. His arguments are so well-composed, I cannot think that this was a mistake. It’s one thing to criticize liberalism. Indeed his observations about the way we think about and use the words free, freedom and liberty are instructive and useful. But this uncritical transition from liberty as power to the identification of liberty with wealth is problematic. Not because it hasn’t ever been the case, but because of how it permits him to suggest that it leads to a call for redistribution of wealth. Never mind the use of a very old trope about radicalized poor people organizing to come for your money, what we can say of the left wing is that any calls to redistribute wealth result from a poorly defined sense of liberty.

It seems wrong to me. And I think he knew it.

Friedrich August Hayek & His Daddy, Ludwig von Mises

I’m working on an essay and re-reading Hayek and Mises. The first thing that strikes me about texts like Mises’s Human Action and Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty: their fundamental theories that serve as a basis for their economics—the philosophy guiding their scientific claims—are aristocratic. It’s a theory of society that serves the common worldview of wealthy Capitalists. I think the goal is to justify inequality.

Both are white guys who created a structural framework that magically finds agreement with all their own political and social beliefs.

I’m not saying that everything they claim is bogus and/or mistaken. Much of what they discuss is rather genius. They’re smart guys, for sure. Nobody would doubt that. What I find incredibly compelling about their work is just how much they were able to justify their own self-interests within the basic principles supporting their scientific findings. It’s suspicious philosophy.

Of course, I don’t think they much cared. They were writing a philosophy that was meant to help the West kill socialism via economic policy. At its base, it’s a wealthy white man’s philosophy, for the Capitalists and their children. It’s a philosophy for Masters.