Posts Tagged ‘castes’
Attempting a class analysis of American progressivism
I don’t speak Marx’s language, but it may be interesting to attempt to piece together a few sentences in it, given both its supposed relevance in today’s progressivism and the relevance to reaction of certain of his predictions.
Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread into every corner of life. The family and the state still exist, but – the family is successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other; the state retains its essential instruments of violence, but more and more comes under the sway of commercial interests, reduced to acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.
Capitalism can survive, and in fact necessitates the need for completely free labor, with equality between workers of all races and genders; thus women and minorities, through tremendous and painful struggles, slowly gain political emancipation through reformist movements (“women’s liberation”, “civil rights”, etc.).
Class generally maps to caste: although there are many Vaisya bourgeoisie, Vaisyas tend to be proletarian or petty-bourgeois. (My tentative sixth caste makes the class-caste mapping even more clear by separating out the white lumpenproletariat as Antyajas; Moldbug folded them into Dalits.) Helots are obviously proletarian by definition. Dalits are almost always lumpen. I’m not sure what Marx would do with Brahmins and Optimates. Insofar as I can sort the former into the class system, they’re usually bourgeois, but I have no idea where nonprofit employees and Cathedral apparatchiks fall, and it seems that Marxists aren’t quite sure either. As for the latter, sure, they’re bourgeois, but they act so differently that the language becomes unwieldy beyond use if the distinction isn’t made.
The point, of course, is that, to use the language, contemporary ‘progressivism’ is a fundamentally bourgeois movement aimed at using the lumpenproletariat to crush the proletariat, not as a class, but as a set of individuals and cultures—which makes it hopeless and counterproductive as a revolutionary initiative—which is precisely what the language of class would predict!
Were I a Communist, I’d be recruiting among the proletariat. Who has the most revolutionary potential in America? That should be obvious. I don’t have the poll numbers showing what percentage of people receiving government money are aware that they receive government money, but I recall that they were rather low.
So. Either I don’t speak the language or American progressivism isn’t Communist at all.
Occasional discourse on the Brahmin question
I’ve been picking up hits from the land of hate and kittens, so it’s probably time for me to either write another post or start dispensing internet fashion advice. Considering that I’m not the one with the underwear line (yet), I’ll go with the former. And considering that I would be terribly out of place writing about intelligence, I might as well take on the other interesting question: why do they hate us?
This, of course, depends on the referents of those pronouns. Given that I’m blatantly pandering to Unamused’s army of kitlers here, “us” can be trivially read as “whites”. But who are “they”? The underclass? That would be boring: resentment, justified or not, is trivial to understand. The freedom-hating pagans from Heathenstan? I’d rather shoot myself in the eye than become a Bush-era foreign policy blogger. No, the “they” at hand is, well…
Perhaps we should start somewhere else. Consider this: it has become a truism in these circles that white culture is under attack. Immigration is being increased to unprecedented levels, the media and school system have been hijacked and are now being used to disseminate anti-white propaganda, and so on. But to state the problem like this is to drop the agent: just as guns cannot sprout limbs and run around Detroit shooting innocent passersby, neither can the media hit the Singularity, become sentient, and turn genocidal. For immigration to be increased, for the media to be hijacked, there must be someone or some group increasing immigration and hijacking the media. They are the interesting “they”; now who exactly are they?
It can’t be the Jews; progressivism, the meme behind the “they”, is outcompeting Judaism. Consider:
“It’s really a matter of statistics,” [Rabbi Elie Abadie ] explained to me. “Except for the Orthodox, the American Jewish community is shrinking, disappearing. In two generations, most of their grandchildren won’t even be Jews.”
And also consider the Israel question. If progressivism were a tool of the Jews, would it not support the existence of a state designed explicitly to give Jews power? Would it not take the classic progressive principle, backed by such respected progressive figures as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Woodrow Wilson and accepted as doctrine by the victors of the most politically significant war in modern history, that “All peoples have the right of self-determination … by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development“, and apply that to Israel? In reality, of course, Ali Abunimah has written for Alternet and the Guardian, Tim Wise (who is—wait for it—half-Jewish, from his father’s side) thinks Israel is fascist and therefore evil, and so on. (As a side note, if the Jews really did run progressivism, Tim Wise would be out on his tokhes in the blink of an eye. The Israel fanboys at NRO et al. are gibbering idiots, but at least they can write a coherent, properly punctuated sentence, whereas Wise’s rambling, middle-schoolish logorrhea would seem deliberately calculated to prove his name wrong if he could be thought capable of deliberate calculation.)
We have seen what the Zeitgeist, the Todesgott der Aufklärung, has to say about Israel: it chants a nonstop chant, a chant of one line in the most ridiculous High Whig dialect it can muster, a chant which can be roughly translated as “Fuck it with a one-state pole!” This is the solution that most easily lends itself to said dialect: the two-state solution “entrenches and formalizes a policy of unequal separation on a land that has become ever more integrated territorially and economically” and “presumes a false parity in power and moral claims between a colonized and occupied people on the one hand and a colonizing state and military occupier on the other”, and so on, and so forth. It is clear that, in the case of Israel, a victory for the Jews will be a defeat for the Devil-unchained, and vice versa—and given that, as the self-described radicals at CounterPunch put it, “the population trend is the only hope left for Palestinians”, and that democracy is tribal… well, if there ever was a “group evolutionary strategy” (as if there is anything to the matter that can’t be explained orders of magnitude more easily and concisely by basic group dynamics!), it has gotten pretty well outcompeted.
So if the Jews are not the “they” at hand, what are the other candidates? A far more popular theory is that that pronoun refers to whites themselves: the question is not “why do they hate us?”, but “why do we hate ourselves?”. Whitey schafft sich ab. But if we accept this, we must ask ourselves: why do white people who hate white people keep acting so damned white? We can easily imagine Tim Wise going to Starbucks; not so easily McDonald’s. Better yet, we can easily imagine that the same white people who like diversity, political prisoners, getting offended, and being the only white person around also like indie music, graduate school, modern furniture, Priuses, and microbrews, all of which are very, very white. If they actually hated white people, would they not abandon such gratuitous displays of whiteness, and instead start driving beat-up white vans, smoking Newport menthols, and listening to Soulja Boy?
However, we can list many white things that white people hate—country music, the Tea Party, pickup trucks, Miller Lite, the Confederate battle flag, non-coastal states, Republicans, the South, going to church, etc.—but it is clear that the two instances of “white” in the phrase at hand, “white things that white people hate”, have different meanings. The white people who like country music and drink mass-produced American beer are not the white people who like indie music and drink expensive microbrews; the cultures are quite distinct. And since they are cultures, we don’t even need the requirement that the members be physically white! It would, therefore, be much clearer to, instead of talking about “white things that white people hate,” keep the operative words distinct from 1. each other and 2. other interfering concepts. Luckily, Mencius Moldbug has already created the terms necessary here, so we can reword the statement quite well as “Vaisya things that Brahmins hate”.
Before we go any further, we must revisit the opening statement. Given that “whites” is an absurd concept for the agent of the operative verb “hate”, so too must it be absurd for the patient. Immigration is being increased—rather, mainstream Brahmindom has increased immigration—to unprecedented levels, but are those who advocate it affected by it? Consider the demographics of Bethesda or Cambridge: Langley Park they are not. As for the media, the fuck-whitey tropes, the Homer Simpsons and Ned Flanderses, are all Vaisya enough to go to church, and generally even have real jobs. The Simpsons could not be set in Cambridge.
It is important to understand that there is a Brahmin culture. It is not a particularly interesting, or even functional, culture—hence the existence of so many subcultures—and it is difficult to identify as a culture, given that one of its core tenets is that of opposition to most (but not all!) forms of continuity, but there exist identifiable attitudes and artifacts passed down the generations: 60s musical acts such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, a curious fondness for Ireland, a pantheon of historical demigods (beginning with MLK, Lincoln, FDR, and Jesus, in approximately that order), a fixation on the piano and the guitar, and, of course, the Zeitgeist itself. Another part of the Brahmin culture is the evangelical impulse: “we are superior, we are more moral, and it is our duty, perhaps even our burden, to civilize the unwashed masses!” Note that this is not the Nazi impulse: the duty of the superior is to work in the interest of the inferior, to work as a civilizing and moralizing agent, not to brush the inferior aside for Lebensraum.
It is natural that two separate cultures that have to deal with each other on a regular basis—and this is, in fact, what we are dealing with here: even white America is multicultural—will come to hate one another: this pattern repeats itself ad infinitum throughout history, whereas counterexamples that did not end in there being only one culture are difficult to find. But the character of this particular instance of hate may seem odd. It is neither the violent rage of the Balkans or the Rwandans or the Nazis during the Holocaust, nor the contempt-toward-pushing-aside of the early Americans or really any other Lebensraum policy in history; it is the crocodilian stance of the colonial officer attempting to civilize the natives, or of the teacher whacking students upside the head for speaking languages other than English, except far less visible due to its inward turn, toward colonizing those generally considered (perhaps due to America’s inordinate focus upon racial divisions) to be of the same group as the colonizers. They only wish death upon those who refuse to be civilized, and even then, their threats are not serious; no, such methods are for brutes, and what need have we, the sophisticated, for brutish things?
But enough of this digging at skulls. What if an alien saw it? After all, we are dealing with, as Moldbug put it, “sincere and goodhearted architects of evil”; the motives and the effects need not have anything to do with each other. Whyever a man drinks, his liver will rot the same. What are the effects? In other words, we have asked “why do they hate us?”, but there is another interesting question that follows naturally from that: “what purpose does it serve that they hate us?”.
What we have here is a class of mostly rich doctors, prescribing their patient medicine that they—or at least the more clued-in among them—do not take themselves. The effects of this medicine have been documented by Robert Putnam, whose list of symptoms corresponds quite well with what I have observed myself. The demoralization of those who do not have enough money to buy their way out of taking the medicine, the turn of said demoralized to consumer culture as escape, and the move toward labor ever cheaper and more easily exploited, under the guise of “justice”, allow for drastic simplification of the model. In effect, the New Left does the same thing as the old New Right of the Reaganites, albeit in a far more subtle way: they both work toward freezing the class structure.
This should, of course, be unsurprising, considering that the defining characteristic of the New Left is the ultra-bourgeois background of its members, and that, when talk turns to economics, they have nothing to say beyond stale slogans and weak calls for the vast Vogon armies of the state to bloat their vile ranks yet further. But this was not always the case. Alain de Benoist’s “reserve army of capital” line on immigration was once the position of the unions. Unions themselves have largely fallen by the wayside, replaced by endless shouting about minor social issues quite like those so conspicuously allowed by the mainstream to exist and be considered the determining political factor for essentially everything. (I suspect there are few people in America whose vote is more influenced by economic factors than gay marriage, abortion, and perhaps guns, and fewer still who are not, well, capitalists.) Contemporary leftism, then, serves a similar purpose to the vulgar sort of libertarianism whose ‘analysis’ is incapable of going beyond shouting about corporate deregulation in the manner of a clueless Windows tech support worker telling users that, no matter what their problem is, it will be solved by a mere reboot: drawing away those who might otherwise develop a proper analysis of how things are, who might rectify the damned names, and thereby ruin the whole game, based as it is on the furthest remove.
In short, the answer to the interesting question is as follows: the hate of one particular class of mostly white Westerners for another particular class of mostly white Westerners is a natural product of true diversity, but its shape is determined at least in part by a historical form, hate toward perceived superiority, that has long existed in the culture at hand. Its purpose is, as usual, to screw the proles.
