Add new comment

I think that Bellamy, in his usual super-convoluted essays that attempt to emulate the gazillion of academic authors he's reading (which ain't in any way more problematic than many other "anarchist" authors in the English world), ain't really taking a position on Gottfriend, while he is crediting his analysis of the Left and Right.

The biggest problem here is how he's ignoring or dismissing the dimension of determinism vs constructivism, where a much clearer ontological and epistemological line can be seen between conservative and radical thinking, not Left and Right. This is the weakness in Bellamy's text, as the tendency to explain human behavior by causes that are immutable, such as genetics and/or "laws of nature" has been also present among the Left, and especially among the marxists. In fact, determinism has always been that other argument raised against Marx through the 20th century. Marx was an evolutionist. This makes several schools of the Left as much conservative as Right wingers.

Social change, to them, is eventually possible, but only through obedience to Law and Order, to property... yeees... and the wider institutional processes of dominant bureaucratic structures.

Marxists believe that humans are determined by the economic forces of capital, and none can escape them ("there is no freedom" is what any hardcore marxist will tell you with a straight face, before you learn that he's an undercover cop). Therefore they must take hold of these forces so to change them from within, through a long transitional process (haha) that either is driven by class struggle, or seeks to pacify it through eternal integration processes (socialism, or now social capitalism), so that one day... in a thousand years...