Separation Anxiety

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3 responses to “Separation Anxiety”

1. 

   Joe Odegaard

   June 27, 2023

   I’m not leaving California. All my family is here. We go back to the 1860s here. No divorce. Fight.

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2. 

   Vito B. Caiati

   June 27, 2023

   Whether consciously or not, the separation of 1860-61 exerts an unjustified influence on those currently advocating this solution. For as “Anonymous” coherently argues, the historical situation of the ante-bellum South is in no way comparable to that of Red American today. “A” correctly underscores the distinctive nature of Southern society, “an organic whole society at the time that it attempted to secede,” that is, as something of its own and not merely a piece of a larger, essentially undifferentiated national reality. However, and this is a crucial point, “A” ignores the fundamental material reality that underpinned its uniqueness: the pre-capitalist mode of production, slavery, that determined its economic character and development and that gave rise to a specific social structure, including a ruling class of large slaveholders. Slavery, of course, existed in a capitalist world market and depended on its commercial and financial institutions, but its productive relations were not capitalist. So, we are not dealing here with what “Anonymous” terms “ethnic and religious particularities” as the determining factors in the great political and economic struggles that run from the Constitutional Convention through the 1850s, but rather with something much more fundamental, the clash of two, increasingly distinct social formations, a rising capitalist North and a pre-capitalist South. The existence of these two forms of economy and society, each with its own culture and value system, held together by nothing but the legal umbrella of one Constitution and some shared history made the separation both feasible and progressively more attractive to a Southern ruling class, with distinct interests, and those subaltern classes over which it exercised cultural hegemony.
   Today, none of these preconditions for separation exist in the United States, a nation whose entire economic, social, and cultural fabric are the products of the prolonged maturation of capitalism. The economic complexity of advanced capitalism has fused the regions and states so tightly that they cannot be untangled without catastrophic material consequences for all strata of society. Moreover, one ruling class, the most powerful the world has ever seen, dominates the nation’s politics, society, and culture. This class, which has shrouded itself in the ideology of Woke Capitalism, has absolutely no reason to tolerate the slightest diminution of the powers by the breaking away of some of the states. The nation—or at least the nation that it is remaking beyond recognition– continues to serve its interests as it relentlessly pursues the accumulation of riches and power on a global scale. At the same time, the secondary cadres that promote Woke ideas, from the ideologues of the Democrat Party, to those of the media and academia, are fanatically committed to its universal extension, making the parting of enclaves of tradition intolerable to them.

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3. 

   BV

   June 27, 2023

   Vito comments, >>The economic complexity of advanced capitalism has fused the regions and states so tightly that they cannot be untangled without catastrophic material consequences for all strata of society.<< In the above sentence you put your finger on the nub of the problem of separation. Perhaps the only type of viable separation available to us is at the individual and local levels. As individuals we can fairly easily separate from our political enemies and beyond that form local enclaves of the like-minded. A safe tactic is quiet withdrawal of financial support from 'woke' institutions and quiet provision of such support to conservative causes.

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