Vacuous Mutuality

This morning I watched Anark's "Authoritarianism is bad actually: a response to Second Thought" [1]. I was planning on writing a brief BlueSky post airing my grievances, but it quickly became too long to be a reasonable micro-blogging post, so I've decided to copy the contents into a normal blog post. It's quite loose and messy [2], but I'm sure you're used to that from me by now.

this is very silly and imo extremely slimy, exploiting the slipperiness of thick moral concepts [3] and doing really poor theorizing as a result.

i'll first note the difference in structure these two definitions take. the former is constituted by a list of more descriptive concepts, while the latter is a series of nested thick moral concepts themselves.

as an aside, it's a little odd in general to have stipulated philosophical definitions that are so blatantly cluster concepts that bottle family resemblances. of course there's nothing wrong with definitions of the sort, but they are typically reserved for descriptive linguistic analysis rather than used as philosophically load-bearing and substantive, and for good reason. the ambiguity present within them lends itself to squishy and permeable applications, which is counterproductive when you're attempting an analytic approach [4].

the inclusion of self-defense is wildly inappropriate to include in a concept of mutuality for a variety of reasons, and it is never argued for. it's not clear at all how it connects to the core concept, and the only similarity is has to the other terms are that it's +moral-good [5]. self-defense can easily and quite often does come into conflict with cooperation, and the same is true of “free thought”.

“free” should tip us off right away to the strategy and should make us uncomfortable right away. the basic problem is that because the concept of “mutuality” is designed to valorize certain socio-political practices, it cannot be so non-partisanly defined as to apply to the enemy, it becomes analytically bankrupt.

i also love how every other term in these definitions is a physically actionable verb besides “free thought”. one could conceive of using any of the other terms as individually sufficient for achieving ends in the real world. but free thought alone cannot politically meaningful structural change. of course that doesn't immediately discredit its inclusion, but i do think it adds additional reason to believe it is a non-operative concept tossed in to lend credence to whatever arbitrary interpretation one desires.

“fascists working on a political project can't be mutuality, because the their cooperation is not free, in the sense that they are suffering from ideological distortion! their claim to self-defense is illegitimate because The West is not under attack and even if it was that would be a good thing.” it all reduces to moralism at the end of the day so why not cut out the middle-man [7]?

an interesting thing applies in the reverse case with domination as well is that based on the stipulated definitions, leftist revolutionary action would easily fall under domination. which is of course fine if you have a non-moralized conception, and many leftists would happily endorse the individual components, but in that case i don't see how it could be used to perform the normative baggage they attempt to apply with it. it's a lot more hollow to accuse someone of domination when you desire to dominate yourself.

to which, of course, the objection goes, “but they are using violence for bad ends, and we are using violence for good ends”. this is a perfectly lovely sentiment; but then why are we beating around the bush with domination? it's a lot simpler to express your moral evaluation directly.

the answer is that domination is not just the sum of its parts. it's violence+bad. it's coercion+bad. it's deception+bad. this is why social anarchists of the Anark variety wont call their own desired revolutionary activity domination. i don't see a way of out admitting domination applies equally without playing more moral word games with “coercion” and “deception”.

and it makes sense too, rhetorically. often “domination” is invoked with clear evaluative character, but with the air of plausible deniability in the form of some supposedly non-moralized definition [8]. it is imperative that the word not be reduced in order to maintain its inherent negative connotation. otherwise the invocation would need to be accompanied by an explanation of why this domination in particular was bad, which undermines the author's original motivation for inclusion.

mutuality and domination are posed as opposites, but they are entirely compatible with one another. the disingenuous deception some leftists engage in by invoking these moralized concepts are self-deceiving and therefore is not compatible with free thought. this unprovoked attack on our collective psyche is an impediment on effective revolutionary cooperation. these leftists would benefit from giving up on such misguided domination and instead embrace mutuality.