Alexandria-on-Orange
Before I finish that big hairy piece on Global Mugabenomics, it might be worth thinking about what to do after the economy downstream from the centres of power has been hosed away by the oceans of central bank liquidity and siphoned off by the kleptocrats. Many put their hopes in the hard currency options offered by crypto, but Zimbabwe also got itself a hard currency, in the form of dollarisaiton. Didn’t fix matters. Zim has been left a country with no real political opposition, continued catastrophic mismanagement and a desperate residue of anxious activists clamoring for the slightest victory in the crippled legal system against a bloated and violent kleptocracy.
A friend of mine has a certain analogy he keeps repeating. We might be talking about national economics and international trade, popular mobilisation, electoral dynamics, localist activism, or any other facet of real political resistance, and he will say that we are little more than Palestinian children throwing rocks at IDF tanks.
One of the big truths about the reactionary right is their utter ineptitude. They completely fail at popular mobilisation, and haven’t read books on protest tactics. They don’t even manage to provide marshalls, legal support or coordinated media coverage. They don’t even manage to provide riot equipment to their frontliners. Small organisations fail at bridging trivial legal and financial hurdles. No educational institution I know of has managed to resist the tide of dominant global ideology, and no political party with a serious desire to resist has managed to break through the clown ceiling. They don’t even own their own library. Weak shit.
What is worse, there seem to be relatively few writers with a decent grip on the nature of the institutions they are facing, and instead focus on value criticism and ideological realignment. This is great up to a point, and many enlightening critiques of modern morality have come out of it. But there is a limit. However many times you go about describing ways in which global capital and its hyperliberal postmodern magpie moralisms are stripping the bones of the western world clean of anything shiny or nutritious, you are left with an increasingly bleak feeling about the inevitability of its victory, and our celebration of the rebels, however noble or cathartic their heavenward thrusts appear, they are equally tragic and ineffectual. This is what is called “admiring the problem”.
One of the most interesting little rivalries in Western dissident intellectual circles right now is the strange circle dance between the impotent reactionary right and the enigmatic weirdness of Kantbot and the Pseuds. KB has no patience for buffoonery, and we know now that the whole Trump train has been a clown car from the start. His indifference to the spectral provenance of an idea that serves to inform understanding likewise leaves the antisemites and Nietzscheans filled with profound distrust and impotent rage. For a few years now, the pattern is quite static – reactionaries are baffled by the obscure stuff KB & co are up to, ask him how this helps “our side”, and he responds in the most maximally and comically irritating why – “who? What? Why? Huh?” as if the entire present is a foreign country and all that breathes truth can be squeezed into a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a pocket-protected, starched collar suit behind an IBM mainframe.
This frustration is quite simply out of an inability to attempt to see things from KB’s perspective. The reactionary right expect KB to share their interests. After all, they shared the same internet incubator over on the ‘chans. But reactionary thought is stuck in the very same trap that they often accuse conservatives of – pointless wailing and gnashing of teeth as the enemy insists on not playing fair. This is fantastically naïve considering how cynical the dissident right are supposed to be. Worse, they store their hopes in grand leaders instead of doing groundwork organising systems of knowledge and patronage that can withstand the storms of capital barbarism.
Likewise the radical left, for whom my old affections have been returning (though not wholly, one cannot regain faith for the precise thing which your soul has refuted), is wracked with constant impotent frustration over their endless failures to achieve the precise ends they desire at the centres of political power - the constant betrayals by institutional allies who settle for the politics of melanin and oestrogen. The purity of the leftism which has taken the establishment is more total in its luciferian progressivism than anything a Marxist could come up with, and behind it sits a vast machine so intricate and powerful that analysis has barely scratched the surface.
One idea that has been tossed about in conservative and reactionary circles with a little more practical sense, is the notion of parallelism. To my knowledge, the only serious attempt to achieve subnational institutional independence for a cultural group or political collective in recent years is the Solidariteit movement in South Africa. In the face of a grand campaign of cultural erasure, they have erected private institutions for carrying on Afrikaans culture and language, while also experimenting with novel organisational formats and the capacities of new technologies. They are building decentralised security networks, labour organisations, legal protections, and reimagining the notion of an ethnic enclave for the 21st century.
Where is this impulse in the West? As far as I am concerned, it merely goes to show my age-old instinct, that Afrikaners are not of the West, but are in truth their own category, embracing a form of postmodernisation of material relations which, I am sure, exist somewhere else, but I do not know of it.
Kantbot has been quietly picking away at the entire history of modernity, building a grand map of the philosophical methods, governing strategies, military and psychological tactics which contribute to the schemes employed to govern the current global society. He manages to take theory extremely seriously and do extremely detailed deep dives into archives, combining network analysis and organisational theories. His desire to create some kind of new library of Alexandria by sifting out all the chaff from the oceans of political communication in the 21st century is an impressive and ambitious task.
He spends most of his time online preaching hate against the mechanical mass homicide waged and sinister control mechanisms employed by the Anglo-American establishment, and is generally not challenged by any serious passers by, because they are far too focused on the present to figure out what the project is. Of course, the true test comes when these ideas have to become a living, breathing political organism capable of action, though I have little doubt of KB’s capacity for cold calculation.
Interestingly enough, he seems to have been rebuilding an entire historical metanarrative from the dawn of the enlightenment until the present day, and is already on the 1960s. at this rate, his grip on the innards of the institutions of modernity should be solid within a couple of years. The density of the material being processed is quite something. Naturally, I keep a little list of his recommendations, but I really cannot keep up with the pace of his reading.
Here are now two simple questions – what are we replacing postmodern hyperliberal Malthusian kleptocracy with, and how do we even begin to oppose it given the massive material asymmetry? Whatever replaces the Great Satan will have to be more competent, more sane, and more conducive to the flourishing of the human spirit than what has come before, or it will die an even more ignominious death.
Sand in the gears would be a start, but where are the gears? We are relatively aware of the capacity for short squeezes to be disruptive, but what are they accomplishing? The system is rigged, retail traders are shut out. While my previous essay illustrated the spirit of electronic market anarcho-populism, and the threat it poses to power, and I stick by my assessment that a skyrocketing silver price could have a crippling effect on the financial system, there really is no substitute for buying the real stuff rather than a virtual promise. In the meantime, we have to face the fact that the financial system is becoming ever more enclosed. Soon, buying deflationary assets could be a real challenge, and exiting the system will become ever harder.
Kantbot plans to understand in the finest detail every facet of the political hierarchy and their mechanisms of control, and whether he intends to find the vent on the deathstar, or play Hari Seldon to a new Foundation, his new library of Alexandria certainly cannot be taken lightly.
I wonder if Solidariteit has started stockpiling Krugerrands? I hope they at least have a serious research division.