Tag: politics

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Opinion

The State Is Not a Cockroach: On Anarchism

This might be a pretty short blog, but I was on my way to do something else and I was suddenly compelled to kind of get my thoughts out about anarchism. I have a feeling that I will want to use them in the future.

Now your hackles may be up, and I would like to calm you down a little bit. I don’t plan to go into a fiery tirade against anarchism. I want to lay this out mainly as an explanation of the issues I have with anarchism as a theory or teleology (/end goal). That way I can explore this issue more and reference back to something concrete.

The image I have of anarchism is one similar, I think, to the idealized Marxist end goal: a stateless society. The anarchist concept is distinct, I believe, though I don’t know the specifics; most of my reading has been on socialist theory and I have not yet engaged much with anarchist theory. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. While Marxists believe the best society is a stateless society, they are not afraid to work within state structures and to employ the state to their end. Anarchists, in my view, have always opposed this on fundamental theoretical-philosophical grounds.

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Opinion

A Review of the American Left Through Its Websites

I am going to lose my mind. I’m living through fascism and I’m watching everybody just live. And I do that, too. I put it out of my mind sometimes. But when is the time when people get serious about this stuff? When is it that people really think hard, really try to figure out a way past this nightmare of oppression?

After a long session screaming about the left (which you all deserved, I do not apologize), an idea popped into my head to look at the websites that represent some major tendencies on the left and see how they were handling this moment. Because if my issue here is that the left is effectively ignoring fascism, basically hoping that someone else is going to save them, then I should try and substantiate that. This is just a blog post, not a research project, so I’m going to basically take a look at their websites, check out a few articles, and give you my general impression.

Did I miss your website? Tell me about it! I’m not gonna update this list, but I am still starving for outlets which might actually give half a shit about the collapse of this government into outright tyranny.

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Opinion

Defining General Fascism

It’s late, I just wrote a bunch about general fascism, it’s over at Journal of Cogency, go read it.

Defining General Fascism at Journal of Cogency

Categories
Opinion

Thoughts on Christian Zionism

I got the urge to write this particular blog after taking a gander at an Al-Jazeera documentary about Christian Zionism. It’s made me think harder about the link between religion and politics, and my own perception of the situation. It’s challenged how I see the Christian influence on the decisions being made by these Zionists, but not totally overturned it. It made me realize that my critique was shallow and that it needed to become more sophisticated. Now, I’m not going to achieve that right here, but this will be a baby step.

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Opinion

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause

I’ve written a blog giving my thoughts on the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I posted it over at Journal of Cogency rather than here because it’s a longer piece, and it being on politics meant I could justify adding it there. Check it out; the prose is a bit messy but I hope the points are constructive.

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause on Journal of Cogency

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Opinion

Value and Control of the Military

I’m about 3 & ¾ chapters into Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money and I started having outside thoughts about it, so I took some time to glance at some other material and now I’m going to ramble about my thoughts for a bit. The issue I’m trying to get at right now is the implications of the monopoly of violence on the institution of money. To try and make sense of this, I looked at some writing about civilian control of the military; I don’t think I will take any direct insights, nor am I really ready to critique any of that literature, but it did get me thinking in a useful way.

If we take the phenomenon being studied here as being “value and its relation to the civilian control of the military”, then there are two questions we need to answer. First, what is the connection between value (as in money) and control of the military? Second, is there any value (as in moral weight) in civilian control of the military? Please don’t misunderstand; here I am specifically not equating money and moral weight, but I didn’t want to sit down and dig out better words for the two “values” here. What I will say is that I think understanding these two distinct concepts will provide some insight into how money operates as a social agent.

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Opinion

Fief, Province, and Monopoly

Studying money is very hard. I’ve looked at a few different attempts to define it and I have skimmed through Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money. His answer to the question implied in the book’s title is complex and I don’t grasp it well enough yet to explain it. One thing I do understand, however, is that he believes that the value of money is primarily determined by society. I agree with this wholeheartedly. But as far as the social mechanics of this interaction, I don’t know that I will find the answer laid out in Ingham’s work. I might find it elsewhere, or I might have skipped over it and I’ll find it when I make another pass through the work.

I say that by way of introducing this blog’s topic, which is finding (or creating) a distinction between monopoly, province, and fief as subdivisions of a state. What I’m interested in is how money works as part of the state-society’s machinery of coercion. To understand that better, I wanted to understand how the economy is broken up from the sense of power relations. The decision to subdivide territory and establish regional administrations, and the type of regional administrations established, are all questions that are deeply tied in with the economy, even though they are not classically economic concerns.

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Opinion

The Case for Taking Over the Democratic Party

I swear I’ll try to do something lighter next time, but right now I want to talk some politics. I want to make a case for the socialist left to try taking control of the Democratic Party in America.

This isn’t my first, best, most ideal path forward. I would like a new party to form in this country, one which isn’t beholden to the old ones which have brought so much misery to America and to the world. So what I decided to do was take a look at the times in which the two-party orthodoxy in the US has been challenged.

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