Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern world. The fundamental need to push products into the hands of more consumers necessitates the creation of allure, of spectacle. An iPhone would be generic without its characteristic apple. Yet such constructs have a fatalistic quality, that being the genericism inherent that leads to lower quality, higher production and more genericism. Mass production as a system leads to large-scale waste, and a continual reliance on surrounding economic structures. Highly regulated financial markets with fortress-like entry barriers, government creation of massive transport infrastructure (highways and transnational rail networks) and authoritarian regimes in the East and Global South who can eliminate any whisper of trade unionism or worker solidarity. These are all children of the state, built from its core ideology of centralising managerialism. Advertising and big data are the children of the children, nominally independent of direct subsidy, yet all the same creations of it.

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being the effective candidates for the major parties, the real question now is when will they both coalesce around similar sets of issues like all other presidential candidates, eventually leading to another election based on rhetoric rather than substance. While it may be said Trump’s rhetoric is more incendiary, anyone truly affected by his nonsensical, impossible-to-implement ideas is most likely stupid, and must view minority individuals and communities as some sort of homogeneous blob of Democratic voters. Equally, while Trump has u-turned on a huge number of issues, Clinton herself can hardly claim to be consistent. In the 90s, she happily stood behind her husband’s Trump-esque rhetoric on immigration and the drug war[1]. In 2005, she claimed to be adamantly opposed to illegal immigration[2]. In 2014, she thought immigrant children should be sent back to their country of origin[3]. She, like Trump, doesn’t know if she’s up or down on a wide variety of issues. Continue reading →

By a weak reading, I mean viewing a concept as overdetermined, revealing a ream of constituent dialogues and discourses which destroy a particular conceptual framework surrounding said concept. By implanting one discursive form upon such a concept, an ideological system is created which hides the truth of what underlies something. In the case of private property, capitalist definitions provide a concept as something privately owned, yet the reality is that much of modern private property came out of the enclosures, of feudal and modern eras, and large tracts of private property have been gifted to vested interests by the state. The capitalist discourse of private property is an ideological lie masking systemic theft.

While my economic views put me on the trajectory of left-libertarianism, with my belief in wider, distributed ownership and the return of mutual aid associations and voluntary, even democratic, structures, I’ve always maintained a cultural conservatism in my outlook, coming from the ideas of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. In combining the two, I come to an idea of left-wing Paleolibertarianism, rejecting the cultural libertinism of elements of the libertarian left and supporting pastoral, paternal structures which are voluntary and decentralist. I respect the multitude of different communities and respective traditions that exist, desiring their maintained existence, and have no inherent problem with hierarchy so long as mutuality is maintained.

The corporation as a concept can easily be summed up by Rothbard, describing it simply as pooled capital among entrepreneurs and other stakeholders. However, the distinction then must be made with this libertarian conception, and the modern reality of corporations as subsidised leviathans that require massive subsidisation through transport subsidies, intellectual property monopolies and limited liability and corporate personhood through state granted charters. All of these limit the market from destroying the modern corporate form, which has huge diseconomies of scale and internal calculational chaos. Continue reading →

Tradition is the conception of a solid society of recognised rules and customs with distributed classes of people. Generally seen as the lower and higher orders, society actually has much more complex relations of heredity and hierarchy, which take on different realms and situations. While tradition is certainly seen as the maintenance of certain orders, even in authoritarian circumstances, the reality is that forms of paternalism and natural order require acceptance by said lower orders, who are in fact important blocs of power that do not necessarily find themselves within authoritarian, top-down enforced relations but rather in localised variations of political dispute and argumentation, that can lead to forms of retribution (both violent and non-violent) to maintain mutualities. These mutualities are the real acceptance of such relations which form the backbone of actual tradition. Hierarchies are variable and can be open to acceptance, in the same way forms of property system are open to challenge instead of reliant on pure acceptance[1]. They require voluntary agreement in the realm of the social, otherwise such relations do take on an authoritarian character.

Family is the bedrock of a healthy society, with children doing significantly better in education if they have a stable family. Family is what recreates the orders and flows of a society, allowing it to maintain a formed culture and idea of nationhood. However, family is only one element of this traditional, culturally conservative society. The other important element is community. This is what the fake conservatives, the neoliberals and neoconservatives, ignore. Community is anathema to their ideology of unhinged neoliberalism which chooses to commodify social relations and destroy tradition. Rather than society being a collective contract to be governed by the little platoons as Burke described, neoliberals and neoconservatives see it as something to be moulded to the interests of capitalist elites. Rather than the altar and the market being two realms controlled by social hierarchies, cast by its constituent actors, with the mutual clericalism and mutual aid of the former, and the local character and decentralised control of the latter, the economy and community are centralised through the state, creating uniformity and destroying culture. Continue reading →

Recent accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party show some of the stupidity of the left when it comes to legitimately criticising Israel and its policies. Rather than showing that Israel, which has widespread support from the United States and evangelical Christians, and has been condemned and criticised by ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups and those who live in Israel respectively, is a militaristic state that, more than simply supporting its own ethnocentrism, actively expands beyond established borders and has regularly flouted both international law in Gaza and offers of peace by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Israeli governments have rejected the right to return of Palestinian refugees, refuse to recognise the realities of the Nakba, and continue to steal land from families who have lived in Palestine for decades and centuries. Continue reading →

Jonathan Meades’ documentary on brutalism was a fascinating insight into an often ignored period of architecture that had so much utopian promise and imagery behind it. Now the same institutions that commissioned these amazing projects have become the means to their destruction, acting as, Meades declares, sanctioned vandals. These vandals are part of the cadre of small is beautiful brigades which see any buildings representing industrialism and largesse as problematic to the surrounding environment and thus have a desire to see them destroyed and replaced by some eco-nonsense that makes little sense and is usually more of a blight on the environment than brutalist architecture. Continue reading →

I’ve heard it contended that when it comes to a multiplicitous anarchist social order, where anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists could live side by side in their own distinct communities, such an order would be practically impossible due to ancoms refusing to recognise the existence of property relations, as it is assumed ancoms deny the capacity for individual ownership of property as defined in the term “private property”. And because ancap economic theory is defined by a recognition of private property, the two communities could not exist together. Continue reading →