Mutualism refers to a social movement and corresponding philosophy— as popularized by Pierre Proudhon— that is decidedly modernist in its original orientation, coming out of the Radical Enlightenment. In the name of postmodernism and cultural Marxism—found among the elites of university campuses—, however, mutualism’s modernist orientation has been downplayed, resulting in confusion (obscurantism), polarization (“Tuckerites” and “neo-Proudhonians”), and followed by reductionism (‘the real mutualism is “neo-Proudhonism”’). This essay argues for the revival of mutualism’s modernist elements, such as its pursuit of collective reason, utilizing the developmental model of Spiral Dynamics, Integral theory, art history, history of the philosophy of science, mutualist history, and ecological-evolutionary theory. In it, I display clearly mutualism’s modernist origins, its position in Spiral Dynamics, its similarity to Integral theory, relationship to Marxism and cultural Marxism, and its position on war, stratification, and sociocultural evolution, as well as matters having to do with the current cultural war. Essentially, I argue that postmodernism is largely irrelevant to mutualism, and that mutualists would do best to adopt a position supporting something more like integral remodern mutualism, which I am advocating as being appropriate to tier-two consciousness in Spiral Dynamics, and in light of insights also from ecological-evolutionary theory.
Part 1
Spiral Dynamics
Spiral Dynamics refers to the developmental model created by Clare W. Graves and popularized by Don Beck. According to the Spiral Dynamics model, as promoted by Don Beck, individuals and their societies go through developmental processes through time that can be symbolized in the motion along a spiral (Don Beck holds that time itself is a spiral, which has both linear and cyclical elements). As one develops in life—either as an individual or as a society, and usually with some degree of both because societies are composed of individuals— one moves up the spiral along different levels, represented by different colors. These colors are Beige, as the base of the spiral, and going on up to Purple, Red, Blue, Orange, and then Green, a complete set representing the first “tier” of development. A second tier is composed of Yellow and Turquoise, with more colors expected to follow with continual development and research. One is said to move up the scale of colors as one develops a more matured worldview, each color representing a wordview orientation.
[Image source: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/campaigns/the-big-rethink/the-big-rethink-part-10-spiral-dynamics-and-culture/8638840.article]
When one starts off one begins in Beige—the “archaic” self— which represents our most primal and narcissistic self. This self has very little concern for others, and is only really concerned with its immediate needs. The next step in the self is the “magical” self—represented by Purple— a self which is very superstitious and ritualistic, concerning itself mainly with security (often provided by supernatural sources). The Red self—the “dominator” self— is impulsive, and operates primarily on the principle of power and control. The “authoritarian” self—Blue—is concerned with formal rules and structured order. Next we have Orange—the “competitive” self—which is concerned with achievement and success. And lastly on tier one, we have the Green self—the “communal” self—which is concerned with equality of outcome. This concludes tier one.
As one develops as a person or as a society, one goes through these various stages from Beige, to Purple, to Red, and so on. One of the rules, however, is that stages cannot be skipped, but that one must go through the intermediate stage to get to the next level up. As one develops through the stages, one is understood to “transcend and include” the level below as one moves up, meaning that the previous levels never go anywhere, and are not eliminated in the individual or society, but are built upon as in a foundation, which can always be reverted to. In some ways, this model is not unlike Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs (Maslow being a contemporary of Graves), which is a model suggesting that we develop further as our needs are met. In Spiral Dynamics, one cannot skip stages, but one can fall back down a stage or more, such that someone at a level Green development will revert to their old Orange or Blue or Red self. However, they are said never to forget that those later stages exist once they have experienced them.
The first tier represents different kinds of insights which, while being stacked, are incongruent and in competition with one another until one gets to the second tier. In other words, as one moves upward along the first tier of development, one tends to ignore the value of the previous stages, believing their new level of development to do away with the need for previous stages altogether. However, when one hits the second tier of development—starting in Yellow and going into Turquoise and beyond—one comes to understand that each of these stages of development has a function which is useful in the correct context.
These stages also coincide with different eras of humanity. Of particular interest to our discussion today will be the developmental stages from a medieval Blue to a modern Orange to postmodern Green and then an integral Yellow, which I argue should be filled by a remodern mutualism.
Premodernity, Modernity, and Postmodernity
The transition from premodern Blue to modern Orange was the change associated with the Enlightenment, particularly that part which was actualized in the form of the bourgeois or Moderate Enlightenment, and what resulted from it for the new WASP elite. The Moderate Enlightenment was associated largely with dualism, deism, and inductive science, and had followed after the mainline Scientific Revolution, the Moderate Reformation, and the Renaissance. It had— with aid from the proto-Industrial Revolution and the help of the resulting printing press, the allegiance of the lower gentry and bourgeoisie, the leadership of fraternal societies such as the Freemasons, and discussion networks and “third places” such as the Republic of Letters and coffee and tea houses— ushered in republican forms of governance and capitalist forms of economy. This was a massive achievement in the history of mankind, which had never before happened. The Orange Moderate Enlightenment is associated with the modern era, with separation of church and state, freedom of speech, republican government, and capitalism, to name a small number of its associated values. However, there is also a little told story about the Radical Enlightenment, which is of interest to us here.
The Radical Enlightenment tended to free thought, and especially grew out of the pantheism of thinkers such as Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, John Toland, and so on, but also with early atheists and agnostics, etc. Unlike the oligarchical republicanism supported by the Moderate Enlightenment deists, however, radicals tended to push for democratic republicanism and individualism. It’s actually with this bunch that the radical and socialist, Gustave Courbet, the leader in modernist art, would be at home, painting a fellow of interest to us in this discussion, the radical republican and mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Among the radicals, modernism considered the limitations of the Moderate Enlightenment from within Orange itself (and may actually be an anticipant of Yellow or Turquoise, ready before its time).
The Enlightenment produced many changes in art, which would come to be known as modern art, which—in its widest sense— would take the form of Romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, Fauvism, cubism, expressionism, cubism, photorealism, pop art, and more. Built into many of these movements following the Enlightenment, was the question of whether the Enlightenment was even living up to its own claims of progress. Romanticism, for instance, would push back against Enlightenment rationalism to some degree. Because of Romanticism’s anti-rationalism, and despite its being a form of modern art, it is sometimes considered counter-Enlightenment and anti-modern, and may not be the most suited to being described as a form of modernism, Orange. However, much within modern art challenged the Enlightenment, and Romanticism was not alone in this. But, where Romanticism criticized the Enlightenment for going too far in its quest of rationality—largely from a populist and aristocratic position—, modernism (in a wide sense which includes realism) challenged the Enlightenment to move further (though, perhaps with some spiritual guidance), some elements of which—such as the socialism of realist painter, Gustave Courbet— may be an outgrowth of the persistent Radical Enlightenment.[1] Naturally, Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe holds that
It is in the ideals of the Enlightenment that the roots of Modernism, and the new role of art and the artist, are to be found. Simply put, the overarching goal of Modernism, of modern art, has been the creation of a better society.[2]
Remodernist, Richard Bledsoe, says,
I define the era of Modern Art as running almost 100 years, bracketed by two art shows: the Salon des Refusés in Paris 1863, to the first major Pop Art show held in New York in 1962. The roots run deeper, and the influence lingers longer, but this is a useful measure for when Modern ideas were the most important in the culture.[3]
Important to note is that Gustave Courbet—who will be central to our discussion of modernism—was on the list for attendance at this event, though his painting of drunken priests was refused even here, and his fellow in the artists’ federation he put together, Manet, took the lead in modern art. Interestingly enough, Courbet’s piece The Painter’s Studio: a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life, which was painted prior, is another contestant for the origins of modernism in art. On the left in this painting are people who Courbet associated with problematic elements in society—“the exploiters and exploited” as he put it, or “a cast of stock characters: a woodsman, the village idiot, a Jew, and others” as others put it[4]— while on the right are found people who Courbet is fond of, including his close friends, collectors of his art, and the mutualist Pierre Proudhon. We might also point out the relationship of modernism to avante-garde, a word which was first coined by the Saint Simonian, Olinde Rodrigues, in his essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.” Modernism is largely a variety of avant-garde.
[Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Courbet_LAtelier_du_peintre.jpg]
[Image source: https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/portrait-of-pierre-joseph-proudhon-1865]
In the pursuit of a better society, art and philosophy constantly interact and feed on one another. For instance—and along with placing him also in his The Artist’s Studio—, the modern artist Gustave Courbet had painted a portrait and a family picture of the radical libertarian socialist, Pierre Proudhon, reflecting his shared political views with Proudhon. This was typical of a modernist outlook. P. Andrew Sandlin holds that
Modernism was committed to utopian visions: for instance, international communism or nationalistic Nazism or global democracy. We can create society as heaven on earth.[5]
[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gustave_Courbet_(1819-1877)_Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon_en_zijn_kinderen_in_1853_-_Petit_Palais_Parijs_23-8-2017_16-48-24.JPG]
Modern art is related to modern philosophy. Nonetheless, and unlike with art, The Basics of Philosophy page on modernism says that
There is no specifically Modernist movement in Philosophy, but rather Modernism refers to a movement within the arts which had some influence over later philosophical thought. The later reaction against Modernism gave rise to the Post-Modernist movement both in the arts and in philosophy.
Enlightenment philosophy is modern philosophy, it turns out. And
Modernism was essentially conceived of as a rebellion against 19th Century academic and historicist traditions and against Victorian nationalism and cultural absolutism, on the grounds that the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life (in a modern industrialized world) were becoming outdated. The movement was initially called “avant-garde”, descriptive of its attempt to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo. The term “modernism” itself is derived from the Latin “modo”, meaning “just now”.
It called for the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was “holding back” progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and better ways of reaching the same end. […]
Some Modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that also included political revolution, while others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in actual political structures. [6]
In some respects, and while not all modern art movements—such as Romanticism— had supported the Enlightenment, modernism[7]— which perhaps first shows itself in the realism led by Gustave Courbet— had been a revival or continuation of the Radical Enlightenment mode of thinking to some extent. Courbet would question the extent to which the bourgeois Moderate Enlightenment brought about prosperity, as by depicting commoners in non-romanticized form. In true modernist form, Gustave says in his “Realist Manifesto,” demonstrating just how arbitrary distinctions in genres of art are, that
The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary.
Without expanding on the greater or lesser accuracy of a name which nobody, I should hope, can really be expected to understand, I will limit myself to a few words of elucidation in order to cut short the misunderstandings.
I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of “art for art’s sake”. No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.
To know in order to do, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal.
Courbet stands out as one of the most important painters of the modern period, and greatly exemplifies the period of modernist art. By some estimations, modernist art started at the Salon des Refusés, in which Courbet was on the list to be featured (but his painting of priests was banned), but this is probably a little late considering avant-garde and some of Courbet’s prior works (among others). Of modernism, Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe says that,
As we have seen, it was the 18th-century belief that only the enlightened mind can find truth; both enlightenment and truth were discovered through the application of reason to knowledge, a process that also created new knowledge. The individual acquired knowledge and at the same time the means to discover truth in it through proper education and instruction.
Cleansed of the corruptions of religious and political ideology by open-minded reason, education brings us the truth, or shows us how to reach the truth. Education enlightens us and makes us better people. Educated, enlightened people will form the foundations of the new society, a society which they will create through their own efforts.
Until recently, this concept of the role of education has remained fundamental to western modernist thinking.[8]
But, alas—as with the Radical Enlightenment—, all good things must come to an end. The modern era came under attack with postmodern Green. According to one perspective,
By the time Modernism had become so institutionalized and mainstream that it was considered “post avant-garde”, indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement, it generated in turn its own reaction, known as Post-Modernism, which was both a response to Modernism and a rediscovery of the value of older forms of art. Modernism remains much more a movement in the arts than in philosophy, although Post-Modernism has a specifically philosophical aspect in addition to the artistic one.[9]
Nonetheless, as one person puts it, postmodernism isn’t something that stands on its own, but is actually modernism turning upon itself:
Postmodernism is really hyper-modernism’s attack on its predecessor. Modernism birthed postmodernism, and then postmodernism committed patricide. Or, to alter the metaphor, it’s the case of the snake devouring its own tail.[10]
Along with the postmodern attack on modernism, Modernism-proper would be infiltrated and financed by the CIA.[11] Much of this was due to an apparent concern (during the Cold War) about the prominence of economic Marxism among Modernists (the early modernists, like Courbet, and unlike many Modernists, were not Marxists).
Whereas modernism was trying to achieve a better society—whether Marxist, nationalist, objectivist, mutualist, or whatever—, postmodernism would reject these attempts in favor of a kind of egotistical narcissism. Sandlin speaks of this change as an adoption of “emanicipatory individualism:”
Postmodernism shifted from utopian society to emancipatory individualism. That is, the important thing was not so much a social vision as an individual vision, which society should guarantee. Society should guarantee that I can create my own reality. I am a producer and consumer of reality. An endless supply of options should constantly be available to me. I can be married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual, introverted or extroverted, passive or aggressive. I can be anything I want to be, and if for some reason I cannot, someone else is at fault. I am entitled to a multitude of options.
In all of its bizarre, tradition-crushing program, Modernism had maintained a unified theory of the triumph of reason, progress by constant, unremitting improvement. Postmodernism depicts life as fragmentary, chaotic, balkanized. There are no universals, only particulars: particular people, particular institutions, and particular communities.
If you think about it, this last part sounds a lot like original conservatism. The original conservatives like Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution and Enlightenment because they tended to uproot individuals and their family and cultures in favor of a universal, cosmopolitan, global viewpoint. After all, the Enlightenment wanted to level everything before universal human reason. The postmodernist saw what happened with universal reason and the quest for utopia that it spawned. They identified Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia with Enlightenment totalitarianism. The problem with a shared vision of the good life is that people disagree on what the good life is. So the only answer is to retreat completely to the individual. In this, postmodernism is the child of Existentialism. And like the Romantics, the individual is the self-creator.
The postmodernists are anti-conservative anti-collectivists. This might sound contradictory to us. When we think of conservatives, what immediately comes to mind is their strong sense of individualism in the face of the collectivism of, for example, communism or fascism. The American Founding was largely individualistic. This is a tenet of what we call classical liberalism. The true conservatives stand for individual liberty against the collective.
So it might seem odd that postmodernists could be anti-collectivist. They are, in fact, radical, left-wing individualists. This is a way of thinking that some modern conservatives have never encountered. They assume that if we oppose collectivism, or statism, for example, we will have a better society. But that is far from the truth. Postmodernists want radical individual freedom from authority, freedom from morality, freedom from creation, from almost all of constraints. All they need the state for is to guarantee that freedom. (This, by the way, is how postmodernism intersects with Cultural Marxism.)[12]
Postmodernism did bring about some positive changes, but the extent to which modernism had the basic elements of this covered already, and in a healthy, solutions-oriented manner, is fairly arguable. Postmodernism would continue with modernism’s skepticism toward the present perfection of society, and extended it into a pessimism that society could ever achieve the sorts of values it sought to establish.
Postmodernism—Green— developed, like Romanticism, out of the continental counter-Enlightenment, which was itself a reaction to, and in ways an outgrowth of, the Moderate Enlightenment. Those among the aristocracy would express the counter-Enlightenment in terms of idealism, Romanticism, and symbolism, while others would eventually take to postmodernism, which rejected the idea that truth was actually attainable in any meaningful way. Some of these ideas were already unfortunately present in Modernism. Romanticism and idealism tended toward a degree of irrationalism, but they had not fully rejected truth or reality. Postmodernism would go so far as to reject the validity of these concepts. The Romantics sought to assert their emotions and aspirations, but the postmodernists merely wanted to criticize. In the case that postmodernists go about constructing anything, this is not what defines them as postmodernists.
The Problem of Postmodernity (Green)
We are currently living in the postmodern era, an era in which Green values have come to the fore and established themselves as dominant. Ken Wilber says that, “’Green’ refers to the basic stage of human growth and development known to various developmental models […] as ‘postmodern.’”[13] He says,
Beginning in the 1960s, green first began to emerge as a major cultural force, and it soon bypassed orange ([…]in short, “modern” in contrast to green’s “postmodern”) as the dominant leading-edge. Green started with a series of by-and-large healthy and very appropriate (and evolutionarily positive) forms […] and—centrally— both the understanding of the crucial role of “context” in any knowledge claims and the desire to be as “inclusive” as possible. […]
But as the decades unfolded, green increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), as the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). […] If there were one line that summarizes the message of virtually all of the truly prominent postmodern writers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, etc.), it is that “there is no truth.” Truth, rather, was a social construction, and what anybody actually called “truth” was simply what some culture somewhere had managed to convince its members was truth; but there was no actually existing, given, real thing called “truth” that is simply sitting around awaiting discovery, any more than there is a single universally correct hem length that it is clothes designers’ job to discover.
Even science itself was held to be no more true than poetry (Seriously). There simply was no difference between fact and fiction, news and novels, data and fantasies. In short, there was “no truth” anywhere.[14]
Wilber refers to the resulting conflicts of postmodern society as “the culture wars.” He has also criticized postmodernism—despite his original praise toward it in A Brief History of Everything, and echoing other scholars— for its “performative contradictions,” such as its absolutist and universalistic claims about relativism and pluralism.
In some respects, postmodernism had been philosophically anticipated by other forms of subjectivism, such as in some aspects of skepticism and the marginal revolution (which was a break from the more objective labor theory of value), but especially in continental philosophy, such as nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, egoism, Marxism, and so on. Because of its relationship to other continental philosophies, it has been confused for having origins in Romanticism, idealism, and even thinkers such as Hegel or in Proudhon. But it had differentiated itself from these late modern philosophies and philosophers, even from Marx, perhaps originating firstly as a manner of art, and later as a philosophical approach (with Nietzsche being a possible exception or anticipant). In philosophy, postmodernism would express itself as postmodernism, as poststructuralism, as deconstruction, and critical theory, some of these coming under the common header of “cultural Marxism” or “neo-Marxism,” and becoming prominent influences on social sciences and especially Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies courses. A “revolt of the elites” would see cultural Marxism establish itself as the go-to ideology of professionals and management.
As the story goes, after the two World Wars, the world was a different, melancholic place, in which an existential crisis had to be faced head-on. The Wars had shaken trust in Enlightenment values, humanism, universalism, objectivity, and basically anything that can lead up to a shared worldview between human beings. With it, and also following McCarthyism, came a decrease in organized labor, and an increase in Civil Rights issues, including a movement against racial segregation, a second and third and now fourth wave of feminism, and so on. Philosophical expositions of the postmodern condition—basically repeating the angst found in the existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist philosophies of an earlier time, and much of modernism— came to the fore with postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, critical theory, and so on, and was commonly found in Beat poetry and in other postmodern arts, and finally working its way into Cultural Studies departments. Postmodern philosophies stressed the inherent limitations of human beings to establish, grasp, or wield meaning, values, purpose, and so on. Rather than offering much substance of its own, postmodernism has been defined by its reaction to modernity and modern philosophy, in particular the Enlightenment, which it tends to despise.
One important institution, which is often seen as being largely responsible for postmodernism, is the Frankfurt School, associated with Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm. Many of the postmodernists being Marxists who came to question the historical narrative of Marx, these Frankfurt thinkers, along with other such as Gramsci and Derrida, would come to be known as cultural Marxists in contrast to the economic Marxism of what would now be known as the Old Left. This cultural Marxism would take the dominant place of Marxism among the Left and establish itself as the ideology of the emerging New Left. The New Left would come to substitute cultural matters for economic ones, stressing identity politics and intersectionality, political correctness, and ending war over working class unity. The New Left would become prominent among many of the Hippies—themselves having developed from the Beatniks—and related groups such as the Yippies. A cultural revolution had taken place, and some among the New Left would buy in to the system, bringing some of their postmodern Marxist and hippie values along with them. Through this “revolt of the elites,” they would become the American New Class, an upper-middle class of professionals with tremendous sway on politics. They’d take a mature form in their position as Bobos (bohemian bourgeois), and secure their place in the technological race as the techno-managerial class. All of this would pose a great threat to more traditional, private capitalism, substituting corporatism and the therapeutic welfare and nanny state, and displacing many of the old guard, WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) male conservatives, as much of the New Class would now be composed of people of color, Jews, women, sexual deviants and more (though Christian-born white males still play a prominent role). Today, there is much conflict between the old guard, old-monied WASP elites and the new-monied Bobos, and they are in competition with one another for power. It’s Christian Nationalism vs. cultural Marxism. Nonetheless, they recognize a common need to keep their class interests up (such as when lesbian Bobo actress “Ellen” made clear that her politics did not separate her from her class interests with former president George W. Bush).
Political Jiu-Jitsu
The problem of postmodernism can be understood as a political Jiu-Jitsu act, in which the momentum of the Enlightenment, and in particular modernism (that is, at least to some extent, Radical Enlightenment) is used against it. In Jiu-Jitsu, the goal is not to use one’s own energy to defeat one’s opponent, but to capture their energy in order to steer them off course, thereby defeating them. Yuri Bezmenov, a defector of the KGB, tells of international cold warfare use of psychological operations and active measures in which Marxist ideology is administered to the United States public in an act of political Jiu-Jitsu. This is used to demoralize the American public to such a point that Yuri says that “exposure to true information no longer matters” to someone who has been infected. Realpolitik plays a major role in postmodern politics.[15]
[Full version here: https://youtu.be/jFfrWKHB1Gc]
Postmodernism did this with the scientific induction behind the bourgeois Enlightenment, particularly after the rise of modernism, leading to solipsistic outlooks and moral relativism that was also fueled by degrees of historicism. This is part of its being an outgrowth of modernism, which approached the limits of scientific understanding.
The sort of induction used by the Moderate Enlightenment was criticized by those among the Radical Enlightenment, because it was not sufficiently holistic. These thinkers believed induction coupled with reduction to be problematic, because it was only capable of taking things apart. It was deduction and intuition that put things together. Yet, the new Newtonian reductionism upheld by the bourgeoisie became the standard. Margaret C. Jacob contrasts the Newtonian deism of the Moderate Enlightenment with the pantheism of the radicals and Radical Enlightenment. She writes,
[T]here was a vast difference between the social assumptions held by pantheistic heretics who believed that God or spirit dwelt in nature, that in effect nature contained within it sufficient explanations of its various phenomena, and the assumptions held by essentially orthodox Newtonians, among them even Voltaire, who argued that God controlled nature from outside, as it were by laws and spiritual agencies.[16]
She says,
[T]he version of the mechanical philosophy that most captivated European thinkers, namely the Newtonian, argued in the strongest possible terms for a material order that was moved by spiritual forces outside of matter, by a providential creator who maintained a system of spiritual forces that regulates and controlled nature. If European radicals were to keep the new science and to escape its ideological burdens, then pantheistic and materialistic explanations would have to be fashioned. Yet these would have to exist in harmony with the mechanical world picture and the new scientific discoveries.
Enlightenment radicals searched for their philosophical foundations in two intellectual traditions. They embraced aspects of the new science while attempting to salvage and to revitalize purely naturalistic explanations of the universe that had largely flourished during the late Renaissance. [17]
Before the Newtonian Moderate Enlightenment, science carried a different meaning, but the bourgeois revolutions would eventually solidify induction as the foundation of the new science. As Larry Gambone writes,
By [the 1870’s] the term “Science” began to change meaning. Previously, any organized body of knowledge was considered a science and there was nothing smacking of pretentiousness or scientism in speaking about the “science of cookery” or “scientific socialism”. With the rise of Positivism and materialism came a new and more restricted use of the word. The term “science” was now reduced to those areas of inquiry which applied the methodology of the natural sciences. Positivism engaged in a search for the immutable laws of nature which supposedly existed independently of the observer. Any other approach was deemed unscientific or pseudo-science and condemned in language similar to that used by 16th Century heresy-hunters. Science had become a new absolutism and a new superstition.[18]
But much of the new science was based on a misunderstanding of Roger Bacon, who had gotten the idea from Sufis after the Islamic Golden Age. Idries Shah, Grand Sheikh of the Sufis, points out that the efforts to move science in the direction of induction and experimentation was a misunderstanding of the original attempt provided by these Sufis. He says,
It is interesting to note the difference between science as we know it today, and as it was seen by one of its pioneers. Roger Bacon, considered to be the wonder of the middle ages and one of humanity’s greatest thinkers, was the pioneer of the method of knowledge gained through experience. This Franciscan monk learned from the Sufis of the illuminist school that there is a difference between the collection of information and the knowing of things through actual experiment.
[…]
Modern science, however, instead of accepting the idea that experience was necessary in all branches of human thought, took the word in its sense of “experiment,” in which the experimenter remained as far as possible outside the experience.
From the Sufi point of view, therefore, Bacon […] both launched modern science and also transmitted only a portion of the wisdom upon which it could have been based.[19]
The new science, based on the misunderstanding of Roger Bacon’s followers, nonetheless, became the dominant worldview over time. Antonella Vannini describes a similar misunderstanding on behalf of another Bacon, Francis:
In the same years during which Galileo was working on his ingenious experiments, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was arriving at the formulation of the inductive method, deriving general conclusions from the observation of the experimental method. He became one of the major assertors of experimental methodology, courageously attacking the traditional schools of thought which were based on Aristotelian deductive logic. The Aristotelian method, starting from general laws, or postulates, deducts empirical consequences which have to be proved; Bacon’s inductive method starts from empirical evidence to arrive at general laws. In order to produce objective knowledge, Galileo’s and Bacon’s scientific methods separated the observer from the observed. This approach totally transformed the nature and purpose of science. Whereas previously the purpose of science had been to understand nature and life, science’s purpose now involved the controlling and manipulating of nature. As Bacon said: “Objective knowledge will give command over nature, medicine, mechanical forces, and all other aspects of the universe”. In this perspective, the aim of science becomes that of enslaving nature, of using torture to extract its secrets. We are now far away from the concept of “Mother Earth”, and this concept will be totally lost when the organic concept of nature will be replaced by the mechanical concept of the world, which can be traced back to the works of Newton and Descartes.[20]
The inductive-reductionism of the Newtonian worldview was associated more with the bourgeois science of the Moderate Enlightenment than it was understood to be science among the more popular Radical Enlightenment. The Radical Enlightenment thinkers had taken more to the likes of Pyrrhonist skepticism or Sufi understanding of direct experience (perhaps owing to the asceticism of their own lay religious leaders, a practice that was shared between both radical Christians and wandering Sufis). The Sufis would make a particularly strong impact in what is now Spain.
When postmodernists attack modernism, they are openly attacking the Moderate Enlightenment, but also modernism, which may be a remnant of the Radical Enlightenment, and Modernism-proper (which was already losing sight of the original goals of modernism). Nonetheless, the Radical Enlightenment, due to its unactualized potential, is impossible to be “post” in relation to: radical modernity isn’t yet a thing. Yet, at the same time, the postmodern attack on the Moderate Enlightenment takes its problem of induction to a new extreme, perhaps in an effort of “political Jiu-Jitsu,” and this attack does not apply with as much validity to the Radical Enlightenment, though it attempts to treat both Enlightenments with one brush.
The difference between postmodernism and Modernism is actually one of degree rather than being a strict difference. Postmodernism is Modernism taken to reductio ad absurdum, and quite possibly as part of a conscious effort on behalf of some of its popularizers. Postmodernism, I repeat, takes the induction and reduction of the Newtonian Moderate Enlightenment and blows it out of proportion—suggesting that quantum theory and free will makes things unknowable—, rending it a vice instead of a virtue. This seems odd, as postmodernism is against claims of scientific objectivity. But, because it takes what Modernism presented and blew it out of proportion— for instance, the cultural relativity found in anthropology or the relativity and quantum dynamics of modern physics—we can understand postmodernism as taking induction too far. In many ways, these inductive sciences would orient the Modern world in a situation of relativity and subjectivity that postmodernism would take to an extreme.
There are some aesthetic similarities between postmodernism and Radical Enlightenment that need to be taken into account. The Radical Enlightenment did make a fair use of subjectivism, skepticism and apophathic thinking (that can be mistaken for poststructuralism), maintained its own questions regarding the limitations of reason, and was also critical of the bourgeois Moderate Enlightenment. It, for instance, would occasionally make us of Pyrrhonist zeteticism and of Sufi mysticism, and stood for radical republicanism as opposed to the oligarchical republicanism of, say, the American founding fathers. But these philosophies did not denounce deduction, deny reductive truths, nor assume infallibility. Rather, they provided a foundation upon which skeptical and free thinking individuals could approach the world with agency, making use of logic and reason all along the way, without becoming rigid in one’s views. Pyrrhonism, for instance, might suggest that one might remain pragmatic in action, and that while truth is never 100% certain, it is more problematic not to act on suspected truths than to act imperfectly. This contrasts to the postmodern position, which serves to deflate confidence. Similarly, Sufi illuminism maintained that there were limits to reason, which the postmodernists certainly echo, but were nonetheless advocates of using intuition in a way that is too assertive to be postmodern, and which nonetheless supported the use of logic. Many radicals were critical of modernism themselves, so we must not get confused about the nuance between the radicals and the postmodernists. The problem with postmodernism is not that it criticizes, or that what it says is incorrect, necessarily, but that it serves to make a person indecisive and non-assertive, weak, by orienting the individual in negation, rather than providing the individual the tool of negation in compliment to position. Pragmatism is a much better philosophy for radicals than postmodernism, and in fact grew out of John Stuart Mill’s radicalism. Proudhon, too, is considered to have been a pragmatist by many accounts.
Because of postmodernism’s pessimism toward truth, meaning, purpose, and other classical ideas—and to the Enlightenment and Western society at large— it has been unable to establish itself as a real powerhouse in the manner of the old WASP elite. Nonetheless, it is supposed by some scholars that the role postmodernism—and, in particular cultural Marxism— is supposed to play is that of a virus in Western culture. In this case, it is not correct to expect it to do much else but eliminate the host. It is suggested that there are other value systems—non-Western value systems—that can fill the vacuum left in the demise of Western culture. By some of these outlooks, much of the culture war exists between national and international capitalists, with postmodernism as an attack on nationalistic capitalists by international capitalists, or between industrialists and bankers. WASP culture and cultural Marxism compose the antinomies of postmodern U.S. society.
Part 2
Remodernism
While postmodernism is often said to have really taken off and become the standard theme of the era after the World Wars, its proper beginning was as an art movement that came out of the late 19th century. This art movement would lend its name to the era that would become known as postmodern, and to the poetic and philosophical approaches that would follow in the Beatniks and among the cultural Marxists. Like postmodernism and its reaction to modernity, remodernism has its origins as an art movement, and is a direct reaction against postmodernity. According to one remodernist, “The Postmodern Establishment is trying to switch off the Enlightenment.”[21] This, much to the horror of modernists, who see the job of the Enlightenment as unfinished business. Richard Bledsoe says
Modern art can be observed as a series of trends proposed as solutions to the void introduced into heart of art-and by extension, life itself. Nothing seemed to work for long.
This lead to a terrible burnout, and what we have now: the sophistry, shallowness and will to power of the Post Modern age. But even this horror is coming to an end. We are at the beginning of a new era. Welcome to the Remodern Age. We integrate the fragmentation of the Moderns back into a holistic approach, art as a tool for communion and connection once again.[22]
Remodernism was established and defined in a manifesto by Billy Childish, and it is best to quote the man himself on the relevant parts of remodernism to political philosophy. Billy says that “Modernism has never fulfilled its potential.” So, “Remodernism takes the original principles of Modernism and reapplies them”. Childish says that “Remodernism discards and replaces Post-Modernism because of its failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being.” He says that, instead, “Remodernism embodies spiritual depth and meaning and brings to an end an age of scientific materialism, nihilism and spiritual bankruptcy.” On point, he suggests that “We don’t need more dull, boring, brainless destruction of convention, what we need is not new, but perennial.” In conclusion, and displaying clearly the intentions of remodernism in art, Billy Childish remarks that
It is quite clear to anyone of an uncluttered mental disposition that what is now put forward, quite seriously, as art by the ruling elite, is proof that a seemingly rational development of a body of ideas has gone seriously awry. The principles on which Modernism was based are sound, but the conclusions that have now been reached from it are preposterous.
We address this lack of meaning
Rather than the elitism of the postmodernists, Billy says that “Remodernism is inclusive rather than exclusive”. Another remodern artist, Richard Bledsoe, in the description for his book Remodern America, says that
Art reminds us of who we are, and shows what we can be. But the visual arts are undergoing a crisis of relevance. Elitists have weaponized art into an assault on the foundations of our culture.
Don’t concede the vital experience of the arts to deranged partisans. Art is a more enduring and vital human experience than the power games of a greedy and fraudulent ruling class. The story of the 21st Century will be the dismantling of centralized power. As always, this course of history was prophesied by artists–those who are intuitively aware of the path unfolding ahead. Their works become maps so that others may find the way. Enduring changes start in the arts.[23]
Remodernism stands opposed to New Class, Bobo (Bohemian Bourgeoisie) elitism, to jargon-filled babble that can’t be understood in common terms or upon earnest explanation, to political correctness, to nihilism and materialism, and to negation without solution: In short, to postmodernism.
Billy Childish doesn’t explicitly state so, but I believe it is fair to suggest that the roots of remodernism, like that of the original modernism, lie in the Radical Enlightenment.[24] My reason for suggesting this is that the unfulfilled potential in the Enlightenment has its home here, rather than in the Moderate Enlightenment, which actualized its potential in modern society. As such, remodernism makes perfect sense for a second tier (Yellow/Turquoise) worldview, and is the most reasonable backdrop for integral mutualism.
Integral
Integral is an approach created by Ken Wilber, which is an attempt to map the various approaches to knowledge in four quadrants of orientation: internal or external, individual or collective. These mix to form the four quadrants: individual/internal, individual/external, collective/internal, collective/external. Ken Wilber suggests that internal affairs of the individual include subjective matters such as psychology, whereas those external to the individual may have more to do with psychiatry; and those internal affairs of the collective might include the subjective meaning behind its myths, whereas its external affairs might be regarded in its social structures. Subjective is basically another way to understand internal, and objective a way to understand external understanding. The whole range of human knowledge—from physics to biology to theology to mythology— is said to be able to fit into the four quadrants. It’s understood that what brings these quadrants together—what unites them—is their being aspects of a holon, a whole composed of parts which is also itself a part of a greater whole.
Wilber refers to holarchy as the hierarchical relationship between greater and lesser holons, such as particles and atoms. He distinguishes this natural form of hierarchy from what he calls dominator hierarchies, in which a holon will try to establish itself as dominator of holons of a similar level (say cells) and stand in as a representation of the whole. Ken Wilber uses the example of a cancer for this sort of dominator hierarchy, which is clearly an unsustainable relationship. For Ken Wilber, “greater” and “lesser” holons are in reference to collectives and individuals, not individuals and individuals or collectives and collectives of a similar sort. For an individual or collective to attempt to be “greater”— in any significance to Integral— may represent an attempt to form an unsustainable dominator hierarchy.
Integral holds that lesser holons are understood to have more breadth and to be more fundamental, while greater holons are understood to have greater depth and to be more significant. Wilber suggests that neither are better or worse than another in any ultimate sense. He says that more fundamental holons (like particles to the atom) are always greater in number than more significant holons (like atoms to particles), and can be destroyed by destroying their fundamental parts, while the fundamental parts can remain in absence of their more significant holon. Ken Wilber provides an example of evolution producing greater depth and less breadth, or span, in his book, A Brief History of Everything.
There are fewer organisms than cells; there are fewer cells than molecules; there are fewer molecules than atoms; there are fewer atoms than quarks. Each has greater depth but less span.
The reason, of course, is that because the higher transcends and includes the lower, there will always be less of the higher and more of the lower, and there are no exceptions. No matter how many cells there are in the universe, there will always be more molecules. No matter how many molecules in the universe, there will always be more atoms. No matter how many atoms, there will always be more quarks.
So the greater depth always has less span than its predecessor. The individual holon has more and more depth, but the collective gets smaller and smaller […][25]
In Spiral Dynamics Integral, the form which unites Spiral Dynamics with Integral, it is understood that as one moves up the developmental spiral, one develops a more expansive worldview, in which one is oriented in greater and greater holons. Then, when one makes the “leap” from tier one to tier two, one establishes a more integral understanding, starting in Yellow, in which all of the different colors are acknowledged and integrated in a compatibilistic whole, rather than competing with one another. This means also that one begins to see the compatibility between the internal and external understandings of the individual and the collective. Whereas before, as one stepped into Green they rejected Orange, when one steps into Yellow or Turquoise one has an understanding of how Green and Orange can coexist to one another’s benefit. This does not occur until tier two consciousness.
Mutualism, an Integral Solution for Remodern Times
Mutualism is a social movement and corresponding socioeconomic worldview arising out of the Radical Enlightenment, and my candidate for second tier (Yellow/Turquoise). This worldview is historically expressed most explicitly in the works of Pierre Proudhon (the mutualist painted by Gustave Courbet), who was among the first to popularize it. Mutualism is an ideal candidate for a second-tier worldview in Spiral Dynamics Integral, as mutualism has traditionally integrated various different positions (such as market competition and socialism) into a compatibilistic outlook. Its more individualistic approaches may resonate with a Yellow worldview, while its collectivistic tendencies may express Turquoise, but both sides are honored and remain intact. This worldview expresses a simultaneous desire for individual freedom and social equality. It ultimately aims to balance freedom and equality in a project of—the seemingly oxymoronic— libertarian socialism.
Anticipating Spiral Dynamics, which describes something quite similar, Proudhon—the heavy-hitter of mutualist philosophy— remarks that “Society, in virtue of man’s capacity to reason analytically, oscillates and deviates continually to the right and to the left of the line of progress, according to the diversity of the passions which serve society as motors for action.”[26] For Proudhon, “Justice is the central star which governs societies, the pole about which the political world turns, the principle and the rule of all transactions.”[27] Another star—the Blazing Star— is spoken of by another mutualist and a follower of Proudhon, the transcendentalist William B. Greene. This star is probably quite related, and is spoken of as being an ever-transcendent ideal, not unlike Proudhon’s concept of perfect societal equilibrium, as when Constance Margaret Hall points out that “Proudhon saw society as a dynamic whole which strove toward equilibrium but which never achieved this state.”[28]
Proudhon also shares much in common with the “holarchy” concept of Ken Wilber, and arguably fits Wilber’s definition of a perennial philosopher (remember, remodernism is calling for a return to the perennial). While speaking of his holarchy approach, Wilber goes on to say, “Interestingly, the perennial philosophy reached the same conclusion, in its own way.” He says,
We may say that [the perennial philosophy] is the core of the world’s great wisdom traditions. The perennial philosophy holds that reality is a Great Holarchy of being and consciousness […][29]
Of course, Ken Wilber was not the first to recognize the holarchic relationship of things. His integral approach was anticipated by Pierre Proudhon, whose sociology takes the internal/subjective and external/objective aspects of the collective and the individual into account in a very similar way, making him, by Ken Wilber’s terms, a wielder of the perennial philosophy, or at least something much like it.[30] Constance Margaret Hall makes the similarity between Wilber’s Integral Theory and Proudhon’s sociology quite clear when she says that (covering the upper quadrants here)
Justice, for Proudhon, was both external and internal to the individual, objective and subjective, an actuality which was coming into being, and an ideal to be achieved through the conscious and unconscious direction and organization of society on a scientific economic basis.[31]
She says that “Proudhon’s concept of justice, which was simultaneously objective and subjective, was Proudhon’s ‘guiding principle’ for both society and for the individual members of society.”[32] In a discussion of justice as it relates to a holon, Proudhon himself says (as quoted by Hall) that
[…] there are two ways to understand the reality of justice, and thus to determine it:
Either by a pressure of the collective being on the individual, the first modifying the second in its image and making out of it an organ:
Or by a faculty of the individual person who, without leaving his conscience, would feel his dignity in his neighbor with the same vivacity as he felt it in himself, and would find himself thus, all in conserving his individuality, identical and complete with the collective being itself.
In the first place, justice is exterior and superior to the individual, whether it resides in the social collectivity, considered as a being in its own right, of which the prime dignity is that of all its members; or whether one puts it even higher, in a transcendent and absolute being which animates or inspires society, and which one calls God.
In the second case, justice is intimate to me, the same as dignity, equal to this same dignity multiplied by the sum of relationships which make up social life.[33]
For Proudhon, every individual was also a collectivity and every collectivity an individual. That is, everything is composed of holons, as Ken Wilber would put it. Shawn Wilbur, despite his postmodernism, correctly paints us a picture of this holon when he says that
Any body or being, Proudhon says, possesses a quantity of collective force, derived from the organization of its component parts. […] The collective force is the “quantity of liberty” possessed by the being. Freedom is thus a product of necessity, and expresses itself, at the next level, as a new sort of necessity. […] Out of [the free absolute’s] encounters, out of mutual recognition, the “pact of liberty” arises […] and a “collective reason,” possessed […] by a higher-order being, which is to say a higher-order […] absolute.[34]
Every individual is also a collective, and every collective an individual, to Proudhon.
Unlike Shawn Wilbur, Ken Wilber does not appear to have been a reader of Pierre Proudhon or the mutualists, perhaps finding them too “insignificant” to be noticed. Nonetheless, and interestingly enough, Ken Wilber has come to many similar conclusions, reinventing mutualism to some extent. One example of this is his approach to governance called “holacracy,” which has many themes commonly found in mutualism. Holacracy has been understood in terms of a holarchy of self-managing teams, and has been posed as an alternative to unstructured consensus and to sociocracy, one of its main rivals. These constitutional and consent-based models of organizational governance have been found appropriate among many cooperative and mutual associations, marking Ken Wilber as a fellow traveler of social economy (in this regard). Of course, this is not to suggest that Ken Wilber is a mutualist or was completely consistent with the mutualist worldview, of which he may have been ignorant, nor to promote holacracy. Some of the similarities between mutualism and Ken Wilber may come from their shared foundations in the pantheistic or emanationist perennial philosophy, which stressed the holarchic nature of the cosmos all along, but some may naturally result from a wide reading of the world. Like Proudhon, Ken Wilber holds to a process philosophy in which there is no end in any Absolute.
In an interview of Ken Wilber, the interviewer says, ‘It seems that a proper integration of Orange and application of Orange to look at Green and figure out the inconsistencies would set people on a track to second-tier consciousness.’ Ken Wilber affirms and then gives a long-winded reply about how we shouldn’t simply revert back to Orange, but that second-tier will integrate the concerns of Orange, such as freedom, back into the equality that Green discovered, thereby balancing those concerns.[35] This says two things to us in this discussion; that Remodernism—a looking back to the unfinished business of Orange— is necessary, and that it will look like the balancing of freedom with equality, which, incidentally enough, is also the project of mutualism.
It should be apparent by now that Ken Wilber’s Integral, Billy Childish’s Remodernism, and Pierre Proudhon’s mutualism belong together on the second tier of Clare Graves and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics. The second tier should be composed of integral remodern mutualism. What’s holding us back?
Part 3
The Postmodern Menace in Mutualism
The postmodern menace is being pushed back against in the arts by remodernism, but it has yet to be pushed back by a working class social movement addressing political economy in a coherent manner.
Mutualism has not gotten far under the postmodern paradigm, and this seems quite natural. If mutualism is to move forward, it must be wrestled from infiltration by cultural Marxist intellectuals. Cultural Marxism rests upon postmodernism, and classical liberalism (capitalism) upon modernity, but—as I think I have fairly demonstrated— mutualism must rest atop remodernism. This is completely natural for mutualism, as remodernism is the re-emergence of modernist Radical Enlightenment potential, within which mutualism had historically developed. Unlike the Moderate Enlightenment, the values of the Radical Enlightenment were never fully actualized. [36] In a way, they informed the Moderate Enlightenment, however, which was actualized. The Moderate Enlightenment, nonetheless, was much less radical than the Radical Enlightenment, and was built upon shallower assumptions. Whereas the Radical Enlightenment stressed the need for popular, direct democracy, the Moderate Enlightenment has been associated with the authoritarian oligarchical republics that are common throughout the world now. Radical Enlightenment values differed greatly from those of the Moderate Enlightenment. As such, postmodernism is not an open reaction against the Radical Enlightenment, but against the Moderate Enlightenment, which modernism calls into question as well. Nonetheless, Jonathan Israel, the foremost scholar on the Radical Enlightenment, writes that postmodernism is one of the greatest threats to Radical Enlightenment thinking:
More recently, among the foremost challenges to Radical Enlightenment principles, and one particularly threatening to modern society, was the modish multiculturalism infused with postmodernism that swept Western universities and local government in the 1980s and 1990s. For this briefly potent new form of intellectual orthodoxy deemed all traditions and sets of values more or less equally valid, categorically denying the idea of a universal system of higher values self-evident in reason and equity, or entitled to claim superiority over other values. In particular, many Western intellectuals and local government policymakers argued that to attribute universal validity and superiority over other cultural traditions to core values forged in the Western Enlightenment smacks, whatever its pretensions to rational cogency, of Eurocentrism, elitism, and lack of basic respect for the “other.”[37]
Israel also tells us—speaking of the importance of modern philosophy to contemporary society— that,
While a perplexing notion for us, it seemed perfectly obvious to most contemporaries that “modern philosophy” […] was the chief engine of the revolutionary process. Condorcet, for instance, held that “philosophy” caused the Revolution and that only philosophy could cause the kind of revolution that entails (and yet simultaneously depends on) a rapid, complete, and thorough transformation in thinking about the basic principles of politics, society, morality, education, religion, international relations, colonial affairs, and legislation all at the same time. Although this view remained broadly current from 1789 down to the mid-nineteenth century, later it came to be completely obfuscated by the dogmas of Marxism, which insisted that only changes in basic social structure can produce major changes in ideas, as well as by the kind of dogmatic anti-intellectualism promoted in the 1950s and 1960s by Alfred Cobban and others, and then latterly by Postmodernism. All insisted on the impossibility of intellectual debates and ideas playing a fundamental role in shaping societal change.[38]
Heed Israel’s warning.
At the present, mutualism is under the threat of postmodern analysis paralysis facilitated by postmodernists such as Shawn P. Wilbur, who has more-or-less attempted to monopolize the “online culture” of mutualism. Shawn has a history with cultural Marxism (and online culture), starting with his formal training, which includes a Bachelors in Language (English/Literature) from Oregon State University and a Masters from Bowling Green University in Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies, itself, is a field that has its origins in Critical Theory, which was developed in the cultural Marxist Frankfurt School, and much of postmodern philosophy makes its way into language and literature studies. Ken Wilber claims, for instance, that “By 1979, Derrida was the most-often-quoted writer in all of the humanities in American universities.”[39] But that’s not all, Shawn is also educated in internet culture, and participated in the cultural Marxist Spoons Collective. He has also been affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, which I take as the likely place he learned both the skill and political importance of archival work. In short, Shawn is a political weapon.
Shawn commonly brings up postmodern philosophy. His neo-Marxist programming seems to keep him from an honest presentation of Proudhon, however. Projecting postmodern philosophy onto Proudhon, a modernist, Wilbur holds that
What [Proudhon did] was a bit peculiar, involving a hijacking of Leibniz in directions that anticipate folks like Gilles Deleuze. The psychological and social physics that is at the center of his mature work on liberty and justice reasons like poststructuralism in places, and I will have some recourse to the vocabulary of the more contemporary continental philosophy as I talk about it.[40]
It sounds like poststructuralism because modernism has all of the insights of postmodernism, which postmodernism simply blew out of proportion. Duh.
This theme of projecting postmodern thinking onto Proudhon carries throughout much of Wilbur’s work, and appears one of his main motivations for taking on the project. Nonetheless, postmodernism is not a popular philosophy among the working class because of its tendency toward empty talking—“obscurantism”—, which working people don’t have time for (but can be intimidated by). Shawn Wilbur claims to be a working person, but he has the privilege—a government-granted monopoly on mental capital (accredited Masters degree)— not to be, if he wants it. Others don’t have this luxury, some on principle, and some because the opportunity was never presented. This is not a small matter, and must be considered with any intellectual who speaks for anarchism (but that’s just “Old Left” modernist reasoning, isn’t it?).
Remember the “cultural wars” that Ken Wilber mentioned earlier? Well, Shawn Wilbur suggests that
There is a strong sense among [postmodern] scholars that it is at the level of language (or at least of ideas and ideologies) that cultural battles are won and lost. This makes deconstructionist readings of “social texts” seem a powerful political tool.[41]
This is said by a man who appears university-trained in this stuff, has lectured in the academy on related matters, and who is playing doorkeeper, archivist, gatekeeper, and maintains a “magisterial tone” in academic books about anarchism costing over $200 (!). Shawn also openly says that “My intuition [is] based in part on some language various places in Proudhon’s work and in part on the connections I’ve been making to other continental thoughts […]”[42] Shawn is, in his work, essentially taking unrelated material from Proudhon (like his “Theory of Property”), comparing it, and then projecting postmodernism onto it. In doing so, he comes up with things that none of the other literature on Proudhon would find agreeable. Let’s have an example, from John Vervaeke, about comparing unrelated material…
John Vervaeke, who is taking on “the Meaning Crisis” (that postmodernism has wrought), suggests that one problem of “the deconstructed mind” is that of equivocation. He says that one can take two different sentences— which use the same word with a different intention, and have perfectly fine meaning on their own—, mix them up, and construct something completely different (in this case, less purposive as well). His example is these two sentences:
Nothing is better than long life and happiness.
And,
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than nothing.
On their own, these sentences confer meaning perfectly well. But Vervaeke continues to put them together in an absurd (absurd being a concept in the postmodern or quasi-existential thought of Albert Camus) manner. He reasons that when together, they say that
Nothing is better than long life and happiness, and a peanut butter jelly sandwich is better than nothing, so— ergo— a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than long life and happiness, so you should eat one and then go kill yourself.[43]
John Vervaeke is pointing out here the absurdity of deconstruction. While “nothing” is used in both sentences, and those sentences make sense on their own, putting them together produces an absurdity. This seems to be precisely the method of deconstruction, a method of literary criticism popularized by Derrida. Derrida—whom Shawn is quite familiar with— is known for having challenged that reading is impossible and that meaning is basically non-existent or hypersubjective. If one breaks down a text enough, according to Derrida, its contradictions render it meaningless. Surely, Shawn is aware of this, and it seems evident to me that he employs these efforts. But deconstruction can only go so far.
In his series on “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, John Vervaeke points out that language likely developed with much help from the shamans that used to be prevalent in human societies.[44] Through entheogens, ritual practices, and abstinence from socialization, food, drink, or sex, and with the help of beating drums, dancing, and chanting, shamans could induce altered states of consciousness such as the trance, which could create—what Vervaeke may suggest later is a form of—a quantum leap in conception, powered by way of metaphor. Vervaekea points out that many of our words, such as “understand” are not to be taken by their literal meaning (under stand), but have their roots in the kind of metaphorical imagination and sympathy that shamans would help to induce. John points out that the shared space for sharing meaning relied on much shared sympathy. Similarly, Roger Scruton remarks, in his attack on deconstructionism, that
Figures of speech are open to their meaning. They are vivid, immediate, unambiguous. They are used all the time, and indeed clichés are composed of them. A sly fox, a loving heart, a sullen anger, a serious face — all those are figures of speech. Some seem more figurative than others. But they are all figurative (in the literal sense of the term). They transfer a word from the context which provides its meaning to a context where its meaning is exploited in some novel way. You might think that figures of speech must therefore bear a double meaning. But that is not so. The literal meaning is usually lost in the transfer. When I read ‘His heart was in his mouth’, the literal sense of the words does not occur to me. If I understand them literally I shall be guilty of a misreading.[45]
If anything can be counterposed to the kind of sympathy that is needed to exchange real meaning with one another, it is the kind of meaning-destroying represented by deconstructionism, an approach that Shawn has a soft spot for. It is for this reason that Roger Scruton says, playing on the name of Derrida,
I hope I shall be forgiven if I add to this list of destructive words a neologism, the verb ‘to derridize’, derived from ‘to rid’ and ‘to deride’. I shall be dis-cussing the attempt to rid literature of meaning in order to deride the common reader[46]
Deconstructionism is often understood to be hyper-critical, to influence a reading of texts which is swallowed in generalized antipathy. The kind of analytics employed by deconstructionism are subject to the criticism of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who demonstrates in his “Introduction to Metaphysics” that intuition as direct perception is a much more authentic manner of understanding the world than analytical text is. Textual analysis is no substitute for an intuitive reading.
At some point Shawn found Proudhon and noticed superficial similarities between Proudhon and his old friend Derrida, particularly between Proudhon and Derrida’s shared rejection of absolutism. Derrida held that reading is impossible, and Proudhon held that property was impossible… but upon completely different grounds. Derrida was a postmodernist, but Proudhon was a student of the Radical Enlightenment. Evoking Derrida’s deconstructionism, and perhaps announcing his own fated position in regard to the job he will be doing on mutualism (deconstructing it), Shawn Wilbur says,
Ok. Concepts turn on themselves, splinter, mutate, disseminate themselves, go to war, form strange alliances—in short, behave much like the human organizations they inspire. These days we might call this deconstruction. Proudhon called it contradiction—antinomy—by which he meant not simply logical inconsistency, but a productive, pressurized dynamic […] In the antinomy, A and B together look pretty good, despite the fact that neither of them alone seem to offer much. The difference is important, in part because it forces us to focus on a rather different conceptual horizon than we might otherwise.[47]
Shawn here is suggesting that his deconstruction of Proudhon is itself Proudhonian, because he’s offering an antinomy to Proudhon’s thinking (in particular, his “Theory of Property”). Wilbur’s deconstruction and Derridization of Proudhon is deemed his “New Approximation” of which he says that “breaking with the founders is an act of fidelity to the tradition,” while establishing a false dichotomy (“possession” and the property-state antinomy) between Proudhon’s own concepts. He says,
The […] synthesis of communism and property […] presumably ought to be of interest […] But I don’t find much treatment of it, beyond a fairly offhand suggestion in An Anarchist FAQ that the synthesis is “possession.” I’m not entirely opposed to that reading, but, unfortunately, I remain unable to tell precisely what Proudhon means by “possession” in 1840
[The “New Approximation” is] a different kind of response to the possibility of […] Proudhon’s repeated suggestion that there might be a “communist” route to mutuality and liberty, as well as one through the encounter with “property.”[48]
Shawn suggests that, in the end, Proudhon supported a property-state antinomy (which sounds an awful lot like welfare capitalism administered by the techno-managerial elite):
“Property” itself never really appears as anything but a simplist, or one-sided, concept. Its incorporation in a non-simplist property-state antinomy is an advance […], but inevitably one which tends to focus us on one part of a complex problem, to the exclusion of other parts.[…] Proudhon attempted [“to focus on some higher-order concept, such as social justice or mutuality, which incorporates property as one of its aspects”], with somewhat mixed results, but he explicitly suggested the possibility of [“attempting to rethink property in some other way”]. In the “New Approximation” […] I’m […] starting to address individual property in its “collective” aspects, in order to avoid some confusions that seem to be “built in” with Proudhon’s approach.[49]
Shawn’s go-to document for making his arguments is Proudhon’s “Theory of Property,” which Wilbur was apparently the first or latest to translate (his translation appears in an anthology of Proudhon’s works). But this document is not taken too seriously by other scholars of Proudhon and of anarchism, such as Ian MacKay. In Property is Theft!, the collected anthology of Proudhon’s works, “Theory of Property” appears as a mere appendix. Why? MacKay suggests, as a preface to Wilbur’s translation, that it was posthumously published and unfinished work that Proudhon himself had laid aside to work on more important things that he actually did finish and publish. Further, he suggests that “What becomes clear from this work is that there is no significant change in Proudhon’s perspective on property and possession.”[50] In the same anthology, it is said that
After 1850, Proudhon started to increasingly use the term “property” to describe the possession he desired. This climaxed in the posthumously published Theory of Property in which he apparently proclaimed his whole-hearted support for “property.” Proudhon’s enemies seized on this but a close reading […] finds no such thing[51]
Proudhon is nonetheless an easy target for deconstruction. Ian MacKay holds that
In terms of the language he used, Proudhon was by no means consistent. Thus, we have the strange sight of the first self-proclaimed anarchist often using “anarchy” in the sense of chaos. Then there is the use of the terms property and the state, both of which Proudhon used to describe aspects of the current system which he opposed and the desired future he hoped for.
[…]
This changing terminology and ambiguous use of terms like government, state, property and so forth can cause problems when interpreting Proudhon. This is not to suggest that he is inconsistent or self-contradictory. In spite of changing from “possession” to “property” between 1840 and 1860 what Proudhon actually advocated was remarkably consistent. The caveat should be borne in mind when reading Proudhon and these ambiguities in terminology should be taken into consideration when evaluating his ideas.[52]
Shawn Wilbur has no real grounds to be making such a fuss about “neo-Proudhonian” sociology. Not only were most of his valid ideas already expressed in thinkers like Constance Margaret Hall, but Shawn’s postmodern nonsense has no basis in reality. Upon a wide reading of both Proudhon and secondary sources, one gets a clear image that Shawn Wilbur just does not fit into. The “New Approximation” he puts forth is a mythical creature, a dragon, whose head must be lopped off as it attempts to grow into a hydra. But, as Shawn Wilbur says,
It is not nearly sufficient […] to try to discover truth by gallivanting about slaying falsehoods. At a minimum, we have to be willing to poke around in the entrails of the dragons we bring down. More than likely, though, we’re going to need some of those suckers alive, at least for awhile.[53]
So, let’s do some poking around in the entrails of the dragon I am slaying here. But, Shawn is right, let’s keep it around for some of his archival work, which is useful enough. Even appreciated (thank you, Shawn).
Shawn acts as the self-designated doorman of mutualism, “greeting” (if you can call it that) all of the new folks who poke their heads into the movement. He has established himself as the administrator on both Facebook and on Reddit, social media sites where mutualists appear the most active.[54] He commonly replies to posts, typically to demonstrate some sort of perceived flaw in a fellow mutualist’s understanding, and one that usually amounts to not using Shawn’s preferred language, or which is too assertive for Shawn’s tastes. Shawn would appear to prefer that his fellow mutualists adopt a religious, postmodern reading of Proudhon, such as his own, and mold their perspectives to whatever new insight is found about Proudhon (so long as it does not imply anti-Semitism or misogyny, etc.), and to be sure to use key phrases and terminology out of the book, rather than to put mutualism into one’s own words. One user says, “everytime I think I’ve got a ‘what is mutualism’ take, I’m wrong, or at least confusing a mix of mutualisms.” This, after forfeiting his cognitive sovereignty to Shawn Wilbur, tagging him to answer in the user’s place. That is, the user tagged Shawn, explaining that his reason for doing so was that he never seems to get it right.[55] This is not an uncommon sort of response to interacting with Shawn.
Shawn also acts as the gatekeeper of mutualist ideology, and in particular what there is to know about Proudhon. Active in archiving, and apparently in translating, Shawn loves to suggest to people that their opinion regarding Proudhon is incomplete, and so irrelevant. Typical of Shawn is the suggestion that his hefty reading of Proudhon in the French language makes his understanding of Proudhon, and so mutualism, superior to others. Despite this, Shawn’s French is largely self-taught (which is commendable on its own but usually comes with a little more humility). Nonetheless, Shawn would have others believe that his insights are so fresh and original that one might as well do away with other third-party interpretations and translations, such as the work of Woodcock, Ritter, Hyams, Hall, and others who have done work on Proudhon—much of it pointing to works in French—and the translations by Tucker and Byington, caliming to be leaving the secondary literature outside of his scope of concern. Often Shawn’s claims are rather empty or depend on fringe material which is not consistent with the general trend of Proudhon’s thought (like “Theory of Property”), while other times they remain empty, elitist challenges to learn French and read Proudhon that way or stop talking about Proudhon at all. While there are surely mistakes in each of these authors’ works, the suggestion that Shawn’s work changes absolutely everything (though it may bring new insights) is outright ridiculous, and seems an attempt at establishing oneself as a “dominator holon.” His gatekeeping antics only act to affirm this suspicion in my mind.
True to his deconstructionist background, Shawn makes a habit of derailing people interested in mutualism or giving their best shot at teaching others (one of the best ways to learn, by the way). It’s not uncommon to see people he has interacted with exclaim that they thought that they knew what mutualism was until they interacted with Shawn. This seems no accident to me, as deconstructionists are known to have held that “reading is impossible” and that there is no meaning inherent in language. One book, Introducing Derrida, summarizes Derrida thusly:
If Derrida’s writing has no extractable concepts or method, we can still look at what it does: what effects it has.
Derrida has a way of thinking these effects. By his own account, his writing has a matrix. Its two strands are DERAILED COMMUNICATION and UNDECIDABILITY. Derrida finds both of these in the figure of the virus. [original emphases maintained][56]
It appears to me that Shawn’s behavior exemplifies cultural Marxist realpolitik. By ensuring that mutualist communication is derailed and material is made to be undecidable, Shawn can remove the confidence from the individual who is trying to share their knowledge, and to keep individuals from asserting themselves in the future. In this way, and by wearing the guise of a mutualist, Shawn can divide and conquer those who would establish their own understanding of mutualism, independent of Shawn’s gatekeeping.
Shawn likes to make of mutualism a Lyotardian differend—a concept under dispute, but which is officially undisputable (in this case, because mutualist history is actually clear, even if uncompiled)—, arguing that his work brings fresh insights that have remained unheard because of one reason or another (such as Benjamin Tucker’s anti-communism). To do this, he splinters mutualism into many “mutualisms,” remaining true to his postmodernist training that every person’s rendition of the world is a world unto itself. Here, he can make the case that any attempt at a generalized rendition of mutualism is not inclusive enough to function properly, pointing to differences in language used between mutualists, inconsistencies in their opinions, and incongruencies between the individuals and the otherwise consensus positions taken. Remember ‘peanut butter and jelly and kill yourself’? Yeah, that.
After splintering mutualism into many “mutualisms,” Shawn prefers to polarize mutualists into one of two major camps: “neo-Proudhonian” and “Tuckerite.” He associates the ex-mutualist author Kevin Carson with this latter grouping, and he himself represents the former. It’s very common to witness followers of Shawn Wilbur come out of the dark to call someone a “Tuckerite,” before retreating back into the shadows.
After denouncing “Tuckerites,” Shawn likes to reduce mutualism to neo-Proudhonism, the only alternative for which he reserves any respect; the alternative for which he is the figurehead. Shawn maintains a big fuss about Proudhon’s “sociology,” apparently feeling himself to have revolutionary insights, while not even having read Constance Margaret Hall’s work on the sociology of Proudhon (“I haven’t read the right books”), which made clear both that Proudhon did make use of the concept of “collective force” and that this did not preclude him from orienting his major solution in mutual credit. To Hall, Proudhon’s sociology was about subduing religion and politics into the economy, an effort that had to be associated with an increased public propensity for reason and rational social structures. This being the case, the sociology of Proudhon does not leave him as distant from Benjamin Tucker’s “plumbline” approach as “neo-Proudhonists” would like to believe (though it does bring new elements to the conversation). Besides, as Ian MacKay says, “Anarchists […] are not Proudhonists, Bakuninists, Kropotkinites, or whoever-ists. We reject the idea of calling ourselves after individuals.”[57] Chomsky holds to a very similar view, as he states in regard to the concept of “Marxism” from his anarchist perspective.[58] Shawn holds that Ian came up with the “Tuckerite” bit, and perhaps that is true, but the pejorative use is no excuse for the religious use wherein one self-describes as “neo-Proudhonian.”
Shawn’s behavior also leaves much to be desired. Between picking on kids trying to learn about mutualism and splintering their understanding, he likes to beat his chest and fluff his feathers at those who are already well-informed. While not offering much of practical use, he prefers to police online communities of mutualists by making sure that they do not mix concepts from Proudhon and Tucker, that they use the language that he likes, etc. and to attack anyone who would combine their insights for the ends of something greater. Shawn likes to make very clear that he is Alpha mutualist, because he has spent ten years “trying to get into the head of Proudhon,” reading his works in the native French and translating them, archiving the work of the apparently unrelated mutualists, etc. It’s almost as if Proudhon had written a Bible in Latin, and that the commoners need a priest to translate it for them. Unfortunately for Shawn, imperfect translations of that book didn’t keep the population passive either. I’m afraid Margaret Constance Hall, George Woodcock, and the rest of the crew stand in as modern Wycliffes, while the counter-Enlightenment (Wilbur) screams something about the original Latin.
Staying true to his New Class cultural Marxism, native to his university training, Shawn likes to take the focus off of practical solutions in mutualism, and, in particular, mutual credit. Shawn refers to mutualists as “money cranks,” and suggests that he is helping to take the focus of contemporary mutualists off of the issue of usury and placing the focus on “collective force,” a word he pretends to have arisen from the dead despite Constance Margaret Hall having identified the concept in her work on the sociology of Proudhon before Shawn even finished college. This concept of collective force is not entirely distinct from mutual credit, of course, as it is collective force that is privatized in the form of interest. Benjamin Tucker was also at least intuitively familiar with the idea, and expresses it in terms of “industrial combinations.” Nonetheless, cultural Marxism would have intellectuals take the focus off of class and instruments for class liberation such as mutual credit, and to concern themselves with more symbolic matters. Shawn says, simultaneously dismissing the importance of mutual banks in practice, and submitting his agency to “circumstances” in a way that would make Rudolf Rocker cringe, while playing “in the entrails” (as he says) of the historical mutualists he intends to covertly slay,
[…] I suspect that mutualists pursued the mutual bank much longer than that pursuit made sense. But I suspect the story of Josiah Warren’s various expiriments—of their successes and failures, and of the specific ways that their pursuit developed according to circumstances—is probably still a gold mine. Similarly, I think the history of land-banks, mutual banks, banks of the people, etc., and of the propaganda in support of them, still has practical secrets to offer up to our continued exploration.[59]
Shawn Wilbur doesn’t seem to have much hope for the practical project of mutualism, outside of co-opting and adapting Proudhon’s criticism to his postmodern philosophy.
The possibility of property “transformed” and “positive,” which [Proudhon] affirmed at various points in his career, remained unfulfilled.
The “New Approximation” that I’m attempting […] takes its cues from those portions of Proudhon’s theory where he was more successful in that business of positive transformation.[60]
Shawn’s postmodern approach to mutualism leaves me wanting. It is empty, indecisive, and weak. By decreeing mutualism a fractured number of “mutualisms” a prophecy is self-fulfilled by those who believe it, and who lose their confidence in organization and coherence by extension. I am reminded of a lecture by the pragmatic philosopher, William James, called “The Will to Believe,” in which James describes a situation in which a train full of people are robbed by an armed gunman. James suggests that if the passengers had the shared belief that they would all rise together and disarm the gunman, that they would keep from all being robbed, but that it is their lack of belief that allows them to ultimately be robbed by a minority among them. Shawn Wilbur’s mutualism is like a train full of passive passengers, content to be robbed and complain about it later. It lacks the drive, the meaning, the purpose, to actually be anything cohesive or constructive. It’s a horrible shame that his work carries so much weight among mutualists of today, an effort which keeps mutualists miserably stuck in the confines of Green, all while having a seed of Yellow waiting to burst forth. So long as this seed can grow past the weeds of postmodernism it can flourish, but Shawn Wilbur—despite the clearly remodern orientation of mutualism— stands blocking the light. Is this the effort of a single narcissist, or are the patterns more consistent than we should expect, that behind disproportionate social influence there is disproportionate money power? With the rise of the New Class, and while it is correct to remain skeptical, it seems that we would be quite naïve not to entertain the possibility.
Intellectuals are battleground zero in our era of Fourth Generation Warfare. Governments prefer to avoid losing legitimacy in the use of brute force, opting instead to control ideologies and information as much as is possible, and manipulating people’s beliefs with all of the collective might they can muster. Considering mutualism’s important history as the original mass working class movement— responsible for the Radical War, Canuts Rebellion, Lowell Textile Strikes, the Cooperaitve Movement, the International Workingman’s Association, the Paris Commune, and revolutionary syndicalism— ruling classes would be absolutely naïve not to protect their interests by having an agent jam up information. It doesn’t matter that mutualism is relatively inactive, as it is likely that much of this is due to external forces.
While military men are usually the leaders of palace revolutions, intellectuals are likely to be the leaders of social revolutions. They alone can supply the one crucial ingredient without which social revolutions are impossible—a new ideology to challenge and destroy the existing one. Ideologies are the stock of intellectuals. They are the opinion leaders with respect to important philosophical questions. Intellectuals may be engaged in any type of employment, but they are concentrated in teaching and preaching.
Intellectuals are easily alienated by systems of power and privilege. They are like ministers without a portfolio, experts without the power to transfer their ideas into public policy. Hence there is a natural basis for alienation. Enlightened elites, therefore, usually find it wise to flatter them with attention and honors, thus securing their gratitude and support.
Such tactics have usually worked quite well. Most intellectuals stoutly defend the conservative position, thus making a major contribution to the defense of power and privilege. By their skill with symbols they have successfully proven to the common people the inevitability, as well as the countless advantages, of the status quo.
Lenski is letting us know about this, because it is a real issue. Ideology is battleground zero in Fourth Generation Warfare. Cultural Marxism is a real thing. Lenski continues:
Another segment of the population of most societies which is attracted with great frequency to social revolutions is made up of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. These groups usually hold special grievances against the dominant majority and thus are more receptive to counterideologies. Unlike the lower class members of the dominant group, there is no common cultural tie to provide a basis for identification with the elite.
Such groups can usually supply numbers to revolutionary causes, and organization as well. Above all, they can sometimes provide financial resources, which are often so difficult for revolutionary movements to acquire. While minority status groups are usually excluded from the higher social and political levels of society, as we noted earlier, they sometimes make substantial economic advances. The economic success of the Jews in Europe, the Hindus in Africa, the Japanese in Hawaii, and the Jains in India are but a few examples. The wealthy members of such groups have often been the major financial backs of social revolutions.[61]
This does not mean that Shawn Wilbur is an agent of cultural Marxism, or at least not consciously so. But, cultural Marxism may not require one to understand the effects of adherence to the ideology, and this might be the strength to its administration in American universities by a small number of influential elites. Conscious or intentional or not, Shawn’s cultural Marxism is readily apparent, and is having the results intended by the Frankfurt School.
Shawn Wilbur, of course, is not alone in his cultural Marxist infiltration into mutualism. Cultural Marxism is a generalized problem. The Center for a Stateless Society, despite being a “Left-Libertarian” or “market anarchist” think tank, is also pushing cultural Marxism while associating its efforts oftentimes with mutualism. In the case of C4SS this is not so much a postmodern attack on modernity or an effort to put readers into a pit of undecidability—this would not work on libertarians, who extol the values of the Enlightenment—, but takes the form of toxic postmodern identity politics, their own way of participating in the “culture wars.” Being market-oriented, I wouldn’t be surprised if C4SS simply caught on that there is a wealthy minority demographic willing to sponsor Left identarian issues with a free market focus.
One-time mutualist, Kevin Carson, whose work on mutualism and organization theory remain classics, has himself taken to denouncing anyone who associates themselves with right-wing populist cultural stances, such as the P2P Foundation and Keith Preston. For example, when giving some of his reasoning, Kevin states that
earlier this year a comrade at C4SS informed me that such material — alt-right or “Intellectual Dark Web”-adjacent — was appearing on the P2PF Facebook group, which I don’t follow because I’m not on Facebook. They suggested I might want to think about how closely I associated myself with the Foundation, and avoid any public interviews or guest articles that promoted them.[62]
A bewildered fan replied, with cutting logic, on Reddit:
I’m still in shock over this one. I’ve watched the P2P site, blog, and recently scanned the Facebook page. I don’t see anything remotely close to alt-right material.
Kevin,
I’m a fan. Could I get some more details?
As an egalitarian individualist, a person against elitism, classism, exclusionary tribalism, and the puritanical mob, I’m a little confused about your issue with:
- a) Opponents of Identity Politics. Could I get a definition of what is meant here? Some people consider identity politics to be synonymous with tribalism and the politics of exclusion… Or is the phrase being used differently in this declaration of separation?
- b) Dirtbag leftists – Admittedly I’m new to this group, but it seems to me they’re leftists rebelling against victim culture, and the mob’s drive to enforce the secular standards of puritanical speech. It seems to me today’s political correctness requires a new and highly updated use of language, not easily achievable by old people or poor whites. Any comment here?[64]
No reply from Kevin, at least not publicly.
Kevin Carson does actually attack some issues of the New Class, however. While he would stray from making arguments about cultural Marxism, I am sure, he does seem to attack aspects of the New Class that are less cultural, such as qualities he identifies with the liberal-progressive welfare state or that I would associate with the techno-managerial elites of the upper middle and lower upper class. He says,
Twentieth century liberalism, as an ideology of social control, goes back to the Progressive movement in this counry and Fabianism in Britain. Its primary base of support was the New Class of social engineers, planners, technocrats and “helping professionals” who saw themselves as divinely appointed to manage the lower orders for their own good. Although the term “New Class” was coined by Milovan Djilas to describe the bureaucratic collectivism of communist society, it is well suited for the ruling class under welfare state liberalism. Orwell’s description of this class is as good as any.[65]
I am much less suspicious of Carson’s motives than I am of Wilbur’s, and tend to believe that he is well-intending, despite some disagreements I may maintain about some cultural matters. In a strong point of agreement, Kevin says,
The solution to New Class rule is not the spurious populism of the neocons and New Right. […] They carefully conceal the fact that the greatest criminals are in the corporate boardrooms and the national security state, and the biggest parasites and deadbeats are the heavily subsidized, privileged corporations.
The real solution is to revive the kinds of working class self-organization and direct action which the New Class so despises: LETS, mutual banks, cooperatives, militant syndicalist unions, squatting, rent strikes and tenant unions, community-supported agriculture, etc. We need to appeal to an American populism not limited by traditional left-right fetishes or sectarianism. We need to fight the New Class in all its manifestations; while we’re organizing to “fire the boss,” we should also be fighting to “fire the school board” and “fire the department of human services.” Those of us on the left who believe in things like workers’ control, community technology, and neighborhood government, need to find common ground with those on the right who are into gun rights, home schooling, and free juries. Anyone who believes that ordinary people should control their own lives and work, and that producers should keep the fruit of their labor, is an objective ally.[66]
Well, objectively then, I am most certainly an ally! However, in his rejection of P2P, Kevin says something about
The wrong-headed (and just plain incorrect) assessment that “identity politics” promotes disunity in economic- or class-based movements also makes a predictable appearance, as does the spurious claim that these things “push people farther right.”
I’m not sure if Kevin has done much offline social organizing. I spent time as a delegate and organizer in the Industrial Workers of the World, putting together a mutual aid collective (Black Cat Collective), and a peer-instructed school of philosophy (People’s Arcane School). These latter two projects—despite my qualms with volunteer-run associations— were more productive than my time in the IWW. In them, I associated with common people, just as they are, flaws intact. Most people in the group tended to liberal/progressive values (including myself, my own views being cosmopolitan), but not everyone. In fact, we had a few people of color who represented some of our more conservative members (but also some who represented our most radical). We had ancaps and ancoms and everything inbetween, as well as people who were not aligned in any special way at all with anarchism, but just wanted to participate in our prefigurative structures. The most divisive moments we had were with ancoms who would bring up identity politics in our consensus-run group. Luckily, they didn’t stick around long, because they saw that they weren’t making any headway in dividing our interests. This, of course, has not been my only experience with identity politics, as I have also attended trainings about intersectionality, wherein it was clear that I was being viewed as an oppressor, trainings about consensus decision-making that promoted the “progressive stack,” anti-IMF/World Bank protest meetings in which I witnessed the “progressive” stack in action, other meetings in which preferred pronouns took precedence over moving forward, arguments in my local punk scene, and much more, all of which made fairly clear that I was a little less welcome to participate than other people. I noticed some of the white men at the meetings who were kept from speaking had some of the best things to say, and that progressive stack was creating mediocrity in the name of cultural equality. I remember the fuss about Crimethinc and APOC. (These ideas seem far removed from the kind of work that Ben Fletcher was involved in.) I think the alt-right reaction to cultural Marxism is nothing but an example of identity politics pushing people farther right. I, myself, am an example of someone who has taken to more culturally conservative views in response to the attacks on my own identity as an unashamed hetero, cis, white, male. I’ll pass on the white guilt and all of that. But I’ll also celebrate the demise of WASP hegemony, so long as it’s not a reduction to mediocrity. Some of my friends will remember my own Green P.C. days when I told a man with a Skrewdriver shirt, in all seriousness, that his shirt would not be welcomed back in the restaurant I was managing (a behavior I no longer believe was right). Nonetheless, with every statement I make to the effect of not being ashamed of who I am, it seems I am met with backlash. This has given me a little empathy for those more foolish than I, who have made a retreat into the alt-right and paleoconservatism. I’m merely staying true to my freethinking pantheist and mutualist values of looking at all sides. This is my real-world phenomenological experience, but perhaps Kevin’s online experience differs.[67]
I still highly respect Kevin Carson’s efforts and highly recommend his work, despite the differences we may have (which may actually not run as deep as it may appear), and even in the case he distances himself because of my friendly critique. I’m not involved in the game of conspicuous association, and I approach mutualism as a freethinker and believer in the liberal values of freedom of conscience and democratic debate and deliberation, and it is in these capacities that I levy my challenges at Kevin’s position, not out of any malice. If my approach is unprofessional, it is because I am not a professional.
It is my opinion that the sort of cultural absolutism that Left identarianism and P.C. culture—cultural Marxism— have to offer is not conducive to the kind of freedom of conscience and freedom of expression at the foundation of Radical Enlightenment values, nor of the kind of deliberation and information-exchange that Radical Enlightenment thinkers had in mind for their radical republics and cooperatives. Radical Enlightenment thinkers were at the forefront of the fight for freedom of conscience, antinomianism, free thought, free speech, and so on. They would certainly respect the right of identity politicians to segregate themselves from the rest of society, but they might question the positive effects of doing so. My own position on the culture wars is more like Chomsky’s position on freedom of speech for people one disagrees with.[68] But I agree, with Chomsky, that mutualism/anarchism is the heir to liberalism. I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a cultural Marxist foundation under an already-standing house.
In Proudhon’s Hegelian-Kantian approach— wherein a Hegelian synthesis is treated as a Kantian antinomy, which continues to have tension—, he never expects two opposites to come to complete harmony. He expects there to continue to be tension between individual and collective, subjective and objective, and so on. A proper mutualist approach to the culture wars should bear this balance of identified interests in free absolutes in mind, and must somehow capture both sides within its scope, while rendering them incapable of enforcing external government upon the other. For Proudhon, mutualism isn’t about having correct beliefs so much as it is about justice, which can always be found as a balancing act between two identified interests. Mutualism did require rationality—particularly, collective reason— to function, but only so far as it served to balance opposing views and maintain association between unique and differing individuals. One major antinomy in the culture war, demanding balance today, is the conservatism of straight WASP males and the Jewish-led intersectionality of cultural Marxism.[69]
Mutualism is often regarded as a “Left-wing” position, due to Proudhon’s having sat on the Left with other republicans during the French National Assemblies. But as time would pass, what was considered classically Left completely removed monarchy and the Right, especially in the United States. In the United States, the main political views are all traditionally Left-wing, including the Libertarian Party. As mutualism is situated between the American Left, which tends to state-socialism, and the American Right, which tends to libertarian capitalism, I believe mutualism—libertarian socialism— is best regarded, at least in the United States, as a Centrist ideology. “Left” gives the false impression that mutualists are identity politicians or state-socialists with the rest of the “New Left,” while it is properly situated (in the United States) between the socialists of the Old Left and the libertarian Georgists of the Old Right. Attempting, myself, at a Centrist position, I describe myself not as “anti-bigotry” or “Left” and not as “bigotted” or “Right,” but as “non-bigotted” and “Center.” It’s my view that bigotry is punishment unto itself, as it can only harm its wielder in the long-term. I find inspiration in people like Daryl Davis, the black man who makes friends of Klan members.[70] This not only speaks to the Golden Rule behind mutualism, but Davis also gets real results this way, whereas groups like Antifa fuel resentment. Perhaps it’s his white privilege, I do not know…
In order to fully unpack what is happening with the cultural Marxist infiltration into mutualism one must get a grasp on some important aspects: the historical relationship between Marxism and mutualism; the relationship between WASPs, the New Class, and mutualism; the dynamics of Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties; and the operations of the ecological-evolutionary theory.
Accidental vs. Essential Properties
Before analyzing the relationship between mutualism and Marxism, as it involves sensitive material, we must entertain a necessary excursus on essential and accidental properties, from an Aristotlean point of view.
Aristotle made an important distinction between essential and accidental properties, which still must be considered to this day. An essential property is a characteristic a thing must have in order to be what it is. An accidental property is a characteristic which is more of a matter of happenstance. For instance, eating is an essential characteristic for a living dog, while brown is an accidental characteristic. Essential properties tend to be universal of a species of thing, while accidental properties tend toward the particular.
It is important to consider accidental and essential properties when it comes to issues of identity. Particularly, when identifying responsible parties. While it may be true that a given salesman of street narcotics may be of a particular race, this by no means establishes that everyone of this race is a salesman of street narcotics. Equally true may be that a landlord may be of a particular race, but this by no means suggests that everyone of that race must be a landlord. The same is true about the occupations of ethnic groups like Jews and WASPs.
In today’s society, it is common to point to gang violence and other black-on-black crimes as an excuse to treat, with a collectivist impulse, everyone who is black as if they are a potential threat, worthy of profiling. This is an injustice often resulting in the excuse of police violence and imprisonment in a system of modern-day slave labor. It is also common, however, to point to the fact that the ruling class is composed disproportionately of white people, and that financial and media institutions are run by Jews.
Among leftists of today, “white people” is a common lament. White people being the largest racial group in the United States, reactionary behavior of this sort pushes some otherwise well-intentioned whites to reactions of their own, and sometimes to affinities with movements that reasonable people consider to be a threat. This is not unlike blacks who engage in or call for violence against whites, without separating whites who have the power to discriminate—the ruling class— from those who do not. Similarly, “Jew” among the populist right is synonymous with “crony capitalist,” which is unfair to wage-earning Jews everywhere.
The fact of the matter is that attacking any identity group will cause mixed reactions from that group (and perhaps other groups as well). When we attack one another for our accidental characteristics, we cause reactions in the other party, and reactions from people who have not always considered the complexity of the situation. Their natural reaction is most often to be defensive, and to associate with others they feel are facing similar circumstances, for the sake of returning the blow. If this defensive association is not reasonable to a high degree, it may react in ways that cause further reaction from their perceived opponent.
On both sides, we find perpetrators and victims. We find fair-hearted whites who earnestly try their best to give everyone a chance, and who are tired of being considered a bigot because of the color of their skin. Poor, rural and urban whites of the lower class often living in trailer homes or rented apartments, surrounded by meth addiction, and lacking liberal education, feel real consequences of affirmative action and are not convinced by the argument that they have any great degree of privilege. Such whites, in laments of “white people” are lumped together with the “old guard” conservatives, often landlords and businessmen, who complain about “the elites” of the liberal “new guard.” This latter is all too prone to use the poor whites as a constituency in their campaigns, pulling upon their ignorance and appealing to their sense of injustice.
We find Jews who reject the concept of usury, and who believe, like the Protestants, that it is important to work for a living. My favorite philosopher, Spinoza, was this sort of man.
We also find good-hearted blacks, themselves having been discriminated against, or having seen it affect others in their family or community in very real ways. Often stuck in inner-city ghettos and government “projects,” surrounded by crack-cocaine, some become less than convinced that the American dream is within arm’s reach. These blacks, tired of being called “nigger,” and being dispossessed, despite their never having acted anymore antisocially than they have been treated themselves, are often motivated by black power and related ideologies. Most large movements of these dispossessed blacks of the lower class are unfortunately led by upper class members of their race, who use their commonalities to gather a customer-base or constituency of their own, as when “black-owned” private or corporate businesses garner the support of black customers on the basis of race alone.
When two sides find themselves lumped together as neo-tribal units, caught up in accidental characteristics, rather than essential ones, and they make countering attacks, good people on both sides find themselves at war, for the sake of their rulers. Oftentimes, these rulers, behind-the-scenes, collaborate in ways that their constituencies would be unhappy with, recognizing that they have more in common due to their class, than they do with those constituencies. Thus, black business-owners who cater to black consumers may find themselves members with white Jews and Protestants in (majority-white) business associations.
It is most assuredly true that the majority of the ruling class is white, and that people of color compose a disproportionate amount of the lower class. But this is an accidental characteristic, not an essential one. There are, though disproportionate, white members of the lower class and black members of the upper class. That there is disproportion at all results from the unplanned results of geographic differences (as outlined for instance in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” among other works of archaeology and anthropology). In short, geographic advantages lent themselves to the dominance of white Europeans.[71]
To confuse the result for the cause, and to suggest that “whiteness” or “white culture” is the problem to be attacked, is to make of a resolvable problem an unresolvable one, by giving credit where it is not due, and so confounding the problem. Were whiteness responsible for said domination, white supremacy would be a sound argument, for it would be to the intrinsic characteristics of whites, and not what we call “chance,” that the results were due. But, as the results are due— at least in large proportion— to geographic advantages (that is, the economic rent of the land), this gives “whiteness” credit for which it is not due. As it was not “white people” which were essential to the problem, but land, there must be another essential culprit. This culprit was originally the owner of the land and benefactor of private property,—the principal benefactor of geographic advantages, the landlord—, but has grown to include the capitalist of various sorts, who, in transition from agrarian feudal modes of production into industrial capitalist ones, and in increasing the productive capacity of marginal land, displaced the importance of the landlord. It was not “the Jews” who were responsible for usury—though they embodied it—, but laws which forbade Christians from engaging in similar activities themselves.
We have come to the point where we must admit that while “whiteness” is not an essential identity of the ruling class, that there are identity groups which are essentially ruling class. These are your landlords, capitalists, financiers, and politicians. By their very nature, these groups rule over others. This is an essential characteristic of theirs. Without this power to rule over others—to set rules that they must follow—they could not be defined as landlords, capitalists, financiers, or politicians, nor would they have any power over their tenants, employees, debtors, or citizens. In short, landlords are essentially capable of discrimination and institutionalizing racism, while white people are not. Some whites have no power of discrimination. But all landlords, employers, financiers, and politicians do. And they come in all shapes, colors, and sizes.
With the difference between essential and accidental properties made clear, it should also be clear that recognition of tendencies within ethnic groups does not amount to essentialism, or the belief that individuals cannot change or are predisposed to a certain kind of thinking or behavior. Rather, because ideas arise in particular instances, among people who often share accidental properties, they will tend to be found among people who are similar in one way or another.
Mutualism, the WASPs, and Marxism
With the discussion of accidental and essential properties out of the way, we can continue with our touchy discussion of the historical relationship of Marxism and mutualism.
It’s important to understand that postmodernists criticize mutualism as being another Enlightenment philosophy based in modernist rationality. While opinions may differ as to the legitimacy of their critique, they are correct to understand mutualism as a historically Western (although, it may ultimately have Taoist roots) and as an Enlightenment worldview. Proudhon was certainly a Radical Enlightenment thinker, and mutualism largely developed among the weavers due to the influence of the Islamic Golden Age on the Silk Road, where the Enlightenment had its origins. Mutualism is decidedly a Western, modernist Enlightenment ideology, and one which is based in cultural Christianity, particularly Protestantism (including, here, the Anabaptists and others commonly considered outside of the Protestant/Catholic duality) and radical Catholicism (as that of Pierre Charnier). Jews have nonetheless participated in mutualism, and rightfully so. Still, one must understand that the relationship between mutualism and Marxism is ultimately rooted in the relationship between Christianity, especially Protestantism, and rabbinical Judaism.
Mutualists largely come from the Christian culture, and especially the Anabaptist tradition which attempted to live according to an understanding of primitive or original Christianity. As such, their anti-Jewish-religion orientation comes natural. However, mutualists also came to reject religion outright and as a whole, and so are probably better regarded as post-Christian than Christian proper. Many of the mutualist sentiments—mutualism being an economy built upon the Golden Rule— have Christianity at their base, while individual mutualists have tended to eschew religion as problematic. This may not be entirely unlike similar behavior among some Jews—Jesus and Spinoza come to mind— who went against their own Jewish heritage in order to pursue the larger goals of humanity. Mutualists seem— while rejecting Judaism as per their native Christian culture— to reject Christian religion for not holding up to its own standards. After all, mutualists developed out of a long line of heretics and radicals who opposed ecclesiastical authority and the earthly riches of the priestly class.
Mutualism is unduly associated with fascism for a number of— if one is honest— quite understandable reasons. The most obvious reason is that Proudhon was critical of Jews, and is often described as being anti-Semitic for some of his writings in his personal journals. Another reason, however, is that mutualism opposes usury, and makes of usury its main enemy; usury being associated with the Jewish (and later Protestant) banking practices that Jesus had rebelled against. So, mutualism opposes usury, and is ultimately Christian in cultural orientation, opposed to Rabbinical Judaism (but also Protestant capitalism and mainline Catholicism). Mutualism shares with fascism a Western, Christian culture. Another reason that mutualism is associated with fascism is that mutualism shares with fascism an opposition to bourgeois liberalism and capitalism. For this reason, mutualists such as Pierre Charnier and Georges Sorel made strategic alliances with royalists, some such alliances leading up to the development of fascism, with groups such as Cercle de Proudhon and Action Francois. Like the royalists, mutualists saw bourgeois society as problematic, and desired a return to the guild system.
Unlike fascism, however, mutualism does not desire the return to a monarchy or to Catholic theocracy, and is modernist and radical, rather than Romantic or anti-modernist and reactionary. Instead, mutualists have been supporters of trustees and deputies and delegates, democratic approaches that are much more closely related to radical liberalism, such as that found among the Ricardian socialists, and utopian socialism (such as the Fourierists, Owenites, followers of Considerant, and, to a much lesser extent, Saint Simonians). They came from the Radical proto-Protestant tradition, such as that surrounding the Anabaptists, and that gave birth to sects such as the Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, and Amish. Mutualists are republicans, who oppose monarchy, and support a federal system of industrial and communal democracy and voluntary exchange. And, for the mutualist, federalism does not mean centralism, but is more closely related to the “true” variety of federalism promoted by the—ironically enough— American Anti-Federalists (who claimed to be the real supporters of federalism) such as Patrick Henry, and the Confederate States of America. Mutualists were not content to have an involuntary republic, however, and found more interest in voluntary association, in which republican values would be safeguarded in the power of secession. Was the republic to be corrupted, a new one could start afresh. In this way, the mutualists were not only decidedly not fascists, but were vastly more liberal than the classical liberals were. They shared with the classical liberals a penchant for individual and commercial liberty, freedom of religion, and so on. They shared with the radical republicans a belief in participatory democracy, and with the socialists a propensity for widespread property ownership and community effort. But they were critical of the monopoly power that the bourgeoisie had achieved, and, in this, they shared criticism with the fascists of bourgeois society, even if desiring to democratize it further, rather than bring back the monarchy. The mutualists and fascists, then, differed in the manner in which they would govern the guild system, with the fascists wanting to re-establish the monarchy, and the mutualists largely wishing to establish a voluntary, democratic, federal republic run by recallable trustees or delegates.
Something similar can be seen in the relationship between mutualism and paleoconservatism or the alt-Right in the United States. Like paleoconservatives and the alt-Right, mutualists have much reason to be concerned with cultural Marxism. But mutualists, nonetheless, do not share the same values or mission for society. This puts them in the peculiar position of sharing a common enemy with an enemy. This peculiar relationship exists from similar cultural circumstances, as well. Fascists opposed Judaism because of its financial power, and Marxism for its degeneracy. Similarly, Proudhon opposed Judaism for its usurious practices and communism for its mediocrity. But they wanted vastly different things. Likewise, paleoconservatives and the alt-Right are critical of Jewish financial power and of cultural Marxist degeneracy. But why should mutualists listen to WASP paleoconservatives and white nationalist alt-Righters? Well, because the best person to listen to about who is in power is who was replaced by them. Why? Because they have a lot of bones to pick, and they’re spilling the beans. If you were displaced by someone, you might be inclined to complain out loud too. And that’s exactly what is going on. Much of what the paleoconservatives and alt-Right have to say has value to the open-minded mutualist, and overlaps with experience. Similarly, one should consider the shots of the postmodernists against the old guard of WASPs. Antinomies must be balanced, or thesis and antithesis sublated. Neither the alt-Right and paleoconservatives, nor the New Left and cultural Marxists should be supported, but their interests identified and balanced.
Marxism and mutualism (and anarchism more generally) have a long, antagonistic history that is ultimately rooted in ethno-religious tension. This history goes at least as far back as the New Testament, in which Jesus turns over the tables of the money-lenders. This is the story of Christianity, and its rejection of Pharisaic ethnocentrism and usury of gentiles. The Pharisees represented the strand of Rabbinical Judaism; most of the world’s Jews— including the Ashkenazi— are of this tradition of Judaism today. According to the ethnocentric laws of this tradition within Judaism, it is understood that Jews are not to lend to fellow Jews at interest, but they may do so with gentiles. The story of Jesus is the story of a Jewish (possibly Ebionite or Essenian) man who rebelled against this worldview, and who suggested that Jews should treat Christians in the manner of Jews (as one’s “neighbor” or “brother”), meaning that they should not subject them to usury.
The Gnostics, too, were weary of rabbinical Judaism, but also of Judaism more generally. Marcion had been an influential Christian Gnostic who may have influenced the mutualism of Proudhon and perhaps some of his compatriots. Like Proudhon, Marcion strongly opposed Judaism and usury. Ultimately, and while certainly not in a common fashion, Proudhon’s mutualism was a continuation of Christianity’s and perhaps Marcion’s opposition to usury—established upon the basis of the Golden Rule— and its war against Jewish ethnocentrism. Concerns about Jews in Europe had been prominent in Europe among the lower classes, and in fact gave rise to the Peasants’ Crusade, considered the first of the Crusades, in which terrible pogroms had taken place, such as the Rhineland Massacres.
Throughout the Middle Ages, “Court Jews”—Jews who held official roles in the courts of royalty as accountants— became very prominent (alongside Sufi Jesters telling wise riddles). Part of the reason for this was the Jewish religion, which allowed usury to be practiced on gentiles, but there were also other reasons. The Catholic Church had forbidden Jews from participating in the guild system and from owning land, so the trades Jews could participate in were rather limited. On top of this, monarchs had established precious metals essentially as legal tender, which inflated the demand, and so the price, of these metals, an affair that Court Jews were more than happy to benefit from. Some of the most famous of the Court Jews were the Rothschilds family. The dynamic between Court Jews and bourgeois gentiles— especially Protestants, but also Catholic Jesuits—, would continue to develop under capitalism, with Jews establishing themselves in important positions of finance and gentiles in production and landholding. Jews would become the main force of international financial capitalism, while Protestants would become the industrial capitalists of the nations.
Come the time of the Enlightenment, Jewish financiers such as Haym Salomon (Marx was related to Salomons as well) would finance Protestant revolutions such as the American Revolution, putting the entire nation into debt. Countries such as the United States would limit the voting citizenry to WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) males who owned land, the original terms of the Articles of Confederation. This national white Protestant supremacy represents the now old guard of paleoconservatives and the elite among old modern society (However, Jewish financiers and young tech professionals represent the leadership of the up and coming New Class of postmodern society). Jews, however, always held an important role in American society, and maintained much international influence. But they could not vote under the Articles of Confederation. That was reserved for the WASPs.
Before Karl Marx (son of a Rabbi) and Marxism became the standards of socialism, Pierre Proudhon and mutualism were its figureheads. Mutualism had been the first mass-organized workers’ movement, especially strong among the weavers, and had largely been responsible for such events as the Radical War in Scotland, the Canuts Rebellion and Paris Commune in France, the Lowell Textile Strikes in the United States, etc. Mutualists had also organized the International Workingman’s Association. This all occurred before Marx’s time and without much input from him at all. Mutualism had successfully balanced the new social sciences of economics and sociology and had become the organized, fighting wing among radicals and socialists of the day.
Mikhail Bakunin, the collectivist anarchist, had posed a bit of a challenge to Proudhon’s mutualism, but while remaining true to an anarchist vision of society. The mutualist and collectivist anarchists could collaborate at times, and often made up a strong majority within the International. This would come to change with the influence of Karl Marx and the Marxists, who would cause a split within the International, eventually kicking the anarchists out of the association. Bakunin, who shared in Proudhon’s views regarding Jews, would point out that Karl Marx and the Rothschilds ultimately shared interests. This family of Court Jews was financing Marx, a relative of theirs. Bakunin said,
Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of blooksuckers, a single gluttonnous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.
This may seem strange. What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralization in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail.[72]
(Contemporary conspiracy literature, such as The Occult Technology of Power, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and The Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, British Spy to the Middle East, has much to say that coincides with what Bakunin is telling us here. These documents are almost certainly not what they claim to be, but nonetheless illustrate well the logical abductions of—paranoid, yes, but also—intelligent people. Even if not real, the fact that they can be dreamt of leaves one to wonder the possibilities of such ideas in the hands of people with immense means; in the Middle East these documents have currency. Nonetheless, we must not forget the other side of the antinomy, WASP conservatism, which certainly has conspiracies equally damning, perhaps coming from its relationship to Freemasonry and Scottish, English, or Swiss banking, and so on.) The Russian Revolution would also be financed by Jewish interests, in the form of Jacob Schiff, who provided backing to Lenin and Trotsky.[73] Nonetheless, the other side, Libertarianism, would also be financed by elite Jewish bankers like William Volkner.[74]
The co-optation of socialism and the labor movement by Rothschild-sponsored Marx (Rothschild was a third cousin of Marx) and Marxism put an end to the dominance of anarchists such as Bakunin and Proudhon in the socialist movement and represents an organized attack on mutualism and anarchism more generally. I can’t stress enough that, before the rise of Marxism, mutualism was the main variety of socialism, and had established itself as a very viable alternative to both capitalism and the state. This did not serve the interests of the ruling elite. So they had to re-brand socialism.
This would not be the final clash between Marxists and anarchists. During the Spanish and Russian Revolutions, for instance, anarchists and the authoritarian Marxists participated in armed conflict with one another. In Spain, the authoritarian Marxists would ultimately be unsuccessful, but in Russia they would take over all of what would become the Soviet Union. This was not finished before crushing the anarchists and council communists in Kronstadt. The IWW also went through much quarreling between Marxists and anarchists, with Marxists eventually—as in the International Workingman’s Association— taking control of the union. It seems that at every turn, anarchists are dealt with unjustly by Marxists, though they continue to try to make strategic alliances with them in the name of “Left unity.”Today, this is possibly even more problematic.
While Marxism co-opted socialism and took the focus off of anarchism, putting it onto state solutions similar to social democracy, it had not stopped the workers from all of the discussion of class. It had merely redirected their efforts away from revolutionary direct-action and into the ballot box. Still, there remained revolutionary Marxists—those who would consider themselves the “Left” of Marxism, like council communists and De Leonists— and other socialists, such as syndicalists, who would not stop at the ballot box and continued focusing on direct-action in the workplace. The discussion had not fully been stopped for these individuals. Economic Marxism had successfully split the focus of socialists, but it had not taken the focus off of class, and some of these pesky socialists were still attached to direct-action. This was to be solved by cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism is arguably not Marxist at all, or is some variety of post- or neo-Marxism, because it rejects much of the metaphysical and historical background provided by Marx, including the primacy of class struggle and Marx’s historical materialism or stages of capitalism. Nonetheless, cultural Marxism comes from Marxist intellectuals who were interested in the limitations of Marx’s ideas, and why they had not seemed to come to fruition, despite the claim to “scientific socialism.” For these cultural Marxists, the efforts of the Left would need to be redirected to an attack on Western—and especially Christian— culture at large, and in particular the Enlightenment. They found Jewish financing, and, for some of them, cultural Marxism was an expression of their Jewish heritage, and a reaction to some of the atrocities of the Second World War. Instead of class and support of classical liberal values that libertarian socialism had attached itself to—like freedom of speech—, cultural Marxism put a greater emphasis on political correctness, identity politics, and on issues such as colonialism and war. These values would be taken up among those of the New Left, defined in part by these new values. Many of the issues that cultural Marxism adopted had been seen among elements of the Old Left to be divisive issues that took the focus off of class (which was seen to really be at the heart of the boss’s wars, segregation of labor, and so on). The New Left would place these issues up front and center.
Ever since the rise of the New Left, there has been little real focus placed on organized labor or mass organization of any sort. Anarchism has suffered greatly by this, going through phases such as Yippie drug and sex addiction and primitivist tooth rot, dumpster-diving Crimethinc kids and anti-war college kids, techno-managerial municipalists and gender-bending transhumanists, but nothing very threatening to the status quo. Nothing like the international organization of which anarchism used to be at the steering wheel! Perhaps the most renowned “anarchist” of our decade—outside of the Jewish intellectual, Noam Chomsky— was the Jewish communalist and libertarian municipalist, Murray Bookchin. But Bookchin had really been a Marxist and state-socialist all along, and only wore the mask of anarchism for a period of time. Really, he was supportive of majoritarian city-statism, and put identity politics and single-issue causes and local elections on a level with class struggle. While critical of postmodernism and its hyperrelativity, as well as of Marxism, Bookchin was a participant in the New Left, in that he was of the shared belief that organized labor was no longer the means by which anarchists could assume a revolutionary position in society. Because of Bookchin’s downplaying of organized labor and because of his prior Marxism which always seemed to infect his thought, it seems appropriate to address Murray Bookchin—despite whatever protest he or his followers may put up— as a cultural Marxist. His “Listen, Marxist!” reads very closely to a cultural, neo-Marxist position, complete with rejection of organized labor as the means of revolution, criticism of Marx’s historical position, and support for identity politics. He does not share all of the same ideas as the Frankfurt Marxists regarding the Enlightenment, but he does share the important characteristic of being oriented more in culture than in economy. This is antithetical to classical anarchism, and especially mutualism, which sought to put governance under economic control by way of organized labor and mutual credit.
Under the emerging control of a New Class, which is often propped up by Jewish financial interests (like George Soros), it is important to consider the role that identity politics play for Jewish financial interests. Most of the world’s Jews are white and of Ashkenazi origin, and come from the rabbinical tradition coming out of the Pharisees (the group that was doing the banking in the temple that Jesus reacted against). Being white, they share a race with the white caucasian European.[75] As such, the Indo-European vs. Semitic cultural wars are not racial, but ethnic. It is well understood that white people stand, in postmodern philosophy, as the colonial oppressors of the world. But Jews get around this by bringing up the holocaust and appealing to their minority status as an ethnicity, thereby being acquitted of the crime of being white, while levying attacks at their WASP opponents. By many accounts Jews are not white at all, they’ve been treated so distinctly. And one is met with the utmost ferocity if one is to criticize the Jewish religion, evoking the name “Hitler” as quickly as possible. Postmodern realpolitik is used to hide away Jewish power, such that anyone who criticizes international finance capital, Zionism, or the New World Order is rendered an anti-Semite and “conspiracy theorist” (a word that is so charged as to mean “wrong” instead of to be taken literally).
The old conservative, national WASP elite are now being given a run for their money by the New Class, and have been given a run for their money for some decades now, especially following the Vietnam War protests and surrounding movements, and infiltration of the universities in the 80s and 90s. But the New Class offers no sustainable alternative to hierarchy.
As you might well tell, contemporary politics in postmodern society is largely composed of a culture war between the Indo-European Christian ways of Western society and the Semitic Jewish ways of Zionism and the New Class. On the extreme Right, the major concern comes from the paleoconservative or traditionalist view that the Jews or Illuminati are in control of world affairs, and are concentrating power into a New World Order. On the extreme Left, the point of contention is that it is hegemonic WASP traditions that maintain straight, white, male, patriarchy. Both sides are pointing to the accidental characteristics of the other to excuse their elitist behavior.
Mutualists, like remodernists, are critical of both the WASP and the New Class elites (and of fascism, of course, which has typically aligned with Catholic interests). While critical of Jewish usury, mutualists are also critical of landlordism and bosses, as well of as government, which have traditionally found themselves in the hands of Protestants, not Jews, owing to the fact that Jews in Medieval society were largely forbidden from participating in the trades that would develop into the factories and from owning land. It’s, of course, also important to note that much has changed since the Middle Ages, and that many Protestants now partake in usury, and many Jews now own and let land. But, historically, in European society, the Catholic Church enforced a strict line of demarcation between what was allowed for Christians and for Jews.
The way out of this situation is not segregation between Jew and gentile, or anything like that, but is actually a rejection of polarized politics oriented around accidental characteristics and cultural conditioning, the rejection of the narrative that all Jews or all WASPs are ruthless creatures, while nonetheless recognizing the WASP and Jewish cultural identity among the ruling class, their ethnocentrism, and attempts to wield power through realpolitik. Both white supremacy/nationalism and Jewish ethnocentrism should be challenged on the grounds of sound philosophy, and transcended through “the brotherhood of man.” And this is naturally the project of the post-Christian effort of mutualism, as well as of the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza (as in the Theological-Political Treatise) and friends.
Part 4
Escaping the Identarian Culture Wars
It’s important to understand the ethnic issues underlying the culture wars, not so that one can start engaging in identity politics, but so that one can recognize the means by which identity politics are utilized in realpolitik. If we do not become aware of the manner in which the pendulum swings, we can fall victim to a self-sacrificing form of telescopic philanthropy, in which minorities are ushered into positions of power in the name of not being oppressive to minorities. The result is Rainbow Capitalism.
Some of the best pushback to identity politics, oddly enough, comes from some postmodern anarchists, and, in particular, “post-Left” Stirnerite egoists (Stirner being an anticipant of postmodernism). Lupus Dragonowl, for instance, says,
Identity Politicians (IPs) are a particular kind of leftist who use the spectre[1] of an identity-category (gender, race, sexuality, etc) as a lever to obtain power. In the sense discussed here, they should not be considered coterminous either with groups of people oppressed by identity categories, or even that subset who prioritise identity as a key site of struggle. Not all women, Black people, People of Colour (POC)[2], or members of other specifiable groups are IPs; not all feminists, anti-racists, or even separatists are IPs. Racism, sexism and other oppressions along identity axes are sociologically real, and not every person involved in the struggle against such oppressions is an IP.
So far, quite agreeable. There really are cultural issues, and these issues are exacerbated by monopoly capital and its hold on the oligarchical republic.
Lupus says,
Intersectionality – the recognition of multiple forms or axes of oppression, with complex interacting effects – is an effective theoretical response to the problems of Identity Politics, but there have clearly been difficulties putting it into practice. In identity-linked movements, some people use intersectionality as a way to avoid the idea of principal contradiction, although occasionally in practice, people who claim to be intersectional end up treating one or two oppressions as primary.[76]
Some have referred to the treatment of some oppressions as being primary as establishing a concept of the “officially oppressed.” Rarely have I seen a serious discussion of class enter the realm of identity politics and intersectionality. Class does not appear to be “official oppression.” The “hetero, cis, white, male” is easily recognized as the “privileged” “class,” but landlords, bosses, bankers, politicians, and the like are nowhere to be found in the list, and the privileged status of the “hetero, cis, white, male” does not seem to be leveled by being a tenant, an employee, a citizen, a debtor, or even cultural matters such as being a punk, goth, “wigger,” redneck, or etc. When “class”—the real issue— does make the list, it is understood purely in terms of income, rather than relationship to the means of production. Class simply is not taken seriously by identity politicians, and for good reason. Class is not an identity. The difference between identity and class is the difference between quality and condition. Class is a condition that can be changed, but identity is an inherent quality of a person. But identity must not be treated as a specter, in a collectivistic manner, but is better left defined by a unique individual. For instance,
From a Stirnerian perspective, systems of oppression such as racism and patriarchy are oppressive impositions of a particular spectre. Systems of oppression based on gender, race, and so on are sociologically real, but ultimately rest on other people imposing a particular spectre – treating another person not as a unique one, but as an instance of femininity, or “just another X.” Such systems entail valuing a particular category to the exclusion of others, leading to violence against those excluded.[77]
According to this view, while it may be correct that privilege is bestowed upon certain identities, one should not focus on attacking the beneficiaries of this privilege so much as the source of the privilege. Thus, when one criticizes “hetero, cis, white, males” from the Left, or when one criticizes “international Jewry” from the Right, one must remember that these are accidental properties which can easily be made into specters upon confusing them for essential properties. The essential property of a banker is that he or she lends money, not that he or she is a Jew, even if a disproportionate number of bankers are Jews. Likewise, the essential property of a landlord is that he or she owns land, not that he or she is a white European of Western Christian cultural background, even if a disproportionate number of whites are landlords. Individual Jews are not all bankers and individual white men are not all landlords. While recognizing the disproportionately WASP orientation of national capitalist affairs, and the disproportionately Jewish orientation of international capitalism, we must not put individuals into prescriptive categories because of their cultural background. Individuals are unique. Nonetheless, it remains important to understand the realpolitikal consequences of taking sides in the culture war.
Despite these attacks on identity politics, post-Left anarchism is still itself attached all too much to postmodernism. Even while breaking down Left-wing spooks, it maintains the basic problem of postmodernism, and that is generalized negativity and pessimism. Such pessimism is rarely conducive to planned, coordinated action, and so rarely expresses the sort of power that an egoist might wish to wield. In contrast to post-Left anarchism— white Stirnerite egoism, oriented in postmodernism—, a remodern approach might make use of Spinozan egoism, which does not religiously avoid the establishment of structure, the maintenance of contracts, and so on, in the manner than a self-defeating Stirnerite does. Post-Left anarchism is no substitute for remodernism.
Laying the Dog to Rest: Power is Not the Enemy
Another crucial key to destroying the postmodern menace is an understanding of ecological-evolutionary theory. Ecological-evolutionary theory quickly diminishes the idea that postmodernism has much merit, because it puts ideas to the test of evolutionary pragmatism, leaving no room for “Your truth, my truth” business.
Gerhard Lenski established ecological-evolutionary theory, a theory regarding the evolutionary development of human societies. According to Lenski, human beings are limited in their developmental capacity by their subsistence technologies, which makes it possible to categorize them according to their mode of production, from hunter-gatherer, to horticultural, to agricultural, to industrial (Ken Wilber adds informational). Throughout evolution, more advanced societies displace others by way of selection, giving way to societal and political succession in a way similar to ecological processes.
In Gerhard Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory, Lenski looks at the mechanisms of societal evolution, including forces of natural selection that bear on societies. As part of this, Lenski is concerned with the manner in which some cultures displace others, and the manner in which power distributes privileges. As Lenski sees it, societies evolve through processes of competition and cooperation, with more advanced societies—often those which bring a larger number of communities under one “roof,” so to speak— displacing or incorporating others into themselves. For Lenski, the main force of societal evolution is intersocietal selection. Patrick Nolan, Lenski’s cohort, and Gerhard Lenski himself say that
Intersocietal selection occurs when a society ceases to exist as an autonomous entity. This can be the result of conquest or absorption by a more powerful society, or disintegration as a result of a natural disaster, environmental change, food crisis, or epidemic disease. Throughout human experience, but especially over the past 10,000 years, societal extinction has been the result of contact and conflict among societies, and warfare and disease, either singly or in concert, have played the most powerful role. As a result, larger, more technologically advanced and militarily powerful, and more disease-experienced societies have prevailed, and they have come to constitute an ever larger proportion of the world system of societies.
The key to the major changes that have occurred in the world system of societies in the last 10,000 years is the process of intersocietal selection that has drastically reduced the number of societies. Were it not for this process, in which the units that survive (or become extinct) are entire societies, human life would not have changed nearly as much as it has.
[…]
Not all differences that have developed among societies have been equally important from the standpoint of intersocietal selection. Differences that influenced societal growth and development have been especially important, because societies that have grown in size and developed in complexity and military power have been much more likely to survive and transmit their cultures and institutional patterns than societies that have preserved traditional social and cultural patterns and minimized innovation.
The reasons for this are obvious. To survive, societies must be able to defend their populations and territories against a variety of threats. These include […], above all, threats from other societies.[78]
They say,
Societies that effectively cope with their biophysical and sociocultural environments continue to exist as autonomous systems, those that don’t either break up or are incorporated into other systems. Although societies with large effective bodies of cultural information are more likely to survive and pass on their traits […], diffusion allows much of the cultural information of systems that fail to survive to be preserved and passed on within the world system of societies.
Because technologically advanced societies have had the advantage in this process of intersocietal selection, their characteristics have increasingly come to be the characteristics of the world system as a whole.[79]
Nolan and Lenski stress that there is a major difference between cultural and biological evolution.
Springing from the easy flow of cultural information among societies and the ease with which it is incorporated into heritable form is yet another way in which sociocultural evolution differs from biological: it has given rise to much higher rates of change in our species. An evolution whose mechanism is genetic change is necessarily a slow process in a species that has a long generation span and relatively few offspring. But cultural information, relative to genetic, can be rapidly acquired, exchanged, recombined, and accumulated, with the result that substantial alterations in a society’s culture may occur within a single generation. […]
Finally, sociocultural evolution may have a greater potential than biological evolution for being brought under rational human control. So far, however, this process has hardly begun.[80]
Lenski acknowledges that societal evolution may at times imply racial tensions and stratification, as societies are often composed of particular races which may correspond at times to unique cultures. However, Lenski does not attribute societal advance to racial causes, but rather treats societal selection as if resulting largely from cultural forces (especially technology, subsistence technology always being the biggest factor). Thus, Lenski finds that while ruling classes are predominately white-skinned in much of the world, this results not so much from superior genetics as from cultural superiority, the ability for a society to find evolutionary success. With Lenski’s position, it is perfectly possible to explain a world in which elite groups share accidental characteristics like skin color in common, without reducing their elite status to those characteristics as if they were essential, simply by understanding where race and culture sometimes overlap. Race and ethnicity can be treated as matters of happenstance, which is the proper way to treat them.
These are not new-fangled ideas that Lenski is peddling. These ideas about intersocietal selection are found in Spinoza and in Proudhon and in Herbert Spencer, and are well in line with the thought of the Radical Enlightenment and mutualist thinking. These are modernist ideas about the potential for change in society, as well as its limits. One merely need read the Theological-Political Treatise of Spinoza, War and Peace and The System of Economic Contradictions by Proudhon, or Social Statics by Herbert Spencer to find overlap with the ecological-evolutionary political succession discussed by Gerhard Lenski. Much of this comes from thinking on positive law, such as that of Grotius. All of these men believed that, through intersocietal selection, political systems become more efficient and ultimately provide their ruling members with more of what is demanded (while also wishing to expand the scope of participating in rule-creation). Intersocietal selection puts the values and social cohesion of a society to a test of quality, with the successful exemplifying progress. But, once again, this is not a genetic or racial affair, but a cultural one.
Lenski stresses (in a way, like Spencer or maybe Proudhon) that while some selection does occur on a genetic level, that selection between and within societies has much more to do with memes. As such, those societies which develop more advanced memes—such as subsistence technologies and ideologies conducive to success—will tend to win out in a competition of selection. For Lenski, this means that while a given ruling class may be of a given race, this demonstrates superior ideas more than superior genetics, ideas that can be taken up by any race. Thus, political superiority does not entail racial superiority. This same kind of thinking is echoed in the thought of Proudhon, who— like Spencer for his social Darwinism— has been criticized as a relentless racist (in Proudhon’s case, for his justification of Southern slavery). But
Nowhere does Proudhon proclaim “the Negro as the lowest in the racial hierarchy” and while he notes “the existence of inequality among the races of mankind” he does not mention a “division of mankind into creative and sterile races.” This inequality of races is reflecting what Proudhon considers as marking his world but this does not mean […] that he was happy with it. This can be seen, ironically, from Proudhon’s talk of “inferior” and “superior” races which he clearly does not consider as unchangeable and so argues that “a superior race” has to “raise” the so-called “inferior” races “up to our level.” Which means that “superior” and “inferior” was not considered as intrinsic (if it were then this levelling of races would be impossible) but rather a product of history – and just as economic inequalities could be ended, so could the racial ones (particularly given that he used the word “race” very loosely, talking, for example, of “the English race”). He was also very clear on who he was arguing against, namely those who would free the slaves by “making them perish in the desolation of the proletariat.”[81]
Proudhon’s position here, and much of his statements regarding political succession, are in line with the general themes in Gerhard Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism (let’s remember that other anarchist projects were interested in the areas of human evolution as well, such as those involved in the anarchist paper Lucifer, the Lightbearer, otherwise known as Eugenics).
Often, those on top were actually resistant to bringing those below them “up to our level.” This would oftentimes result in war or, better, revolution on behalf of the lower strata of society. Constance Hall says that
[…] Proudhon saw war as being a dominant type of social change, history itself being explained by war […] It was through war that reason, which was temporarily hidden by the actual conflict of war, would emerge and act in its true role of directive of history: “In war as in politics, as in history, it is the general reason, reason of the peoples and reason of things, which triumphs definitively.”
[…]
[…] “I have re-established war to the prestige it had in antiquity; I have shown, contrary to the opinion of lawyers, that it is essentially an element of justice.”[82]
Not only that, but
For Proudhon war was not only fundamental and necessary in the nature of man, but rather it was through the social activity of war, and war as a dimension of social change, that man had been inspired through the ages to utilize and express his higher faculties. It was through war as a social activity and as a dimension of social change that the mores of society had been reformed and social progress made. Furthermore, it was only because of the social indicators of a state of war that we could understand the nature of peace[83]
“Collective reason,” for Proudhon, was also put to the test in the process of war. Sounding a radical democratic reasoning, much like Spinoza, some reason for this might be found in the fact that
[…] Proudhon insisted that only society as a collective being could follow its “instinct” freely. This was so because the superior reason in the group would disengage itself gradually from the reflections of individual members of the group and would consequently always lead the group in the “right” direction, namely the direction of the constructive working out of the principle of justice.[84]
This principle of justice, discovered through collective reason, and along with it, is precisely what war would put to the test and, ultimately, refine. In other words, and as Lenski might suggest, in intersocietal or intercultural competition, values and processes and organizing principles—the whole of a society’s technologies— are put to the test against one another. Ideas that have been diffused, altered, discovered, invented—including physical technologies as well as social systems and ethics—all come to play in intersocietal and intercultural selection. Thus, society progresses, in part, through the displacement of relatively defunct societies or cultures by those which are better working, thereby spreading progress to those resistant to it.
Again, this is in reference to intersocietal and sociocultural selection, and not so much to biological selection. This is because cultures can be learned, and human biology already allows for this, allowing evolutionarily advantageous cultural strategies to be transferred between the races. Much of the biological selection has already been undergone in the deselection of human species such as Homo habilis, Neanderthal, and Denisova, bringing about homosapien, of which the races are not separate species, but actually approach an equilibrium called the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Through this long selection process, humans have come to be very capable of adapting to one another’s cultures, and share a mental capacity with only a minute—and debatable—range of difference. Nonetheless, the process of cultural absorption can be quite uncomfortable, and may take a long time, especially if there is a lot of resentment toward the conquering culture, which prevents the conquered culture from properly diffusing the new culture which is absorbing them (sometimes this can be for good reason and may even find success in re-establishing itself). This is similar to working class resentment toward bourgeois tools such as money, which leads to irrational ideas such as the belief that communism can function well. Ideas such as communism among the working class, and resentment toward a particular culture among conquered people, keep those people from establishing themselves on the same level as their rulers. This was understood by mutualists, who, in opposing the Moderate Enlightenment and bourgeois Freemasonry, upheld the republican values of the Radical Enlightenment with their Freemasonry for workers.
“People of color” do often represent subdued groups of people. But Proudhon, himself, was of the peasant class, and represents then some of the conquered families of Europe, much as Mestizo peasants in South America represented conquered families. Across the world, class is often demarcated by differences in skin tone, with lighter skin associated with higher rungs of the hierarchy and darker skin in the lower rungs. But, in Europe, where the conquered are of a similar race, this demarcation is not so sharp. While they look similar, the lower classes of Europe are as much a conquered group as are people of color, even if they are further along in being culturally absorbed (tensions from absorption still linger in European nationalist movements, such as in the Basque region, where remnants of non-Indo-European language might remain). And Proudhon recognizes that both white workers and black slaves are less than free. As quoted by Robert L. Hoffman, Proudhon says that,
To be free: the man who is in possession of his reason and of his faculties, who is neither blinded by passion, nor constrained or impeded by fear, nor decieved by false opinion.
[…]
The negro who sells his wife for a knife, his children for glass beads, and himself for a bottle of brandy– he is not free. The merchant of human flesh with whom he deals is not an associate but his enemy.
The civilized worker who gives his labor for a piece of bread, who builds a palace in order to sleep in a stable, who makes the richest materials in order to wear rags, who produces everything in order to do without everything– he is not free. The master for whom he works does not become his associate by the exchange of salary and services between them, and is his enemy.
Despite Proudhon’s own position as a European peasant, and despite his own desire to transcend the class system, he did not believe it desirable simply to abolish it in one revolutionary act. Instead, a gradualist, and a child of the Enlightenment, Proudhon believed that it was necessary to get rid of superstition and to participate in the collective reason, which, over time, would work out successive solutions to the tensions of society. Much like Spinoza’s position on monarchy in his Theological-Political Treatise (essentially a treatise on the establishment of a democratic state), wherein Spinoza honors the successes of monarchy, while also wishing to displace it, Hall says that
Proudhon saw the social class system of his day as being a necessary historical stage of the evolution of French society. He thought that eventually no stratification system would exist, except as necessitated by the division of labor.[85]
She says,
For Proudhon all inequalities and contradictions served a function only insofar as they were a necessary stage of evolution through which society must progress.[86]
But Proudhon— like Spinoza, Herbert Spencer, Ken Wilber’s developmental approach, and Gerhard Lenski— acknowledged that there are necessary stages of evolution, and that some degree of stratification was an inevitable result of that. Is it unfair of Proudhon—and Spencer, and Lenski, and Wilber— to apply this concept not only to the classes, but also to cultures?
Proudhon was a peasant, and he did support the peasant classes. Were his program of mutualism to synthesize the classes— as he aimed to do— and to bring about a new prosperity; because people of color are peasants too, they too would share in the prosperity that was brought about by mutualism! So, it appears that the rational development necessary to bring about prosperity for the lower classes is precisely what is needed to bring prosperity, also, for people of color; both groups are conquered peoples. They should share ultimately one and the same goal: for conquered peoples—the working class— to raise their level of consciousness to such a point that they can establish the dominance of collective reason.
There is nothing racist about acknowledging the superiority of a particular culture, because race is different from culture. Proudhon was addressing this issue while maintaining that his own position as a peasant in society was legitimate in so far as his class did not remain elevated in consciousness. Part of the context for understanding this position might come from the fact that the Lyons mutualists whom Proudhon got mutualism from considered their project a “Freemasonry for workers,” and all of the character-alchemy that such a project involves. In short, Proudhon was assuming an elevation in consciousness, equivalent to that brought about by Freemasonry for the bourgeoisie, was not only possible for the working classes, but was a necessary precondition to establishing a more mutualistic society. And he adopted the mutualist project while this was already in action!
The problem for postmodernists is that their great realization—that everyone has a perspective that is a legitimate part of reality—does not explain the dynamics of how those perspectives interact, which ones will be successful, which will fail, and so on. It can’t stand being put to the test; it will wiggle and squirm and whine and complain. The postmodern pushback against colonialism, and support for disorganized “indigenous peoples,” is a perfect example of this. Postmodernism simply has little truly consequential to say about the qualities of success and the liberation of success (but it does offer some value in regard to tearing down some impediments to success, or seeing them in context). This would have to be found in modernist philosophies such as the necessitarianism of Spinoza and Godwin, or the pragmatism of Proudhon, Mill, and James, or even in efforts of “creative evolution” found in continental process philosophers such as Henri Bergson (Proudhon is also a bit of a process philosopher), himself influenced a great deal by the pragmatism of James. Postmodernism wishes to treat all of the unsuccessful cultural values and systems as being on par with Western success, all out of sentimentality and ressentiment. But cultural values which do not succeed, and which have no real competitive advantage, are not of equal worth to those which do succeed or which have the potential to compete. Proudhon criticized communism of producing mediocrity and exploiting the strong; it seems that same criticism is appropriately levied at cultural Marxism.
Much of the cultural Marxist narrative is about the oppression of people of color, women, sexual deviants, etc. with a large focus put onto patriarchy, white power, and colonialism. Colonialism, for instance, is made into such an enemy by cultural Marxists that there are books written like Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat, which argues, essentially, that all white people (especially males) are basically capitalists (!):
The mythology of the white masses pretends that while the evil planter and the London merchant grew fat on the profits of the slave labor, the “poor white” of the South, the Northern small farmer and white worker were all uninvolved in slavery and benefited not at all from it. The mythology suggests that slavery even lowered the living standard of the white masses by supposedly holding down wages and monopolizing vast tracts of farmland. Thus, it is alleged, slavery was not in the interests of the white masses.[87]
Like much postmodern thought, there is plenty of truth to be found in the pages of this book—white Western culture is dominant, and participants in this culture do benefit—, but it ends up being an attack on the unprivileged by the disprivileged, which ultimately works out to the benefit of the privileged or up-and-coming privileged, just like racial divides always have. Black union organizer in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Ben Fletcher, would address the issue of segregation on behalf of the bosses by organizing white and black workers alike into an unsegregated union. That’s the modernist solution! Postmodernists, however, would tear such efforts apart, by internally re-segregating collective action in the form of ideas like the “progressive stack,” wherein the officially oppressed are given special privileges.
One problem with the outlook in Settlers, characteristic of cultural Marxism, is that it does not consider the dynamics of cultural and societal evolution, and does not have a properly progressive understanding of history (a little reading of Proudhon might fix this!). Cultures evolve and, as they come into contact with one another, those cultures that are more environmentally “fit” win out. And this is how evolution works. And evolution does, as uncomfortable as it may be, demonstrate cultural superiority. But this is an ongoing process. Settlers does not consider the causes of white European success. Settlers is not concerned with the merits of the evolutionary success of Western “white” culture, nor of Western radicalism, which would spread the benefits of Western culture to everyone, no matter their racial, sexual, ethnic, etc. identities. This is different from a position like mutualism, because Proudhon’s position is neither conflictarian nor functionalist in regard to the state and capitalists, but compatibilist. Proudhon believes that capitalism and the state are necessary under the present circumstances (but wants to dissolve both into reciprocity). Proudhon is very interested in the causes of state and capitalist power, while at the same time wishing to subdue that power in the progress of history. I believe a better view than that provided by Settlers is provided not only in the thought of people such as Proudhon, but also in more contemporary thinking such as that found in Gerhard Lenski.
Postmodernism would treat cultural dominance as a more-or-less bad thing that is fundamentally oppressive. But this is not the view of Proudhon, nor is it the view of modern sociology, such as the ecological-evolutionary theory of Gerhard Lenski. Both Proudhon and Lenski (and like Herbert Spencer, a mutualist[88] to whom Proudhon is at times compared, and Lenski draws from) understand cultural dominance to be a symptom of progress. This calls into question whether or not WASP or even Jewish dominance is a fundamentally bad thing, or whether it is just a temporary impediment to particular desires which have not yet been brought up to par in practicability, or which represent old ways to be done away with. What is clear for mutualists is that, fundamentally bad or not, it is undesirable, yet, for the mutualist, as with the Spinozan (in which the Radical Enlightenment is rooted), it is understood that the responsibility of doing something better remains in the hands of those affected by a given problem or “oppression” and their sympathizers, and that this requires collective reason and collective force (as Constance Margaret Hall points out). For the mutualist, as with the Spinozan, the solution relies on the organic development of an alternative within the existing society. This is, of course, a reflection of the modernist pursuit to change the world.
Ultimately, it should not matter to mutualists the race or ethnicity or sex or whatever of who is exploiting them, and ultimately, I don’t think they really even need to know these accidental characteristics of individuals. Mutualist methods of change affect the capitalist no matter their face, and, because they are non-violent, require no marksmanship in aggressive activity. Instead, mutualists passively withdraw their labor from the control of the present system, not needing to know who is ultimately holding the reigns in that system. No matter what their race or ethnicity, no matter how hidden from the public, individuals—through collective reason and collective force—may withdraw their labor from those who would otherwise maintain an external constitution. As even Shawn Wilbur points out, “Mutualism recognizes positive power, and looks for liberty in the counterpoise of powers, not in power’s abolition,” as “mutualism is progressive and conservative”.[89]
Closing
By now it must be very clear that cultural Marxism represents the institutionalization of the techno-managerial New Class of Bobos and their friends, which has infiltrated United States universities and is taught to intellectuals in their Cultural Studies, Literature, and related departments.[90] This infiltration has penetrated into mutualism by way of postmodern literary criticism, tending to fragment, polarize, and reduce mutualism according to the subjectivity of the postmodern critic. This represents a departure from mutualism’s modernist roots, which can be revived in the form of remodernism. Remodernism is not reactionary, but, instead of completely neglecting some of the more valid insights of postmodernism, wishes to “transcend and include” postmodernism, in the movement from first-tier Green level consciousness (in Spiral Dynamics) to second-tier Yellow and Turquoise levels of consciousness. Remodernism has the capacity to represent a return to the unactualized values of the Radical Enlightenment, in which both modernism (by way of Courbet) and mutualism (by way of Proudhon) has its home. The similarities between mutualism and Spiral Dynamics Integral is noteworthy for mutualism’s fit, along with remodernism, in the Yellow+ stage of consciousness. In order for mutualists to get beyond their current self-restrictive paradigm of postmodern self-fullfilling prophecies of failure, mutualists must return to the values of the Radical Enlightenment in which they have their roots— such as those of pragmatism and necessitarianism— and must move past the self-stunting postmodernism that keeps them from doing so. Proudhon’s and Spencer’s early mutualist sociology can be a guide in this matter, informed also by Gerhard Lenski’s more contemporary ecological-evolutionary theory— which demonstrates on a material level that cultures are not of equal fitness, and so taking the rug from under postmodern demands for subjectivistic equality, and affirming pragmatism—, a position which is consistent with the views of Proudhon and of Spencer. By pushing back against cultural Marxism, mutualists can establish a firm position of cultural mutualism as a counter-position. This might look more like the approach of Daryl Davis or of attempts at unity between black liberationists and poor white populists,[91] balancing the antinomies between cultural Marxism and white nationalism.
[Image source: http://theconversation.com/chicago-1969-when-black-panthers-aligned-with-confederate-flag-wielding-working-class-whites-68961]
[1] There are actually many notions of “modernism.” Some refer to all modern art, including realism and Romanticism, as modernism; some to any art which forward the values of modernity; and others to a particular reaction against realism. The lines of demarcation can be quite arbitrary in this regard.
[2] http://arthistoryresources.net/modernism/roots.html
[3] https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/commentary-the-isms-of-modern-art/
[4] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/realism/a/courbet-the-artists-studio-a-real-allegory-summing-up-seven-years-of-my-artistic-and-moral-life
[5] https://docsandlin.com/2019/10/04/postmodernity-simply-explained/
[6] https://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_modernism.html
[7] I don’t include Romanticism as modernism despite its being modern art because it was not upholding the values of the Enlightenment so much as participating in an aristocratic sort of counter-Enlightenment.
[8] http://arthistoryresources.net/modernism/roots.html
[9] https://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_modernism.html
[10] https://docsandlin.com/2019/10/04/postmodernity-simply-explained/
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5YSikO6JRM
[12] https://docsandlin.com/2019/10/04/postmodernity-simply-explained/
[13] Wilber
[14] Wilber
[15] Realpolitik is sometimes used to co-opt and redirect an enemy’s influence, or in order to infiltrate and destroy an enemy from within their own ranks. This has been used on anarchism a number of times, as when anarchists have had their energies directed toward “Left unity,” or when the word “anarchist” has been misappropriated by communists or capitalists.
[16] Jacob, xi
[17] Jacob, 4
[18] http://vcmtalk.com/jospeh_dietzgen_page
[19] Shah, xxvii
[20] https://www.academia.edu/6292926/2005-Entropy_and_Syntropy_From_Mechanical_to_Life_Science
[21] https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/tag/billy-childish/
[22] https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/commentary-the-isms-of-modern-art/
[23] https://www.amazon.com/Remodern-America-Renewal-Western-Civilization/dp/1977200001/
[24] When I am discussing remodernism, I’m not specifically drawn to Modernism-proper so much as I am to modernity and modern art. My personal taste is toward an early modernism, Courbet being a painter whose work I can admire and respect.
[25] Wilber, 31
[26] Hall, 42
[27] Hall, 42
[28] Hall, 42
[29] Wilber, 31
[30] Proudhon has a dualism in his philosophy that is not unlike that found in Freemasonry, of which he was a member. In masonry, this is made apparent in the symbolic pillars of Boaz and Jachin. Freemasonry is very often associated with the perennial philosophy. Others have attributed Proudhon to being something of a French Marcion or of having Manichean tendencies, both having roots in Gnosticism, itself associated with the perennial philosophy.
A probable mentor to Proudhon, Pierre Charnier, had previously described mutualism as Freemasonry for workers.
[31] Hall, 94
[32] Hall, 93
[33] Hall, 92
[34] Wilbur, 15
[35] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o2_dbLq070
[36] Mutualism also happens to be the political view of one of the most prominent modernist artists, Gustave Courbet, painter of Proudhon.
[37] Israel, xiii
[38] Israel, 49
[39] Wilber2, 281
[40] Wilbur, 15
[41] http://nideffer.net/proj/_SPEED_/1.4/articles/wilbur.html
[42] Wilbur, 18
[43] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czddkPxz4K4
[44] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY
[45] http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/cultn/cultn032.pdf
[46] http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/cultn/cultn032.pdf
[47] Wilbur, 5
[48] Wilbur, 12
[49] Wilbur, 8
[50] MacKay, 775
[51] MacKay, 61
[52] MacKay, 61
[53] Wilbur, 5
[54] Shawn removed me from the Facebook group after calling him out for his cultural Marxism.
[55] This comment is on a post in the “mutualism” Facebook group, which Shawn removed me from for criticizing him publicly for his cultural Marxism.
[56] Collins and Mayblin, 16
[57] MacKay, 51
[58] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le7OqmDtcLo
[59] Wilbur, 7
[60] Wilbur, 11
[61] Lenski, 70
[62] https://c4ss.org/content/52344
[64] https://www.reddit.com/r/Market_Socialism/comments/ct2aqm/kevin_carson_statement_on_the_p2p_foundation/
[65] http://www.mutualist.org/id7.html
[66] http://www.mutualist.org/id7.html
[67] I say this because I invited Kevin to participate in a real-life workshop with me at my farm, to which he politely declined. Kevin prefers to write. C4SS has recently dissociated from me, taking my essays down, so perhaps he does not want to taint his conspicuous association with someone like me. Regardless, I maintain respect for Kevin and his work.
[68] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE
[69] We don’t just want to balance the antinomies of cultural Marxism and white nationalism, we want to also recognize and honor the plurality they are stifling and which has potential to spring back to life, and to find a means to establish that plurality in a revolutionary unity. This would look something like oppressed people from many different cultures—including those outside of the antinomies, but not discluding those accidentally within it— organizing across identarian lines for the sake of purely human values that are co-arisen at by way of a confederated democratic process. Postmodernism may be a necessary step to break down the trust in the antinomies and to create a kind of pluralism, but it is not a final step, as the vacuum will eventually be filled with something assertive enough. It is the responsibility of mutualists to fill this vacuum if they do not want to see it filled by some form of authority. A disunited pluralism lacks the power to fill this vacuum, so a renewed cultural unity appears necessary.
[70] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw
[71] While geographic advantages have been a major culprit of white European domination, it is nonetheless true that those advantages have lent themselves to technological achievements and cultural advancements which have hitherto been out-of-reach to humanity. And these have been the manner in which geographic advantages have been chiefly expressed, lending themselves to the wider advantages over other groups. It is unfortunate, but natural selection sees in warfare a suitable means of spreading advantages and generalizing them amongst a wider populace. War, that is, results in the passing of favorable cultural practices and technologies to a wider population for use, and is often a test of a population’s values and organizing principles. That some groups have an advantage over others does not seem to be a primary concern to Nature, as she has made it that way. While the cultural advantages have been given arbitrarily and accidentally to one group—white Europeans—over some others, by way of geographic advantages, they are nonetheless advantages when it comes to power, nature’s primary consideration. And colonialism has been the manner in which these advantages have been passed along to other cultures, which tend to incorporate the people of those cultures into its own, some of whom become fortunate enough to join in the ruling class, though class remains largely but impurely separated along the lines of race. Once a colonized people is subsumed into the population of the conquering peoples, they begin to be treated under the laws of those peoples. Even during the period of slavery free blacks could be found in the South and in largely equal proportion to that found in the North. Colonization, then, becomes less about racial hatred, and more about advantages. And those advantages eventually become shared as racial boundaries become diluted through intermarriage and favoritism.
[72] https://libcom.org/library/bakunin-marx-rothschild
[73] http://www.wildboar.net/multilingual/easterneuropean/russian/literature/articles/whofinanced/whofinancedleninandtrotsky.html
[74] https://thedailyknell.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/86/
[75] Many Biblical scholars, particularly those on the Right, hold that many of Europe’s population has its cultural origins in the lost tribes of Israel. Regardless, most Jews are of the caucasian race.
[76] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity-politics
[77] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity-politics
[78] Nolan and Lenski, 64
[79] Nolan and Lenski, 70
[80]Nolan and Lenski, 72
[81] https://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/proudhon-neither-washington-nor-richmond
[82] Hall, 63
[83] Hall, 64
[84] Hall, 35
[85] Hall, 101
[86] Hall, 106
[87] http://readsettlers.org/ch1.html
[88] See Piers J. Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England
[89] Wilbur, 4
[90] This has also penetrated highschools, by way of criterial demands (as well as by the teacher’s own formal training).
[91] See, for instance, the pragmatic involvement of the Black Panthers with the Young Patriots, a Confederate flag-waving group of white leftists (SDS origins) established to support whites from Appalachia.
