Dearest Friends,

Why is the sandwich the way it is? Why is the bread there? Certainly, to hold the ingredients. And while the bread takes different shapes, and is sometimes not bread at all, the idea of sandwich possesses the idea of bread for a reason, and is not arbitrary. What is this? This is materialism.

Let’s talk about the form of the next regime. I’ve held off on doing this for a long time. Part of this is because it is not a relevant question. As I’ve stated in the importance of ripping spines, the most crucial power is taking power, not drafting ideal policy, because policies are shaped by the power discourse and the reality of existing cultural and political traditions anyways. Part of it is because the descriptive is always more interesting and correct than the prescriptive. It is far easier to identify the problem than it is to solve the problem. It’s easy to see something is wrong, and even the simplest of citizens in our great empire now sees there is something rotten in this Denmark. But there are a variety of answers, and scratch long enough – all of them are stupid.

But part of it? Part of it is simply that this is a largely useless thing to do. I will explain.

First, without further ado, what is the shape of the regime I have envisioned? It is simple. I intend to complete the system of the NEP. What is the basic unit of society? It is clear that all communities must do two basic functions. First, to provide for their members. Secondly, to structure their lives and provide social bonds and continuity. Here we have the dual nature of production, and the social relations it engenders – around production, a community of producers is formed. And what we have, then, is a village. The factory is not merely a factory, but a township. The company town is not an aberration, but a reflection of that ancient truth that villages spring up and specialize in tasks. The company town was an echo of that, but itself was overcome by the steady expansion of production towards monopoly-social production. Where you have a factory owned by its workers, collectively, you have a village which is run by its members – and the Comrade-Director is merely a local noble lord – in truth, a Comrade-Baron. But when your lord is local, you can wring his neck. Strikes, protests, and general grumbling is always more effective when your master is next door and only has your local community as their power base. It is a return to the stationary bandit. The Soviet and its expert is merely the village and its lord.

Of course, many have noted that village life and laboring in a well-defined community is less alienating. The trick of it is that village life was *obsoleted* by the material conditions and the social relations of a new form of production. And that’s the snag which often catches budding reactionaries. The first layer of reaction is merely aesthetic – a desire to return to a prior time without grasping the real and material differences. The tradwife who is a whore for you and gives you anal and wears IG model makeup in the woods. RETVRN to TOGA without surrendering your iPhone. The second layer of reaction grasps the form had a function, and that the value of that Chesterton’s fence was lost, and having seen that, tries to put the fence back up. But the fence failed in the first place for a *reason*, a material cause, something which made its timber no longer so sturdy. To walk the left hand path of reaction is to recognize that the progress in history has made the old fence too weak to hold, but also to see the old function can be preserved by crafting a new form which will preserve the old idea. Old wine in new bottles.

The village is dead. Long live the village.

What has destroyed the village? Simply that the village is not compatible with monopoly-social production and the specialization of labor not only on the individual level, but on the industrial firm level. No longer the butcher, the baker, and the brickmaker, but MeatCo, Bakr, and Amazon Prime Presents: House. Why can’t we RETVRN? Because there was a reason why monopoly came about. Monopoly is not just a blight, a wart, on the face of history. Monopoly is necessary because of irreducible complexity, and thus represents a genuine advancement in the productive forces. What is irreducible complexity? It is when a product is so complex that any of the highly specialized constituent parts cannot form an independently viable product. The consumer is only one kind of consumer, the producer therefore faces a monopsony – even if one were to break up the monopoly, all the individual firms face monopsony conditions, thus operate as a de facto monopoly, guided by an invisible hand of market necessity. This is what Yang means when he says monopoly can’t be broken up – the Facebook website cannot be split into smaller Facebooks, even if you can spin out things like IG. It’s irreducibly complex. You *can* attack this by democratizing protocols, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem of irreducible complexity where it remains – it is trying to kill the category by plugging a single hole. You need a general solution to the problem of monopoly.

Here we have the dialectic: the village production system against the result of capitalism advancing until it abolished itself into monopoly-social production (“late Capitalism”). The thesis, the antithesis. The synthesis! The de-alienation of labor and community while preserving the fruits of monopoly-social production and advanced planning of labor. What separates the Soviet from the Village? Both have a council, yes. The difference is that the Soviet, the council of workers, will be refounded around the productive element. By doing so, these productive units can voluntarily self-combine into larger productive combinations, while keeping the elements of worker control: corpo-duchies. What you get is not bourgeois democracy, but industrial democracy. Insofar as there are disputes to be mediated by different opt-in combinations or rules which must be maintained universally, those can be resolved by a central state which maintains, as Lenin wrote, a class of industrial judges, led by a powerful central committee – the monarchy, which protects the interests of the plebians against the powerful aristocratic heads of the various enterprises and even larger industrial combinations.

This may be sounding familiar – and you are right.

What is Gadaffi’s Arab Socialism and its partitioning of society into smaller, autonomous, self-governing units but this? They call it tribalism, but tribes reflect an ancient reality that can’t be ignored.

What is Curtis Yarvin’s latest foray of villages and foundations but this? The only difference is the governing entity he has is cultural, a foundation, while I propose an economic structuring of the villages. Perhaps a distinction without a difference! A good materialist believes culture is downstream of material conditions, and material conditions are downstream of culture.

What is Anarcho-Capitalism and its private security corporations but this? What difference exists between the Megacorp and the Corpo-Duchy? Merely ownership.

What is White Nationalism but this? The communities defined a different way, but fundamentally, the return to free association and the creation of local communities and collectives over the atomized individuals of modernity.

In short – White Nationalism IS Communism IS Anarcho-Capitalism IS Salus Populi IS TradCath Benedictism IS Reaction IS Revolution IS

A revolt against the modern world.

And why? What is the radical?

The radical is a person haunted by specters of futures past and futures present.

It’s merely convergent evolution. What you’re seeing is the common perception of a future present. If Woke Capital, the force of atomizing monopoly-social production, is the problem, then the solution necessarily must be AGAINST atomization, and a RETURN to Dunbar communities. The rest? Ideology, pure ideology. Imperial aesthetics! Ideology is an aesthetic, because the contents of ideology are governed by material conditions, by what the ideology is called into being to fight. All antitheses to a given thesis must have shared characteristics which relate to the negation and opposition of the original thesis.

So now, dear reader, you understand the meaningless of prescription. Because the way an ideology forms, is shaped, and runs downstream is governed by the material conditions of the age. This is a blessing. If I am wrong, then, so long as my successors do not impose my beliefs in a totalitarian manner, reality will correct them. The United States, Nazi Germany, and the USSR had very different ideologies. All thought they were building different futures. But the conditions of reality, the conditions of monopoly-social production, obliged them all to become managerial-planned economies. All these ideologies, these visions of the future, are shaped by a shared vision of what the future must be, but if the future is different? Then they will be different.

I am watching the night die. I am watching the day be born.

I am seeing the rot of ancient institutions. A place, of which I am legacy, but not alumnus – that itself, indicative of something – falling to ruins, shaking itself apart. And despite it all, I am saddened to see it passing. What am I, unworthy barbarian, to be the last to receive an education as old as this country, one that made, groomed, defined the American ruling class? It is one thing to wear a mask which a thousand generations before have worn. It is another to see the snapping of a chain forever. And though one might take a spark from a dying flame, the new flame which grows where it is planted will never be the same one. But I am no passivist. I was born and bred a prince, and this? This is duty. This is my birthright, which is really the same thing. If I fail here, then so what? History shall produce another. And another. And another. So long as the contradictions of the present hold, then their intensifications will result in more and more free energy for the taking, until even a mere child can knock down the whole rotten edifice. The Green New Deal and the Great Reset are not a change, but merely the maximum extent of the logic of managerial-planning, the whole world under the thumb of a handful of apparatchiks, which does not resolve the Information Problem, but only makes it more dire.

One way or another, history comes, not softly through a back door, but magnificently, astride a white charger, as a conquering general.

For better or for worse?

גַּם זֶה יַעֲבֹר.

Your humble scrivener,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest Friends,

The statues weep salt as they topple. The barbarians are at the gates, but they’re inside the walls. The rivers run raw and jet black, the sky is burning bright and red, and the sparks dance minuet. Bombast and burst and crackle. The rockets stream white and black striped across the heavens. It is the end. It is the beginning. At the end of the game, the toys go back into the box. The pilgrims say a prayer for Absalom and prepare to depart. The beams shudder and crack under a weight they cannot bear. The stone is fracturing, dust spurts from open wounds. It is heaving, it is coughing bloody, faces are coated with limestone ash. A golden bull is melting.

Into the night goes a single spark, a torch passed to a distant and unknown future, given out of a single and solitary hope, the hope of man sitting alone in the wee hours of the night since time immemorial. The hope of not being forgotten. The hope of not being alone. The phoenix rising from a man who is sick but healthy.

The year is 1917. The year is 1956. Here is what the power elite did. The system of Capitalism 1.0, like all systems, had within itself the seeds of its own destruction, a set of internal contradictions that would destroy it and lead to the construction of a new system. The operation of unrestricted markets must produce a competitor which is more able than the others and which therefore comes to dominate the others, creating a monopoly. In this manner, competitive capitalism passes into monopoly capitalism. A monopoly no longer produces blindly for a market, but attempts to predict the entire social demand of a product. To this end, it must gather information and manage its response.

The ruling elite that was constructed as a response to this new form of capitalism was an amalgamation of different power bases. You had the powers of the military, the powers of corporations, and the powers of the old rich. These powers were bound, horizontally, through shared cultural connections and institutions, such as schools, universities, and social events. By this, they are bound into a single managerial elite for the whole empire with a shared class consciousness wrapped up in maintaining it. Above the managerial elite is an upper class of “rich kids” corresponding to these, the “smart kids”.

The “rich kid” strata, the upper class, is also a horizontal, bound by similar means. And they control their own operations of “smart kids”, which they move and deploy throughout the machine to contest various points of control and sources of power. The upper class strata is so small and concentrated that one node reaches to more or less every other node, allowing them to personally connect to all power within the empire. Each of these upper class families constitutes an organization similar in structure to a crime family. While younger families might be run by the house head, more commonly they are run by a chancellor serving the family’s interests. The organization is hub-and-spoke, with every upper class person as a hub connecting to the other hubs. Resources and capabilities flow up from their controlled verticals while protection and access flow downwards.

The endless subdivision of shares and ownership allows for increasingly small stakes to control corporations, because the wider pool of mass ownership is unable to meaningfully organize itself to contest anything, and the smaller the divisions, the more a single motivated stake can control a corporation’s formal sources of ownership authority.

This is one vertical. The other vertical is the NGO-political machine, discussed in Maw of the Machine. Upper middle class kids run each of these verticals for the benefit of their hub. In this manner, you have a variety of internal factions competing over hard power. Rather than weakening the system, this strengthens it, as iron sharpens iron, as power nodes become captured by the most ruthless operators. An operator can be deployed to capture a NGO through seizure of the board through large donations followed by a nomination of a director, or through lawfare. In the case of a corporation, loyal elements can be pushed upwards through the chain of command, or they can be installed by buying a directorship and then appointing a loyalist.

The largest of the hubs is itself an agglomeration of hubs as well as the decentralized consciousness of the government-mind. The larger the entity, the more fragile it is. Monopolies, being the largest possible sectoral entity, are extremely fragile. At the same time, the logic of competition means that monopoly sooner or later develops – if not everywhere, then at least in one sector. This is enough to bring about the next stage of capitalist development. The monopoly is powerful but fragile, and it wants to survive. And a monopoly is incentivized to form, sooner or later, because free competition is anathema to megafortunes, therefore a megafortune reward awaits the one who can first make and preserve a monopoly. The best way to survive is to transfer its exposures and its fragility to an outside entity – the state. In this manner, a monopoly comes to meld itself with the state apparatus in order to guarantee its own survival. The banks and fund-offices which control the monopolies through their ownership shares come to develop a close and tight relationship with the state’s central bank. The state, in order to safeguard the monopoly, must grow larger. Having grown larger, it becomes more profitable for each newly formed monopoly to exert its power to capture the powerful state and use that to make profits.

In this manner, the economy comes to be centrally planned by a managerial-bureaucrats running monopolies producing for all of social demand. This system is inefficient and is dissolving under the weight of its own failings. The US watched the USSR collapse and took it for a failing of Communism vs Capitalism, when it failed to realize its own economy was taking the same managerial-bureaucratic shape and is now facing the USSR’s same issues.

The keystone of the managerial-bureaucratic planned economy is information. This is why the masters are so-called technocrats and engineers have a special role in our current Second Technocracy. The more information, and the more this information can be parsed, the less wastefully the great planned machine can run. But the planners being distant from production, the knowledge problem must always rear its ugly head, and the information can only be a narrowing of the efficiency gap, not an abolition of it. The monopolies are inefficient but necessary because the long complex chains of late capitalist products cannot be reduced to smaller production combinations, so specialized is every node.

The finance capital-central bank machine has the mechanisms of direct control, through the aforementioned share pathway. But it also has an indirect means of discipline. The C-M-C cycle is dependent on the ability to convert capital back into money back into capital. In the modern economy, this is done by lending. Large corporate loans bear debt covenants which restrict and mandate a certain course of actions, set of behaviors, and key metrics. In this way, finance capital doesn’t even need to directly own a company to control it. The economy runs on debt to convert capital back into money, and debt is controlled by the banks, and the banks need the guarantee of the central bank as a backstop.

The Green New Deal and Great Reset are intensification of this trend, by further integrating the global economy into a more cohesive unit and by bringing production planning to an even more centralized cabal of bureaucrats, not realizing the inherent fragility of this system must only exponentially increase the more integrated and centralized – larger – it becomes. To cope with the even larger efficiency losses, labor must be stripped of even more amenities, reduced to pod-living, bug-eating inputs to the capital machine.

It is not a matter of decadent elites or wickedness. The material conditions of monopoly capitalism give rise to this power structure. Indeed, the material conditions of an era give rise to the power structures of that age. The Military Revolution creates absolutism by making it impossible for fortifications to withstand a strong central power, but also forcing that strong central power to be strong because a mass gunpowder army could not be deployed by a weak state. The castle-logic is undone by gun-conscript logic. The French Revolution was a fundamental incompatibility between the forms of the Ancien Regime and the material realities of the forming industrial-capital age. And when I say forms, I do mean forms. It is a classic middle class error to mistake the forms for the essence. That is why they believe the French Revolution was the overthrow of the aristocratic families rather their ultimate strengthening. The aristocratic families became richer after the Revolution – the Revolution brings about a new social order in which their power can be operated in a manner more aligned to the material realities of the day. The essence of the class is the continued rule of these families, not the aesthetics of the Ancien Regime, not its forms.

This is also why certain strains of NRx are fundamentally revolutionary, not reactionary. The Kshatriya, as a new self-appointed nobility, are really expropriating the descendants of the Ancien Regime, not restoring them. An analysis which focuses on the battles of forms in the superstructure misses the real families (which would like to go un-expropriated), the real bonds of loyalty and mutual affinity within these circles, and the material interests they pursue. It is fundamentally the same as the liberal notion of families of choice, people bonded by the same taste in Marveloid mass culture – aesthetic bonds are superficial, and wrapping one’s self up in the clothing of the Ancien Regime will only attract the wrath of its inheritors.

There is no going back to the old forms, and that is a place where classical reaction fails. The classic reactionary fetishizes the old forms, such as the ermine cloaks and court balls and swords belted to waists. But that order was born out of older material conditions, and any attempt to resurrect it will find it destroyed by the still extant modern material conditions. You can’t restore classical feudalism by just building new castles, because gunpowder will demolish them again. The free bourgeois has no answer to monopoly-capitalism and state capture by finance capital.

That is why Trotsky rightly said the Russian Revolution was betrayed. Because the essence of “Communist Revolution” was the abolishment of class society, but the USSR became a vehicle to adapt elite rule to the new material realities of monopoly capitalist production, which allows the old elite families to preserve their rule rather than abolishing it. Lenin was not a class traitor but ultimately his class’s greatest champion.

This is the secret of Burnham’s Machiavellians. This is the secret of Lenin in the dusty volumes of collected works. This is the realization of the Duke of Wellington in his old age. Translatio Imperii. It’s not just a dusty old phrase, nor is it merely a matter of piddling legitimacy. It is the means by which old wine can take new bottles. It is the process by which Cthulhu’s long swim can be yoked to the engine of power. It is the left-hand path of reaction.

Through leftism, ensure you and yours rule for ten thousand years. The House always wins.

Can there be anything more fundamentally *conservative* than that?

The pilgrims filed out of a forgotten and untended side gate, marching in a thin, narrow line, cloaks clenched tight to their bodies. And on their tongues and nestled behind their lips was the unspoken promise of Ethiopia distant. The hills were small, the city loomed large behind. Soon enough, the hills were large and the city was shrinking. First it was a bonfire, burning bright. Then merely a flame. Then only a spark, a single ember, reaching out to the spark fleeing it, one spark listlessly, longingly trying to recover a lost child, and then it was gone. Their number was 3 and 14, the flat circle, and to Jobela they gave gold and rubies and emeralds until he was laden thick, and he went back towards the city armed with a twenty-four inch gauge. Under the canopy of an acacia, they rested, and there they broke bread and salt. They slit the throat of a goat and let the blood bleed gently into the earth. Their names were Jobela and Jobelum and they set out on their bizarre adventure.

They went south, following the Wormwood Star.

Does the world revolve around the pendulum?

Running from the skifree yeti,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

I must admit I have had problems laying out my answer. What is to be done? It is as difficult a question now as it has ever been. But perhaps the way to clarifying the answer is to lay out the problem.

Within the newborn state lie the seeds of its own destruction. Its own ideology, carried to its natural ends, must self-contradict. The more a state ages, the more it accumulates Schelling points increasingly unsuited to present conditions, while at the same time, it accelerates more and more towards the extreme of the present conditions it itself created. The long state invariably becomes a state haunted by its own contradictions.

Take, for instance, the Ottoman Empire. It was founded as a religious state, explicitly so, defender of the House of Islam, the house of peace. From the get go, this mission was… only dubiously true. Early on, less than half of the ghazis, the warriors of the faith, were Muslim. Why would they be? The Ottoman Empire was the phoenix rising from the ashes of Byzantium. A young Christian lord had a simple choice. Either stand and die for a dying empire, or turn coat and live. And so it went. Constantine XI’s nephew becomes the Grand Vizier of a great new empire.

Even in the early stages, the contradictions of a regime exist. But so long as the empire is growing and strong, the elites have no reason to question them. Instead of debating angels and pins, they are getting rich and powerful. The Ottoman Empire grows, first reclaiming its rightful core territory as inheritor of Byzantium, then going forth to seize more land. It is here that the ideological is least valued, and yet, most truly believed. For only a man who believes when it does not provide gain is a true believer. The rest are grifters and fairweather friends.

But an empire cannot grow forever. There are physical limits. And as the empire stagnates, the elites must now compete among themselves. There is the material conflict, but an empire also seeks to centralize power and bring all authority under the sovereign. Violence becomes more and more the realm of the state, starting with physical violence and seeping down to any kind of imposition of force, until the elites are totally neutered in any material sense. And the more neutered they are to wage war by other means, the more the nobles must wage war through ideology. Leftism is the extension of a regime’s ideology further towards its natural ends. Liberals become more liberal. Japanese militarists become more militarist. Islamists become more Islamist. The more you push an ideology, the further it must diverge from reality, because it becomes more and more about ideals and idealism, and less about material conditions. The end result of this must be to wildly diverge law and reality, as law is the product of the political process, and the political exists symbiotically with ideology. Thus, the law, at first fair, devolves into anarcho-tyranny, as ideological demands become totally opposed to the actual maintenance of order. Any single noble may try to stop it, but then they will be deposed by a rival outflanking them from the left. One must speak the language of power to stay in power. From the perspective of the peasant masses, it looks like the elite are coming to believe more and more insane things, a mass lunacy. The Dirt People and Cloud People can no longer understand each other.

Why does the ruler not step in? The ruler cannot move left, because then the laws and what is real will diverge even further. But if he moves right, he undermines his own legitimacy, becoming the Caliph who stands against Islam – a doomed maneuver. But this means the gaps between the Schelling points of ideology and what is on the ground soon become unspeakably large.

Near the end of the Ottomans, janissaries roamed the land, plundering the peasantry through malicious lawfare and abuse of their powers. Their actions had the weight of false legitimacy, as they were nominally servants of the national ideology and its consensus. Enter Hadji Mustafa Pasha, governor of Serbia, the “Mother of Serbs”. He was a benevolent lord, concerned with the wellbeing of his land and its people. So, like any wise ruler, he summons his ghazis to strike down the bandit-janissaries and restore the Sultan’s peace. And here he dies, and the course of history turns another corner.

Mustafa’s men and their captain are Christian. The captain writes a letter to the Sultan, asking to be recognized as the new Duke of Serbia so that he may carry out the Sultan’s will and protect his laws. A young empire could have assented. But this is no young empire, but an old and crooked thing, constrained by forgotten law. It cannot. The captain has a choice. He can die for the sake of the Sultan, for the regime, for its laws, for its ideology, and all that which he previously believed, a bright reactionary blaze. Or he can choose to live.

Awake, Serbia. History calls.

In that sense, Camp of the Saints and Submission are two sides of the same coin. In one, the heroes choose to die gloriously, submitting to the beautiful end of the reactionary death cult – a sacrifice to expiate the sins of the dead regime which recapitulates all its art and virtue, men standing against time. And in the other, the last man resigns himself to life and becomes the first man of the new order. The human sacrifice of the reactionary is the blood which permits the sun to rise on the first day of the new order.

We, as builders of the new order, must reenact the mystic secrets of the Osiris mystery. Like Isis, we shall don the seven veils, and descend through seven hells, to take the pieces of the dead man, the reactionary, and bring him back to life as the living-dead man, the soul of the old and the flesh of the new. Here is the dialectic of an ancient occultism resurfacing and its opportune time.

A perceptive soul must be appalled by all the horrors and abominations of a dying anarcho-tyranny. And so the thesis of the regime creates its own antithesis which begins to attract dissident elites. Out of this, a new synthesis must be drawn from the unity of far right and far left.

Wokeism is not a perversion of liberalism, but its highest fulfillment. It is the highest stage of the capitalist, liberal republic, carrying out the work of atomization and commodification to the fullest.

What else? Last time, we discussed the construction of a political machine. A political machine allows you to build a patronage network and a power base. In a time of chaos, a political machine easily becomes a war machine. The working boys are turned into fighting men. When you own a local government, it is only a short step to go independent. The natural instinct of power is to tend to itself. As Rome falls, the city walls go up.

Behold the glory of Ali Pasha, king of Ioannina, lord of the Epirotes. Here is an elite with an independent power base. He ruled over much of Rumelia, and Rumelia, in turn, was the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Officials in Rumelia held rank and privilege over their equals elsewhere in the Empire. It would be like having a warlord ruling over New England. Here was a man of cruel and magnificent appetites. For his own sexual amusements, he had the young women of his lands thrown into lakes. And he dreamed big. He dreamed, one day, of restoring Greek culture to its rightful glory. To this end, he built his power greater and greater, holding court with some of the great Romantics of the age.

A more vigorous Empire could reabsorb an independent power base like this. But not the Ottomans, not at that point. Ali Pasha dies, but Greece springs from his blood. And when Greece goes, so goes almost 40% of the Ottoman tax base. A mortal wound. A great Alexander, Augustus, or Alexios could recover from such dire straits.

But none are coming.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.

So too with China in many collapses. Elites are able to construct their own power bases, and when the core shakes, the power bases can strike out on their own. Empires splinter into many pieces. Here, there is sometimes an easy path back through the marsh. If a warlord has enough personal loyalty cultivated in a large enough army, they can, like Franco, conquer the whole land themselves, and restore order. But without that personal loyalty, one cannot do this. Politics runs on loyalty. You have personal loyalty, built up through long relationships between patron and client, but to make a larger machine, you must have engineered loyalty. What is to stop multiple minions from combining to remove the master? Nothing. This infighting necessarily prevents reunification. To restore order, one must have an ideology which can generate loyalty in a new Party. Not only that, it must be a better ideology than even the regime had. The regime had the benefit of inertia, allowing it to staff itself with the pathetic and weak. The new ruler must be able to generate loyalty from the best and most talented, those whose abilities give them many abilities and thus natural independence. When you are on the rough path, many will want to retreat back to the safety of the marsh. When you are on the rough path, only the best and most skilled comrades will do. A would-be ruler must be able to drag them back forward, and if not, then clearly mark those who return to the marshes as weak and not of the Party. You need an ideology for that.

The natural instinct at this point is restoration, to end the chaos by reinstating the old order. But the material conditions which made the original regime possible no longer hold. Recall the regime is founded on its original power bases and then has to flex and bend its system as new power bases and new elites come into being – the original constitution is even less suitable than the perverted one, since it removes all the cultural adaptations. And the ideological conditions which exist are not suitable. It is attempting to return thinking to the state of the original question, when the intellectual chaos of the collapse comes from carrying ideas to their natural conclusions. And finally, the ruling clique itself is rendered unsuitable. Regimes are founded by players of naked power politics, persons of an UMC or WC background, those who can play with concrete realities. Over the course of a regime’s lifespan, the top elites transition from UMC thinking to UC thinking. Power becomes curried through court maneuver and social scheming and thin networks of charm, rather than the brute force of gold, guns, and grunts. Necessarily, this must be so, because the state must monopolize force, and therefore must prevent open conflict, causing a transition to battle by social grace. The dinosaur evolves into a chicken. The dirty business of rule is devolved to the lower aristocracy, and the dirty business of facing power to the proles, leaving these as the two classes with an understanding of what power means when the clock runs out. The middle class bureaucrat and the cloistered emperor have simply drunk too much of the koolaid to be saved. And any attempt at restoration will be full of the apparatchiks of the last regime, the eunuchs come to pick over the corpse. Cao Cao begins as the regent defending the emperor’s lawful rights, but this is a path that can only end one way. The restoration of a regime requires the same skills as founding a new one, and the last emperor is not up to the task.

Let us lay out the necessities of our new movement or any new movement which must succeed. First of all, it must be the furthest left and furthest right movement possible. If it is not, then one will be outflanked from the left or the right. One must not be overcome, but always be overcoming. Like Lenin, we must be able to attack and absorb all our rivals from the left, right, and center at the same time, attacking our enemies as cowardly Kautskyites, left-utopians, and right-opportunists without reserve and without contradiction. Secondly, the ideology must engender loyalty by creating a contradicted ruling class. A Christian class of ghazis. An aristocratic Bolshevism. A Jewish Nazism. Because we lack enough personal loyalty to rule an empire (this must always be the case, Monkeyspheres are too small), and we are moving fast, without the old regime’s structure, we must be able to manufacture loyalty from our elites en masse. There are our basic requirements.

This leaves us with the problem of building a Biostalinism. You can never turn back the clock. The horse has bolted.

The only way out is through.

A cultist for the Red Tsar who was, is, and will be,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

Have you ever inserted money into a vending machine? I have! Where does the money go? How does it turn the dollars into chocolate? It is like magic, if magic was real and made of chocolate and also magic. Amazing! And friends, have you wondered how your dollars magically turn into social justice? I haven’t. Step into my Chocolate Factory, but please avoid Mr. Weiner or he’ll show you his Willy Wonka.

How much does it take to buy your way into a politician’s good graces? $1,000,000? $10,000,000? $1,000,000,000? If you answered $10,000, you’re closest to the money. A donor dinner is often only a thousand or couple thousand dollars. For very important people, it might be tens of thousands of dollars, or a hundred or two hundred thousand for someone like the President. These sums are, in fact, fairly small dollar. But the small proletarian donors can’t play because they’re just too small. They could aggregate their funds under a suitable figurehead like le Chapo Man or a union boss. But the boss, once elevated, soon finds his material interests differ from his former comrades. No longer a proletarian, he becomes his own player in the great game, able to independently express his will. The coordination problem prevents proletarians from pooling their resources together to fight.

So you can make contact fairly cheaply. But what about following up? How do you buy a politician with such small sums? Laundering the money through organizations. I don’t mean in the “dark money” sense. That’s childish. Instead, found a cause. A front organization. Get together a few of your friends and make a NGO focused on some political cause you have coming from some ideology you share. Call this the backers a “faction” or “ideo-tribe”. More on this later. When you look at something like urbanism, that’s obviously a front for certain elements of high finance, right? It allows you to justify further development through livability rhetoric. This new construction, preferably of something holy like public housing, creates profits for developers, real estate private equity funds (hedge funds), issuers of asset-backed bonds relating to these deals, and ultimately becomes its own power base which can feed back into the original cause. Or take the green movement. Green rhetoric allows the subsidization of green industries. Good news if you run Nikolai’s Motors or Zappy Sun Power Fun. You get you and a few of your other well-heeled friends in your faction and you each chip in, say, 10 grand. Because these are causes, and ideally, “good causes”, you can attract the donations of small donors, well-meaning progressives or conservatives who want to make change. All of that goes into your slush fund. Being the founder and a major donor, you can set the agenda, which effectively means you control all that money, which means you’ve effectively levered up your initial small dollar outlay several times over. Your initial million or whatever becomes twenty or thirty or fifty million.

And it all comes from the little people. That it comes from the retail workers and clerks and delivery boys is not a flaw but the point! These are the people who can’t fight back if they ever notice you using the organization as a front. Not that they will. How could they? What does the corrupt organization look like? One imagines no show jobs and corrupt cynicism everywhere – but that’s not necessary. Because the front organization’s cause legitimately advances the material interests of the backer, overt corruption is not needed at all. The sinecures need not look like sinecures. Sincerity does not dissolve the organization. Let in all the sunshine you want – the demon does not melt.

Best of all, it’s a tax writeoff. Isn’t that something?

Once your front organization is rolling, you can put people on the payroll. Bluechecks, writers, activists… and politicians. And once you give a politician a sweet, sweet sinecure, you buy the man. And why not? You’re supporting some nice, sweet progressive cause. Nothing corrupt about it, no sir. And even if there are people so principled they’ll never take any money at all, there’s always far more willing to be bought. Many are the activists and bluechecks waiting for their big chance to be pushed up the ladder. Push them, and they will repay you with loyalty. Why not? You made them.

Once they’re in office, they can start repaying you. And believe me, why invest in a cause if it won’t turn a profit? If you and your friends chip a total of $1mm, leverage it to $20mm, and win back a development opportunity worth $25mm, you’ve gotten a 2400% return on your own money and a 25% return on the front org’s. A profit! And you had better turn a profit. The cold logic of capital demands it. If you are not increasing the resources of your front org rather than diminishing, someone else is. There are many ways to redirect money back into your pockets. Secret information, like knowing about coronavirus beforehand so you can short it. Sinecures and created job positions at new bureaus so you can place your lackeys. Favorable laws – or unfavorable ones for your enemies. And the best part? Most of the giveaways don’t even have to look that crooked. Because the cause advances your interests, even sincere laws passed will help you. All the while, the cost is footed by public funds. The burden on the taxpayer creeps higher and higher.

Thus moves the political machine. This is the base. The action of the base is to concretely mobilize manpower, money, and mantras to serve your political empire.

But how do you coordinate and form your ideo-tribe in the first place? That’s the superstructure, the dynamics of ideology. That’s social media, that’s the blogosphere, that’s the public square, that’s Reddit and Twitter and 4chan and all those spaces. Ideology is always promulgating around the internet. One or another flavor of communist thinking or liberal thinking or conservative thought will match up with your material interests and moral sensibilities. Then you can latch on. Now you have a common thread to connect with other players in the game. It launders sordid material interest into sacred morality and ideology.

And what kind of ideology is ideal? Not orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in an ideology signifies you want to conform to something greater than yourself, which often means seeking a tribe to belong to, a protector to shield you, or a patron to employ you. No, you want heterodoxy. Drop a Marx quotation in the right places on the “Right”, and you can be ushered into a hidden circle. Those who are overcorrect in professing their ideology create a signal for wanting a party job. Profess heterodoxy, and it shows you aren’t in a position to need to parrot a party line for cash. It shows you can afford to dictate one.

You take your heterodox ideology with which you’ve bonded and you turn around and create organizations to push it. These are your front organizations. The control doesn’t have to be direct here, though it sometimes is. The point is that it pushes discourse your way. As discourse goes enough your way, your front orgs grow more and more powerful, thus moving them from the superstructure from the base. They pay off, pay you, you seize power. Your new ideology, whatever it is, Anarcho-Frontierism, Radical Recyclianism, Eco-Fascism, is now the mainstream in some way. Once upon a time, neoconservatism was a few followers of the mad Jew Strauss, and the New Left was a bunch of radical chic philanthropists and some young buck politicians with the steely ambition in their eyes.

But once it becomes the mainstream, it is no longer heterodox to profess your ideology. Professing it is now the domain of young Twitter suckups looking for a cushy media job. So the organizing ideology shifts again. Thus, the base-superstructure dynamic is always shifting the discourse window to new politics. Thus we have a continuous feedback cycle of base-superstructure ideological laundering for material interests.

And what about the employees of the front orgs? For some, fame, power, and prosperity await. They will rise high, and those that envy them will be many. Their smiles will strike fear into the hearts of their courtiers. All the riches of the empire will be splayed before their feet. But for most, the machine will consume their big city dreams. They will pen article after article chasing the big break. They will march and call and knock. Their friends will decry them as a gentrifier or the stooge of Melon Tusk or a thousand other things. And in time, they will return home, ashamed by their own brokenness. It does not matter what happens to them. The freelances are the free lances, mere disposable foot soldiers.

These are the shadow wars waged by capital from its invisible fiefdoms, their movements only betrayed by the occasional silver-steel flash in that everblack night.

Lamenting his own unread ink,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

Lee Kuan Yew is a brilliant man. And to be honest, it was an insight of his that prompted these points.

The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.

The words of the great man himself! And yet, if egalitarianism is transparently false, why is it the cornerstone of all these great movements? It can’t just be because it’s absurd. Many things are absurd, but the Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has never attracted many sincere adherents. One answer, one very true answer, is that it widens your coalition, helping you seize power. But once you’ve seized power, why keep paying lip service? Why not discard it like other parts of the pre-revolution rhetorical crap? If you’re an elite, doesn’t egalitarianism paint a giant target on you?

Yes. And that’s the point. The fact that a revolution occurred shows that there were too many elites to begin with. Look at some other points adopted by the USSR after the Revolution. Great Russian Chauvinism and a hatred of intelligentsia as “bourgeois specialists”. A campaign against rootless cosmopolitans. Combine an anti-nobility campaign, an anti-intelligentsia campaign, and an anti-non-Russian campaign, and you’ve managed to implicate the entirety of the Party as class enemies. Which is precisely the idea! Killing people is bloody work. Killing people who are your friends, your comrades-in-arms, even your family, is even harder. Even worse is doing so basically arbitrarily. But in short order, you run out of enemy elites to purge. And there are still a lot of elites. You need to kill randomly, but no humans ever agree to kill randomly. That’s monstrous. You need a Schelling point to rally around. So various persecution campaigns are made that conveniently damn the Party’s whole membership. After the Great Purge, the number of Old Bolsheviks is reduced by 2/3rds, and only 1% are pre-Tsarist nobility. Sure, a lot of those people get politically rehabilitated instead of killed. But you cut down drastically on the numbers. And why does egalitarianism keep showing up in the mix? Because egalitarianism is always against the presence of a standing elite at all, by denying the justness of eliteness and the existence of genuine differences in ability. If all people are equal, any elite must necessarily be comprised of oppressors. And therefore, any member of such an elite can be justifiably purged.

Furthermore, the ability to arbitrarily purge elites allows the new post-revolution sovereign to restore order and the supremacy of the throne. One of the problems before the revolution is an unruly, disordered elite with outside power bases. How do you fix that? You purge the shit out of the elite. You’re disloyal? You’re fucking purged. I think you’re disloyal? Purged. Take too long making the waffles at the Politburo breakfast? Purge, motherfucker. When a revolution occurs, the country is mired in the aftermath of the conflict, and leftist signals are spewing everywhere, like a fire hose. By purging the elite, the sovereign is able to take control of the holiness spiral and reassert control of the situation.

Furthermore, any statement of holiness which must destroy the ruling elite when carried out to its natural conclusion is a negative feedback loop. Nature loves negative feedback loops, and for good reason. The end of a Christian holiness spiral was to become a monk – a celibate monk who disdained worldly power – and that was the end of you as a political entity. It’s too bad Protestantism did away with that, and look at how badly Protestant countries holiness spiral! When you have a negative feedback loop like this, if you go too far, it starts destroying you or even the elite as a whole. At the height of the purge, people were selling out their wives, their families, their children. That’s a tremendous psychic pain and creates a huge incentive to bring the holiness spiral to an end. Hey, fuck this Marxism crap, let’s just have intra-Party peace. As soon as there is enough economic surplus to sustain every surviving elite, there’s a very good reason to call it quits before the monster consumes you too. And so, the French nobility end the French Revolution with a higher median wealth.

But it’s not just egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is just a great universal negative feedback loop. Any creed can work so long as it places disproportionate burdens upon the elite. Let’s take Germany. Specifically, Nazi Germany. A million or two mischlinge survived Nazi Germany – isn’t that fucking weird? That’s a lot of fucking Jews, not just a few freaks. Why would Jews work for the Jew hating machine? Well, one reason is that regime has them by the nuts. If you’re a Jew, and the state’s ideology is to kill all Jews, and you don’t cooperate, you will be killed. But if you do cooperate? Here’s this Certificate of Official Aryan Blood, you’re a good fellow. And there are a lot of Jews placed in that position. Germany was not a particularly anti-semitic place before Hitler. It had full Jewish emancipation. Jews were over-represented in the nobility, and even more over-represented in business. That means there are a lot of Jewish elites. Far from being destabilizing, it builds tremendous loyalty.

To quote Hermann Goering, “I decide who is a Jew in the Luftwaffe.” Far from being a quirk of history, the anti-semitism of Nazi Germany necessarily creates Jewish Nazis. Now let’s go invade Poland and gas their Jews. After all, our Schelling Point demands we put the Jews in camps, so we must round up some Jews.

You would think that noble defectors from the USSR would despise it, but the US troops recording the defectors noted the highest class defectors were the most loyal to Communism, and lamented the excesses of the purge – if only Stalin knew!

Any point which implicates the ruling elite in injustice or perceived injustice can be used as a Schelling Point for purges.

So now we can finally explain the tragedy of Spain, the expulsion of the Jews. It’s because Isabella and Torquemada are nasty, bigoted, closeminded Christian proto-Nazis, right? Spain, the earliest fascist state. Well, actually, there were marriages across religious lines, and the Umayyad elite had mixed with the Christian one. And Jews were fully emancipated, and made up a substantial portion of the Spanish nobility. Well, maybe Torquemada or Isabella are particularly bigoted? Torquemada came from a Jewish family, and Isabella’s father died at a young age, leaving her to be raised by a Jewish father figure. What did happen? The crowns of Castile and Aragon were joined as one. The Reconquista was finished. Great! Spain was unified! And a unified Spain means no more Spain to take as your own.

And with so much Jewish freedom, everyone has a little bit of Jew in them.

How convenient.

And so it came to pass that the Spanish monarchy was able to make a Big Book of Jews, in which any family suspected of being crypto-Jews could be placed, and in it was written the whole Spanish nobility. If any Spanish noble fuck started holiness spiraling about the brown babies? Hey, is your aunt’s name Mary or Miriam? Are you sure your grandfather was named Henry and not Hebrew Shekelstein? How curious. Would you care to step into my office for a moment? Some Jewish peasants get exiled too. That’s politics, baby. It’s not like Stalin wanted to kill off a bunch of kulaks either, it’s collateral damage.

And Daddy’s little girl makes Papa take the wafer and eat a nice juicy pork sausage. He cries. Tears of joy, of course.

The rest of the spares are shipped off to the New World.

Spain enters a Golden Age. Until it ends.

Sic transit gloria mundi,
Monsieur le Baron

EDIT: Some of you may have seen I left my notes/outline up top! That’s why you don’t publish in the middle of the night.

As an addendum, I might as well make a point explicit. You need that negative feedback loop otherwise your movement consumes itself in wasteful signalling before you ever reach power. A political movement with a Schelling point of fitness just turns into a fitness movement. Only when signalling imposes political costs can it keep checking itself long enough to reach power. Egalitarianism works. BLM works – if you are white.

Dearest friends,

America is burning. And so I thought I would finish a post I’d been keeping on the backburner for a while, about the elite and revolutions.

If you read this blog, you almost certainly read bigger blogs, so you are probably familiar with the concepts of Bioleninism (See: Spandrell) and Elite Overproduction (Turchin). I won’t go too far into that, so please read up on that before continuing if you haven’t.

Instead, I’d like to talk about the social composition of revolutionary parties and the significance of that. It is often asserted that revolutions are the middle class using the proles as a bludgeon to pry their way into elite status, killing off the innocent pre-Revolution nobles along the way. There is a lot of handwringing about Jewish bolsheviks killing off the Russian nobility or the rising merchant bourgeois in France destroying the Ancien Regime. It’s a neat little story.

It’s too bad that it’s bullshit.

In my typology of class conflict blog post, I explained that the middle class can rarely create a critical mass of followers because it’s too transparently self-serving. I’m going to elaborate on that. What would you expect the social origins of the early Bolsheviks to be? One would guess a bunch of Jews and middle class people and middle class Jews, right? To some extent, that’s not unfounded. The Party is about 15% Jewish and 44% middle class (Riga). Sounds pretty over-represented, right? Well, Riga is coding noble origins conservatively, since the line between service gentry (upper middle class) and true noble was blurry in the late empire, and still comes up with 13% of the Party being noble. I am less conservative about this, and estimate 15-20%. Commentary’s estimate of Jewish bolshevism skews higher, at 20%. Jews were 4% of the Russian Empire. At most, Jews are 5x over-represented in Bolshevism. The middle class numbered about 10%, so the middle class is also 4-5x over-represented. The nobility was 2.4% of the population (and formally included the service gentry upper middle class, so the broadest definition of noble), and at the very least over 5x over-represented, and perhaps as high as 8x over-represented. No wonder Trotsky, who was both Jew and noble, was a Communist.

Well, some people may say that the NKVD was 75% Jewish. For them, I have a quote from a man who went to observe the Red Army in action.

“Among them, many come from old Russian noble families, where military service in the position of commanders was a tradition of many generations, where military science, one might say, was im- bibed at the mother’s breast, and where military talk surrounded the child from the first years of his life. Cadet schools and military academies were the next steps in their training. Formerly 80 or 90 percent of the famous Russian military leaders as well as the rank and file of officers came from these privileged classes of old Russia.”

80 or 90%, huh? That’s a backbone of the Party. The Red Army wins the Russian Civil War. The Red Army kicks the ass of all the foreign powers intervening. Without the Red Army, there is no USSR. And not only are these the Tsarist officers, they’re the creme of the Tsarist Army. A scholar, Kenez, says of the White Army – their officers are cadets and young, unestablished men. The Red Army gets the old grizzled veterans, real nobles that have been blooded in war. And Trotsky leads them! If you’re Stalin, you can see why you have to purge the Red Army after purging Trotsky, even though you have wars to fight. Can’t have that power base lingering. So it’s a really important part of the power structure.

Okay, so let’s talk about the French Revolution then. Bunch of fucking bourgeois, right? Bzzt. 21 of the Society of Thirty are from the highest levels of the French nobility, almost half, and a majority are noblesse d’epee, which tend to be older and more established than the noblesse de robe. So what about the loyalists? What about the regime? Only 3 out of 36 of Louis’s ministers are of ancient feudal extraction. Far from a rowdy bourgeois element trying to make room for itself, it was the membership of the most pedigreed families that were upset.

So why would an established elite do this? The standard Marxist explanation is economics, historical materialism. Why would a old Bolshevik turn class traitor? True, there is some virtue, but don’t deify them, they are the product of larger material trends. In 1905, the Russian elite was more conservative – and then things went totally to shit. Agriculture produce prices were plummeting, roving bands of anti-semitic thugs called the Black Hundreds roamed the land looting, manors were attacked. Basically, it was becoming really fucking hard to be a noble. Even with so many impoverished peasants, there was not a lot of economic surplus to go around.

What about in France? Well, the French revolutionary families often had one thing in common. They were disfavored at court. That meant they didn’t get the juicy sinecures. Louis XIV was a smart guy, and he always distributed titles and sinecures around all the old families fairly, so that everyone felt like they got a piece. Not so with Louis XVI. Guy is dumb, and he lets his wife award all the best sinecures to her friends and favorites. Bad, bad move. But even with that, the kingdom was broke. They made a big stink about the necklace. Louis XIV did lavish stuff for the court, who complained then? But France then was able to handle it, and the cost of all his many wars. The American Revolutionary War was ruinous for Louis XVI’s France.

You may be sensing a theme here. By the time of the collapse, the state was no longer able to sustain all of its elites. This is Turchin’s elite overproduction in action, a classic set of examples. So why are these revolutions identified as bourgeois? Because there is a grain of truth to that. A truly middle class person has no resources or credibility to rouse the masses, since they have no skin in the game. But as history passes, new forms of maintaining elite power arise (See my post “The Second Technocracy”). One of the leaders of the French Revolution, the Duke of Biron, ran an early form of hedge fund. Does that sound like bourgeois merchant behavior to you? Yes, it does. While not all of the Party was middle class, almost all of it was “middle class” in the sense the early members almost always had a time they spent as itinerant intelligentsia. The managers and thinkers of the coming Managerial Revolution. These new ways of holding power create ways to be powerful and elite without being directly dependent on the state for your power base. It creates an origin point for an alternative state. When the state is rising, it is able to successfully assimilate a new counterelite. 19th century France assimilates the rising medical establishment into its power structure. But when the state is weak? They will have their pound of flesh.

And how do they do it? Signalling spiral. Leftism. Easy enough. Do they believe it? I’m sure they do. Few people are so cynical. You can very easily hold a belief even if it benefits you in a cynical way. Humans are wired that way.

It is too bad they picked an ideology so disastrous for them to personally signal. On comes the guillotine.

Luckily, we humans are smart.

As a non-white, upper middle class person, I would never associate with a political ideology that would harm me. Ha! That would be stupid. Oh wait.

Perhaps this deserves explanation. To be continued in part 2.

Knitting by the rolling carts,
Monsieur le Baron