[LAF] Latest Installment on Pendrism

[steve ash]

I havent been able to fwd all due to the complex cross posting in different pages on Facebook, but this gives the general idea.

From Tim Pendry (via Facebook)

Steve's paper is very well written and makes some of my points about the nature of politics better than I had done myself. His criticism of trades unionism is well taken.

The point at which his argument breaks down is in his consideration of the Milgram experiments as showing the potential for revolt (expressed in the refusal of a minority to act cruelly despite their orders or at the least to question those orders before complying). Steve tries to grasp at this straw by noting its potential for radical change but I must insist that we go back to the original subject of my paper which is the current crisis.

I will concede that it is quite possible (indeed I feel I am working towards this in my personal life and morality) that, in time and with will, the human condition will change to the extent that the minority who refuse to obey orders becomes larger and the minority who questions orders becomes a majority (there are some signs of this revolution taking place over the last thirty years in the West). The next stage will be that the minority who refuses to obey orders becomes a majority and the system then falls apart.

My new-found 'conservative pessimism' arises not from any rejection of this as a possibility in the far future but of its lack of likelihood now in three respects: a) the survival of the manipulative sociopath who can make or exploit what rules exist under any circumstances; b) the adaptive ability of the system to construct new, 'soft' forms of power (influence instead of 'auctoritas') that result in the same outcomes as the use of command and terror; and c) the sheer length of time it will take to get people to understand that not only can they question authority but that they can stand up to undue influence. It is not that we won't get there in the end but that cultural, social and economic conditions enable the system's manipulation of us as much as it enables our resistance to its manipulation.

The 'green revolution' in Iran was almost sent down to us from heaven as an example of how objective conditions can be manipulated to promote a fairly spurious form of freedom through the use of soft power manipulation. It is not that the revolt is wrong in its aims, but it is a revolt in which genuine grievances are being manipulated into a form of revolt for the ends of others whose eventual grasp of power will merely be more 'modern', easier to live with but not much more free in its essentials. The victors (if they win) will replace the struggle against authority with a life lived swimming in the molasses of self-imposed conformity with values derived from outside the culture in which the revolution was created. It is a constructed struggle appearing before its time, not an organic struggle appearing at its right time.

The difference between Steve and I is not so great but this matter of the cultural enablement of liberation is critical. If oppression is worn lightly by us as human beings, we can throw it off soon and as an act of collective will, but if, as I suspect, oppression is embedded within our very souls by habit, conformity, practice, convention, anxiety and fear, then the process of liberation may take generations. Meanwhile, we are left with a system that is not merely capable of adaptation but is conscious of its ability to do so through transferring its modus operandi from the employment of hard to the use of soft power techniques of social management.

This can be the only explanation for a massive diversion of state funds in the West from hard power tools (including troops on the ground and air power) to the purchase of the time of political scientists and anthropologists. We have already seen, in West Asia, a struggle within the military system between those who see victory through the aggressive application of force and those who see it as a matter of 'hearts and minds'. This debate has been synthesised into new strategies for subverting cultures where subjects police other subjects in order to save resources for short, sharp and targeted attacks on nodal points in an insurgent or even just dissident system.

So, in regard to Steve's paper, much of which would guide my own personal conduct, I still see our problem in the present crisis as one in which we, the people, are not on an inevitable path to liberation but are, on the contrary, faced with a dynamic new threat from unaccountable state power and its allies and owners. This threat is all the more dangerous because it appears less threatening as it learns to adapt itself to our limbic and emotional drives. 

For example, street revolt was once liberating and a precursor to real change - at least of a circulation of elites. Now it is often street theatre designed to effect elite change where local elites are inconvenient for the global elite. Once street revolt created some sort of change that the people demanded, now street revolt is the mobilisation of some of the people for purposes that assist powerful interests outside their own immediate community. In an irony of history, what was once feared from Communist subversion against 'us' has become transmuted into bourgeois liberal subversion of 'them' through the medium of the 'colour revolution'.

We will have to disagree on the necessity for some rule of law but then, though both left-libertarians, if I did not, I would cease to be a democratic socialist. Steve, if he agreed with me, would cease to be an anarchist. But, in the current crisis, with whose description by Steve I broadly agree, this is a difference to be fought over later. No one would be more pleased than me to find out that the state can wither away and that the lion may lay down with the lamb at the end of days.

This brings me naturally to Simone's shorter but equally useful note. It is cast more as a series of questions rather than as a set of opinions but there are two flawed assumptions hidden within it (in my opinion): the malign influence of Rawls on progressive American thinking; and the idea of personal transformation as an internal act with immediate political consequences (which undoubtedly comes from the embedding within American culture of its history of religious transformative 'enthusiasms').

The first I can pass over because it is not core to Simone's argument but it does set the tone by implying some external 'fair' standard that can be imposed on a community of individuals but which soon develops into the rights-based liberalism in which the arbiters of society become the lawyers - a very American trajectory. 

Apart from the fact that there is no ontological basis for the language of rights and that rights-based political philosophes are as vulnerable to collapse from some hard thinking as scholastic ones (because the base assumptions eventually come down to 'faith'), Rawls positions each individual as, in effect, only having worth in the context of equality with others and not in themselves. This is actually a rather fascistic position, an attempt to intellectualise politics into some sort of order that it cannot have. 

In that sense, Rawls represents the polar opposite of anarchism and provides us with a version of the law that becomes totalitarian in its practical effects, driven down on to the people by priest-lawyer-intellectuals and precisely not the framework of law which I consider necessary. In my view, law is the consequence of struggle, negotiation and arbitration, is flexible and derives from below.

More worrying is this idea of starting with the transformation of the person in order to transform the village, then the town, then the county, then the state and so on. I am committed to personal transformation but not naively as a political act but as an act of value in itself and this transformation should include an awareness of the objective conditions of one's transformation, its political as well as social, economic and cultural environment. Hence, my intellectual drive towards conservative pessimism about current conditions and optimism about the human condition in the long run. This reverses the ideology of contemporary liberal progressivism which is as optimistic about short term change through political action as Pollyanna but has an eco-anxious depression about human survival on our planet.

The problem is that 'inwardness', far from liberating the community, merely provides sufficient liberty to oneself that the community can permit and encourages the system to develop new modes of adaptation (as described above) that can appeal to this transformative ideology. Liberalism, in other words, without objective political analysis, increases rather than decreases the ability of the system to cease to rely on hard power and to make more use of soft power. It gives freedom of expression but also gives itself the freedom to impose an underlying infrastructure for the removal of freedoms in the event of an emergency. Small and atomised networks of individuals and 'village communities' have no effective mode of resistance other than passive resistance and, in extreme cases, insurgency. This is the flaw in National Anarchism - it reduces the subject of power to the status of Native American as the pilgrims land on the shore.

In the very long run, personal and 'village' (meaning small community) transformation will change social, economic and cultural conditions and so political structures - perhaps in the direction of some form of neo-feudalism - but, in the current situation, such approaches actually assist the system to develop the means of future oppression. The new lords are bureaucrats and technocrats and the owners of mobile rather than landed property but they are lords nevertheless.

Think on the paradox of a military-industrial system that is relaxed about neo-pagans in its armed forces. The personal transformation in the neo-pagan has not affected his need to become part of a complex killing machine because of objective economic circumstances or psychological need. The complex killing machine has adapted quite happily. 

Once upon a time, workers in the city of London could have their career prospects affected if they wore a coloured shirt, now they can live private lives involving gay swinging and no-one would dare link this to their professional competence. The essential structures of the British financial system have not only not changed one jot in those thirty or forty years, unaccountable financial power has actually strengthened against a weakened State regardless of liberal reforms.

So there we have it - excessive utopian faith in humanity at large in Steve and excessive belief in the power of the individual implied (no more) in Simone. Perhaps a harder, harsher view of the human condition in which individuals see themselves in direct struggle with the system, instead of relying on their 'rights' being granted from elsewhere, might actually begin to chip away at unaccountable power!
Updated on Sunday · Comment · Like · Report Note


 Steve Ash at 18:15 on 22 June
Okay, that's a very insightful riposte Tim, and once more I agree with much of it. But I'd like to address three of the vectors in what might be termed this pessimistic Pendrism.

Firstly the power of the system to assimilate liberal change is one of the key problems we face, as is the related softening of it's control mechanisms. However the forces of liberation can also assimilate the assimilation (and so on in a perpetual dialectical process). Given that the liberatory forces are rooted in nature while the control factors are essentially abstractions, at best rooted in the artificial sublimation (and often the repression) of nature, this dialectic is weighted in favour of liberation. Of course the common leftist dogma of a culture of us and them (often disguised with naive economic arguements, but really rooted in a insecure culture of tribal belonging) prevents many from engaging closely with the cultural products of the liberal process (Facebook for instance) and alas ghettoises.

 Steve Ash at 18:25 on 22 June
The systemic assimilation is also supported by the bourgeois dichotomy of private and public, lifestyle and professionalism etc. Dualisms that like any other whose boundaries can be broken down.

The second and related point concerns the liberation of the individual and its degree of political efficacy versus liberal co-option.Yes, this is a slow process, but its power is not just in transforming the personal life of the isolated individual but in transforming the individual relationships that constitute the individual (political, cultural, economic, social and sexual). And crucially openly and freely socialising these transformations in a universalising direction to enhance the personal rewards achieved.

 Steve Ash at 18:36 on 22 June
Finally while all of this may point to a long process as Tim suggests, there is no need to adopt a linear model to change. History demonstrates transformation can accelerate rapidly in entirely unpredictable ways. A study of so-called Catastrophe Theory, where long periods of stability suddenly collapse into unpredictable radical transformations is very enlightening, as is the relation of this to Chaos / Complexity Theory.

The role I think anarchism plays is a preservation of a pure 'tradition' of radical libertarian change, not a vanguard but a wave front perhaps, one ready for constantly ready for immanent change without expectation. And also one rooted in direct action (activist and life-stylist) as much as ideology and 'political education' . Propaganda of the Deed as the old school used to call it.

In terms of the 'current crisis' this project becomes even more important.