The unintended consequence of GOP's Minimal State goals are policies that will transform the US into a
Failed State an example of minarchism. An anarcho-capitalism might more accurately be called the libertarian's
minarchism, if only because of neologism phobias as well as some controversies about whether in the history of anarchist efforts during the capitalist mode of production, any commune is but an isolated occurrence, regardless of its vanguard importance. This is complicated by the misconceptions of free-market(sic) laissez-faire capitalism as exhibiting perfect competition and the blind faith necessary for Republican hegemony most easily contradicted by recent events of institutional racism and the application of police power.
contradictions of the local nightwatchman state
Advocacy of a night-watchman state is known as minarchism. Minarchists argue that the state has no right to use its monopoly on the use of force to interfere with free transactions between people, and see the state's sole responsibility as ensuring that transactions between private individuals are free. As such, minarchists generally believe in a laissez-faire approach to the economy. The rationale for this belief may be economic prosperity, moral limitations on the use of state force, or both
Resembling in some aspects an
Asiatic mode of Production, we may be at an
unevenly developed moment of warlordism if only because the modern GOP selectively and oppressively exhibits clientelism, promotes low bureaucratic control and the most obvious motivation for provoking imperialistic wars. The more obvious examples come with privatization of the PIC and the security apparatus (Blackwater/Xe/Academi) as well as the continuing anti-democratic manipulation of pluralistic politics (Koch / ALEC). Warlordism in its most obvious form comes with the
kleptocracy of our foreign policy and its military incursions.
Texas governor Rick Perry proto-warlord?
Warlordism frequently appears in failed states, states in which central government and nationwide authorities have collapsed or exist merely formally without actual control over the state territory. They are usually defined by a high level of clientelism, low bureaucratic control, and a high motivation to prolong war for the maintenance of their economic system
Wolves of Wall Street, those
smartest guys in the room sometimes resemble these warlords in terms of venture capitalists, speculators, banksters, or other usury speculators leveraging quasi-public debt. All supply-side theories have a bit of a redistributive myth where entrepreneurs are the Robin Hoods resisting the regulatory monarchy and its sheriffs
Link
Social Banditry!
In 1959 Eric J. Hobsbawm created one of the most famous and influential historical archetypes, the social bandit. Fleshed out a decade later in his book Bandits, the construct touched off research on crime and social deviance around the world. Hobsbawm described “social bandits” who gained fame, Robin Hood reputations, and popular adulation. These men made themselves admired by flaunting authority and championing the interests of the folk masses against elite oppression.
Social bandit or social crime is a term invented by the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels, a study of popular forms of resistance that also incorporate behavior characterized by law as illegal. He further expanded the field in the 1969 study Bandits. Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history, and forms of social banditry still exist, as evidenced by piracy and organized crime syndicates. Later social scientists have also discussed the term's applicability to more modern forms of crime, like street gangs and the economy associated with the trade in illegal drugs.
A greenwashed version of such warlordism might look like this:
‘Regional warlordism’ involves a barbarism of unregulated climate change, increased flooding and extreme weather events, the elimination of many existing ‘civilizing’ practices of economic and social life, and the dramatic collapse of long range mobility and related developments of the past decades, with the flooding of New Orleans iconic of the future. Life even in the ‘north’ will be nasty, brutish and almost certainly ‘shorter’, while life in parts of the ‘south’ is already being transformed by global climate change. Bangladesh in the low lying Ganges is the country worst affected by global climate change and yet has only produced small amounts of carbon emissions. These emerging global relationships have been termed ‘climatic genocide’ with millions being forced to migrate away from global climate change risks that are overwhelmingly engendered from within the rich ‘north’ but are so far mainly experienced in the poor ‘south’… (Urry, 2008: 274)
More importantly can the libertarian view of individual or even collective self-management be viable without a teleology based on a
material view of history. The libertarian's resistance to coercive force and the opposition to any state apparatus (not withstanding the concept of a "
local state") while an idealism, does seem attractive but as with the terminological privileging issues with "anarchism" or even the "anarchist- libertarian's" minimal state, however designed or defined, some preliminary concepts are necessary. The orthodox notion of
base and superstructure as one way of refining a problem of
structure and agency should not be heuristic but rather the first step to achieving a clearer position on finding out what is necessary and sufficient for revolutionary direct /indirect action. As many writers here have suggested "the most viable intermediate step would be to expand the voluntary alternatives to capitalist society: voluntary communes, cooperatives, worker-owned firms, or whatever else free people might establish to fulfill their own needs while they enlighten others."
link
the question of dominance "economic in the last instance" bedevils our discourse
False Consciousness: In classical Marxist terms, being possessed by all the other "-isms" which do not acknowledge their ideological projects and hide behind implicit claims of "naturalness" or "rightness" that never can be rationally explained. One is in a state of false consciousness whenever one's mind accepts the "naturalness" of ideologies that really are the products of material historical circumstances and that disguise their control over one's thought by pretending to that illusion of being the "natural order of things." Such ideologies draw one's attention away from the socio-economic facts governing one's condition and toward the pursuit of notions like "the American Dream" of self-improvement achieved solely by individualistic effort, pursuit of temporary satisfaction of falsely constructed needs by means of Consumerism, or belief in false ideological systems like "Patriotism," "Classism," and "Religion." While one pursues the mythic satisfactions of the "Dream," placates one's true desires with purchases advertising conditions one to desire, or chants the slogans of Patriotism, Classism, or Religion, the people who really run the culture, like politicians, business owners, aristocrats, and religious leaders, grow richer and more powerful.
http://faculty.goucher.edu/...
Lenin's theory of perception for some extends the
Camera Obscura model for false consciousness cited by Marx in his earlier work, but as an economic determinism leaves so much undone in terms of the role of culture among other social structures.
Camera Obscura as Plato's Cave and as the model for the monocular eye's cinematic point-of-view
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on their retina does from their physical life process. (German Ideology, "Idealism and Materialism)
The role of
ideology as a distorting fun-house mirror rather than a lens or window remains for most orthodox thinkers. Whereas
heterodox thinking might have more than two dimensions for modeling activity in culture.
Thus, the materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice. But let us listen to a little more of Engels (Bazarov at this point ends his quotation from Engels, or rather from Plekhanov, for he deems it unnecessary to deal with Engels himself):
“…And whenever we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them” (the Russian translation in On Historical Materialism is incorrect). “So long as we take care to train and to use our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity (Uebereinstimmung) of our perceptions with the objective (gegenständlich) nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it. …”
V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 94-95
For a post-Leninist state-capitalism kleptocracy seems to be an easy transition as the new book on
Putin's Kleptocracy reveals in ways no different than the current state of other
kleptocracies.
minarchist warlords
For some the frontier of venture capitalism resembles the early Silicon Valley, but one only has to imagine the failed state delusions of the doomsday preppers as prefigured by a
post-US Afghanistan. We have yet to work through "how left-anarchism and anarcho- capitalism intellectually relate to the broader progressive and libertarian movements, respectively." But it does not obviate the pressing need to continue the discourse.
3:17 PM PT: I've recently discovered an entire cultural movement of fascist. white supremicist reactionaries working under the banner of "Smashing Cultural Marxism" complete with some rather fancy graphics which I may share in a future diary - oddly enough some of their ilk actually inhabit DK, only occasionally making complaints about "political correctness" and whose presence seems to date close to the inception of DK