Context and Definitions
Given that my recent essays have dove deeper into explaining the antileftist position, avid readers of this newsletter are already familiar with the basics of the antileftist frame. However, given that each each essay is paywalled as new essays are published, some context is still necessary for absent or first-time readers unfamiliar with the framing, with additional context given which further develops the frame for even those who have had more robust exposure.
Antileftism is a rejection of all leftist political tendencies, with leftism defined as any political movement which seeks to advance actually-existing liberalism to its next stages. This includes both explicitly left-wing and explicitly right-wing political movements which are extreme in their denunciations of liberalism, while in reality functioning as competing vanguards for the primary vanguard of liberal democracy in the world, the United States of America. In the last edition of this newsletter in particular, I made the distinction between antileftism and reactionary or “right-wing” political tendencies, defining the nascent “dissident right” as a leftist project in its own right, only considered “right-wing” because it positions itself against the explicitly left-wing activism of the Democratic Party while still containing within it a radical liberal current which reifies that party’s gains.
The terms “left” and “right” are derived from the French Revolution, where the radical liberal Jacobins sought the removal from power of the monarchy and aristocracy, while the conservative liberal Girondins sought the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The Jacobins sat on the left side of the revolutionary parliament while the Girondins sat to its right, thus giving rise to these terms as a common (but vague) political shorthand for where one is situated in a liberal political system.
From the antileftist perspective, both extreme rightists and leftists are “the left” as the contradictions between and within these broad coalitions create new forms of statecraft and political economy which continue to advance liberalism. Within this frame, “the right” or conservative wing, are political moderates who, like the Girondins, seek to entrench those gains of the left wing which they find favorable while curbing some of its extremist tendencies which would threaten their positions in the political economy. Today, these people are known as, in the common parlance I’ve used here, “moderates” or “centrists.”
With regard to its political contributions (to the extent it contributes anything at all, given how insignificant it is) it may appear as though the antileftist position is analogous or even the same as the “centrist,” or conservative position. Indeed, there is slightly more overlap between this conservative position and the antileft then there is between the antileft and the left, especially with regard to principles of unrestrained and uncompromising free speech. However, it would be a mistake to consider these positions as effectively the same, even if the difference is mostly rooted in analysis.
The March of Civilization
The “goal” of antileftists, insofar as there is one, is to provide a ruthless critique of all that exists, including and especially those radical movements which claim to position themselves against liberalism and and against capitalism. This critique is not premised in perceived moral or idealistic failings but in their functional failure to actually supplant the capitalism and/or liberalism which they claim to seek to destroy (capitalism being our economic system, liberal being our political system established to manage capitalistic production and class contradictions). For a political force capable of replacing capitalism to emerge, the machinery of liberal ideological production must be wholly liquidated and never reformed. Leftists of all stripes, however, emerge from within the intellectual class which produces this ideology. Those that find mainstream success tend to be highly censorious, conformist, and uncompromising; they also tend to feverishly support the current zeitgeist among their ranks with a rabid zeal. Those that do not find such security within that class become disaffected and begin to agitate against the institutions which rejected their contributions.
When feudalism was the prevailing economic system, it too thrived on a certain degree of contradiction and dynamism—assassinations, wars, genocides, plagues, famines, revolts, usurpers, etc. In its early stages, feudalism was an attempt at reintroducing a stable world order safe for capital accumulation in the wake of the Western Roman Empire’s collapse. In its later stages, however, as trade with other nations proved itself ever more profitable than raw agricultural production, as monarchs grew to become the stewards of the state’s accumulated capital, and as the nobility grew disaffected with their roles as mere managers of the king’s estate, the nobility (hand in hand with the merchant class) unknowingly ushered in political developments which, while chipping way the power of the monarchy to their advantage, led also to their own dissolution as a class by the merchants from whom they sought profit.
Just as the foundational elements of capitalism, ergo also liberalism, were established within the prevailing feudal/mercantile system of the era, the foundational elements of a world beyond liberalism will be discovered and created within the prevailing liberal world order. However, just as liberalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, what replaces liberalism will necessarily be the dictatorship of an economic class which will either liquidate the bourgeoisie, or itself be liquidated by a bourgeoisie which will then reform itself and its economy into a wholly new structure.1
As an aside, (and rehashing a point made in my most recent work), liquidation does not necessarily entail mass execution. Some of the most prominent and influential members of today’s bourgeoisie trace their roots to the aristocracy of the Old World. Though they have aristocratic blood flowing through their veins, they are no longer aristocrats; that political and economic role has been dissolved, those specific noble families having permanently fallen many rungs lower on the social ladder, having been exterminated in successive revolutions and world wars which brought about the prevailing liberal world order, or having permanently assimilated themselves into the new ruling class.
In order for the proletariat to be liquidated, the bourgeoisie would need to render it property once again, transforming it into a class unable to choose to whom they’d lend their time and energy. This will only occur if the new form of slavery or serfdom developed is more economically advantageous to that of free waged labor and the proletariat are entirely disarmed of any of their latent economic or political power, neither of which is necessarily a given. This would in itself constitute an end to the liberal capitalist world order and the creation of a new political system still ultimately managed by the same ruling classes in a slightly different configuration similar to the slow transition from the collaborationist feudalism to absolutist monarchy. For the proletariat to retain or expand their immense gains seized from within liberalism, their organizing efforts would necessitate them to liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, placing themselves as the dictators of a wholly new world order.
Ultimately, however, just as the development of industrialization led to the economic decay of the nobility, new economic, social, spiritual, and political developments will lead to the decay of the bourgeoisie. At its outset, the functional goal of early liberalism was to replace all existing political networks with itself, with this goal having been achieved with resounding success at the conclusion of the Second World War. Its present functional purpose is to stave off the economic decay of its ruling class for as long as possible, i.e., attempting to liquidate the proletariat. Ergo, liberalism is in its maintenance phase, and as such, all further developments will simultaneously serve to entrench its gains and hasten its decline.2
Antileftism & Centrism
The centrist, moderate or, in the antileftist framing, the conservative wing of liberalism, is defined by its staunch position “within the center” of the competing vanguard left coalitions. As mentioned, they explicitly seek to preserve the liberalism that recently was, guarding against the new liberalism dawning on the horizon. As time goes on however, they harken back to later and later forms of liberalism, ultimately ceding ground to the vanguard of a prior era or allowing themselves to—however briefly—become a vanguard themselves when the utopian-revanchist elements prove too dysfunctional.
While an antileftist may do the same on a case-by-case basis, the goal in preserving specific elements of liberalism in the present is not the same. For an antileftist, the goal in doing so is to retain those elements of liberalism which might allow the prevention of the enslavement of all classes subject to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This is not out of deep-seated ressentiment for the bourgeoisie but a defense of one’s own interest in not becoming a member of that new enslaved class. The explicit opposition to liberalism’s vanguard is meant to provide the critical and analytic tools needed to form a vanguard out of existing political and economic networks that share the same interest; i.e., antileftism is first and foremost a means by which to both identify and weaken this future movement’s most accessible enemy: The ideological obfuscators whose dogmatic critiques of present-day liberalism serve only to advance the interests of its stewards.
Pure centrists, however, see these emergent forms of liberal ideology as dangerous to the liberalism they once knew and loved. Their concern is that the liberal principles and sentiments they grew up with will dissolve away into the ether, either on a nominally “left-wing” or “right-wing” basis, largely unaware or uncaring that those principles were born of similar vanguard movements which were ultimately just as divisive, unpopular, and uncompromising as those existing in the present day. They wish to freeze the moments just before the present in amber so that they may bask in their nostalgic orange glow for eternity, well before new developments in finance, property relations, geopolitics, and technology gave way to a demand for new forms of statecraft needed to manage these developments.
It is not that centrists are necessarily against adopting some of these new developments—quite the contrary—they’d just prefer to do so in a way which also preserves the spirit of what they once knew, allowing it to advance, allowing the world to change, without changing it to such a degree that they no longer recognize the world in which they live. A good example would be that of Katherine Dee (a good friend of mine whose observations I often find incisive), someone who acknowledges that all of the radical changes wrought by the digital revolution cannot be turned back and that some of these changes do not even have their roots in technological innovation at all but, all the same, some of these changes have been utterly devastating to the overall health of society and that it would be better to reimpose a slightly older status quo where the internet did not play such a central role in everyone’s lives.
That particular sentiment is one amenable to the antileft, as digitalization presents a unique danger to political consciousness via rapidly deployed, interactive, and dissociative agitprop. The physical hijacking of the internet user’s limbic system allows for all manner of manipulation to take place, whether it be for political purposes or otherwise. This is but one of the many threats the internet raises3 for whatever freedoms still remain for those classes subject to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Where the antileft would break with such a position is that this older status quo, were it to be recreated, does not address the underlying contradictions which led to the development of the present situation in the first place.
Likewise, the sentiment that the world is governed by a close-knit conspiracy of large financial interests who exert a collective oligopolistic control over disparate political bodies and supply chains is one premised in fact. That this fact is then wielded by the ideological vanguards of this very system as a justification for their ideological saber-rattling does not make it any less of a fact. Where this ceases to be a fact is when those vanguards claim not to collectively embody the ideological vanguard propelling that very system forward.
What the Future Holds
At present, liberalism is nowhere near the level of decay which allowed for its tremendous rise beginning in the late 18th century. It took many centuries for feudalism to finally collapse in on itself, just as occurred with Rome and the Bronze Age civilizations. In order for truly new political forms to emerge, successive crises which pose existential threats to the present world order must also emerge. It is only within the depths of those crises that novel solutions can burst forth and be experimented with. So long as liberal capitalism maintains its relatively stable trajectory—stable in the sense that famine, warfare, and plague, in any real sense, have all but disappeared in this century (even with recent events in mind)—any new ideological formulations wearing the skins of long-dead ideologies will serve only to advance liberalism further into the future, with centrists to serve as their rearguard.
Thus antileftist Marxism does not and will not pose a threat to the liberal world order any time soon. The decay of the bourgeoisie cannot presently be hastened by making extravagant claims of the coming proletarian revolution or by animating the disaffected to arms in a time such as ours, a time of great abundance and prosperity never before seen in humanity’s experience. It can only take place through the generation-spanning processes of the existing, living world order. Any attempt to predict with accuracy what the world will look like as this order actually exits its final stages is, at this time, sheer fantasy put to use by this order’s most cynical ideological actors. Antileftism is merely a critique of and a tool for demystifying the ideological machinery of our time, something which future generations will need when this era does see its true conclusion.
Though my analysis is premised upon Marx’s critical work, I am not convinced of his conception of historical materialism, nor do I believe that the policies put forward in his Communist Manifesto would necessarily lead to a proletarian revolution. We have seen many nations nationalize the means of production throughout the 20th century, some of them with the explicit goal of building communism, and none of them have established that fabled dictatorship of the proletariat. As such, though I remain a Marxist and though I am sure of liberalism’s ultimate demise in the coming centuries, I would not consider myself a communist. Indeed, in order to utilize antileftist critique effectively, one would need to distance themselves from such ideologies as they tend to override one’s ability to think critically about the actually-existing conditions of their time. If one is convinced that their ideology’s ascendancy is inevitable, then every development appears to be a stepping stone towards it, even if it is clearly the opposite.
While I am not a believer in historical materialist dogma, I am a student of history. If there is one thing to glean from the many millennia that have passed, it is that no economic or political or spiritual system lasts forever. Transitions between different economic or political models can span several centuries, and for most of human history there has not been a clear breaking point with the old world and the new, the World Wars being a very special case. That the bourgeoisie will decline as the ruling class is inevitable; that it will be replaced by the proletariat is not, even though these two classes are in direct contradiction with one another. Serfs were in direct contradiction with their nobility and were also a critical mass of society, and they did not emerge victorious at the end of feudalism. Instead, feudalism transitioned to mercantilism, leading to the rise of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class under the very noses of the nobility, church, and monarchy. For Marx to have predicted the ascendancy of the proletariat at the very beginning of its birth as a class was premature and is still premature today, even given the profound instability he witnessed in the 19th century.
Another threat which digitalization raises which is more economic in nature is the adoption of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). While seemingly innocuous as a means of cutting out the middleman of payment processors and raising the speed with which payments are accepted, centrally-issued digital currencies have the potential of controlling how individuals can spend their own money. In theory, cash can be used to pay for virtually any service, legal or illegal; under a CBDC, it is possible to restrict certain individuals from purchasing even otherwise legal goods, as each digital dollar’s transaction history is logged in a centralized ledger. This is already possible without CBDCs, as participants in the Canadian trucker convoy had their bank accounts frozen for engaging in political speech against the government of Canada, but such activity would become even easier with a CBDC system in place, perhaps permanent. China has already piloted a CBDC program wherein their digital yuan has an expiry date; users of this particular type of digital yuan would need to spend their money before it expires, else it disappear forever. It cannot be converted into ordinary cash. Likewise such technology makes quantitative easing much easier to deploy, reducing the purchasing power of those who do not hold financial assets as those assets continuously increase in value while wages struggle to keep pace. In hindsight, QE could perhaps be considered the first stepping stone towards CBDCs, taken before any of the infrastructure which enables CBDCs existed.
The bourgeoisie is irrelevant as it has become subordinated to the PMC which control all centers of power be they public institutions or major private corporations. The proletariat is irrelevant due to the ever increasing automatisation and commoditization of labour which is something that was already obvious by the time Marx was playing the modern version of the jewish prophet.