John Dunn

Neo-feudalist myth

Saturday, 22 March 2025 at 17:15

Neo-feudalist myth

Capitalism- a pejorative term used by socialists in the nineteenth century - was a myth perpetrated by Marx. Capitalism was not a new and progressive economic phenomenon. However, the myth gave the neo-feudalists a controlled opposition, both philosophically and politically. Through a controlled radicalism, the workers were led to oppose a straw man - the capitalist class - with the promise that the next and inevitable stage in history would mean the overthrow of that class and result in freedom from exploitation.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Constant geo-political upheaval

Friday, 21 March 2025 at 19:57

First established in Venice

Constant geo-political upheaval

The outcomes of the so-called Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution were no teleological advance. This was not a shift from feudalism to capitalism. Rather they marked a metamorphosed return to pre-Renaissance feudalism, establishing new ways in which to extract and share the surplus produced by the producer-class, not through serfdom, but rather through the wages system, central banking and taxation. The pre-Renaissance exploiters operated in a monetary economy that existed in parallel to a world ruled over by kings and princes. Following the French revolution, economics as monetary accounting moved to centre-stage. The state and state trappings of kings, princes, presidents and parliaments were co-opted as the guarantors, not of a feudal hierarchy, but of central banking, taxation and debt collection by means of physical force. This was the system first established in Venice, then later in the Netherlands, Britain, France and the USA. This was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ writ large. The pressure to extendthis system has resulted in constant geo-political upheaval over the past two and a half centuries.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Counter-Renaissance

Thursday, 20 March 2025 at 19:06

Counter-Renaissance

The concept of a self-driving materialist teleological progress in history was introduced by Marx, based on Hegel. This was a false interpretation of history, but one which was convenient to the neo-feudalists, or ruling oligarchy. So-called capitalism as a successor to feudalism (as in the Marxian narrative) never happened. The socio-historical and cultural phenomenon known as the Renaissance was the actual successor to feudalism. The Renaissance was the true post-feudalism. The political manifestation of the Renaissance was the Renaissance state, which reached its zenith with the Peace of Westphalia.

The Counter-Renaissance followed the Renaissance, a socio- historical, cultural and historical phenomenon best exemplified by Sarpi’s Venice, the Dutch Republic and England under William of Orange following the 1688 Dutch invasion. The Counter-Renaissance re-established feudalism, or a neo-feudalism, which was an amalgam of the feudal interests that had served Spinoza’s free-trading progenitors well, but which the Renaissance and the rise of the Renaissance state had restricted.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Cosmic vocation

Wednesday, 19 March 2025 at 21:26

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Cosmic vocation

With Fichte's inversion of Spinozist philosophy, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Man’s purpose is to act upon the world, change it and perfect it, i.e. change what is into what ought to be. The vocation of man is a moral one, which is to transform nature and bring it into accord with his ideals. The world exists so that man can express those ideals and bring amoral order into being. It follows from this that any distraction from man’s moral vocation is a reversion to Spinozist determinism. After all,with trade there is a preoccupation with profit and ongoing subsistence. The lives of individuals are determined by forces external to themselves, principally the controllers of money supply (a truth later masked by democracy), quite apart from the economic forces, which take on a life of their own. Fichte’s politics were at one with his idealist philosophy. In the context of his philosophy, to embrace trade is to renounce freedom, the Absolute I, God and man’s cosmic role in bringing moral order into the world and beyond. This is what drove Fichte to postulate the closed commercial state, a controlled economic environment that would free individuals to follow their true cosmic vocation.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The Closed Commercial State

Saturday, 15 March 2025 at 21:18

The Closed Commercial State

Fichte presented his ideas in The Closed Commercial State(1800), in which he postulated the withdrawal from foreign trade, the introduction of a national currency, a system of price controls, the balancing of production and consumption, and the regulation of the workforce - as means of securing the industry and the economic independence of all its citizens. His comprehension of the enduring tensions between commercialised society and political freedom was ahead of its time. It was his philosophical idealism, rooted in a reading of Kant, and opposed to Spinozist materialism, that motivated his recommendations, i.e. the desire not simply to subordinate the individual freedom of the Absolute I to the external imperatives and needs of globalised capitalism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Fichte’s philosophico-historical alternative

Monday, 10 March 2025 at 20:08

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte’s philosophico-historical alternative

Practically all official histories present the liberal account that capitalism and the emergence of liberal freedoms went hand in hand as part of the general process of modernisation: feudal restraints were removed domestically, and the expansion of international trade produced economic growth. Marxism is rooted in this same liberal narrative. Marx saw the expansion of the productive forces of society as resulting from an unfettered exchange economy - ‘universal commodity production’ - and he thought the role of the state in capitalism’s development was primarily negative: capitalism succeeded where the state did not hold back the dynamic forces at work in ‘bourgeois society’.

Fichte’s legacy remains a philosophico-historical alternative to the propaganda of the liberal-Marxist-capitalist nexus. In his philosophical works, Fichte had already turned Spinoza on his head. The great Spinozist presupposition,the Substance, was no longer anterior to the individual. Instead, the Absolute I became the presupposition and all else resided there. Fichte had superseded Spinoza’s secularised kabbalistic Judaism with a secularised capax Dei, God incarnated in man, the restoration of humanism in the Renaissance tradition of Dante.

What followed naturally from this was a fresh look at the nation state. Again not surprisingly, consciously or not, Fichte followed the pattern of Renaissance states. His main concern was to establish economic autarky within defined and policed borders, not as a matter of principle in its own right, but as a means of wresting control from a resurgent globalising oligarchy. This oligarchy had mutated from the former tripartite oligarchical alliance of landed nobility, Jewish traders and Venetian financiers, to an Anglo-Dutch oligarchy which exhibited many of the attributes that Sarpi had expressed two hundred years earlier.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Confronting determinism

Sunday, 9 March 2025 at 20:23

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Confronting determinism

Fichte did not attempt to supplement or develop Spinozism; he sought to confront a deterministic, necessitarian, fatalistic and dehumanising philosophy with a ‘hatred of mankind’ that he himself had once espoused.He sought to break out of its closed entrapping mathematical schema. Nowhere is it more clear than in the ‘state within a state’ rebuttal, which represented Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozist kabbalism, his awakening to the socio-political and economic implications within the universalising Tikkun of Spinozism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.