From Philosophical Research
Content warnings
- 1900s Korean history — sex slavery; rape.
Main entry
- 618
World's first anarchist manifesto
(Anselme Bellegarrigue 1850/2020) [1] -> this was written around the same time as Marx's writings?? 1850 was quite a year wasn't it, the whole 1840s really
Motifs or claims
- 618I have not been a revolutionary so I can be honest -> this is one of the bluest motifs ever that can still be charcoal. it's perfectly logically coherent with all the nonsense that is about to follow though, so yeah, it's charcoal.
- 618Revolutionary factions never bring any benefit -> Anselme Bellegarrigue has never lived in Korea
- 618Democracy should be able to dismantle government / Anarchy is the negation of governments -> this is one of those things which could be totally on-point or complete incoherent hogwash depending on the surrounding context and material significance you give to it
- 618Anarchy is not anhierarchy (feudal orders) / Anarchy is not a warring states period -> this is a definition and an Idealist statement, but by itself I can't falsify it so go on
- 618Sovereignty and freedom of each individual brings equality -> that is a claim. not a truth. and with observations of chunk competition applied it starts to look pretty dubious.
- 618Sovereignty and freedom of each individual brings solidarity and social order -> and this is the big one. he just tossed out a stack of propositions and defined tent of freedom poles.
- 618Government is negation of the people -> how? he really hasn't lived in 1850s Korea.
ok I looked it up and Korean slavery was starting to develop in 1894, put in place by 1910. so maybe it wasn't fully apparent at that time that China and Japan were global empires that were fighting over other countries and about to turn Korea into a colony which would be used in some of the most brutal ways, not just "taxation without representation" in here, but "we will confiscate your women as objects". yeah, Korean colony or none, has Bellegarrigue ever had to deal with all the women around him being abducted? what does tent of freedom poles get you then?
- 618Government is negation of the people -> to be fair, he's got a point if he's talking about the Imperial-Japanese government. that negated the Korean people rather literally with that super strange scheme to morph them into Japanese people that hardly made sense on any level. but we have an important problem which is not being addressed which is that the workers' parties of China and Korea actually fought off the Japanese empire. forming those governments and even leaving bodies behind in the war wasn't 'pointless'.
- 618Individual dependency on government leads to class rule -> dependency is a weirdly evocative term to use. I wonder where he's going with this.
- 618Who says government says warring states period -> this is a tough one because it's true in some ways and false in other ways.
- 618Point me to a place where men openly slaughter one another and I will show you a government behind all the carnage -> this is mostly true except that there are select cases where you really can't point to any center of command and people are genuinely just dividing into ethnic groups that fail to go together and one ethnic group killing the other ethnic group for being a nuisance to its existence. that has only become more apparent during the history of the United States where obvious hierarchies have fallen away and you'll see isolated individuals just spontaneously slaughter isolated individuals for being part of the wrong pure socially-linked group of individuals. gaps between populations are a much more universal factor than governments.
- 618A government divides people into supporters and adversaries -> no. this is just false. a government doesn't divide people into Imperial-Japanese soldiers and Koreans through the social construct of government.
I don't know how I started coming back to Korea on every point in this entire thing when this author comes from France but it's been very effective. okay, here's another one: a government doesn't divide people into Stalin-followers and Trotskyists, despite each of them having a concept of government. because if Stalin's party didn't exist, the Trotskyists could still exist and show up one day on their own as soon as somebody has independently constructed a not-as-good version of what Lenin did. Stalin's government existing sped up the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism through the ability to push Trotskyists out of the central party. but it didn't invent Trotskyism, or the general kind of person who would exist but not be good enough for the CPSU. those people existed before the CPSU existed, and their own independent characteristics that would later distinguish them still existed before. if Trotskyism was created by Stalin's party existing then Rosa Luxemburg probably wouldn't have shown up from Germany and joined the Fourth International, and there would have been about one faction of Trotskyists in one country ever, but they can pop up independently from other countries, which is part of what fuels their assertions that several countries generating Trotskyists must mean they have the power to actually build some kind of gigantic 100-country workers' state.
- 618A government protects its supporters and attacks its adversaries -> "There is no possibility of the supporters not feeling its favour" okay but Trotsky. when the CPSU came to exist about 60 years after you, it became infamous for throwing some of its ardent supporters out for not meeting particular objective criteria for the task it was created for. also.... that a government attacks its adversaries isn't an obvious conclusion either, given how China kept granting mercy to the classes of people it was supposed to be forcing into transitions to new production relations so they would stop screwing up the other things it was trying to do. China made strawberry errors multiple times, with the academics and eventually the corporations and some other places too. and it acted with its adversaries the way it did with its supporters when it capitulated to the United States. there is an actual difference between the idealized government that protects its supporters and attacks its adversaries and real-world imperfect governments that fail to do the things a government is supposed to do.
I have this terrible premonition that I'll get all the way through this and find out this man didn't care about global empire and for instance what was happening to French Algeria if he were in that time period. if he did have a concept of French Algeria I feel like he'd have a totally different approach to probing whether governments are bad.
what would Bellegarrigue be saying in a world where like 70 countries merged into one big Existentialism but they were all abusing and exploiting France? would it be desirable to smash government and assimilate into The Big Europe then, even if it sees you as an object and doesn't see you as human? I think it's arguable that Black people in the United States have been exploited specifically by anarchy and not even by government.
- 618Peace can happen if people just stop supporting specific governments -> god this sounds like George Orwell
it's either something you hear in early Chinese Buddhism or from Orwell. and in the latter case it's quite wrong.
- 618Paying government no heed and tossing it on the dung heap -> okay now we're slowly starting to get to the good parts
- Anarchism is that which opposes what is imposed / I deny what denies me / I deny everything and affirm naught but myself (Bellegarrigue)
- An individual's own existence is the most solid fact / I am the only thing I have tangible experience of and full information on, so I am the most solid fact (Descartes, Bellegarrigue) -> and this one sounds like something you hear out of Ayn Rand.
well, nice to know where she actually got it from. she got it from totally inverting what is subjective versus objective through a terrible definition of "subjective" — because sense perception and perspective can fail to give you the facts about external reality it just isn't as real as your perceptions. by the way this is totally bogus if you have ever been hit with an unseen baseball, which is more real than your own existence and experience at the moment it hits you.
all right, now I know that the best way to dismantle Existentialism and communicative rationality is to refer to it as Ayn Rand logic, reason, or rationality. for unclear reasons Existentialists really cringe when you associate something they fervently believe in with a bad person but the idea is clearly the same and the identification of the idea being there is correct; it's like appealing to authority is a fundamental part of their reasoning process on the level that they need nice-people ideas associated with the nice people linked to them and mean-people ideas associated with mean people and when that heuristic breaks they panic.
- An individual's own existence is the most solid fact -> "the sole truth of which I have material and moral proof" — here I need to note that saying your individual experience is moral proof about yourself goes against the entire point of morality. the point of morality is that there are moral or ethical theories because as an individual you don't inherently know whether what you're doing is moral. morality is a big reason governments give for justifying themselves, either accurately or inaccurately (see: Bolshevism existing to block the immorality of empire, versus Toryism existing to crush "the gangs" or "the Illegals"). if he doesn't even know what morality is, it would definitely explain why he is so certain that governments can never be justified. he ignores morality!
- Everything outside you is the variable x / Everything outside you is the variable x; this is to imply that it is inconsistent or unknowable -> this... has interesting implications in a lambda calculus existential-materialism context. there are real subtleties to this if you take it seriously. I'm thinking. I think the thing he is missing is that if you use multivariable functions, you can be the variable x and things around you can be other variables y and z, but what you learn from daily life is the swappable factor of what kind of function is being used to combine the three, to go through what particular process. the "function" variable; the "meta-variable". this is the most important variable and he's totally overlooked it and discounted it.
- There is not a collective republican interest belonging to a whole population outside of legislation -> this is.... correct. only inside Liberal-republicanism in particular it's correct.
- My interest is equal to the interest of any other person; there can never be an interest to which I must sacrifice my interest -> not if that interest is preventing people from sheltering socially-prominent pedophiles? while "the pedophile will always reject the State" is a common bad argument, the fact that a bunch of people can just associate with that person and end up insulating them from consequences to anyone else is the more interesting problem. that ring of people can be anarchic by these bad definitions. by these definitions anarchies themselves can be abusive through hiding abusers in select parts of them.
- There can never be an interest to which I must sacrifice my interest / I cannot owe more than is owed to me -> this has already gotten hugely non-Materialist because it's very easy to imagine a scenario where no human being owes you anything but you live by extracting things from the natural environment, chopping down trees, exterminating all the thylacines, eating all the songbirds if you live in a really really undeveloped country; if you remove a lot from the environment you theoretically owe a lot to the environment. the concept of humans in society doing favors or services back and forth really messes with people's heads, and they don't realize that very often to do anything for anybody you need a productive force which is an input from the environment, and like, everyone is helping each other in a neat zero-sum circle but they're all taking from the environment and they all owe something there. there is no inherent wealth which is constructed out of nothing, whenever a commodity is produced most of the time it had to snatch something from the environment for wealth to be "created".
The Lorax would be more accurate if instead of being portrayed as a single person attacking the environment it was actually people helping each other and whenever they help each other back and forth they increasingly deplete the environment so they don't want to stop because it would mean prohibiting what were in intent pro-social behaviors — the human mind is not really built to comprehend that building society and helping people could be bad. though that's if you still want it to be easy to understand; I know that's an oversimplification because there are times where First-World countries will just flat-out force Third-World countries to develop and deplete the environment or else they'll have an all-out war across the country and coldly burn down all the trees too. the human species just hates the environment, subjugating other human populations before they get ours or get big enough for peaceful coercion is the only thing that's important to us.
Subjective themes
- 618African-Americans have been exploited by anarchy -> the way Bellegarrigue defines the beginning of anarchy, as the dissolution of separate kingdoms or republics into one society, it's hard not to draw this conclusion.
Related
- Bellegarrigist argument
- government (Bellegarigue) / Government (Signifier Case)
Ideologies or fields
- Z–3300[A] [Z] A / anarchism (top-level category)1:
-1:-1
- Anselme Bellegarrigue (📥 / A)1:
-1:-1
Full title for bookmarks (optional)
[9k] World's first anarchist manifesto - Q618 - next nine thousand ; Anselme Bellegarrigue 1850
