what should the Left be?

a bigger, shinier, better written and more aesthetically interesting text is coming up on this topic, but here are the main characteristics of the Left in civilized modern societies (or at least the ones that it should have, were it not too busy governing):

– it aims at the destruction of western modern civilization. consciously or not. if it’s conscious it’s better and more effective at this. this is a specific case of the more general tendency of installments of the Revolution: destroy the socius.
– therefore, it aims at the destruction of order, hierarchy, peace, propriety and everything cherished by most of the moderns. if it pays lip service to these things, it’s merely to advance the cause of their destruction.
– it’s necessarily utopic, because it must always lose in the end. the dream world in which the Left attains all its goals is of course impossible (that’s why it wants that). if the Left wins, the Right is doing a lousy job (and society eventually ceases existing).
– its relations to Capital are ambiguous: the Left is interested in the most destructive and deterritorializing aspects of the market, and abhors the formal legal infrastrucure that allows for capital accumulation and reterritorialization.
– its methods are mostly focused on erasing lines and divides, creating confusion and disorder. from this method stems its insistence in equality and freedom.
– therefore it abhors morality and seeks being past, besides, outside, or at least above judgments of good and evil (utilitarianism is an attempt, but still has expediency judgments).

early (1960s and 1970s) radical feminism is probably the most developed blueprint of the Left at its height.

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to the Left #1

i’ve been around the reactosphere lately. the most impressive thing about it is how much i can agree with people, and draw completely different conclusions. this is LRx: establish a Left that can argue with it’s main (and most interesting) adversary in contemporary society, the Neo-Reaction.

* * * * *

i’ve selected a few texts i want to answer briefly, and so produce some groundwork for LRx:

1) in “What’s The Neoreactionary Position On Akhenaton?“, David Grant develops four “neoreactionary themes in history”:

Number 1: The Only Morality Is Civilization
Number 2: Civilizations Follow Cycles
Number 3: Demography Is Destiny
Number 4: Men Were Better In The Brave Days Of Old

a proper LRx to those themes would be:

Number 1: Morality and Civilization are Unsensual Sacrifice and Reality Denial

to begin with, Grant’s identification of society with civilization is at the very least misinformed. uncivilized societies survive (and survive longer) and thrive, sometimes even take over civilizations.

second, the whole “hierarchy of civilizations” thing is terrible for any kind of optimization. the open conflict among societies is the only guaranteeing that we won’t be stuck in some form of eternal order, and in this conflict civilizations tend to lose in the long run. defending them is shielding from reality.

says Greer:

What sets barbarian societies apart from civilized ones is precisely that a much smaller fraction of the environment barbarians encounter results from human action. When you go outdoors in Cimmeria—if you’re not outdoors to start with, which you probably are—nearly everything you encounter has been put there by nature. There are no towns of any size, just scattered clusters of dwellings in the midst of a mostly unaltered environment. Where your Aquilonian town dweller who steps outside may have to look hard to see anything that was put there by nature, your Cimmerian who shoulders his battle-ax and goes for a stroll may have to look hard to see anything that was put there by human beings…

That’s one of the details Howard borrowed from history. By and large, human societies that don’t have urban centers tend to last much longer than those that do. In particular, human societies that don’t have urban centers don’t tend to go through the distinctive cycle of decline and fall ending in a dark age that urbanized societies undergo so predictably. There are plenty of factors that might plausibly drive this difference, many of which have been discussed here and elsewhere, but I’ve come to suspect something subtler may be at work here as well. As we’ve seen, a core difference between civilizations and other human societies is that people in civilizations tend to cut themselves off from the immediate experience of nature nature to a much greater extent than the uncivilized do. Does this help explain why civilizations crash and burn so reliably, leaving the barbarians to play drinking games with mead while sitting unsteadily on the smoldering ruins?

if you want reality to rule, civilizations seem the worst way to do it.

on morality, i’ll let old Land speak:

Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination, and which he exhibits as natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to act without the prior authorization of a juridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of natural intelligence that the human animal comes to prostrate itself before universal law. Kant is quite explicit about this in the second Critique; only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principal definition as the supersensible element of the subject, and thus as fundamentally negative. In other words, morality is precisely the powerlessness of animality. (Delighted to Death, pp. 141-2).

morality is the sacrifice of animal cunning. and that is shielding from biology.

Number 2: Civilizations Follow Cycles

this is absolutely sane. the role of the Left in these cycles is accelerate decline.

Number 3: Ecology is destiny

Demography is indeed important (and Grant is right in pointing out how leftism tries to ignore it – to its own demise, since it’s a powerful tool against order). But demography is a function of the interaction of human populations with it’s environment in a systemic – ecological – way. Demography is derivate from the complex interaction of biogeophysical elements in the biosphere. Gaia moves in mysterious ways, and we are part of it (capital autonomization notwithstanding).

Number 4: People Were Better Off In The Lazy Days of Pre-History

Following our Number 1 theme, it seems pretty clear that the ancient or medieval standards of masculinity were civilized notions, and therefore need to be washed away if we are to produce a return to reality. the “laziness” and “indocility” identified with hunter-gatherer peoples are the ones that LRx cares about and wants to maximize. Cthulhu prompts us there.

* * * * *

2) in his “Rules for Brotherhood“, Warg Franklin provides a neat description of how male groups may shield against their main vulnerability: women. unfortunately for them, that’s a good guide for feminist intervention and disruption of powerful male groups. he doesn’t elaborate on the reverse: how groups of females may be affected by male disruption (or even how vulnerable a mastristic coalition would be to patriarchal brotherhoods), but you can look up the history of feminist movement and see that it has been strongest when women grouped around clear goals of self-help, and waned when they wanted to focus on “changing society” at large. the exploitation of such dynamics of disruptions of brotherhoods and strengthening of sisterhoods should be the Left’s most powerful weapon (as of now, it’s been abandoned by the incessant theoritical arguments on “who is the most oppressed?”).

Franklin’s analysis of state power hold some true in that local male brotherhoods provide a bulwark against tyrannical state power (insofar as the state power is not “organically ordered”). but the tendency of organized brotherhoods is to take over the state, not eliminate it. sisterhoods may, on the other hand, be completely unable to control large nation-state affairs and indeed run them down into dysfunction. a much more interesting outcome, from the point of view of the Left.

* * * * *

3) Reactionary Future makes a wonderful rule:

A mechanical process will be gamed, it will give rise to the the left wing, and it will tear society apart.

another tactical insight fighting the Absolute that the Left has ignored (or took for granted) in the latest years: mechanize processes, and society will fall apart. the adoption of cryptoanarchy and a Left comprised more of technologists and engineers than sociologists and journalists should be the way to go. that those things have been refused by the Left is a sign of its current fragility.

* * * * *

4) looking through Social Matter’s Compendium, two articles strike me as incredibly useful. First there is the proudhonian solution adopted here described in perfection: AAA (agree, amplify, accelerate). Ironic intesification of evils is Satan’s holiest ways.

Secondly, there’s this law:

Successful rebellion is always, without exception, a mere tool of someone already in a position of power.

one corollary follows: true egalitarian rebellions are never successful (if you won, it’s not really Left enough).

* * * * *

5) The Anti-puritan’s “The Consenting Llama” is a masterpiece of the ways technology is Left’s best friend:

Isn’t technology great? Enjoy the decline.

* * * * *

6) last but not least, Spandrell’s “General Theory of Civilizational Decay” presents us with two great insights:

1) slavery is a fucking bad idea for thriving nations;
2) demographic invasion – however it’s done – is the best way to destroy civilization.

* * * *

in general, reactosphere tends to provide the Left (at least a Left conscious of its role in society as a creator of turbulence and disruption through order and hierarchy shattering) with the tools that can be more consciously used towards its proper ends, as well as great analyses of the work done so far.

thanks NRx!

“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”

Moldbug goes:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.

and then Land

The techno-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed. The problem with bad government, which is to say with defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow Cthulhu far enough. It is from turbulence that all things come.

so, the Left leads producing turbulence and chaos; the Right’s supposed to follow and tractor in ordo ab chao. if the Left fails, the world stagnates in perpetual order, immovable, and nothing can any longer be changed – thus nothing can be optimized . if the Right fails, then, as Lovecraft prophesied:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Accelerationism, Left and Right

After my giant NRx piece at The Awl, I’d been planning on leaving the topic alone. Recently, however, I’ve had a few interactions – a conversation with another grad student who’s into Left Accelera…

Source: Accelerationism, Left and Right

Park makes a good summary of Land’s Right-Accelerationist poltics. I will eventually come to make some notes on Land’s theory, as expressed here, but there are some interesting points to be made right now, regarding a Mutualist reading of the whole accel-conundrum:

1. Carson’s view of market catallactics (echoing Tucker, and to a certain extent Proudhon) affirms it as a equalizing and left-wing force per se. Indeed, the whole Austrian Economics’ view of the market is about viewing the market economy as space for individuality to manifest, for autonomy to organize itself. It’s an open question to view to which extent the process of capital autonomization described by Land is not itself a force of human autonomization (not in the least as humans fuse with capital, either literally or through individualization of capital ownership).
2. Left-Accelerationism mostly ignores left-wing anarchist tendencies which focus on individual autonomy and the forces of bottom-up global organization *through* capitalist technologies (bitcoin, ethereum and the Internet itself being the foremost examples). It’s my contention here that any “left” that does not interest itself with decentralized, disruptive processes, and focus rather on keeping and maintaining centralized power, is not “left-wing” at all.
3. Carson has made a very decent attempt at synthesizing Austrian/marginalist economics and LTV, in such a subjetivist way as to possibly present some problems for Landian remarks. Its main contentions – that a market cannot calculate prices properly if not through an application of labor-value, and that the removal of such element in the calculation is only possible through extra-market coercive mean – need to be dealt with, at least for dismissal.
4. Long’s ideas for non-territorial security agencies are probably a better fit for a global market. Neocameralism seems all very good, but if sovereignty moves spatially, it’s better.

the proudhonian solution

 

in 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the infamous first assumed anarchist, published a little book. in it he wrote:

“One of three things must be done. Either the laborer must be given a portion
of the product in addition to his wages; or the employer must render the laborer
an equivalent in productive service; or else he must pledge himself to employ him
for ever. Division of the product, reciprocity of service, or guarantee of perpetual labor, — from the adoption of one of these courses the capitalist cannot escape. But it is evident that he cannot satisfy the second and third of these conditions — he can neither put himself at the service of the thousands of working-men, who, directly or indirectly, have aided him in establishing himself, nor employ them all for ever. He has no other course left him, then, but a division of the property. But if the property is divided, all conditions will be equal — there will be no more large capitalists or large proprietors.” (p. 103)

and later:

“Thus we see property, at all ages and in all its forms, oscillating by virtue
of its principle between two opposite terms, — extreme division and extreme
accumulation.
Property, at its first term, is almost null. Reduced to personal exploitation, it is property only potentially. At its second term, it exists in its perfection; then it is truly property” (p. 247)

and:

“Now I think that I have demonstrated in my First Memoir, that large accumulation and minute division are the first two terms of an economical trinity, — a thesis and an antithesis. But, while M. Wolowski says nothing of the third term, the synthesis, and thus leaves the inference in suspense, I have shown that this third term is ASSOCIATION, which is the annihilation of property” (p. 275)

through these quotes, we can see what Proudhon meant as a solution for the problem of property – the problem of distinction, separateness, of boundaries and limitations, that is, the problem of a system* which creates organization, and therefore suppression. his solution matches perfectly the dark irony that is the Zeitgeist of post-modernism: produce more of the problem, until it’s nullified.

(* = I’m drawing on Luhmann here to equate system to distinction)

for Proudhon, the more divided property was, that is, the more property existed, the less significant it would be. at the limit, when property had been so divided that everyone had it, it would cease existing. and, of course, all of this would be utter nonsense if we wasn’t talking about primary property (in his very words: possession).

one working hypothesis in this site will be that this kind of solution can be applied systematically to most if not all social problems. generalizing it, the formula gets so simple it’s beautiful: if you want to destroy a distinction/system, produce as many of those distinctions as possible.

a brief list of potential problems that could be solved through this method: genders, schools, states, racism, nationalism/tribalism, and even wars. in coming posts, i’ll try and apply the method to these and many other problems.

the left can’t govern

it’s true. and it’s not much of a normative principle (“we should not let leftists govern”) – which would be quite sensible because it would weld and strengthen the left as opposition, the place where it belongs – but more of a factual one: leftists are incapable of governing.

left-wing is the modern representation of the Revolution. in other times they were called “traitors”, “troublemakers”, “criminals” and the like. these people have a purpose in body social: break the rules, create new paths, run away, be outrageous. what happens if these people get in the business of wielding state power?

well, what happened when they did get such power: mass murder, mass incarceration, bizarre social planning, busting of tribes, universalist moralism, and a host of other specifically modern phenomena.

when the left governs, then, there’s not anything that can be properly called “government” – a central force that tries to contain the decentralized forces under it – there’s merely very organized and expensive crime.

to get a better grasp, let’s take a look at the other side of the antinomy: the Absolute, which has been called “right-wing” in modern times. when the left governs, the people that are in fact capable of governing (right-wing people), are left in a very uncomfortable position for them: that of breaking the order they’re in.

a revolting right-wing is just as bizarre as a governing left-wing: a permanent Revolution is just as unsustainable as a struggling Absolute.

in time, the governing left is forced to take up some right-wing habits in order to stay in power: it creates a legitimating ideology, it organizes some sort of defensive structure, it thinks about organizations and institutions. the left in love with power remains “left-wing” only in its desire to constantly reform what it has created. the phenomena of heaps of legislation being enacted every year is very symptomatic.

the flip-side is more subtle and more problematic. a right-wing deprived of government starts taking up left-wing habits: wishing to overthrow the existing order, associating with popular politics, talking about majorities and rights of the people, creating mass movements and – in the worst cases – propping up riots and coups. Fascism and Nazism are the apex of a “popular right-wing”, a leftified right-wing. it remains right-wing merely to the extent that it still supports some kind of aristocratic morality: “there are some people better than others” (but it’s usually so upside-down that the better people are the struggling poor, not the rich plutocracy – those are left-wingers).

in time such political habits prove unsustainable. either the left sucks so hard at maintaining power that it eventually blows up the entire society with its idiotic policies, or the right gets so good at revolution that it produces its own coup and establishes a totalitarian government (“forced equality for all the superior equals of our tribe – death for everyone else, especially those leftists”). in both cases, the prospects are very dim.

the upshot being: we’re screwed.

currently, around the Western World, both tendencies are spiking up. Europe is probably going down the first path. having already trodden much of the second one some 80 years ago, it’s probably memetically vaccinated against right-wing populism. America (the US, more specifically) looks more inclined to the second path. The left failed miserably at failing in a proper catastrophic way in 2008 and its aftermath (or at least it invented a very good myth to get through the last 8 years), so now the enraged populace are interested in playing political chicken – the american dream is dead anyway, so why not a better nightmare?

the rest of the world in the periphery or outside the Western Empire are bound to watch these developments and then decide what to do. we’ll come back to that eventually.

com certeza eu quero o desmonte

o desmonte da universidade pode ser a melhor coisa que já aconteceu à humanidade desde as desgraças de Bolonha. (ou, mais precisamente, as de Ur).

eu só peço que desmonte e não venda. nem as peças. nem as pessoas. eu peço que desmonte sem cuidado. de preferência taque fogo. não deixe nem as brasas no chão (ou as use como ultimas relíquias de Carvão) .

eu quero a abolição da universidade. desse corpo de monges de uma nova Religião. (deus está à frente, abra os olhos e siga!).  o fim de uma casta de padres recolhendo o dizimo de quem sua sob o sol a fim de “produzir conhecimento” = “interpretar o desejo divino”. tudo cientificamente claro. é como se produz a melhor religião.

o teto é de vidro, óbvio. eu nem saberia que sou basicamente um padre semi novato, se não figurasse entre seus quadros. a universidade vai até você. mas pelo menos por isso posso dizer, com pecado, que o conceito de culpa não faz sentido e você vai entender.

nos compreendemos, porque estamos em situações minimamente semelhantes. eu não sei apenas a mesma Língua e jargão que você. eu sei o que você espera que seja dito, e o que você pode responder sem maiores problemas. nós conhecemos o discurso do não pode (o discurso de subtexto de qualquer organização escolástica como a nossa).

somos (aqui me apropriando de termos sem créditos – algo que também não pode) brahmins da sociedade industrial (ou seríamos – a distinção periferia-núcleo ainda faz sentido, afinal).

desses se espera que levem a sociedade ao caminho certo. e estamos, pelo menos em intenção, buscando isso com o máximo esforço! (não, não estamos. estamos assistindo séries no netflix, trabalhando em empregos, digitando em celulares e louvando o capital-progresso). Intenções importam,  no entanto?

intenções são importadas, com toda certeza. nosso pouco ativismo é feito em plataformas desenvolvidas e mantidas por pessoas que sabidamente ganham dinheiro (muito) com isso.

onde eu quero chegar, afinal? no óbvio: não estamos mudando nada. Absolutamente nada. o discurso é de mudança radical e continuada. a prática é o negócio símio de sempre (LAND, 231X): poder. o harem do imperador e alguns artesãos pra entreter, soldados pra lutar, inimigos pra vencer e espaços pra conquistar (siderais, ecológicos).

a evidencia é clara: estamos em uma universidade. que não pagamos (e bradamos em altos pulmões que não queremos pagar) – sem nunca nos perguntarmos: então, quem paga?

a pergunta volta (a caça com bumerangues é uma habilidade rara e complexa): e você,  não faz nada? [evitarei de falar em falácia porque o discurso filosófico é exatamente o que me enoja]. faço, mas não é da sua conta. o que é da sua conta – vai ficar na sua conta, vão contar sobre você – é o que você faz. um castelo bem pequeno, mas é o único que te pertence.

na paralisia confortável em que nos consternamos, perdemos vista do que há, efetivamente para alem dos muros (da cidade, da civilidade): caos. interações determinísticas sem linearidade alguma (essa é mais ou menos a definição matemática de caos). é esse caos, esse lá fora (as profundezas onde dormem monstros), esse desconhecido, que manda em nossas vidas.

se de fato queremos mudança (e isso de forma alguma é um dado – as evidências vão no sentido contrário: queremos o antigo futuro, para vivermos no antigo passado), então é com essa força que temos que lidar. temos, essencialmente, que trazer um pouco de caos (de ausência de ordem, de abandono do esforço de contenção, da recusa à domesticação, do traçamento de linhas) para dentro. de nos e da universidade. vamos ter que esquecer efetivamente dos inimigos. (não do conflito e da concorrência, mas da eliminação do adversário e do triunfo do bem). vamos ter que parar de louvar o poder.

enquanto seu objetivo como revolucionário for obter poder – e não se livrar dele – você não vai revolucionar nada. será funcionário público de carreira aos 45, ganhando na média para comprar o último modelo de smartphone,  ainda torcendo pelo seu partido, rezando pelo seu time (intelectual, esportivo, memético) e votando em seus clérigos favoritos. Ou, pior, será arcebispo da Catedral do Progresso, viajando de avião para conferências sobre capitalismo e sustentabilidade, passando a doutrina do bem aos seus pupilos e preocupado com o mais novo ressurgimento do fantasma do fascismo (a nova caça às bruxas favorita).

prefiro que desmontem tudo agora.