Dearest Frondiers,

I have an admitted distaste for the prescriptive – it is so hard to do in a way that doesn’t cause you to lose 20 or 30 effective IQ points. Plus, plotting a New World Order™ is impossible to do without seeming both sinister and megalomaniacal, probably because that’s exactly what it is. Nevertheless, the Great Moldbug has pointed out that a losing regime must surrender to something (though it certainly isn’t going down peacefully!), and this something must present a superior positive vision.

So… allow me to define the terms of Marxism-Leninism 3.0, Monarcho-Communism.

Micro-ethnostates:
This one comes directly out of Lenin, but the idea is simple. Imagine any sort of community. Like a Historically Black Neighborhood, or a Levittown suburb. Or imagine moving to a neighborhood for the Good Schools. You may not directly like all of these, but I’m sure you can imagine one of them. But there are cases where a Levittown gets block busted, a Historically Black Neighborhood is gentrified, or your local good school is turned into a flaming crater, that something has been lost, and some implicit agreement has been violated, even though it breaks no laws relating to our individual property rights. That’s because what is at stake is not individual property, but communal. People have legitimate communal interests, but no defined communal rights. A corollary of Coase’s theory of property rights is that when the legitimate interests of parties are not codified into some form of property rights, negotiation is damn difficult. Even without legal action, covenants, like cartels, usually break down. But that doesn’t make them harmful. The costs of losing a neighborhood’s character are distributed and small for every individual transaction, while selling out is individually beneficial. But overall, you experience… some loss.

So what do we do? We codify. Communities have communal rights. We define the community as the micro-ethnostate, which only requires two formal rights to function: the right to secede and the right to associate. The first right, the right to secede, means that a subunit of the original community can divorce itself from the shared laws, covenants, and codes of the whole and form its own new community with its own new laws, covenants, and codes while remaining within the larger polity. The second right is the right to associate. This means that a community is allowed to police its own boundaries. In order to be admitted to a new community, one must have the permission, however granted, of the community itself. No forcible block busting here. Covenants are genuinely binding. This implies one more individual right, the right of exit, allowing persons to exit, as individuals, communities they dislike to seek greener pastures, if they can find them.

Within this framework of micro-ethnostates, one might even conceptualize people who wish to go on living in the old liberal way, the Last Libertarians. I wish them no will, and it is their right.

Conflicts between communities are mediated by the Sovereign and his national law, but most life occurs *within* the community by nature.

With the contiguous bourgeois ethnostate, there are no options but relocation and genocide. Abolish the ethnostate, community, and greater belonging, and you have only alienation instead. Lenin saw this way back in the 1910s. He was right then, and he’s right now. It’s time to listen.

Industrial Judges:
Another Lenin idea that sadly never found flesh. Just as communities have legitimate collective interests, so too do sectors. The current regulatory environment is governed by the rules and whims of bureaucrats who basically know nothing about what they govern. This is because of the stupid bourgeois idea of impartiality, which really means that those who know something and must care are automatically exempted. We systematically create experts with no skin in the game and are astonished by their spectacular stupidity.

This is mediated by a layer of skin. But only mediated. The owners, through lobbying, can exert their will over the law. But this only reflects the interests of the owners, which is not always concordant with sectoral health, but only the profit-maximizing (in the short term). Furthermore, owners, through lobbying, can engage in informal lawfare with each other, destroying rivals with onerous regulation. This damages the long-term viability of a sector by creating ridiculous, damaging regulations that only exist to take out enemies.

Instead of having bureaucrats write the regulations, the sectors themselves will write the regulations. And these regulations will not just be written by owners, but will be decided by workers. Workers have skin in the game to keep their workplace pleasant, while they have an incentive to not regulate it into oblivion. A combined sectoral union will, through its decision making process, create the regulations of a sector. When there are intra-industrial conflicts, chosen men, the Industrial Judges, will mediate these conflicts fairly. At the same time, a sector can attempt conditions unduly favorable to itself. To prevent this, the Industrial Judges of all sectors, collectively, can strike down individual sectoral agreements for the good of the whole, with the assent of the legislature.

What I am proposing, simply, is the idea of privileges. This was a concept abolished by bourgeois universalist law – we all became equals, with no special privileges. But the idea is that collective, corporate bodies can have special exemptions made for them by themselves, with the assent of the Sovereign, in order to fulfill their duties. The most notable is the job security granted to the guilds. Guildsmen had job security for life, essentially, which seems like an impediment to economic “efficiency”. But today, workers often withhold knowledge to protect their own jobs, not training a (cheaper) replacement until they’re ready to retire. The granting of the job security privilege facilitated knowledge transfer and the maintenance of techne. The inability to teach techne is one of the main causes of Admech America, or the decay of the American technological base. The Industrial Judges, the representatives of a sectoral interest, will attempt to pass the privileges necessary for a sector to carry out its duties.

Feudal Socialism/Industrial Democracy:
Here I break with Lenin.

Property is hereby abolished.

What are the usual arguments for property? That an owner has better incentive alignment, right? When the monarch is the owner of society, he has an incentive to keep it in good order, unlike someone who only enjoys usufruct rights, who wishes to loot it for permanent gains for his backers. This is a fine story.

The problem is that those “property rights” are not what we understand as property. What we have now is bourgeois property, not what they had. What they had was not property, but usufruct – but a particular kind of usufruct. The lord was a mere steward, but he was a steward not for “the people”, but for posterity. The claims here are the claims of all our dead ancestors and all the cries of the unborn upon the present. Are you sensing a theme here? The story of communism is collectivism, and the story of collectivism is the recognition of legitimate collective rights and interests *in exchange* for duties fulfilled. We are a sum of our identities, which constitutes the privileges we have and the duties we must carry out. No man is an island and no man can be.

Faith. Family. Fatherland.

An individual may possess no property. Instead, for their labor, they are compensated with labor vouchers, a particular narrowing of currency that retains its exchange value for goods, but not for ownership and the power that implies (See: Basic Marxism, Contra Luka – if you don’t read Luka, you must. This charming young lad is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on Rosa Luxemburg). That is, when you are paid your socialist wages for socialist commodity production in our Socialism in One Country under our great Red Tsar, Mecha-Stalin, you can only exchange them for short-term use of property (rental) or long-term (life-lease) use of said property, a state which does not outlast your death. Some would call this “personal property” rather than general property. That’s right. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.

But property, by reality, exists. I mean, there is property, and it will always be owned. If not by us, the individuals, then someone. An abdication of ownership only defaults ownership to either strongmen or the state (the largest of strongmen). So who can be owners?

It’s simple. All property is hereby owned by Noble Houses. A Noble House is a durable corporate entity which exists over time. Individual income taxes are hereby abolished. Instead, only corporate taxes remain. To remain in existence, a Noble House must pay a base tax (~$10,000/year) and a progressive share of its income. By nature, (non-sole proprietorship) businesses being corporations, all (non-sole proprietorship) businesses are now Noble Houses. Sole proprietors are better understood as craftsmen belonging to a particular sector. In addition, a Noble House must have a clear designated line of succession, or it is abolished. For most, this will be the family relation, though others can legitimate stake on posterity, like a childless person adopting or taking godchildren, or a famed professor establishing a school of thought. But those with no stake in the future cannot be allowed to govern it. Until you’re a married adult with children or some other stake, you’re not a political adult – sorry! No cat ladies allowed. Only the heads of Noble Houses can participate in non-industry sectoral politics. A community’s covenants are set by the perpetual owners that reside within it. As it was before the rigidization and formalization of the font of honor, anyone who can meet the burdens can self-declare into the nobility. The only caveat is that their voting power begins at 50% and increases by 1% per year, as they acculturate upwards.

The employee relation is hereby abolished. The adult members of a Noble House are hereby co-owners. All Noble Houses are socialist cooperatives which engage in profit sharing. The profit sharing will be set internally, but must at least be proportional to wage-labor contribution, with deviations towards more equitable sharing being permissible, but not more inequal distributions. So long as someone is engaged with a Noble House, they hold their share of the Noble House enfeoffed from their Lord, so as to share skin in the game. In practice, employees of small businesses already share the negative skin in the game, as anyone who has been paid late during crisis can attest to.

The potential votes of a Noble House are its profits divided by the average per capita GDP or some other metric of national citizen income. Like Lenin, we recognizance the equivalence of economic and political power as power. (See my various writings on monopoly and cronyism). As a bonus, this gives Noble Houses an incentive to report high profits rather than squirreling everything through holes – if you don’t, you can be buttfucked politically. But the actual votes which it can cast are the number of people who swear fealty to the Noble House to represent its interests. This is a yes/no operation and fractal. Persons can swear fealty to a Noble House and agree to be governed by its laws, which does not give them a voice in picking those policies, or they can choose not to do so. Noble Houses can, in turn, swear fealty to larger Noble Houses. Very powerful members of a large Noble House, like engineers and lawyers, can be heads of Noble Houses in their own right, giving up some of their consumption-income in the standard way. Only those with a perpetual stake in society have a say, but the popular sovereignty mandate is maintained. This creates, again, a hierarchy.

Why do I break from Lenin here? Because I must.

When mystifiers talk about index fund socialism, they are defending the system which already exists. Lenin may have been a centralizer and a plannerist, but he always was adamant that the particular politics of a place exist rooted in its particular material conditions. The material conditions of yesterday, with industrial combinations and irreducibly complex products, necessitated the development of monopolies, which necessitated the securing of state power and the expansion of finance capitalism. When a modern mystifier talks about monopolies, securing finance capitalism, or central planning, they are defending the system of managerial capitalism which came into being in the 20th century in all major industrial powers. We already have the FED! We already have monopolies everywhere! To advocate for that is not progressive (again, meaning only the consequent flow of history), but conservative, conserving an order which has become stagnant and repulsive, and which knows only further planning, further monopoly, and further impoverishment of the common man. The Green New Deal and the Great Reset are the culmination of the contradictions of a decadent system.

The Emperor
Comrade-Kings of Regions and Religious Heads
Comrade-Dukes of States, Industrial Judgeships, and Megacorporations
Comrade-Counts of Counties and Big Businesses
Comrade-Barons of Families, Small Businesses, and Neighborhood Blocks
Free Tradesmen with Sectoral-Union Votes -> Sovereignty collectivized and delegated to Industrial Judges
Co-owning Members of a Noble House who lack individual sovereignty
Free Men living off in the woods

Collectively, all the heads of Noble Houses are the nobility, or, in Marxist-Leninist fashion, the Party. The Second Estate.

The Great Chain of Being is restored. If this is all sounding very politically Catholic, well…

The Cult of Personality/Divine Right:
Because it is. Who else but Stalin, educated a Jesuit priest, could have invented the Cult of Personality? The people are right to venerate him. A Cult of Personality is only just and proper. The Emperor is the Sovereign. The Sovereign, like many a monarch before him, is the vessel of the People and their Popular Sovereignty. He is the General Will made manifest, through the Divine Grace of God. You can tell this is so because he remains on the throne. His powers are the ability to determine the state of exception (effectively, unlimited power when desired, but destabilizing to do too often), to veto any legislation on behalf of the People, to propose a problem that must be legislated on behalf of the People, and the powers of Purge and Terror.

That’s right. Purge and Terror.

The Sovereign has a limitless and legitimate right to erase any Noble House it so chooses, and to levy any punishment upon its members. The chief oppressors of the people are the nobility: the thieving landlords, the crony capitalists, the labcoat tyrants, the crooked judges. They cannot be abolished – many a revolutionary has tried and failed to war against reality. We must have hierarchy, because hierarchy is human nature. But the people, being individually quite weak, cannot hope to stand against their oppressors. Only the Sovereign, invested with their popular sovereignty, can strike a blow against them. Hence, Purge, unlimited Purge, so that all corrupt elements may be swept away.

But this runs up against the classic problem where the Sovereign may be mad. And here, I will shamelessly borrow from Moldbug – the Sovereign can be removed by his board. But what board is worthy enough to judge the Sovereign, the People’s Representative and God’s Chosen? Only those who are his peers.

Within the nobility are those who are so grand, they are like little Sovereigns in their own right, so many have sworn to their banner. These greater Counts, Dukes, and Kings of the realm constitute the Emperor’s peers, and are thus the realm’s peerage – the Central Committee. There is one check and one check only on the Sovereign’s absolute power, which is a large supermajority of the Central Committee voting to depose him. At this point, a replacement is found, and all members of the Central Committee abdicate to their heirs.

There is no way forward but back, and no way back but forward. History proceeds not in a straight line, but in a spiral.

Warm regards,
Monsieur le Baron

Appendix: Updates and Suggestions
1. To remove the Sovereign, the Central Committee must also attain popular assent. An obvious hole to patch that I missed. Obviously, a Sovereign protecting the people against the peers is doing their job right.

2. This post covers the Second and Third Estates, but not the First Estate. Matters of culture and custom belong to the church, and the church can patch what law cannot. By custom, most punishments meted out should be public apologies/cancellations/due penance. This will protect against a mediocre and zealous monarch – most purged will just be cancelled.

3. Also, by custom (anything relating to the Sovereign can only be by custom, for law cannot restrict a Sovereign), the Sovereign ought to periodically tour the country. Hope lord leaves, hope lord returns. And the peasants should be able to visit the court and see the Central Committee dicking around.

4. Most “middle-class” families would be minor nobles here. It’s hard to draw a line between baron and truly free man, because many of the original words for baron, and the concept, mean “Free Man” or “Significant Man”. America really is a widely franchised society even if you restrict it to only married, staked, property holders. Perhaps a first tier of significant men, middle class citizens, who are locally franchised, and only true barons can vote on national events. Or maybe it doesn’t matter – your average middle class person only has a fraction of a single vote, which will only matter in local microelections.

5. Tax vote can be hacked by paying a lot of tax one year to push some nefarious scheme through. Let’s say the average of the last five or ten years.

6. Industrial court should be hard to legislate in, to ensure we only have the most essential and agreed-on rules. Fines are treated as a slap on the wrist, but accounting fraud, which punishes officers, is relatively rare. So violations of industrial court rulings should result in punishing the heads of the Noble Houses directly.