Political science offers various explanations about the complex relationships and the conflicts around the world. According to some analysis the tensions between countries, or regions, or entire continents are mostly caused by economic inequality. According to others, the main reason are the religious and cultural differences. In this context, the analysis by Dominique Moisi in a book called "The Geopolitics of Emotion" is a challenging, interesting and unusual work. He sees the current conflicts and trends through the prism of three emotions - fear, humiliation, and hope. The founder of the French Institute of International Relations believes that the political dynamics of the modern world can be properly explained only if we understand human emotions. And they, just like cholesterol, can be both good or bad...what really matters is the balance between them.
The fact that communities have always had policies concerning the movement of people into the lands held by that community should surprise nobody with even a modicum of understanding of anthropology and history. True, there are some rugged individuals who dream of a past or of a future, where one can simply wander with absolute freedom wherever they should like and perhaps many of these are well intention with a desire to interact with nature in solitude. But terra nullius was, and is, a fiction; the principle of freedom of movement is one that must be negotiated and balanced with present occupiers and their claims of jurisdiction. It must be acknowledged that capital will always be more likely to have greater freedom of movement than labour, for capital itself is not a moral actor. With technological and systematic development, such borders have developed from vague marchlands often defined by natural boundaries (forest, river, mountains) to very specific and precise designations, controlling both the movement of people and also the movement of animals, plants, and goods, not to mention the opportunity for rulers to acquire lucre through visa charges, excises and duties.
No one can be expected to see it all. No one can be expected to see how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time, but one can be expected to see the direction we are going in. Wealthy white male privilege is being challenged. We’ve been challenging it for years, decades, centuries… and one should expect we will continue to challenge it. Now, what does this mean?
Grab your remote control and switch on your television. Most likely the news shows you see will be about wealthy white male rule. If not, then about wealthy white rule. If not, then about wealthy rule. Or maybe they’ll avoid the topic altogether, which just tells you something about the nature of the channel you’re watching. We’re challenging each and every property of that description — wealth, race, and sex — and replacing it with the idea that neither of those deserve the kind of privilege afforded it by our society today. This is a thoroughly dangerous idea, for the group of individuals which fit that description have been in the driver’s seat of our civilization for as long as any of us can remember. They’ve responded violently in order to suppress any dissent. High-power water hoses and white hoods come to mind. But those actions have only backfired. It has only served to whittle away at their legitimacy in the public mind. So they have to pretend that they’re not in control. That’s how they maintain it now.
But we’re smarter than that. They try to drug us with soma; plant seeds of escapism in our minds. It’s tantamount to a burglar waving a chew toy to distract a guard dog whose hair is standing up on his back and whose teeth and gums are showing. We’re not going to let their entertainment distract us. We’re not going to let them convince us they’re not still in charge. It’s not hard to see that they are.
So, the challenge now is to detect their chew toys, and to re-focus our eyes on the burglar in the house. What is he doing now? Waging wars for oil, natural gas pipelines and poppies? You bet. Cheering the fastest drop in “labor costs” since 1948? You bet. The veins of the poor are still open and the rich are still sucking every ounce of blood they can from them. They pit the poor against the poor for the benefit of the rich through concepts like terrorism. What did they call the Cuban or Brazilian peasants who revolted against enslavement and sugar monoculture? Terrorists or communists, I suppose. Then they commenced to hunt them down and decapitate them, or cut pregnant women’s bellies open, or skewer their children on their bayonets only to return to the wealthy white male/s who had ordered it with bags of severed ears as proof that they did what they were told. They followed the orders. No doubt that soldier had a hard time making ends meet himself.
Enough. We need to take our eyes off the things that are keeping us distracted and finally recognize the truly radical nature of the doctrine that all humans are created equal and that political legitimacy is truly dependent upon the consent of the governed. And manufactured consent is no consent at all.
To see the arch of history is to see a continual progression toward the de-centralization of illegitimate power. Whatever takes us even further in this direction should be seen as a positive development. As a writer for the upcoming political documentary Dear America: From Patriotism to Participation, I see the arch of history like never before. Illegitimate authority has taken some hard hits to the face thus far. What we have is a woozy opponent. We shouldn’t let his erratic dancing in the ring fool us into thinking he’s still the all-powerful opponent he was when we began this fight. And we must snap out of the hypnosis he has put us in and realize that we are — this generation is — still locked in a fight with this entity. Our tag team partners (the generations before us) threw punches that were hard and true. A few more blows, and he could be on the mat, down for the count, forever.
Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism (Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand). Describing his politics as being "the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism", he certainly will find a welcoming audience among our group - which is why he's been asked several difficult questions.
Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The Isocracy Network.
Thanks for inviting me.
Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial definition offered by the anarchist Proudhon to contemporary examples and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?
Presentation by Lev Lafayette to the Melbourne Atheist Society, October 13, 2009
The History of Religion and Religious Freedom
The history of religion - in addition to being a history of charity, of good deeds, of community, of attempting to provide an explanation to timeless questions of existence, of making significant contributions to the development of the human spirit - is also a history of discrimination and persecution both by those who are greatly devout and towards those who are greatly devout. We may keep this in mind as the question of atheist support for religious freedom is explored. Some of these religious persecutions, and persecutions of religion, lasted for centuries and in many less liberal and democratic regimes than our own they are ongoing. At times this persecution has been subtle such as in the form of cultural discrimination. In others it is systematically enforced in the restriction of property titles, or the requirement of payment of additional taxes. More seriously it involves widespread censorship, forced conversions, segregation and pogroms, terrorism and war.
One thing that is clear with the debate on health care and the evolving legislation in the U.S. Congress is discourse in that country is filtered through an issue agenda that is top-down and highly manipulated. What I mean by that is while we are free to have our own opinions and exercise our constitutional right to express them, we rarely choose the topics for discussion. Much less do we participate in formulating the solutions. What happens instead is that the average person is presented with a menu of the issues of the day - already determined by someone else - and then we are left to comprehend them (not always accurately) and take sides.
The direction of public discussion turns out something like this; we are presented with a set of issues that are already defined, with back-door compromises that have already been made and then they sit back and see if it "plays in Peoria." That is, the public debate is the last phase of a process to see what the public will swallow. We, the people, have been reduced to beta testing democracy. Hardly that, even. More like being part of a giant market research project. I'll use an analogy to illustrate. Rather than all of us collectively creating a list of our favorite flavors of ice cream ourselves and sending it to the dairy producers, we are presented with vanilla and ketchup-flavored ice cream. There is sustainable support for vanilla and the reaction to ketchup is so negative that it is rejected. Oh, what powerful consumers we were. We made our choices and determined the market. But what happened to chocolate, fudge swirl, pistachio, black cherry and a hundred other flavors? Well, those weren't on the agenda. Sorry.
This is what happens in the political marketplace every day. And unlike the retail marketplace, there is really no competition to keep the system somewhat honest. Ben and Jerry's government is not out there to offer alternatives. We may periodically elect candidates to office, but we get the same existing institutions - and they go on and on. We don't have a choice of types of government or economic systems. Real change is thus only incremental at best.
Isocracy is a political philosophy whose time has come. As the last dregs of totalitarian and authoritarian statist socialism have become anachronisms, mainstream politics has become almost entirely colonised by corporate interests as democracy increases loses its honoured attachment to the polis and the formation of genuine public opinion [1]. 'Capitalist democracy' has become the orthodox political position, an acceptable system for conservatives and social-democrats alike; private ownership of the economy, public determination of socially acceptable behaviour. The only recognised alternative to this neo-liberalism is reminiscent of the classic description [2] of the 'dangerous class', the social scum, who have been thrown into existence by the new order. In this case, religious-inspired anti-modernists who through terrorism, the systematic use of violence against non-combatants for a political goal, seek to impose a new totalitarianism which incorporates modern weaponry to enforce the absolute rule of theocratic rulers and and pre-modern prejudices against the ruled.
Where the supposed major conflict is between capitalism and Islamism [3], there exists a enormous opportunity exists for the new left whereby its historical objectives - secularism, republicanism, personal liberty, common wealth, and national self-determination - can reinvigorate the notion of historical progress within the collective human spirit with recognition of the need to re-establish moral reasoning in each and every generation as technology advances. The experience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century shattered forever the Enlightenment illusion of an inevitable connection between technical progress and socio-cultural development, even to the extent that some (e.g., various forms of primitivism) have rejected technological development altogether. Whilst in some cases well-intentioned this is ultimately an idyllic and reactionary approach which abdicates from dealing with the existing social system and technologies, and thus will inevitably fail. More realistically, the most serious challenge is that posed by the claim that history is effectively at an evolutionary end; liberal democracy will become the only - and last - form of government for all States [4].
The weakness with the argument is that it is explicitly tied to the notion of governance through the State and cannot conceive, like many contemporary anarchists, of governance without a State. But the State, as the holder of monopoly on legitimated violence and as an instrument of class rule [5], is a limited institution and one which will inevitably come into conflict with the technological potential, the productive forces, and the social networks that these technologies allow. At that stage of development any State, no matter how progressive it may have once been, will become a deadweight on further social development as its core characteristics require both governance and oppression. Only through overcoming those components of a monopoly on violence and class rule can a society truly become free and the 'withering away of the state' can be achieved [6]. The historic mission of isocracy, "equal rule", with the universal principles of personal liberty through self-ownership and social democracy in the commonwealth is to create such a society in the context of contemporary technology.
Not so long ago, the United States made the pursuit and maintenance of moral authority one of the tenants of it's foreign policy. The incident that comes first to this blogger's mind is one that Henry Kissinger has roundly criticized in his 1994 book DIPLOMACY: America's intervention on the side of Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956 against its English and French NATO allies.
Mr Kissinger's analysis (which I do not have on hand and, regrettable, cannot therefore quote) is a good starting point. He writes that Egypt sought to make overtures to both NATO and the Soviet Union, playing the two blocs against each other to better place Egypt in the new world order; when Egypt warmed to the Soviets, America and England withdrew their financial commitments to Egypt (the building of the Aswan Dam). To finance the construction of the Dam, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, an old Anglo-French joint colonial venture. As the old colonial powers and the new state of Israel geared up for war, America forced its NATO and Israeli allies to withdraw. America, then under President Eisenhower, realized that it could not condemn the Soviets' brutal suppression of Hungary while simultaneously supporting colonial imperialist gestures in Egypt. To retain its moral authority to inspire revolutions to destabilize the Soviets, America -- putting it bluntly -- betrayed its allies to side with a country that was warming to the Soviets. But what is counter-intuitive from a strictly geo-political standpoint is a wise and prescient in a more nuanced analysis: for America to inspire revolutions behind the Iron Curtain it had to stand apart as an ideal example. Today, for America to undermine religious fanaticism, it must similarly deploy moral authority as part of its arsenal; to do that it must again stand apart and stand morally upright.
Like so many parts of the world the Malay states (defined here as Nusantara; Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Brunei and perhaps Singapore), are victims of European colonialism. The borders that exist are not borders of their own chosing. The largest country, Indonesia, is the outcome of the gradual expansion from the Dutch East Indies Company and the subsequently nationalised colonies. Timor-Leste's borders are the remains of the Portuguese presence. Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei are the result of British interests in the region and in particular the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 which divided the archipelago. As a result, there is very uneven political and economic development in the region and difficulties with national identity and conflicts between and within countries.
This should not however, prohibit raising potential developments with a perspective of modernisation, common wealth, human rights and federalism regardless of the difficulties. As Oscar Wilde correctly observed; "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."
The debate about same-sex marriage has raged on for the past few years. I have personally been trying to find a stance that I feel comfortable with. On one side, I believe in maximising individual liberty and opportunity for all - regardless of adult sexual orientation, but I also acknowledge that marriage is a sacred institution for many, or at least a very important institution that in many cultures is strictly defined as being between a man and a woman. For a long time, I believed that those in same-sex relations should be allowed civil unions that have equal status to federally-recognised marriages, but the notion of "separate but equal" is a hard one to swallow in this day and age.
Ultimately, I have come to a solution that I am comfortable with... civil unions for all, marriages if you can get one.
I do not believe that a secular government has the authority to sponsor a single definition of marriage. Marriages should be left strictly to private religious institutions or social groups. Marriage seems to be a purely ceremonial thing and each culture has its own definitions, requirements, and rules regarding marriage. Supporting a single definition is not fair and breaches the concept of a separation between religion and state.
Civil unions, on the other hand, are purely legal constructions with no affiliation to any culture, religion, or social group. That is the domain of the government. All those in a relationship that seek to be recognised by the government and be given the associated benefits of being in a legal union must be granted a civil union - regardless of adult sexual orientation. That way, the government will not favour any particular group of people or sponsor a single definition of marriage.
