Update: The great Oliver Bateman has provided a PDF link to the Surkov text. The link in this post has been changed, but I’m not rewriting the whole thing.

This summer has been incredibly productive for me, albeit not on this blog. I fear I have to admit a touch of writer’s block. However, I will return to the sideline pieces in August. For now, I leave you not with an essay but two awkward recommendations.

Texts, 1997-2010 by Vladislav Surkov is a collection of essays, interviews, and speeches written by the author during his time working on the construction of the Russian Federation’s political system alongside Vladimir Putin.

In this very short collection of texts, he discusses controlled pluralism, sovereignty in designing democratic institutions, the need for stability over revolution, Russia as a separate civilization from Europe, and Surkov’s most influential concepts, politics as theater. On its own, it is impressive in its structure. Surkov lays out the chronology of modern Russia and the steps he believed were necessary to create the state that it is. With context (such as the knowledge that Surkov deliberately created subcultures opposed to United Russia’s leadership), it is all the more impressive. Many of the seeds of Russia’s present geopolitical aims and political function can be found within these pages. It is at once a postmodern and deeply modernist text, and modern politics the world over is easier to understand when viewed through some of Surkov’s unique lenses.

However, it is an awkward recommendation because it is completely out of print. Used copies appear rarely and there is no online PDF that I have been able to find. Columbia University’s library has copies in circulation, but there are only 3. I purchased my copy from Amazon for $14.95 some five or six years ago, back when it was still in print.

An easier find would be Unrestricted Warfare by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The full PDF is linked above but a hard copy can also be found on Amazon and other retailers. It is a military doctrinal text outlining the shape of 21st century warfare; namely, that war will no longer be contained by the usual parameters of combat (conventional or asymmetric warfare), but will expand into every sphere of life out of necessity. In the West, the concept is also known as hybrid warfare. The thesis is thus: The United States proved during the Gulf War that its military was an unstoppable force by conventional means. Its technology, logistics, and combined arms tactics were unparalleled, and even small resistance forces would eventually bend to its might. In order to compete, rival nations would need to be willing to view the rest of society as a battlefield: psychology, economics, technology, logistics, politics, and more would all need to be viewed as valid theaters of combat in order to undermine the US’s ability to project power militarily. Each state engaged in this competition is in a state of total war even during peacetime. Published in 1999, it is a necessary text for demystifying the world’s many escalating crises, though now partially outdated thanks to addenda penned by Russian and American strategists, and by real-world events in the last 27 years.

What makes this recommendation awkward is that it is fairly lengthy, though the translation is of exceptional quality and the writing is extremely clear. Though occasionally calling back to certain events in Chinese history, only a scant amount of context is necessary.

Thank you for reading.

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Re-introduction to the Übermensch

In the first essay in this series, I made the following claims:

1. Contemporary leftist discourse surrounding the revolutionary potency of the proletariat is sentimentalist, romantic, and moralistic rather than structural, hierarchical, and functional

2. There is a division of labor within the proletariat, and that different sections of it have different roles in a revolutionary scenario

3. The so-called “labor aristocracy” (which I have inverted to “aristocratic proletariat”), i.e., the segment of the proletariat which designs and engineers contemporary infrastructure, is the segment with the most potential to form a revolutionary vanguard

4. There is a tension between national- and global-oriented segments of contemporary Western class structure which complicates our ability to properly identify the revolutionary subject

5. The proletariat have no nation, and thus must build their own while insulating themselves from the ravages of the global capitalist market

6. Immigrant proletarians are not natural allies to native-born proletarians, and in fact, often maintain a hostile stance due to contemporary ideology and incentives structures

7. The labor cartel is the ideal political-economic structure to incubate a revolutionary vanguard

This essay is primarily concerned with points 2 and 3. The second essay in this series was primarily concerned with point 6—out of order, but necessary to introduce some mechanisms regarding consciousness and ideology which will be applied here.

The hierarchy alluded to in point 2 has already been outlined in detail in the first essay in this series. This statement is also apparent, but not necessarily obvious to those deeply entrenched in leftist (or right-wing) ideology. DoorDash drivers and nuclear engineers are both technically proletarian, but they perform visibly different roles in society. As such, if DoorDash drivers decide to go on strike, it will cause some disruptions, but the economy will go back to normal fairly quickly without a significant state response. If nuclear engineers go on strike—or more, threaten to take over their facilities—this will invite a militarized response. This hypothetical clearly shows the hierarchy within the proletariat in terms of revolutionary potential.

Staying with this example for point 3, nuclear engineers are considered part of the “labor aristocracy,” as they are highly-specialized, well-compensated, well-regulated industrial workers who do not necessarily do the heavy lifting, but their intellectual labor is necessary for the construction of nuclear facilities. The average DoorDash driver might be more primed for radicalization because of their immiseration, but structurally, they are unnecessary other than to provide incomes to peoples whom global capital no longer relies on. If gig work as an industry ended or was automated, the problem wouldn’t be that their labor has disappeared, but that the official unemployment figures have crept up beyond the point they can be obscured, thus damaging largely fictitious, algorithmically-driven financial markets dependent on these statistics. Nuclear engineers, though less likely to be radicalized, more entrenched in bureaucracy, and possessing skills which lend themselves to success in capitalist economies, occupy a position which is undeniably necessary for a revolutionary government to control. Thus, they have more “potential” revolutionary energy. If all gig workers became fully “kinetic,” the most they will accomplish is destruction of infrastructure they will not necessarily be able to rebuild. If all aristocratic proletarians became fully “kinetic,” that is, all their revolutionary potential is fully converted into action, they would immediately become stewards of a dual power within the existing state.

But those are big “ifs.” The question is not merely which class fraction possesses the greatest latent power, but what kind of human being is capable of converting that latency into command. A class position with revolutionary potential does not guarantee that they will tap that potential. Technical indispensability does not become political will on its own. The engineer, administrator, planner, soldier, teacher, builder, and operator remain servants of capital unless they undergo a transformation in self-conception from functionary to founder, from specialist to legislator, from managed subject to creator of order.

Marx and Nietzsche agree that to be is to become, that we are always in a state of “becoming” rather than static “being.” Nietzsche interrogates this morally, psychologically, mythologically, and identifies his “revolutionary” subject (such that one can exist within his anti-systematic philosophy) as an individual who is able to create new values capable of reordering the world: The Übermensch. Marx does so through rigid political economic materialism; he describes the material processes by which one class usurps another—the engine of history—the contradictions which drive it. They both agree that their ideal subject will abolish itself and all prior ways of life; they disagree entirely on who that subject is and what they could become. This is a generative tension.

Limits to Potential

Traditional Marxist dogma1 has claimed that this segment of the proletariat that I consider to be that with the most revolutionary potential is in fact the most reactionary, the least likely to join a mass movement to overthrow capital. While I believe such claims have degenerated into dogma such that Marxists and other leftists see it as self-evident, as with many dogmas, there is material analysis to support the claim. The task of this essay is to determine whether contemporary conditions continue to support said claim.

Indeed, there are pressures which prevent this segment from radicalizing, and “release valves” which divert any emerging radical energies toward reactionary sentiments.2 These pressures and releases differ from those which exist for “the masses.”

For “the masses,” obfuscation, repetition, symbolism, sensationalism, fragmentation, and deprivation are enough to keep people sated and to keep radicals among them leashed. Obfuscation of history. Repetition of slogans, mantras. Symbolic interventions with no material follow-through. Sensational acts, often laden with symbolism after the fact, obscuring historical events as they happen. Personal identity fragmented, forced into a corner, often based in consumerism. Material deprivation through a variety of methods, many of them relating back to one’s consumption-mediated identity. For most of “the masses,” leverage and power is not deliberately made esoteric, it just is from their perspective because they have no meaningful input. What they do control is, ultimately, how they choose to distract themselves.

Some of the above applies to the petit-bourgeoisie and aristocratic proletariat as well, but must be supplemented by additional material considerations. Proximity to bourgeois culture, access to bourgeois lifestyles, discrete labor protections and bargaining channels, and of course, higher pay. In a way, this is an indirect bribe, consistent with Lenin’s formulation of super-profits (see footnote 1). It allows aristocratic proletarians to see themselves as similar to the bourgeoisie because they have a direct hand in building the infrastructure and superstructure of capitalism.

These are organized and skilled workers, paid handsomely through financial obfuscations which allowed them to live well above their supposed comrades in the imperial core and periphery. Lenin considered this class to comprise skilled engineers, craft unionists, labor bureaucrats. The only addition necessary to modernize his description is the coder, who is the same engineer under a new division of labor. Lenin extends his description by noting that this arrangement was fragile; imperialism itself was moribund, the highest stage of capitalism, and only catastrophe could follow in the form of inter-imperial wars. He predicted that within this revolutionary epoch, rank-and-file laborers would have an opportunity to seize the means of production, while labor aristocrats would align themselves with imperialists seeking to dominate other imperialists, obscuring from themselves their decision to do so in socialistic rationale. I do not dispute Lenin’s interpretation of events or analysis of class, as many of them did come to pass within his lifetime.

But then history occurs: The imperialist nations did indeed go to war, and working class revolutions were crushed—predictably, per Lenin—by the social-chauvinists within the labor aristocracy. Only Russia fully embraced revolutionary socialism, transforming itself into the Soviet Union. Then, the interregnum wherein the last imperial war did not resolve the conditions which led to the first: a time at once alienating, absurd, surreal, experimental, and radical. This was followed shortly thereafter by the Second World War, which none of the old empires survived, and which resulted in revolutionary attempts aborted before they could even be crushed, and left only the United States and the Soviet Union as the new centers of global power. The labor aristocracy was dramatically reshuffled worldwide, and in the USSR, became the base of power—which Lenin began to expect only toward the end of his life, and dreaded until his final stroke.

Simultaneously, in the United States, the labor aristocracy played a much larger political role than at any other time in that country’s history. Keynesianism practically cemented its inclusion in statecraft and coalition-building. Until, of course, Keynesianism itself reached its own crisis, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy ceased to be mutually beneficial. Does the world enter into another inter-imperial war? No.

No obvious catastrophe on par with the death of the European empires occurred. Instead, in the midst of stagflation, capital concentrated, globalized, and the imperial core deindustrialized and deregulated. The periphery then had an opportunity to transform its own forces of production, and did so. Labor aristocracy is reshuffled again. Many engineers lost their prestige alongside the rank-and-file they had lorded over. With the rise of computing and the internet there existed new growth for this class, but under very different conditions than its predecessors. Now that we are on the other end of the digital transformation of the economy, this class again sees a contraction in its size and prestige—and again, there is no inter-imperial war.

The advent of nuclear weapons is the primary reason why there have not been inter-imperial wars since World War II. There have certainly been imperial wars since that time, but not directly between large, entrenched empires. War remained profitable through proxies in the old colonies, but a direct nuclear exchange would have made victory for either party impossible.3 Thus, imperial competition occurred through other channels. The US government during the Cold War was practically unconcerned with its peripheral allies’ ideologies; it only cared that they were either not communist, or if communist, willing to allow Americans to access internal markets. The Soviet government did not have this kind of flexibility. At first, it demanded ideological loyalty to enable easier economic integration into the bloc. This meant states that took more independent internal policy moves would either leave the bloc or find themselves ousted, which damaged the USSR more than the departed. Later, when the ideological requirements fell away, non-communist nationalists were more willing to work with the Soviet Union, but this prevented the economic integration the bloc needed to validate its ideology. Thus, global economic competition favored the US. Finally, the internal contradictions of Soviet Marxism-Leninism resolved, dissolved the Soviet bloc entirely, and created the founding conditions for the unified global market we live under today. The states on the periphery of the Soviet bloc were only meaningfully threatening so long as they remained allies of the Soviets; they then had to choose whether to remain closed to the world market, or if they were going to open themselves up for business.4

It is under these conditions that the labor aristocracy’s role in capitalism changed, and that change accelerated when the Soviet Union dissolved. Where, in the 1950s, it was a politically entrenched member of a quasi-corporatist military-industrial complex, by the 1970s, it had become the gravedigger of the rank-and-file proletariat in its own nation. Keynesian-led deficits structurally demanded that the United States become a net importer rather than exporter, fundamentally changing the proletariat’s role in the economy.5 The breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971—the abolition of gold convertibility and the creation of the fiat-based global reserve currency system—entrenched this reality in explicit international agreements and set us on a path of total financialization. This substantial change occurred with hardly a single directed fight. Its secondary effects (offshoring and outsourcing) resulted in mass union action later, but not immediately.

The events of the documentary Harlan County, USA provide us an indication of the results of that mass union action. The documentary follows a wildcat coal miners’ strike in Kentucky. The miners were striking to join an already-existing national union. It took years, but they were ultimately successful. Months after gaining union representation, there were negotiations for a new contract; it provided greater benefits and a handsome wage bump, but it removed the ability for individual chapters to strike when their local contracts were violated. Only national strikes would be permitted, and those were (for obvious reasons) exceedingly difficult to muster. The new contract passed nationally, removing the very economic leverage and legal coverage that coal miners once had to contest localized contract violations. It was the union’s leadership—a leadership consisting of internal populist reformers—which cosigned precisely such a pro-business provision.

In the first entry in this series, I neglectfully omitted union leadership from my outline of contemporary class structure. For clarity, I consider this caste to be part of the petit-bourgeoisie, on the same level as human resource departments and other middling managers. In reality, they straddle the class boundary, as many members of a union’s bureaucracy did originate within the rank-and-file and some unions are more labor-conscious than others. However, most large, state-integrated, bureaucratized unions act as another layer of management or as extractive local guilds in practice. There is also notable overlap with government agencies such as the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and with organized crime (especially in the Northeast and Midwest). As such, they do not retain the same skills and potential as what I consider to be the “aristocratic proletariat.” Organizationally, they appear to be the “highest stratum” of the proletariat due to the fact that they are often democratically elected by workers, they are meant to handle the grievances of said workers, and they are technically separate entities from both the state and management. It is because they also benefit from super-profits while maintaining tenuous connections to rank-and-file labor that Lenin grouped this bureaucracy with his conception of the labor aristocracy. However, I argue that their role within existing political economy and the skills imparted by practicing this role are different from those of the aristocratic proletariat as I have defined it. Therefore, while “labor aristocracy” does still define an existing caste, it is too broad of a category to remain useful.

The union representative is a creature who knows labor law and grievance procedure to the point that they have become habit. The specifics of each individual grievance matter to him only so long as they comport to his understanding of the procedure. He will flatly tell his charges that it is impossible to defend them if the procedure has made it impossible. If he were to pursue an independent course of action, arguing that the procedure should be changed to accommodate the workers on his caseload because they have valid claims not already covered by the law, then he would be terminated for wasting the union’s resources. This is not a deficiency; it is for the best that such negotiators stick to the script. A consequence of this is that they do not stick their necks out, lest they be chopped off. There are already other procedures in place to determine if procedure should be changed, other bureaucrats in charge of changing the contract, the arbitration, the leadership, and so on and on and on. In effect, union representatives are little more than blue-collar attorneys, especially when they mean well.

The aristocratic proletarian, by contrast, does not claim to represent labor. It is itself labor, and it performs necessary tasks which do not require a legal appendix to be performed in full. An engineer and a union bureaucrat may both be bribed by super-profits in a given period, but over time, one will be automated, offshored, or otherwise devalued as soon as it becomes possible to do so, and the other can continue to be bribed indefinitely because his work is managing other workers, and he need not belong to the same union for the rest of his life. It is far cheaper to pay a hostage negotiator indefinitely to convince terrorists to self-destruct or turn themselves in than it would be to pay a handsome ransom each and every time a hostage is taken or to mobilize SWAT for a potentially deadly PR nightmare. For most of the aristocratic proletariat, there is no hostage negotiator—no union bureaucrat. They are bribed directly, and the only reason this works at present is because they do not see themselves as the terrorist in waiting. Should that bribe be revoked consistently over large enough spans of time and in large enough numbers, then that lack of a mediating layer will create structural risks capital has not yet absorbed.

The Fork

Once those structural risks become actionable threats, a fork in the road is paved, and the aristocratic proletarian must choose: Revolution or restoration. Historically, there has always been a split within all labor castes when this fork emerges. Revolution is as it sounds: Creating a wholly new world out of the old one, reshaping it according to the will of the ascendant, suppressing the will of the decadent.6 Restoration involves the ascendance of a new sovereign who seeks to reimpose order—not necessarily conserving the past nor imposing the future. It may be progressive and forward-looking, as the New Deal was, or it may be conservative, as Louis Napoleon was.7 Whether restoration is mostly the former or the latter depends more on underlying conditions than on conscious ideological orientation; whatever will restore a state’s sovereignty and crush its internal revolutionary impulses will do.

Those that once enjoyed privileges and power and later lost them, or are in danger of losing them, are more likely to embrace restorative/reactionary movements. Both leftists and rightists in the United States do this today: The Left and Right both valorize the 1950s for the obvious Golden Age that it was, but claim incompatible causes for the positive effects they associate with that decade. The Left highlights financial regulation, high taxation, strong labor unions; the Right highlights social order, anticommunism, the nuclear family. They also criticize that decade for the same reasons their opponents valorize it. The Left criticizes the mass conformity, its racial and sexual repression, the Red Scare; the Right criticizes New Deal bureaucracy, the Republican Party’s abandonment of laissez-faire, and its weak defense of Southern culture leading into the 1960s. Everyone agrees that life was better and that life was worse. Purchasing power was high and jobs were plentiful; it was unevenly distributed and paid for by foreign war. Communities were close-knit and orderly; conformity was stifling and anti-creative. There was a profound sense of stability and unity; nuclear armageddon loomed in the background. Everyone had a meaningful role to play in society; everyone was a cog in a faceless machine.

One thing everyone agrees on, regardless of their criticisms, is that the 1950s were a time when state sovereignty was high and the people of that time saw the political and economic system as worthy of supporting and participating in. The revolutionaries were relentlessly rooted out or brought into the fold. Reactionaries unhappy with this progressive iteration of restorative sovereignty were forced to take a backseat until they could make peace with it or adapt their strategies to changing circumstances. A long period of turbulence and distrust in the state followed resulted in another new sovereignty in the 1980s, this one with its logic inverted; revolutionaries forced to make peace or adapt, reactionaries relentlessly hounded for going too far, or moderated and brought into the restorative fold. Now, we have reached yet another unstable period, less cohesive than what existed between the two examples provided.

In neither case did these dueling coalitions see a new class take charge of that sovereignty. The old base continued to hum under the new superstructure. Class relations were reconfigured, the state was reshuffled, but not entirely transformed. In both cases, Lenin’s labor aristocracy attached themselves to the rising restorative coalition; this speaks simultaneously to the conditions of the time, the savviness of those coalition leaders, and to the short-sightedness of the labor aristocracy (the aristocratic proletariat included). This time is somewhat different: For one, there is no sovereign actually on the rise. As significant as Trump’s punctuated presidency has been, many of his most significant policies were reversed within a single term by a president who was borderline unconscious for most of it. While his second term has been more substantial in suppressing the opposition, it has failed to force that opposition to reshape itself in Trump’s image, as the prior restorations have done. He has not managed to build a new consensus; rather, he has produced the conditions by which a new consensus must be reached. It is only within such a moment that a segment of the aristocratic proletariat may break away from attaching itself to a new sovereign and begin to conceptualize itself as one—but not as the end of this particular cycle. I see no signs that they have arrived at the earliest stage of revolutionary labor consciousness. Instead, I see a broad spectrum of disappointed withdrawal, reactionary griping, and technocratic pet projects (e.g. YIMBYism). This strongly points to a desire for restorative sovereignty over revolution.

But there is another fork fast approaching. The global political economy is in a uniquely fragile position. It is possible that before a new restorative sovereignty arrives, a severe global recession (or even depression) will cause it to miscarry, undoing much of the restorative groundwork that has already been laid by the tension between Trump’s coalition and its opponents. This would deepen the existing process of immiseration for the aristocratic proletariat and prolong the arrival of restoration, and would occur even if it is not an explicitly named recession.8 If this does not occur, and instead restoration arrives before the next major recession, then it can be safely assumed that the aristocratic proletariat will side with the new sovereign.

Without a sovereign coalition in place or nearing coronation before another major crisis, the aristocratic proletariat cannot assume its interests will be addressed. It may be forced to fend for itself, creating individuals in the a.p. who, armed with the right analytical tools, may be more inclined to create space for themselves and their brothers-in-arms in a chaotic political economy, creating the foundations of an autonomous, class-conscious organization rather than relying on an external savior. By the time a sovereign arrives, the seeds of a vanguard have already been sown. If there is already a coalition at or nearing sovereign status when the crisis arrives, then the a.p. will readily align themselves with it, expecting concessions purely because they have lost status and concepts of “restoration” are vaguely, imprecisely in the air—in short, they’ve panicked and lack the confidence that only a trial-by-fire may confer. This sovereign will almost undoubtedly dispose of most of them because they have created no leverage for themselves, and will once again remain sorely disappointed and withdrawn until this cycle ends. Those that remain favored will become loyal patrons and clients of the new sovereign out of gratitude for leaving them dangling above the abyss of the “permanent underclass” (as the kids like to say) instead of casting them into it.

Just because the latter is the more likely outcome does not mean the revolutionary horizon shuts forever, capital has won, and Marxists should just pack it in. No, on the contrary, it means another rendition of this same song and dance will occur, and the historical evidence that restoration is untenable for the aristocratic proletariat will be that much more obvious. How they react to this information will determine what will be done.

The question remains: Is the aristocratic proletariat to become the aforementioned Übermensch, the coming revolutionary vanguard? I have answered in theory, if only partially. I will continue to expand on it in time. Someone else must answer in practice.

I apologize for the lateness of this entry. As I have noted in my paused sideline series, life has been busy and remains so. I did not intend to miss the date, but I have fallen out of practice, and picking up the keyboard again to add onto this ambitious series was more difficult than I had anticipated.

Part IV of this series will define the appearance of a cartel structure for a potential vanguard, justify it, and explore its limitations. It will be released August 1st. Sideline pieces will return to their normal posting schedule August 15th.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

As established last month, my life has gotten very busy, so I do not have time to produce quality biweekly “sideline” essays on current events for the next few months. I intend to return to that project relatively soon, though cannot say for certain when that will be. In place of those posts, I will continue to share others’ essays who were and remain influential in my own work. I do not necessarily endorse every conclusion or prescription they offer, but they were thought-provoking nonetheless.

Today I have Edward Luttwak’s “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future,” at times also referred to as “The Future is Fascist,” from the London Review of Books, 1994. Luttwak is a controversial figure in many circles, often seen as a populist opportunist. Regardless of those claims, his predictions for the newly globalized world market were prescient and worth interrogating. While some of what he has claimed has not come to pass, and other elements are exa…

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I publish twice a month. On the first Saturday of every month, readers can expect a “mainline,” often multi-part essay clarifying, applying, or adding onto Marxist theory. Two weeks later, a “sideline” essay analyzing a major current event or viral point of discourse is published using the frameworks laid out in the theoretical pieces (sideline pieces currently on hold; apologies). Every essay is free for one month after publication, after which it is automatically paywalled (with exceptions).

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The Forging of a Foil

Immigrants are not “the enemy.” It is normal and natural that when greater opportunities are found in another state, that people will seek to migrate to that state. Despite its flaws and degenerative contradictions, the United States still has plenty to offer. Mass immigration as a matter of state policy is a different beast, however. The immigrant is not a friend, but a competitor. In some cases, a predator, but only an opportunistic one. Most of the worst stories of perverted foreigner violence highlighted on the news or on Twitter would not have ever occurred had the state not aided in trafficking them. It is still not worth the energy to project all manner of sociocultural racial theories to every anonymous foreigner who sets foot in the United States. The chaos he may sow is more of a force of nature that must and should be contained regardless of national origin.

As I have stated in a previous essay, mass immigration is a structural feature of American capitalism. It can be held at bay for a time, provided global market conditions favor it, but it cannot be stopped altogether under this mode of production. Cheap labor and scabs are always in demand, and they are either hired within their country of origin or must be imported.

Who, then, is “the enemy?” You may expect me, a Marxist, to say “the bourgeoisie.” While I have no love for them (any more than I do the global population of potential scabs), they are not worth hating either. Like the lumpenprole immigrant and like the scab, they are creatures of habit. Opportunistic predators. Can one expect a tick to avoid parasitism when it has no consciousness we would recognize? Obviously not. “The enemy” I identify is not a group of persons (at present), but a social mode of organization. It is the set of incentives and disincentives that have created these last few decades of stagnation and decay. The connective tissues which allow us to feed and clothe ourselves is the same one which will starve and strip us when that becomes more convenient. Privatized gains, socialized losses. The individuals who will benefit are few and far between, and cannot be predicted. Even the Astors took a hit during the Depression.

There cannot exist an embodied antagonist without a protagonist. As such, there is no “enemy” until the revolutionary subject manifests itself. At no point in history has any revolution succeeded without a clear sense of whom said revolution is for, and by whom. It cannot be for no one, nor can it be for an abstract set of ideals. “By the people, for the people, and of the people” is a universal claim, it can be applied to any “people,” but it was written by and for a specific historically and culturally bound “people.” The most common interpretation is that those people are Americans. The materialist interpretation is more complex: Which Americans? The Gettysburg Address was written to encompass all of them, including the formerly enslaved. This ideal cannot possibly match reality when “Americans” are such a broad, self-contradicting population. Nor can it match reality when the Constitution is applied to those who are not Americans, nor have ever claimed to be so, but reside on American soil. To apply the Lincoln quote to the whole earth in reality is an even more monumental task, but liberalism has universal aims, and so it was and will continue to be applied despite humanity being far too complex to identify if such an application was successful.

Marxism, though, is also universal. The proletariat exists everywhere, today, but nowhere is it in power. The majority of the world qualifies as proletarian. This is too large of a mass, laden with its own contradictions, for it to move without leadership (hence, why identifying the divisions within the proletariat was necessary for the first part in this series). These internal and national divisions are not mere obstacles to Marxism’s vision of a global socialist order giving way to stateless communism, and they should not be treated as such. They are the very materials at hand to build a world we would wish to see. This is true not just of Marxists, but of any political tradition seeking a formal break with the contemporary order. The hand the world is presently dealt may not immediately favor the achievement of all our wildest dreams, but it is the starting point, regardless of those dreams. Thus, before universalist ideals can be applied universally, it must be incredibly particular about who it is by before it can answer whom it is actually for.

Immigrants are a fact of life in America, and in much of the rest of the world. There is a very specific “immigrant consciousness” which has taken root in the United States, a state which has very recently begun to describe itself as a “nation of immigrants.” This consciousness is coalitional in aspiration; it seeks to incorporate different blocs into one ruling faction, bound by that faction’s procedures. Hence, many European and Caribbean and Central American immigrants refer to themselves less by their old national consciousness and more to their status as immigrants within America; they form the broad immigrant bloc of a much broader political coalition. This coalition and its constituent groups is why archconservative Muslims in Michigan exist as part of the same coalition as transgender rights advocates who are by and large native-born Americans. This is an open contradiction in the Democratic Party’s makeup.

A transgender Islamic fundamentalist is not a subject which meaningfully exists, and yet the coalition manages to speak to both of their alleged interests, poorly. In reality, the Party exists to prop up its donors, the most important of which do not belong to the same class as the coalition they fund; another contradiction, and frankly the central one. This electoral coalition can appear to balance the interests of both, but only for so long, and only so long as this coalition remains useful to the Party’s donors. If the contradiction generates a rupture which causes electoral losses, or demands which upset donor interests in some significant way, one or both coalition members will be culled from it or will leave of their own accord. And go where? Well, that’s their problem.

Most transgender and Muslim constituents are proletarians, or somewhere close (maybe lumpen, maybe petit bourgeois). One group is majority native-born American, the other are immigrants or descendants thereof. Though very different in world outlook, their actual needs are generally quite similar. They need livable housing. They need stable jobs with decent pay. They need affordable groceries. They need savings for retirement. They need emergency services on standby, healthcare screenings, and safe communities. Transgender individuals generally don’t need childcare or education once they’ve reached adulthood, but Muslim families usually do, as do many other native-born families of other faiths. These are the basics that basically every person needs. Not everyone may maintain them, and not everyone may like how they are distributed or how they are constituted, but they are needs nonetheless. Elected officials move to provide them, but only within the frame allowed by their donors. The donors generally are the ones who own these goods and services, and are the ones who organize labor and capital to provide them—provided they make a return on this capital. If they do not, then they will not be provided.

The subject with transgender consciousness1 and the subject with Islamic fundamentalist consciousness both place a heavy premium on the particularities of their respective sense of identity. The fundamentalist cannot imagine not being Muslim, the transgender individual cannot imagine not being transgender. Both are imagined, yet to assert their realities, both must impose their imagination on the material world to bring it in line with their imagination. This is not a claim about the existence of God one way or another. Religious tradition (and, likewise, secular divergence from it) are accumulated material conditions. But dogmas are malleable. Traditions drift, shimmer, and contort to meet the present moment—the only moment which ultimately matters. They are not as fixed or as stable as their practitioners believe them to be. They provide a sense of stability, which is why we assume they are stable—but most modern American traditions, for instance, are inventions of the last century and a half. Much older civilizations with much older traditions mostly carry them on out of habit, or just for the sake of preserving them. For something to be considered a tradition is, in fact, an admission that it is no longer strictly necessary for society to continue. It is practiced solely for society to remain recognizable, not for it to remain.

As such, consciousness changes rapidly. Transgenderism as phenomenon is not strictly new (people have been earnestly and ironically pretending to be the opposite sex for millennia), but as a consciousness on the international stage it is brand new. Islam is not, by comparison, but its existing sects, interpretations, and attempts to balance faith with social and industrial progress are still new. America as a “nation of immigrants” is also a new and still-contested national identity, but is the result of hundreds of years of accumulated immigration, dislocation, assimilation, identity reconstitution, and so on. These things are not permanent, nor are the unconscious mechanisms which allow such changes to take place. Nor is one’s class position in the individual sense, but as a new mode of production matures, settles, becomes the dominant mode, the structure of class becomes permanent on a human scale, even as class signals, tastes, traditions flow into and out of the historical record. The underlying structure of class itself, not the persons who come to occupy its various positions. As such, class becomes a much better vector for incubating a revolutionary subject than any of these more superficial identities. Nations can be created, cut from whole cloth with whoever happens to be in a certain place at a certain time, and razed into a fine powder such that we can only analyze their residue. Class structure is the closest thing to a historical constant which exists—the sociologist’s speed of light, as it were—and as such, it contains the only subject which could bring us out of history as we have known it.

But what then, is to be done with the Muslim and the transgender, who both have needs to be met and no lasting vector through which to meet them? Are they not part of this grand proletarian project? No. Not as Muslims, nor as LGBTQ. Only as proletarians. To participate as subject, they must cut out the parts of themselves which conflict with the historic mission. If they do not, then they are not part of the revolutionary subject’s social body at all. If some remnant of their past self-conception lingers on inside of them, that is both probable and strictly their business, but it can no longer be externalized. Though there exist Muslim, transgender, and immigrant proletarians, there cannot exist a Muslim, transgender, immigrant proletarian subject. Any or all of them could and already have changed the United States as a nation; only one would be able to grip it and permanently alter its historic destiny.

Why then, must this Marxist revolution be national in scope to begin with, and why specifically within the United States? And, moreover, if immigrants are not “the enemy,” why do I go to great lengths to justify their general exclusion from such a project?

Continental Picket Line

There exists a tension within Marxism which cannot be resolved philosophically until it is resolved materially: The tension between national strategy and internationalist aims. Communism describes a stateless epoch after history; a global socialist order is necessary for achieving this, according to the dogma. But in order to achieve it, this requires one or a collection of states willing to use their leverage to support socialist revolutions in capitalist states. Necessarily, this means “the revolution” must begin somewhere particular, and cannot begin universally, since conditions differ around the world. Yet, because Marxism has such universalist aims, Marxists are wary of nationalism except in instances where nationalism is weaponized against empire. Within the imperial core, there is a tendency for Marxists to react against nationalist sentiments and sympathies, instead insisting that it can only be used to justify further imperial violence.

The tension exists even outside the imperial core; many anti-colonial Marxist movements contained similar concerns about using nationalism to oust imperial forces. The concern was—and still remains—that focusing on national aims and national development leads to a drift towards state bureaucracy and its maintenance, rather than cultivating the conditions for truly international socialist revolution. For many of these anti-colonial movements, this gamble did lead to the ousting of imperial forces (China, Vietnam), but have not yet meaningfully resolved the latter concern—the closure of the international project.

There is something of a fallacy involving the anti-nationalist position. How was China supposed to oust Japanese and other imperial forces without relying on nationalism to unify its people against them? How was Vietnam supposed to oust the French, the Americans, and the Chinese without using their specific national conditions as a basis for repelling hostile invasions? They cannot answer this question because this is not how history occurred.

Suppose a hypothetical state experiences a proletarian revolution and a vanguard is now in control. Neighboring states experienced similar uprisings, but were quashed. The surviving capitalist states conspire to embargo this weakened socialist state, reducing its ability to develop internally and project itself externally. What is the socialist power meant to do? Can it immediately afford to extend its influence into its openly hostile neighbors? No. Can it afford open warfare against multiple allied peers? Probably not. Should it just open the border, dissolve its class structure, and abolish the party? What does one expect to happen if they were to take that course of action?

These are the starting conditions of most fledgling socialist states, and it is because they are so harsh and so brutal that many do not survive. I don’t mean to leave the leadership off the hook; Cuba, of course, has made many preventable mistakes that resulted in a state of near-total ruin. However, these mistakes are understandable given the enormity of the task they choose to inherit. Though China acts very aggressively to protect its position in the global market, and though they have a stratified class structure and capitalist property relations, and though they have, as of late, become more and more nationalistic than internationalist in positioning, I cannot say that any of this was a mistake for the Chinese Communist Party. They have leveraged their position well. But it is this very position that prevents them from being anything more than they already are, and frankly it’s a miracle the country did not remain an impoverished backwater. It still produces Marxist economic, geopolitical, and legal theory. It still take its scientific and historic dimensions seriously. It has done very much to overcome their starting position, and to contest the American-led world order. And it has done so on a nationalist basis, because that is all that was available to it at the time.2

There will likely never come a time when global conditions favor an internationally-organized revolutionary movement of proletarians without the existence of at least one major socialist state as a precondition for its success. Even if this hypothetical state manages to completely erase its own national identity in favor of a purely proletarian national identity, that is still nationalism of a kind, and it would still be a necessary strategy until the rest of the world is ready for their leadership. China is not that state, and will not become that state soon. But this is not a failure of Chinese leadership to fulfill Marxist destiny. It is simply one of many realities.

The most successful socialist project of the 20th century ended in abject failure, yet it had organized itself as a proletarian nation.3 Its subjects were not Russian any longer, but Soviet citizens—citizens of the union. Yet, it failed to enforce this collective identity. Rather, it devolved towards regional nationalisms, granting autonomy it arguably should not have. In all likelihood this was inevitable, due to reasons I have already examined behind the Soviet Union’s collapse in another prior essay. But because it failed, we in the present have something to look back on; the architects of the Union did not have this advantage.

The United States is uniquely positioned to fulfill the role of a socialist power exerting influence on the rest of the world precisely because it can develop a unique proletarian consciousness in isolation. The US is a continental superpower with only two land borders, both with more or less friendly nations. It contains a vast supply of readily accessible natural resources, industrial infrastructure, and an underutilized population of laborers. It will remain relevant even when it does not retain its supreme financial position as manager of the global reserve currency. While China and Russia retain similar advantages and may even surpass it in some areas, their historical development patterns do not favor them nearly as much as ours do.

Why on earth would a Marxist project in America choose to ignore all of these national advantages and choose to adopt a political identity which is not distinctly American? How on earth is a socialist America to survive immediate encirclement without a strong, unifying identity? And, importantly, how is it to forge that unifying identity if all other identities—immigrant, LGBT, foreign nationalisms/allegiances, Democrat, Republican, Heritage American, African-American—assert that they are more important or worthy than the nation as a whole? In an era where capital and labor move freely across borders, ours must close. In a future where the proletariat commands the American state, the continent itself must become our picket line. Anything less would be akin to the dissolution of America we have already experienced, and the dissolution of the Marxist project just as it has raised itself to sapience.

Of course, this is not a novel concept in American Marxist discourse. The American Communist Party (ACP) already espouses this, though in perverted form. This party affixes existing American nationalism to Marxism like Frankenstein building a man out of corpses. It’s a good start, but obviously insufficient. American nationalism today is extremely sentimental and nostalgic, and where it is not, it is an extension of capitalist logic. Sewing this onto Marxist posture as one sews a patch onto a torn garment is not the same as unifying the two such that they are indistinguishable and inseparable.

This is the more monumental task, and it cannot result from a piece of theory such as this. It must be born out of love such that it may live, grow, and evolve as a natural being does, not artificially induced in vitro to satisfy the neurotic whims of its sterile creators. I cannot describe for you what an American proletarian nationalism should look like because it does not exist. The specific signifiers chosen to represent it would not be what it actually is. It must be the product of a marriage between Marxist political theory and genuine American patriotism—this is as specific as I can be. Contingent though it will prove to be, as nothing men build will last, it has the potential to spawn hundreds of generations of offspring. It is this consciousness, barely a glint in even mine own eye, which would raise the American Marxist project into maturity. This is the consciousness the vanguard must internalize for itself before it has even formed as a vanguard, so that it may spread by its actions in the future. It is from this position that such a consciousness can be formed elsewhere.

And it is from this point that I must leave you. Until next time, thank you for reading.

I am swamped in my personal life. I have not had the time to pick a topic, much less ruminate on it. Because of this turbulence (nothing bad, just very busy), the sideline pieces will be paused for the next few months. Instead of my own original work, I will be sharing the work of others who have influenced me. This week, please enjoy the following article by Nicolas D. Villarreal, published in Cosmonaut.

I will be back with the next part in the “Who’s Afraid of the Revolutionary Subject?” series on Saturday, June 6th.

Thank you for reading.

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Context and Dogma

Marx argued that the revolutionary subject which ushered in capitalism and its political manifestation, liberalism, was the bourgeoisie. His arguments were based in their economic role and leverage within existing feudal political structures. The bourgeoisie were predominantly responsible for stewarding mercantile empires while the mother-country remained predominantly feudalist. As such, many of them were wealthy, educated, had control over economic nodes and infrastructure, and a degree of autonomy not available to slaves, serfs, peasants, and urban servants. In America, the bourgeois revolution took place according to the will of an elite vanguard of bankers, merchants, and large-scale planters whose economic affairs were disrupted by Britain’s abandonment of salutary neglect in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. In France, the bourgeois revolution took place within the imperial core, resulting from the bourgeoisie’s political control of the Third Estate, and that Estate’s inability to advocate for itself amid market liberalization efforts which decimated the peasantry represented by the bourgeoisie.

For Marx, the revolutionary subject emergent within capitalism was to be the proletariat—this is to say, the class which rents its labor for wages, and lacks property ownership. The bourgeoisie, despite having some utopian socialistic impulses, was unable to usher in anything but bourgeois egalitarianism. The remaining peasantry and artisans were unable to usher in radical transformation as their awareness of their own class conditions degrading rendered them reactionary—attempting to preserve social structures which were already severely in decline.

Utopian socialists, Western leftists, anarchists, and reactionaries who wish the Soviet Union would resurrect see the proletariat as a put-upon victim in need of saving, or that capitalism and value extraction were simply “unfair.” This is a partial theoretical origin for the “workerist” dogma.1 Workerism, in this context, is meant as a slur; it abandons party politics (note: not in the electoral sense) in favor of grassroots direct action and decentralized factory control. I deploy it as a slur because the proletariat is not at all united, even abstractly, on what their interests are. Different proletarians have different concrete interests specific to their industry’s conditions, and the general condition of the global market. Decentralized direct actions, undirected by some kind of shared central authority with a cohesive strategy, is adventurism by another name. It prevents a clear and homogeneous class and national consciousness, and its coagulation into a sovereign state capable of self-defense and future expansion. It prevents coalition-building with reactionary elements which might have otherwise been able to see their fates tied to that of the general condition of their nation’s proletariat through strong, unified messaging and clear strategy.

They are not. Marx was not emotionally attached to the proletariat in the way these other thinkers were and are. He didn’t even like proletarians as people much of the time. And why would he? He didn’t have much in common with them. His assertion that the proletariat was the revolutionary subject of communism was in line with his observations about how the proletariat and bourgeoisie were developing hand in hand. Where the bourgeoisie once directly controlled the logistics of far-flung empires, today, the actual labor is done by proletarians. Where the bourgeoisie were once directly interested in the daily production of their factories, today, they are only concerned with their financial conditions—conditions which are increasingly disconnected from reality. Where the bourgeoisie once found natural allies in the urban poor and the peasantry, the proletariat has a fundamentally different relationship to production and to the bourgeoisie itself than these other classes—namely, that the former two had no real role in capital reproduction, whereas the proletariat as a class is capital’s sole means of reproduction. The bourgeoisie can guide how capital is reproduced through its control of private properties, but it does not itself reproduce capital. All it can do is redistribute.

The proletariat’s latent revolutionary potential arises from the fact that they now must be the educated and productive class, whereas the bourgeoisie is a decadent and declining class that has enslaved itself to capital. The proletariat is likewise enslaved to capital, but it can free itself if it overturns the bourgeoisie, who is increasingly superfluous and decadent to production and social reproduction. In order to save themselves and the system upon which they rely, they must periodically liquidate their national proletariat in search of cheaper labor elsewhere; this is not evidence of a healthy, stabilizing social hierarchy. Not unfair (though it is), but deeply sick, diseased, and desperate.

A Class, Not a Mass

The general class structure of capitalist society today is this:

1. The bourgeoisie: the property/capital-owning class.

2. The petit-bourgeoisie: smaller property/capital holders, and/or those with proximity to state power.

3. The proletariat: the working class who owns little to no productive property, but who rent their time and their bodies out to the upper two classes for production.

4. The lumpenproletariat: the chronically dependent classes, including the criminal class.

Within each of these classes there is a structure unto them:

1. The bourgeois classes

   1. Financialists

   2. Industrialists

   3. Statesmen

2. The petit-bourgeois classes

   1. Government administrators

   2. The military officer class

   3. Media figures

   4. Law enforcement and corrections

   5. Mid-level management (e.g., HR, most union leadership)

   6. Academics and intellectuals

   7. Retirees

   8. Small business owners (especially those who work alongside their employees)

3. The proletariat

   1. Engineers, logisticians, & other abstract/knowledge-based labor which results in the creation of industrial infrastructure

   2. Skilled tradesmen, logistical laborers, and specialized factory workers

   3. Enlisted or conscripted military

   4. Assembly linemen and other unskilled productive labor

   5. Service and retail workers

   6. “Gig” workers

4. The lumpenproletariat

   1. Chronic welfare recipients

   2. Criminals

The class structure is a gradient. “Gig” workers are closer to the lumpenproletariat than to the proletariat because their wage structure and productive role is inherently unstable; many of them are already welfare recipients. Small business owners are technically petit bourgeoisie as they own productive capital, but they also work for a living on that productive capital. Statesmen may or may not own productive property in their own names, but they command vast resources when they are in power, and are functionaries of capital. Financialists rank above industrialists because they are the true stewards of capital, since it is by their logic that industrialists are capable of commanding productive infrastructure. Both financialists and industrialists may be owners of certain firms, large shareholders, and/or corporate officers. Criminals are all the way at the bottom because they can only ever be parasitic upon the rest of the hierarchy, either when on the streets or in prison.

As for retirees (possibly the most controversial element), they may at one point have been proletarians and though they rarely command productive property and they are mostly chronically dependent on pensions, savings, and portfolios, which are aligned with capital. They need housing prices to continue rising in order to tap into their equity, they need stocks to continue rising in order to reap dividends, and they need resource- and labor-intensive healthcare that young workers generally do not—and this must be subsidized because they are past the point that they can create new value. If the value we create today were earmarked for us in the future, this would be fine, but it isn’t. We are paying now for everyone’s grandparents (especially the bourgeois ones), but who will pay for us to live when we reach their age? We cannot liquidate the pension system entirely just because it is not working for us now, but at the same time, this dam of fictitious capital will not hold. When it breaks, it will expose latent class antagonisms currently disguised as generational antagonisms.

We can disagree with this or that placement; they are somewhat fluid. Capitalism allows for greater class mobility than the economic systems which preceded it. This means no one is strictly a proletarian or strictly bourgeois or strictly lumpen. The purpose of this outline, however, is to illustrate that there is a structure within each class, and the proletariat is not an undifferentiated, homogeneous mass. There is a hierarchy within it, and some proletarians are more useful to capital (or to revolution) than others.

Baristas, retail workers, gig workers, though proletarian (they lack property and receive wages for their labor), are not engaged in the transformation of production. They are readily disposable functionaries who are barely engaged in productive labor at all. I have made this criticism before, but baristas do not grow or roast the coffee, they do not produce the blenders or espresso makers they work on daily, and most of their menus are completely unnecessary luxuries (what else do you call an iced cold foam lavender matcha latte?). There is little value added since all of the constituent parts are already in their processed form, created across vast global supply chains; they need only be assembled for drinking. The DoorDasher who ferries slop bowls from kitchen to the private equity office that owns the kitchen barely provides value to the economy, if any at all.

The upper end of the proletariat, on the other hand, is indispensable, even in a theoretically fully automated economy. They have the skills necessary to completely upend the forces of production as they are already engaged in the continuing revolution of the means of production within capitalism, making them uniquely suited to transition away from it. Financialists do too, but they do so through capital. Capital on its own is not going to usher in a revolution of productive forces today, only someone with an intimate knowledge of those productive forces is capable of this. Engineers design the infrastructure, tradesmen execute and maintain the design, enlisted military defend it or help execute/maintain it, the factory line uses it to produce, and service workers are merely a point of final assembly or interface with the broader public. Those lower ends—the factory line, the service labor—they cannot transform society on their own; they do have latent labor power, and it will have to be flexed, but from their position, unguided action is adventurism at best and retrenchment of drudgery at worst.

This is why only that higher end, what could be considered “labor aristocracy,” and which liberal economists clumsily refer to as “knowledge workers,” lumping them in with lawyers, management, marketing, and human resources, is capable of guiding the revolution. The proletariat as a whole is necessary to usher in this transformation, but only the labor aristocracy—the “aristocratic proletariat,” as I have dubbed them—are capable of organizing the masses below. Whether they do or not depends on their material incentives to do so. In the short-view, they may not exist; but given the degradation of our conditions in the last 30, 40, 50 years, that long-view is already forming. They are working harder for worse outcomes, and they will leave that legacy to their children.

Now the question becomes: How are they to lead? By forming a vanguard. This party would not be organized as a traditional electoral party or as a junior partner of an electoral party like the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, they would need to start as employee reading groups following and analyzing trends in their industries. Then, as leadership emerges through competence and trust, make connections with others at other companies and within other industries, they should form a cartel—not a union, but a cartel. This is to say, they should work primarily to restrict labor competition, gatekeep access to technical information, and begin to exert control over hiring decisions and labor retention. This would need to take place in order to consolidate their labor power, and later, for ideological cohesion, to become managers of labor for their own purposes. From this position, they will be able to exert influence in society more broadly than if they were a mere electoral party or a wing within one. Their politics would be wrapped up in their interests as a class, not in political ideals like the castrated DSA which predominantly functions as a feeder for the Democratic Party.

The cartel claim requires justification. Third-parties cannot win under first-past-the-post; infiltrating existing parties dilutes ideology. Unions are defensive and co-opted, at times acting as guilds, at times as legal cover for bosses, at times as slightly more independent human resources departments. A cartel structure, however, exerts direct control over production decisions—the material nodes capital depends on—and instills discipline within and without itself, extracting concessions from multiple parties without subordinating itself to any. Bourgeois cartels already demonstrate this form's effectiveness.2

When the moment is right, this cartel structure becomes the platform for a broader social transformation.

The Immigrant Question

In the class structure delineated above, I purposefully left out discussion of one of the more pressing issues of our time: Immigrants. In another prior essay, I have decried mass immigration as an influx of foreigners diluting the national proletariat’s potential for cohesion, simultaneously depressing their wages, and as violent lumpen recruited to liquidate the national proletariat to this end. I stand by these claims, but they would benefit from some additional structure. We can further divide the class structure of modern capitalism thusly:

1. Bourgeoisie

   1. Global financialists

   2. Global industrialists

   3. Statesmen

   4. National financialists

   5. National industrialists

2. Petit-bourgeoisie

   1. Government administrators (national, often serving global ends)

   2. The military officer class (national, serving global ends)

   3. Media figures (global)

   4. Law enforcement and corrections (national)

   5. Mid-level management (global in almost every respect)

   6. Academics and intellectuals (global)

   7. Small business owners (mostly national)3

3. The proletariat

   1. Labor aristocracy (split between global and national interests)

   2. Skilled tradesmen, logistical laborers, and specialized factory workers (largely national)

   3. Enlisted or conscripted military (national, with some exceptions)4

   4. Assembly linemen and other unskilled productive labor (split)

   5. Service and retail workers (split)

   6. “Gig” workers (split, global increasingly predominating)

4. The lumpenproletariat

   1. Retirees (based nationally, but aligned with global interests)

   2. Chronic welfare recipients (split)

   3. Criminals (global)

Important to note that “global” does not equate to “foreigner.” It describes which economy each class serves, or which interests it is aligned with. A software engineer is far more aligned with global interests than a Detroit auto-worker by the nature of his work. However, it is not in the interest of an American software engineer to be replaced by a foreign software engineer on an H-1B, or for his work to be outsourced to a foreign country; yet, the very function of the industry in which he works lends itself to exactly this kind of globalization. Unlike an auto manufacturing plant, software engineering is light, mobile, and can be done from anywhere with a strong enough internet connection and a powerful enough computer (many consumer-grade laptops are capable of it). The individual coder is not all that important, unless he is engaged in labor which cannot be replicated by another. The advent of AI threatens this particular cohort of proletarians because it makes their utility more accessible to the masses, especially the cheaper ones.

Capital exploits this cleavage in interests, and it is not a particularly clean one. National elements of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat clash with the global elements—especially where they occupy the same space. The global forces are presently more powerful, and of course they would be. They have monopoly control over the global market. They clash because the national elements wish to insulate themselves from the disruption caused by the free movement of capital and labor, whereas the global elements seek to dislodge and deracinate them.

A national industrialist, however, always has incentive to become a global industrialist. National industrialists remain national either because their labor force exists nowhere else, or because they do not have the capital or management acumen to offshore their production. The ones that can are already global. Thus, national industrialists have an incentive to encourage mass immigration, as it allows them to offshore their production without ever having to move their equipment.

But a national proletarian working for a national industrialist can only ever be aligned with his class within the confines of a workers’ nation. What benefit is there for him if production moves to another country? Or if immigrants move in to undercut his wages? Why should he accept this? The obvious answer is that he will not. This has nothing to do with racial attitudes or animosity, but it absolutely helps to cultivate it.

Thus, when the national bourgeoisie sponsor statesmen who tell them they will shut the borders and bring the factories back all at once, the national proletarian might believe that this is in his countryman’s interest as well, especially if they both subscribe to nationalist sentiments. However, this almost always proves itself to be a shell game—as conditions change to benefit the national bourgeoisie, they have more opportunity to pivot towards a global orientation, especially if the state their patron commandeers is deeply entrenched in the global system. This may take one year or several decades to manifest, but the national proletarian loses regardless.

Leftists will argue since foreign labor often loses in this arrangement as well, that the obvious answer is for national labor to unite with foreigners, even those who acknowledge the dislocation or wage-depression caused directly by immigration.5

They are mostly wrong.

In the long-term, yes, the foreign proletariat should expect that as they entrench themselves as the new national proletariat that they will be treated in much the same way. Once they become citizens, they are now just as vulnerable to the wage-cutting and offshoring as the people that they replaced. But this is in the long-term; in the short-term, a lower wage in America means a higher wage than virtually anywhere else on the planet. Developing the long-view might take over a generation to really set in, if it does at all, and by that point it will already be too late. In the medium-term, what blinds them from the tragedy they carry out as soon as they arrive on our shores is the ideological apparatus which tells them that they are more industrious, more disciplined, more capable than the natives they displace. They have no reason not to believe such flattering lies when they are paired with material benefits.

What makes the leftist strategy wrong is that there is already a national proletariat in the United States, and they are already primed to resist their own displacement and liquidation. They already occupy key infrastructural nodes, they already form part of the division of labor which allows this displacement to happen. Uniting with immigrant labor would be a mistake since immigrant labor is actively trying to occupy those positions. They are not yet in those positions, and where they are, they accelerate globalization efforts. To bring them into the fold would require far more effort than simply speaking directly to the interests of the national proletariat, since it would also require disciplining the national proletariat to see their nearest enemies as brothers.

This is not to say that no immigrants can be brought into the fold whatsoever, or that the primary division within society is between foreigners and nationals. Some, sure; but why make it a goal? Why not court the nationals and let the chips fall where they may? Some immigrants will join, sure, but those will be the ones who have already adopted the long view, who already know that they are dispensable to the bourgeoisie which brought them here, and that they will have to adapt to the new nation and allow themselves to be changed by it, rather than prey upon it and make it “more like home” by changing its culture to their benefit, or by importing all of their far-flung cousins. It is either already home, and thus worth defending as it is according to the needs of their fellow proletarian comrades, or it is a foreign land which must be molded according to the whims of their foreign compatriots. It cannot be both. The only immigrant remotely worth recruiting is the immigrant who has voluntarily abandoned his consciousness as an immigrant.

The same cannot be asked of the native worker, i.e., to abandon his national consciousness. He must reshape it to align with his class consciousness. Today, workers have no nation. They are treated as disposable, interchangeable units rather than as a people. Such a nation would have to be consciously built.

Lingering Questions

Expanding out from the immigrant question (which itself requires further justification) is the national question, and from here, the internationalist question. This is to say: Why would the labor aristocracy (as I have defined it) aspire to proletarian revolution rather than bourgeois management as they have in the past? How does the cartel structure not collapse before it has state power? What is the revolutionary subject meant to do in the world arena when he has power? How is socialism to encompass the globe if it must start with a national vanguard? What are the civilizational risks of pursuing this project? These will be discussed in later parts. For now, thank you for reading.

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PRE-PUBLICATION EDIT: I wrote this on Wednesday, April 15th, 2026. As of Friday evening, President Trump has announced the Strait of Hormuz is open. Judge for yourself how accurate my long-view is given that information.

The Limits of Trump

In a prior series at the end of the 2024 election cycle, I posited that Trump was the Marxist candidate. He ran on “no new wars,” “reindustrialize,” and “mass deportations.” He has largely failed on all three of his policy planks, but th…

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A Shocking Display of Arrogance

Where 20th century Marxists asked “How do we seize control over the means of production?” Marxists of the 21st century must ask “How do we reorient the means of production towards the means of reproduction?”

The 20th century provided us with some answers on how to seize the state, but not how to hold onto it, nor how to export Marxism reliably, nor what that more permanent transformation would look like in practice. The state was s…

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In Media Res

I confess that despite the military buildup in prior days, I was reciting “nothing ever happens” to myself. I believed the buildup to be an aggressive negotiation tactic rather than preparation for an actual conflict. I did think the US was…

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Quick Recap

The prior entries in this series provided two very important clarifications/demystifications of liberal critique of monopoly:

1. Monopolies tend to become more efficient as they scale up, not less.

2. Monopolies tend to produce more significant innovations faster than the free market.

These are the clarifications of the following liberal critiques:

1. Monopolies are bureaucratic, inefficient, and more expensive to deal with.

2. Monopolies strangle innovation by crushing the competi…

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The Prior Decade

I do not use the term “conspiracy” pejoratively. Whatever Epstein was, he was at the center of a conspiracy. On this, virtually everyone today can agree. But from 2016-2020, much ink has been spilled vilifying the people interested in his activities as “conspiracy theorists,” cranks, and cultists. There is, of course, some truth to these malignments (more on that later).…

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Nuggets of Truth

In the last installment of this series, I started with a critique of progressive and reactionary ressentiment towards monopolistic firms. It is only fitting that I start this installment with a vindication of some of their primary critiques, if only to show that I am enduringly magnanimous to even the most vile and despicable of creatures.

A common refrain among both progressive liberals and reactionaries is that monopolies resemble central planning structures found in comma…

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High Praise

Long-time readers know my shtick by now: a Marxist who openly appeals to reactionaries. Superficially, yes, this is the case, but it is in line with Marxism as method, not dogma. So-called “reactionaries,” are in fact anything but, with very few exceptions. In reality, they have been the most progressive force in American politics since the End of History. By contrast, the “progressives” are histori…

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At the beginning of the 45th Presidency, left-wing activists coined the now-infamous “Abolish ICE” meme. This was, of course, driven by reflexive emotional reaction to Trump’s anti-immigration platform. However, back then, “Abolish ICE” was not universally accepted on the left. Those wielding the slogan were obliged to engage in discourse surrounding it, and what emerged was a coherent motivation and conscious strategy. The bullet points that follow outline the chronology:

• INS was reworked into ICE as part of the creation of the DHS

• Where INS was once part of the DoJ and largely bureaucratic/judicial, ICE is more of a federal law enforcement agency

• This decision co-occurred with a rapid militarization of police under a post-9/11 state of emergency which never ended

• “Abolish ICE” could mean, to a non-anarchistic liberal, a return to the INS, and a possible opportunity to roll back the permanent state of emergency and return to a more procedural, adjudicative …

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Progressives and reactionaries alike tend to share similar grievances around the monopolization of industry. Monopolies tend to stifle competition, become bureaucratic, disconnect from local—or in some instances, human—needs, and cut corners to save on costs while raising prices once consolidated. Progressives are generally concerned with price-fixing, planned obsolescence of product fleets, and their outsized influence in politics. Reactionaries, on the other hand, are more concerned with their stifling of market competition, their social and legal engineering, and—once more—their outsized influence in politics. Their primary grievances differ slightly but overlap substantially, though on the point of “social and legal engineering” they often diverge on the details.

Progressives often favor regulation of monopolies, up to and including breaking them apart—“trust-busting.” They often hold monopolies to higher legal standards than small businesses, resulting in reams of paperwork: compliance trainings, safety codes, environmental reviews, legal retainers and so on. The result is remarkable inefficiency that has slowly ground industry to a near-halt. Progressives expect to reap reward from monopolization’s many benefits while using the state to mediate away its worst excesses. Once a firm has cemented itself as a monopoly, its primary drive becomes rent extraction. The more regulations added, the more difficult this becomes for the monopoly itself, and the more rent is instead extracted by intermediary layers that must be consulted simply to get projects off the ground.

This dynamic is visible even in critiques of Uber, DoorDash, and other monopolistic “service” companies. The primary complaint is rarely that these firms are unproductive or socially unnecessary, but that they are monopolies. The concern is not over the quality or character of any given monopoly, merely that it is a monopoly.

The reactionary position differs in form but not in outcome. Reactionaries are generally anti-regulation and believe the market to be the primary economic organizing principle, but that they feel monopolies destroy the ethos of capitalism rather than drive it to its logical conclusion. They, like Adam Smith, see monopolies as a distortion of perfect market conditions, usually the result of government interference. Indeed, there are clear examples of this—utilities companies, public transit, the aerospace industry, etc. However, these are not merely the result of government interference.

In almost all cases, monopolistic firms arise in industries where standardization, economies of scale, and capital-intensive research lead to a commensurate rise in profitability. Such firms then game the market in order to corner it, offering below-market rates in order to drive local competitors out of business. Nothing about this violates competitive market logic. But competition presupposes a victor; monopolies are the victors of capitalist competition. They stand alone, and can only be dismantled either by the state (which holds a monopoly on the use of violence) or by another monopolistic firm which subverts the existing monopoly’s business model.

It is only once rising monopolies are acknowledged as such that the state steps in to support them, and they are only supported in their monopolistic forms because they have become critical infrastructure that the rest of the economy cannot do without. Truly unrestrained markets tend towards consolidation; thus, the reactionary simultaneously opposes their consolidation and any regulation which would dissolve such consolidation—a contradiction.

The progressive position is also in contradiction. Progressives do not believe the market can operate unrestrained because this produces all manner of social externalities: pollution, foreseeable accidents, catastrophically low wages, unreasonably high prices, etc. However, by regulating the market to account for these externalities, they create conditions which accelerate monopoly formation, since only monopolistic firms can comply with swaths of regulatory demands and still be able to turn a profit.

Ultimately, once a monopoly accedes to progressive regulation and continues to return profits to shareholders, it can expect to be broken up once such a move becomes politically expedient. In practice, anti-trust interventions are largely superficial: a single large firm is divided into three or four smaller ones that remain anti-competitive, retain enormous political influence, and continue to exploit massive economies of scale. More commonly, anti-trust legislation functions as a tool for extracting political favors from firms seeking to merge, rendering its populist roots moot and subordinating long-term economic concerns to short-term political gain.

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A Full-Throated Defense

Monopolies are a historically progressive force. I use “progressive” here not in the American liberal sense, but in its Marxist one. The continued rise and persistence of monopolistic firms signals the waning of purely competitive market logic as the dominant economic organizing principle. This development is neither inherently “good” nor “bad.” It is historically contingent, much as competitive markets were themselves progressive relative to feudalism. So-called “natural” monopolies—those arising from organic market consolidation rather than direct state sponsorship—have transformed relations of production to a staggering degree. In doing so, they have oriented economic life toward a new historical configuration, one defined less by competition among many firms than by planning, coordination, and scale.

Monopolistic industrial firms often excel at productive planning, research and development, economies of scale, and large-scale capacity to meet human needs. In many cases, they function as closed economic systems in their own right, operating according to internally coordinated—often explicitly planned—logics rather than competitive ones.

Boeing, for instance, must coordinate the production of innumerable highly sensitive, fragile, and technically complex components, all of which must conform precisely to the designs of both its commercial and military aircraft. This requires long-term planning and close partnerships with suppliers, many of whom are themselves monopolistic firms producing a narrow range of specialized components exclusively for the aerospace industry.

Similarly, Bell operated for decades in the twentieth century with no meaningful competition. Rather than eliminating innovation, this condition compelled continuous technological advancement, resulting in massive investments in research and development. Much of this research did not immediately generate profit, yet what did emerge proved transformative. Bell Labs pioneered revolutionary technologies and secured substantial returns through the patents that followed. By effectively subsidizing research, Bell was able to pool extraordinary human capital, pairing genuinely exceptional engineers and inventors with resources and institutional support they could never have accessed in isolation.

Monopolistic economies of scale are most visible today in firms such as Walmart and Amazon, with U.S. Steel serving as a useful historical case study. All three are logistical behemoths: vertically integrated, globally coordinated, and capable of directing trillions of dollars in fixed capital. Each possesses a core business model—retail for Walmart and Amazon, steel production for U.S. Steel—that demands massive resource and labor inputs drawn from across the world.

Their strategy for securing these inputs has consistently been absorption. Inputs are brought in-house, folded into subsidiaries, or otherwise subordinated to the firm’s internal planning logic. In some cases, this results in profitable spin-offs; in others, firms deliberately subsidize unprofitable segments of the supply chain in order to gatekeep access to critical inputs, exclude potential competitors, and stabilize the profitability of the system as a whole. The general outcome has been persistent deflationary pressure on their goods—not because of any commitment to consumer welfare, but because internalized planning allows costs to be reduced at scale.

Whether consumer prices are later raised to extract rent is irrelevant to this point. Economies operating at this scale are only possible under monopolistic logic, and they clearly do meet human needs (albeit imperfectly). The competitive market was never able to do this as efficiently as these mega-firms, and moreover, the competitive market can never be reinstated.

A General Critique

Though I have shown that monopolies are historically progressive, they are still presently inefficient and their capacity to meet human needs is breaking down due to the financial logic of the early 21st century. In the next installation, I will provide a general critique of monopoly under modern capitalist conditions. But for now, I provide a general critique of trust-busting and regulation which lays bear why the contradictions of the progressive and reactionary postures toward monopoly are destructive, rather than generative.

First, anti-trust law introduces arbitrary thresholds for what constitutes a monopoly, distorting market behavior by preventing economically efficient consolidations while permitting others. These thresholds are not merely technical; they are political. Their arbitrariness invites state intervention driven by ideological preference or rent extraction rather than economic coherence. For example, two mid-sized media firms seeking to merge may be blocked on anti-trust grounds, often at the behest of a far larger incumbent that enjoys close relationships with regulators or employs former officials from agencies such as the FCC. The dominant firm remains untouched despite already functioning monopolistically, while simultaneously leveraging its political influence and legal expertise to prevent the emergence of a comparable competitor. This stifles innovation, prevents inefficiencies from being resolved, and prevents the market from consolidating in earnest.

Second, the breakup of monopolies cannot restore pre-monopoly market conditions. All actors in any reconstituted market would be aware that monopoly is possible and would therefore rationally optimize toward forming one themselves. Even if such awareness were somehow absent, the dynamics of market competition naturally tend toward monopolistic outcomes beyond certain thresholds which vary by firm according to their specific business models. Attempts to “reset” the market thus inevitably reproduce consolidation. Breaking up monopolies cannot eliminate the rational solutions monopoly provides, nor can it reverse the historical conditions that made monopoly viable in the first place. Moreover, progressive liberal anti-trust regimes rarely exist in isolation; they are typically embedded within broader regulatory frameworks that, as discussed earlier, further accelerate monopoly formation.

Third, anti-trust law and broader “progressive” regulatory frameworks push society toward an extremely inefficient and highly extractive form of central planning. Rather than articulating general goals for economic development, the state instead imposes a dense web of constraints. Firms must then maneuver around these limits in order to remain viable, often either rendering legislation ineffective for its stated purposes—such as fuel-efficiency standards like CAFE—or preventing otherwise beneficial economies of scale from forming at all. The state subsequently extracts rent from monopolistic firms as they grow in size, primarily through fines, legal fees, and compliance costs. These expenses are not prohibitive but anticipated. Monopolies incorporate them into their business models, periodically violating regulations when the temporary gains exceed the predictable cost of enforcement.

This tacit, politically contingent accommodation of monopoly produces an economic system that neither consistently meets human needs nor meaningfully empowers workers or consumers. To be clear, the immediate abolition of regulatory agencies such as the FDA or FCC would be socially catastrophic: food and drug adulteration would immediately proliferate, and advertising practices would become even more invasive. Yet it is equally clear that the present equilibrium—a system in which regulatory agencies exist but are structurally ineffectual, and monopolies persist but remain economically irrational—cannot be sustained indefinitely. The contradictions this arrangement generates demand not a return to pre-monopoly conditions, but a rationalization of central planning itself, along with a resolution of its own contingent contradictions.

In a past essay, I postulated that there is a layer beneath the traditional base-superstructure model of society as described by Marx and formalized by Gramsci. This addition would be known as the “substrate,” and was described vaguely as the cumulative adaptations of humanity, both biological and behavioral. For the uninitiated, the original dyadic model described the “base” as the mode of production of a given economy—how societies organize themselves to extract, harvest, process, and distribute the goods which they rely upon for survival. The “superstructure” is the collection of cultural, legal, and ideological artifacts which emerge from the base—how families form, how people conceive of themselves and others, what language is spoken, what religion is practiced (if any), how existing laws are applied or enf…

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Let’s get this out of the way: I am not suggesting that the issues raised in Jacob Savage’s Compact piece The Lost Generation are false, trivial, ineffectual, or the fault of White millennial men’s inadequacies. It is obviously the case that ill-defined diversity initiatives are designed to exclude younger White men from employment opportunities. This is not a novel discovery, even if it is just now becoming socially acceptable to utter.

The title of this piece instead is a response to the tearful self-pity dripping throughout Savage’s work. The prose reads as stoic and fatalistic at first blush, but beneath that facade is a barely-concealed melancholic hysteria. So many testimonies from men in media and academia, all saying the same thing. So many instances of magnanimity towards the people making these decisions (not to mention the deranged ideologues they end up hiring) leading to nothing but therapeutic massaging for the jilted young men shut out of their careers. There is no resolution offered, just the self-absorbed shock of a middle-aged millennial realizing far too late that meritocracy may not have ever truly existed in his lifetime.

Notice how I began the first paragraph: I began by making a structural claim and signaling an analytic critique of Savage’s treatment of it—but in the second paragraph, I go on to attack Savage’s temperament and the psychological tone of the piece. This is essentially what Savage does with his piece, albeit without any kind of righteous acridity toward anyone but older White men. While I stand by my character assassination, it is entirely beside the point. What follows is not a refutation of Savage’s structural claim, but a critique of what he does with it: after thousands of words documenting this systemic trend, he collapses analysis into temperament, offering no direction or politics. Instead, by withholding these conclusions, he subtly instructs the reader to catch “the vibe.” That, ultimately, is the whole point.

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Holding Hands with Ghosts

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

By “grievance politics,” I refer to any political or ideological conclusions drawn from vague sentiments of unfair treatment. Even if the grievance is legitimate, creating a politics around it, consciously or unconsciously, does little to address the source of the grievance. Rather than generating strategy, institutions, and durable forms of power, leaning into grievance encourages reactivity and desire for catharsis. Validation, revenge, a return to a better time, these are reasonable desires when faced with real discrimination, but they are personal emotional reactions, even when shared by millions. Lacking a clear vision past the present, politics based around these emotions inevitably become superficial signifiers for the existing political system to exploit.

Exploiting “the vibe” well can get your podcast off the ground, or get your dumb friend into elected office. Doing it poorly can land you in jail or dead (not an exaggeration). The vibe may reflect something entirely real, but the vibe itself is a pure abstraction of that thing. It is filtered through so many competing personal interests, emotions, and worldviews that it is nearly impossible to ascertain which aspects of “the vibe” are real and which are not until the vibe in question has already passed. Right now, there appears to be a reckoning with the hiring practices which discriminate against White men. Is that reckoning real? No. Will it ever become real? Probably not. Will getting angrier or more woeful about that fact lead White men to “do something about it?” Not in any real sense.

It will encourage more limp-dicks to post about the inevitability of the Zoomerwaffen and will definitely lead to more mournful “thinkpieces” that can barely formulate a coherent thought, but it will never lead to anything real. There is no vision beyond the grievance, and to the extent that there is, that vision is usually born from the grievance in the first place. If anyone is to be truly radicalized in a way that affects the material world beyond “shifting the vibe,” it will be another schizo teenager killing a bunch of children because his 764 groupchat told him to. Even this is nothing but a spectacular tragedy set up by spooks to be exactly that, because it can do nothing else.

Conclusions

One should be unafraid of the conclusions one comes to as a result of his observations. Savage (or his editor) is a coward for not including one. There have been, however, plenty of people filling in the conclusion for him, each of them more amped-up than the last.1 I don’t blame them, though, really. It’s not their fault that they’re not cut out to compartmentalize and move on. Monkey see, monkey do.2

The conclusions I came to by the end of the piece are as follows:

1. There will be no return to meritocracy under liberalism.

2. The institutions Savage is worried about salvaging should be left to rot.

3. The disillusionment and underemployment of young White men is as much an economic problem as it is an ideological one.

4. This demographic is growing in size and will remain relevant even when the zeitgeist turns on their concerns again.

My justifications are as follows:

The manner in which these diversity programs have been pushed is a legal gray area, and straight White American men are the only group not protected under the Civil Rights Act. Diversified organizations are already expecting reprisals. They will double down on selecting for ideological and personal loyalty under the guise of selecting for “fit.” Expansion of the CRA would create a regulatory framework so onerous that hiring for actual competence becomes virtually impossible as any hiring decision could result in a lawsuit. Abolition of the CRA is preferable only in that it then becomes possible for parallel institutions to be created which are unhindered by concerns over “discrimination.”3 Still, we run into a similar problem: existing institutions will be able to discriminate against White men openly, more so than they already do. Continuing the status quo or relying on the courts to smooth things over will only lead to more of the same. This is the new normal, and you can’t have the old one back.

Given this, and given the stark decline of these institutions since their commitment to diversity, they should be left to their own devices. Let them choke on their own bile. That they went to such great lengths to expel White men rather than cleaning house in any other way means their run as Serious Institutions is over. There are many other indicators to suggest their legitimacy is evaporating (the literacy crisis among the most significant), so why would you want to be brought back in as they’re dying? Replacement institutions will have to be built regardless, premised around an entirely different political economic structure.4 This is exceedingly difficult to pull off, and necessary all the same.

Underemployment of a given demographic, even if primarily driven by ideological fervor, is an economic problem. Economic problems are spiritual problems as well. Everyone knows a capable White guy who’s completely given up. His depression, nihilism, and lack of will are the result of an economy that does not have secure, productive roles to offer him. In many cases, it’s not even that low-skill retail or food service are beneath him—those jobs aren’t open to him either. The only reason we have gotten to the point where diversity initiatives took precedence over real governance issues is because of how abstracted we are from real supply chains, real value production, real hierarchies of concepts, technical expertise, human capital. Our political economy is based on highly complex, interdependent systems of absolute horseshit. As immiserating as unemployment is, so is holding down a job (or three) you know provides no real value and won’t pay the bills. Either way, disillusionment is inevitable.

If you are an over-credentialed White man reading this, you may be asking “How does any of what you just said help me and my DOA career?” My advice to you is this: It’s over for you. You are not getting tenure. You will not be the next Atlantic editor.5 No one is coming to save you, and obviously no one cares about how that makes you feel. They will only want you back once they realize they could not actually function without you, and you still won’t be put into a position of real authority. Your job will be to clean up everyone else’s mess, then berated for jumping at the chance. Sometimes, that’s just how life is.

Acceptance is the first step. What follows next is reflection. What do you actually want out of life? What skills do you have that you could transfer to a career which would be less hostile to you? What skills would you be willing to learn to collect a steady paycheck and a tolerable standard of living? After reflection comes action: Make a plan, stick to it, get to where you need to be. Once you’ve resolved those material problems, only then can you begin to ask the bigger question, the one that grievance politics only appears to ask: What do I actually want from society, and what would need to be done in order to get it?

Society does not owe its subjects meaning or fairness. To believe otherwise is childish, naivete unbecoming of adult men. Expecting justice from society is no different than expecting physics to grant us teleportation. Society, like physics, must be understood as it is—both abstractly and intuitively—to be manipulated toward desired ends. We must be clear about what our ends are and why they are worth pursuing, and have the discipline to not let resentment, emotion, or circumstance substitute for careful thought.

China and the United States each represent the dual faces of capitalism. China, the productive, stalwart, patient face of industry; the US the huckstering, thieving, Jewish face of finance. This is not to suggest that there are no hucksters and thieves in China, or a total dearth of productive industries in the United States. These caricatures only apply to their broader role within the world-system.

China’s industrial capacity is immense. No other single nation on Earth has ever had a comparable level of industrial output. Though often overstated, it must be still be stated for an honest appraisal. They provide unparalleled percentages of raw and manufactured goods for a global market consisting of 8 billion people. While the Un…

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Modern Western Marxist morality centers around the subjugation of the “oppressed,” oppression no longer having any connection to economic exploitation but to various social grievances across identity categories. Even the concept of “exploitation” no longer has any connection to the more neutral definition used by Marx and his contemporaries to describe the exploitation of labor’s value creation. Instead, it is about the generic discrepancy between poverty and wealth, no different from the concerns of the average liberal. Almost all modern Marxist analysis and political positions are derived from these moralistic priors. This is because almost all modern Marxists are, in effect, liberals. They are not revolutionary in scope. They hear “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and pretend as though the first clause was never uttered. Luckily, those of us who retain more radical sympathies do not have t…

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In the first part in this series, I left off asking a question: If the US economy is based around financial rentierism and the export of dollars, from where does the value undergirding those dollars arise? This installment does not yet answer that question, as the answer to that question lies outside the borders of the United States. The question this installment poses remains inside its borders: Why has the United States so forcefully changed its demographics since the onset of industrialization, and what has it done to the American nation?

Please be aware, reader, that though I am of recent immigrant stock, having been born in this country in the same decade my family arrived here from the Eastern Bloc, I am not writing to make excuses for why I should be allowed to stay and all other immigrants should be deported. While I believe there are tens of millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are financial or violent criminals, who should be sent…

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