J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
Warning: Lying Psychotic Marxoid Ahead
Mark Ames is a lying shithole of a Marxoid scumbag.
On his blog at The Exiled Online, Ames accuses me and other libertarians of being stooges for J. Edgar Hoover, and, without sourcing, quotes from a personal obituary I wrote for Agorism’s founder, Samuel Edward Konkin III, to accuse me of nostalgically being insufficiently radical to satisfy his revolutionary lust for a high collateral-damage body count.
This is not hyperbole, since Ames wrote a book calling the Columbine school shooting of high-school students and teachers by a couple of psychotropic-induced psychotic teenagers an act of political rebellion.
Ames wrote,
I did a brief check on what sort of “libertarian anarchists” were at Hunter College in the early 1970s, and discovered this: some libertarian hack named J. Neil Schulman waxing nostalgic about his libertarian youth, including some forgettable “libertarian anarchist” lectures at Hunter College in the early 1970s.
As it turns out, Schulman’s story goes a long way towards explaining why the FBI called off the dogs on these early libertarian “radicals.” Because they’re about as radical as the Partridge Family—no, actually, on the “radical” “danger to the system” scale, these Hunter College libertarians were so depressingly harmless and conventional, they made the Partridge Family look like the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Schulman’s reminiscences recount the touching tale of how the young 16-year-old Schulman first met his libertarian hero, one Samuel Konkin III, back in the early 1970′s. In scenes so hilariously banal they could have been taken from those old Chris Elliot Get A Life shows, we learn how Konkin showed the young Schulman the world, to the point that you can almost hear the montage soundtrack accompaniment as they’re, “searching out ‘underground gourmet’ restaurants…catching the latest Woody Allen movie or James Bond movie…[Sam] introduced me to the writings of Ludwig von Mises…[we] ate many of my mom’s homecooked meals at my parents’ apartment of [sic] the West Side of Manhattan…”
Oh, and of course, “Sam took me to my first libertarian conference at Hunter College in New York City.”
It’d all be so sad if it wasn’t a brief description of how the shit world we inherited turned to shit.
In Schulman’s libertarian Bildungsroman, the action goes from his mom’s kitchen and Hunter College anarcho-capitalist lectures to the big highway: Schulman and Konkin hit the road and head west to Southern California, where the libertarian duo go on to Big Things: Konkin joined a notorious Holocaust-denial outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, founded by white supremacist Willis Carto…while his disciple/sidekick Schulman grew up to be a big NRA propagandist, churning out “radical” PR garbage like his book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, a book so radical that Charlton Heston’s blurb adorns book’s cover. Hey, if Charlton Heston blurbs your book, then folks, you know you’re stickin’ it to The Man, anarcho-libertarian style!
So now those strange FBI’s instructions ordering their spies to lay off the “libertarian anarchists” make sense. These “anarcho-capitalist” libertarians are the stuff of the old J Edgar Hoover’s wet dreams–“radical” youths who threaten radicals, not the capitalist system. “Anarchists” who suck the air out of anarchism’s threat to capitalism, and replace it with a fierce defense of capitalism; anarchists who grovel for a pat on the head from sleazy old Republicans like Charlton Heston—in J Edgar Hoover’s wildest dreams, could he ever have imagined it? (Actually, to be fair to the folks in the FBI, they must’ve despised these libertarian suck-ups as degenerate scum. Harmless scum, and useful scum, but scum nonetheless.)
This is just another reason why libertarianism is so goddamn offensive. They’ve even managed to turn “radical” into a harmless, meaningless, anti-radical brand—they’ve sucked out everything that was dangerous, and replaced it with its every opposite, the most shameless pro-capitalist, pro-bootlicking ideology imaginable. All they kept from the hippies was the very worst, most imbecilic, self-absorbed, childish nonsense that you can find in that Jerry Rubin manifesto: the whining about teachers, the whining about wanting to smoke pot and grow out his hair.
It’s the worst of all worlds—so naturally, the FBI did everything to coddle and protect it, and make sure it alone emerged unscathed from the counter-revolution crackdown in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Mark Ames,
Photo Courtesy of Reason.com
I chose to reply on his blog and submitted the following comment, which he chose not to publish:
Mark Ames chides me for waxing nostalgic about my youth … which he never sources as my tribute to my friend Samuel Edward Konkin III, written a few days after his death in February 2004. Maybe Mark Ames considers friendship irrelevant to whatever revolutionary people’s struggle he was involved with in his youth, but that would make it easy for me to caricature him as some old fart nostalgic for the days when his dick still worked.
Konkin, today, is regarded as the founder of the Agorist movement. Look it up on Wikipedia, Ames, since the revolutionary alternative to Geritol Marxism seems to have escaped your notice.
If you want to know what this particular libertarian hack has been doing since the 70’s, you can look me up on Wikipedia, too. Or Amazon.com. Or IMDb.
And I suggest reading my article “Mere Anarchy” and apologize in advance if the agorist approach to achieving a free society doesn’t have a sufficiently high body count to satisfy your aging gonads.
I looked Mark Ames up on Wikipedia and learned he was born in October 1958. This surprised me because he wrote as if his voice had changed when I was getting busted at an anti-war-tax demonstration in 1972. It’s a pity when one so young is struck with Marxheimer’s Disease in the prime of life.
I couldn’t resist posting one more comment on his psycho rant:
“Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, 2005 (ISBN 1-932360-82-4). In this work Ames argues that “killing sprees” at U.S. workplace and schools are acts of political insurgency rather than ordinary crimes or the actions of disturbed individuals.” — Wikipedia
I just have insufficient blood lust to satisfy this psychotic.
This one he chose to publish. Sort of.
He published, as a comment under my name:
27. J. Neil Schulman | July 7th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
“Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, 2005 (ISBN 1-932360-82-4). In this work Ames argues that “killing sprees” at U.S. workplace and schools are acts of political insurgency rather than ordinary crimes or the actions of disturbed individuals.” — Wikipedia
I just have insufficient blood lust to satisfy this psychotic.
No seriously, I’m not at all bothered by Ames’ article. That’s why I’m posting these hilarious comments on Ames’s site: Because I’m not bothered at all. Nope, not at all. Not a lick, I say! It’s like what my hero Charlton Heston once said, “You can pry my not-at-all-bothered comments that I’m posting on your comments section as soon as you pry those comments from my lukewarm, retarded brain. Woops! The comment’s up! Oh well, guess you pried it. Dang! Hate when that happens!
Signed,
Chuck Heston Fanboy-4-Ever
Okay, douchemouth. You want to play?
Come here where I can rewrite your comments under your byline, you disgrace to journalism.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available as a DVD on Amazon.com and for sale or rental on Amazon.com Instant Video. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!
July 7, 2011 - 6:56 pm
Somebody claiming to be Mark Ames, using the email address shulmansfolly@exiledonline.com, tried to post a comment here.
Spammed.
July 7, 2011 - 11:59 pm
Wait–you mean you’re not a corporate ass-kisser masquerading as some sort of anarchist? You mean agorism isn’t just another keep-the-rich-rich jack-off approach to pretending that you’re a more interesting kind of Republican?
Boy, you sure had everybody fooled.
July 8, 2011 - 1:18 am
You are just as feckless in your personal arguments as you are in your the prosecution of your ‘revolution’. Since you seem to think (or are just an establishment rightist hack in disguise) that grousing over the tyranny of the welfare state and sanctimonious moralizing are worthwhile parts of a program aimed at breaking the power of the state over commerce, it’s no surprise that your idea of shaming someone in a battle of words includes quoting the bland retorts you attempted to make in their comment section and bragging about your ability to block their comments. Will you spam filter this? Gonna show me who’s boss?
July 8, 2011 - 2:30 am
July 8, 2011 - 3:17 am
Your picture eerily reminds me of the self-professed spiritual guru my friends and I let live at our house last year. He intended to walk across the country to spread his message but settled for the first place that let him stay, citing tired feet, and lived off broke youngsters, eating our food and even smoking our weed. He preached self-fulfillment and empowerment and performed Beatles songs all day in-between using my room-mates computer to communicate his inner spiritual progress. He inappropriately touched the kid who invited him with a smile on his face and nearly drove the kid’s motherly girlfriend to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Sometimes he claimed to go “busking” but inevitably came back emptyhanded. We never suspected he got as far as the nearest bus -station, even if we gave him rare change. To me, he is the true spirit of your brand of “libertarianism” born of the sixties,a far cry from a hopeful creature born having learned the lessons and failings of Marxist theory and aware that C in C-Om-Passion stands for Context
July 8, 2011 - 3:39 am
Doc, you have to read someone if you don’t want to be fooled.
Quoting the novel I wrote which first presented Agorism, published in 1979:
–Alongside Night, Chapter 26
July 8, 2011 - 3:44 am
My picture is clipped from one showing me in costume and makeup during the filming of Lady Magdalene’s, in which I play a terrorist.
But you’re absolutely right. Trust no one with a beard. That’s a reliable test of character.
*snort*
July 8, 2011 - 3:52 am
Libertarianism is probably the most plagiarized philosophy ever, since a promise of being less fucked over is the core product being sold by every revolutionary.
That’s the difference of Agorism. It’s the only revolutionary strategy that doesn’t have “Trust me with power” as its first demand … and the new boss not being just like the old boss is the first promise betrayed as soon as the revolutionary party is in power.
July 8, 2011 - 4:01 am
Wow, what an inflated sense of your own eloquence you have.
You haven’t read me, don’t know what I advocate, and you’re too lazy and insular in your little cult to care about being corrected.
Mark Ames got everything wrong, but at least he tried reading me first.
July 8, 2011 - 4:24 am
Trust no-one who is not direct towards personal or philosophical criticism or challenges, personal grooming habits perhaps notwithstanding.
Including the US government, yes, but are we really on the same page? I’m aware that we are probably not even reading the same books. However, we are both (hopefully) living in a group society with interconnected values of equilibrium. How is it to be maintained with self-centered eyes?
July 8, 2011 - 7:08 am
In all fairness, declaring oneself a supporter of capitalism in a clearly capitalist society does deflate any further claims of rebellion against said society.
July 8, 2011 - 8:39 am
This is actually largely true. The trouble is, if you had any interest in making them disgorge the wealth they’ve stolen for distribution back to the victims or their heirs, you’d be on the Left.
Anything short of that is worthless; the hierarchical nature of capitalism is entirely the fault of the fact that very few people have the resources or wherewithal can make a go of it independently (and those that do almost always require debt financing), and even fewer as a voluntary workers’ cooperative, and this in turn is because of the long history of “initiations of force” extracting wealth from the many for the benefit of the few. Indeed, “initiation of force” is how we came to have the many and the few in the first place.
Until that wealth has been disgorged, all economic interaction is just revictimization.
July 8, 2011 - 10:33 am
While Mr. Ames is wrong-headed about much that he supports, there is also some truth in his remarks.
Specifically, libertarians as a rule aren’t very interesting to the authorities, as demonstrated by this apocryphal tale that’s long circulated in libertarian circles: http://libertarianpeacenik.blogspot.com/2008/04/man-doesnt-worry-about-libertarian.html
July 8, 2011 - 12:18 pm
It’s not the Libertarian Party that was ever going to be a threat to the State. Historically third parties never are. Ballot access and other barriers are controlled by judges and election officials appointed or elected out of the two major parties. Financing of campaigns flows from lobbyists to candidates realistically able to promise political pay-offs.
Those were among the first premises that inspired Samuel Edward Konkin III to seek a revolutionary strategy that can’t easily be co-opted by statists.
Tell me how the State can co-opt the agorist Silk Road website. They can’t. The best they can do are the same ineffective tactics they’ve tried in the War on Drugs for decades now, which resembles nothing so much as a game of Whack-A-Mole.
July 8, 2011 - 3:33 pm
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: Warning: Lying Psychotic Marxoid Ahead « J. Neil Schulman
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 17:17:03 -0400
From: Vikram S Khemka (vikram.s.khemka@gmail.com)
To: JNEILSCHULMAN
Dear JNEILSCHULMAN,
Thank you for your [sic] letter to The eXiled Online.
Please allow one of our editors 4-6 weeks to reply to your letter, as we are currently deluged with fan mail. If this letter is addressed to editor Mark Ames, please allow another 8-12 weeks, as the volume of letters since Mr. Ames began appearing on MSNBC is simply overwhelming!
JNEILSCHULMAN, we want you to know that we value each and every piece of fan mail we receive from our many fans and devotees. We do try our best to let you know how much we appreciate your support. For it is thanks to our collectivist action and unity of thought that we are moving forward towards a brighter and more egalitarian future, a future in which we finally free ourselves from the chains of capitalist exploitation, and abolish bourgeois individualism forever.
Долой свободу! Да здравствуйте диктатуру!
Vikram. S. Khemka
Senior Intern, The eXiled Online
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 7:27 PM, J. Neil Schulman wrote:
http://jneilschulman.agorist.com/2011/07/warning-lying-psychotic-marxoid-ahead/
July 8, 2011 - 4:21 pm
‘Welcome to my lair, said the typically petulant Randroid spider': “Wow, what an inflated sense of your own eloquence you have. You haven’t read me, don’t know what I advocate, and you’re too lazy and insular in your little cult to care about being corrected.” This encapsulates all that Alisa Rosenbaum had to offer: a dispossessed rich kid with a jones for nerd revenge spouting off at great and heroically boring length.
Perhaps the greatest contribution Mark Ames has made is relating that in Russia, a culture with great literary depth, Ayn Rand doesn’t even qualify as a joke. No one cares. She’s irrelevant. The only way her self-absorbed American offspring avoid the same fate is by busying themselves fellating American billionaires, justifying the explosive social setting that Ames described so well in Going Postal.
July 8, 2011 - 4:33 pm
Libertarian class theory isn’t so cut and dried as you describe. There have been capitalist victims of state intervention (for example the manufacturers put out of business by the FDR administration to favor a few which were being given contracts to convert their factories to production of WW2 materiel) and there are the plutocratic beneficiaries you describe. The problem with the left is that it blanket classifies all capitalists as state-allied predators, when many capitalists are victims of other capitalists with state privileges.
Gabriel Kolko, in his book The Triumph of Conservatism, describes how just about every regulatory agency is first demanded, then run, by one group of capitalists to shut down their competition.
In fact, much of progressivism is nothing more than established wealth using government to create entry barriers to competition from the capitalization of upstart innovators.
The purpose of most professional licensing is the same thing: keeping out competitors, to the benefit of a small protected clique of the powerful, by the elimination of competition and skyrocketing prices for the working-class consumer.
The remedy is problematic, because government consumes or redistributes to its clients what it steals — either outright destruction, such as in war, or walling off access to resources to maintain high prices for its clients.
You look at a debt in the trillions and have to ask: how much is left before you can talk about reclaiming it.
July 8, 2011 - 4:47 pm
That’s shutting down real discussion with a semantic game.
If you equate the term “capitalism” with plutocracy, fascism, organized crime, or any sort of government intervention to replace consumer choices with politically selected winners and losers, then your statement is a tautology.
If, however, you have an understanding of economics drawn from Bastiat and Mises and their disciples rather than Marx and Keynes and their disciples, there’s a real-world distinction to be made between free enterprises that thrive based on producing products and services freely chosen by buyers, and BINO’s (Businesses In Name Only) that accrue wealth by using government to eliminate competition and make themselves the Hobson’s Choice of a Hobbled Consumer.
July 8, 2011 - 5:50 pm
The only part of the above that has anything to do with this discussion is
But then again, I suppose all blacks and Asians look alike to you, also.
July 9, 2011 - 5:01 am
They have no need to. Agorism serves the State’s purposes splendidly. It distracts those who might make real change; it maintains existing power relationships; it shakes its widdle finger at those who really would threaten corporate capitalism; and it provides comic relief for those who have any actual understanding of economics.
Nothing’s quite so sad as a sell-out who has simply given it away.
July 9, 2011 - 3:33 pm
I charge the reverse is the historical case. You’re the piper who leads people to stagnation and doom. Show me a single revolution of the sort you support which has not resulted in the revolutionary victors being more oppressive than the regime they overthrew. Egalitarian-motivated revolutions are bloodbaths, and the revolutionary party’s egalitarianism not the redistribution of wealth from thieves to victims, but from an old aristocracy to a new aristocracy. Whether you call them the People, the Masses, or the Working Class, they’re always left at the bottom of the food chain.
Agorism is the real alternative to fake revolution because it recognizes that traditional black-markets do precisely what you suggest: provide a safety valve for non-functional command-and-terror economies. The Agorist difference lies in replacing the traditional thieves and gangsters who populate underground economies with honest players who are more rational in their pursuit of wealth, playing not the zero-sum gains of wealth transfer (by robbery, intimidation-by-terrorism, or fraud) but the positive-sum games of free trade and entrepreneurial production. The key is making the black-market more lawful and stable than the above-ground command-and-terror economy, so capital flows away from the plutocrats and toward the revolutionary activist/entrepreneur.
I don’t know what your idea of a good outcome is, but mine is one where ordinary people can move from being behind the eight-ball of bare-subsistence work to surplus savings that can accrue them financial safety nets, progressive wealth-building, and hope for their children.
That probably sounds hopelessly bourgeois to a silver-spoon radical who grew up in a wealthy country, but I assure you that’s the whole game for the third world who are the usual targets of Marxoid revolutionary bunko artists.
July 10, 2011 - 6:39 am
You mistake my point. Perhaps if I try a similar point on another economic model, the greater distance will make my point clearer.
Feudalism was created when invading tribes seized land, and then contracted with the poor to wok that land in exchange for protection (or “protection”, as the case may be). If you reject the right of conquest as title to land, then you must reject feudalism, even though there was always some turnover between the lord class and the peasant class, because the structure itself and the set of roles, obligations, and rights assumed by its law were all created by force. When a peasant is oppressed, it is not sufficient to point to the extremely small chance of ascending to the aristocracy and telling him it’s his own fault for failing to pull himself up by the bootstraps: the fact that he even had to is a violation of his rights.
So it is with capitalism. It doesn’t have to be true that violence (both state and non-state) is still used on behalf of capitalism to the detriment of workers’ (and, as you note, lesser capitalists’) rights, although it’s a nice bonus that it does. It’s enough that capitalism built on ancient hierarchies founded on unjust force, both feudal and the prefeudal slave societies that informed feudalism, and that the formation of capitalism itself consisted of stealing such property rights as the peasants had; that’s where the great concentrations of wealth and the masses of workers with nothing but labor to sell came from.
If you reject open theft as title to property, the whole system is illegitimate and no violation of rights will happen if we destroy it and start over. If you don’t, then you have no ethical objection to dispossessing the capitalists. Since there is no ethical difficulty with overthrowing capitalism and starting over, a fortiori there can be no ethical difficulty in intervening in it to make it work better, by which I mean to the advantage of the general public as well as the tiny number of capitalists. The latter is what I actually prefer, since it has it’s more likely to succeed, and wouldn’t likely involve bloodshed.
July 10, 2011 - 1:42 pm
You write as if capital wealth were a toy chest — there’s only so many toys in the chest, the biggest kids stole them first, if the little kids don’t figure out how to get them back the big kids will continue to monopolize playing with them.
This zero-sum game is the problem with the Marxist paradigm you just expressed. It starts with an obsession on stolen land titles and never breaks free from it.
Ever hear of Wang Laboratories and Dr. An Wang? In the 1970’s and through the early 1980’s there wasn’t a major office that didn’t have a Wang word processor at every secretary’s desk. It was a virtual monopoly. At its peak in the 1980’s Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people.
Suddenly a bunch of affordable personal computers hit the market — Kaypro, Osborne, with a bundled software program called WordStar. Offices began buying desktop IBM computers and a word-processing program called Word Perfect became the office standard.
And in a matter of months, Wang Laboratories lost its market and was gone.
Then the clones came and IBM lost its monopoly.
Then all chaos happened and even though certain companies like Apple earned large market shares, there was always competition waiting in the wings from open source alternatives and go down to Fry’s and build it yourself.
There is no static “wealth” that “they” have and that needs to be taken back. All that needs to be done is to break free of the command-and-terror economy by which competition against established wealth is stifled.
Break free from the Zero Sum Game of “Redistribution” and join the Positive Sum Game of “New Production.” Let people produce and protect what they produce from both the MacroThreat of the State and the MicroThreats from ordinary criminals.
Freedom will do the rest.
July 10, 2011 - 5:40 pm
So if I steal everything you’ve got, how long do I have to wait before I can blame you for not having gone out and bootstrapped yourself some replacements?
Like all right-wing arguments, your thought is based in a fundamental unreality — even atheist right-wingers have the mental habits of the religious. In this case, you imagine entry costs away. IBM was a good deal older than Wang, and did not arise like Athena from a pure “Positive Sum Game” of wealth creation. All its predecessors were up to their necks in the extremely exploitative and violent capitalism of the late 19th century. Not mention the fact that they profited off the Holocaust.
As it happens, the world you foolishly imagine we already live in, where you can just get to work without needing accumulated capital, is beginning to break in around the edges. You mention one of the ways that this is true, freeware, without acknowledging the basic fact that it’s still very specialized. If you want to do anything physical, the best we’ve got is the RepRap. But what happens when Drexlerian nanotech becomes available?
Before you get too optimistic, remember that ruling classes very seldom just roll over and give up, especially such as we have now. So far from having lost their nerve, they have fully internalized the “just world”; they believe, really know deep down, that their possession of wealth and power proves that they deserve it. There are a variety of intellectual defenses of this that might be offered, but to each a counter example might be offered. A person who worked hard and innovated but was cheated by his business partner (e.g., Tesla), the actively destructive rewarded (the entire FIRE sector). They’ll just hop to a new justification. The only thing really there is a bone deep certainty that the one and only real human value is to be privileged. They’re going from strength to strength. They’re breaking the unions, they’re breaking the safety net, they’re privatizing goods built with public money like water supplies (and even parking meters), in short they’re erasing any memory of a common purpose. They’ve conned many of us into believing in the fundamental illegitimacy of anything that’s not done for the sake of money-getting.
And at the height of their power the technological basis of the social order they’re at the top of becomes obsolete. Do you think they’ll go quietly?
BTW, I’m not a Marxist. I prefer to avoid revolution, a pretty non-Marxist position. I also reject his schematized version of history, although you’d need blindfolds not to see that the means of production is pretty damn important, his definition of value (I go in for use-value), and probably a few other things.
July 10, 2011 - 8:08 pm
You want to give downtown Atlanta back to the Cherokee, good luck be upon ya.
Some arguments reduce to absurdity so quickly they break the sound barrier.
You’re very good at both arguing beside the point and changing the subject. Try sticking to the point.
Wang had a monopoly. Wang was unable to prevent a better product from taking away his monopoly. If the IBM PC hadn’t shoved the Wang word processors into the trash bin any number of other desktop computers would have. Kaypro could have done it. Osborne could have done it. Anyone who could put a motherboard in a metal box with a cooling fan and plugs for disk drives, keyboards, and monitors could have done it. And they didn’t need a fancy headquarters in Armonk, New York to do it.
You like to speculate on future technology trends? Good for you! We’ll make a capitalist out of you yet.
Along the way to Kurzweil’s singularity, I’d look into 3D printers and C&C machines. I’m looking forward to countertop fracking, myself. (Frak you, you gorram cloneraper!
)
You remind me of Matt Groening’s cartoon, the Angriest Dog in the World. Past a certain point hatred is self-immobilizing. Take it down a notch and pay attention.
The profit motive is no different from the altruistic motive. It’s what you do with the motive that matters.
Me, I’m fundamentally motivated by a need to feel important. There, I’ve said it. I’m unwilling to regard myself as a spear carrier in the play, so I keep on trying to upstage the principal cast. Which annoys them and if they can’t just ignore me, I take the cold pricklies instead of the warm fuzzies I’d prefer. But enough 70’s psychobabble.
Ruling classes (geez, you say you’re not a Marxist but you’re talking about “classes”) are no different from anyone else. They’re just guys trying to impress girls, mostly. It’s just extended high school for rich jocks who actually think the sort of women who want to fuck the rich jocks are worth fucking.
Killing off your competitors works for a while, until you start noticing that the competitors you can’t kill off are now getting rich and making better toys than you have. And buying the mansion next door. And fucking even greedier women than you fuck.
It’s just another variation of the Zero Sum Game, for Zero Sum Losers.
Winners are real artists, jazzed by the shock of the new. That’s as true in business as it is in comic books.
The ruling classes incapable of adapting are dinosaurs. Or do you actually think Prince Fucking William and his arm candy matters?
No, I expect them to bitch, bitch, bitch all the way down, clueless why their temper tantrums don’t impress anyone anymore.
You are the means of production. Or at least I am. Fortunes have started out with other people’s throw-aways and left-overs.
Genius is the only thing necessary for revolution. Although looking good in black helps.
July 11, 2011 - 10:06 pm
Now suppose the Indians were still the majority of North America’s population, and whites were as small a proportion as the rich are. Would anyone for a minute expect the Indians to tolerate our having all their land?
I guess that’s what you say when “the point” has been totally refuted.
The fact is, anyone didn’t replace Wang, IBM did. But I’ll humor you. I’ll imagine IBM and every other well-financed player out of the market. There you are, in your garage, making your general-purpose computers so you can sell them to all the giant corporations. How fast can you stick your motherboards in metal boxes? How many can you turn out in a day? I guess if you’re going to displace Wang you’re going to need to go get some financing from the existing piles of money, which kind of undoes your point; you are no longer free from the injustices which created the old concentrations of capital. And even at that, you’re still a new player (and not in a late-90s-style tech bubble). Wang will have plenty of time to adopt the PC model.
I suppose you could suggest that you might hide behind intellectual property; you seem pretty big on using state power to prevent others from reading your stuff unless they’ve given you money, based on your other posts. Cory Doctorow seems to be doing okay, but when you cultivate an audience who think “rational economic calculation” is the highest possible virtue, you can no longer quite trust free interaction to get by. Ironic, that. But this is a digression: intellectual property will not keep Wang from putting out their own general-purpose computers (remember, you haven’t got the productive capacity to simply sweep them away before the adjust) because Turing got there first and made it all public knowledge, that bastard.
Suppose you could come up with some really truly pure example. I can’t imagine what it would be. You reached for examples in computing because, although it’s strictly physical like everything else is, it feels ethereal and non-physical. Heck, in my last comment I myself contrasted doing physical things with computing, when I meant to contrast arranging the pattern of light on the screen with producing items such as can be held in the hands. That ethereality makes it feel as if computers, at least, must be free of any connection to the history of all past accumulations of wealth, and then by the pretense that some “opportunity” available to the victim makes him not a victim this pure sort of business will retroactively sanctify the much larger part of business that still deals in the gross hyle. No, the past is there anyway, as powerful as ever. But suppose you really did have a truly pure example, whatever it was, where success had nothing to do with access to older accumulations which could be traced to injustice. If the workplace is hierarchical then it still depends on roles which had their ultimate origin at the moment, sometime during the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, when the victor of a tribal war realized that he’d be better off forcing his defeated enemies to labor for his benefit, rather than killing them as his ancestors had done since before we were even apes.
I used to be one but then the weight of reality got to be too much to go on ignoring.
You may not believe this, but my natural temperament is moderately conservative. I have no quarrel with the upper class merely as such — their illegitimate historical origin merely gives us warrant to replace them if it becomes necessary. It has. And I don’t mean elections to replace the political elite, I mean that the economic elite are intractably destructive. They could have joined in — or even just tolerated — common projects for the general welfare, such as we used to have during the postwar era. But no, they never really accepted it, and now they’re trying to squash anyone who isn’t them so that their preeminence may be absolute. We are to be made prostrate that they may be that much taller than us, even if they have to stoop to keep us down.
Yep. So did Plato, and Aristotle, and Machiavelli, and even James Madison, among others. All you have to do is look out at the social world and pay attention.
You actually wrote that.
This is astonishingly naive.
I thought you were a published novelist. Turns out you compose orally, like Homer.
July 12, 2011 - 5:47 am
Participants in a debate don’t get to declare victory for themselves. In this case, there are no actual judges except whoever reads this and takes from it whatever they can.
In the market as we find it, where an entrepreneur with a new product has to seek out a venture capitalist or a banker, you’re correct.
But I suppose the difference between us is that unlike you I take seriously an alternative economy where — because of less regulatory barriers to starting a business, a working class capable of saving and accumulating capital, an honest banking system in which individual savings accounts don’t pay .5% interest while consumer credit cards charge 28%, and courts that treat copyrights and patents as protections applying only to major corporations — an ordinary guy with a better idea can drive a major player to the wall.
We did have an economy like this once, and sometimes it even worked for foreign immigrants who spoke funny and dressed badly, former slaves, and women. Yes, being a white male Protestant who could join the right clubs helped, and there were robber barons who did their best to use government troops and private Pinkertons to get their own way and keep down people they didn’t respect. We’re plagued by bastards like this today as well.
But think what it would be like if — without all these prejudices — which Americans have gone a long way toward ridding themselves of — we had freedom, too.
I won’t claim to know all the answers how to get there, but I know that an economy this free is the where we have to get.
I see the same corruption of the current corporate economy you do. It’s only the direction we need to go in to change that we disagree about.
I think, like most intellectuals, you’re in love with paradigms. It’s a disease I suffer from, too.
Can we agree that ordinary decency should trump policy decisions made solely on ideological grounds?
Now don’t go all medieval scholastic on me. Just because someone is ancient and famous because they had some really good ideas doesn’t mean they aren’t full of shit, too.
Individuals are real. Classes are abstractions, and always lose humanity in the translation. Any time you hear yourself arguing about the people, or masses, or races, or genders, or classes — just stop. You can’t always — it’s a semantic trap even I still fall into despite my best efforts — but you have to try.
First time I’ve ever been compared to Homer.
I think I’ll take that as a compliment.
July 12, 2011 - 9:32 am
I have edited comments by blog annoyances for “clarity”, but only after warning them to buzz off.
And I always mark it as such.
The purpose is to encourage the person to go away, not to post an untruth. His failure to mark the comment as one that he lampooned is inexcusable.
July 14, 2011 - 1:28 am
Don’t feel bad, Neil. The only writer worth paying attention to at the Exiled is Gary “the War Nerd” Brecher. Ames used to be all right, but being kicked out of Russia traumatized him. These days, he’s an echo chamber for whatever the coffee-house pseudo-revolutionary crowd likes to say.
August 9, 2011 - 6:44 am
ITT: Marxshits attempt to reconstruct and then deconstruct a highly evolved apolitical philosophy based upon economic realities and legitimate analysis of human interaction without having delved deeper into said philosophy than: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism
This would not be so profoundly absurd if not for the fact that they are attempting to debate this above strawman with one of the founders.
Barrel of laughs and a half a stack of wispy gray matter. At its best, we have a group of ideologue washbrains so thoroughly convinced of their own “faith” they can’t stand for a moment to question their preconceptions and prefer to perform the mental equivalent of blindfolded pogo sticking on a unicycle in their exegetical review of a philosophy of which they are completely ignorant. At its worst, we have poster-children for willful misinterpretation.
TL;DR whores of thoroughly defunct political theories attempt to discount Agorists for the sake of their own intellectual greediness
August 9, 2011 - 4:39 pm
I haven’t a clue who Mark Ames is. Perhaps the wonders of the agora have revealed a new truth, that ignorance is its own reward.
I don’t do best ever, or Top 10, because it simply is impossible to rate anything or anyone “the best” without leaving out so much of what truly is great and fundamentally earth shaking.
Just like I never say Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams or Barry Bonds was the greatest, each is included as one of the greats, along with many, many others.
Probably the only reason there is no Cooperstown for writers is that far fewer people read than are likely to be in the crowd or television audience along with me for any MLB game.
There ought to be a Cooperstown for writers.
While I do not count Alongside Night as the greatest novel ever written I put it right up there with what I consider some of the best I’ve read, books like Sometimes a Great Notion, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Atlas Shrugged. Yup, Alongside Night is right up there with the best.
And is there any need for me to know the whereabouts and accomplishments of one Mark Ames?
August 9, 2011 - 5:26 pm
John,
First of all, your kind words on Alongside Night are much appreciated.
I ended up writing about Mark Ames on my own blog because Mark Ames took the reply comment I made on his blog and rewrote it into something ridiculous but still under my byline.
Cheers!
Neil