Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 10 June 2011 00:41.

Graham Lister sent me a link today to a YouTube page full of videos of Chris Hedges, the journalist, author and jeremiah of American liberalism, democracy, education ... you name it.  Everything but white America - he is definitely not racially conscious.  His comprehension of nationalism appears to rest on his understanding, inevitably, of National Socialism and of his personal experiences as a journalist amid the sorrows of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Nonetheless, Hedges is an interesting case ... a liberal, even a leftist, an AGW supporter, fundamentally a Christian moralist, but a man with an analysis that, once, would have been a hot ticket among the educated young.  In the 1960s such anti-Establishmentarianism was in high demand.  Now, according to Hedges, elite universities in America are corrupted by corporation money, and exist not only to churn out narrow, unquestioning future managerialists and plutocrats.  All across the rest of the system, he says, the humanities are under pressure.  Creative thought will not be required in post-industrial, post-white America.

He offers no reprieve.  He says the banking and corporate interests have won their war against us.  He fears that, from the social chaos and impoverishment which is taking hold only bad will come.

This video is of a lecture he gave to publicise his book, Death of the Liberal Class.  At 55mins it’s long, but there is interest throughout.



Comments:


1

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:53 | #

GW what I think is interesting about Hedges is that he is obviously a thoughtful commentator and what he is really talking about is the total hollowing out of all forms of social-capital/solidarity which binds cultures and communities together. 

On a plus point he kinda gets that America, in particular, looks like it’s in deep trouble (and is very good on mass-culture, what passes for education and non-reality based worldviews).

Obviously people will say his account is incomplete and perhaps off the mark in certain areas - but frankly no-one has a fully complete account yet of how hyper-liberalism will ‘work out’. Analysis structured along the traditional left-right political spectrum might prevent rather than aid understanding.

I’d also suggest that more thoughtful people of all sorts of backgrounds are, almost at an gut level, worried about the direction of travel even if they can’t work out the precise reason why they feel that way. The world is complex so simple mono-causal explanations are probably not going to be the whole story.

I’d also suggest some interesting books by John Ralston Saul.

“Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”

“The Collaspe of Globalism”

and finally

“The Unconscious Civilization”

The Amazon product description for the last one is as follows -

This work argues that the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling “corporatist” structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats, as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks.

Food for serious thought.


2

Posted by anon on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:06 | #

I was about to suggest Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization as the perfect work on this (limited) subject. Much quicker read than Voltaire’s Bastards.


3

Posted by daniel on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:06 | #

Although I’ve made an unqualified recommendation of Saul (Canadian liberal) before, I’ll partially contradict Graham here and say one should only waste time on Voltaire’s Bastards. It reads very much like Kevin Phillips combined with Christopher Lasch.


4

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:18 | #

but frankly no-one has a fully complete account yet of how hyper-liberalism will ‘work out’.

Sure we do.  If European descended people accept with docility globalist liberalism what Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny will be increasingly their lot in life.  The only possibilities of acting against that trajectory lie in supremacist, apartheid rule by Whites over non-Whites or hard racial separation.  How could it be otherwise, unless our worldview is fundamentally mistaken and liberalism is in fact true?


5

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:52 | #

Very interesting, and at the end, moving talk. However, I am confused by those like Hedge, who retreat into moral towers of intellectual suffering and throw a pox on everyone’s house. He doesn’t consider the sacrifice of the actual work, fraught with danger, risk and violence, to create secure society. For him Christianity is a private jet above the world. Moral-ism placed at a remove from reality, and his answer to ‘magical’ thinking is a retreat into a even more analgesic form of intellectual piety as justification of nihilism. He condemns others means of mental escape as pitiful, while indulging his own private extra-strength variety. 

The talk was good, but I cannot respect the man. His remarks of Yugoslavia, tells me he was wearing blinders, he was not there, he was in Galilee…where things are simple. The only thing he was capable of seeing was what he was looking for, material for a good parable - milk and the child, think of the little children, reality be damned. And now Yugoslavia is happening here. What did you think?
Let him climb on the cross and be gone. When he has died a martyr’s death, and not the magical death of paid speaking engagements, limo rides and prebooked hotels, I will respect him and consider his words. When he has suffered to bring milk to a child, and not just accept payment to simply talk about milk to well off moral tourists, I may consider him a fool but a noble one. His type of Christian bring ruin to all. These eunuchs. I cannot condemn him, but I cannot respect him.


6

Posted by Jawake on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 05:50 | #

Sorry, Hedges is out of touch with reality.

It is amazing how leftists in America are blind to their own success. I can only wonder if it is willful blindness or merely ignorance.

The liberal institutions he says lost their moral authority in the 1920s have certainly regained it since the 1960s. And they have not only regained moral authority, they have a substantially increased amount of political and financial power to boot.

In many places in America, it is only liberal institutions that have any power to mold public opinion anymore, as they are the groups most likely to receive government grant money and funding from corporate America. Believe me, in liberal cities, businesses neither have the desire or the understanding to wage political war on the dominant liberal class or the Democratic Party.

For instance, I just did a study on advocacy groups in my local community which supported National Health Care. Many were supported by local businesses and the local church authorities as well.

People like Hedges go after the last redoubts of conservatism- like poor struggling conservative churches- so relentlessly it is almost like watching an adult body builder beat up a little kid and get satisfaction from it.

What is his definition of a conservative/liberal church anyway? I have had a hard time finding any people in my church who are even Republicans!

The Reds from the 1920s earned their contempt, and look at the results of the so-called attempts to suppress them: A decade later you had a socialist FDR administration riddled with Communist spies that created one of the most progressive institutions of all time-the United Nations!

Wall Street is notoriously liberal, and he leaves out the work of Antony Sutton, which reveals the extent that financiers and Wall Street banks financed the Bolsheviks.

And I could go on, but after watching the first 20 minutes of this claptrap, I am starting to suspect that the ideology behind Majority Rights is essentially collectivist/socilst.

It is just socialism/ big government for whites and no one else, especially the Jews.

Blah!


7

Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:27 | #

I don’t have an hour to waste on this. I do know that Hedges is a pacifist, leftist, Christian anti-conservative, a 100% guaranteed, impeccable ‘anti-racist’. So what do I want to listen to this shithead for?

Two further comments, and a prediction.

1. The great litmus is nonwhite immigration. Ask anyone where they stand on it. If against it, they are either rightist, or have the potential to become so, and thus are worth engaging. But if not immediately, viscerally against it, then they are psycho/genetic leftists, and will never be converted to racial realism.

2. At least in the New World Anglosphere - US, Canada, Aus/NZ - anybody who is anti-capitalist, absolutely including nationalist anti-capitalists, sooner or later discovers his inner leftist, and replaces his nationalism with a primary emphasis on socialism (sometimes also ecologism) of some variety or another. No true white rightist outside of historic, folkish European contexts, can ever be either anti-racist or anti-capitalist.

3. Prediction: Graham Lister will eventually discover that he’s more of a ‘communitarian’ than a nationalist, and will proceed to leave MR.


8

Posted by Jawake on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:49 | #

Economics is a bone of contention amongst WNs and it should be, as every nation is different. Understandably, the class struggle is important in British history and the rest of Europe as well. Parties like the BNP believe in right-wing collectivism (socialism for whites only) in order to attract the English working class to its ranks and to defeat the Anglo-American establishment and its banking system. Also, as books like David Schoenbaum’s Hitler’s Social Revolution show, the class struggle is an under-examined key to understanding the Nazi appeal to workingmen, though that was proven to inevitably be a mirage, while the central Nazi state became a close friend to big business.

While I know our continental friends must tire of the U.S. context, it is perhaps needless to say that the class struggle, while fueling the American Left until the 1980s, has run out of steam as any kind of front line historical agent.

For an understanding of why American conservatives can’t stand the centralizing state, and why some are turning to sites like yours, you need look no further than the website Stuff Black People Don’t Like. 

While economics is one point of contention you obviously try to avoid, it is also perhaps important to open up another: global warming and the environment. It is quite obvious to me, that while mainline American conservatives have spent themselves on the struggle to discredit global warming as a tool of globalization and global governance, the radical right sees it much differently. Your own Soren Renner has implied that one of the chief reasons he got into this movement was his concern over environmental problems.

Scratch the surface of sites like VDare as well, and you will find similar Malthusian thinking. Groups like this are opposed to immigration into the U.S. because they believe in population control and thus, social engineering. This is part and parcel of what the BNP believes as well. Again, it is this attitude that social engineering is OK as long as it is for whites only and in order to further evolve the race. 

This is everything that certain conservatives have spent a lifetime fighting against, but because the left has used race masterfully to promote their agenda and relentlessly attack any reaction to their projects, conservatives find no where else to go, except racial sites, like yours, who are not really conservative in the sense that it can be a bulwark against certain dreadful trends of the coming age.


9

Posted by Jawake on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:01 | #

I’m in agreement with Haller above.


10

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:24 | #

Sustainable stewardship of the environment and it’s resources has to be a major plank in any political outlook. Anyone who can travel by small plane or boat can see the world is being destroyed beneath our feet. Future generations are going to pay dearly for the ‘spend now, worry later’, habits.

As for capitalism, just the flip side of communism. Market economy is one thing - Capitalism is supremacy of the market over all other concerns - which is cancer.


11

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:06 | #

Jawake,

I don’t know that theoretical nationalism’s broaching of socio-economic factors in society has changed all that much since Giovanni Gentile wrote:

Each man is unique because of his own individual experiences. He forms other associations which become unique because of the collective group experiences; these group experiences, in turn, bear on the individual. The highest association an individual can form is with all his fellows in the state mechanism. The state is the ultimate association and it has its own collective experiences which mark it different from all other states which have existed, do exist or can exist.

Obviously, the individual man, and not simply his experiences, is what creates uniqueness, and we can go a good way in discussing what that individualism really is (a way that leads to an ontology of difference).  But it is really the transposition of the state from political tool to political master that was the negative factor in fascist thought.  Such a state, as an institution of power and therefore decision, cannot remain indefinitely true to Gentile’s core idea, which is that the coherence of interests is the achievement of a community of purpose, and is mightily preferable to Marxism’s conflict of interests.

Nationalism in our age should also aim to cohere all society’s interests, and by and large seeks to do so on a substrate of genetic interest and continuity, since our first battle as a unified whole will be just to survive.  The alternative substrates to the genetic community are cultural or civicist, but they serve other ends.


12

Posted by jrackell on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:05 | #

Jawake, business owners support the health care reforms because it removes a large area of unpredictability in their operations.  If they pay for healthcare, they are at a disadvantage against competitors who don’t.  When healthcare is socialized, then, yes, my company pays but so does my competitor; no one is at a disadvantage.  Furthermore, such social policies like health care privilege current participants in the market, amonst other ways, through grandfathering and increased compliance costs which inhibit new entrants. 

So it’s not really a surprise church members and business owners both support it. 

And by the way, current conservatives are riven through with socialism and collectivism—they are all a bunch of rent seekers, eg through patent and copyright protection, and socialize costs when it suits their convenience.

And—the BNP were onto the global warming hoax as a matter of policy—or so I believe—well before the release of the emails exposing the fraud.  They are big proponents of Peak Oil, of course.


13

Posted by Wandrin on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 07:01 | #

Jawake

This is everything that certain conservatives have spent a lifetime fighting against, but because the left has used race masterfully to promote their agenda and relentlessly attack any reaction to their projects, conservatives find no where else to go, except racial sites, like yours, who are not really conservative in the sense that it can be a bulwark against certain dreadful trends of the coming age.

Don’t worry about it. There’s racial socialism (which is just genetic altruism in disguise) and ideological socialism. Any nation that is racially homogenous enough will develop elements of racial socialism as soon as it has a surplus to pay for it. White America isn’t homogenous enough so it won’t apply.


14

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:45 | #

Jawake,

Good comment above, though I am absolutely ‘on top of’, and in agreement with, Malthusian arguments, and have long considered the environment to be an Achilles’ heel of free market theory, and especially of libertarianism - and I have said so many times here at MR, including just recently on the Kievsky thread.

Global warming is horsesh—on so many levels it’s not worth discussing - though the justification behind the potential catastrophe of “cap and tax” is something I could refute in a short paragraph if necessary. However, the human (and more especially, nonwhite) threat to the quality and perhaps even perpetuity of the biosphere is beyond question. I was already known in my gradeshool back in the 70s as a rabid environmentalist, and militant anti-Third World natalist and anti-immigrationist (that is not an exaggeration: I was very racially precocious, as a friend of mine constantly reminds and berates me - I had all these racialist ideas in more than embryonic form before I became a teen - and even in the 70s used to get punished by teachers for my racism).

[Two points of error: keeping out the immigration invasion is not “social engineering”. Allowance of that race-replacement process is the ultimate in state-sponsored social engineering. Don’t confuse the horse and the driver.

Also, I may not be understanding you correctly, but (real) conservatives have always been opposed to immigration - for as long as I can remember.]

I stand with nationalists who dislike neo-liberal worshippers of homo economicus. Idiots around here continuously misinterpret me on this point. I do not place markets above all other values. I absolutely am willing to limit economic and other freedoms in the interest of race and civilization - and have so acknowledged repeatedly.

Unfortunately, I’m coming to realize more and more that nationalists (like paleoconservatives) really for the most part have not studied economics, or finance (probably also not business management to any significant degree), and so are prone to making purely ideological, and wildly ignorant, animadversions about markets and fiscal matters.

Worse, they insist on conflating free market theory with much less sound libertarian ideology, despite their being no necessary intellectual reason for doing so. They proceed to criticize some aspect of libertarian inadequacy, and then act as though they’ve discredited free markets.


15

Posted by Trainspotter on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:41 | #

Haller: “The great litmus is nonwhite immigration. Ask anyone where they stand on it. If against it, they are either rightist, or have the potential to become so, and thus are worth engaging. But if not immediately, viscerally against it, then they are psycho/genetic leftists, and will never be converted to racial realism.”

A lot of truth to this.  I’d still make some allowance for the astounding level of brainwashing that people have been subjected to, but certainly anyone over 30-35 who still supports non-white immigration is probably not worth wasting much time on.  We must target our scarce resources at those whites who, while they may be misguided, retain essentially healthy instincts. If the others come around in time, that’s a bonus. 

Haller: “At least in the New World Anglosphere - US, Canada, Aus/NZ - anybody who is anti-capitalist, absolutely including nationalist anti-capitalists, sooner or later discovers his inner leftist, and replaces his nationalism with a primary emphasis on socialism (sometimes also ecologism) of some variety or another. No true white rightist outside of historic, folkish European contexts, can ever be either anti-racist or anti-capitalist.”

Really?  I’ve not noticed an outflow of former white nationalists heading into non-racial socialism/environmentalism. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single example. In fact, we seem to lose very few people period, outside of the occasional nut.  Our truth is simply too powerful and, well, it also happens to actually be true. 

My own journey toward white nationalism has indeed made me more “leftist” in the sense that I am more concerned about environmental and economic sustainability.  In fact, I would argue that tribalism implies environmental concern at many levels.  For one, our ancestors are buried in our lands, as is the blood they shed to win and defend those lands.  So there is a traditional/spiritual aspect to it that comes naturally to us, as well as the economic/habitat aspect: if we are concerned about our tribe’s long term survival, then future generations will need a healthy and secure habitat in which to perpetuate our people. We start to see ourselves as part of an ecosystem that we need to protect for reasons purely practical as well as emotional. We start to to see things in organic terms. 

I also tend to believe that when we look at a mountain vista, we see something different than a non-white.  Nature and beauty calls to us in a way that it doesn’t seem to with others.  For example, camping and hiking are notoriously “white” endeavors, just as our relationship with animals seems to be closer and more emotionally important to us than is the case with most of the non-white hordes. While we build great civilizations that allow us respite from nature’s harshness, we also admire and are drawn to her beauty and majesty.  It’s just a part of what we are, a distinguishing characteristic. We conquer nature but don’t destroy her, if you get my meaning.   

As for capitalism, I have also found myself becoming more critical of it (keep in mind that I’m a former libertarian/laissez-faire type, so it is not from ignorance of capitalism that I speak). 

If we are going to really have a sustainable tribe that can endure over the long term, we can’t simply write off the bottom half of our people as losers and white trash…while expecting those same people to fill out our military in times of crisis and shed their blood for the tribe, not to mention behaving themselves and contributing to social stability in times of peace.  We can’t judge people in purely economic terms as winners and losers.  Sure, some tribal members will be more economically successful than others, and we are certainly not egalitarians.  But to go to the other extreme is to invite nothing more than class warfare and seething economic resentments.  A tribe so divided, and so detached from its tribal nature (we have to be a nation, not just a market/flophouse) is not likely to make it over the long haul. 

Again, this is not a call for egalitarianism.  But it is saying that if we’re going to have a society in which some people can make millions, hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars…then it might be a good idea if the guy we expect to dig our ditches can at least make ends meet in some sort of dignity.  He’s part of our tribe, and normally a fairly decent guy who more or less behaves.  He’s not just a thieving, raping nigger who would be happy to cut our throats if given half a chance or, if we’re lucky and he’s a more peaceful sort of black, limits himself merely to destroying our gene pool, culture, history and aesthetic sensibilities. 

To view these men as the same is madness - they couldn’t be more different.  Yet that is exactly what capitalism does. 

On the other hand, we aren’t just any tribe, we’re a white tribe.  As such, our economic system must take into account our particular nature and traits, a nature that is different from non-whites.  Whites need a lot of breathing room, and a good deal of personal freedom and autonomy in order to express their economic creativity and acumen.  Whites both need and can handle a good deal of personal autonomy.  I think a true free market, with appropriate limits to protect the race as a whole and also protect the bottom strata of the white working class, is appropriate. 

We can have a hell of a lot of freedom, relatively low taxes, etc., while still ensuring that all members of the tribe who are willing to work and be productive will at least be able to live in dignity.  Moving up higher is of course up to the individual in question, but a basic minimum level of dignity for even the most humble among our working people is not too much to ask.  It should be understood as a tribal guarantee, part of our deal with ourselves, if indeed we are to be a tribe as opposed to a gaggle of graspers, stock jobbers and short term profit seekers.  The likely truth is that the market resulting from such a white tribe would be more free in a meaningful sense than what we have today. 

In any event, I think white nationalism is a natural fit with these things, and while perhaps not requiring them, certainly implies.  Hence my use of the term “sustainable ethnostate,” which I think is a winner in the coming decades.  The sustainable ethnostate is not a one trick pony, instead it recognizes the interconnectedness of things, and thrives on it.  We must wrest back from the Left those things which don’t belong to it.  It’s absurd that the Left has, for example, a near monopoly on genuine environmental concern (as opposed to power grasping/data fudging scams…a natural fit for the lying Left), yet also is a great champion of massive non-white immigration (e.g. Sierra Club) which is putting phenomenal strain on resources that the Left falsely claims it’s defending. Yet they are able to get away with this scam year after year, a true testament to the failure of the existing political paradigm.  We can do better. We can offer better. 

Modern liberalism and conservatism are dead ends and failures.They’ve both been tried, and they have both failed.  The sustainable ethnostate is the future.  It’s the only thing that offers a true way out of our current dysfunctional and unsustainable circumstances.


16

Posted by Grimoire on Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:41 | #

Good points Trainspotter. If we have to pick concepts to base an economy on ‘sustainable’ and ’ ‘stability’ are good starting points.
Leon is tubthumping and pretending to lecture a bunch of naughty school boys. IMHO….the left/right paradigm is bullshit. I am no rightist…so that makes me a leftist? And to throw in prognosises that then if I don’t agree with some rightwing American blockhead ignorance I must be slinking off to join the communist party….it’s just too stupid for words.

There is no such thing as a ‘free market’. This is a made up term to excuse the maintenance of monopoly in order to build a hereditary capitalist elite…whose only qualification for the elite is money.

The market is owned collectively, always…production is not owned collectively, the market is, always.

For example if I buy 500 hectares in Britain….can I start the country Grimoiresberg? If Trainspottersville has a village market, can I buy the land under it and turn it into a garbage dump? Why can’t I wage economic war against Leonington? Why can’t I use slavelabour in a country that doesn’t support human rights, and fire everyone at MajorityRights?

Fuck this lecturing us with 19th century American retard economics.


17

Posted by Trainspotter on Sun, 12 Jun 2011 07:46 | #

“Fuck this lecturing us with 19th century American retard economics.”

LOL! That about sums it up.

Leon’s post gave me an excuse to expound upon the sustainable ethnostate.  I’ll be interested in Leon’s critique, as this is the sort of thing that needs to be hashed out if we are going to get anywhere.


18

Posted by Jawake on Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:49 | #

There is no such thing as a ‘free market’. This is a made up term to excuse the maintenance of monopoly in order to build a hereditary capitalist elite…whose only qualification for the elite is money.

“Fuck this lecturing us with 19th century American retard economics.”

Wow. I guess I should take the latter as personal insult. Why? Because you use a vulgar Marxism-a 19th century idea, by someone partly supported by Americans- to supposedly put the final kabosh to what you believe is my reliance on classical liberal economic ideas, which are neither American nor-strictly defined- a product of the 19th century. And I guess you thought me too stupid or too embarrassed to catch that or respond back. Thus, the insult.

Just so we are on the same page here:

Monopoly Theory is one of the of the founding principles of Marxism-Leninism. So,although I know it easy to say we are eschewing labels and the left/right divide it actually serves a purpose if we are to understand what we are talking about. Now, if you believe that the theory of monopoly capital sufficiently explains an economic phenomenon, then I think it serves a great purpose not re-invent the wheel.So, the following is posted not to say you are a Marxist or anything like that nor to lecture you like a retard.Rather it is to understand where these ideas come from because, frankly, I do not know of any economist who represents the ideas of the Radical Right (If you know of any send them along)*. So, on monopoly capital we have the Marxists:

In Monopoly Capital, Baran and Sweezy described advanced capitalism, exemplified by the United States, as an economic and social order dominated by giant, monopolistic (or oligopolistic) corporations—the product of the concentration and centralization of production described by Marx in Capital. The central trait of the system was a tendency for surplus (value) to rise—a phenomenon made possible by the effective banning of genuine price competition in mature, monopolistic industries, together with continually rising productivity. Under these conditions, the main economic constraint was no longer the generation of surplus, but rather its absorption, i.e., a chronic lack of effective demand.3

And the anti-Imperialists:

Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries.-Che Guevara

And the New Left theory of state monopoly capital:

The coalescence of two forces the monopolies and the state forms the basis of state monopoly capitalism…. The essence of state monopoly capitalism is a union of the power of the monopolies with that of the bourgeois state for the achievement of two purposes: 1) that of strengthening the capitalist system ... and 2) of redistributing the national income through the state to the benefit of monopoly capital.

Now, I think that the latter is very important as it relates to the Radical Right. Not only because the Left openly calls State Monopoly Capitalism fascism or corporatism in disguise, but because if the Radical Right is offering an alternative to this system, I just wonder on what ideals it will be based.

In Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (co-written with Gentile in 1932) he wrote:

Since 1929 economic and political development have everywhere emphasized these truths. The importance of the State is rapidly growing. The so-called crisis can only be settled by State action and within the orbit of the State. Where are the shades of the Jules Simons who, in the early days of liberalism proclaimed that the “State should endeavor to render itself useless and prepare to hand in its resignation “? Or of the MacCullochs who, in the second half of last century, urged that the State should desist from governing too much? And what of the English Bentham who considered that all industry asked of govern­ment was to be left alone, and of the German Humbolt who expressed the opinion that the best government was a lazy ” one? What would they say now to the unceasing, inevitable, and urgently requested interventions of government in business? It is true that the second generation of economists was less uncompromising in this respect than the first, and that even Adam Smith left the door ajar - however cautiously - for government intervention in business.If liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.

So, I wonder, just how opposed is the Radical Right to state monopoly capitalism? And if not, isn’t any pose as liberators from the present system of capitalism a bit disingenuous?

Yes, it is true that many American conservatives are attracted to the ideas of classical liberalism (which is frankly an 18th century European movement and updated for the 20th by…Europeans), but there is also a wide belief that this system offers a non-statist alternative to state monopoly capitalism-the very thing you say you disdain, and a Marxist thing I happen to agree with (sort of).

For instance, the Von Mises Institute has done a lot of work on the question of monopolies. And many of the scholars there have shown that the idea of monopolies controlling production and resources to the exclusion of competition is almost impossible, save for the case of very rare resources. To them, the idea of monopoly capital was invented to justify state intervention, or state monopoly capital, which is the system we have now in both Europe and the US and in many other parts of the world.

They have diligently worked to show that licensing, utilities, regulation et al are in fact what create government monopolies.

GOVERNMENT AND MONOPOLY

If we drop the strict free-market assumption, however, a real monopoly problem is easy to visualize. Government could license only one supplier (e.g., a taxi cab company) in some city market and restrict entry to all other suppliers; the market would then be monopolized by law. Or government could establish a legal monopoly in telecommunications, electricity generation, telephone service, first-class mail delivery, and in many other areas; indeed, government in the United States has historically done precisely this. And, curiously, these monopolies have always been legally immune from antitrust law!

Clearly this is a monopoly problem since consumers, regardless of their preferences, would then legally be tied to only one supplier. In addition, would-be entrepreneurs with lower costs or with new products would legally be prohibited from offering those benefits to willing buyers.

And with competition prohibited by law, the monopoly supplier would have few (if any) incentives to innovate, to expand output and to lower prices.

But this monopoly problem ought never to be associated with “free markets” since its explicit source is the power of government to prohibit new supply. Removing all legal barriers to entry and competition (deregulation, correctly understood) would end this monopoly problem without antitrust intervention. -From D.T. Armentano, A Politically Incorrect Guide to Antitrust Policy

Now, this all may sound retarded, to you, but the point is that economic law does not just disappear because the state pronounces man a spiritual collective. And when the that state goes to war because “war alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it,” somebody is going to have to fucking pay for it!

*I have read and listened to almost all the materials by Jonathan Bowden available. While he is an anti-Marxist, his main opposition to it is cultural. There is very little economic critique in his work.


19

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:27 | #

Let’s see ... what did I just say immediately above? Please re-read what I have now placed in bold.

I stand with nationalists who dislike neo-liberal worshippers of homo economicus. Idiots around here continuously misinterpret me on this point. I do not place markets above all other values. I absolutely am willing to limit economic and other freedoms in the interest of race and civilization - and have so acknowledged repeatedly.

Unfortunately, I’m coming to realize more and more that nationalists (like paleoconservatives) really for the most part have not studied economics, or finance (probably also not business management to any significant degree), and so are prone to making purely ideological, and wildly ignorant, animadversions about markets and fiscal matters.

Worse, they insist on conflating free market theory with much less sound libertarian ideology, despite their being no necessary intellectual reason for doing so. They proceed to criticize some aspect of libertarian inadequacy, and then act as though they’ve discredited free markets.  (LH)

I think we are all arguing at cross-purposes, though I’d like to hear a bit more (see below) before I explain the problems.

The comment by Grimoire is literally too confused for me to follow. One great thing about the classical, not to mention the Austrian, economists, is that their writings are clear and relentlessly logical. Those of all leftists, as well as various Third Way types, very much including fascists and National Socialists, never are.

Unfortunately for Grim, he really disrobes himself and gives away the game (in this case, revealing how little he understands whereof he speaks in the economic area, whether in terms of theory or history) with this Parthian shot:

Fuck this lecturing us with 19th century American retard economics.(Grimoire)

How retarded is this statement? Should I count the ways? Do I really have the time?

1. While correct economic (ie, free market) thought to some extent goes all the way back to Aristotle, it really started developing in a systematic way with Thomas Aquinas, and still more, with the Later (Spanish) Scholastics. There is a good book on this (albeit with an awful title in my first edition of it): Chafuen, Christians for Freedom (it’s been reprinted under a different title, and can be purchased here:

http://mises.org/store/Faith-and-Liberty-The-Economic-Thought-of-the-Late-Scholastics-P170.aspx).

2. The venerable (18thC) Adam Smith was a Scotsman, though free market ‘purists’ now consider him to have set economics off on a somewhat misdirected path; Turgot, Say and Bastiat were French; Humboldt German. The most consistent scholars of ‘laissez-faire’ became known as the Austrian School, so-named because it began with the 19thC Austrian Carl Menger, continued through his students Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Weiser, and then the great champion and dividing line between the early and ‘modern’ Austrians was the celebrated 20thC economist Ludwig von Mises - after whom came his still more famous (though less rigorous and consistent) student Friedrich von Hayek, as well as the leading American libertarian Murray Rothbard - and so it goes, down to the present.

3. The pattern of America as a nation with very strong property rights (really going all the way until Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal, beginning in 1933) was set not in the 19thC, but by the Founders in the 18thC. I don’t need to name names, because virtually every leading figure in the American Revolutionary, Constitutional and even Antebellum periods was a staunch advocate of private property rights and the free markets arising from them, at least by today’s enervated standards (this absolutely includes the ‘Strong Statist’ Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to use the state to promote industrial development, which he correctly saw as the foundation of national power, and thus ultimately the guarantor of American survival and liberty - but who was as pro-capitalist as anyone else at the time, if not as pro-individual rights; my own nationalist economics, the economic theory which I believe must guide the coming Racial State, is very much Hamiltonian, seeking to combine laissez-faire understandings in terms of the necessity of strong property rights, as well as incentives for individual betterment, with an agenda of state-guided economic development - rather like China’s today, btw - to ensure the financial resources to pay for the large military expenditures that will be required for it to survive, especially in its infancy, once it “comes out of the closet”).

4. My point is that free market analysis was primarily developed by Europeans, not Americans, and that America’s 19thC laissez-faire economy, itself not very different from Britain’s economy, or Germany’s, had its origins in the 18thC.

5. Note, also, that America in the 19thC (and Britain) had one of history’s greatest economic development trajectories under conditions of laissez-faire. Compare this to the anemic growth and dismal fate of modern Keynesian/interventionist and welfare states (look at the economic decline of Britain pre-Thatcher!), not all (or even very much) of whose economic sclerosis can be blamed on racial minorities before very recently, especially outside the US.

6. Note what I said about not confusing market theory with liberal/libertarian ideology. Free market economic understanding is one of the underpinnings of the modern world (and free markets, and the entrepreneurial energies they unleashed, were greatly responsible for the literal (population) growth and power of Western Civilization). Libertarian ideology is simply silly.

7. My own economic theory (an adjunct to Racial State theory), and any intelligent nationalist economics (both as theory and practice), will be built on a free market foundation. Mises was essentially right, as were the Jewish scientists whose efforts produced atomic weapons. If we are to save the white race, we must use the tools available, however they came to hand.

8. From the fact that we will make use of the insights of the economists, it does not follow that we will follow all of their wealth-maximization recommendations (which, I understand, are often even self-defeating over a longer period; eg, immigration). The RS will not be purely laissez-faire, let alone libertarian. The individual must be subordinated to the telos of collective racial survival. But he must also be ‘incentivized’ to be productive (so as to create the wealth and self-sufficiency to ensure collective survival). Fascists prefer that incentivization to be in the form of either patriotic exhortations (which do have their place), or totalitarian coercion. I believe that the most effective approach is to harness private greed to public ends through a largely free market economy, but one subject to overarching, racially teleological guidance. 

9. Trainspotter: I think you and I are mostly on the same page in all this. I will respond to you later, when you flesh out a bit more what your own RS political economy would look like.


20

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:34 | #

The following statement of mine is syntactically awkward:

Note, also, that America in the 19thC (and Britain) had one of history’s greatest economic development trajectories under conditions of laissez-faire.

It should read,

Note, also, that America in the 19thC (and Britain), under conditions of laissez-faire, had one of history’s greatest economic development trajectories.

Proofread, always. Apologies.


21

Posted by anon on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 01:35 | #

Leon,

For a man ever short of time, you are ever finding the time to write all this epic commentary, which you have also recently sworn off as “unmasculine”, between references to your impending opus. I am not complaining or disagreeing, only observing.

Someone on TOO writes:

During college I was drunk on “economics”, that voodoo of the Jews. I’ve since grown up. I noticed that every single economics/libertarian/anarchist book I owned was written by a Jew. That ended that.

Well, that’s very head-in-the-sand, but as the whole subject puts me to sleep I’m getting behind it just the same. Besides, isn’t almost axiomatic in poli sci that a free market always leads to democracy? when oh when shall we be free from the oppressive shibboleths of “freedom”-pushers?


22

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:42 | #

Jawake: Actually my ‘vulgar Marxism’ was not directed entirely at yourself….but at the imposition of the Left/Right, Either/Or…dichotomies (with a few fascist darts) on economic thought in a Nationalist state. I think a Nationalist state should engage someone within the bourse or exchange houses to carry a pistol, and shoot the first economist who mentions Smith, Marx, Von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard etc….the list growing in true Darwinian survival of the fittest style…until we have economists who simply do what is best and right for economic stability and commonwealth, utilizing only the facts at hand, with the law of the land. A sensible approach I think the reverse of the present system.
For me economics is like psychology (a speciality fit for the chosen), in that the practitioners build castles of sand in the clouds, and with the help of their compatriots, rent them out, or sell them to speculators, at high price due to the matchless location and views.
Furthermore, planning for surplus via economic manipulation on the rational of funding a war state, is a passport to destruction. The people do not want war, they do not want economic manipulation in order to finance war…nor do they want a government constantly funded for aggressive war….Quite seriously, maybe I’m off the mark but it is my humble opinion that quite plain accounting and accountability is all that is required. The people like the idea of the government and the military complex on a short financial choke chain.
So the rational that you end with:

And when the that state goes to war because “war alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it,” somebody is going to have to fucking pay for it!

Should entitle you to a bullet through through the forehead, in a Nationalist state. This is not meant in any way to insult you, or with disrespect. It is just my humble opinion


23

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:58 | #

Leon: Good response. Well written with only a few random categorical imperatives.

As for:

Unfortunately for Grim, he really disrobes himself and gives away the game (in this case, revealing how little he understands whereof he speaks in the economic area, whether in terms of theory or history) with this Parthian shot:
 
  Fuck this lecturing us with 19th century American retard economics.(Grimoire)

How retarded is this statement? Should I count the ways? Do I really have the time?


  I was not disrobing…. I was showing you my ass and inviting you to kiss it. My ass, strangely enough…enjoys discussing economics (along with leveraging a compound loaf)...so I leave the economic discussion up to the expert.

Carry on.


24

Posted by Desmond Jones on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:36 | #

If we are going to really have a sustainable tribe that can endure over the long term, we can’t simply write off the bottom half of our people as losers and white trash…while expecting those same people to fill out our military in times of crisis and shed their blood for the tribe, not to mention behaving themselves and contributing to social stability in times of peace.

As if this is something new and insightful, it existed seventy years ago and was stolen from the Anglo-Saxon tribe by an alliance of southern and eastern Europeans, Jews, yellows and blacks.

The author of a letter to the Windsor Daily Star, for example, drew no distinctions among them when he asked why “the foreign element such as Italians, Jews, Russians, Pol[es were] all working and holding down good jobs, while our English-speaking boys are on welfare, walking the streets.“20 Many Canadians believed that some groups of immigrants were less deserving of jobs because they did not — indeed could not — form part of the Canadian nation.

While Canadian young men are volunteering and having to enter training for home defense ... many hundreds, perhaps some thousands of alien youths are having a good time in British Columbia. They are taking the jobs of the Canadian boys. They are earning better pay than they have ever known before. They are acquiring new skills that will serve them well when the war is over. They are digging in.

Farmers around Cooksville, Ontario, were “stewing because their sons and husbands are in the thick of war while those damn foreigners [Jews and Italians] are running Toronto markets and fruit stands and growing rich.“35 Suspicions that Jews were profiteering through black market activities instead of enlisting were especially widespread.36

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/59/patrias.html

Of course, not surprisingly, minorities were under represented in the war effort.

The Second World War representation of other ethnicities in the CF was better than in
the Great War, but still below standard. Every ethnic group has carefully massaged
data to show that it sent the highest percentage etc, etc; this is all nonsense, in my
view, because it includes conscripts and fails to differentiate between combat arms
and services: Jews, who might have been expected to be especially concerned with the
Second World War, e.g., had a lower percentage than their population share in
volunteer enlistments and a higher percentage among conscripts; they also had a lower
casualty rate than the norm which suggests a low combat arms representation.

http://www.cda-cdai.ca/cdai/uploads/cdai/2009/04/2001granatstein.pdf

In summary, what did the WASP tribe possess seventy years ago? A society that was racially aware, classically liberal (free speech and free association) both politically and economically and cognizant of their responsibility to all echelons of WASP society, regardless of their economic position. Why was it destroyed? It discriminated against other tribes, (free association) including other ‘white’ tribes. What was it replaced with, white multiculturalism aka white nationalism.

“Fuck this lecturing us with 20th century white nationalist lies.”


25

Posted by Wandrin on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:19 | #

it existed seventy years ago

Past tense. Build a time machine or a plan that starts from now.

and was stolen

It wasn’t stolen it was given away.


26

Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:22 | #

Why not just spell out your thesis Desmond?


27

Posted by Captainchaos on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:30 | #

Build a time machine or a plan that starts from now.

The Anglo-Saxon Manifesto!


28

Posted by Wandrin on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:55 | #

The Anglo-Saxon Manifesto!

Quite


29

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:21 | #

Look there is an axis of variation in any political philosophy – this is true in liberal thought as in any other. Rand/Hayek/Nozick are at the right-wing end of the liberal spectrum and the post-modern ultra lifestyle/value liberals like Rorty are at the left-wing end. Any critique of the liberal world-order has to start with that simple and obvious insight. Liberalism is a Janus-faced formation.

No-one can deny the ‘successes’ of liberalism. At our most generous we may even concede that liberalism generates the most ‘wealth’ and ‘freedom’ when these terms are measured via monetary success and moral relativism, respectively. However there are other goods that might be valued – the health and beauty of our physical environments (both natural and built), the cohesiveness and stability of our socio-cultural environment and the notion that human excellence and the good life is something other that how much money one has, or how many choices one has as a consumer. Crudely put ‘shopping and fucking’ consumerism/hedonism are not the ultimate values upon which a sustainable society and culture can be based.

In any optimization process the boundary conditions will shape the outcome. Historically perhaps no society has been more enamored and conceived in liberal political theory than the USA. I’m not really sure it will end well. Moreover if a society/culture has a cardinal value such as ‘freedom’ it inevitably trade-offs with other goals and values. Give people maximal individual freedom in the market and in lifestyles and watch the slow-motion destruction of a sustainable society. Not all people are equally wise or capable of making good choices. Many people can be badly manipulated by advertisements and the shaping of their wants in a mass-consumerist society. And many people will act with maximal selfishness and ruthlessness if it is in their self-interest and everyone else can go to hell - no matter what the damage is to our environments (physical, social, cultural etc.).

Liberalism is a species of utopian thought and like all such ideologies ignores or dismisses any facts and processes that are ‘counter-ideological’ to its own self-conception. Political wisdom, in my view, comes from recognizing that all ideologies are distorted and crude ‘social models’ which all have their blind-spots. Treating one ideology as a ‘catch-all’ model of reality is to be in the grip of ideology. But we can have better or worse models. Maximally-individualistic, universal-liberalism is a terrible self-defeating social modal. In fact a Randian-Rorty conceived world is in the long-term the anti-social model.


30

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:48 | #

Leon,

For a man ever short of time, you are ever finding the time to write all this epic commentary, which you have also recently sworn off as “unmasculine”, between references to your impending opus. I am not complaining or disagreeing, only observing. (anon)


I can’t quite remember the “unmasculine” quip, but alas, it is mostly an addiction. Though I can also justify my time spent here (which isn’t all that much, really - I write quickly, don’t post, etc) as starting the “thinking through” as well as refinement process for my more important work down the road. Over the years here I’ve already been forced to consider points which had not previously been at the fore of my racialist thinking (eg, that there is a lot of anti-Christian sentiment among WNs, as well as anti-capitalism, more than I had realized - and that those tendencies need to be refuted or neutralized).

I suppose what I really ought to be doing is to formalize some ideas (eg, “nationalist economics” or “Racial State”), and then submit them as posts, in order to garner the most feedback.

But you’re right: time is always at such a premium. And as you get older, and progressively run out of (life)time, the premium only increases.


31

Posted by bubba on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:00 | #

For a man who swears he’s not an example of homo economicus, Haller sure acts like one.  Narcissistic and lots of free time on his hands, definitely.  Pensioned?  Independently wealthy?  Dividends “earned” in China and socialized risk, I’ll bet.  Money works!  Anybody recommending Mises should be strung from the highest lamp post, then cut down and eviscerated.  Never heard a libertarian put Mises down.  But then I’m an “economic illiterate.”  Haller and his libertarian friends use the term quite often.

To quote Josey Wales, “Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s rain!”


32

Posted by bubba on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:25 | #

Over the years here I’ve already been forced to consider points which had not previously been at the fore of my racialist thinking (eg, that there is a lot of anti-Christian sentiment among WNs, as well as anti-capitalism, more than I had realized - and that those tendencies need to be refuted or neutralized).

You’re not a WN.  You’re merely another Christian homo economicus with a racialist hobby.  God and Money comes first.  Any pensioned “nihilist” with time on his hands could take your Jeboo and libertarianism to the woodshed - far more effectively than MR’s CaptPissedAllOverHisself.  You’ll not convert intelligent Christians or libertarians to racialism.  Their too self-centered for that.  A handful of dumber ones, maybe, through talk of “free association.”

Hey GW, what happened to your website?  It’s empty!  Did Leon “neutralize” them with his libertarian proselytizing?



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