Putin Vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right

According to Dugin, Putin is far from the image of the hardcore nationalist created by Western media propaganda. He is a man of halves: half-liberal, half-Eurasianist. He has made many steps in the right direction, but somehow he never seems to reach the end goal. Putin is essentially a realist, as defined by Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt. He has not found an ideology, but rather reacts instinctively to events and circumstances.

Despite his flaws, Putin is, according to Dugin, the best leader possible; especially when compared to the standard Western politician.

Putin Vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right (Alexander Dugin-Putin vs Putin_ Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right) is not a biography but a Eurasianist analysis of Putin’s reign and of the challenges to be overcome in the future. It is an excellent introduction to Russian politics, thanks to the many footnotes, which introduce the main protagonists of the Russian political scene and the many influences at work in Moscow.

The Political: NRx, Neoreactionism Archived.

This one is eclectic and for the record.

The techno-commercialists appear to have largely arrived at neoreaction via right-wing libertarianism. They are defiant free marketeers, sharing with other ultra-capitalists such as Randian Objectivists a preoccupation with “efficiency,” a blind trust in the power of the free market, private property, globalism and the onward march of technology. However, they are also believers in the ideal of small states, free movement and absolute or feudal monarchies with no form of democracy. The idea of “exit,” predominantly a techno-commercialist viewpoint but found among other neoreactionaries too, essentially comes down to the idea that people should be able to freely exit their native country if they are unsatisfied with its governance-essentially an application of market economics and consumer action to statehood. Indeed, countries are often described in corporate terms, with the King being the CEO and the aristocracy shareholders.

The “theonomists” place more emphasis on the religious dimension of neoreaction. They emphasise tradition, divine law, religion rather than race as the defining characteristic of “tribes” of peoples and traditional, patriarchal families. They are the closest group in terms of ideology to “classical” or, if you will, “palaeo-reactionaries” such as the High Tories, the Carlists and French Ultra-royalists. Often Catholic and often ultramontanist. Finally, there’s the “ethnicist” lot, who believe in racial segregation and have developed a new form of racial ideology called “Human Biodiversity” (HBD) which says people of African heritage are naturally less intelligent than people of Caucasian and east Asian heritage. Of course, the scientific community considers the idea that there are any genetic differences between human races beyond melanin levels in the skin and other cosmetic factors to be utterly false, but presumably this is because they are controlled by “The Cathedral.” They like “tribal solidarity,” tribes being defined by shared ethnicity, and distrust outsiders.

Overlap between these groups is considerable, but there are also vast differences not just between them but within them. What binds them together is common opposition to “The Cathedral” and to “progressive” ideology. Some of their criticisms of democracy and modern society are well-founded, and some of them make good points in defence of the monarchical system. However, I don’t much like them, and I doubt they’d much like me.

Whereas neoreactionaries are keen on the free market and praise capitalism, unregulated capitalism is something I am wary of. Capitalism saw the collapse of traditional monarchies in Europe in the 19th century, and the first revolutions were by capitalists seeking to establish democratic, capitalist republics where the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocratic elite as the ruling class; setting an example revolutionary socialists would later follow. Capitalism, when unregulated, leads to monopolies, exploitation of the working class, unsustainable practices in pursuit of increased short-term profits, globalisation and materialism. Personally, I prefer distributist economics, which embrace private property rights but emphasise widespread ownership of wealth, small partnerships and cooperatives replacing private corporations as the basic units of the nation’s economy. And although critical of democracy, the idea that any form of elected representation for the lower classes is anathaema is not consistent with my viewpoint; my ideal government would not be absolute or feudal monarchy, but executive constitutional monarchy with a strong monarch exercising executive powers and the legislative role being at least partially controlled by an elected parliament-more like the Bourbon Restoration than the Ancien Régime, though I occasionally say “Vive l’Ancien Régime!” on forums or in comments to annoy progressive types. Finally, I don’t believe in racialism in any form. I tend to attribute preoccupations with racial superiority to deep insecurity which people find the need to suppress by convincing themselves that they are “racially superior” to others, in absence of any actual talent or especial ability to take pride in. The 20th century has shown us where dividing people up based on their genetics leads us, and it is not somewhere I care to return to.

I do think it is important to go into why Reactionaries think Cthulhu always swims left, because without that they’re vulnerable to the charge that they have no a priori reason to expect our society to have the biases it does, and then the whole meta-suspicion of the modern Inquisition doesn’t work or at least doesn’t work in that particular direction. Unfortunately (for this theory) I don’t think their explanation is all that great (though this deserves substantive treatment) and we should revert to a strong materialist prior, but of course I would say that, wouldn’t I.

And of course you could get locked up for wanting fifty Stalins! Just try saying how great Enver Hoxha was at certain places and times. Of course saying you want fifty Stalins is not actually advocating that Stalinism become more like itself – as Leibniz pointed out, a neat way of telling whether something is something is checking whether it is exactly like that thing, and nothing could possibly be more like Stalinism than Stalinism. Of course fifty Stalins is further in the direction that one Stalin is from our implied default of zero Stalins. But then from an implied default of 1.3 kSt it’s a plea for moderation among hypostalinist extremists. As Mayberry Mobmuck himself says, “sovereign is he who determines the null hypothesis.”

Speaking of Stalinism, I think it does provide plenty of evidence that policy can do wonderful things for life expectancy and so on, and I mean that in a totally unironic “hail glorious comrade Stalin!” way, not in a “ha ha Stalin sure did kill a lot people way.” But this is a super-unintuitive claim to most people today, so ill try to get around to summarizing the evidence at some point.

‘Neath an eyeless sky, the inkblack sea
Moves softly, utters not save a quiet sound
A lapping-sound, not saying what may be
The reach of its voice a furthest bound;
And beyond it, nothing, nothing known
Though the wind the boat has gently blown
Unsteady on shifting and traceless ground
And quickly away from it has flown.

Allow us a map, and a lamp electric
That by instrument we may probe the dark
Unheard sounds and an unseen metric
Keep alive in us that unknown spark
To burn bright and not consume or mar
Has the unbounded one come yet so far
For night over night the days to mark
His journey — adrift, without a star?

Chaos is the substrate, and the unseen action (or non-action) against disorder, the interloper. Disorder is a mere ‘messing up order’.  Chaos is substantial where disorder is insubstantial. Chaos is the ‘quintessence’ of things, chaotic itself and yet always-begetting order. Breaking down disorder, since disorder is maladaptive. Exit is a way to induce bifurcation, to quickly reduce entropy through separation from the highly entropic system. If no immediate exit is available, Chaos will create one.

Conjuncted: Whats Right-Wing With Negri? Note Quote.

Already with his concept of the socialised worker, Negri had rejected the central pillar of Marx’s economics – the relationship between value and labour. As the whole of society becomes a social factory, so the duration of labour becomes unquantifiable and it becomes impossible to reduce specific forms of labour into abstract socially necessary labour. As the 1980s and 1990s unfolded Negri underpinned his new politics with reference to two fashionable right wing theories – the idea of a ‘weightless economy’ developing out of a high tech ‘third industrial revolution’ and, more recently, extreme versions of globalisation theory depicting the death of the nationstate. Today Negri claims that ‘immaterial labour’ has taken the place of industrial labour as the hegemonic form of production that other forms of labour tend towards. Negri’s descriptions of contemporary production will seem unfamiliar to most workers: ‘A gigantic cultural revolution is under way. Free expression and the joy of bodies, the autonomy, hybridisation and the reconstruction of languages, the creation of new singular mobile modes of production—all this emerges, everywhere and continually’.

[Global corporations are anxious to include] difference within their realm and thus aim to maximise creativity, free play and diversity in the corporate workplace. People of all different races, sexes and sexual orientations should potentially be included in the corporation; the daily routine of the workplace should be rejuvenated with unexpected changes and an atmosphere of fun. Break down the old boundaries and let 100 flowers bloom!

Exploitation, in the Marxist sense of the pumping of unpaid surplus labour out of workers, has ended. Exploitation today means capturing the creative energies of a joyous, cooperating multitude – who may be inside or outside of the workplace. The domination of dead labour, such as machinery or computers, over living is finished because living (for Negri, intellectual) labour is now dominant. The tool of production is now the brain. Paul Thompson explains how Negri’s thinking parallels right wing accounts of the economic changes since the 1970s:

This appears to be remarkably similar to knowledge economy arguments, which we might briefly summarise in the following way. In the information age, capital and labour are said to have been displaced by the centrality of knowledge; brawn by brain; and the production of goods by services and manipulation of symbols. As a commodity, knowledge is too complex, intensive and esoteric to be managed through command and control. The archetypal worker in the new economy makes his or her living from judgement, service and analysis… As none of this is calculable or easily measured, it is the inherent property of the producer… This shifts the power balance to the employee, an increasing proportion of whom fall into the category of mobile, self-reliant and demanding ‘free workers’.

Thompson goes on to provide a detailed critique of the idea of immaterial labour. Even at the most immaterial end of the labour market, intellectual property regimes allow the commodification of knowledge. And such workers are still subject to exploitation and control centred upon the workplace.

Far from the workplace ceasing to be the centre of capital accumulation for the ruling class, it plays an increasingly important role in a world of labour intensification and tightening managerial control. The workplace is still the point at which fixed capital necessary for the production of most goods and services is centralised. And it is still the site where surplus value is extracted from workers – the central obsession of capitalists and states – and thus the point at which those opposed to the rule of capital should concentrate their efforts. Just like his vision of the weightless economy, Negri’s account of
globalisation is almost entirely unsupported by empirical evidence. He writes that:

large transnational corporations have effectively surpassed the jurisdiction and authority of nation-states…the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the earth!

Ideology

For Žižek, we are not so much living in a post-ideological era as in an era dominated by the ideology of cynicism. Adapting from Marx and Sloterdijk, he sums up the cynical attitude as “they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it”. Ideology in this sense, is located in what we do and not in what we know. Our belief in an ideology is thus staged in advance of our acknowledging that belief in “belief machines”, such as Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses. It is “belief before belief.”

One of the questions Žižek asks about ideology is: what keeps an ideological field of meaning consistent? Given that signifiers are unstable and liable to slippages of meaning, how does an ideology maintain its consistency? The answer to this problem is that any given ideological field is “quilted” by what, following lacan, he terms a point de capiton (literally an “upholstery button” though it has also been translated as “anchoring point”). In the same way that an upholstery button pins down stuffing inside a quilt and stops it from moving about, Žižek argues that a point de capiton is a signifier which stops meaning from sliding about inside the ideological quilt. A point de capiton unifies an ideological field and provides it with an identity. Freedom, i.e, is in itself an open-ended word, the meaning of which can slide about depending on the context of its use. A right-wing interpretation of the word might use it to designate the freedom to speculate on the market, whereas a left-wing interpretation of it might use it designate freedom from the inequalities of the market. The word “freedom” therefore does not mean the same thing in all possible worlds: what pins its meaning down is the point de capiton of “right-wing” or “left-wing”. What is at issue in a conflict of ideologies is precisely the point de capiton – which signifier (“communism”, “fascism”, “capitalism”, “market economy” and so on) will be entitled to quilt the ideological field (“freedom”, “democracy”, Human rights” and so on).

Žižek distinguishes three moments in the narrative of an ideology.

1. Doctrine – ideological doctrine concerns the ideas and theories of an ideology, i.e. liberalism partly developed from the ideas of John Locke.

2. Belief – ideological belief designates the material or external manifestations and apparatuses of its doctrine, i.e. liberalism is materialized in an independent press, democratic elections and the free market.

3. Ritual – ideological ritual refers to the internalization of a doctrine, the way it is experienced as spontaneous, i.e in liberalism subjects naturally think of themselves as free individuals.

These three aspects of ideology form a kind of narrative. In the first stage of ideological doctrine we find ideology in its “pure” state. Here ideology takes the form of a supposedly truthful proposition or set of arguments which, in reality, conceal a vested interest. Locke’s arguments about government served the interest of the revolutionary Americans rather than the colonizing British. In a second step, a successful ideology takes on the material form which generates belief in that ideology, most potently in the guise of Althusser’s State Apparatuses. Third, ideology assumes an almost spontaneous existence, becoming instinctive rather than realized either as an explicit set of arguments or as an institution. the supreme example of such spontaneity is, for Žižek, the notion of commodity fetishism.

In each of these three moments – a doctrine, its materialization in the form of belief and its manifestation as spontaneous ritual – as soon as we think we have assumed a position of truth from which to denounce the lie of an ideology, we find ourselves back in ideology again. This is so because our understanding of ideology is based on a binary structure, which contrasts reality with ideology. To solve this problem, Žižek suggests that we analyze ideology using a ternary structure. So, how can we distinguish reality from ideology? From what position, for example, is Žižek able to denounce the New Age reading of the universe as ideological mystification? It is not from the position in reality because reality is constituted by the Symbolic and the Symbolic is where fiction assumes the guise of truth. The only non-ideological position available is in the Real – the Real of the antagonism. Now, that is not a position we can actually occupy; it is rather “the extraideological point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as ‘ideological.'” (Mapping Ideology) The antagonism of the Real is a constant that has to be assumed given the existence of social reality (the Symbolic Order). As this antagonism is part of the Real, it is not subject to ideological mystification; rather its effect is visible in ideological mystification. Here, ideology takes the form of the spectral supplement to reality, concealing the gap opened up by the failure of reality (the Symbolic) to account fully for the Real. While this model of the structure of reality does not allow us a position from which to assume an objective viewpoint, it does presuppose the existence of ideology and thus authorizes the validity of its critique. The distinction between reality and ideology exists as a theoretical given. Žižek does not claim that he can offer any access to the “objective truth of things” but that ideology must be assumed to exist if we grant that reality is structured upon a constitutive antagonism. And if ideology exists we must be able to subject it to critique. This is the aim of Žižek’s theory of ideology, namely an attempt to keep the project of ideological critique alive at all in an era in which we are said to have left ideology behind.

Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality

H/T West Hunter.

Bookmarked.

The rare variants that affect IQ will generally decrease IQ – and since pleiotropy is the norm, usually they’ll be deleterious in other ways as well. Genetic load.

But, considering what is now known about the biological origins of cognition and intelligence, it is generally difficult to take claims of discrimination seriously when underrepresented groups also display relatively lower intelligence profiles. However, in this case there is no reason to think that conservatives as a group have an intellectual profile below the general population. Social conservatives tend to be a little lower in intelligence relative to liberals, but free-market conservatives (libertarians) tend to be smarter than liberals. Being very partisan, either liberal or conservative, tends to be associated with high IQ as well. Increased income levels, which are a proxy for IQ, also moves people right ideologically. In other words, there is nothing that biologically determined intelligence can do to explain the lack of conservatives, and even moderates, in the humanities….Race Hustling /r/science

genomic-analysis-of-family-data-reveals-additional-genetic-effects-on-intelligence-and-personality

Capitalism’s Triumph or Commoditizing Communism

Why is revolution not possible? This is an old debate.

Terms like “socialist” and “revolution”, and “right-wing groups” tend to mean different things to different people, according to their perspectives. which can be quite contradictory, in many regards. Revolutions don’t tend to resolve such contradictions as absolutely as idealists and ideologues tend to imagine. Counter-revolutionary tendencies persist in the society, and even among the revolutionaries, such that it’s never really “over”, and the struggle continues.

Technically, “socialism” is a theoretically “necessary” supposedly “interim” period, during which an elite vanguard seizes political power, “on behalf of” the proletariat, and struggles to transform society, toward the eventual emergence of communism, which is to say, democracy, the ultimate utopian communist dream. That transformation is essentially the suppression of counter-revolutionary (anti-democratic) tendencies, and inculcation and cultivation of revolutionary (democratic) tendencies among the masses.

Marxian concentration on capitalism was all about demonstrating how undemocratic, and thus unjust, irrational and inefficient capitalism tends to be, despite it’s claim to be, relatively speaking, “more democratic” than monarchy, say, or feudalism. He merely sought to show that it is not the ultimate, final stage of that evolution, as it’s proponents tend to assert, but that, like the “socialism” he proposed to supplant it with, an interim stage, which would, in fact, sow the seeds of it’s own destruction, even as previous socio-economic paradigms had done before them.

At the time he was doing all this theorizing, a hundred years ago, his premise of an educated working class, capable of democracy, seemed a virtually impossible utopian dream, considering conditions in the masses, steeped in centuries of ignorance, illiteracy, grinding poverty and religious indoctrination. Rather than second guess his conclusion, then, that further resort to elitism was “necessary” to change those conditions, I’d prefer to just point out that, in fact, those conditions have changed, profoundly, since then, such that the prospect of democracy is no longer such a distant utopian dream, but more feasible and viable a prospect than ever before in human history.

Technology, the engine of all socio-economic relations, has evolved, especially in terms of communications. Here and now, into the 21st Century, both capitalist and “socialist” elitism have become outmoded, I think, and need to “wither away” with the whole concept of the “State” as we now know it, as an externally imposed governor…as Marx predicted would some day be possible. Anymore, most of us aspire to democracy, and we realise that we aren’t there, yet. The issue is not whether anti-democratic rightwing reactionary conservative and fundamentalist counter-revolutionary elements of our society, will, or can, prevent democracy from ensuing. The issue is whether those, who tend to be staunchly opposed to racism, sexism, cultural chauvinism, eco-rape, murderous monopoly corporate fascist ripoffs, and imperialist warmongering, will call off the demoralized cynical defeatism of electoral boycott and excessive splitting, and will step up to actually seize the power, for a change…democratically, electorally…and then proceed to suppress counter-revolutionary anti-democratic tendencies legislatively and judicially, from now on…explicitly for justice and peace, to save the planet. Which, of course, is why the right is freaking out like they are, even now waging “low intensity” civil war, desperately trying to prevent that from happening. For Revolution to be at hand, we must not try and smash capitalism, or even right-wing resistance at that, as democracy is invested in and of itself with enough potency to destroy capitalism and its moribund form, fascism. But, the authorial point of exploiting freedom as against suppressing it is the Negri’s position on the corollaries of reaction to right-wing accelerationsim. So, whatever be the seductive power of neoliberalism, which indeed is undeniable, banking on the track record of proletariat would be stuck in the molasses of the past, or even getting to dynamically shift the agency to cognitariat be akin to letting the seduction of neoliberalism suck the agency in. The alternative is agency/ies, which someone like the obscure Agamben would call “Whatever Singularity” (even Gayatri Spivak flirts with the idea), or precariat, which is the umbrella term for the ones stripped of or dehumanised by the forces of neoliberalism. Unless, the left has this in vision, left is a position best avoided for excepting archival purposes. Yes, commoditising communism spells doom, and we are ideologically headed towards it.

Is the Hierarchical Society Cardinal?

Even the question posed has a stink of the inhuman, or un-human, though it is evident that in theory we might try and flatten such hierarchies, the same never holds true in practice. Although such hierarchies might be held on to surreptitiously, the tendency to be resilient is never really ruled out in matters as sensitive as these, which make us prone to getting branded as fundamentalists or fanatics, or anything which has semblance to the right-wing ideology. So, in a nutshell, hierarchies in the Social are indeed emanating from the right-wing, or are at least given to sway in their descriptions and prescriptions.

So, are these hierarchies important? Well, the answer at first go is a strict ‘no’. But, let us deliberate upon. One way is to look upon hierarchy as dominant, and the other is identity when there is an absence of hierarchies. Now, those that belong to the first camp would imply reciprocity as enabling social order. Reciprocity is a relationship that exists one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one as regards the first camp, while one and the many merge into one another as regards the second camp. In the first camp, reciprocity is built up on adherence, while in the second, it is more and more symbiotic. The existing of social strata could advocate the existence of micro-cultural forms characterised by the features that lead to the formation of such strata in the first place and could include notions like religiosity, power (both muscle and economic), cultural and intellectual/ideological. On the flip side, such notions are tolerant towards multiculturalism or pluralism. Dominance becomes a nested approach, while becoming-identity is a web-like structure with nodes of individuals or clusters of societies that interact on a horizontal level, or to put it more politically, act on a democratic level, in theory at least, to say the least. Disturbance in this net is knotted into a nest, where dominance takes over the democratic structure and subsequently forcing the second camp to be evacuated onto the first one. Now here is where the catch lies. From netted to a nested structure would mean classification, and it is classification that gets conceptual authority, thus in a hugely ironical manner ameliorating the potential of conflicts due to centralised authoritarian structure. This is its use value. Hierarchies try to make sense out of the apparent relationships between things with the caveat that orientations that determine those relations are just looming round the corner.

In hierarchical societies there are domains of individuals, clusters, micro-cultures or societies that are instances of isolated-ness from each other, whereas in non-hierarchical societies these domains tendentially overlap into one another, or even across one another making the very study of latter kind of studies difficult in intent. Other use value would lie in mapping domains become easier in dominance or stratified societies as compared with in non-hierarchical societies.