My goal to complete the SMP Compendium is still staying within schedule. If this continues, I should be able to complete the Compendium by the middle of October. Once the last Compendium entry has been completed, whichever one that may be, my next decision is to compile all of the Compendium entries in a single .PDF file. It will be made available here on The Fourth Estate as well as on Archive.org. The goal is to have everything read before the end of next month. Included with all of the Compendium entries is the “Introduction to the Work-Standard” and a discussion about why the Compendium was written in the manner that it was.

Anyone who has read the Compendium as I worked to complete it over the past four months will know that entire Compendium entries were done at various times. While writing the Compendium back in early May of 2021, I was still trying to figure out what should be included in the Compendium and what can be discussed separately on the Blog. A whole Section devoted to the philosophical and theoretical origins of the Work-Standard had to be removed since it was technically an incomplete bibliographical catalog of various works written by a very broad range of authors.

The Compendium Section which I am referring to, in case people are not aware, was called “Philosophical and Theoretical Origins.” The problem with this Section is related to the fact that the connections are not always self-evident. Some connections are easier to make since they tend to be cited more frequently, but there are other influences which are more subtle and less unambiguous, and I nonetheless acknowledge their presence regardless.  

The whole bibliographical list of books, treatises, pamphlets and other documents which went into the SMP Compendium and the Work-Standard in particular are as follows:

• The Federalist Papers, specifically the ones written by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, are a major influence on the Work-Standard’s relationship with its conceptions of economic planning and taxation. Various documents penned by Hamilton like Report on Manufacturers and Opinion as to the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States are additional influences. I also consulted a number of peer-reviewed academic journal articles that elaborated into aspects of Hamiltonian Federalism, which proved to be problematic since the authors offered little except for bits and pieces of relevant information. If an opportunity exists, I may be able to share the details as to which ones I had chosen.   
• Prussianism and Socialism and Man and Technics were these two treatises that Oswald Spengler had written as his continuations of the final chapters from Volume II of The Decline of the West. Simply put, the exact cause of what will bring about the destruction of Western Civilization are financial, technological and a combination of both. Given my previous experiences as an electrical engineering student (who could have gone into financial engineering as a subdiscipline), it did not take long for me to combine the financial and the technological concepts to perceive Spengler as talking about Fintech (Financial Technology), which was already in its infancy in the 1920s and became more sophisticated by the 1970s and the decades thereafter.   
• Ernst Jünger’s 1930 essay “Total Mobilization” and his 1932 treatise, Der Arbeiter, and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in places related to the macroeconomic aspects of the Compendium. Those who read the SMP Compendium will know that the “Political Organization Problem” was chosen as an alternative to the more well-known Economic Calculation Problem of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. It is still amazing how Heidegger and Jünger turned out to be natural replacements of von Mises and von Hayek since the philosophies of Heidegger and von Mises are both related to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s key contribution to Philosophy was “Phenomenology,” the study of personal experiences and expectations. Like the Economic Calculation Problem, the Political Organization Problem revisited the same issues with economic planning. But unlike the Economic Calculation Problem, which relied on the pseudoscience of Praxeology, the Political Organization Problem employed Psychology.
• Speaking of Psychology, various aspects of Carl Gustav Jung’s work were incorporated into the Work-Standard to buttress the Political Organization Problem as well as provide additional correlations between Spengler’s “Prussian Socialism” and Hamilton’s “American Federalism.” The “Self” from Command-Obedience Account Bookkeeping is derived from the same Jungian conception. The concept of “Synchronicity” in the SMP Compendium is also a Jungian concept. In fact, the Compendium’s discussions about the Y2K Bug, the World Wide Web (WWW), and Ernst Jünger’s “Luminar internet” and “Phonophore smartphone” did rely on a Jungian analysis. The most important of which involved the conceptualization of a Socialist Internet that bears a greater resemblance to Jung’s “Unus Mundus,” which is similar to Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence.”  
• Technology-related aspects of the Compendium, when they were not relying on Man and Technics or Der Arbeiter, were influenced by Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” Other lesser-known influences included the works of Heinz Guderian, Richard Alan Clarke, and Russell Kirk. While those three were subtle, they provided the contextual basis on the implications that the Work-Standard would have on Technology. For Guderian, it was Achtung-Panzer!, particularly the analytical insight into military technologies and how they interact with military tradition if enabled by the Work-Standard. For Clarke, Your Government Failed You, Cyberwar, and Warnings provided the basis behind the limitations of the Work-Standard’s “Mechanization Rate,” “Economic Socialization” and “Cyberwarfare” by contributing to its art of “Financial Warfare.” As for Kirk, The Conservative Mind contributed to the Work-Standard’s adherence to revolutionary technologies being synchronized with traditional cultures, supporting its advocacy for a Socialistic conception of Property.
• While Marxist Theory does not figure prominently in the SMP Compendium, I still recognized the need to ensure that the Work-Standard can be reapplied in a Marxist context, hence the “Marxist Socialism/Non-Marxist Socialism Distinction.” Some of the works penned by Vladimir Lenin were influential in the Compendium, which were related to discussions about “Economism,” “Vanguardism,” “Democratic Centralism,” “Imperialism,” and “New Economic Policy” (NEP). Any discussion of Chairman Mao’s Combat Liberalism will be reinterpreted in a more appropriately Conservative context.
• Another influence from Leninist philosophy involved finding those with aspects of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. For Kant, that was the Work-Standard’s “Work Theory of Value” (WTV) and the concepts of “Perfect Duties” and “Imperfect Duties” as important for applications of Democratic Centralism within a functional Council Democracy. For Nietzsche, Lenin’s “Revolutionary Vanguard” is reminiscent of the “Übermensch” from Also Sprach Zarathustra, the “Anti-Imperialism” from Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism being a political validation of the “Eternal Recurrence” from The Gay Science, especially when paired with the Maoist concept of “Social Imperialism” (what Lenin called “Socialism in words, Imperialism in deeds”). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an obvious one because Lenin’s more philosophical works insisted that Marxist Socialisms should be more familiar with Hegelian philosophy.

• Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger, was influential in understanding the Work-Standard’s interactions with Council Democracy. The works in question are The Human Condition and On Revolution. The former provides the argument that the Work-Standard is a Western conception of finance with planetary-wide implications, supporting Lenin’s thesis from Imperialism. Human Condition and On Revolution formed the philosophical basis discussed promoted by Arendt about why America was once a Council Democracy in the Socialist sense when Hamilton and the Federalists were in power. This is important because Congress has always been understood as a Parliamentary Democracy. Her advocacy for America to revisit Council Democracy supports the Compendium arguments in favor of a convergence between the economic and the financial by the political.  
• And then there is Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and Nomos of the Earth. His ideas have influenced the Work-Standard’s functions in national emergencies and in international law. The “State of Exception” is given an additional dimension involving young people as being integral to the future of the nation through their “Socialist Student Economy” (SSE) and its role in Continuity of Government (COG) operations. The “World State Organization” (WSO) and its reign over the international Internet is in some respects an attempt at realizing another Nomos, a sort of ‘interplanetary Unus Mundus’ where the digital realm is an extension of the physical one.  

Those are all of the more frequently cited influences. Those people and their works provided the logic behind the Work-Standard in almost every conceivable context. Some entries also received influences from a number of even more obscure historical figures from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

• The Work-Standard’s concept of the “Equipmentality,” despite the term itself being Heideggerian in origin, was not possible without some insight from Dr. Karl Polanyi’s “Fictitious Commodities” in The Great Transformation. Dr. Polanyi’s ideas were also helpful in conceptualizing “Life-Energy” as being integral to the “contributions of Arbeit” within the LER (Life-Energization Reciprocity) process as well as the “Digital Arbeit” of its subvariant, LERE (Life-Energization Reciprocal Electrification).

• The Work-Standard’s ability to distinguish Arbeit and Geld from Kapital and Schuld, especially in contexts where the Gold and Silver Standards (“Bimetallism”) were concerned, relied on the conclusions of Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter was one who provided the historical basis behind Plato and Aristotle as the ones responsible for contributing to the Western world’s problems with Kapital and Schuld. This ties in with why the Work-Standard insists that Kapital and Schuld are ‘being created out of thin air’ in a “Creative Destruction” of other Kapital and Schuld by a “Fractional-Reserve Banking System,” thereby justifying the need for a “Reciprocal-Reserve Banking System.” The term “Creative Destruction” did not originate with Schumpeter because it was his version of the original conception as it appeared in the works of Werner Sombart.   

• I can cite a few more influences from other figures within American history like Daniel Webster, Edward Bellamy, Theodore Roosevelt, Thorstein Veblen and Gore Vidal. With the obvious exception of Vidal, the other four Americans spent one part of their lives in the 19^th century. Webster opposed Slavery just as he also opposed both sides of that same issue, arguing in favor of the American Union to remain united over any controversial political issue. Bellamy advocated for the coalescence of American Nationalism and American Socialism in Looking Backward, a coalescence which was later attempted by Roosevelt (unlike his cousin, Franklin Delano). Meanwhile, Veblen’s and Vidal’s ideas were perceived as being on a similar wavelength as those men advocated for the Eternal Return to the original American essence of Hamiltonian Federalism. The former articulated the Prussian influences behind Hamiltonian Federalism in domestic policy, given that American Consumerism and Producerism are Jeffersonian in origin. The latter intuited the Prussian influences behind Hamiltonian Federalism in foreign policy, given American Isolationism and Internationalism are also Jeffersonian in origin.

Finally, I must point out, as an American political scientist, that the philosophical basis behind combining “Hamiltonian Federalism” and “American Socialism” may seem nuanced or even a social taboo. Contemporary US politics now has its “Democratic Socialists” and its “Economic Nationalists,” in addition to Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicanism as “Liberal Capitalism” with subvariants like Social Liberalism (“Progressivism”), Liberal Conservatism, and Classical Liberalism (“Libertarianism”). If I had to choose which ones are conducive to the SMP Compendium and the Work-Standard, America’s Democratic Socialists and Economic Nationalists are the best-possible candidates to date. But even if such a coalescence is possible, I still have mixed feelings about Democratic Socialists and Economic Nationalists being able to work together. Not only do they have to overcome their differences and seek common cause as Americans, they also need a Political Science-oriented designation to distinguish themselves.

It would be best that they avoid calling themselves ‘National Socialists’ since there is too much historical baggage associated with “National Socialism.” Even in America, the term ‘National Socialism’ continues to be despoiled by Hitlerism, which is a subvariant of what I will always refer to as “Pan-Germanic Socialism.” It also does not help that there are some Americans of Jeffersonian persuasion perpetuating Adolf Hitler’s Cult of Personality on US soil. Nothing is more Jeffersonian than to despoil the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, an American of the Jewish people’s community, with Antisemitic conspiracy theories and promoting a Class Struggle along racial and sectarian lines. At the same time, they also need to distinguish Hamiltonian Federalism from the sort of “Madisonian Federalism” promoted by the Federalist Society and The Federalist. Those people have a lot more in common with James Madison, a protégé of Jefferson who perpetrated the “Great Divergence” that led to the untimely demise of the original Federalist Party.

Therefore, the formal Political Science taxonomy of the ideology promoted in the SMP Compendium shall hereby be referred to as “Hamiltonian Federalist Socialism.” Other political scientists may, if necessary, shorten it to “Federalist Socialism” or just “Federal Socialism.” Anyone who adheres to Hamiltonian Federalist Socialism is to be referred to as either a “Federal Socialist” or else a “Hamiltonian Federalist,” the latter in contexts where the word ‘Socialist’ is counterproductive.

The Hamiltonian Federalist guide to avoid being accused of promoting Hitlerism (or even Marxism, for that matter) has already been provided by Theodore Roosevelt in two important pamphlets: “Where We Can Work with Socialists” and “Where We Cannot Work with Socialists.” What Roosevelt argued in both works is integral to understanding why Federalist Socialism must be flexible enough to be applicable to every aspect of the American Way of Life. Everyone from all known national people’s community in these United States must be included here, preserving their cultural and traditional values as well as promoting their interests as Americans.   

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: Carl Jung, Carl Schmitt, Edward Bellamy, Ernst Jünger, Federalist Party, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gore Vidal, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Richard Alan Clarke, Russell Kirk, Theodore Roosevelt, Thorstein Veblen, Vladimir Lenin