When to Look Back
Sometimes, where you come from matters less than where you are going
I have something in the works tentatively titled “Of Belief, Beginnings, and Being,” in which I discuss the reasons that certain political movements fixate on human origins. I may eventually re-work it into something less redundant than what it currently is, but for now, there are a few important things to keep in mind about why human origins are actually an important subject. No, this is not going to be another rant about creationism.
There are two competing solutions to the progressive problem in modern politics. The first, which is, rather unsurprisingly, the position taken by historians, is that we need to understand the origins of the strange beliefs of those who adhere to “progressive” ideologies. However, this has some shortcomings, on account of the fact that it addresses only belief, rather than tactics. There is, for example, a huge difference between progressive (i.e. incremental) socialists and revolutionary socialists. Herein comes the second solution, which is a more pragmatic approach taken by activists such as
, which is that we need to focus on what the socialists are doing now. You can read centuries-old philosophy and occult literature if you want to, but for any group obsessed with “moving forward,” the fact that the foundations of their ideology was shown to be shaky long ago doesn’t matter. You may point out that they are trying to build a house on water, pointlessly dropping bricks into the deep, but their retort will be something akin to “if we drop enough bricks, eventually they will stick above the surface!” There is no answer to such determination. Luckily, very few people are that stubborn; those who are need minions to do most of their dirty work.In my article on political alchemy…
…I refer to left as the political alkahest, a solvent to be synthesised, used, and discarded. In the third (and hopefully final) instalment, on mass depopulation psychosis, which is already almost finished as of this writing, I mention one other aspect in which alchemy provides a useful analogy to political theory, and that is how such theories are constructed in the first place. I’ll go over that here as well, but before I do, it is necessary to point out yet another glaring flaw in communist thought: what happens after the revolution. Capitalism is concrete, communism is abstract. This is why we know that true communists never have any realistic way to run society once “capitalism” has been abolished; capitalism, to the communists, has no consistent definition, hence my constant challenge to any anti-capitalist to:
Define Capitalism
…so that we may identify what is actually wrong with society. However, this assumes an honest desire to get to the root of the problem, and not simply advance a specific cause at all costs. The justification for their lack of a concrete system is fairly straightforward:
When you remove a cancer, what do you replace it with? - Thomas Sowell
Communism, in the purest sense, is the abolition of economics itself, which is why they have not only have no real economic proposals, but refuse to learn the subject.
, for example, envisions a utopia in which “no-one needs to work, but some people still want to.” Define work, love. Yes, I am familiar with the old saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, but somehow, I don’t think that’s what Johnstone meant. Even if money and private property were both abolished, someone would still have to till the fields and build the houses unless we lived in a post-scarcity society where everything is done by robots. Bitch, when I was in engineering school, one of my classmates decided to make a robot to pick strawberries as his senior project, and he knew from the start that it was going to be a massive undertaking. Berries of all varieties are far too delicate to be harvested by any automated means available at that time, but there had been some recent advancements in materials science and additive manufacturing to make the production of soft and pliable end effectors feasible at scale. My point is that the technology to facilitate this hypothetical fully-automated post-scarcity society doesn’t exist yet, and never will if capitalism is abolished.So, what is to be done? Well, frankly, I don’t care what the communists intend to do (though I will explain their intent later anyway), because puritanical communist ideologues seal their own fate the moment they start a revolution. Even if they succeed, they will find themselves needing to work in service of the common weal. Would they even work for the benefit of their neighbour directly in a “capitalist” system? No, of course not, “solidarity, not charity.” Their justification, of course, is that “helping people to live under capitalism forestalls its downfall,” when it’s actually just an excuse to be lazy. They would not put away their arms and work in service of the common weal after the revolution, and we know this not just because of history, but because every aspiring revolutionary on social media envisions themselves a commissar, rather than a worker. All this talk of “beating our swords into ploughshares” on the part of the revolutionaries is precisely that: talk.
Those who beat their swords into ploughshares usually end up ploughing for those who didn’t. - George Santayana
In reality, every single true believer in the revolutionary cause will have the proverbial rug pulled out from under them by the political alchemists in the party, as Iosif Stalin did to Leon Trotsky. Yevgeniy Zamyatin actually predicted this would happen back in 1921, when he wrote Мы (We). Zamyatin was able to not only predict the rise of Stalin, but what Stalin’s regime would end up looking like, and the book is still relevant today. So then, how does one spot a political alchemist? It’s actually quite simple: look at the thinkers within a movement, and find the ones whose proposals can be mapped on to the transmutation circle:
We’ll leave aside the four Aristotelean elements and focus on the three primes. Salt represents stability and the body, sulphur represents combustibility and the soul, and mercury represents fusibility and the mind. Each of these corresponds perfectly to an aspect of the totalitarian state.
The word “corporation” comes from the Latin “corpus,” meaning “body.” Unlike in American English, the word “corporation” means “department” in British English and many European languages. Corporations are, quite literally, organs of the state, and this is something that fascists go on about quite a lot. Thus, the body of the State is the concrete system, the administration and the means of production.
The soul of the State, on the other hand, is its collective identity. Of whom is the State comprised? Is it the people of a certain region, a scattered ethnic group, or an economic class? There are ethno-states, nationalist states, and of course, proletarian states, every one of which is, by definition, a democracy, because “democracy” simply means “people’s state” in totalitarian-speak.
The final component, the one that binds everything together, is the mind of the State, i.e. its guiding philosophy. Totalitarianism is not simply a cynical desire of the political class to micro-manage everything for the sake of their own ego or pet projects, it is highly idealistic, even mystical in its nature. Totalitarianism is a religion, hence those who adhere to it seeking to either subvert or outright supplant all others. Look up “unitarian universalism” sometime if you would like details on an excellent example.
might find it particularly interesting if he isn’t already aware of it on account of some recent comments by Pope Francis.Using this pattern, we can identify the political alchemists of both the past and the present. For an example from the past, Italian Fascism was comprised of syndicalism, nationalism, and Actualism, now known as Actual Idealism, as it is similar to but distinct from Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. For an example from the present, Woke Socialism is comprised of socialism, intersectional internationalism, and queer anarchy.
“But Sasha,” I hear you scream, “how can a totalitarian ideology have an anarchist philosophy?!”
Anarchy doesn’t have a consistent definition. To some people, it is synonymous with chaos. To others, it means “order without rulers.” To internationalists, the abolition of nations. To communists, the abolition of hierarchy. For this reason, anarcho-communists (ancoms) and anarcho-capitalists (ancaps) each insist that the others are not real anarchists. Both also insist that the others are wrong about the state of nature. Ancoms maintain that humans evolved to live communally, and that private property is a social construct created by the bourgeoisie. Ancaps maintain that humans evolved to have an instinctual understanding of property rights, a position that palaeoanthropology supports, and an instinct which actually emerged long before humans did. Consider this your weekly reminder that communists reject Darwinian Evolution; they are Lamarckists. Anyway, in order to explain what queer anarchy is, it’s best to start with its estranged older sister, anarcho-feminism (anfem). Anfem is a form of radical feminism that seeks to emancipate women from society ruled by men (patriarchy). It goes as far as saying that the idea that women think differently from men is a social construct, that women only think the way they do because they are conditioned to by a patriarchal society (“internalised misogyny”). Some anfems have even gone as far as saying that centuries or millennia of social pressures for men to be dominant led them to choose smaller partners, so the reason that women are smaller than men is, you guessed it, a social construct. Yes, anfems are Lamarckists too. Now, take everything I just said, but replace “women” with “LGBTQIAPPWTFϢΨϦѪҨ,” and “men” with “straight people,” and you have queer anarchy in a nutcase. Anarcho-feminism was a flash in the pan because it sought to abolish a largely imaginary patriarchy (societies that are actually patriarchal have a striking dearth of feminist activism), whereas queer anarchy seeks to abolish very real sexual dimorphism, or as they like to call it, the gender binary. I don’t like that term because gender is linguistic and a lot of gendered languages, including all the ones I’ve ever studied, actually have three (masculine, feminine, and neuter).
As a thought experiment, I once posed the following question: how many generations of total gender egalitarianism would humans have to live through before sexual dimorphism disappeared? Assuming that were even possible (it’s not), then given how long sexual dimorphism has been around for, the answer is about 350 thousand. However, the woke folx are definitely not going to like hearing that, not just because they are impatient, but because it assumes that the mechanism of Darwinian Evolution (natural selection plus genetic drift) is valid. Remember, most socialists are Lamarckists. Karl Marx himself flatly rejected Darwin’s theory. The only socialists even willing to entertain Darwin’s ideas are third positionists, and they are usually Darwinists, rather than Darwinians. The difference is that the former position is prescriptive, the latter is descriptive, as are all scientific laws. However, as I’ve already explained, socialists believe there is no such thing as a mere description, that every idea is a social construct, and through the magic words of the dialectic, one can change reality by changing the idea. Speaking of which, that is the reason for the strikethrough of the “LGB” portion of everyone’s favourite acronym, because if you haven’t caught on by now, there has been a massive schism between the LGB and the TQ+ portions of the… sexual minority? IDK… communities. However, queer anarchy doesn’t even really concern itself with trans-sexuality, because it rejects all concretes. After all, if gender isn’t determined by genitals, then how does surgically altering them change it? According to modern queer theorists, it doesn’t; biological sex is a social construct, and therefore is entirely in one’s head… note the complete inversion of anarcho-feminist doctrine, which maintains that the differences between the sexes are purely physical, rather than cognitive.
Despite my previous assertion that the far left hates all concretes, this is where we see a massive double standard within intersectional thought, because whereas the “oppressor” identities are social constructs to be torn down, the “victim” identities are immutable reality. This is true of race as well as sexuality, for just as “the gender binary” is a social construct, but “nonbinary” is valid, “whiteness” is a social construct, but all other races are biologically essential, which is why trans-racialism only ever works in one direction: branding “race traitors” as white. So, why the double standard? Ah, that’s because white leftists, who hate their own existence and yearn for the destruction of “whiteness” as penance for the sins of 20th-century white supremists, have made themselves sacrificial as the alkahest, whereas the coloured leftists, who wish to advance the interests of their own in-groups, are the political alchemists. Yes, I called them “coloured.” I apologise for nothing.
The alliance between gender communists and race communists per intersectional theory is entirely predictable; after all, queer theorists maintain that the gender binary is capitalism, and the “anti-racists” maintain that whiteness is capitalism. Take this chart, for example…
…simply replace “white culture” with “straight culture” for a list of things to be de-constructed and again, you have queer anarchy in a nutshell. Intersectionality is thus a two-pronged attack on capitalism. However, as it excludes the white working class, intersectionality is widely detested among classical proletarians, e.g. Orthodox Marxists. Having once been an “Orthodox Marxist” myself (I was actually a National Bolshevik, but hey, details), I can tell you from first-hand experience that the feeling is mutual; Bolsheviks are almost as hated as fascists and Nazis by most modern leftists. In fact, though the term “Orthodox Marxist” was coined by Vladimir Lenin to describe himself, modern leftists (woketoids in particular) use it as a slur. The great irony I have noticed is that those who best fill the role of political alkahest, i.e. the revolutionaries, are willing to make an alliance with pretty much anyone against the current system. However, it is those who focus not purely on the revolution, but what comes after, that are the most puritanical in their choice of allegiances. After all, only one faction can rise to fill the void left by the overturning of capitalism, be it fascist, Nazi, Nazbol, woke, etc.
History has shown that after the revolution, the faction least tolerant of competing ideas will ultimately prove victorious. This is why no anarchist state (“state” as in “state of existence,” rather than “nation-state,” fuck this is so much easier in Russian) has existed in industrial society, and anarchism was relegated to the dustbin of history until quite recently. This is also why liberal totalitarianism is now a thing, as “liberalism,” if you can even call the global hegemon liberal, has defeated every other competing political theory in an infantile test of will that ended around the same time I was born (them: “how old are you?” me: “same as Russian Federation.”). The liberal hegemon is a form of oligopoly capitalism, and the liberals’ only hope to prevent their inevitable doom is to double-down on neo-liberalism, consolidating control under monopoly capitalism while adopting the trappings of woke. In other words, the conclusion of neo-liberalism is to maximise social liberty while completely abolishing economic freedom. Actual woke socialists disparagingly refer to this as “rainbow capitalism,” so if you were wondering why the establishment leftists talk like woketoids, surround themselves with queer influencers, and drape themselves in rainbow flags, yet the woke socialists still hate them, wonder no more. It would be akin to the United States replacing the blue field and 50 stars on its flag with a red field bearing a yellow hammer-and-sickle, calling itself the Union of Amercian Socialist Republics, but not changing a single one of its policies… but enough about why those same people say that West Taiwan isn’t really socialist. In fact, no socialist regime has ever been truly socialist because of the schizophrenic definition of socialism that the modern left is working with.
Five modes of production are known to history: primitive communal, slave, feudalist, capitalist, and socialist. – Iosif Stalin, On Dialectical and Historical Materialism
This neo-Platonic penta-cycle of history was one that Karl Marx proposed at one point, though Marx also entertained a three-stage cycle (like Joachim of Fiore, who mapped history onto the holy trinity) and a six-stage cycle, and creationists like Ken Ham subscribe to a variant of it as well, in his case, the “Seven C’s of history.” In their minds, the world as God (“The Idea” to the atheistic Hegelians) originally created it was a paradise, there was no scarcity, no death, all the animals ate plants, people communed in harmony with nature, and had no knowledge of good and evil. In other words, Adam and Eve owned nothing and were happy until the serpent tempted them with the forbidden fruit of transcendent self-improvement. So, when you tell a communist that humans didn’t evolve to be communists, their first assumption is that you believe that humans were created to be communists. Either way, both creationists and communists believe in the same paradise lost that can be restored if only people deny reason and simply have faith, but the rhetoric and mythology of the two factions are radically different. Ask any modern leftist to give a real-world example of a socialist society, and they will always point to some primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers while mis-representing the way they actually live. The only reason, and I do mean the only reason that the modern left hates the “you will own nothing and you will be happy” mantra of the WEF is because they know that Blackrock, a “private” corporation, will own everything if the liberal NWO gets its way. You’ll be free to live whatever fantasy you want in the Metaverse, but you will not be free to leave whatever pod your technocratic masters put you in.
I will leave you by teasing a follow-up which I will publish I don’t know when, because there is a pachyderm in close proximity that needs discussing: fascism. Most leftists of both the classical and modern variety have swallowed the lie that this technocratic corporatist system trying to dominate the entire world is some form of fascism; it isn’t. Actual fascists don’t like Blackrock and the WEF any more than communists or fourth positionists like yours truly, but to explain why will require a deep dive into both classical and modern fascism. Luckily, Substack is one of the best places to find both grievances and proposals written by actual fascists, so there is no shortage of sources to pull from. I won’t lie, in desperate times like this, a lot of what they have to say actually sounds pretty reasonable, especially when you compare it to the neoliberals, neoconservatives, and woke socialists. And no, Donald Trump is not a fascist, in fact he’s about the furthest from it in American politics right now. In fact, one thing I will leave you with is that some neo-fascists call themselves “national anarchists.” Just…
Na shledanou!