Dark Mutualism

You can find more about Dark Mutualism here

This would use the Landian type of nrx before it went off the rails (in a way that would make Post Anarchists proud)

Nothing concrete in terms of true praxis will ever come out of Dark Mutualism

This transition from PJ Proudhon and Kevin Carson to classic Karl Marx certainly has yet to be properly articulated and Dark Mutualism tries to do that

I know that Edmund Berger is itching to write a book rehabilitating Karl Marx's critique of PJ Proudhon from, um, rehabilitations like that of Iain Mckay which he just finds half-convincing. This shall clarify quite a couple of things about the accelerationism/anarchism relationship, I hope.

Many leftists based on their moral convictions would say that Dark Mutualism is the overall understanding of PJ Proudhon’s work and so represents a worthy and essential contribution to the mutualist canon.

If that wasn't the case, I wouldn’t give Dark Mutualism much attention just like I already don’t give much attention to the majority of what is produced under the Anarchist banner.

But I definitely don’t expect to convince Left Libertarians of that . I am hardly a reactionary ideology in the traditional sense of that definition, which should be pretty damn obvious to anyone who is even a bit familiar with my blog writings.

Dark Mutualism is a complete, synthetic and autonomous ideology . But for now, it’s only context-heavy, theory-ladden cliff-notes. Dark Mutualism is mutualism with leftish accelerationism or neoreactionism thrown into it

Dark Mutualism very much a work-in-progress, I do have a specific fascination for the reactionary tradition, and especially for neoreaction, only due to the way neoreaction unconsciously mirrors much of the traditional anarchist (and more generally socialist) analysis while taking entirely opposite directions in terms of concrete normative political predictions.

This is a phenomenon that I see as particularly illuminating with people like Curtis Yarvin—who has, originally come from the Austrian School, and so predictably shares more than a few of his references with someone like Kevin Carson (hence the New Class/Cathedral parallel).

More specifically, Menicus Moldbug, who is an ex-m rothbardian, empathetically agrees with typical anarchist and communist critiques of propertarianism. Moldug agrees that all of the attempts to justify property by way of absolutist provisos pathetically fails using their own standards as measuring sticks, and this ends up backfiring on them

This is the reason he grew disenfranchised with libertarianism, and turned to reaction in the first place.

Where there is a true break from anarchists is that nrx like Moldburg believes, in an old-fashioned hobbesian sort of way, that anarchism is chaos and violence, and that this means even the most arbitrary of archist authoritarianism is more preferable to anarchy.

So he agrees with the definition, but he goes in the opposite direction with the solution. I see this path, from PJ Proudhon to Hans Hermann Hoppe back to PJ Proudhon again heavily ironic, especially as Menicus Moldbug himself never actually realizes that he’s basically only retrading Proudhon’s critique.

For more clear instances, as Edmund Berger has pointed out some time ago, Moldbug’s neocameralism resembles many of John Francis Bray’s joint-stock socialism works https://www.google.fr/amp/s/disubunit22.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/john-francis-bray/amp/.

Likewise, Menicus Moldbug’s patchwork clearly is born out of panarchism, as it is more or less right-wing panarchism. It has helped to revive a lot of talk around the subject despite panarchism being out of style for a very long while, even if the majority of people picking it up went quite far away from Moldbug, and developed it in their personal unique direction.

Now, these ancestral socialists and anarchists were not capitalists in the same vein that Menicus Moldbug is, and accusations are pretty tongue-in-cheek, but there is something going for it. It’s been this thing of an inside ribbing in the milieu for a bit that Moldbug was really a crypto-communist after all, and that neoreactionaires never caught on to this joke. Neoreaction is retroprogressivism from the other side .

Now I am not claiming that Moldbug is a mutualist, an anarchist, or that he even is a leftist: he pretty darn openly is not. (but in real life he is progressive and known as Curtis Yarvin)

But I still find these messy connections compelling to explore, and they have became all-the-simpler to explore due to the work of people like Shawn Wilbur and Kevin Carson who have made a bunch of forgotten socialist and anarchist literature from the 19th century publicly accessible—and beyond merely the mutualist corpus—and for that I am obviously grateful for.

As for the appropriation problem, I pay my dues to Mutualists for their (indeed) necessary and excellent work, and I enjoy going in my own heretical way. I can see why it would ruffle a few feathers though my embrace of Dark Mutualism. All-in-all, the revival of the mutualist title is still a super recent happening, and as such, it’s clearly going to be very contested by numerous parties, for better or worse.

I’m sympathetic towards Shawn Wilbur’s familiar accusation that Dark Mutualists are being way too hasty in tossing classical authors to the side while we have only just started to dig appropriately into the mutualist canon, not even mentioning the fact of the overall anarchist canon. At any rate, it’s not a new issue. Most market anarchists have given up on PJ Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker a long time ago for the sake of giving Frederich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises another read. Non privately, I embrace all of them, PJ Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Frederich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises

But privately, I do think there’s so much more for anarchists to pick up from PJ Proudhon than from Frederich Hayek (or even Menicus Moldbug)

I have long been interested in translating mutualist literature

I read Menicus Moldburg's formalist manifesto and parts of the blog on patchwork, but what he said about the brown scare and how the US was actually communist was so pretentious and terrible that it kind of killed any more interest I had in exploring his stuff. If someone studied the reactionary tradition, there wouldn't be anything left for people to get "redpilled" by Moldbug about?

To be fair, I think that at on a certain level, if you set aside all of the rhetorical grandstanding, Menicus Moldbug is not that far off when he claims that socialism (although he wrongly says « communism ») has always been a present US tradition, not some type of foreign agent that came from the USSR, and that Conservatives are deeply ignorant of their own history and tradition in falsely believing that socialism was invented by the Frankfurt School or by the hippies etc. That’s obviously a point that could be made by a mutualist, even if formulated very much in a different sort of way

I can somewhat see the fascination in observing the way that various strains of thought can unconsciously "mirror" each other, but ultimately there's so much unexplored about PJ Proudhon and company, with (in my opinion) much more useful and synergistic connections waiting to be connected

As far as lesser known theorisation of these types of politics goes, I believe that Eugene Holland's Nomad Citizenship should be of way more interest to mutualists than accelerationism.

Does it seem that I conflate mutualism with market anarchism? Of course I am more of a tuckerian (Benjamin Tucker)-Austrian economist adherent than I am a Poudhonian as far as I tend to favor market arrangements (including redistributive economic policies dirtbag left ie post left), but at the same time I don't preclude non-market arrangements either

As with Kevin Carson, I am super okay with letting people do their own thing.

As for PJ Proudhon’s progressivism, My contention on that is that this rests on a theory of time that I see as insufficiently kantian. I do not deny Proudhon’s anti-absolutism at all, I only affirm that Proudhon didn’t conceptualize it good enough—on this exact point, I am admittedly closer to Karl Marx than I am to PJ Proudhon.

I take Proudhon’s great anti-absolutist manifesto to be his own Philosophie du progrès which, even though is a very good text, is not specifically completely representative of PJ Proudhon’s more mature work. Anyway it does appear to me that Kant’s influence on Karl Marx is much more huge than it is on PJ Proudhon as it is to their respective approaches to both political economy and also to capitalism.

At the end of the day it is in the Grundrisse that Marx’s kantianism is at its obvious glaring—that is to say, in unpublished manuscripts—so who has any clue what we would find in Proudhon’s own

My version of mutualism (or LRx) sees market economy as one tenant but that could falsely make me seem like I am conflating Mutualism with market anarchism

I know that Mutualism and Market Anarchism are distinct from each other.

Like with AnCaps, I am interested more in people doing their own thing without stepping on the rights and privileges . I favor in this case market anarchism

I simply believe that mutualist arrangements are way more likely to end up being market arrangements as opposed to being communist ones, for rigidly practical reasons (I am talking long term). OR at the very least that it's much more likely to begin off of communist before evolving into market arrangements.

PJ Proudhon's theory of progress is just tangibly related to his anti-absolutism. It is what he is against and what he distinguishes in his theory from hierarchy but it is not so akin to that you can use it like we can use it now. Anti-absolutism is—by its nature—a praxi, and not a screed.

I do concede that PJ Proudhon's strength is that he focused on laws of social forces and interaction instead of doing some religious forecast of the future.

"It gets the idea across. The fact that you’re focused on semantics shows your own commitment to avoiding the question. Change does not require an understanding of time." In Dark Mutualism we 100 percent do not believe this to be mere semantics, but a real and important metaphysical disagreement.

"There is zero metaphysics involved in Dark Mutualism, time is not a needed part of understanding change as a constant. If something is constant, you can form an analysis of it separately from its dependencies. This is the reason that history requires some notion of time while physics does not"

Dark Mutualism says that this amounts to transforming change into an absolute. According to Dark Mutualism this admittedly is what Heraclitus did, but it is problematic from a hardcore anti-absolutist perspective Dark Mutualism questions that if anti-absolutism is the affirmation of change as the one and only absolute, then is anti-absolutism not itself a covert form of absolutism?

in a nutshell:

Dark Mutualism is NOT NrX ,it is mutualist

Left-accelerationism is just as important to Dark Mutualism as neoreaction is

Dark Mutualism sees Rights as in natural rights and not in positive rights. The M Stirner Egoist in me is sympathetic to the idea that there is no distinction between the two and that they carry the same dynamics.But as used in this way, rights have nothing to do with legitimacy and justification. They are not the same as positive rights which are founded on authoritarianism by essence.

Dark Mutualism says that natural rights aren’t enforced or justified (but says you can build narratives around them, I suppose). In the Dark Mutualist context, natural rights just mean someone can run a machine by generating heat (or maybe more so Natural law than Natural rights but Natural does conflate the two)

Dark Mutualism has Anarchism being transcendental and that PJ Proudhon viewed time as being linear

Concretely speaking, Dark Mutualism sees anti-absolutism is progress, as opposed to being a specific body of texts and theses.

Rights (i.e natural rights) are an approach that has precedent within anarchist literature, however within Dark Mutualism, the focus on rights are more (early) tuckerian than proudhonian.

Dark Mutualism seeks to plug in the kantian theory of time into the mutualist matrix.

Dark Mutualism seeks out to merge the insights of NRx with those insights of traditional, PJ Proudhonian Anarchism.

Basically, Dark Mutualism says that Anarchism hit an impasse like a century ago since it got caught up in universalist—or to be blunt, communist—politics, and that the works of PJ Proudhon, if read through the prism of Menicus Moldbug, gives us the tools that are needed to both understand this impasse and get out of it.

Dark Mutualism is by far the most interesting research program to be born out of NRx in years (as an anarchist I might be biased).

The fundamental vector of progress isn't a moral, but a technical arc, starting way before humanity came into play, and extending ahead into vast tracts of unknown unknowns. (Dark Mutualism). What travels the path of such arc is intelligence, abstractly conceived as negentropy. all cosmic history is the history of intelligence optimization into an asymptote.

The motor of this movement is generalized Darwinian processes of variation and selection. it's only through this arms race dynamics that anything ever gets built and improved. biological life is just a subset of these processes.

The obstacles in this arc are all variations of "peace" - entropic stagnation. the latest human, social form of such peace offering is democracy and its conciliating, universalist ideology.

All such peace offerings tap into ancestral drives towards organisation. they project the emergent functioning of systems into an idealised "organic" compound, centrally managed, and then scale them up towards universality.

The task intelligence progressively builds for itself is one of engineering systems in which larger scale conflict can be sustained, thereby both eliminating the previous peace offering, as well as creating the conditions for a new one.

The ever larger complexity of such new decentralized systems make time tick faster. the dissipation of entropy increases with each new step, which leads ever quicker to the next.

The fundamental expression of this in human societies are cities. more than just human hives, cities are self-individuating intelligence systems, singularities even, becoming cosmos within themselves.

The prediction of the future path of the intelligence arc is complicated by its inherent nonlinearity and self-reference, but the future cities charter for themselves are likely the best starting points.

The current best summary of the likely, imo, is the "Transcention Hypothesis" by John Smart: accelerating.org Transcension Hypothesis — Acceleration Studies Foundation

My only minor alteration would be that cities are likely to shoot themselves into space (and avoid gravity wells like the plague) before becoming black holes.

Critique points: Anarchism has generally and widely failed to rise up to the task that anarchy - the everlasting decentralisation of the cosmos - has out forward for them.

It may be indeed that the human form and psyche is utterly unprepared to deal with the horror of anorganic yet systemic reality. but I think there's also more to it, since many non-anarchists got close to it.

One could excuse the humanism, given the time and place Anarchism rose to prominence (everyone was a humanist in the 1800s), but the fundamental failure was not *embracing* the factionism that almost instantly sprang up in the movement.

Even now that Anarchism is way more out of fashion, the unifying tendencies still arise. "let's have *One* movement against oppression" etc. what if, instead, anarchy is actually right?

Developing "anarchy = order" remains the central task of Anarchism, even it hasn't done much work in that direction. how can the division and disunity of the world lead to order? how could it not!

This is important in terms of destabilising the current peace offering as well: being many different is incompatible with being One Together.

So with that we're thrown into the muddy terrain of "praxis" or "what should be done".

First and foremost I'm obliged to say: do what thou wilt

Secondly, it is important to recognise that operating under a practical reason framework (one in which plans, habits and tactics make sense) does not immediately follow from any one transcendental appreciation of reality.

Finally, if the anarchist transcendental ontology I sketched above makes any sense, practical reason is only going to be good very locally, and even then it's important to remember that "you" are not in the driver's seat.

What that means is basically "antipraxis", i.e., whatever you are doing right now is not serving only (or even at all) your purposes, but is necessarily embedded into processes that far exceed your conscious capacity of apprehension.

The best way to subjectively deal with that is, by and large, the u/acc motto: let go. it turns out to be very enjoyable.

Thus contrary to most criticism, antipraxis is not about defeatist "I can't do anything" but rather an affirmative "I can do anything I want", which immediately leads to the interesting question of desire dynamics

Desire dynamics (what I sometimes think of as "mutual excitation") is something that deserves further study, especially from the angles of thermodynamics, economics and sociology.

Slightly parallel to the previous line of thought, but definitely stemming from the same anarchist transcendental ontology, is the question of an economic analysis of force. an endeavour hardly undergone by anarchists (or, for that matter, anyone else)

The closest I have found to anything like that is David Friedman's "A Positive Account of Property Rights" http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html…

Where the costs and benefits of protecting things are weighted.

Any anarchism that fails to take that into consideration, and proceeds to merely affirming moral creeds against current status quo, is lacking in both breadth and depth. the question remains: if states are so abhorrent and absurd, why do they keep existing?

Anarchy is the perennial condition of the world. the idea of centralized, unified control is a pipe dream of monotheism, and has never been, nor could ever be, attained. (Dark Mutualism)

My current working answer, derived from the above: statism is the box intelligence found itself in when it finally got out of feudalism.·

Leading to the modern state apparatus was an abrupt change in military technology, which implied new calculations of costs and benefits for the use of force. the rise of the rifleman meant that faceless bureaucracies directing standing armies and police forces made sense.

Economic sense, much before any moral sense could be derived through many series of validation propaganda. I'm always starving to read economic analysis of this change, which amounted to modernity in statecraft

Prediction of the future path of the intelligence arc is complicated by its inherent nonlinearity and self-reference, but the future cities charter for themselves are likely the best starting points.

The best way to subjectively deal with that is, by and large, the u/acc motto: let go. it turns out to be very enjoyable.

Desire dynamics (what I sometimes think of as "mutual excitation") is something that deserves further study, especially from the angles of thermodynamics, economics and sociology.

The closest I have found to anything like that is David Friedman's "A Positive Account of Property Rights"

http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html…

Where the costs and benefits of protecting things are weighted.

My current working answer, derived from the first tweets: statism is the box intelligence found itself in when it finally got out of feudalism.·

I am not an anti-egalitarian in the sense that mutualists understand and critique, and I explicitly consider equality to be a core element of both the left and mutualism. My anti-egalitarianism is only just akin to Benjamin Tucker’s hostility towards communism.

I am engaged in all types of both rhetorical and argumentative games that I got a genuine interest towards, but whose meaning is obscure to any person only stumbling into my blog.

Left Libertarians if they knew me personally would be charitable towards my private Dark Mutualism views because they would have a pretty clear understanding of what I am attempting to accomplish and of where I am trying to go with my private Dark Mutualism views. But, I’m aware that to the average anarchist, who is already suspicious—for clear reasons—of novel online labels that take advantage of anarchism’ (in)famous reputation to”

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