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Saturday 16 September 2017

The Real Class-Warfare and Relativism



Recently, someone on theRPGsite challenged me to read an article that's gone somewhat viral, from the Atlantic.  It was about the way, allegedly, that America (but especially the Right) has "lost touch with reality".  The person who challenged me on it claimed I would probably not read it, because it was 'critical of Trump'.



But it's the Atlantic. You don't need to bother saying it'll be highly critical of Trump; that's repetitive.

And the assumption was fundamentally wrong; telling me that something doesn't agree with my views makes me MORE likely to read something, rather than less. I'm much more interesting in seeing what the enemy thinks than in reading gushing cheerleading from my own side. It's why I read or watch surprisingly few right-wing media sources, usually the informative ones (Breitbart, The Rebel, The Thinkery -though Sargon would object to being called right-wing) and almost never the ones that are just about how awesome we are.

Now, as to the article itself: my overall analysis is that it is too clever to even be wrong, and thus creates the illusion of a coherent argument when it is in fact championing something else entirely.

The way author conflates the rise of the idiotic new-age "Green Meme" (as Ken Wilber puts it) with the methodical and intentional Anti-Western position of the academic relativists and deconstructionists is either naive or intentionally deceptive.
The notion that the Right was opposed to relativism because it was "threatening to their white privilege" is insulting. They objected to relativism because it denied the reality of Objective Truth, and people on the Right (be it for religious reasons, or philosophical reasons) understood the consequences of spreading that lie that 'nothing is true'.

Also, it was ultimately not the 'elite left and the populist right' who were on the same side. It was the Establishment Elite, on both sides. The Neocons betrayed the right-wing intelligentsia when they decided that 'we can create our own reality' was a great excuse for their empire-building fantasies. The Leftist elites created this myth that America was the worst country in the world and Western Civilization the worst civilization in the world, and needed to make up for it. Both of these lies seem opposed, but in fact both of them served a single goal: Establishment Statist-Corporate Globalism. In practice, that was the purpose of it, to destabilize and destroy our Civilization to create a civilizationless void-state run by Public Employees and large Multinationals, free of all those pesky barriers to their power like nationalism, democracy, or free speech.

Their problem is: it isn't working. Not just because of the opposition of people like me. But fundamentally, because these people are all a gang of nepotistic inbred incompetents. The further they get in their goals the less they can make things actually function, so we've had a collapse of economic success and a collapse of military/police stability, and all those foreign workers that they needed to import are turning out to be causing more problems than they're fixing and all of this is just generating much more pushback from the hoi poloi than any of them had expected.

Well, sort of. Almost anyone. Because if you look at the pre-marxist model of Class Warfare, this is obvious. There are really only two classes, which were elaborated on (before Marx ever came up with his nonsense) by the Enlightenment Philosophers as the "productive class" and the "political class", but would now be better put as "producers" and "parasites".
These people who have pushed for the erosion of our civilization and (to that end) the elimination of the idea of absolute values are every one of them to a man (or woman, or miscellaneous) part of the Parasite Class. The Rich Rockefeller Republicans, the Hippie bullshit-selling academics, the Celebrities, the Lobbyists and 'career Activists', and the people who work that very special type of corporate job that involves making money without creating anything and often without even selling anything.

It is inevitable that the Parasite Class, achieving their goals, will bring down whatever polity they've managed to subvert to the level of harm that there will be a revolution against them from the people of the productive class: actual workers, actual farmers, actual businessmen, actual artists, actual intellectuals, actual aristocrats, etc.

All of these groups have ultimately got more in common with each other than with anyone (even someone closer to their own income level, whichever it is) from the Parasite Class; and the more the Parasite Class fucks everything up the more the varied members of the productive Class from such different backgrounds realize that. That's why today you have the alliances of Atheist Biologists and Gay Dilettantes and Game-designing Shitlords and Christian Factory Workers and Computer Engineers into Meditation and Jewish writers that aren't self-hating and Black Cops and Anthropology Professors who actually did their work and crazy half-Latino wizards and Lesbian Feminists who don't want little girls' clits cut off even if they're not white little girls.

You know, "deplorables".

It's not about Republican or Democrat, because the Republican Establishment is as completely a part of the Parasite Class as the Democrat Establishment are. It's not about Rich vs. Poor, which is what leftists don't get when they ask why it is that the working poor feel like the multi-millionaire Clintons don't represent them but somehow feel that multi-millionaire Trump does. It's not even about religious vs secular, except in the sense that those religious people and communities that actually believe in something will stand against the Parasite Class (unless what they believe in can be defined as "the destruction of western civilization", a belief strongly-shared by faith communities of Gaia-cults and Salafist Islamism alike), even if they don't get all they want from it and even if some of their fellow spokespeople in the opposition seem like 'sinners' to them.


The idea in the article that "the Right became more unhinged than the Left" is absurd. The left has become SO unhinged that it has essentially abandoned the Productive Class altogether. That's why in some ways the Democrats (in spite of their massive losses last year) seem stronger or more-united than the GOP, and at the same time why they can't win an election outside of massive urban megalopolises disproportionately populated by the Parasite Class.



It's because what had come to emerge gradually after WWII, in almost all the West, was a situation where the elites of the mainstream political parties of all Western Democracies had been taken over by the Parasite Class (who had always had a strong, but not a virtually absolute showing among the Political Elite like they do now) while they continued to use smoke & mirrors to fool the rubes in the Productive Class into following along with them.

But the inevitable result of the mass-embracing of relativism the way it was done on the Left was that by the end of the 1990s the Left has, almost everywhere in the West, just decided to slowly and then quickly purge its ranks of the Productive Class altogether. They are so Unhinged that Hillary Clinton thought she could shit all over the actual working citizens of the country, call over half the nation "Deplorables" and applaud feminists who were making videos for her about the Extermination of White Males, and still win.

By the time the article gets to the part about the internet, its argument is laid bare as having the agenda of someone who is very clearly a member of the Parasite Class resenting the loss of their ability to Invent THEIR Own Reality, and how the democratization of information on the internet has meant that the Establishment is no longer able to decide for you what information you will or won't see. Has that led to all kinds of people believing all kinds of idiotic things? Sure. It's also led to Wikipedia. And to Wikileaks. It's also led to the mass exposing and laying bare of the Parasite Class and all their teams: showing the bad behavior of leftist academia, showing the corruption and criminality of the DNC and the Clintons, exposing the control-freak nature of the Big State and the Deep State alike.

And part of why they despise Trump so, so badly and madly is that he is anti-Establishment (as the article correctly suggests, but not for the reasons they suggest) but moreso because he is just so much better than they are at using their own weapons, and turns it against them; and at mastering that free-flowing democratized-information Internet to bring together everyone who fucking hates the goddamn fucking Parasite Class.


The author here (who if you're familiar with him, is a longstanding member of the Establishment Left) is not actually trying to condemn relativism. He's bemoaning the loss of control of the failing Parasite Class, too incompetent and useless to even put on an effective Totalitarian State. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't just keep trying harder, becoming more repressive, and trying even more to use propaganda like this to get tighter and tighter grips on control.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Poker + Solani Aged Burley Flake

15 comments:

  1. What Enlightnement philosophers talked about that distinction between "productive" and "political" classes? The closest I know was the concern of classical economists like Smith and Rircardo with what constituted "productive labour" and what didn't, ie. what labour inreased the net wealth of a society. For Smith, productive labour was present when workers were employed out of capital, not revenue, and resulted in the production of physical vendible commodities. Marx, who was an avid reader of classical political economy, was keenly aware of these criteria (he mentions them in Theorys of Surplus Value and Capital), so I don't know why you dismiss him like that.

    In any case, they were not "two classes at war", but two different kinds of labour. Class warfare, at least historically, is much better explained historically when you consider both the clash between the privileged by birth classes (nobility, clergy) vs. bourgeoise (that ended up codifying the liberal conception of rights, free speech etc.) and the one between labour and capital conflict (otherwise you would never understand the birth of the welfare state in Europe, second and third generation human rights, rights that are not just applied to the individual like freedom of speech but that also keep in mind their social context, ie. collective rights).

    All in all, I don't understand the two sides you seem to make. Why would a working person from a rural state be in the same side as an investment banker as Steve Bannon? Why is the latter "productive" and not a parasite? There are very good leftist analysis of the success of Trump and the failure of the Democrats which do stress the abandonment of a common project for all working people and the embracement of a rethoric of "liberal in morals and social issues, free market in economics". Ie. "Why can't you see that an ethnically and gender diverse rating committee for your health insurance is a victory? Oh, you wanted single payer universal healthcare? Sorry, can't do that".

    You also posted the other day that "the Left abandoned you" because you always stood by principles such as minimum Government intervention and support of Israel. But since when was that a tenet of the left? Opposition to any sort of racism or discrimination, of course. But "support for Israel" in neocon speak and goes hand in hand with "support for US foreign intervention, usually through funding, destabilizing or armed intervention in other countries in order to protect our geopolitical interests", something that both establishment Democrats and Republicans (Clinton in Lybia, Bush in Iraq) know very well. What does that have to do with the left?
    "Minimum Government intervention" is also a very weird thing to link with the left. I could understand it if you linked it with anarchists but with the left? All working class conquests (banning of child labour, unemployment benefits, healthcare, universal education) involve some sort of intervention from the state. Those who propose a minimum intervention from the state are either left-anarchists that want all of that but to be provided by some sort of mass assembly procedure (not sure how that would end up being different from a state, tbh) or libertarian right wing anarchists or Rand fans who think that the "free" market should be the sole provider of everything. The common element is being an anarchist, not "the left". It seems to me that the support Trump got was in part from people who want intervention from the state, just some sort of specific intervention: limits on migration, re-orientation of the economy for the US to have a productive infrastructure again etc.
    Would be very interested in your reply.

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    1. I'm guessing you're quite a bit younger than me. Otherwise you would remember that there was a time when it was the Left who were notable for supporting Israel, and the Right were the ones who had undercurrents of anti-semitism. Naturally, one of the reasons for this was that Israel had a center-left socialist government for many decades of its early history. Another part, however, was that Israel was seen as a great success of largely liberal western values: it was the righting of terrible wrongs committed against Jews not just by Nazis but by (often religious) conservatives and outright authoritarians for centuries. And Israel was a great, western-inspired, democratic state with western-liberal values in a region where democracy was weak and unstable.

      But that was all back when the Left mainly believed in the West and western values.


      As to the rest of your points: the "productive class"/"political class" distinction was (if I'm not mistaken) first explicitly put in those terms by Charles Comte, though it may actually have been Dunoyer, who was writing at the same time. Thierry and Say also wrote about it.

      In the United States the Jeffersonian school (Taylor, Calhoun, Leggett, etc) wrote about it, using similar terms. Both the French school (the very people Marx referred to when he wrote about how 'bourgeoise historians and economists that recognized class warfare') and the Jeffersonians were influenced by earlier work from people like Benjamin Constant and Thomas Paine, and their fully-formed theories emerged out of those influences.

      Since you seem to be unaware of these writers, it makes sense that you'd think that the marxist model would make "more historical sense", but it doesn't. It doesn't account, for example, for the fact that there were non-labor members of the 'industrial class' who were engaged in struggle against other moneyed interests whose profit was born out of the hindering of economic growth while living uproductively off of the labor of others.

      The Productive Class is then ALL people who create utility through voluntary exchange. The Parasite class are those who create no utility and profit from involuntary exchange of wealth.

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    2. Also, in the blog entry you're referring to (http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/09/when-did-i-choose-to-leave-left-i-didnt.html) I didn't state "minimum government intervention" but rather "against large government interference in the form of social engineering". I'll grant you that there was always (at least, since the 1930s or so) a significant part of the left that was a fan of Big-State answers to social ills. But this didn't use to be a universal value of the Left, because a large part of the left used to be extremely mistrustful of government (who were, after all, the architects of things like Segregation, the HUAC, and the War on Drugs).

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    3. Tried posting this on your forum, but I can't find this anywhere, so I will leave it here just in case (don't want all these words to get lost :P).

      Hello all. I am posting a reply to the conversation the RPGPundit and I were having at his blog [URL="http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-real-class-warfare-and-relativism.html"]regarding this blog post[/URL], just in case anyone else finds it interesting and would like to join in.

      I'm replying to his latest comment first so he can read it in case he wants to reply (will quote both the original post and our replies below).

      RPGPundit, you say:

      [quote]As to the rest of your points: the "productive class"/"political class" distinction was (if I'm not mistaken) first explicitly put in those terms by Charles Comte, though it may actually have been Dunoyer, who was writing at the same time. Thierry and Say also wrote about it.

      In the United States the Jeffersonian school (Taylor, Calhoun, Leggett, etc) wrote about it, using similar terms. Both the French school (the very people Marx referred to when he wrote about how 'bourgeoise historians and economists that recognized class warfare') and the Jeffersonians were influenced by earlier work from people like Benjamin Constant and Thomas Paine, and their fully-formed theories emerged out of those influences.

      Since you seem to be unaware of these writers, it makes sense that you'd think that the marxist model would make "more historical sense", but it doesn't. It doesn't account, for example, for the fact that there were non-labor members of the 'industrial class' who were engaged in struggle against other moneyed interests whose profit was born out of the hindering of economic growth while living uproductively off of the labor of others.

      The Productive Class is then ALL people who create utility through voluntary exchange. The Parasite class are those who create no utility and profit from involuntary exchange of wealth.[/quote]

      I am aware of the authors, you just didn't happen to name them at the post, so that's the reason I asked for them. And yes, the ideas on the topic of Mills, Say, Taylor, Calhoun, Comte, Thierry are all based on the ideas by Adam Smith and owe a great deal to his thoughts about productive/unproductive labour that I mentioned to you, so your argument remains unconvincing, I'm afraid. No wonder even Roderick T. Long, the libertarian philosopher groups all of them in what he calls [I]the Smithian theory of class[/I].
      Non-labour members of the industrial class engaged in the struggle against moneyed interests was something that Smith recognized. As a representative of the classical economists he criticized the feudal mode of production by pitting it against the newborn capitalist mode of production. His objection to feudalism as a social order was not inefficiency, but profligacy and waste. It was the way that
      the nobility wasted labour in prodigal displays of luxury that held back progress.

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    4. Smith says:

      [quote]The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems
      every-where to regulate the proportion between industry and
      idleness. Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails:
      wherever revenue, idleness. Every increase or diminution of
      capital, therefore, naturally tends to increase or diminish the
      real quantity of industry, the number of productive hands,
      and consequently the exchangeable value of the annual produce
      of the land and labour of the country, the real wealth
      and revenue of all its inhabitants[/quote].

      Most of those following Smith's conception were aiming the bourgeois criticism of feudalism at landlords, aristocrats and all those representing roughly the ancien regime: right by inheritance, control of the state and its coercive strength in order to subjugate those individuals who were participating in productive labour (in order for unproductive members of society to live off that productive labour of others).

      This is why I didn't understand your theory of class warfare from the post. You say:

      [quote]It is inevitable that the Parasite Class, achieving their goals, will bring down whatever polity they've managed to subvert to the level of harm that there will be a revolution against them from the people of the productive class: actual workers, actual farmers, actual businessmen, actual artists, actual intellectuals, [COLOR="#000000"][B]actual aristocrats[/B][/COLOR], etc. [/quote]

      I'm left scratching my head when you say that "actual aristocrats" are members of the "productive class". Aristocrats were the target of the criticism of both Smith and of many of those influenced by him who you cited, and were, by definition, living off the use of the coercive state (which is the apparatus that holds their birthright, their land titles, their authority). It's not that I support the ideas of Smith or of any of those authors you cited, mind you, but at least they are consistent. This lumping of "actual aristocrats" with "actual workers" is nowhere to be found in Smith, and I highly doubt in any of the other authors (I don't know, maybe there's some writing by Calhoun supporting aristocrats to couple his fawning over slavery somewhere).

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    5. Your definition of "the productive class" as:

      [quote]The Productive Class is then ALL people who create utility through voluntary exchange. The Parasite class are those who create no utility and profit from involuntary exchange of wealth.[/quote]

      Is thus difficult to understand. When an "actual worker" works he is not "exchanging" anything "voluntarily": if he doesn't work, he doesn't it, simple as that. That is not "voluntary exchange" from which you can withdraw. An "actual aristocrat" can choose to exchange the rent he collects from his land or not, but how does the rent he is collecting "create utility"? It is actually the opposite of it: he is charging because there is an authority (the state) which protects his private property over it.

      It gets even more confusing when you say that the "parasite class" is composed of:

      [quote]The Rich Rockefeller Republicans, the Hippie bullshit-selling academics, the Celebrities, the Lobbyists and 'career Activists', and the people who work that [B]very special type of corporate job that involves making money without creating anything and often without even selling anything.[/B][/quote]

      The last line is ironic, as that is exactly what "actual aristocrats" make. It is also weird to separate "actual businessmen" and "Rich Rockefeller Republicans" with no objective basis (who's to say which is one and which is the other). Exactly the same as "actual intellectuals" and "bullshit-selling academics". At the end, it looks like you separate between "people from X profession or group that I like vs people from X that I don't like". The thing gets even more convoluted when you think that many of those you describe as the "parasite class" [B]are fulfilling the criteria you yourself set for the productive class[/B]. I might despise bullshit-selling academics as much as you do, but by your own criteria (which leaves the market to validate what is productive and what not), they are productive. Con artists pitching TED talks about postmodernism, why the West is so evil, and all those SJW things we don't like are doing it because it pays to do so. People pay for it, and they get "utility" from "voluntary exchange": they pay money to hear someone tell them they are evil because they were born in some country and they should "check their privilege".


      Why do you then exclude them from the productive class when they fulfill the criteria you yourself set? It's one way or the other: either the market validates or it doesn't, but you can't then no Scotsman

      ").

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    6. [quote]I'm guessing you're quite a bit younger than me. Otherwise you would remember that there was a time when it was the Left who were notable for supporting Israel, and the Right were the ones who had undercurrents of anti-semitism. Naturally, one of the reasons for this was that Israel had a center-left socialist government for many decades of its early history. Another part, however, was that Israel was seen as a great success of largely liberal western values: it was the righting of terrible wrongs committed against Jews not just by Nazis but by (often religious) conservatives and outright authoritarians for centuries. And Israel was a great, western-inspired, democratic state with western-liberal values in a region where democracy was weak and unstable.

      But that was all back when the Left mainly believed in the West and western values.
      This does not address my question which was why do you think "support for Israel" was supposed to be an intrinsic part of the left that it "abandoned". There is nothing that support that. If anything, you can say that, as during the Cold War the international stance of different political factions mirrored what the power they adhered to (the US and the USSR, with some leftists factions following China) did. In that case, most countries aligned with the Soviet Union cut ties with Israel after 1967. It could be that you were old enough to have memories from before that time, which would put you in the 60's range, I guess. The actual tradition of a big part of the left, especially after that, is more in line with support for colonized peoples like the Palestinians (see for example Irish Republicans in Ireland, the French Communist Party, etc.).
      But that is not related to the question, as what you said is that "support for Israel" put you "squarely on the left", and there is simply nothing that makes it an intrinsic leftist feature (nor is not supporting it a requisite either).
      Also, I am a leftist and I very much support some western values (I don't really think that you should support values just because of their place of origin, as, like I said, some "western values" positive and some negative; it's absurd to need to adhere to some "geographical values" in bulk).

      [quote]Also, in the blog entry you're referring to (http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/09/when-did-i-choose-to-leave-left-i-didnt.html) I didn't state "minimum government intervention" but rather "against large government interference in the form of social engineering". I'll grant you that there was always (at least, since the 1930s or so) a significant part of the left that was a fan of Big-State answers to social ills. But this didn't use to be a universal value of the Left, because a large part of the left used to be extremely mistrustful of government (who were, after all, the architects of things like Segregation, the HUAC, and the War on Drugs).[/quote]

      I stand corrected in the quote then. And the idea that the left considered the need for a collective actor (the state) to solve social and economic problems predates the 1930's by large. Just consider that the debates economists were having about how to organize production usually involved either leaving everything to the market or using a planning agency (be it worker councils, the state) in order to achieve maximum social efficiency (revolutions were happening way before the 1930s in order to attempt to do so).
      The part of the left mistrustful of government were either mistrustful of particular governments (as a socialist, you had every reason to mistrust the government of a capitalist state trying to jail you for political activities) or anarchists (who were largely associated with the left, but who are not all of the left; and as I mentioned, there are right-wing anarchocapitalists, and in general libertarianism is the current more obsessed with governments being something bad "per se

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    7. (I'm sorry, just realized there is a filter in your forum where new threads have to be approved by a mod before being visible, that's why I can't find it... my bad!)

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    8. That's right. That subforum in particular requires approval, just because it is the only part of theRPGsite where political issues are covered.
      Your thread was approved, and I answered it there, so I'm not going to bother repeating it here.

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  2. "And part of why they despise Trump so, so badly and madly is that he is anti-Establishment".

    We elected a wealthy white guy, can't get much more anti-establishment than that. Pull the other one, its got bells on.

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    1. In an age where all the values of the Baby Boomer generation have taken complete control of the culture, and where the Millennials have taken it to its rotted extremes, shifting from "do your own thing, man" to Totalitarianism, the only way to be anti-Establishment is to reject that rot.

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    2. One does not overcome rot by appointing members of the "power elite" to critical positions in government. One is not anti-establishment when one's secretary of state was the CEO of ExxonMobil. Even if he was, positions of power are not the appropriate place to experiment with the culture wars.

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    3. Just to be clear,I am not a liberal. I voted McCain in 08, Romney in 12, but I did not vote Hillary or Trump last year. I voted for Gary Johnson, along with 4 million others, because he impressed me.

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    4. Seriously? Naked fat beardo guy dancing at the Libertarian convention impressed you?

      You get that if those 4 million stopped fucking around with the useless party of stoners and lunatics and mass-joined and subverted the GOP, we'd have a party that would be really Libertarian and could also win?

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    5. I appreciated Johnson's stance on civil liberties. If another candidate were to come along with the same views, I'd probably vote for them . I see no difference between the Republican and Democratic party. They all voted for the Patriot act, for one. If Trump had any firm stance on civil liberties I would have voted for him. He is woefully lacking in that department.

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