Re The Swamp and The Fire Urgent Warning to the West

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Thomas Lord <lord () basiscraft com>
Date: Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 12:16 AM
Subject: Re: [IP] The Swamp and The Fire Urgent Warning to the West
To: <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () listbox com>


djf,


I have read the other (so far) IP list responses to the "The
Swamp ...".  I think that the others have misunderstood and
underestimated it.  I could be mistaken, but here:


1. The author is completely serious and literal in advocating
    a return to mercantilism.

    An idealized mercantile society comprises regions that are
    culturally homogeneous internally, engaged in both war and
    de-monetized trade between them.

    Historic mercantilism gave rise to capitalism, but was
    not itself capitalism.  The author is, in part, an anti-
    capitalist.   He envisions a return to mercantilism
    followed by an avoidance of capitalism.

2. The author recognizes that liberal projects are encountering
    hard limits.  There is no apparent reformist way out of
    lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis.  There is
    no apparent reformist way out of chaotic and perpetual
    warfare.   I find it hard to disagree with him on this one
    narrow point.

3. The author recognizes that liberal ideologues used to
    dominate the command positions of US power.  US foreign
    policy and war conduct were, heretofore, guided by liberal
    ideology (including traditional "conservatives" counted
    as liberal ideologues).

    Trump's election (allegedly) helps to show that now, liberal
    ideology no longer orders the activity of the US.  This is
    taken to be an extreme, portentous, central example of how
    liberal projects are encountering hard limits everywhere.
    (Looking at the emerging cabinet, especially in security,
    defense, and state roles -- I think there is something
    to the author's claim about Trump.)

    So what is to be done, according to this author?  Well...

4. The author is (or writes as) an idealist who resembles "The
    Young Hegelians" in Marx's "German Ideology".  Marx wrote:

      "Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of
       men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations
       are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians
       logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging
       their present consciousness for human, critical or
       egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their
       limitations."

    The author senses that liberal consciousness can no longer
    lock nature into an out of control misery ("the swamp"), and
    so there is once again an opportunity for pure spirit to go
    on a violent rampage and express an "idealist phase" of
    society -- a phase in which spirit savagely reshapes material
    reality and society.

    "Let's you and him fight," says the author.

5. What shall emerge in such all-on-all war?  What are we supposed
    to fight for?

    The author envisions that the strong groups will emerge as
    culturally homogeneous and mutually reinforcing harmonized,
    homogeneous societies -- each able to hold territory against
    the others.  Ideal mercantilism, in other words, is a kind of
    separatism, with separate societies experiencing both trade
    and war at their geographic boundaries.  To the victors the
    spoils.

6. Globalism on one hand, and on the other hand the concept of
    civil rights (like "LGB..."  projects) are all only sensible
    in the context of liberal ideology.  If liberalism is dead,
    so are those.  What do "equal employment rights" mean if
    "employment" is no longer an ordering concept in society,
    for example.

    The author must be read carefully here.  I don't think he has
    any complaint (in this essay) about homosexuality.  His
    attack on LGBQT projects is an attack on the legalistic and
    capitalist social engineering projects.  (Perhaps he is also
    separately a homophobe, but that is not part of his argument
    in that essay.)

If the author is correct that globalism is dying under its won
weight then liberal projects are, indeed, dead.  Capitalism is
dying and nobody knows how to fix it.  To me, this much seems
pretty plausible.

In response, the author lays out a generic recipe for fascism:
totally internally ordered societies fighting over territory.
He hopes to get to fascism by inciting all-on-all warfare, using
abstract reason.

The alternative -- disordered societies cooperating over
communal territory, unable any longer to use capitalism -- would
be communism.

In conclusion:

I think the essay is written from the perspective of fairly
sophisticated theorist of fascism.  The author is trying to
lay out a blueprint -- a social project -- meant to bring
about a pre-fascist era of all-on-all war.

Hopefully Marx was right, and the author's idealism -- the idea
that Spirit can dominate Nature -- is drek.  The project to
bring about pre-fascism can't work.

Of course, in that case, global communism is apparently what
happens instead.

-t



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