Evolutionary Inactivism: Obliquity as a dialetical progression towards Eudaimonic Society

Evolutionary Inactivism: Obliquity as a dialetical progression towards Eudaimonic Society

i) The Failed Present Consensus

The divisory and brutal realities of Late Capitalism have become increasingly apparent in the twenty odd summers since the fall of the Old Left.

The development of post-Keynesian monetarist theories of economic planning (id est. Non-planning) over the period 1970-2008 has belied the central flaw of most 20th century attempts at Marxist social development.

These flaws were highlighted as early as the 1920's with Lenin's articles in Pravda heralding the NEP (New Economic Plan) - even he realized a limited free market would be required for the industrialization of the fledgling Soviet Union. The free market is a natural system, indeed is the natural system of human organization - supposedly impossibly so, hence the neo-liberals telling us that attempts to escape it will cause disaster. However the natural state of mankind also involves sitting a tree eating your dinner while it still wiggles, though the free market possess all the rises and falls of any ecosystem this is not a recommendation of it.

ii) Of Moloch

Often I have thought that while James Lovelock was accurate in describing the biosphere of Earth as a super-organism he may have been ill advised in naming the super-organism Gaia - the new age connotations have biased many against his theory ever since. The main logical flaw of his theory seems to be that he is so rabidly opposed to anthropocentricity that he could consider mankind only in the context of a cancer harming Gaia who Gaia would inevitably wipe out.

The way in which mankind exists in relation to the Earthly Super organism (Gaia for conventions sake) seems more akin to a parasitical mammalian foetus. The child floating within the womb of Earth, sucking nutrients though an thinning placenta and leeching minerals, steel and oil from her bones. Humanity represents the only possibility of Gaia reproducing and forming other biospheres (Mars, Venus, Europa, Alpha Centauri terraformed would fill this analogy) yet at the same time it seems that like a hundred year cactus the Earth may die in childbirth.

The economic activity of mankind, the titular “Market” seems to represent a separate superorganism regulated by different rises and falls and a markedly different modus operandi to Gaia. “The Market” seems to be the super organism Moloch which rises within and in competition in Gaia – her son the cuckoo. Lovelock is wrong, mankind may outlive Gaia and all that is green and crawls upon the Earth, Moloch could devour his mother.

iii) Pubescence

Thus the short Twentieth Century seems more likely the beginning of a difficult species wide pubesnence. As our population soars so to our bandwidth of tastes shrink – daily we shed languages, faiths, tastes and entire systems of thought.

The formation of the global market and birth of Moloch due to Western technocratic expansionism has allowed the emergence of a discernable ‘cultural character’ for the whole of humanity in our age.

Despite the obvious Great White Hero Saves The Natives myth behind films such as Avatar their concerned citizen portrayal of meta-pragmatic moral blind future humanity shows one vision of our future. Indeed it seems likely that we will soon (if we have not already) box ourselves into corners from which decent or pleasant escape seems impossible.

The fact that such movies have proved so resonate with the trend setting cultures of the West is telling. Of what, no man can say.

iiv) Dissonance

The university student who lurches from student loan funded binge of sambuca shots and high street slave made clothes to the oppositional paradigm of anti-materialist environmentalist leftist orthodoxy find themselves trapped within cognitive dissonance.

The rise is such dissonance within personalities and societies as people try and deal with conflict between personal tastes and instincts and the nonsensically different views of are society are among the most obvious causes of the correlation in rising levels of unhappiness and mental illness in the Advanced Cultures and the encroachment of the condition which is termed Late Captialism.

It would seem that the failiure of the Old Left both in the form of Authoritarian Bolshevik Collectivism and European/Latin American Socialism was based on a combination of lack of adequate mathematics or computing for the adequate economic modelling of the Control (id est Planned) economies. This technical failure of history and technological progression not coincided prevent them from being able to guarantee similar QOL (Quality of Life) and QLY (Quality Life Years) to the liberal capitalist democracies.

This historic oddity which left the west convinced of its apparently final victory and its population unsure of the likelihood of the possible future failure inherent in non-reserve banking, profit generation based social hierarchies, exponential growth literalism and long term private ownership of all forms of property.

iv) Mensheviks rising

I would like to argue that any New Left or Fifth International must take Bakunin, Proudhon or Kropotkin as its starting point instead of Lenin or Trotsky, the future it seems is inevitably Menshevik. One of the ironies of our time could be that the West has unknowingly walked the path to inevitable communisation faster in its embrace of the market  than the old nations of the Warsaw Pact.

To embrace any ideology as clearly modernist in subtext as socialism takes courage in the age of post modernity – yet it may be that the semiotic chaos of Late Capitalism intellectual sphere is  a contingent condition for actualising communisation.

The priest giving opiates to the modern masses are the great megacorporations of America and Zaibatsus of Japan while the academic world bows before the secular saints of capitalist epistemology Baudrillard and Fukuyama.

If the dialectic exchange of ideas that Marx predicted in Das Kapital has truly come full circle then it must be considered that the current dissonance is a desirable necessity for the generation of the socio-political analysis and discussion for ideological reconstruction.

v) A spectral tune is haunting Europe...

Europe is passing into a neo-medieval age, since the Berlin Wall fell the economic order has become almost mercantile in its adventurism and this is now spreading abroad with Chinese explorationism in Africa.  The multitude of rising quangos and transnational’s compete for territory with in the Western Noosphere and attempt to fill the roles of the old guilds and holy orders. From Brussels the European Union looks on as it neatly assumes the role the 13^th century church, with its Council a committee on the throne of a Holy Roman Emperor.

However quietly invisible committees wait, and the shift to alternative models of economic activity develop as advocated by the Transition Towns, Lett systems, Freegans, Sustainable communities and internet pirates. The quiet side step of millions of people leaving the normal economy to go into the black, grey and green externalised parallel markets is a massive challenge to the current order.

Rather than being a revolution of guns and fire it is an evolution of obliquity and indirect consequences emerging from ten million actions all reacting in response to the horror of the market. Every step in the daily increasing commonality of intellectual property and mass media is a element of the process of communisation, furthermore the efforts of transitionism and greenism to return food production directly to its pre-industrial localism represents a gradual unconscious attempt to wither the state.

What has begun this last ten years will not culminate in riots in the street, though they may be symptons of its passing, nor will it overthrow governments, though they may crumble before it, nor lynch aristocracies,  though they may be displaced by it – it is the sound of a great green spectral song which stalking Europe once more, dancing to the tune of a billion actions of obliquity producing the echo of the Warsaw concerto. It is the spectre of inactivist evolutionary communisation.

Workers of the world forget your chains. Workers of the world are united whether they know it or not.

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Source: www.sambennetts.com

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