Enlightenment, Spinoza, And Reason In The Service Of Power

I think some may find this as interesting as I did. It helped me reconcile something in my head: why is the enlightenment rationalist thinking so fiercely attacked as supporting all kinds of vicious European and white supremacist ideas?

One argument is that the enlightenment was divided into two camps – those who sought to justify the status quo using reason instead of tradition and scripture, and those who were bolder and didn’t stop at the threshold of what was politically comfortable.

The great Jewish ethicist and atheist, Baruch Spinoza, is presented as a champion of the latter group. Instead of accomodating the traditions of either his Jewish community or the Christian one in which he was embedded, he let reason take him to radical challenges of orthodoxy – such that he seems more modern than many of his contemporaries who stopped short.

This also reminds me of the split in ‘new’ atheism, so wedded to enlightenment thinking, between those whose atheism leads them to challenge many beliefs about modern society vs. those who seem to be desperate to be the first to justify all of the old prejudices without using any religious arguments.

It’s a reminder of the danger of using reason tamely as a plaything of biased, power-driven ideas.

This is something I posted on Facebook. Rather than let it disappear into social media purgatory, I’m posting these as-is. I’ll hopefully return to add links, images, and make necessary edits in future.

Know your lefties part 4: The Democratic Socialist

This is part of a series that I’ve been posting on Facebook. Rather than let it disappear into social media purgatory, I’m posting these as-is. I’ll hopefully return to add links, images, and make necessary edits in future. But the idea is to give people who only know left politics from right-wing propaganda a basic understanding of how the left sees its own overarching ideologies.

Wait. Didn’t I do this one before? There is a profound difference between a Social Democrat and a Democratic Socialist. The former seeks to manage capitalism for the benefit of the population. The latter seeks to drop capitalism from production altogether within a democratic state.

Let’s use two recent examples. Bernie Sanders is a social democrat. He loved using the word ‘socialist’ to take it away from his enemies as a weapon against him. But he only proposed regulating private business to lessen the appalling effects of capitalism.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, had an election proposal that got very little attention (in the unprecedented frenzy to paint him as Hitler and Stalin’s love-child). He said that the Labour government would pass a law giving employees of a company first right-of-refusal whenever the owners sell. Furthermore, he’d create a large government fund to give cheap loans to help employees buy.
This proposal would have been a vehicle for passing private business into the hands of employees. A worker owned-company obviously doesn’t throw its workers under the bus for profits. But also, since workers usually represent a broad spectrum of the society – rather than the elite that run and own private companies – they also have a huge disincentive to harm the society with their activities and to enhance public programmes rather than lobbying against them.

That was to be the starting-gun for democratic socialism – the state-supported attempt to undo the minority ownership of industrial production and hand it instead to the *population* – not the *state* as seen in Marxist-Leninist countries like the USSR and Cuba.

Even in social democracies like Denmark and Germany, democracy is curtailed at the workplace door (in the USA it all but ends). Most of your waking life is spent with a tiny minority of powerful people telling you how to dress, when to take your lunch, what to work on, when to work, and how to work on it.
Everyone who’s worked in a private company knows that the bosses are often not the best-informed people in the organisation. They’re sometimes downright incompetent. And nearly always they have very different financial concerns than employees.

In an industrial ‘worker co-operative’ like the enormous Mandragon in Spain (pictured above. Src), it’s one employee, one vote. This doesn’t only ensure that the best interests of employees are always the priority of the company. It also makes the kinds of conspiracies that frequently take place in and between private companies extremely difficult. You’re not dealing with eight people in the know anymore, but dozens.

The likes of Tiger Brand’s sociopathic price-fixing of bread would not only have come out sooner but many of the workers and their extended families who’d be hurt by it would oppose such a conspiracy in the first place.
This is the focus of democratic socialists: bringing democracy through the workplace doors.

Many, like Corbyn, see no need for revolution. If government incentives let employees choose between worker-owned and privately-owned companies, private companies would need to give their workers equal treatment or not find talented employees. Eventually, they’d be unable to exploit employees or the society sufficiently to provide big surplus profits to shareholders.

Unlike Anarchists, democratic socialists mostly see a powerful role for the government in nurturing such a society and providing services that benefit from economies of scale and require constant ethical oversight – such as healthcare, education, public housing, utilities, transport, etc..

Unlike Marxist-Leninists, they don’t want a new boss who’s the same as the old boss. Having an all-powerful, unaccountable state controlling everything obviously led to corruption and state violence. And it offered employees no greater freedom in the workplace than they had under capitalism.

Unlike social democracies, ultra-wealthy elites would not be constantly undermining hard-won quality-of-life gains.

This is the centre within the left. Democratic, but still seeing a role for a government. People would enjoy the social freedoms and security they enjoy under social democracy. But those freedoms and agency would extend into the workplace. Production for people, not vice-versa.

Know your lefties part 3: The Anarchist

This is part of a series that I’ve been posting on Facebook. Rather than let it disappear into social media purgatory, I’m posting these as-is. I’ll hopefully return to add links, images, and make necessary edits in future. But the idea is to give people who only know left politics from right-wing propaganda a basic understanding of how the left sees its own overarching ideologies.

Anarchism is probably the most misunderstood political ideology in existence. In the popular imagination, anarchy means chaos. It’s therefore widely assumed that anarchists seek chaos. That is 100% not the case.

Anarchy literally means, “no rule,” as democracy means, “rule by the people,” or aristocracy means, “rule by the best,” (one of history’s most ironic labels). So chaos, right? No. Anarchists use the label in the sense of no one having the right to control others. They oppose *hierarchy*. That’s the critical thing to understand. *They do not oppose organisation.*

Anarchism is a radical form of absolute democracy in which institutions are all governed by majority decision. Anarchists seek the destruction of institutions that are coercive – that get to decide what people must do without their consent. Well, that covers just about every institution currently in existence.

There’s a superb example of anarchist thinking going on at the moment: dissolving police forces in the US. The argument is that these police forces are inherently unjust institutions and they should, therefore, be dismantled and recreated in a form that is justifiable. Anarchists seek to do this with all institutions.

Noam Chomsky, who calls himself a “conservative anarchist,” argues that anarchism can be achieved progressively by asking every institution to justify itself. If it cannot do so it should be dismantled. He argues that almost no institution can, in fact, justify itself, but would allow that something like a universal healthcare system might be able to justify its existence even if institutions within it would need to be dismantled (differing pay structures, different rights to decision making etc.).

But many anarchists are revolutionaries and believe that institutions should be overthrown all at once and all rebuilt as necessary without any hierarchy. This means, principally: the state. Most anarchists believe that society should be rebuilt on local collectives that share productive resources; with management – where it’s necessary – falling to elected members who can easily be recalled should they act out of accordance with the will of the collective. The state would be replaced by affiliations between these collectives who would negotiate overarching bodies and contribute, also by negotiation, to projects that benefit all (such as universities and research institutions).

So no. Anarchists would not automatically fall victim to any strongman wishing to take advantage of the lack of a state – since they’d be perfectly capable of arranging the defence of their collectives through a unified defence force – but one that would be influenced by genuine representatives from the people in the collectives. In other words, all anarchist institutions would be completely accountable to the people.

The key difference between anarchist and state-based institutions is the realistic understanding that state-based institutions frequently don’t have to regularly account for their decisions and often contain powerful bureaucrats who are able to act against the wishes of the populace and their junior staff members. This is extreme in autocratic states such as the USSR, but also totally normal in liberal democracies like the United Kingdom.

Anarchists generally accept that people should be allowed private ownership of personal property (dwellings, clothing, personal items, etc.) but not productive property (farms, factories, mines, etc.). They generally believe that coercion may be permissible in child-raising and caring for people with cognitive problems.

Anarchism is accused of being unworkable because anarchist regions have often been swiftly destroyed – such as Catalonia in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. But those examples can be explained as being due to the historical circumstances in which collectives have formed between powerful enemies that seek to restore the power of hierarchies. The Syrian Kurdish region of Rojava (The press loves showing their women warriors without mentioning the radical political beliefs that made them possible) is semi-anarchistic and is also beset by powerful enemies (ISIS and now the Turkish army). But it is currently surviving and boasts almost-certainly the most accountable democracy on Earth.

(The headline image is of Kurdish YPG fighters published by The Jewish Star)

But the basic counter-argument is that you could have said the same of ‘liberal’ democracy for the 2,000 years between its invention in Athens and the founding of the United States of America.

The harder problem for anarchism is perhaps the existence of bigoted collectives in which hatred of some minority is popular. Without an overarching state to forbid such abuse, the best that can really be argued is that, in lieu of gross inequality created by capitalist hierarchies, such scapegoating would be far less common.

Last note: slandering anarchists as seeking chaos was made easy by the rather crude approach to destroying hierarchy by many early anarchists: blowing up rulers with bombs. This made it easy to suggest that they were simply trying to cause as much mayhem as possible. And, of course, it was pretty unsuccessful since individuals are not institutions, so blowing them up doesn’t destroy the hierarchical position they held.

Dagnabit, I should also mention the concept of ‘direct action.’ Most anarchists believe in acting as if you are free in order to demonstrate the lack of need for hierarchical institutions. This means forming organisations to act against hierarchy and to provide the kinds of support that people would receive in an anarchist society. In some cases this can even include violent attempts to sabotage hierarchical institutions and mechanisms of capitalism.

Know Your Lefties 2: The Social Democrat

This is part of a series that I’ve been posting on Facebook. Rather than let it disappear into social media purgatory, I’m posting these as-is. I’ll hopefully return to add links, images, and make necessary edits in future. But the idea is to give people who only know left politics from right-wing propaganda a basic understanding of how the left sees its own overarching ideologies.

Swinging to the other end of the left spectrum from the tankie is the social democrat. This is the most centrist ideology that can be considered left.

The social democrat believes in putting the well-being of people ahead of private industry (which liberals fundamentally do not – putting them on the right) but believes that this wellbeing can be best achieved by regulating a capitalist economy – making use of its productive capability while offsetting its worst negative effects. They have good reason to be confident. The countries with the best standards of living and the greatest equality are all social democracies.

Because many of these countries are in Scandinavia, this ideology is sometimes called the “Nordic Way.”

The state usually takes full control of industries that would have perverse incentives to cause social harm if left in the private sector – health, education, utilities, law-enforcement and correction. These services are then provided free to citizens at high quality – at the expense of medium-to-high tax rates (although the right grossly exaggerates the taxation level in these countries).

There is even an extraordinary example in the “third world.” The Southern Indian state of Kerala has been largely run by the Communist-Marxist party since Britain was kicked out in 1947. Subject to the constitution of India, it has operated as a social democracy since around that time. Even in the 1970s, when India was swamped by poverty, Kerala was famous for its 100% literacy and its health outcomes equivalent to those of the United States at the time (from its free health services and food provision to the poor and elderly). Today Kerala still enjoys the highest standard of living in India. You don’t need to be rich to have a successful social democracy.

(The cover image comes from a Hindustan Times piece titled: State-run Punalur hospital in Kerala gives pvt hospitals a run for their money)

The right-wing claims social democracies are unaffordable and will collapse in a few years time. They’ve been saying that since shortly after WWII. Sometimes they pretend these states and their clearly superior outcomes don’t exist (Sweden even consistently ranks higher for economic competitiveness than the USA). At other times they call them, ‘socialist’ with the implication that they’re the same as Stalinist Russia (see the spittle-flecked denunciations of Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic policies).

So why are there still lefties further left if social democracy is so successful? Two main reasons:

Capitalists in social democracies still enjoy enormous power from their disproportionate wealth. This is combined with a huge incentive to overthrow all the regulations on their activities that make social democracies such pleasant places for human beings. Capitalists use their massive financial power to continually erode the foundations of these states – often successfully weakening their best institutions. This fight is incessant. They have the money and incentive to keep at it, while normal citizens have many other priorities and far less money to throw around.

The second major flaw is that, while social democracies enjoy far more rights in the workplace than dystopian hellscapes like The United States, democracy still effectively ends at the workplace door – through which adults spend *most of their waking lives*.

Private companies continue to be petty hierarchical dictatorships in which your ability to set your working agenda is virtually nil and in which you are expected to behave in arbitrary ways according to the whims of your ‘superiors.’

Know Your Lefties 1: The Tankie

This is part of a series that I’ve been posting on Facebook. Rather than let it disappear into social media purgatory, I’m posting these as-is. I’ll hopefully return to add links, images, and make necessary edits in future. But the idea is to give people who only know left politics from right-wing propaganda a basic understanding of how the left sees its own overarching ideologies.

Tankie is a derogatory term used by leftists and socialists for people who genuinely believe the things that the media thinks lefties believe. And that’s a key distinction. They’re seen as weird and deluded by the majority of people who consider themselves socialists, anarchists, communists, etc.. but, in the popular imagination, all of those people are what lefties call tankies.

The term comes from lefties in the West who claimed that the Soviet crushing of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule in Hungary by sending in tanks (pictured in the header image) was entirely justified – idiots, in other words.

In their most grotesque form, they believe that every single bad thing ever said about the hideous regimes in the 20th C that called themselves “socialist” was Western propaganda. This includes believing absurdities such as that North Korea is a utopia.

It’s the flat-Earthism of leftism. They recognise the genuine propaganda about these regimes, and go on to extrapolate that every bad thing said about them is propaganda. It’s a species of conspiracy theory.

While most people still believe the *actual* propaganda – that there was, and cannot have been, anything advantageous about these regimes compared to capitalist democracies – tankies have gone so far the other way that they don’t believe in their genuine gross violations of human rights and their unspeakable atrocities.

The average socialist hates the anti-democratic authoritarianism and violence of the Cuban regime but justifiably praises its health and education triumphs. The tankie claims that the latter is proof of the greatness of the regime and the former is made up.

These people provide handy examples to convince people that lefties are unhinged and support brutal dictatorships. The reality is that almost all lefties are just as convinced that they’re nuts.

There’s also a hefty crossover with “Marxist-Leninists” – people who believe in the authoritarian Marxism invented by Lenin to justify his dictatorship – who sometimes get called tankies by other socialists. But even among that authoritarian bunch, the true tankie is often seen as delusional.