Many threads, together, a post!
This first section mostly deals with basic Marxist theory, but with fun analogies.
Trying to find the old Luke Ford show where I said the future was out-flanking from the Left so I can soak in my own status points. Occurs to me that Twitter/reddit politics/protesting is a form of parasocial relation where people can pretend to be friends with powerful Dems.
Blue check culture and its hangers-on is like celeb culture but for RBG and others. Incredibly cold takes here, for sure. But the social effect has an added effect – it adds psychological plausibility to the narrative talking heads propagate. Would my “friends” lie to me?
And this is made possible by the dissolution of traditional social bonds. Melt the family, replace it with commoditized Twitter bonds with your designated pal. Secondly, this is part of a greater “theme parking” of life, for lack of a better word. Everything becomes clean, fake.
Bugman technocracy is a natural outgrowth of this cleanness. Everything looks tractable and controllable, ready to be directed. Entertainment further encourages this outlook. In vidya, everything is easy and predictable. Use the Bird Mana to stoke your pops for war!
As if it was a matter of pulling the right levers and pushing the right buttons. People lose sight of the essentials. Politics is zero-sum. Politics is about power, not policy. The lives of the people are reduced to numbers to be regulated.
The people who fall for this feel like the rulers, when in fact, they are the ruled. The more reality separates from their own ego image, the more they have to lash out. Truth is, every society is ruled by a small clique of mostly hereditary elites.
palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/ The reaction of liberal elites to Trump and the reaction of this author to Yalies shows status illegibility. Status competition through consoom only impresses those of limited means. They aren’t hiding from the plebs. They don’t even know what plebs are.
Without consumption signals, you end up like Twitter. Taste and idea signals dominate. Plebs think about what they’d buy with their money, so to show your class, don’t buy anything. The tension is greatest at the new money/minor nobility descendant barrier.
Showing off your new wealth is a signal that it’s new and therefore bad. 40% of Japanese salarymen at the zaibatsu are samurai descendants, and a sizable minority of the non-noble are going to have 3 generations of PMC pedigree or more. The pattern repeats everywhere.
The university is intricately tied with this status dance as the repository of Ancien Regime values. 80% of 16th century Provencal nobles had degrees. It’s symbiotic. Unis today basically have trained like fucking half of American young people to be Versailles-style leeches.
The deep concern and involvement of increasingly vast swathes of the population with politics is bizarre. It’s bizarre because, well, Sticky Shoe is right. Politics, left or right, is the manipulation of ideological symbols to manufacture consent so some elites can topple others.
Hence Che Guevara (read: Che Guevara Lynch of the Lynch family, noble for nearly a millennium) topples other elites of another stripe. And Lenin topples the Romanovs and sets up his own shop. Rent still gets paid in the USSR, just to a State Owned Company.
Stalin restores order by purging a potentially hostile Party elite. Is he essentially reactionary? Yes. Why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t any ML vanguard party be? Exit Jin Yuzhang, Manchu Prince, nephew of the Emperor. Enter Jin Yuzhang, vice director of Beijing.
Ideology is the belief that literally the same people (hereditary elites) with the same acculturation doing the same things will produce a different result. Hierarchy is conserved through many forms. One man saw through this: Mao.
Mao is able to see that the party structure itself constitutes an elite and will reproduce class privilege, ergo, a revolutionary state must undergo Permanent Revolution. Well, it turns out, that is a frightfully unpleasant and unpopular state of affairs. It’s rolled back.
When you see someone super excited over politics in that blue check way, what you see is either an elite scheming to get a bigger hat, or a striver who would put their own yoke on you instead. Why does the OWS founder flip as soon as he goes to Davos? Because that was the goal.
So what is the worker to do? First of all, vote for me goyim. I’m your pal. But secondly, recognize no elites are inherently their friend. Instead, the worker can strategically strike in favor of weaker elite factions opportunistically, extracting concessions from the new regime.
This means rejecting the left/right dichotomy as essentially a hobgoblin of capital. Instead, strike for those who you can exert leverage on, like in Yugoslavia, where young noble children allied with workers to overthrow their fathers. Then they rewarded the workers with coops.
But wait, Monsieur! Stalin was a working class man! How can he act according to aristocratic or bourgeois class interest? Because the nature of a vanguard is to be a ruling class, and all ruling classes trend towards aristocratic class consciousness. All nobles began as peasants.
I suppose I’ll expand on a comment I made on Spandrell’s blog. I am capital. Tucker Carlson represents a faction of capital. The Pentagon is capital. Why would Redgov, the military-industrial complex and its interests, red-bait? It’s simple – the tendency of profit to decline.
The long run interest rate and long run profit rate are intertwined. The developed world is facing widespread ZIRP, or worse, NIRP. Many investment classes have reached negative profit levels. That represents capital destruction. Productive capital is being destroyed.
While the billionaire class can flee this through imperialism and globalism, minor capital like myself cannot. Neither can the Pentagon, for obvious reasons, or domestic industry. Bezos is happy to take a larger share of a shrinking pie. I’m not.
What’s the answer? Worker coops have proved a durable method of raising profit rates, as seen in domestic coop industry and Austrian social housing. I won’t get into particulars. If you raise profits by 4%, and the long run interest decline is .02%/yr, you buy 200 years.
Thus, a reform towards socialism and worker-owned means of production extends the life of the ruling class. I’ll see you in 2220 for the next crisis of capital, the showdown between the Party-State vanguard and the new self-owned proletariat.
And yeah, the idea that Twitter anarchists seem to have where the Revolution swoops in tomorrow and they get to have FALGC is utopian fantasizing. Just remember, my class interests aren’t yours, even if they sometimes intersect.
Anyways. Speaking of this little gremlin, Matt, we have another solution to the 2020 crisis of capitalism. What if we just import, like, a billion people. Whoa. Naturally, the woke left defends the principle of limitless immigration as sacred. But what does it actually do?
Why don’t we “listen to Bernie?” To quote Mr. Sanders, “Open borders is a Koch Brothers proposal.” Not only do more workers drive down the cost of labor, more identities allow for capital to play a divide-and-conquer racial game. Diverse communities are less cohesive communities.
So who gains? Well, the GDP goes up. But what does that even mean? The GDP per capita doesn’t go up. And the median income goes down as the population composition is shifted downwards to lower classes and the great mass of the proletariat loses bargaining power.
So why should it matter if GDP goes up? It’s simple. Just as socializing the means of production can raise profits and rescue the capitalist class, so too can generating more growth. While the people remain poor, the corporations are able to grow. The capitalists prosper.
Markets, ever more markets, seeking ever more growth. Not only does the domestic grow, so too does global consumption as a whole, since First Worlders consoom more goods than Third Worlders. And there you have a solution for capital’s woes.
One way or another, capital will find a solution. At the end of the day, the ruling class rules, and it will find a way to save itself, taking its materially governed course into the future. But you can move it towards a path that also benefits you. Seize the means of production.
Finally, as a followup to my last thread on this crisis of capital, in 2220, when the Stalinist state runs out of profit in turn, it will also try to save itself. What’s one way to open a new market? The market of space. And that’s how you get United Empire Space Stalinism.
Endless markets in Endless Space… 2.
Unironically love me a slimeburger with cheese as I guzzle liquefied corn in my pod while watching liquid modernity on my Armeniaphone.
I like to think a lot about ads and what they reveal about society. Its wants, its fears. The adworld is not the real world, but some sort of twisted reflection. We despise it, but clearly, we also want it. Adworld is the promised hedonist utopia.
No wonder the average DSA “socialist” thinks not about political economy, but consumption as the key marker of the socialist future. Working only 20 hours a week on hobby amusements. Living in free housing anywhere. It’s a reflection of a fixation on consumption.
All politics becomes, like a T-shirt, another product. And the politics, in turn, reflects the spirit of consumption. Where are the builders? All we have are the eaters. But you cannot have a world where everyone is a hobby farmer working 20 hours a week.
The bourgeois socialist dream implicitly rests on economic assumptions that must demand exploitation of *someone’s* labor, forcing *somebody* to do the unfun, unhobby work. Like the slimeburger itself, DSA socialism is “Impossible”.
The impossibility means it will never come, thus preserving the current class order. Thus, real class interests are reproduced using the fantasy. Price is only the flip side of cost. So long as products must be produced with depreciated capital and labor, there must be cost.
Claims we will use wealth taxation to *pay for* this or that program are in reality regressive claims because they feed a common myth. The falsehood is to conceive of wealth as a movable stash of consumer goods. Large fortunes are not dragon’s hoards of gold.
Even if they were, gold cannot conjure new hamburgers or horse buggies into being on its own. Rather, large fortunes consist of control of the means of production through debt or equity instruments. Amazon cannot be converted *into* universal healthcare.
This common misconception leads to one of the most common (and not misguided) criticisms from the average working Joe: “You just want free shit. You want gibs.” If wealth taxes were framed as means of redistributing the means of production, one sees what socialism is.
Socialism is the promise that the workers and their respected foremen can labor in peace without the depredations of coastal elites and meddling Washington bureaucrats. They themselves will control the means of production. Framed like that, the worker understands.
Chasing the bait, or failing to outwit a system. Let’s take the power instinct. In the primal environment, why chase power? Because power is status is women. As we are complex apes, not simple apes, this relation no longer holds as strongly. Power can often mean no women. Between the Silicon Valley nerd and some kind of rugged, muscular warehouse worker, who ges more sex? Or what about Cardinal Richelieu and other such powerful clergy? The stated purpose of the urge and the actual biological purpose of the urge divorce. Power becomes unfitness.
But a funny thing can happen. The TRP movement accrued a crust of rhetoric about building power. At the same time, it advised various alpha behaviors which often do not lead to power. And yet… what is the result? The result of adopting those alpha behaviors was not power. But it did result in sex! And sex was the biological purpose of the urge to begin with! We can see that the urge, ironically, did loop back around to fulfilling its purpose, through the failure of achieving the conscious purpose in favor of the subconscious.
We can think about many of these biological and social systems this way. Success at the conscious goal may cause failure at the hidden, true goals. The system may look totally broken, but in its brokenness, accomplish some other goal, Chesteron’s Fence style People can fail at their stated goals and still get what’s good for them. Getting back to the theme of this account: The DSA fails at its conscious goals of revolution and pushing the party left. But it succeeds at the real class goals of networking its middle class members.
Good for a person vs good for a class.
The median wealth of aristocrats went up after the French Revolution, but individually, it could be quite the tragedy.
The DSA machine chews up a lot of middle class kids, but as a class, it produces government/NGO sinecures for them. Bureaucratization is a political strategy which allows an executive to achieve absolutism. FDR, Stalin, Louis XIV – all these power struggles create a bureaucracy to cut down an aristocracy, leaving a very strong central figure but hollowing out the future.
Après moi, le déluge. A similar principle holds in corporate politics. Top employees and department-fief executives are powerful, powerful enough to oust the C-suite. A strong HR department allows you to collar these threats to your power. By running hiring/firing through them, you can purge. But like the bureaucracy in the state, HR is not a value center. By itself, it is not an independent power source, power is delegated through it. So you always have your C-suite control over it. The monarch plays the bureaucrat against the peerage to maintain control. “The natural border of the US is the Rhine.” – FDR
By subduing all power in your polity, you are able to wield an immense amount of force. You can build a world empire. You can sprawl everything. The loyalty problem is what governs parties. Bureaucrats have perfect loyalty. The problem? Once built, the bureaucracy never goes away. Gore Vidal called FDR our American Augustus, and he was. But the machine he made didn’t go away.
Without a master, it grows unceasingly, and its master becomes itself. The bureaucracy, the eunuchs of China, the apparatchiks – all these are the same thing. They are the machine gone rogue, existing to enlarge itself. This is true of both private and public bureaucracies. The Ford Foundation no longer serves the Fords, but is a thing for itself. The point of the DSA is itself.
Political ideologies, if they are to be stable, must reproduce the power of the class that enacts them.
Good for a person vs good for a class.
The median wealth of aristocrats went up after the French Revolution, but individually, it could be quite the tragedy.
The DSA machine chews up a lot of middle class kids, but as a class, it produces government/NGO sinecures for them. Bureaucratization is a political strategy which allows an executive to achieve absolutism. FDR, Stalin, Louis XIV – all these power struggles create a bureaucracy to cut down an aristocracy, leaving a very strong central figure but hollowing out the future.
Après moi, le déluge. A similar principle holds in corporate politics. Top employees and department-fief executives are powerful, powerful enough to oust the C-suite. A strong HR department allows you to collar these threats to your power. By running hiring/firing through them, you can purge. But like the bureaucracy in the state, HR is not a value center. By itself, it is not an independent power source, power is delegated through it. So you always have your C-suite control over it. The monarch plays the bureaucrat against the peerage to maintain control. “The natural border of the US is the Rhine.” – FDR
By subduing all power in your polity, you are able to wield an immense amount of force. You can build a world empire. You can sprawl everything. The loyalty problem is what governs parties. Bureaucrats have perfect loyalty. The problem? Once built, the bureaucracy never goes away. Gore Vidal called FDR our American Augustus, and he was. But the machine he made didn’t go away.
Without a master, it grows unceasingly, and its master becomes itself. The bureaucracy, the eunuchs of China, the apparatchiks – all these are the same thing. They are the machine gone rogue, existing to enlarge itself. This is true of both private and public bureaucracies. The Ford Foundation no longer serves the Fords, but is a thing for itself. The point of the DSA is itself.
Political ideologies, if they are to be stable, must reproduce the power of the class that enacts them.
So, monopoly production. I talk about how this leads to a certain political economy in my latest blog post. But it occurs to me that it might be helpful to explain the concept itself. A monopolist is someone that is the only major producer in a sector. Why does this matter? Well, a monopolist can extract rents by using market power. It can control the labor supply and dictate wages as a monopsonist – the only buyer of said labor skills. It can control prices on its products as the only game in town. By this, it can gain excess profits. The problem with this? The monopoly is fragile. It is a big creature, like an elephant, and must consume extra economic calories to survive. It is more exposed to the whims of fate. It can create variance to destroy its smaller rivals, but it is exposed to systemic shocks. So if a monopoly just sucks blood, why not trustbust them all? That’s the answer the early 20th century progressives came up with. You can break it up into oligopoly pseudo-competition.
It doesn’t work out. It worked then, doesn’t work now.
Why? Lenin said Monopoly is Good, Actually. Why is that? It seems strange to praise such things.
First of all, monopoly is the progressive (here, meaning merely consequent) direction of history. Monopoly is the production-relation of the Managerial Age. Monopoly is a planned economy. Monopoly needs big government and big government needs monopoly. But why do the *people* need monopoly? What does monopoly do that that makes it not an aberration on history? Two words: irreducible complexity. What does that mean? There are products that are made up of so many different pieces with so specialized a customer that the constituent components of a monopoly business *do not constitute viable independent businesses*. As such, a broken monopoly must still function as a de facto monopoly.
But we’ve got problems. The USSR collapsed. Planned monopoly production necessarily suffers from the information problem because the planners are not close to the business, but far. Adding more plans and regulations doesn’t fix it. 26%. 26%. Today, 18% of Americans work directly for government and 8% indirectly through NGOs. A full quarter of our workforce as apparatchiks, and a mismanaged economy. That’s trillions of dollars of value being tied. The Revolution will make the world’s first trillionaire. Just as the French Revolution resolved the contradictions of feudalism and birthed the bourgeois democratic system in Europe, *increasing* the median wealth of the nobility, so too does the problem of moving from planned to social production present tremendous latent power. The stage is set for a politics of the 21st century. The stakes are high. Who will complete the system of the NEP?
Plannerism is not sufficient to have Socialism. I think this is a really important point to stress because of modern capitalism. Modern capitalism is not the early, primitive capitalism in which a few owner-operator-shareholder bourgeois compete, but the finance capital system outlined by Lenin, in which the power of the bourgeois is diffused and specialized into various roles and production monopolies. Under such a regime, we already have a system of central planning – by the key bankers and apparatchiks.
By the plannerist definition, we already live under socialism – and God save us from it! 18% of the US works for the government directly, 8% for NGOs. Some few hundred financiers call the shots and by this, the bulk of this industrial colossus is directed. But this leads me into my point – you collapse the distinction between socialism and capitalism. However, there exist intermediary stages between communism and capitalism. Suppose all businesses are privatized into coops. We’ll call this semi-NEP, because there will still exist a directing class of Red Technicians which serves a dual role as a ruling class and Party Vanguard. This is obviously still capitalism. But over time, the roles of the Red Technicians could phase out (not that they will). Under this “full NEP”, the only coordinators would be foremen and craftsmen, who serve a dual role as technical experts AND workers, rather than engineers/doctors/other professionals. In this, the workers would wholly own production. So they would not be self-exploiting. Profit would not be abolished, but there would be no fraction given to bourgeois. This does seem like an intermediate state between communism and capitalism.
The value-form still exists because the different coops must trade because labor, capital, and resources remain scarce. From each according to their ability, to each according to their ability, and no coercive control or extraction. The second criticism relates to your critique of “socialist money”. It is true that socialist money necessarily preserves the value-form and commodity production. However, the idea of money as labor-scrip to purchase use-value is genuinely a deviation from capitalist money.
You overlooked the dual role of money under a capitalist system outlined in Capital I/II. Money is the means by which labor and bourgeois acquire products to consume. However, money also can acquire control-power, and capital *ownership* is essential to understanding power under capitalism. Anyone can accumulate value and then exchange it for control, allowing them to direct production and politics. Thus, money is not just consumption… It is crystallized power, which can be saved, and which renders all consumption opposed to the goal of power accumulation. By detaching money from control-power, you prevent people from accumulating control outside the Party-State mechanisms, forcing power formalism. i.e. power lies in office and formal control of means of production by appointment/election, and not through purchase or acquisition. The oligarch is formally part of the State and his position is revocable. This is an advantage the USSR and China enjoy over wild oligarchy.
And secondly, by detaching this, one also undermines the inheritance principle. Not just that property go to one’s heirs, but *control* does. Party offices cannot be inherited even if cars, dachas, and cigars can be. And this is essential when considering the historical context. Stalinism did not emerge from the void but in the context of a struggle with the Bolshevik Party, substantially composed of descendants of Tsarist aristocratic elites. As such, the inheritance principle and power-accumulation principles are core to that class consciousness.
The creation of Socialist Money is not just an arbitrary revision, but a reflection of the need of Stalin to struggle against and prevail over the feudal-aristocratic Party, replacing it with a loyal and centralized bureaucracy. Without that, he would not be able to win WWII. It is a repeat of Peter’s struggle against the boyars, and Stalin much admired Peter the Great for these very reasons. And as a practical man and from a practical viewpoint, we cannot discount power politics as a real material source of conflict and engine of history.
On material conditions and ideology – by analogy.
Do you recall the Bush and early Obama age of gaming? With brown and bloom everywhere? It was dark, it was grim, it was grimdark! Reviewers said it reflected the tastes of consumers, who wanted gritty realism, not kid heroes. Consumers were adults now! Dark, edgy adults! They wanted a dark, edgy product with a dark edgy aesthetic!
Yeah, that was bullshit. It turns out that that age of gaming was actually one about noble heroes and traditional, if paint-by-numbers, narratives. Big damn shoothero. So why the grimdark narrative? Why brown and bloomgloom? Some sort of artistic subversion where noble heroes looked like… dirt? No, nothing so high-minded. Graphics were improving. Games were moving past origami paper blob creatures. The new tech was bloom/brown. The material conditions – improved graphics cards – required the backfilling of some bullshit ideological reason for why everyone was brown now, and why you should care. But it was all bullshit! It turns out that games were going to get way, way darker in tone and story content. Spec Ops The Line pointed out real conflicts aren’t sunshine rainbows where big damn heroes kill bad guys in comic numbers to protect FreedomLiberty. You’re possibly a monster! The games industry answered that self-awareness with a Nordic Gamer Yes. But the brownbloom went away! Games became about evil people, very very evil people, who loved murder and pillaging innocents while snarkily quipping. In tone, very dark. But the graphics turned bright and cheery. Darker stories, but in Amazing Technicolor. Not ideology, but improving technology.
Now the current gen of graphics cards, first developed to mine bitcoin, can do realistic water and mirror lighting. So there are mirrors and water everywhere. They’re going to come up with some kind of narrative, a sell-story, to push these graphics cards. But it’s all bullshit! I actually like this aesthetic shift, but it’s technology-driven. Game developers put in the latest graphics tech to flex and sell graphics cards. That’s all. It’s not an artistic decision. Brown realism was just to sell graphics. It existed to *manufacture* hype.
And so what is ideology? Ideology is the manufacturing of consent for changed material changes. They craft narratives for the same sorts of purposes as the games companies want to sell graphics cards – to sell a regime more configured for the material conditions of the era. Do maggot sausages save the Earth? Short answer, no. Long answer, no. Why farm crickets when they have a feed conversion ratio as good as chickens, and a worse taste? For the narrative. For the humiliation. For the story. But just to sell some bullshit, mostly. NatSoc racial war, USSR communism and social justice, American freedom and justice – all of these were selling the same *material* changes by creating a packaging for managerial-monopoly capitalism. The US is the last one standing, but the cracks are showing in this model. Industry is too big and complex to efficiently centrally plan now. The regime has to collapse into, revolution, or reform into a regime more well-suited to time. They’ll have a story for that. I have a story for that – monarcho-communism. But it’s just a story! What you get? What you will get is a regime well-shaped and well-designed for the coming age of production, an age focused on high-tech manufacturing, automated industry, and the information economy. China’s already there, arguably. The question is if America survives the transition. And what this age of production will evolve into! Perhaps something liberating! Perhaps something horrifying. Perhaps a monster beyond even Zero HP Lovecraft’s imagination.
Stalin didn’t know he was building the bureaucratic Soviet economy. Great Men are still swept by history. In gaming, as in politics, I pray that the future will bring a renewed age of heroes. Sure, it’s corny. But corny doesn’t mean bad. Ironic evil, the watchword of the late Millennial era, is bad. It feels bad. It does bad.
Snark is the sadism of neoliberalism asserting itself.
Compare the behavior of the wretched “Left” to that of Lenin. In the Third Duma, the so-called Black Reactionary Duma, 34 peasants of 68 were right MPs, another 15 liberals. Did Lenin conclude the peasants were hopeless? Castigate them? No! He went to war against the mystifiers! He attacked the Mensheviks, the Liquidators, the compromisers, and all those who would blame the *peasant* as regressive. He knew that the peasant’s faith in the Tsar could only be dispelled by destroying the myths of liberalism, and this had to be done through the PARTY. He purged the Party of the weak and built the strong. He spread agitprop. And most of all, he set out to prove to the peasant, through experience, that the Tsar’s cronies were bloodsuckers, a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who mercilessly exploited the poor workers – body and soul!
Of course, Lenin was vindicated – in truth, despite Menshevik lies, the deplorable peasants were in fact the *closest* to Red radicalism, not the *farthest*, and certainly not the bulwark of reaction. They desired the leadership of a true Tsar – and Lenin brought it. The Mandate of Heaven has been lost. The American CHUD awaits the coming of a true Tsar and a true peerage. Who will take up this heavy burden? Any seizure of power by the proletariat is necessarily premature – power is what conditions its wielder to power. The socdem is one who says “Riper, riper” to the fruit on the vine until it rots off, then smugly says that this fleshy carcass proved the prudence of their caution. The proletariat will never live up to the ideological purity tests of so-called red intellectuals because the proletariat does not exist as the theorizing class. The proletariat works – and the essence of working without burden is to work without burden, not to talk about it.
Can the workers protest without “tangible results”, win victories they do not profit from? Yes. But they have action and spirit. Don’t blame the mass for not knowing theory. It is the job of the party to provide the theory and the plan. It’s easy to be a lecturing intellectual. In the aftermath of 1905, the peasants were majority “right-wing”. Lenin had to show them that there were Black Hundreds police infiltrators among them encouraging them to Fedpost and misstep. Because these right-wing peasants? They were – and had been – revolutionary material. In the meantime, what is the task of the class conscious advanced worker? To develop and expand the reach of the secret, illegal press. To ensure the second uprising succeeds where the first one failed (and the first is always doomed), there must be secret, secure comms. Don’t worry about numbers.
Be a lion, fight like a lion. The SocDems, the liberals, the police will have the numbers. And still, with only a handful, you can make them quake, if you have the strength of God and an iron will. 50 of you must become strong enough to be a contender against the whole machine!
Be the light in the darkness.
Do not ask for a savior. Be able to save others.
Picture, if you will, an awakened proletarian, full of fire and brimstone. His passions are inflamed against tyrants, his gut burns with righteous justice. With hammer and sickle in hand, he strikes out against against the regime and its machine. Miraculously, the regime falls. It is joy and light. Everything can change. Now, the peasants can be free. The lion can lie down with the lamb. At last, oppression is ended.
Our proletarian hero soon finds that a bigger barrier to the reading of theory was apathy, not force. He was always a bookish sort, and assumed others were the same, and only lack of opportunity stopped them. What a shock to find that they preferred their crude amusements.
Try as he might, he could not make them read. Or listen to opera. Or appreciate the fine arts. There are many fine places left abandoned, with much beauty. What is a palace, after all, but a house for government? And we, the Party, are now the government. Should it not be our house? Our House of Government? Our luscious spas and grand dachas? After all… why shouldn’t I? And he deserves it, after all. His duties are vast. His responsibilities lay heavy. It is the People’s Army, but he must lead it. It is his charge as a Party man, one of the shepherds of the proletarian mass (is he no longer a proletarian himself?) Rest befits a warrior. And one day, on leave, he meets a woman who is not of the rough hewn sort, whose eyes glimmer with intelligence, who speaks easily of art and music and the high sciences. He embraces her – but she pulls back: “I am a former person.”
He whispers to himself: “I will change that.”
The wars come to an end. He is old now. And when he washes his face and looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a familiar face, scarred by battle, eyes full of callous pride – the face of a Tsarist officer. For what have the years done? They have taken this callow youth and made him a champion of culture, a student of the most progressive sciences, a defender of the commoner, and a loyal servant of his lord.
The concept of aristocracy is anti-fragile because it arises organically. So long as elites conceive of themselves as elites, as a thing separate and above, and so long as they value certain virtues, then the creation of this class is natural, for that is what the class is, regardless of the words used to describe it. What does competition do? If competition arises along the traditional virtues, then it acts as a thresher, separating wheat from the chaff. The most brutal conditions harden and purge decadence. Anti-fragility benefits from conflict, it is not harmed. Hard times make strong men. After all…
Piast the King was Piast the Wheelwright.
So bring the storm and call the lightning. Let the forest burn out the deadwood. Our body politic is in need of some chemotherapy. The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end. History moves in cycles.
