BradSpangler.com

A Marxist is understood as a follower of Marx’s political thought or later variants of it. A Marxian, however, could refer to anyone substantially influenced by Marx, but not necessarily a “Marxist” strictly speaking. One loses credibility by inaccurately labeling people as “Marxists” with reckless disregard for what that word specifically means. However, it’s not out of line to label an establishment social-democrat a “Marxian” if you are prepared to make the following point — that they subscribe to the same particular key error that Marx made in economics. That error is the supposition that oppressive capitalism, best understoood as state driven monopolization of capital, derives from market exchange rather than state granted privilege, forcible transfer of wealth by the state and assorted other statist market distortions.

If someone knows something you don’t know, how can you know that they know it?

How can knowing that someone knows something you don’t know translate into knowing that if you were to know what they know you would know how to save some unknown person from an unknown threat that may or may not exist?

Discuss.

Keith Preston is someone whose work I’ve been aware of and mostly respected. The problem is that, while he’s the sort who is usually right about many things — when he’s wrong, he’s really, really, really wrong.

Rothbard’s Law, the observed phenomenon that people tend to specialize in what they are worst at, has got a cruel hold on Preston. Henry George was (from a free market libertarian standpoint) pretty good on almost all issues except land. Naturally, he made land his principal focus. Rothbard saw Milton Friedman as correct on a lot of economic matters but horrible on money, which naturally became Friedman’s principal focus. Preston makes the error of expanding pluralism in anarchist theory so far as forge overt alliances with the nutzoid authoritarian right (i.e. Nazis and Klansmen), so long as they make insurrectionary sounding noises. Naturally, he has come to see that as his own special niche and is apparently determined to ride said hobby-horse to Hades.

I’ve mostly ignored Preston for the past few years after this tragic flaw of his became clear, although that was interspersed with a handful of episodes in which I felt compelled to explain and defend him as merely mistaken. All the while, I was hoping he would eventually straighten up and fly right.

I can’t do that anymore. At least, not after he posted the odious piece of garbage he titled “Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?”, anyway.

The critiques of Preston’s post that I’ve noticed have been pretty spot-on overall and particularly precise and incisive in the case of Kevin Carson’s post.

• Taking sides on the right to be a complete jackass by Mike Gogulski
• An Open Letter to Keith Preston by Kevin Carson
• Perverts Versus Preston by Darian Worden

The first thing that came to mind for myself was that Preston’s colorful call to purge the queers reeks of the influence of the sort of strutting leather-boys with way to much Fallschirmjäger memorabilia who think that they’re not gay as long as they’re always the top.

Carson, though, aptly summarized this mess when he wrote:

But while I could respect your willingness to tolerate loathsome people on pragmatic grounds, I can’t remain neutral when you advocate purging the anti-state movement in order to appease those loathsome people. You have “evolved,” if you can call it that, from a willingness to share a tent with racists and homophobes for the sake of defeating Empire as the primary enemy, to promoting an active purge of anti-racists and gays from the anti-Empire movement because the majority of your anti-state coalition might find them offensive. In short, you have “evolved” from tolerating racist and homophobic groups as a means to an end, to withdrawing support from the “cultural left” in order to appease the right wing of your coalition.

You’ve drawn a line that requires me to take a public stand, and publicly disassociate myself from your statements. If my choice is between “self-hating whites, bearded ladies, cock-ringed queers, or persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity’,” and Nazis, Klansmen and white nationalists, I know which side I’ll take.

Indeed. Give me your freaks, your weird, your huddled masses yearning to exchange bodily fluids.

Towards the end of his piece, Preston encapsulates what I take as his principal point:

Before we can have an anarchist revolution, we need to have a revolution within anarchism itself. We need to convey the message to other radical tendencies and to the public at-large that anarchism as a political ideology is not simply some freak show that exists to provide group psychotherapy to a bunch of psychologically damaged personalities.

I will list and debunk some of the apparent misconceptions touched on in that statement and which it appears to rest upon.

First, as I see it, Preston mistakes the sociopathic proclivity for personal violence commonly encountered among white nationalists for martial prowess and “fighting spirit”. Simply put — every bigot is a bully, and every bully is a coward. If we are to fight, let us fight at the side of the brave. There is no Nazi utopia. The handful of “damaged personalities” who would lay down their lives for a twisted, dystopian vision would undoubtedly be no challenge for a suitably well-armed Girl Scout troop.

Secondly, despite wearing the grandiose term “American Revolutionary Vanguard” on his sleeve, that same above statement by Preston betrays an apparently very crude, shallow and underdeveloped understanding of anarchist revolution as simply insurrection. It appears that in Preston’s view, if we can manage to collect enough of those who simply want to kill people and blow things up, we “win”. A more credible understanding is the notion that by attacking the illusionary moral legitimacy of the state we build a revolutionary class consciousness among the victims of statism that can compel them to cooperate in defending themselves against the state. And since you can’t blow up a set of dysfunctional social relationships, Preston is metaphorically flailing about at imagined nails because the only tool he apparently respects is a hammer.

Third, Preston suffers from a failure to understand the realities of multilateral conflict in failing states. I’ll use Iraq as an example. Ba’athists, tribal militias and Islamists commonly do cooperate on the battlefield on a per-project basis when it suits them, despite the gross differences in their visions of what they are fighting for. They create no unifying organization. Preston’s laughable proposal to “purge” an entire family of related movements with no centralized command and control speaks volumes about his understanding of organization. He’s acting as if he seeks some sort of neo-Maoist political coalition unified in thought and action — and any thoughts would apparently be okay, as long as those thoughts gather together a sufficient amount of cannon fodder.

Preston doesn’t understand people, he doesn’t understand revolution and he doesn’t understand warfare. These are serious matters.

I’m looking to possibly get involved in some traveling activism projects. Anybody that can help me out with getting an inexpensive but rugged Linux netbook and a similarly small and rugged video camera, please let me know via the contact form on this web site.

UPDATE: A friend writes…

I use a Dell Inspiron mini 9, you can occasionally get them on sale for $199 with Ubuntu pre-installed, ubfortunatly, that ships with a 4GB SSD. You can max out the RAM (2GB) for $25 and upgrade to a FAST 32GB SSD by Runcore for $130 shipped. There are other, cheaper brands but they are much slower. You will be able to pick them up for even cheaper with 3G wireless and a contract from AT&T soon, but I don’t know if they have any linux offerings.

As far as activist video goes, I recommend a Flip Video Ultra, 60 minutes of flash memory for $130 shipped. 640×480, handles low light better than the Creative Vado, decent sound, & works well with Ubuntu.

In arguments where someone claims “A can’t be true because it would cause B and B is undesirable”, it’s probably a safe bet that A doesn’t cause B, because it’s being mentioned as supposedly obvious by the same sort of person who doesn’t recognize their own desires have no impact on whether something is true or not.

Actually, mostly just money and maybe lawyers — but I couldn’t resist an opportunity to allude to a Warren Zevon song.

The entire three-man crew of The Motorhome Diaries has been arrested and imprisoned in Mississippi. Details here. I suggest sending them financial support ASAP via the support/donations page on their web site.

The freed market (future tense) is the libertarian socialist answer to statist monopoly. Proudhon’s cooperatives, Bakunin’s collectives and Kropotkin’s communes — these are all privatization proposals.

Here’s a comment I posted on Digg for this article:

While the RKBA is absolutely crucial, it’s not enough by itself because it doesn’t answer the question mentioned in the article for the post-Constitutional aftermath — “But what then?”

Neither guns nor the Constitution can provide either the will to resist or the revolutionary theory adequate to restrain and channel insurgency away from terroristic acts that undermine popular support for revolution.

The prospective Constitutionalist revolutionary of the 21st century must, therefore, first ideologically confront the failure of Constitutionalism — in order to survey the intellectual landscape and seize upon that which comes after Constitutionalism, addressing its failures but holding true to the same Classical Liberal principles that inspired the US Founders.

That answer is out there, and those who will not take up the challenge of its advocacy despite mere social ostracism will never stand and fight either.

That answer is anarchism, and specifically individualist anarchism.

Those who see themselves first and foremost as “patriots” more loyal to the idea of what America is supposed to be *about* than the American government should start educating themselves and preparing to serve as zealous advocates of a stateless society, a vision that unites the best elements of the radical “right” and “left” for the cause of Liberty.

The following classic essay is a good place for the patriot to start — “Anarchism and American Traditions” by Voltairine de Cleyre:

http://praxeology.net/VC-AAT.htm

A recent post by Roderick Long proved to be an occasion for me to comment on the agorist anti-political approach:

My own position deviates from Konkin in that I have doubts about the full applicability of the standard moral objections [to electoral politics, i.e. reformism] in all cases, but I do believe electoral politics is bad strategy because it disguises the true problem as one of scope of state policy rather than one of irrational obedience to policy.

It now occurs to me now that I ought to explain one more area in which I deviate from Konkin’s thinking. I accept Strauss and Howe’s four-phase generational cycles framework of historical analysis, and believe that American society entered the predicted “Fourth Turning” or Crisis phase with the WTC attack on September 11th, 2001.

During a Fourth Turning Crisis, the political future is more malleable, more “up for grabs”, than at any other point in the 80 to 100 year four-phase cycle or saeculum as Strauss and Howe term it. Thus, it makes sense, regardless of whether agorists ultimately prevail or not in the 20 to 25 year Crisis, to be as radical as absolutely possible during that time. Our actions now will, regardless, echo over the course of the ensuing new saeculum.

That presents yet another compelling reason for reformist partyarchs to join me in advocating agorism right now. I will admit, though, that after a new First Turning or “High” has started and the previous Fourth Turning (that we’re now in) has not resulted in full blown agorist revolution, it also would present a reason for agorists to then join the reformists in attempting to ameliorate the existing statism through conventional politics — so long as the reformists support sufficient freedom to continue publishing and archiving agorist ideas, so those will still be there to get dusted off 80 to 100 years hence. I should add, BTW, that agorism not prevailing in the current crisis would not be a failure of agorism, but a failure of the broader libertarian movement to embrace it sufficiently.

In any event, the ongoing FDR-style hero worship of Obama indicates we’re still knee deep in a Fourth Turning — with presumably another 10 to 15 years or so left in it, as Strauss and Howe predict. After an identifiable beginning of a new First Turning, I will perhaps reconsider reformism as a personal choice for how to spend my time; but not now.

“There are no nobles, no big landowners, no industrialists, and no very wealthy merchants in Turkish Serbia. Yet in spite of this there emerged a new bureaucratic aristocracy composed of young men educated, partly at state expense, in Odessa, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris, Germany, and Switzerland. Before they were corrupted in the service of the State, these young men distinguished themselves by their love for their people, their liberalism, and lately by their democratic and socialistic inclinations. But no sooner did they enter the state’s service than the iron logic of their situation, inherent in the exercise of certain hierarchical and politically advantageous prerogatives, took its toll, and the young men became cynical bureaucratic martinets while still mouthing patriotic and liberal slogans. And, as is well known, a liberal bureaucrat is incomparably worse than any dyed-in-the-wool reactionary state official.

Moreover, the demands of certain positions are more compelling than noble sentiments and even the best intentions. Upon returning home from abroad, the young Serbs are bound to pay back the debt owed to the State for their education and maintenance; they feel that they are morally obliged to serve their benefactor, the government. Since there is no other employment for educated young men, they become state functionaries, and become members of the only aristocracy in the country, the bureaucratic class. Once integrated into this class, they inevitably become enemies of the people…

And then the most unscrupulous and the shrewdest manage to gain control of the microscopic government of this microscopic state, and immediately begin to sell themselves to all corners, at home to the reigning prince or a pretender to the throne. In Serbia, the overthrow of one prince and the installation of another one is called a “revolution.” Or they may peddle their influence to one, several, or even all the great domineering states – Russia, Austria, Turkey, etc.

One can easily imagine how the people live in such a state! Ironically enough, the principality of Serbia is a constitutional state, and all the legislators are elected by the people. It is worth noting that Turkish Serbia differs from other states in this principal respect: there is only one class in control of the government, the bureaucracy. The one and only function of the State, therefore, is to exploit the Serbian people in order to provide the bureaucrats with all the comforts of life.” — Bakunin, Some Preconditions for a Social Revolution