I
haven’t been doing a lot of blogging recently. Partially because I know no one
reads these posts regularly so keeping uniform intervals between posts is a bit
less than important but mostly because I’ve really been trying to figure myself
out recently. With the end of my high school days, I think I’ve come to a
better understanding of a lot of what I was feeling throughout my high school
career and how that has colored my thinking on subjects from politics to
philosophy, which have always been a form of escape for me and a pursuit of
meaning in a world that often seems alien and meaningless. Reexamining myself,
I think a change in identification may be in order; I’m just not exactly sure
from what to what. All in all these changes have taken place throughout the
last four years and some of the might not seem very important to someone who
isn't interested in anarchism and I’ve still got a lot to sort out but my
horoscope told me that today was a good day to write about my beliefs so I
decided I’d muse a little on what has shifted. Besides, it’s good to reflect on
yourself a little bit, even if it seems narcissistic.
I
really made the move to the left of the political spectrum a long time ago and
have been moving further and further that way ever since. I was a vulgar
libertarian for only a short time and a Rothbardian anarchist even shorter
before discovering the works of Kevin Carson which really pointed me in the
direction of anti-capitalism and what might be called “true anarchism” going
back to Bakunin and Kropotkin. Understanding the roots of the inequalities in
capitalism to be the result not of inherent differences in human abilities (as
most mainstream conservatives and vulgar libertarians do) or of plain dumb luck
(like I used to believe) but of systematic exploitation which was really just a
continuation of medieval hierarchal society with new gods and new machines led
me into a study of the work of communists, who I used to consider my
intellectual enemies (I now recognize thinkers like Nietzsche and Machiavelli,
with their emphasis on individual power, to be my enemies-- In the spirit of how their works are popularly understood, not in the men themselves or even their works as a whole).
Many
communist ideas sat well with me (more of those of Kropotkin than Marx); after
all I consider myself an egalitarian at heart and have always detested
commercialism. I also know that throughout high school, in both academics and
athletics, I had my fill of competition. I considered myself somewhat
anti-social, going so far as to diagnose myself with avoidant personality
disorder (though I distrust psychiatry as much as anything else). Following
what I thought was my anti-social nature; I lost myself in individualist
literature (if one can call Ayn Rand literature. Stirner, maybe, but Rand?).
Upon reflection, I can say that a good deal of my anti-social nature was due to
my disgust with competition and hierarchy. If I had to talk to someone from a
position of inferiority, I’d sooner just not talk to them (I never got to know
any of my teachers all too well and always had a kind of paranoia that my peers
were looking down on me, particularly the female ones). I had been familiar
with most communist doctrines before, including the basic idea of workers’
solidarity, but they never appealed to me until I began to discover the root of
my discomfort with modern society which is based on coercion, subjugation, and
exploitation. Solidarity then, was not an acceptance of the collective will, as
I had once thought and therefore shunned it, but instead a rebellion against
their selfish competition. The idea that, as one blogger on libcom.org put it,
“working too hard is anti-social behavior” really spoke to the part of me that
felt alienated. It said, “Maybe you’re not the one with the problem. Maybe you
aren’t the anti-social one. Maybe it’s them and their heartless competition.
Maybe it’s them and their fetishification of the commodity and their obsession
with money and their need to quantify everything.” In short it said, “Blame
capitalism. For all your angst, just blame capitalism.” This is, of course, the
all too simple answer of a self-isolated teenage boy to his suffering in a
position in which all of society was saying, “You have no reason to suffer!”
So
I began to refer to my friends, who had the confidence to get jobs, as
wage-laborers, to modern medicine as the cult of doctorism, to a popular
shopping center in our area as a den of commercialistic depravity. I had
decided this society was not for me and I would make my way out to study
others, rekindling my passion for anthropology.
This
is not to say that I consider myself an anarcho-communist now, I am still much
closer to mutualism based on Carson and Proudhon. I can’t say I consider the
sensible pursuit of profit to be immoral, particularly through a useful trade.
Even merchants are useful when they are turning a profit based solely upon
their service of transporting goods from those who have them and are looking to
sell them to those who need them. Sinbad and the Arab traders in history and
the Kajiit caravans in fiction live a life full of adventure which is easy to
romanticize and it’s hard to say they hurt anyone. So I do believe in a market,
as I always have. A truly free market uncorrupted by coercion and those that
make profit on it.
This
does likely mean that some people will get ahead, though not nearly to the
extent that they are able to under modern state-capitalism. But is it fair for
me to declare competition immoral because it disgusts me? Is it fair for me to
declare that the only just society is one completely devoid of it? No, it would
be no more fair than if I had declared that the only just society is one
entirely free of spiders. My opposition to hierarchy and competition is on a
fundamentally lower than, say, my opposition to war and violence (it’s ironic I
began this ordering of my beliefs with my opposition to hierarchy considering
I’m doing so hierarchically. I was, of course, referring to hierarchy in human
relations only. I believe many things but some of them mean much more than
others. For example: I would die for my belief in the inherent value in a
single human life but I probably wouldn’t even lift a finger for my belief that
The Next Generation is better than the Original Series).
Taking
my distaste for hierarchy and competition (distaste is perhaps a better word to
use than opposition) into account I’d say I wish to see a society much like
Lysander Spooner and the American individualist anarchist wished to see, with lots
of small landowners employed by themselves and carrying out some useful trade
or other. This is certainly no departure from my older beliefs. I’ve always
romanticized Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian and republican America of small
farmers with no one coercing or being coerced, in fact it’s probably been this
Shire-like dream that has colored a good deal of my political thinking.
To
see where I’ve diverged from this ancient dream of mine we have to go back to
solidarity. In the past couple of years, as I have studied syndicalism and the
labor movement, I think there is more place in my ideology for the collective.
I have no problem standing with comrades; in fact I prefer it as long as they
don’t mind that I don’t do an awful lot of the talking. It was only when I was
asked to stand against adversaries that I chose to stand alone.
My
problem with collectivism is that it’s hard to accept half-heartedly. Halfway
in between individual property rights and communal ownership is some sort of
democratic capitalism, likely with a heavily entrenched coercive apparatus and
likely to descend into kleptocracy, the prevailing political system of the
world today. This leads me back to mutualism and the dichotomy between property
in use only or property in use and holding.
Mutualism
is less an exact philosophy than a set of similar trends in thinking. Its
adherents generally consider themselves socialists, anarchists, libertarians
and promoters of a truly freed market (as opposed to the Reganesque free
market). It has its roots in Proudhon but I’m not the right person to attempt
to really describe exactly what it is. A major distinction between it and the
other market-loving individualist anarchists is the difference between property
in use and holding and property in use alone. Most propertarian individualists
consider property to be made when an individual mixes her labor and creativity
with the natural world to change it in some meaningful way. Mutualists, on the
other hand, might say that this amounts to little more than moving a couple of
sticks around and declaring the entire forest hers.
Personally,
I believe such beliefs are very much cultural abstractions and would likely
vary by community in an anarchist world. The mutualist idea in practice would
be a hedge against capital accumulation and large scale inequality; though I
think large scale inequality is nearly impossible without a sustained
application of force. If an individual is using force to protect her forest,
which she considers hers by virtue of her rearranging the sticks; one could see
how such “defensive force in protection of property” could actually be
exploitive and aggressive force.
The
difference between mutualism and other socialist anarchist philosophies is its
focus on the market and trade. One would expect a mutualistic society to look
quite like Lysander Spooner’s individualist America except with more workers’
syndicates and less bourgeois tastes in which workers would own a good deal of
the means of production but an individual would not be entirely dependent upon
the community for her lively hood and could still likely go into a trade for
herself or with her family.
The
mutualist idea is not an end-all answer either however, but again, these
theories of morality are cultural abstractions and serve only to prevent
conflict and serve the peoples’ happiness. For anyone who is interested I would
recommend looking at Per Bylund’s ideas of property in use rather than in the
object itself. However, these ideas are something I only wanted to address in
brevity. I’m more concerned with the changes in my own thinking based on my
experiences and wanted to introduce mutualism as my middle ground between
individualism and collectivism in which the enterprising spirit (which I am
certainly not) can create and find success and happiness and in which there is
also room for the quietly loyal and all together unambitious second-rater
(which I certainly am) to find do something meaningful other than be subjugated
to the capitalist class; join the military, subjugate others and die; or get a
government job and prop up the exploitative system.
I
guess that with self-examination I’ve discovered that I really just don’t have
the heart for capitalism. In fact I’m not sure any of us do. Human beings
didn’t evolve to be calculators of net worth; we evolved as communal hunters
and lived that way for a stretch of time that makes capitalism look like a
mosquito on an elephant. False consciousness and greed can only carry us so
far. You can give people symbols to be loyal to and to define themselves by
(sports teams, hipsterism, bands, nation-states). You can exploit all the
avarice you can find in the human soul, but in the end the things people are
always the most loyal to, the things people wish they had spent more time caring
for and being cared for by are not things at all but people. I remember hearing
somewhere that the most mentioned dying regret of men is that they wish they
hadn’t worked so much. I’m not even twenty years old yet and I already feel
that way. I already know that I don’t want to define myself by what I do to
make money (money is just a tool to get by in a foreign world) or by what
false-consciousness symbols I’m loyal to but by the people I love. I want to
live a life of comfort yes, but meaningful comfort. I want to live in a world
where people don’t have to work a lot, but when they do it is out of love for
their brothers and sisters. I want meaning. With every fiber of my being I want
meaning and that’s really been what my pursuit of philosophical truth and
political virtue has been about.
When
I lost my faith in the supernatural, though I certainly don’t rule it out, I
found that it’s much harder to find individual meaning in life than I had
thought it was and when people do it’s usually a form of aesthetic nihilism. I
thought liberalism was about clearing a ground for individuals to discover
their own meaning and to an extent I was right. The problem is that people
derive meaning from each other and in a liberal society, in order for them to
provide for themselves and their loved ones they have to spend an awful amount
of time toiling to prop up an exploitative system. A liberal society encourages
competition at the expense of cooperation, which was never what I was about
even when I considered myself a true classic liberal. It pushes meaning into
the hands of the individual who is then left to her own devices to define who
she is and why anyone should give a damn about her in the first place. This
just isn’t how it should be. Mankind is a social animal and virtue and meaning
and identity are all communal ideas. You cannot separate a person from their
community identity and expect them to be happy. That’s why I think people spend
so much time trying to define themselves with social media and fan crazes. It’s
also why nationalism took on its great fervor after the rise of capitalism.
With the decline of religion people needed something to be loyal to besides the
market and nation-states have done a pretty good job filling in the void. We’ve
lost community identity so we look for it wherever we can.
My
greatest fear truly is meaninglessness. That’s something I’ve known for a long
time. I want my life to mean something. I don’t care what happens to my
consciousness after I die, eternal darkness doesn’t sound so bad; I just don’t
want everything to have been meaningless. Meaning is what I have been looking
for through my study of mankind and my search for it has led me away from my
previously individualistic ideas towards more collective ones (I’ve always been
more of an aggregate thinker anyways). The pursuit of Truth is the pursuit of
meaning and I believe that Community and Love are where we find meaning and
that is why I chose to embrace the philosophies that place enough of an
emphasis on them. When faced with the choice between individualism and
collectivism I still choose both just as Max Nattlau did. Human beings find
comfort in both solitude and community. I suppose this is where I should give
something of a closing statement, after all I was told by my horoscope to
practice my writing a little, but the holes in my thought process are far from
filled and my ideas are far from their closure. There is quite a bit more I
should have to write before I write the end. I’ll just take solace in the fact
that I found an appropriate place where the end should be, even if I haven’t
quite found the end yet.
