In the maddened fits of my dreaming, I see, rising in fits and lurches, a dread city, a monolith from the sea, a tyrant fish, a city of mirrors and rust, and the cog and nut cladding of a thousand eyed minarets. Above it all, the Black Sun rises.
The whispering voices, they tell me to write, and so I take up my pen…
If you don’t understand my theorizing, worry not. Sometimes, neither do I.
What is the concept of the political? Politics is about power and the power competition between interests and factions. Politics therefore is the battle which goes on in every society over who gets to be in charge and the distribution of its scarce resources. The concept of the political boils the political down to the core distinction, which is that politics is the friend/enemy distinction. But this itself is not a political statement or act of politics. Rather, it is metapolitical, describing the nature of the political system.
Metapolitics is a description of the systems and mechanisms of politics. Instead of describing any particular faction or interest or issue, it describes how factions and interests and issues come to form. The core concept of the political is the friend/enemy distinction, but this is not the core of metapolitics. Metapolitics considers itself with how the friend/enemy distinctions are formed and what distinguishes the sides. The friend/enemy distinction is the distilling of politics, but it is only the beginning of metapolitics. It is the first brick in our next layer of abstraction. Neoreactionary thought typically focuses on metapolitics and the study of systems rather than the study of liberal rhetoric and the owning of libs (oh, you believe so much in property rights? then why don’t you own more libs???).
Loyalty is the glue that holds political systems together. Loyalty is generated by the gain or promised gain of status or the threatened loss of status. All political mechanisms flow downwards from that fact. Fundamentally, all ways to build coalitions are ways to somehow increase or threaten the status of persons or groups.
Neoreaction spends a lot of time discussing Leftism and trying to define what Leftism is. My definition of Leftism is as follows: Leftism is the extension of a civilization’s foundational principles towards themselves. A liberal society becomes more liberal. A militarist society becomes more militarist. And leftism itself is the power process, because leftism enables to you build loyalty and outflank your rivals. Power exists on the left.
But what is reaction? This is a question, I think, rarely properly considered.
Let’s start by talking about status. Status is definitionally zero sum because it only makes sense as a relative measure. One is high because others are low. Equality in high status does not exist because there is no one to “lord it over”. Status being zero sum, all gains in status must come from another’s loss. All status adjustments are redistributions. Feminism necessarily is anti-male because it raises the status of women, thus lowering the status of the counterparty (because the counterparty, men, exists as a status group relative to women). The status hierarchies of a society are defined by what it values as good, its values. Being in accord with those values raises one’s status, making you a bigger chimp among chimps.
A social constructivist supposes all these values are socially constructed. But we are not social constructivists. There are things which are, by nature, good. These natural goods and their natural value constitute the basis of what I’ll call “innate social status”, or innate status. Natural goods are things like being more beautiful, more intelligent, stronger, more charming, talented at a skill, or possessing more resources (natural wealth). One does not need to be told such things are good to come to believe it (though one can be educated to the contrary). All things being equal, having any of these things is just plain better. The typical cope is to say pretty people are wicked (often true) or intelligent people are pathetic nerds (also often true). But we all know wicked ugly people and pathetic idiots. Again, all things being equal, to have something good is better.
So therefore, all status adjustments occur relative to the baseline of innate status. Political coalitions are built by adjusting status. By conducting politics, we are robbing the winners of nature, the natural aristoi, in order to elevate our own favored group, the created aristocracy. We are also often robbing many others. But the initial act of rule demands a robbery, and the easiest first exclusion to *only reward those who are talented AND loyal to you because they helped you take power*. The first division is to separate the natural aristoi into those in power and those excluded. But every further act of politics, to generate loyalty, must make further adjustments. And to redistribute status *back* to the natural aristoi does not generate particular loyalty, because it’s not a redistribution but a mere relaxing of one’s hold. So politics drives a status hierarchy, which, over time, must become more and more deviated from the innate status hierarchy. After all, the House of Welles was loyal to your father – ah, but you are not your father, are you?
When progressives speak about the continual progress of mankind and reactionaries talk about cyclical history, they are talking past each other. Progressives are talking about the steady improvement of quality of life, and this is true. For all of recorded history, we have seen a more or less steady march of technology, with only a few (but dramatic!) regressions. But reactionaries are talking about social orders. And in social orders, cycles prevail. After all, man is more or less what he was ten thousand years ago, even at the fastest rates of evolution. He may be somewhat smarter or somewhat more altruistic or somewhat less clannish, but the status drive is a far more primal thing than all of that – and we remain chimps. That is why we can read old books and relate to the characters, because human nature remains the same. When the queer historians look back at history to queer it, they are able to find plenty of material. And it is true that some is fabricated. But I have found examples even before the Great Awokening. The problem with the queer historian is that you cannot be too smart and engage in the field, because it is a bit like discovering hyper-advanced ruins or the remnants of a forgotten and regressed alien race. If we had gay rights in late Classical Persia and Imperial Germany and all the rest, what happened? What eldritch monstrosity must have come to devour these enlightened ones? It is a question that must crack the sanity of a true believer in progressive social history, so the best defense is to be too stupid to ask it.
But the monster is real.
And its dread name is Reaction.
Heretofore, we have only known it by the passing glimpses we have made of its qualities. While Leftism advances by inches and creeps, Reaction comes in a flash, suddenly and totally. And it is related to nature or reality, it is somehow the reckoning of reality, ala Gnon or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. We have whispered its maddened whispers, which come in the form of “Might makes right” or “The strong shall eat, the weak are meat”. We have seen cults of it rise, the Social Darwinists and others, who sought to praise a cruel, indifferent God that would just as quickly devour them.
Reaction is the mirror image of the social adjustments made to a civilization’s values through its long process of political maneuvering. If Leftism takes a civilization’s values farther and farther towards madness, it is because all civilizational values are a little mad to begin with, because the only values which can generate political capital are those that stand in the way of raw innate status. Not even those who praise the Master Race as cover actually want to be ruled by a Master Race, they want to be the Master Race. To submit to a caste of innate superiors who are not in any way beholden to you is totally monstrous. The order of Gnon is merciless and without compassionate. Nevertheless, the mirror image of our social adjustments necessarily grows stronger and stronger over time *because* innate status is not constructed. You cannot make an idiot into an expert: hence why our experts are so consistently wrong. Only one quick and clear of mind can *truly* be in an expert, because expert is not an arbitrary label but a recognition of a real capability. Reaction is like a pulled spring, merely the stored up energy of a war against reality reasserting itself. Revolutionaries or barbarians are merely pushing over a rotten house, a regime that has already destroyed itself. Total Reaction is the total reassertion of the innate status order and partial Reactions can be defined as a partial restoration of that innate status order. A civilization is therefore always waging a war on reality, an inherently romantic gesture, and eventually, it MUST lose. It is Civilization, not Reaction, which is the romantic act.
The day we stole the apple, we resigned ourselves to an eternity of tragic fate, redeemed only after death.
And thus, we have arrived at the definition of conservative. American conservatives are conservative liberals, just as conservatives of any stripe are always those who genuinely believe in the values of their civilization. Because the conservative is one that sees the course of history… leads off a cliff. He stands athwart History, yelling Stop, because he knows where it ends, and where it ends is the destruction of everything he holds dear. Whether it be liberalism or a thousand other dead creeds.
If the West dies, liberalism dies with it. After all, who still keeps the Arian faith?
If we might define the Neoreactionary intellectual, it is making tractable and reasonable the force of Reaction, which in prior ages was derided as irrational, sentimental, spiritual, and emotional. It is not that there can *be* no reason for the Right. It is that its secrets and mysteries do not yield to casual investigation, and therefore it was present as a political force long before it could be understood. There is a lesson there, more generally.
Ia! Ia! Monsieur le Baron
EDIT: I was shown this: https://web.archive.org/web/20180202060308/http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/ Ah, and just when I thought I was being original. Yes, everything nice comes from Hell. Reaction brings us back to Hell, where virtues are forged, but, man, Hell sucks ass. So we build a nice little myth that says things should be better, and the Golden Age exists where people have the virtues of Hell but the myths we have, our ideologies, are not yet very insane. Or, in short, GOOD TIMES MEN HARD HARD MEN MEN TIMES BAD.
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.
With credit to Comrade Stump
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It seems that when I am at a party, I am in a party, which makes me party to certain things. Personally, I’d rather be privy to the privy, a privy in the privy. Too many people are looking for a magic spell, or some formula which may as well be one, but I am sympathetic to the sentiments of Gore Vidal. The greatest magic is not some occult scrap or incantation, it is being smarter than your enemies. If only I could be such a wizard.
Alas, it seems I am often in the stupid party. The only problem is that no one can seem to agree which one it is! To hear Donkeyphants tell it, Demonthuglirats are a party masterminded by Big Fupa, Cleetonius Snapback Sueytonius, Hitler Jesus, and the Menergy lobby. Every day, the Cock Brothers drill the Ladyboy Earth Mother and extract her viscous black fluids (should probably get that checked out, by the way) so as to collect the Menergy profits they use to fund the racism machine, which beams the racism that keeps wypipo alive.
Tangent. Cleaning product called Ethnic Cleansing. WIPE POWER! WIPE POWER! It’s got all the cleaning secrets of… uhh… the ethnics. Fund it, bruvs.
By contrast, we have the Muleodons. When they aren’t desecrating the cross, they’re getting spitroasted by the handlers in the Big Gay. They outsource factories and import fudge-colored fudge packeries to satisfy their lust for the British Broadcasting Corporation. They erect dead baby castles made out of live babies, just to be ironically extra evil (Note: Don’t try this at home). Their list of crimes is so long, you could make a whole documentary denying them all. Does anyone want an NPR tote?
Let’s take one contemporary issue, which I have studied at great length. To pro-abortionists, it seems obvious abortion should be mandatory, because we must abort the fetus of the baby Cthulhu before he awakens and begins a thousand years of darkness. The pro-choicers only have the weak argument that baby Cthulhu should be free to self-actualize and get a LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE in world-destruction, the hippie bastards. Since it’s ridiculous anyone would sincerely believe in this, it’s clear their organizations have been paid off by the sinister Cock Brothers and their Menergy Companies, collectively known as the Menocratic Manocracy. Not even the Cock Brothers want a thousand years of darkness. But they’ll still pay for people to protect the bodily autonomy of the fetus against the parasitic sustainer (who leeches off the fetus’s Instaauras for precious likes and upvotes).
The problem with labeling the Pachydemos the Evil Party is that the roles are often reversed in different situations. Sometimes the Remonrats are trying to make our economy more sustainable by using precious green energy mined from our Earth’s confetti deposits, while the DMC scaremongers about the threat caused by runaway clown emissions. That’s because there’s a profit to be had tying our energy to the non-renewable sun, which will soon grow dim and explode, whereas confetti rocks last billions of years and can be recycled into new planets. Now, both parties will claim to be using fax and logjams to DESTROY their opponents, but the problem with that claim is that you can fax anything so long as it fits on a flatbed scanner. Obviously. Indeed, if you go to college and take a Philophilia course, or get a Doctorate in Office Supplies, you will often be called to fax something from one side of the room, go to the reverse side, fax it again, and keep faxing it back and forth until the professor gets bored and unleashes the rabid badgers on everyone who hasn’t done their homework. This is a training technique known as the Devil’s Avocado, where you try to spread toast that isn’t yours.
Ultimately, people come to rely on their moral intuitions and certain core axioms. And that’s the problem. Political parties are not composed of people of one mind, like the Borg, but are coalitions built on a constant struggle for advantage between internal factions. Because of this, one party may have many different positive agendas within it, which the factions can’t agree on. The political platform itself is, of course, a compromise position. When a party plays the “stupid party” role, it means that they are trying to set forth a positive policy but can’t agree on one. After all, policies come from different axioms and also present different tradeoffs. To the lumpen, oblivious to party politics, it looks like squabbling over minutia. And to some extent, it is. When a party is being the “evil party”, it is acting oppositionally to a positive agenda. It can be because the positive agenda smells, because they’re being manipulated by nefarious forceps, or probably even a third or fourth reason. Either way, it appears like one party has a moral message, and the other party is just saying “Fuck you”. Because it is. The opposing party doesn’t need to agree on a path forward to agree that a certain path is obviously bad, but because it sets forth no positive agenda of its own, it looks like it is opposing an obviously good thing (all positive agendas are sold to the masses as obviously good).
But Monsieur, this is all stupid and obvious! How dare you waste my time? Apologies, dear reader, but I am a brainlet and it takes me a while to get anywhere. Besides, regardless of how obvious things are, sometimes they must be restated. Education has a knack for blinding people to obvious truths. They get so many fax, they can dial into anything. That’s tragedy and alienation of modem life, we’re not on the same page. And worse than that is to fax too many modems – life becomes phoney. That’s post-modem thinking, that there is and can be no one true AOL disk (but it’s AOL 10). Personally, I think we will one day look to the heavens again, and cast our ether nets there.
To get back on track, sometimes policies get passed. Obviously stupid policies get passed. You see, when setting a positive agenda, and you have many good but flawed paths forward, dissenting is entirely reasonable. Accordingly, it’s not a good show of loyalty. But if the party chooses a very, very stupid policy, then agreement shows that everyone really is a true blue party member. It’s a classic example of signalling. So instead of seeing a party choose one of several viable options, we should see them ultimately unite behind very stupid plans that please no one. A very stupid party indeed.
