LWDT V: Completing the Five Thread Plan

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

I would love to ask the Lefties on NS this question. Those things “highly intersectional identities” that have a hard time find accepting from the communities they belong to for various reasons turning to political and philosophical individualism as a source of defending their validity? I’ve found that political and philosophical individualism to be the best solution for those with “highly intersectional identities”.

For example, I face mass rejection from my LGBT community due to my body size, my personal appearance, my politics and many other things. So, rather than what I did before, become an anti-LGBT bigot, I adopted a more individualist perspective on life and politics.

I've never resorted to a pure individualist politics because the relativism makes it empty of substantive content and ultimately collapses into having no strong convictions and getting dragged along with whatever the nearest person with principles says.

But I've struggled with this broad issue myself quite extensively over the years, so I have given the issue some thought.
We live in a world where we're encouraged constantly to be "true to ourselves", but in which politics is increasingly shrill, cliquey and locked away into closed bubbles unreceptive to outside thought. The problem is one of contrary and irreconcilable expectations. There are broadly four options if you find yourself with a set of beliefs that don't quite fit the moulds, whiich I've listed broadly in order of my personal "journey":

1) Attempt to make yourself fit as best as possible into the one group you find most appealing and do your best to hide and deny any contrary loyalties or expressions. The path of least resistance, but one which will likely cause you some disquiet.
2) Actively challenge the established order in the groups and fight your corner, knowing that whole the group may reject you at large, a subsection may accept you, allowing you to interact with them on a more authentic basis. This might require trying several groups and going through substantial and repeated rejection.
3) Maintain memberships of a mulitude of groups, pretending as best as possible to fit all of them while you're with them. In which manner, your entire self is reflected in aggregate but not simultaneously. Again, can often feel fake, or like you're "wearing too many hats".
4) Withdraw from active membership of political/identity social groups and fulfil social needs via an easier method such as online forums etc. where the relative distance makes disagreement and rejection less distressing. The lack of a face-to-face regular connection can be difficult here, particularly if you're also lacking in close family ties.

As I say, I'm currently on 4, having being repeatedly dumped by all the social groups I nurtured during my university years for political reasons, finding the local LGBT community rather seedy and excessively prideful, and being too left-wing and queer for national-conservative politics and too culturally conservative and nationalist for the liberal internationalist left.

Society is not obliged to accept anyone, and if you do not have the charisma and force of personality to make people want to accept you regardless then there is no shame in keeping yourself to yourself. It's not necessarily a fault on your behalf, or even on the people who reject you - everyone has and is entitled to their ideological red lines - it's just a feature of the natural in/out, them/us, community and "other" dynamic of group formation and the political times we live in.

Your piece is very good, except for the start. How is individualism relativistic and priciple-less?

[Dumb Ideologies]

Ehh.

I get what it is you're saying. I have the misfortune of having one of those highly intersectional identities. But I don't turn to radical individualism, I believe individual and collective to be ultimately illusory concepts.

An individual aint an illusion. You can observe, see, and touch an individual.

Oh you sweet summer child. If you look at them for more than five seconds it's harassment and you can only touch them if you've first drawn up a legal contract, got it signed in triplicate and joined the masons so you can give the nice policeman a special handshake so that he doesn't shred the evidence :^)

[Dumb Ideologies]

I've never resorted to a pure individualist politics because the relativism makes it empty of substantive content and ultimately collapses into having no strong convictions and getting dragged along with whatever the nearest person with principles says.

But I've struggled with this broad issue myself quite extensively over the years, so I have given the issue some thought.
We live in a world where we're encouraged constantly to be "true to ourselves", but in which politics is increasingly shrill, cliquey and locked away into closed bubbles unreceptive to outside thought. The problem is one of contrary and irreconcilable expectations. There are broadly four options if you find yourself with a set of beliefs that don't quite fit the moulds, whiich I've listed broadly in order of my personal "journey":

1) Attempt to make yourself fit as best as possible into the one group you find most appealing and do your best to hide and deny any contrary loyalties or expressions. The path of least resistance, but one which will likely cause you some disquiet.
2) Actively challenge the established order in the groups and fight your corner, knowing that whole the group may reject you at large, a subsection may accept you, allowing you to interact with them on a more authentic basis. This might require trying several groups and going through substantial and repeated rejection.
3) Maintain memberships of a mulitude of groups, pretending as best as possible to fit all of them while you're with them. In which manner, your entire self is reflected in aggregate but not simultaneously. Again, can often feel fake, or like you're "wearing too many hats".
4) Withdraw from active membership of political/identity social groups and fulfil social needs via an easier method such as online forums etc. where the relative distance makes disagreement and rejection less distressing. The lack of a face-to-face regular connection can be difficult here, particularly if you're also lacking in close family ties.

As I say, I'm currently on 4, having being repeatedly dumped by all the social groups I nurtured during my university years for political reasons, finding the local LGBT community rather seedy and excessively prideful, and being too left-wing and queer for national-conservative politics and too culturally conservative and nationalist for the liberal internationalist left.

Society is not obliged to accept anyone, and if you do not have the charisma and force of personality to make people want to accept you regardless then there is no shame in keeping yourself to yourself. It's not necessarily a fault on your behalf, or even on the people who reject you - everyone has and is entitled to their ideological red lines - it's just a feature of the natural in/out, them/us, community and "other" dynamic of group formation and the political times we live in.

Your piece is very good, except for the start. How is individualism relativistic and priciple-less?

Perhaps the wrong words, but a platform of "everything's okay, let everyone do as they wish, keep bumbling along, don't mess with the current order or people might get hurt" lacks the driving metanarrative of left or right in terms of identifying flaws in society and making it better.

While it may be radical in socially backwards areas of the world, in the West it can lack emotional connection and feel ideologically "empty", and this - combined with the limits of people's tolerance - makes people see it as the beige placeholder text of the ideological world, limiting popular appeal.

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

An individual aint an illusion. You can observe, see, and touch an individual.

Oh you sweet summer child. If you look at them for more than five seconds it's harassment and you can only touch them if you've first drawn up a legal contract, got it signed in triplicate and joined the masons so you can give the nice policeman a special handshake so that he doesn't shred the evidence :^)

After Xenopolis was expelled to the gulags at the bottom of the Great Bear Lake in northern Canada for opening his eyes within seventeen miles of the philosophically questionable "individual," the mangled, yet delicate form of a travelling Jesus impersonator ascended from the murky depths of the Libertarian Discussion Thread on a slow day. Just when we thought he arrived merely to flip the bird at us, he revealed a 1997 15MB USB, and gestured at us to take it. Upon our obligation, he collapsed and died from what our autopsy identified as either Fatal Familial Insomnia, or non-allergenic lactose overdose. The USB contained a single 16MB ISO file, which when run in the Linux release of Dolphin 3.5 with the BIOS file for the PAL release of the mobile port of BUZZ Junior in the 34th line of the code cache, displayed a Minecraft re-enactment of Team Fortress 2's "Meet the Sniper," except every 64th frame contained a letter or symbol, which when entered into the URL box of Microsoft Edge, took us to an unlisted Youtube video which was 24 hours long, titled only "that's collectivism." It featured a still frame of a screenshot of a Youtube video entitled "A post-Marxist analysis of Chicken Run 2," and (on the surface) no audio except for the soundtrack of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Video Game (For the PS2). When slowed down to x0.001 speed, the video played a sound which was unmistakably Yddish Morse code, which when translated using the Beta of google translate read "But I've been on the forum for like 8, months, and I'm 17."

[Mattopilos II]

> The individual is an illusion

Yeah, because the collective is a physical thing, right?

Use your damn brain woman.

I know you say both are, but here is the difference: The collective requires the individual to compose it.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

Does everybody here want the market to not exist?

<raises his hand>. I would select an appropriate emoji, but none exists.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

How is class struggle not living for others? It is collectivism in its purest form.

What is wrong with living for others? I mean, unless one is a Stirnerite. Roy Bhaskar, the libertarian Marxist founder of critical realism, said that we must work to emancipate ourselves and to help emancipate others. One of the ways we emancipate others is by establishing libertarian communism.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

What about "Don't attack us and we won't attack you."

Us and You is an illusion. There is only Us.

[Geneviev]

What about "Don't attack us and we won't attack you."

Us and You is an illusion. There is only Us.

And you.

[Dumb Ideologies]

How is class struggle not living for others? It is collectivism in its purest form.

What is wrong with living for others? I mean, unless one is a Stirnerite. Roy Bhaskar, the libertarian Marxist founder of critical realism, said that we must work to emancipate ourselves and to help emancipate others. One of the ways we emancipate others is by establishing libertarian communism.

Unless the order collapses by itself and the old elites get Raptured, a lot of non-emancipatory and non-libertarian activity would be required to establish the conditions where communism could be enacted and become self-sustaining.

You don't win just by smiling and through being a nice enough guy that those with a stake in the old system just sigh, say "go on then", and fly their saucer back to their home planet.

[Evil Dictators Happyland]

What is wrong with living for others? I mean, unless one is a Stirnerite. Roy Bhaskar, the libertarian Marxist founder of critical realism, said that we must work to emancipate ourselves and to help emancipate others. One of the ways we emancipate others is by establishing libertarian communism.

Unless the order collapses by itself and the old elites get Raptured, a lot of non-emancipatory and non-libertarian activity would be required to establish the conditions where communism could be enacted and become self-sustaining.

You don't win just by smiling and through being a nice enough guy that those with a stake in the old system just sigh, say "go on then", and fly their saucer back to their home planet.

The best way to establish communism would be to work within the system and only break it when necessary. Pass a law here, an economic initiative there, slowly equalizing wealth until everyone is truly on par. Above all, you need to make sure that the majority's voice is heard, since the entire point of communism is that it is the people's will. If your plans aren't working because the majority isn't with you, then that means that you are completely altering someone's society based entirely on the grounds that you know what's best for them better than they do, which sounds pretty authoritarian if you ask me.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

The best way to establish communism would be to work within the system and only break it when necessary. Pass a law here, an economic initiative there, slowly equalizing wealth until everyone is truly on par. Above all, you need to make sure that the majority's voice is heard, since the entire point of communism is that it is the people's will. If your plans aren't working because the majority isn't with you, then that means that you are completely altering someone's society based entirely on the grounds that you know what's best for them better than they do, which sounds pretty authoritarian if you ask me.

That's what Eduard Bernstein said. The problem is that the system which caused the problem can't fix it.

[Dumb Ideologies]

Unless the order collapses by itself and the old elites get Raptured, a lot of non-emancipatory and non-libertarian activity would be required to establish the conditions where communism could be enacted and become self-sustaining.

You don't win just by smiling and through being a nice enough guy that those with a stake in the old system just sigh, say "go on then", and fly their saucer back to their home planet.

The best way to establish communism would be to work within the system and only break it when necessary. Pass a law here, an economic initiative there, slowly equalizing wealth until everyone is truly on par. Above all, you need to make sure that the majority's voice is heard, since the entire point of communism is that it is the people's will. If your plans aren't working because the majority isn't with you, then that means that you are completely altering someone's society based entirely on the grounds that you know what's best for them better than they do, which sounds pretty authoritarian if you ask me.

Would this involve standing openly as communists or seeking to disguise themselves in the short term as more palatable social democrats? Does the wide-ranging global shift towards lighter-touch economic regulation and the opening up of markets over the past few decades not concern you or lead you to think that the concentration of economic power and the increased mobility of capital may be making a democratic gradualist approach increasingly difficult?

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

And you.

And me what?

[Geneviev]

And you.

And me what?

Us and you. It's not an illusion.

[Painisia]

Fascists and National Syndicalists hate rich people too? Or do they hate the foreigners

[Dumb Ideologies]

Fascists and National Syndicalists hate rich people too? Or do they hate the foreigners

Most hated of all are overly simplistic questions.

[Evil Dictators Happyland]

That's what Eduard Bernstein said. The problem is that the system which caused the problem can't fix it.

Why not? As long as you can pass reforms, you can reform the entire system piece by piece. All it takes is making it so that you can make a change, and patience.
If the system doesn't allow even that, then feel free to change it outside of the system. But destroying it entirely results in anarchy, and the end result of every anarchy I can think of is either extreme instability or dictatorship. Usually the second one.

[Free American Empire-]

That's what Eduard Bernstein said. The problem is that the system which caused the problem can't fix it.

Why not? As long as you can pass reforms, you can reform the entire system piece by piece. All it takes is making it so that you can make a change, and patience.
If the system doesn't allow even that, then feel free to change it outside of the system. But destroying it entirely results in anarchy, and the end result of every anarchy I can think of is either extreme instability or dictatorship. Usually the second one.

Yeah. Also, revolutions can be hijacked, and in a few years, revolution might be reverted completely.

[Dumb Ideologies]

That's what Eduard Bernstein said. The problem is that the system which caused the problem can't fix it.

Why not? As long as you can pass reforms, you can reform the entire system piece by piece. All it takes is making it so that you can make a change, and patience.
If the system doesn't allow even that, then feel free to change it outside of the system. But destroying it entirely results in anarchy, and the end result of every anarchy I can think of is either extreme instability or dictatorship. Usually the second one.

Democracy is a see-saw, it's rare for one party to get more than a few consecutive terms. If you're periodically losing power to people bent on rolling back your achievements you are not going to get anywhere and you'll have to regularly restart from the beginning or from a worse position than your previous term. This is an inherent problem with gradualism.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

Us and you. It's not an illusion.

As a critical realist, I would argue that the separation between us is an illusion. That does not mean we are not two separate beings, but we are not separated from one another.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

Fascists and National Syndicalists hate rich people too? Or do they hate the foreigners

National syndicalists are a diverse bunch. It is hard to make a statement about them which would be inclusive. As to fascists, more specifically, generally they hate the other. It is why Antonio Gramsci, Italian fascism's greatest enemy, referred to the subaltern (the socially marginalized or other). Mussolini hated Gramsci, which brought Gramsci great delight.

[Ostroeuropa]

Why not? As long as you can pass reforms, you can reform the entire system piece by piece. All it takes is making it so that you can make a change, and patience.
If the system doesn't allow even that, then feel free to change it outside of the system. But destroying it entirely results in anarchy, and the end result of every anarchy I can think of is either extreme instability or dictatorship. Usually the second one.

Democracy is a see-saw, it's rare for one party to get more than a few consecutive terms. If you're periodically losing power to people bent on rolling back your achievements you are not going to get anywhere and you'll have to regularly restart from the beginning or from a worse position than your previous term. This is an inherent problem with gradualism.

This is why a sortition based second house would help, it removes the ability for winner takes all factionalism, unless that faction genuinely has a majority of the populace on their side consistently for all their proposals.

"We should privatize everything"
"We should socialize everything"

Gets subjected to public will as a check/balance, until the compromise is found.

[The Multiversal Communist Collective]

Why not? As long as you can pass reforms, you can reform the entire system piece by piece. All it takes is making it so that you can make a change, and patience.
If the system doesn't allow even that, then feel free to change it outside of the system. But destroying it entirely results in anarchy, and the end result of every anarchy I can think of is either extreme instability or dictatorship. Usually the second one.

And who is going to pass those reforms? The very people who benefit from the status quo. That is why reforms cannot ultimately transform a society.

[West Leas Oros]

I would love to ask the Lefties on NS this question. Those things “highly intersectional identities” that have a hard time find accepting from the communities they belong to for various reasons turning to political and philosophical individualism as a source of defending their validity? I’ve found that political and philosophical individualism to be the best solution for those with “highly intersectional identities”.

For example, I face mass rejection from my LGBT community due to my body size, my personal appearance, my politics and many other things. So, rather than what I did before, become an anti-LGBT bigot, I adopted a more individualist perspective on life and politics.

I don’t blame you for your course of action. I personally reject intersectionality, which I believe diminishes the importance of the class struggle, turning it into a pale side goal. As for individualism, I believe in the good of the collective first, but the individual is the foundation of the collective, being an essential and integral part of the whole, and should be given a range of freedom, with the only rule being, do not infringe on the rights of others. (Akin to the social contract or MAYBE the NAP). People should be able to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Defining what it means to “hurt someone” is where it gets tricky. I’d argue that capitalism is exploitation, and that would hurt others. Others might disagree. Just my 2 cents on the matter.