On Authoritarianism and Freedom
“Authoritarian” is the word used today to describe any government which stands against the NATO-market-feudalism world disorder. This world disorder is not authoritarian because it is not “authored”. It is the result of competition-maximalism, randomly competing forces which produce war, strife and devastating economic crises.
Having learned from history and wishing to avoid the extreme hardship which unbridled so-called competition — what is more properly called war — can bring to the great majority of any particular nation, it happens that a ruling party or person emerges to defend its people and attempt another way.
This is rightly called by the chaos profiteer “authoritarianism” because it has an author, an identity which articulates itself in the onslaught of the global imperialist destabilisation. Opposed to this polity based on the discursive analysis of historical record, we have an idealistic policy generated ad hoc by the imaginary “invisible hand.”
The imperialist Security State is not authoritarian because it has no message, no ethics, no purpose save the continuation of the imperialist scheme. Any regime which dares to resist imperialism can fairly be deemed “authoritarian” as it always must “author” or elaborate a program or proposal which can be claimed would better serve its populace. Authoritarian in this sense is anathema to the radical “freedom” — which is merely a psychopathic bellum omnium contra omnes — of the hegemon. In this logic, anti-authoritarianism is enough grounds for the empire to go to war, whereas the state against which the imperial war is waged must rationalize and “author” the reasons for its resistance.
Anti-authoritarianism is remorseless, nihilist, miserable and true, in that the unbridled passions of humanity will reliably bring disaster and destitution, which is understood as a “state of Nature”. This tragic situation is seen as “natural” by anti-authoritarians who will justify the hardship as part of inevitable and eternal cycles of construction and ruin of civilizations. For this reason, though they may superficially espouse progressive ethos, the anti-authoritarian is fundamentally conservative. The anti-authoritarian by default accepts whatever polity provisionally rises up to the top of the pecking order.
An “author” is the creation of the rational enlightenment, of the Gutenberg press with its democratic vulgate bible. Authorship is an invention of the scientific age, with the principles which undergird and reproduce modernity we have the concept of radical innovation, in the arts as in policy.
Authorship emerges as science began to unlock unprecedented power from the materiality of the earth and it became apparent that the ancient conservative human institutions would have to be radically rethought in order to ensure that this immense new power could be managed properly and that unprecedented hardship and misery could be avoided. This would be attempted through the application of the same scientific reason at work in physics and chemistry to the management of social reproduction.
A political author attempts to formulate an ethics of power, in the best case “with and against Nature”, whereby the prosperity and peaceful flourishing of the nation can be best assured. The artificiality of peace, progress and the relief from the vicissitudes of war and want is unprecedented in this history of humanity and, as such, goes against Nature. The Old and New Testaments are records of the explosiveness of the unnatural concept of radical social justice.
The artificial and “untrue” proposal, which is called justice, is terrifying to the imperialists, not only because it seems to entail just retribution for the historical and present crimes of wanton imperialism, but because it dares to provisionally and tentatively have faith that the lot of the world can be improved. Imperialists believe their truth of perpetual war, and strive merely to protect their own possessions from the ravages they themselves unleash in their extreme self-interest. This is the “truth” of imperialism which rejects any other system which attempts to avail for its people any other prospects then living on the crosshairs of imperialist whim.
In the so-called left, the distinction authoritarian/anti-authoritrian is basically the socialist/anarchist divide, and we can see here how what today is called anarchism approaches conservatism whereas socialism is the radical divergence into authoritarian justice. Only the authoritarian, socialist or other, can hold out against the ravages of imperialism. An “authoritarian” regime offers a program which promises to insulate its people from the ravages of imperialism. Imperialism, in its contemporary form as market feudalism, necessarily perpetuates colonialism, racism and genocide in order to stop the people coming together and “authoring” another organisation of agency. Today’s anarchist who does not have a theory of how the anarchist realm is to be protected from the ravages of imperialism is by default imperialist.
All regimes called “authoritarian” are not socialist, but all socialist regimes are called “authoritarian”. The imperialist always strives to ensure maximal oligopolistic return on investment. The socialist always strives to ensure maximal majoritarian or general return on investment. A socialist regime elaborating practices which can ensure egalitarian distributions of social agency, must do so as part of its defence against the ravages of imperialism. As such, in the current world, a socialist state will always be authoritarian. It must author its program, as opposed to the imperialist competitors who simply fight to the death or to stalemate.
Understand, if you identify as anti-authoritarian, you are certainly an imperialist, and believe that there is no better future for humanity than to be subject to the whims of the wealthy and powerful, to endless war and destitution for the vast majority. Authoritarian systems are not necessarily more just, but they have a far broader latitude to be, since they are sheltering their populations from the ravages of the imperialist world disorder.
On Freedom of Expression:
What does it mean when your freedom of expression comes at the expense of generations of people in the oppressed masses and colonized regions whose prospects are curtailed? Your own “true” freedom of expression will only truly be emancipated when the vastness of humanity is released from debt-servitude — neocolonialism and the other schemes set up by imperialism to extort their productivity, which affords the veneer of freedom people enjoy in the imperial core. Your freedom of expression is fake flight of fancy to the degree that you do not recognize where your ease is reproduced, it is the freedom of the privileged, and therefore, you will always default to the police state to “preserve” that freedom. Ironically your freedom will depend on submitting those who you perceive to threaten your fanciful fake freedom to a police regime. Watch what you say or your friend will call the police on you next.
Freedom is contingent and never absolute, it is a trade-off which must be renegotiated. In the fast-moving world of no-culture, the surest way to harmony and real freedom, which is social freedom, is through flattening out the distribution of political agency. Freedom of expression is reproduced socially, the social conditions of that reproduction are the true latitude of the expressed freedom.