Originally published in December of 2021
The revolutions of 1848 brought about the unifications of both Italy and Germany, and both were completed in the year 1871. Notably, only three years prior, Emperor Meiji of Japan proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule in the wake of the Shogunate’s collapse. As such, the process of rapid centralisation and industrialisation which this proclamation launched in Japan was contemporaneous to similar processes in each of the other states. All three had a rather large hill to climb in order to catch up with the levels of industrial development seen in America, Britain and France, and I do not think it’s a coincidence that these states formed the core of the Second World War’s Axis.
In Japan, the Meiji Restoration marked the establishment of a kind of liberal-democratic parliamentary system of governance, modelled primarily on Britain’s Westminster system. This most suited Japanese sensibilities, as a constitutional monarchy allowed the Emperor to retain his role as spiritual figurehead of the nation – a role of renewed importance, considering that nationalism is a driving force of capitalist development. As well as this, the system’s upper house – the ‘House of Peers’ – was a space in which those men who had been Japan’s feudal lords – the daimyos – were granted lifetime peerage. The new parliament, or ‘Imperial Diet’, played a difficult balancing act; that of satisfying the competing special interests of the newly industrial nation of Japan.
On the one hand, there was the Zaibatsu (‘Financial Clique’): large, capitalistic business conglomerates which gained influence over the parliamentary process the way corporations inevitably do. Individual corporations tended to be aligned with specific political parties (significantly, Mitsubishi with the Minseitō and Mitsui with the Seiyūkai), though it goes without saying that zaibatsu interests were broadly the same.
On the other hand, we see the Gunbatsu (‘Military Clique’). This term represents not only military officials, but also factions within the Japanese military. Where the Ministry of War was entirely under the control of the Diet, the military also had its own ‘Imperial Japanese Army General Staff’, which eventually superseded the ministry in terms of influence. This allowed for the rise of the Tōseiha, or ‘Control Faction’ and Kōdōha, or ‘Imperial Way Faction’ in the 1920s. I’m sure the parallels to the German Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitary wings do not warrant explanation.
The Zaibatsu, along with the Diet itself, had been broadly discredited by the spiral of inflation and unemployment wrought by successive financial crises in the 1920s. This opened the floodgates to the Gunbatsu, allowing them to make rapid inroads with their militaristic agenda. The power of the Army General Staff office was shown to override that of the Ministry of War with the unauthorised invasion of Manchuria in 1931. This, followed by the Prime Minister’s assassination in 1932, essentially marked the end of party politics in Japan, and further discussion of liberal democracy was suspended until 1945.
The military was originally hostile to business interests, and this is evidenced by the initial exclusion of the Zaibatsu from economic activities in Manchuria. This episode, however, led militarists to realise that the Zaibatsu would be instrumental to any future imperial expansion, due to their capabilities in manufacturing and developing military technologies, in refining the raw materials harvested from newly acquired territories, and in kick-starting commerce in said territories. In 1967, Chō Yukio summarised the economic impact of this development as follows: ‘the Japanese economy overcame the Showa economic crisis and promoted the recovery of business through export and war demands.’ You know, strawman Keynesianism. The diversified nature of Zaibatsu operations, with holdings in banks, manufacturers and mines, ultimately proved essential to military development. From the corporate perspective, of course, an imperialist Japan would exponentially increase the productive capacity of their businesses; the rubber, metals and fossil fuels of Japanese possessions supplied the ever-increasing demand for machinery and armaments’1.
We can see, then, the sense in which imperialism generated a cosy symbiosis between the Zaibatsu and the Gunbatsu. Imperialism, in turn, was driven by a fascistic ultra-nationalism, albeit under the banner of ‘Pan-Asianism’ – the Japanese Empire sought to establish a free Pan-Asian sphere of influence, which was of course to be administered by Japan. Louise Young finds that ‘under the banner of Asianism and a Japanese-led Co-prosperity Sphere, these experiments were designed to sharply distinguish the Japanese Empire from its Western counterparts.’ Indeed, the implicit Japanese exceptionalism of Pan-Asian ideology would be most sensibly contextualised as a reaction to the attitudes of Western imperialists. This reaction was something echoed in Italy and Germany also. Mussolini – the ex-socialist that he was – saw a world of ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ nation-states. That the Nazis projected their problems onto an ‘International Jewry’ is surely common knowledge.
I’d like to haul this discussion back into the present day by investigating a subject which seems to have been vacuumed out of the discourse in the last few years. Specifically, in the neo-reactionary, or ‘NRx’ sphere of discourse. Maybe I just haven’t been paying close enough attention, I don’t know. I don’t know what any of those people have been doing in this time if not the same things they were doing a few years ago. To be sure, this is the subject of the ‘NRx Trichotomy’, ‘Neoreactionary Triad’ or ‘Trike’. This is a lens through which one is able to distinguish three primary strands of reaction: enthno-nationalism (fascism), theonomy (traditionalism) and techno-commercialism (capitalism).
In Significant Triangles, Nick Land explicitly equivocates this trichotomy to the feudal Estates of the Realm. Firstly, the commoners map onto today’s white nationalists, for their preoccupation with populist causes and surface-level analysis. To be sure, I can’t disagree with this one. The alt-right have only ever offered proles a more explicitly racial variation of the same nationalistic bottle of easy answers as any Trumpian, from immigration reduction to trade barriers. At what point in ancient history any individual was pulling out the DNA kit and testing for white genes is unclear, but wignats are so blindsided by their own modernism that they are entirely incapable of envisioning anything beyond it. The clergy, of course, are represented by today’s theonomists. Well, I’m sure the tradcaths would like to think of themselves in this way, but I’m not entirely convinced. Finally, the nobility maps onto the techno-commercialists (which, rather conveniently, is the only category which one might identify Land with). He specifies that ‘Nobles of the Middle Ages directed production and commerce, just like CEOs and Presidents direct production and commerce today.’
Land states that the triangular, trans-historical model he’s developed for reactionary politics here is merely ‘an expression specific to the Westerner genome.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, if I were to accept its existence in any capacity, I would be inclined to disagree. It seems to me that the en are ecks trichotomy maps rather neatly onto the class allegiances of Imperial Japan. Nationalists map onto the Gunbatsu, capitalists onto the Zaibatsu, and theonomists, insofar as they could ever be satisfied, are represented in the Emperor and the House of Peers. This framework could just so easily be projected onto the Italian Fascists or the National Socialists – though perhaps the lack of theocratic representation helps to explain the more esoteric and mythological aspects of these ideologies. You could even draw out parallels in Sukarno’s konsepsi of ‘Nasakom’, though such parallels would probably be more acute after Suharto’s coup.
In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that liberalism itself is little more than a reconfiguration of the trike. It would certainly explain how effectively Japan was able to restructure following World War II. Where fascism represents the predominance of the nationalist triadic force, what we know as neo-liberalism is simply the predominance of the techno-commercialist force. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence, then, that techcoms such as Nick Land or Mencius Moldbug would seek to craft the narrative of ‘The Cathedral’: that ‘progressivism’ has supplanted the clerical positioning which theonomists held in feudal societies. Land states as much in the linked article:
‘The point labeled ‘communism’ maps to the Clergy (controlled by the church of Progress), denoted by unlimited cooperation. This is why neoreaction labels those currently in power, pushing Utopian Progressive lies, the Cathedral. Neoreaction recognizes hyper-Calvinism as a driving force within the Cathedral, coupled with a rejection of Darwinism, for that is what Utopia is: the promise of freedom from the struggle for survival, freedom from competition, freedom from Darwin. This Cathedral circumvented the Church, out-competing them in their control of the memeplex, through accretion of media control.’
This is a restatement of the Moldbuggian line about Christianity: that the atheists of today are simply Calvinists in denial (because Calvinism equals progression, and progressives control everything via Da Cathedral, of course). One comes to wonder what these ‘Dark Enlightenment’ people actually want, then, if not liberalism. I can only speculate, but the detached economic observations and demure, racially-charged jokes which Moldbug and Land have marketed themselves on seem to represent a kind of rewired apoliteia. Indeed, Moldbug has in recent years explicitly advocated a kind of detachment from the political life of the modern world, and this is very much in tune with the way he always wrote.
A YouTube disciple of Moldbug, formerly known as ‘Reactionary Expat’, once remarked somewhat offhandedly towards the end of a video about finances that his parents were likely among the richest in Australia. No big deal, of course. Nothing major, not at all related to his Austrian perspective on economics. This isn’t special, though. The hyper-capitalists always seem to have this kind of background, from the Academic Agent to Curtis Yarvin himself. Despite this, they seem to get along just fine with representatives of the other triadic forces. In the Xenosystems piece ‘Neoreaction (for dummies)’, Land suggests that ‘each major branch of the Neoreactionary super-family tends to a social outcome that its siblings would find even more horrifying than Cathedralist actuality.’ In reality, however, it looks like the nationalists and theonomists are nodding along to techcom ideas in spite of the techno-commercial social outcome which we are living through.
One does wonder about the nonsense logic of neo-reaction. ‘Cthulhu always swims to the left, therefore embrace fascism.’ ‘Society never ceased to be Christian, therefore become a Catholic traditionalist.’ What.
I think it starts to make more sense in the context of their highly sophisticated understanding of the term entropy: ‘when bad thing accelerate.’ En are eckses tend to believe that the Cathedral is progressing society toward some kind of collapse, and prepare accordingly. Now, whether you conceive of this event as ‘The Bottleneck’ (as Reactionary Expat did) or as an intensifying ecological collapse, preparation definitely seems like a good idea to me. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that I seem so sympathetic to lifestylist anarchists, when they are the only ones actively pursuing this — if GK Chesterton has only one accurate observation about social anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday, it’s that half of them might as well be working for the state.
What of this Moldbuggian talking point about Cthulhu, though? What of the claim that ‘conservatives are progressives driving the speed limit’? I mean, lol. Unfortunately, this is very much an inversion of reality. In reality, the ‘progressives’ of today are little more than the conservatives of yesteryear.
Let’s look at this for a moment. First of all, the apparently ‘progressive’ character of the Protestant Reformation from whence Calvinism originated is sorely challenged by the American evangelical, who today carries the torch of Protestantism forward. And what is it they say? Chivalry is dead? Not so! Just look to the apparently effeminate trope of the male feminist whiteknight. He’s here to save the day! He wants to protect his girlfriend, don’t ya know?
In the 1970s, Britain’s leftists never would’ve settled on the political policies of Harold Wilson or James Callaghan, would they? And indeed, they didn’t! Yet, in 2017 and in 2019, they were apparently greatly excited by Jeremy Corbyn’s political platform, which promised little more than renationalisation of a few of the utilities and services which had been privatised in the preceding 40 years. This is to say that, by the standards of today’s British leftist, Britain in the 1970s was a ‘left-wing country’ – whatever that is supposed to mean. Yes, the same 1970s Britain where punk rock developed and strikes were suppressed. And this is to say nothing of the hype around Bernie Sanders. Wasn’t he quite explicit about it, as well? ‘Unlike Donald Trump, I am a respectable politician who conservatives can trust!’
I refuse to engage in these idiotic little delusions of ‘pushing to the left’ as reactionaries continually shift the goalposts! I refuse to participate in these entirely predictable orchestrated protests and marches which were already incorporated into capitalist political life long ago! There is really something to be said for that old adage about doing the same thing and expecting a different result, however much it might’ve been assaulted by UAP advertisements in 2019. If people aren’t made to understand that wealth is not simply the product of labour, they will continue to protest for a ‘communism’ which reaffirms the social democratic wing of the status quo. If people can’t understand that feudalism was a reactionary lurch backward, and an entirely superfluous mode of production, rather than a linear societal progression, they still will advocate an ‘anarchism’ which reinforces traditionalist conceptions of community.
In this sense, then, I hope it is clear that I am not a ‘progressive’, nor do I subscribe to the progressive’s left-right dichotomy. I can never be ‘left-wing’, for such a marker could only ever mark the left wing of capital. Don’t you see, that this lens is inherently a tool to further entrench conservatism? This is not to say, though, that I stand for ‘post-leftism’. Aside from the fact that the term has been taken by unapologetic reactionaries like Aimee Terese (and that the original posties seem to have cleverly adopted ‘post-right’ in response), one cannot merely define oneself in relation to another thing.
Aimee Terese, however, is fundamentally beset by the same failure to grapple with modern politics as any Leninist. If you ask a Leninist, or indeed a Stalinist or a Maoist, of their regard for each of the leaders of the Soviet Union, they will generally write you a list in chronological order of when each man was in charge. Lenin was perfect, Stalin was great except maybe for productivism or nationalism, Khrushchev was okay besides certain liberal reforms, et cetera. Wow, what a coincidence. What a fucking coincidence that every major Soviet leader was more market-oriented than the last, and that this pattern was repeated in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and every other Marxist-Leninist state. It sure would be a shame if the only explanation available was the same great man theory of history which plagues reactionary political strategising. Good times (purges) create weak men, after all!
Of course, this isn’t the only explanation, and the ‘Dengists’ which Leninists deride simply take the far more logical step of stating that ‘actually, the market reforms were good.’ It really does not take a scholar of history to note that the state-centric social democratic economies of the West’s post-war consensus were structurally aligned to the autocratic command economies of the Warsaw Pact. It is not just by luck that the United States and the Soviet Union were able to rapidly flip impoverished African nations between ‘socialist’ and ‘capitalist’ economic models. It is not a coincidence that, regardless of political party, the tariff barriers to international trade were cut by every major Western government in the 1970s, nor indeed that Maoist China opened itself to Western markets in the same period. It is not just accidental that, following this, these Western governments enacted neoliberal economic reforms at the same time as Eastern states were integrating themselves into a new global economic framework. It’s just as stupid to blame Deng Xiaoping for this transformation as it is to blame Margaret Thatcher. You are either for the global economic market which Leninism and social democracy alike paved the road to, or you are against it!
In just the same way as we can say that Germany, Italy and Japan weren’t just coincidentally Axis powers in World War II, we can see how both Russia and China, which were each continent-sized semi-feudal hellholes at the beginning of the 20th Century, resorted to a comprehensive Leninist industrialisation. Certainly, this was a form of industrialisation more rapid and costly (in both material and human terms) than any which came before it, but it couldn’t ever have been anything other than a fundamentally capitalist endeavour. In considering this, it’s little wonder that ‘Marxist-Leninists’ never seem to be able to confront the crises of the developed world with anything more substantive than unionism and propaganda. In the last six months, I have seen Infrared stans advocating for ‘re-industrialisation’. Re-industrialisation. Can you imagine flying the red flag of communism, only to proudly declare yourself such an utterly intellectually bereft ally of reaction. What on earth is the point of this shitty humanistic populism? Truly, it is not at all an exaggeration to state that these people are Bernie Bros in denial.
Cyber-communism, which seems primarily to have come back into existence as a direct result of Paul Cockshott figuring out what twitter is, seems forever lost in the economic malaise of the 1970s. The network of telex machines which comprised Chile’s Project CyberSyn was quite impressive for the period, but it hardly coordinated the plants it was hooked up to in 1973, and certainly couldn’t hold a candle to the technologies DARPA were developing around the same time. Don’t hold your breath that Big Computer Mafia will acknowledge that the internet represents their ‘network of small computers’ better than whatever Beerist science-fiction intranet they have in mind, let alone that this kind of system would manifest some of the worst bureaucratic control mechanisms ever seen.
With all this being said, however, even the technophiles themselves are eternally restricted to the technological optimism of the 1990s. The inevitable centralisation of the internet into the hands of a small number of companies, and the immeasurable disappointment of intellectuals who apparently didn’t see this coming, is something which was never really recovered from. Yet, the poststructuralists who preceded them already foresaw this outcome, and it’s as clear as day! Forget societies of control, when Baudrillard wrote in 1987 of ‘gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections’ in place of public space2, was anybody listening? Or then, when Deleuze told of ‘computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses’ expressing the social forms of the age?3 Yet still, we must revere the bold innovators of Silicon Valley. How gracious of Mark Zuckerberg to bestow upon us a website in which content produced entirely by users will enrich only his accomplices and himself!
The set of socio-economic conditions which, following the Second World War, allowed for the development of Western youth subcultures, seem to have been entirely peculiar to the 20th Century. From the 1990s onwards, subcultural currents were plugged into the internet and dissipated across thousands upon thousands of webpages, dispersed and then reintegrated into an ever more international and all-encompassing cultural mainstream. Yet, of course, the very same neoliberal triumphalism which unreservedly celebrated these developments now decries the apparent ideological ‘cults’ or ‘bubbles’ which have emerged across the digital sphere. Liberals hurled the goths and the ravers into the acidic pits of ventilation, and are now shocked at the effervescent ‘political extremism’ which has bubbled up in their place. Indeed, there are no longer Nazi punks and anarcho-punks, but Nazi larpers and anarchist larpers. Yes, they all wear pink skirts and listen to hyperpop.
I mean, who could’ve seen this coming? Not the technophile, apparently. Oh yes, shock horror that religious faith in the eminence of the Whig view of history, and in the inevitability of the information superhighway, didn’t manage to stamp out people’s actual experience of reality. That millennial nostalgia for a digitised reality which never materialised hasn’t won the hearts and minds of the youth which it might’ve appealed to 30 years ago. I, for one, can’t pretend to be anything but glad that this sort of ideology has been consigned to the pages of a history book in just the same way as the cultural niches it stripped down and incinerated. Blade Runner was yesterday’s future, assholes.
We all at least implicitly understand the processes by which we arrived at the current socio-economic situation; that the libidinal impulses of the 1960s were redirected to a space of pressurised entrepreneurial elasticity. That where the neoliberal saw dissatisfaction in menial, state-sanctioned industrial drudgery, he inverted this circumstance to one of unassailable free-market precarity, and in so doing, supplanted the society of naked discipline with one of appetising corporate control. It’s commonly said that Australia has ‘one of the highest casualisation rates in the world’ (no thanks to the recession we had to have), and this has certainly reflected in my own experience. Despite the limited amount of money I’m able to squeeze from my current part-time job, I cannot give it up for fear that I’d be thrust back into the environment in which there’s no consistent source of income at all. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about how many fucking McDonalds applications you need to complete before you even get a response.
Of course, the offshoring process which this coincides with is the essence of modern liberal mythology about the ‘developing world.’ No, don’t you understand? Those Congolese children digging out the mineral resources for your computers have not lived in vain! Just like their parents, their children and their grandchildren, they have a bright future of factory work to look forward to. In a hundred years or two. Probably. You are presumably not meant to think too hard about the fact that, even in this version of reality, the good and free liberal democracies of the West will eternally remain an entire phase of development ahead of those fake and evil African democracies. This is to say nothing of the hastening ecological collapse, the scarcity of resources such as water and sand, the recurrent economic crises of capitalism or the seemingly infinite coronavirus lockdowns.
The left’s complete failure to propose any path other than Leninism or social democracy for the last century has rendered it entirely obsolete in the face of any of this. Apparently, Blanqui and Lassalle fucked it up the ass good and proper. The glaring instabilities and fractures of the dominant economic order have been brought out like never before with this covid business, and as usual, the left has utterly fucked everyone over on the possibility of any kind of transformative change.
I must say, however, that my own camp – that of poststructuralism – is also far from free of issues. Snarky, elitist quote tweeting, ritualistic purchase and consumption of literature and related trinkets, sanctification of academia and fetishisation of philosophers, restrictive emphasis on social identification – I could really go on. ‘I’m a revolutionary! I’m a mystic! I’m a post-Buddhist Mao-spontex left-industrial u/acc femcel!’ The popularity of pseud as an insult is surely indicative of a deeper problem. Like, do you really conceive of yourself as an intellectual? Is this kind of obnoxious obtuseness banking on the tastes of the artificial intelligences of tomorrow? Lol. Perhaps the outcome of this most recent Chilean election truly is the only impact autonomism can hope to have.
And what is an ‘anti-capitalist’? Well, I am not an anti-capitalist. I am a worker. A worker is inherently anti-capitalist by virtue of not being a capitalist, just as a renter is inherently anti-landowner by virtue of not owning land. You may call this perspective crass and Marxian, but you will not refute it! The Situationist account of May 68 notes that ‘the best statements by the workers who came to the Sorbonne during the initial days were often stupidly received with a pedantic and condescending attitude by these students who fantasised themselves as experts in revolution, although they were ready to salivate and applaud at the stimulus of the clumsiest manipulator proclaiming some stupidity while invoking [the plight of] the working class.’ And isn’t this just always the way. Fuck you! Call yourself a communist if you wanted a label that badly, you goddamn pussy!
Of course, there is frequent discussion of gender abolition in certain circles, but what of ideology abolition? What of the abolition of the entire left-right political spectrum! Well, know this:
I will not be a ‘socialist’
I will not be a ‘’progressive’‘
And most importantly, most significantly and most of all: I will not be a leftist!
Endnotes
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