Grey, my thoughts are that these two knuckleheads have no beef with the principles of Anarchism whatsoever. Their only problem is they’ve heard it’s what they call "left-wing"

Tell them to read Hayek and leave it at that. Rest assured: they won’t.

Hayek was a vague influence on the Thatcher government, not to mention Milton Friedman. Hayek didn’t mind being thought of as a conservative anarchist.- neither did Thatcher. No such thing as society, innit. Anarchy in the UK.

Personally, I think Anarchism’s been completely usurped by freemarket libertarianism. The majority of Australians are now too bloated and effluent to risk the more experimental social and political philosophies. Thank the mining boom and five decades of social change and economic reform. We’ve reach a comfortable level of material prosperity, but in many ways, we’ve become poor. We’ve given a lot away without even thinking. How can you think? These things just seem to happen.

Mind you, we don’t mind social change - just don’t tell us it’s change. Dress it up as returning to a bygone past and we’ll eat it hook, line and sinker - with a little help from Alan and the Tele.

I have no beef with a  localised model of power as long as it’s not an abstracted, liberatory form of power - qua Bolshevism. In my experience, one social and political model can never suit all situations and circumstances. Better to do away with models altogether.

If Anarchism siincerely did this, great. As long as there’s no hint of ism left, no problem - that’s the movement I’d sign up for.

As long as I didn’t have to sign anything.

FD wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2013 at 9:17pm:


I don't think anyone has any beef with the principles of anarchism.  It sounds wonderful, but then it's supposed to - it exists only in the realms of fantasy.

Probably the closest we'll ever get to an Anarchical society, is if the Qld government dissolves itself through lack of interest 

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Apr 4^th, 2013 at 12:19pm:


Alan, Today Tonight, and the front page of the Tele are not sources of research and thinking - same as the Light's nutjob websites. These sources of information are what is known as ideology. We're all subject to ideology in one form or another.

Every political system contains ideology - the Roman Republic, the Divine Right of Kings, the early French Republic (and Napoleonic Empire), Stalinist State Capitalism, and now post-cold war capitalism (globalization), or what Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.

Stalinists and Maoists believed they were on the way to the end of history - using a Marxist-Leninist analysis.

Fukuyama originally believed the end of the cold war and the triumph of liberal democracy was the end of history - using a Hegelian analysis.

They all believed they had found the way out of ideology, be it class struggle or whatever it was that Hegel rambled on about. Fukuyama, of course, changed his mind - as did Marx at the end of his life. Marx went from being a communist to being a social democrat. His observations on ideology were taken up by later Marxians and post-structuralists. 

The ideology of market capitalism is individualism. This drives capitalism and vice versa - power can never be separated from knowledge. The model of the atomistic individual resides in every area of our society. Mental health, law, technology, education and trade. Compare this to a society like China, where most of these areas are aimed at propping up the state, or the collective. Ideology is in the little things - the things you rarely notice until you try to explain your ways to a foreigner.

You also learn about ideology when you learn another language. More than anything, ideology is in our words and sign systems. For instance, it may not be an accident that feminism was thought up in a language that doesn't have gendered nouns - English is the only European language not to have gendered prefixes.

Mind you, when the Angle and Saxon languages crashed into Latin, there was probably a decision somewhere along the way to do away with all the confusing genders. Who knows? Gender is a huge ideological matrix, reliant on the prevailing economic superstructure. As early feminists like Woolstencroft advocated for fairer property laws, feminism would not have happened without capitalism.

You can never understand ideology without looking at history - and this includes a history of language. The first thinker to call for an end to metaphysics was a philologist. Friedrich Nietzsche studied the history of words. Beyond Good and Evil was based on the ethics housed in classical languages like Latin.

How do you uncover ideology? Look at who benefits. Who benefits from not having a mining tax, a carbon tax, a rollback of tax incentives for superannuation? Who injects the rhetoric of "class war" into all these policy debates?

Yes friends, look at who profits, and you will see the source of ideology staring you in the face.

Grey wrote on Apr 4^th, 2013 at 2:00pm:



Given a choice between;

Lets have more, and more ???
OR,
Lets have 'a better idea' ???


It is a silly question, grey, imo.

"I'll have more and more please!"            

FD wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2013 at 9:17pm:


Hayek is exactly the sort of conservative, (if that's the right word) that's needed at the Anarchist table. A man of ideas, and from what I've read of him, uncertainty. I think it probable Thatcher privately dismayed him. 

My kind of Anarchy, keeps the traditional lore, No racism, sexism, coercion, exploitation, hierarchy. We deem the wrongness of these things to be self-evident. Apart from those core issues everything is on the table.

My kind of Anarchy believes 'small is beautiful'. It starts with seperate collectives/associations tries different models, shares information, evaluates what works and what doesn't.

Anarchists should always be willing to agree and ideally agreement should be sacred. But then people should always be free to change their mind. I think if you want to sign something or you don't is entirely your choice.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Apr 4^th, 2013 at 12:19pm:



Because having lived in regional Qld for many years, I am yet to meet one asylum seeker that is having any effect on my life or those around me, yet I meet people who are outraged that these 'boat people' have ruined their lives. We don't even have asylum seekers here.

Unless you've been to Iraq, Libya or Egypt, you don't know that the situation has improved for those people, yet because Alexander Downer said so, it is believed.

People have been whingeing about how the carbon tax is going to ruin their lives. When I asked how? they said it's been in the news for months. They couldn't show how they had been affected, but they just went along with popular media spin rather than actually thinking about the actual situation.

We must remember that there is no independent media in Australia. Also remember when SBS used to give an informed news coverage, now they mimic government opinion and have become pro Israel and anti Middle East. They sold their hearts and mind for funding.

Then we have the Muslim bashers. Muslims ruin Christmas, Muslims want Sharia law. They don't know any Muslims personally, but they sure seem to know a lot about them.....because that's what they are told to believe.

Independent thinkers will have formed their own opinions. From my experience most people can't name people, situations or places, they just repeat the media hype ad nauseum.

Occupy Wall Street, we get the usual comments "dirty lefty tree hugging layabouts', regardless that many Occupy members are academics and business people, but you won't hear that in the media.

Yes, the brainwashed sheeples, believe what you are told to believe.

FD wrote on Apr 4^th, 2013 at 2:20pm:


Yes, I thank both you and MM for your contributions. I think there's a lot of truth in what you've both said, albeit from different directions. The big stumbling block, you make clear, is the old story of the monkeys, 'That's the way it's always been done around here'. 


http://www.wowzone.com/5monkeys.htm

Anarchism appeals to contrarians.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201206/field-guide-the-contrarian

Perhaps 'Freethinkers' is a better term. Though I don't mean people who take the opposite view for the sake of it, when I say 'Contrarian', I think of Christopher Hitchens, Germaine Greer, ( "everything that is, could be otherwise" ) and George Orwell and of course post-structuralists like Foucault and Cixous. I think also of, 'The ones who walk away from Omelas'

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/dunnweb/rprnts.omelas.pdf

And so I make an assertion, there ARE freethinkers. And what is more they DO have an impact. In fact all of the above have had an impact on me, not least Ursula Le Guin, with 'The Dispossed'.

So what produces 'freethinkers'? Disillusionment? It must be one of the drivers at least. Feminism, I count as the ism that did most to teach me how to think. Powerful argument dispersed the illusion of the patriarchal and left a space that filled with questions aimed at all other assumptions.

Surely there has never been more disillusionment than there is now. Surely the ranks of freethinkers are growing? Which means that there is a market for new ideas. Anarchism, ( of a form) is a possible, it just requires a marketing team to get it over the 100th monkey line.