Fighting with Anarchists

I enjoy the Anarchist Notebook, because I often find articles like the one penned on New Year’s Eve, entitled Political Warfare.

While there’s a clear trajectory towards more totalitarianism of a Leftist flavor (and a possible Reactionary response), history is less linear than it is cyclical. At some point, a return to the natural state of things will happen, but that could take many years. The Soviet Union lasted from roughly 1917 to 1991, even though its economic policies made it doomed from the start. The right global or national event may trigger a similar destruction of the heavily concentrated power found within Western countries today.

The economic policies of the USSR were identical to those of its erstwhile client state, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The Vietnamese constitution is a cut-and-paste of the Soviet constitution. Why is the USSR gone, while Vietnam is getting wealthier by the year? The author gives us a hint in the very same article.

 This is all relevant within the context of the modern states which govern countries such as the United States of America. It is a political jurisdiction that is too large, too diverse, and too divided in order to be anything that one might regard as united (or American, for that matter). In prior times, the degree of tension and conflict within the USA would have produced a revolution, rebellion, or secession movement well before now.

The USSR dissolved not because of its economic policies, but because of what guys like Sloterdijk and Fukuyama call scale. Jamming disparate populations together increases complexity which thereby increases social atomization, which thereby increases all the derivative problems that result from it. In the end, the USSR dissolved for the same reason the USA will likely spin to pieces within the next few generations. Vietnam doesn’t have this problem. Its ethnic minorities live in their own autonomous enclaves. Moreover, it’s a small, geographically contiguous country, unlike our own.

Real Americans are a nation with no country and no government they can call their own; they are an occupied, conquered people – subjugated not through military force, but their own foolishness and subversive elements. Most of them are ignorant of this or in denial about it.

Whenever I see the phrase real American I know who the author is talking about: people who agree with him. For a white nationalist, a real American is not merely another white dude from the USA, it’s another white nationalist, who agrees with him. To the white multiculturalist, a real American is not the white nationalist, above.

The one thing that leftists at least attempt to do, which rightists don’t, is think and apply the consequences of thought to the real world. They make an honest effort to grapple with material conditions in situ. They don’t always do this well, but they do make an attempt. This is why you see leftish types in the USA coming up with laughably complicated, abstract theories about the status quo, while rightist types just retreat into mouthing meaningless buzz-words like “liberty,” “free markets” and such.

If I argue with an American liberal, I know that he’ll at least understand me. What American leftish types usually do is concede that scale is an issue, but insist that the benefits of scale will someday outweigh the problems. It’s a vulgar plagiarism of the objective historicism of Marx and Hegel, but at least they’re intelligible. Rightists just look flummoxed when I bring these things up. Eventually they’ll start muttering something about “states rights” or “the constitution”. That’s why everyone thinks they’re morons. Go read Proposition Nation Starter Kit for a funny and accessible introduction to rightist idiocy. The average neoconservative flag-waver on the American right actually believes such stuff.

In an era when “fascist” is simply a buzzword to describe anyone to the right of the accuser, and the subsequent vanishing of the distinction between citizen and radical, we can still think, and we should. When elections are openly faked, when people mistrust the state and each other, when governments struggle in vain to reclaim a legitimacy that has long since dissolved due to their own ineptitude, we can take comfort in the fact that we are at least allowed to think our own thoughts.

The phenomenon of scale has concentrated our system’s wealth in the hands of its rulers, and to this end, scale will be its own undoing. Life as an end is qualitatively superior to life as a means.