"Such laws are the legal-bureaucratic expression of a much broader liberal-humanitarianism that takes any outcome inequality between groups as a sign of morally illegitimate actions or structures."
The brutal irony here is that equality is a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment, and we were warned about this quite some time ago:
"The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle."
That is none other than Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America.
As for Marxism, particularly the Frankfurt School (vice those "vulgar" OGs and their obsession with dialectal MATERIALISM) - there's nothing original there; it comes directly from Rousseau and is only translated into German. Every hope of the Bolsheviks to create the new Soviet Man is absolutely derived from Rousseau's obsession with "freeing" man from all of his social bonds. Gramsci laid the blueprint for the capture (and perversion) of the institutions.
Well written! In the specific case of the USA, the expansion of higher ed in America was, contrary to what we've been taught, actually a post WW2 consolidation and centralization of many elements of the USA's Old Republic's wide and deep and diversified and variable educational and training sphere(s) (science and engineering wasnt easier, in fact pre computers it was in many cognitive ways more difficult, and a majority were not produced by what we today say is a university, those varying schools track records speak for themselves), it was a huge mistake, it not only degraded much of the capacity in those regards, it also created a nexus through which powerful special interest groups can project themselves, coordinate, and indoctrinate/socialize groups of people, not to mention its market dominance regarding discourse makes it the ultimate pr agency
But in regards to the Nazi comparison, there are some problems with these comparisons, while Nazi Germany certainly eliminated electoral democracy, it paradoxically expanded another key aspect of democracy through the NSDAP, which, however imperfectly, functioned as a publicly accessible and decentralized mass-member party. This aspect of political participation distinguishes it from purely autocratic systems and should be considered when evaluating its structure, and given that .
Also, while the German economy was centrally planned before and during the war, it was not dramatically more centrally planned than our own economy has been in recent decades. This is is important to state because it clarifies the nature of economic control within different political systems and forces us to recognize who actually holds power within our current political economy.
Analogy does not require equivalence, merely being relevantly like. The trouble with operating through networks is that many of the institutions still operate to allow countervailing politics. There has been no equivalent of the Enabling Act. Hence Trump’s waves of executive orders attacking much of such politics root-and-branch.
Hitler was more of a socialist than current left-progressives typically are or “wokery” doctrinally is. The modern “coordination” show little interest in nationalising industries or in purely “economic” regulation. Some of this is “you can’t step into the same river twice”. In a world where even ruling Communist Parties in Vietnam and China allow, even facilitate, huge levels of commerce, such economic planning and centralisation just does not have the cachet it used to. Some of it is they clearly do not feel much need to go there. The existing regulatory state already gives them all the levers they need.
The CCP, which has about 90m members, also allows a form of participation. But democratic centralism is like fuhrerprinzip, it hugely attenuates such participation. The jokes about folk being NPCs hints at the same thing. In reality, there is a lot more scope for a certain entrepreneurialism of activism in a structure of networks and signalling within what are still structurally liberal-democratic states.
In the latter 20th century the USA effectively instituted central planning, just via the private sector. In the latter 20th century, banking and finance were centralized through deregulation that removed barriers to interstate banking and the various capital flow inhibitors that had existed fully for ~140 years since the 1830s, allowing a small number of financial institutions to dominate investment and capital allocation. This concentrated control over credit, investment, and mergers, favored supers over smaller and medium firms. At the same time, interlocking directorates created a management superstructure that made coordination between large firms, limiting competitive pressures while coordinating decision making related to investment allocations and many other things. Big consultancies, which serve as gatekeepers to corporate strategy, further reinforced this by standardizing business practices and ensuring that only a handful of firms dictated industry wide decisions.
Business schools also played a role in socio-professionally homogenizing corporate leadership, producing executives trained in the same ideologies, reinforcing managerial consolidation, and ensuring that corporate decision-making adhered to a centralized logic rather than competitive market forces. Meanwhile, various other forms of cartelization, such as industry-wide lobbying for nationally harmonized regulatory (and remember, the word regulatory applies to several very different things), regulatory capture, or informal agreements enabled by all of the above, further insulated dominant firms from competition while coordinating activity, turning industries into private-sector equivalents of planned economies.
This is private sector central planning: a system where key economic decisions are made not through open market competition and politically and economically diffused decision making by large and diffused groupings of variegated actors but through a tightly controlled network of financial institutions, corporate boards, and consulting firms and other that coordinate strategies, allocate resources, and shape markets from the top down. The structure of economic power has shifted from a decentralized, competitive environment to one where market outcomes are largely dictated by a concentrated elite operating within a quasi-coordinated system that mirrors central planning, except it's done by private entities rather than the gov (although the gov plays a big role but 1) this concentration has made those actors drivers of state decision making and 2) the state itself has become very centralized by the removal of states and localities from real economy economic matters and 3) the govs themselves have seen similar homogenizing of decision makers along with stark declines in broader population and small/medium business representation)
I think the notion of finance-capital as central planning is hugely over-stated, not least because of the development of the venture capital market in the US.
Yes, a lot of parasitism comes via regulation, but the point I have been making is that a lot of this is networks and signalling rather than anything that can be usefully seen as central planning.
If you such a narrow view of central planning, then Nazi Germany in the 1930s would not qualify as centrally planned either. The Nazi economy had heavily on networks of industrialists, cartels, and private firms that matched state priorities but maintained significant autonomy. Hitler’s regime avoided full-scale nationalization in favor of using regulatory control, incentives, and strategic partnerships with key industries to achieve its economic goals. Much of the coordination happened through informal mechanisms, voluntary matching with state policy, and private sector collaboration rather than actual top down command structures. If you that central planning requires direct state control over industries and decision making, then the Nazi economy, at least before the war, would fall outside that definition, just as you say the US economy today is not centrally planned
As for the arg that the development of the VCs in the US goes against the claim that finance capital operates as central planning, I think you may be missing that VCs, even much more than "traditional" finance, do a whole lot of structured coordination. The big VCs tend to set up ecosystems their investee firms operate within in, and the don’t just provide capital; they impose management frameworks, industry standards, and strategic direction on startups, effectively embedding them within the broader corporate and financial ecosystem, and create standardizations of business practices in the. VC firms, consultancies, and interlocking directorates, and others create a centralized framework where major economic decisions are dictated not by freewheeling competition but by a small, interconnected elite that coordinates across industries. The fact that this coordination happens through networks and signaling does not negate its centralizing effects; if anything, it strengthens the case that economic decision-making is concentrated within a structured system that functions much like central planning, just under a private-sector model rather than a government-run one
It was partially centrally planned. The Nazis had actual Four Year Plans. I am not particularly worried about possibilities of central planning. I am much more concerned with some version of what I would call the Latin America Option—use of regulation, preferences, etc to favour those who are well-connected.
There is clearly some of that already: in fact, quite a lot. But it is still nowhere near Latin American levels.
There was no meaningful autonomy for factory owners in the Third Reich because non-compliant businesses were denied their centralised resource allocations, including raw materials and labour. Owners were effectively demoted to middle-managers, for as long as they followed Party orders.
I fully agree that today's VC's are part of the system, not outside of it. Small business owners become effective employees of their backers, even operating from buildings owned by the VC. That's nothing new. It's why Henry Ford bought back shares in his company as soon as he could afford to.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply. Respectfully, the claim that there was "no meaningful autonomy for factory owners" in the Third Reich is quite oversimplified. Where it can become more more accurate -- but still not not the whole picture -- is in regards to very big business/the cartels, Germany had what they called "cartel laws" that formally enabled them, during the latter 19th and early 2th century USA big biz fought hard to get them here but never succeeded (btw thats one of many pieces of evidence that we were once, at the very least, far more democratic than we are now), but they had them in Germany and the Third Reich strengthened them, there was a complex relationship between Nazi leadership and big business. While the Nazi state exercised significant control over resource allocation, especially during the war, the major industrialists and cartels had considerable autonomy in decision-making and at the same time the private sector remained relatively diffused (Berghahn, 2004). By the way, some of the same with the broader historiographical debate on whether German business leaders were "reluctant or willing collaborators."
Large firms, particularly in heavy industry and chemicals (such as IG Farben), actively engaged with the regime, benefiting from rearmament policies and war mobilization. But they werent simply middle managers just obeying orders; they had agency in shaping policies and often matched up with Nazi goals for their own economic gain. And while there was much consolidation, mid sized biz did indeed remain, albeit diminished, while he gov's influence was undeniable, especially through Four Year Plan and the allocation of resources. but private capitalist enterprises continued to exist, even during the war, and the regime relied on their cooperation and expertise. The involved system of controls and interference, while extensive, couldn't prevent waste, jurisdictional conflict, corruption, or deviations in planning (Bracher, ch. 7, 1970), indicating that individual entities decision making still played a serious role. And it should be very emphasized that throughout the 1930s and even into the early 1940s (they were confident they would win and didnt event enter full economic mobilization for war until well into the war against ussr!) the four years plans and rearmament accounted for way below total production and decision making regarding what consumer facing and industry facing products to make and where.
But much of these nuances reinforces me broader argument about private sector central planning. In Nazi Germany, large firms had huge influence, and decision-making was often fragmented across different power centers, state agencies, party organizations, and business elites, rather than being dictated in a purely top-down manner. This is like the USA's modern private sector, where financial institutions, consulting firms, interlocking directorates and others shape economic planning outside formal state mechanisms but are themselves largely dominated by a very tiny share of the pupation who are in many cases networked and in others at least have overlapping personal interests.
References:
Writing the History of Business in the Third Reich: Past Achievements and Future Directions by Volker R. Berghahn. Appears in the book Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (2004)
The German Dictatorship: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM by Karl Dietrich Bracher. (1970)
China, at least from the mid 1980s until recent years, Xi et al have been trying ti change this, had local trade protectionism against the law and the wishes of the national center (and this was limited but still substantial and good!), and other things that added up to real variability in relation economic, scientific, and lots of other decision making, its very strong local parties are broadly reflective of a not full but still super majority large slice of the local socio-economic spectrum. Yes their unified in ideological sort (an expansive def of ideological) of ways
The analogy being made is the infiltration of ideology into every nook of society regardless of how un-political. The Nazis required even local chess clubs to become Gleichschaltung'ed. Same with the commies (I had to swear allegiance to socialism to join the scouts).
NSDAP may have looked like a "mass participatory movement" until the NOTLN, then it was shown in clear terms to be an elite top-down hierarchy.
Gleichschaltung didn’t mean they didnt have mass participation, it was an act of forcing a framework. The NSDAP remained a mass-member organization with active local branches, youth programs, and labor groups, even after the Night of the Long Knives. Second, his claim about Nazi Germany being a rigid, top-down hierarchy oversimplifies the reality. Decision-making within the regime was often decentralized, with overlapping authorities, power struggles, and competing factions. Hitler frequently allowed subordinates to interpret his broad directives, leading to a chaotic but highly engaged political structure rather than strict central planning. His analogy fails because modern ideological enforcement through finance, HR structures, and regulatory incentives functions similarly—not through overt authoritarian control, but through decentralized yet coordinated mechanisms.
The private sector remained relatively diffused, with businesses operating independently within the framework of state directives instead of under strict state control. Additionally, governmental responsibilities were fragmented, often overlapping between different agencies, party organizations, etc. (in some cases personal fiefdoms), the NSDAP had real participatory structures for the formulation, design, and execution of policy at varying levels down to pretty low
The NSDAP’s mass membership (around 7 million) and participatory structures played a key role in day-to-day governance. Rather than decisions flowing strictly from a central authority, much of the administrative and organizational work was carried out by local and regional party functionaries, who had significant autonomy in implementing policies. This decentralized dynamic, often referred to as "working towards the Führer," meant that individuals and groups within the regime interpreted broad ideological goals and took independent initiative. Nazi governance functioned through a somewhat decentralized complex web of power centers, bureaucracies, and party networks. This further undermines the argument that Gleichschaltung made all decision-making highly centralized, coordination and ideological conformity were imposed, but actual implementation was often diffuse and competitive.
Are there any rebuttals to this and your previous articles? If so, would you be willing to share them? My concern is that you have perfectly captured the actual situation. But things cannot be perfect. What am I missing? I want to hear counter arguments.
If you go to the “Worshipping the Future” series (pinned on the front page of my site because Substack featured it last year), you will be able to track Lorenzo’s thinking as he works on his arguments, goes up dead ends, fixes errors etc.
We do not seem to be getting pushback, apart from discussions in the comments. “Wokery” tends not to rebut, as they often regard them engaging as them thereby legitimising. The presumption that they own morality in operation.
I find this essay (and its other part) to be spot on. My main concern would be that it operates on such a high level of abstraction that its implications for how to address the present situation may be beyond most of us to imagine. Let's hope that, going forward, it can also delve into practical responses that might be useful. Otherwise, it might fall prey to the fate of brilliant 'beautiful losers', such as the Pro-Situ polemicists of Berkeley in the '70s, who were so busy crafting their own theories toward a goal of perfection, that they failed to influence or inspire a wider audience. Nevertheless, great stuff here, and I look forward to more.
Yes, an Action Plan will be produced. The basic principle of the action plan can be summarised simply:
Do not give any government bureaucrat, or taxpayer-funded bureaucrat, a moral project and do not do anything that pushes moral-project bureaucrats into organisations, such as companies.
Thanks for all your hard work in expressing complex and dangerous ideas so clearly. What worries me is the state of the other side, the non-elite players, the working classes, the cultural conservatives, the ordinary people who keep their heads down, until something goes wrong and they find ‘the system’ is against them. The young couple trying to get a mortgage, the old couple waiting for a hospital appointment, the parents whose child is in the wrong body or in a gang, the homeowner who’s just been burgled. The list goes on. Those on the losing side are partly to blame and entirely powerless and if they confront where they are, uncomfortably, know where they stand. To be powerless, emasculated, angry and resigned is a powder keg that can corrode one way or explode the other way. Either way, it destroys a decent functioning social order.
Gold, as always. I'd be interested to know what you two think will happen to the PMC once AI starts vapourising their (typically relatively secure, relatively well-paid and relatively prestigious) jobs.
Well, it’s a great question. I am nowhere near tech-savvy enough to try and work out the implications of AI, not least because I suspect no one has any real idea. The very scary idea is that they may be working to get their ideas built into the base architecture of AI. As for job implications, I presume the push will be to emphasize whatever it is that AI apparently cannot do.
The immediate IT reflex would be to go to open-source, but there is a problem...
Conventional open source relies on the good will of many but is not resource intensive. Whereas this is precisely what AI is - it requires huge computational resources and data storage so its not something a network of nerds can cook up like an operating system.
They are already trying but are getting sponsorship from companies in any case because as I said the resource needs.
In fact AI may actually be the silver lining to online censorship - to work AI may need the ending of censorious interference, so its adoption could fortify the re-freeing of speech.
I am currently studying AI after my prior track IT career went off-track... my predictions so far are as follows:
In the short term there will be an explosion in productivity because the low-hanging fruit like automation of mundane low-value tasks will be achieved by the existing worker pool. The gains of this productivity will be of course unequally shared by the management & shareholders and enabling professionals like AI tech staff.
So I don't see mass layoffs at this point. Instead a large cohort of people will accumulate without entering the workforce since they are no longer needed to perform the routine admin anymore. This will be the build-up to the AI labour crisis.
Procedural-knowledge automation systems will come next - ie nobody needs to do basic accounting like tax returns anymore, running an "Audit Agent" over company data will compliance a business instead of an assessor coming in etc.
The profitability gains in the short term will shield the political economy for a while before the labour issue forces the political class to deal with it. In the long run I cannot see a future without UBI. The modern economy needs consumers more than it needs workers.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Frederick! As a student of politics and history and a frequent creator of 'tech content', I've given this matter some thought. (If I can be permitted a moment of self-indulgence, I've addressed it on my own Substack – https://precariatmusings.substack.com/p/bringing-back-shared-prosperity-is). But the tl;dr version is that I think you're on the money with that time frame. First, graduates will struggle to get jobs, then those with jobs will be made redundant, then it's either UBI or a Mad Max time.
Trump's revolution is causing mass hysteria amongst the PMC because their empire is being rolled back by sheer weight of mass popular opinion finally pushing back. Quite timely as the deficiencies of DEI are becoming so publicly visible - look at the LA fires fallout, the Hollywood woke cult hitting a wall, Jaguar... It has been quite enjoyable to watch (with apologies to the fire victims).
Yeah, I've seen him on a few podcasts recently and am a fan. Much like our gracious hosts Helen and Lorenzo, he is doing the Lord's Work in calling out the velvet glove, iron fist tyranny of the PMC! I've been amazed at how quickly the woke edifice has crumbled upon finally meeting some vigorous pushback.
I wouldn’t count one’s chickens yet. Yes, there is a preference cascade going on, but the institutional structures from which the woke push came are still there. Remember, the 1985-95 PC push came and receded, but not all the way, and the subsequent woke surge was way more intense.
Yes, as someone old enough to have lived through PC, I've had the same thought myself. I take your point, but the latest US election strikes me as similar to 1932 or 1980, with the US (and its culturally downstream Anglosphere imitators) striking out in a radically new direction. But maybe, as an increasingly stale, pale male I'm falling into the temptation of wishcasting.
They are making money from a new resource: exploiting grievance in a growing market of minority groups. In the past activism was at least non-profit and (lots of it) in good faith. Ferreting niches of potential gain is of of C's great strengths. And there's lots of money to be made at the top of this market: apparently Coates & the BLM ladies (sorry non-binaries) made millions.
The UK is well on its way to becoming a country that suppresses free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we realize that we can no longer be allies with a country that doesn’t share our love of freedom.
Hi Helen, hi Lorenzo, I think you're correct in your analysis overall, but I'd like to quibble on some details.
It is the Marxist framing which claimed the Third Reich was on the right wing. It was anti-aristocratic, offering power to the lower classes for the first time in modern Germany, leading to deadly tension between the SA brownshirt militia and the traditional Prussian military which culminated in the Night of the Long Knives, and later the aristocrat von Stauffenberg attempting to kill Hitler.
The Reich's conception of private property was contingent on Party approval. Germans, particularly Jews and dissenters, had no property rights in practice. Nominal factory owners became middle-managers for a state-directed, centrally-planned manufacturing programme, subject to their continuing political compliance of course.
I disagree that there is no Party control today. The red-blue symbiosis of UK politics has been subordinate to the trans-ideological corporations for decades, and those corporations' ultimate loyalty is to the CCP, as clients of the manufacturing power which they all depend on.
It's just that our cultural revolution became more obvious since the credit crunch of 2007-2008 when these corporations stopped pretending that they believed in the ability of free markets to set direction for the global economy. I read the situation in the USA as slightly different because Trump is a reactionary, an anti-progressive, but no less a corporate ally.
When you look at who funded the NSDAP, the support was very middle class, with some corporate types who had been traumatised by the 1918/19 disorders and emigre Russian networks and similar. It is also conspicuous that the NSDAP vote came from the collapse of the middle class Parties.
I have no time for those who say the NSDAP was not socialist. They certainly said they were and I take them at their word.
As to the Left/RIght thing, apart from the fact that they got their electoral support so much from the right side of politics, they structured their valorisation in terms of a glorious past and primordial identities. And there is a long history of right-wing illiberalism, which they seem to fit into much better than the traditions of left-wing thought.
The UniParty is a real issue, but is still very different from the sort of central direction a NSDAP or CPSU or CCP provides. It is much more about networks and signalling. The UniParties are often responding to such, who they are typically not directing.
Thanks, good points. The primordial aspect is directly from the Left. There was supposedly a time before (Jewish) capitalism when all men were free, equal (so far as possible) and understood their place in the world. Marx and Engels advocated for the concept of primitive communism.
If you recall Jeremy Corbyn's endorsement of an antisemitic New World Order mural, you'll notice the hard left's explanation for the sorry state of the world is similar to that of Hitler's American mentor, Henry Ford, in the latter's book 'The International Jew'. Industrial production was supposedly hamstrung by the wickedness of string-pulling Jewish financiers, preventing The People (non-Jews) from achieving their desires.
We might also recall that in the original text of Brave New World, Ford was the god-figure, as in "Thank Ford for that!" These references were omitted from the recent TV adaptation, and a woke climax substituted. Ford's company had a Sociology Department which spied on workers, and intervened in their lives to better them. In Britain, we now call that Behavioural Insights.
In my experience, the Right's golden age tends to be more recent, a few decades ago before the Current Thing happened, not a primitive state. For Thatcher, it was eighty or more years ago at the time, understood as Victorian values. For current American conservatives, it seems to be the 1950's, before the 'sexual revolution' and civil rights, when Ford's vision of a car for every man and sociologically correct behaviour was supposedly realised.
Also, the SA miltia depended on working-class street fighters, growing to several million members and rivaling the professional military, leading to the downfall of Hitler's openly gay best friend who had fought alongside him ever since the Freikorps and the German Soviet. The reason why they wore brown shirts is that they were so poor in the beginning, they wore army surplus clothing, from the desert unit which was the only part of the German army undefeated in 1918.
There is a lot of argumentation floating about the socialist-or-not nature of Nazism - mostly fuelled by its usefulness to the commentator to advance whatever apologetics they are pushing...
One very important thing to remember is that the Germano-Prussian approach to welfare has a very different history - the assumption that "welfare = socialist/leftist" is a Western/Atlanticist one. Germany's creation of the welfare state was "from above", imposed by the patrician elites downwards - one of Bismarck's wisest policies, precisely done to preclude capture of the working classes by Marxist ideology.
In this context pro-working class advocacy by the original DAP-NSDAP progression was not inherently leftist at all. So the Roehmist/Strasserite branches of the brown tree don't necessarily imply socialism.
This is very important, and mostly unrealised by many since very few engaging with the subject actually know German history well.
Thanks for the comment, but I wasn't relying on an argument about the German welfare state. Britain also had paternalistic anti-poverty initiatives at the time of Bismarck. Authoritarian socialism is entirely different; it does not ask for more gruel, it seizes control of the workhouse and replaces the overseer with a loyal Party official.
If you liked Helen and Lorenzo's latest you may like this exceptionally lucid piece by Mary Harrington. It causes the social psychology of it all brilliantly.
Yeah, I love Mary H and tried that one, but I have to confess to an extreme Derrida allergy, probably from my days as a 1980s Lit major.
Just seeing that man's name makes my bullshit alarm ring so loud I can't concentrate. If he'd only been an honest and said: "The goal of my project is to cut the tongue from the mouth of Europeans, as revenge for what they did to my people," then at least I could respect him. Otherwise he's an apex charlatan.
I realize it's an anti-intellectual bias, but sometimes these things are unavoidable.
I fully understand, though Derrida's revival of radical scepticism (very much a part of the Western tradition) was not IMO motivated by ethnic resentment. More likely he was showing off to attract attention, just as Foucault admitted doing.
Worth noting that you can actually use Derrida and Foucault to make a case on behalf of Scripture and revealed religion. Was actually done by a guy in Brooklyn, though I have not read it. A reversal of the Devil quoting Scripture perhaps.
"You can actually use Derrida and Foucault to make a case on behalf of Scripture"
Makes sense, their work is kind of a handy tool like a Ginsu knife, which is why it was imported in bulk to upscale American academia.
And I guess sometimes you use a hammer to build and sometimes to tear down.
I'm all for the skeptical tradition and enjoy Pyrrho and his Pyrrhonian skeptics, plus on the Eastern side Nagarjuna and Chuang Tzu (my fave). I think the issue I have is the telos or purpose.
For Pyrrho and the ancient skeptics: ataraxia (tranquility).
For Nagarjuna: dharma/nirvana (from what I remember).
For Chuang Tzu: Tao.
For Derrida and the Deconstructionists: moving the class struggle into the Western corpus, claiming it's based on inherent oppression (power-knowledge), pouring nihilistic acid all over any text so it's stripped of beauty and meaning. Or, in his words:
“Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”
If the man cared so much about the proles that he worked in a factory or in a soup kitchen (a la Simone Weil) he'd have my eternal respect, instead he was a master con man and bullshit artist whose prose makes me reach for my wallet to make sure it's still there.
With you all the way. My big problem with D and F was their prose. I am a style snob. Clarity requires mastery of both form and subject. Anything that is painful to read (not the same thing as intellectually difficult) is not good for you.
My teacher, David Stove (a lovely clear stylist himself) said this very firmly. If I am not clear, that is my failing. Alas, since Kant and Hegel, the notion that obscurity = profundity has been very much a thing.
A great piece. Very instructive. Would like to make a few points.
1. The shift from the Old Model Totalitarianism to the New is downstream from the disintegration of mass society.
Mass society grew out of the confluence of the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the political need to mobilise people en masse. The demobilisation of the masses following WW2, followed by the disintegration of traditional forms of social life (above all the nuclear family) paved the war for a more fragmented, culturally disrupted and very complex society. The old institutions that defined61 mass society (nation-states, conscript armies, workplaces that offered lifelong or at least long-term employment, trade unions, mass political parties) are gone or unable to function as before.
The new forms of totalising power are adapted to the fluid and unstable world of a rapidly emerging globally integrated economy. The Neue Gleischschaltung serves a networked oligarchy that presides over a sub-altern class of professionals and managers that is increasingly diverse, often recruited by DEI and H1B. Establishing trust and cooperation, building class consciousness, amongst this strata requires constant ideological affirmation.
The new version differs from the old in that mass society could regulate using an explicit ideology identified with a single party, while the new has to operate across partisan, ethnic and national lines without explicit identification with a specific party.
2. If you have not already read it, Adorno and Horkheimer's THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT identified the totalising character of power in their day. May be worth reconsideration.
I take your point that the Party is not as prominent as before, but we can reliably predict how people vote depending on their attitudes to matters such as DEI and open borders. Membership of the Party is no longer as important as support for the Party's programme, probably because the Party is primarily funded by trans-ideological corporations and their owners rather than rank-and-file members now.
💯 agree with this analysis, thank you
"Such laws are the legal-bureaucratic expression of a much broader liberal-humanitarianism that takes any outcome inequality between groups as a sign of morally illegitimate actions or structures."
The brutal irony here is that equality is a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment, and we were warned about this quite some time ago:
"The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle."
That is none other than Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America.
As for Marxism, particularly the Frankfurt School (vice those "vulgar" OGs and their obsession with dialectal MATERIALISM) - there's nothing original there; it comes directly from Rousseau and is only translated into German. Every hope of the Bolsheviks to create the new Soviet Man is absolutely derived from Rousseau's obsession with "freeing" man from all of his social bonds. Gramsci laid the blueprint for the capture (and perversion) of the institutions.
Well written! In the specific case of the USA, the expansion of higher ed in America was, contrary to what we've been taught, actually a post WW2 consolidation and centralization of many elements of the USA's Old Republic's wide and deep and diversified and variable educational and training sphere(s) (science and engineering wasnt easier, in fact pre computers it was in many cognitive ways more difficult, and a majority were not produced by what we today say is a university, those varying schools track records speak for themselves), it was a huge mistake, it not only degraded much of the capacity in those regards, it also created a nexus through which powerful special interest groups can project themselves, coordinate, and indoctrinate/socialize groups of people, not to mention its market dominance regarding discourse makes it the ultimate pr agency
But in regards to the Nazi comparison, there are some problems with these comparisons, while Nazi Germany certainly eliminated electoral democracy, it paradoxically expanded another key aspect of democracy through the NSDAP, which, however imperfectly, functioned as a publicly accessible and decentralized mass-member party. This aspect of political participation distinguishes it from purely autocratic systems and should be considered when evaluating its structure, and given that .
Also, while the German economy was centrally planned before and during the war, it was not dramatically more centrally planned than our own economy has been in recent decades. This is is important to state because it clarifies the nature of economic control within different political systems and forces us to recognize who actually holds power within our current political economy.
Analogy does not require equivalence, merely being relevantly like. The trouble with operating through networks is that many of the institutions still operate to allow countervailing politics. There has been no equivalent of the Enabling Act. Hence Trump’s waves of executive orders attacking much of such politics root-and-branch.
Hitler was more of a socialist than current left-progressives typically are or “wokery” doctrinally is. The modern “coordination” show little interest in nationalising industries or in purely “economic” regulation. Some of this is “you can’t step into the same river twice”. In a world where even ruling Communist Parties in Vietnam and China allow, even facilitate, huge levels of commerce, such economic planning and centralisation just does not have the cachet it used to. Some of it is they clearly do not feel much need to go there. The existing regulatory state already gives them all the levers they need.
The CCP, which has about 90m members, also allows a form of participation. But democratic centralism is like fuhrerprinzip, it hugely attenuates such participation. The jokes about folk being NPCs hints at the same thing. In reality, there is a lot more scope for a certain entrepreneurialism of activism in a structure of networks and signalling within what are still structurally liberal-democratic states.
In the latter 20th century the USA effectively instituted central planning, just via the private sector. In the latter 20th century, banking and finance were centralized through deregulation that removed barriers to interstate banking and the various capital flow inhibitors that had existed fully for ~140 years since the 1830s, allowing a small number of financial institutions to dominate investment and capital allocation. This concentrated control over credit, investment, and mergers, favored supers over smaller and medium firms. At the same time, interlocking directorates created a management superstructure that made coordination between large firms, limiting competitive pressures while coordinating decision making related to investment allocations and many other things. Big consultancies, which serve as gatekeepers to corporate strategy, further reinforced this by standardizing business practices and ensuring that only a handful of firms dictated industry wide decisions.
Business schools also played a role in socio-professionally homogenizing corporate leadership, producing executives trained in the same ideologies, reinforcing managerial consolidation, and ensuring that corporate decision-making adhered to a centralized logic rather than competitive market forces. Meanwhile, various other forms of cartelization, such as industry-wide lobbying for nationally harmonized regulatory (and remember, the word regulatory applies to several very different things), regulatory capture, or informal agreements enabled by all of the above, further insulated dominant firms from competition while coordinating activity, turning industries into private-sector equivalents of planned economies.
This is private sector central planning: a system where key economic decisions are made not through open market competition and politically and economically diffused decision making by large and diffused groupings of variegated actors but through a tightly controlled network of financial institutions, corporate boards, and consulting firms and other that coordinate strategies, allocate resources, and shape markets from the top down. The structure of economic power has shifted from a decentralized, competitive environment to one where market outcomes are largely dictated by a concentrated elite operating within a quasi-coordinated system that mirrors central planning, except it's done by private entities rather than the gov (although the gov plays a big role but 1) this concentration has made those actors drivers of state decision making and 2) the state itself has become very centralized by the removal of states and localities from real economy economic matters and 3) the govs themselves have seen similar homogenizing of decision makers along with stark declines in broader population and small/medium business representation)
I think the notion of finance-capital as central planning is hugely over-stated, not least because of the development of the venture capital market in the US.
Yes, a lot of parasitism comes via regulation, but the point I have been making is that a lot of this is networks and signalling rather than anything that can be usefully seen as central planning.
If you such a narrow view of central planning, then Nazi Germany in the 1930s would not qualify as centrally planned either. The Nazi economy had heavily on networks of industrialists, cartels, and private firms that matched state priorities but maintained significant autonomy. Hitler’s regime avoided full-scale nationalization in favor of using regulatory control, incentives, and strategic partnerships with key industries to achieve its economic goals. Much of the coordination happened through informal mechanisms, voluntary matching with state policy, and private sector collaboration rather than actual top down command structures. If you that central planning requires direct state control over industries and decision making, then the Nazi economy, at least before the war, would fall outside that definition, just as you say the US economy today is not centrally planned
As for the arg that the development of the VCs in the US goes against the claim that finance capital operates as central planning, I think you may be missing that VCs, even much more than "traditional" finance, do a whole lot of structured coordination. The big VCs tend to set up ecosystems their investee firms operate within in, and the don’t just provide capital; they impose management frameworks, industry standards, and strategic direction on startups, effectively embedding them within the broader corporate and financial ecosystem, and create standardizations of business practices in the. VC firms, consultancies, and interlocking directorates, and others create a centralized framework where major economic decisions are dictated not by freewheeling competition but by a small, interconnected elite that coordinates across industries. The fact that this coordination happens through networks and signaling does not negate its centralizing effects; if anything, it strengthens the case that economic decision-making is concentrated within a structured system that functions much like central planning, just under a private-sector model rather than a government-run one
It was partially centrally planned. The Nazis had actual Four Year Plans. I am not particularly worried about possibilities of central planning. I am much more concerned with some version of what I would call the Latin America Option—use of regulation, preferences, etc to favour those who are well-connected.
There is clearly some of that already: in fact, quite a lot. But it is still nowhere near Latin American levels.
There was no meaningful autonomy for factory owners in the Third Reich because non-compliant businesses were denied their centralised resource allocations, including raw materials and labour. Owners were effectively demoted to middle-managers, for as long as they followed Party orders.
I fully agree that today's VC's are part of the system, not outside of it. Small business owners become effective employees of their backers, even operating from buildings owned by the VC. That's nothing new. It's why Henry Ford bought back shares in his company as soon as he could afford to.
Hi, thanks for the interesting reply. Respectfully, the claim that there was "no meaningful autonomy for factory owners" in the Third Reich is quite oversimplified. Where it can become more more accurate -- but still not not the whole picture -- is in regards to very big business/the cartels, Germany had what they called "cartel laws" that formally enabled them, during the latter 19th and early 2th century USA big biz fought hard to get them here but never succeeded (btw thats one of many pieces of evidence that we were once, at the very least, far more democratic than we are now), but they had them in Germany and the Third Reich strengthened them, there was a complex relationship between Nazi leadership and big business. While the Nazi state exercised significant control over resource allocation, especially during the war, the major industrialists and cartels had considerable autonomy in decision-making and at the same time the private sector remained relatively diffused (Berghahn, 2004). By the way, some of the same with the broader historiographical debate on whether German business leaders were "reluctant or willing collaborators."
Large firms, particularly in heavy industry and chemicals (such as IG Farben), actively engaged with the regime, benefiting from rearmament policies and war mobilization. But they werent simply middle managers just obeying orders; they had agency in shaping policies and often matched up with Nazi goals for their own economic gain. And while there was much consolidation, mid sized biz did indeed remain, albeit diminished, while he gov's influence was undeniable, especially through Four Year Plan and the allocation of resources. but private capitalist enterprises continued to exist, even during the war, and the regime relied on their cooperation and expertise. The involved system of controls and interference, while extensive, couldn't prevent waste, jurisdictional conflict, corruption, or deviations in planning (Bracher, ch. 7, 1970), indicating that individual entities decision making still played a serious role. And it should be very emphasized that throughout the 1930s and even into the early 1940s (they were confident they would win and didnt event enter full economic mobilization for war until well into the war against ussr!) the four years plans and rearmament accounted for way below total production and decision making regarding what consumer facing and industry facing products to make and where.
But much of these nuances reinforces me broader argument about private sector central planning. In Nazi Germany, large firms had huge influence, and decision-making was often fragmented across different power centers, state agencies, party organizations, and business elites, rather than being dictated in a purely top-down manner. This is like the USA's modern private sector, where financial institutions, consulting firms, interlocking directorates and others shape economic planning outside formal state mechanisms but are themselves largely dominated by a very tiny share of the pupation who are in many cases networked and in others at least have overlapping personal interests.
References:
Writing the History of Business in the Third Reich: Past Achievements and Future Directions by Volker R. Berghahn. Appears in the book Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (2004)
The German Dictatorship: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM by Karl Dietrich Bracher. (1970)
China, at least from the mid 1980s until recent years, Xi et al have been trying ti change this, had local trade protectionism against the law and the wishes of the national center (and this was limited but still substantial and good!), and other things that added up to real variability in relation economic, scientific, and lots of other decision making, its very strong local parties are broadly reflective of a not full but still super majority large slice of the local socio-economic spectrum. Yes their unified in ideological sort (an expansive def of ideological) of ways
The analogy being made is the infiltration of ideology into every nook of society regardless of how un-political. The Nazis required even local chess clubs to become Gleichschaltung'ed. Same with the commies (I had to swear allegiance to socialism to join the scouts).
NSDAP may have looked like a "mass participatory movement" until the NOTLN, then it was shown in clear terms to be an elite top-down hierarchy.
Gleichschaltung didn’t mean they didnt have mass participation, it was an act of forcing a framework. The NSDAP remained a mass-member organization with active local branches, youth programs, and labor groups, even after the Night of the Long Knives. Second, his claim about Nazi Germany being a rigid, top-down hierarchy oversimplifies the reality. Decision-making within the regime was often decentralized, with overlapping authorities, power struggles, and competing factions. Hitler frequently allowed subordinates to interpret his broad directives, leading to a chaotic but highly engaged political structure rather than strict central planning. His analogy fails because modern ideological enforcement through finance, HR structures, and regulatory incentives functions similarly—not through overt authoritarian control, but through decentralized yet coordinated mechanisms.
The private sector remained relatively diffused, with businesses operating independently within the framework of state directives instead of under strict state control. Additionally, governmental responsibilities were fragmented, often overlapping between different agencies, party organizations, etc. (in some cases personal fiefdoms), the NSDAP had real participatory structures for the formulation, design, and execution of policy at varying levels down to pretty low
The NSDAP’s mass membership (around 7 million) and participatory structures played a key role in day-to-day governance. Rather than decisions flowing strictly from a central authority, much of the administrative and organizational work was carried out by local and regional party functionaries, who had significant autonomy in implementing policies. This decentralized dynamic, often referred to as "working towards the Führer," meant that individuals and groups within the regime interpreted broad ideological goals and took independent initiative. Nazi governance functioned through a somewhat decentralized complex web of power centers, bureaucracies, and party networks. This further undermines the argument that Gleichschaltung made all decision-making highly centralized, coordination and ideological conformity were imposed, but actual implementation was often diffuse and competitive.
Are there any rebuttals to this and your previous articles? If so, would you be willing to share them? My concern is that you have perfectly captured the actual situation. But things cannot be perfect. What am I missing? I want to hear counter arguments.
If you go to the “Worshipping the Future” series (pinned on the front page of my site because Substack featured it last year), you will be able to track Lorenzo’s thinking as he works on his arguments, goes up dead ends, fixes errors etc.
Eventually, all the good bits will be in a book.
Thank you.
We do not seem to be getting pushback, apart from discussions in the comments. “Wokery” tends not to rebut, as they often regard them engaging as them thereby legitimising. The presumption that they own morality in operation.
Also, that the gnosis, being special knowledge, may not be shared with unbelievers. Therefore discussion is not only pointless, it is forbidden.
I learn so much from these articles. It's like sitting through a class where every word matters.
Oh this is what writers love to hear!
Thank you for a brilliant exegesis on the apparent pathology of the networked left. You make it clear it’s not actual pathology but pure fucking EVIL.
I find this essay (and its other part) to be spot on. My main concern would be that it operates on such a high level of abstraction that its implications for how to address the present situation may be beyond most of us to imagine. Let's hope that, going forward, it can also delve into practical responses that might be useful. Otherwise, it might fall prey to the fate of brilliant 'beautiful losers', such as the Pro-Situ polemicists of Berkeley in the '70s, who were so busy crafting their own theories toward a goal of perfection, that they failed to influence or inspire a wider audience. Nevertheless, great stuff here, and I look forward to more.
Yes, an Action Plan will be produced. The basic principle of the action plan can be summarised simply:
Do not give any government bureaucrat, or taxpayer-funded bureaucrat, a moral project and do not do anything that pushes moral-project bureaucrats into organisations, such as companies.
The basic program of the action plan is:
Abolish everything that does these things.
Thanks for all your hard work in expressing complex and dangerous ideas so clearly. What worries me is the state of the other side, the non-elite players, the working classes, the cultural conservatives, the ordinary people who keep their heads down, until something goes wrong and they find ‘the system’ is against them. The young couple trying to get a mortgage, the old couple waiting for a hospital appointment, the parents whose child is in the wrong body or in a gang, the homeowner who’s just been burgled. The list goes on. Those on the losing side are partly to blame and entirely powerless and if they confront where they are, uncomfortably, know where they stand. To be powerless, emasculated, angry and resigned is a powder keg that can corrode one way or explode the other way. Either way, it destroys a decent functioning social order.
Yes, and there will always be folk willing to fish in those waters.
Thanks Lorenzo. I worry about the non-elites and what it does to them (our?) sense of who or what we are.
Gold, as always. I'd be interested to know what you two think will happen to the PMC once AI starts vapourising their (typically relatively secure, relatively well-paid and relatively prestigious) jobs.
Well, it’s a great question. I am nowhere near tech-savvy enough to try and work out the implications of AI, not least because I suspect no one has any real idea. The very scary idea is that they may be working to get their ideas built into the base architecture of AI. As for job implications, I presume the push will be to emphasize whatever it is that AI apparently cannot do.
The immediate IT reflex would be to go to open-source, but there is a problem...
Conventional open source relies on the good will of many but is not resource intensive. Whereas this is precisely what AI is - it requires huge computational resources and data storage so its not something a network of nerds can cook up like an operating system.
They are already trying but are getting sponsorship from companies in any case because as I said the resource needs.
In fact AI may actually be the silver lining to online censorship - to work AI may need the ending of censorious interference, so its adoption could fortify the re-freeing of speech.
I am currently studying AI after my prior track IT career went off-track... my predictions so far are as follows:
In the short term there will be an explosion in productivity because the low-hanging fruit like automation of mundane low-value tasks will be achieved by the existing worker pool. The gains of this productivity will be of course unequally shared by the management & shareholders and enabling professionals like AI tech staff.
So I don't see mass layoffs at this point. Instead a large cohort of people will accumulate without entering the workforce since they are no longer needed to perform the routine admin anymore. This will be the build-up to the AI labour crisis.
Procedural-knowledge automation systems will come next - ie nobody needs to do basic accounting like tax returns anymore, running an "Audit Agent" over company data will compliance a business instead of an assessor coming in etc.
The profitability gains in the short term will shield the political economy for a while before the labour issue forces the political class to deal with it. In the long run I cannot see a future without UBI. The modern economy needs consumers more than it needs workers.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Frederick! As a student of politics and history and a frequent creator of 'tech content', I've given this matter some thought. (If I can be permitted a moment of self-indulgence, I've addressed it on my own Substack – https://precariatmusings.substack.com/p/bringing-back-shared-prosperity-is). But the tl;dr version is that I think you're on the money with that time frame. First, graduates will struggle to get jobs, then those with jobs will be made redundant, then it's either UBI or a Mad Max time.
Thank you for the vote of confidence - I'm flying by dead reckoning through this subject, so its helpful to get encouraging feedback.
Trump's revolution is causing mass hysteria amongst the PMC because their empire is being rolled back by sheer weight of mass popular opinion finally pushing back. Quite timely as the deficiencies of DEI are becoming so publicly visible - look at the LA fires fallout, the Hollywood woke cult hitting a wall, Jaguar... It has been quite enjoyable to watch (with apologies to the fire victims).
BTW: By complete chance I became familiar with Al-Gharbi this week through this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/is-wokeness-one-big-power-grab/ar-AA1ucyPG
Yeah, I've seen him on a few podcasts recently and am a fan. Much like our gracious hosts Helen and Lorenzo, he is doing the Lord's Work in calling out the velvet glove, iron fist tyranny of the PMC! I've been amazed at how quickly the woke edifice has crumbled upon finally meeting some vigorous pushback.
I wouldn’t count one’s chickens yet. Yes, there is a preference cascade going on, but the institutional structures from which the woke push came are still there. Remember, the 1985-95 PC push came and receded, but not all the way, and the subsequent woke surge was way more intense.
Yes, as someone old enough to have lived through PC, I've had the same thought myself. I take your point, but the latest US election strikes me as similar to 1932 or 1980, with the US (and its culturally downstream Anglosphere imitators) striking out in a radically new direction. But maybe, as an increasingly stale, pale male I'm falling into the temptation of wishcasting.
I like his work and have linked to it. I am less thrilled with his term ‘symbolic capitalists’, as I am generally not keen on the term ‘capitalist’.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/capitalism-and-capitalist-are-analytically
They are making money from a new resource: exploiting grievance in a growing market of minority groups. In the past activism was at least non-profit and (lots of it) in good faith. Ferreting niches of potential gain is of of C's great strengths. And there's lots of money to be made at the top of this market: apparently Coates & the BLM ladies (sorry non-binaries) made millions.
I don’t doubt the perverse entrepreneurialism.
The UK is well on its way to becoming a country that suppresses free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we realize that we can no longer be allies with a country that doesn’t share our love of freedom.
Hi Helen, hi Lorenzo, I think you're correct in your analysis overall, but I'd like to quibble on some details.
It is the Marxist framing which claimed the Third Reich was on the right wing. It was anti-aristocratic, offering power to the lower classes for the first time in modern Germany, leading to deadly tension between the SA brownshirt militia and the traditional Prussian military which culminated in the Night of the Long Knives, and later the aristocrat von Stauffenberg attempting to kill Hitler.
The Reich's conception of private property was contingent on Party approval. Germans, particularly Jews and dissenters, had no property rights in practice. Nominal factory owners became middle-managers for a state-directed, centrally-planned manufacturing programme, subject to their continuing political compliance of course.
I disagree that there is no Party control today. The red-blue symbiosis of UK politics has been subordinate to the trans-ideological corporations for decades, and those corporations' ultimate loyalty is to the CCP, as clients of the manufacturing power which they all depend on.
It's just that our cultural revolution became more obvious since the credit crunch of 2007-2008 when these corporations stopped pretending that they believed in the ability of free markets to set direction for the global economy. I read the situation in the USA as slightly different because Trump is a reactionary, an anti-progressive, but no less a corporate ally.
When you look at who funded the NSDAP, the support was very middle class, with some corporate types who had been traumatised by the 1918/19 disorders and emigre Russian networks and similar. It is also conspicuous that the NSDAP vote came from the collapse of the middle class Parties.
I have no time for those who say the NSDAP was not socialist. They certainly said they were and I take them at their word.
As to the Left/RIght thing, apart from the fact that they got their electoral support so much from the right side of politics, they structured their valorisation in terms of a glorious past and primordial identities. And there is a long history of right-wing illiberalism, which they seem to fit into much better than the traditions of left-wing thought.
The UniParty is a real issue, but is still very different from the sort of central direction a NSDAP or CPSU or CCP provides. It is much more about networks and signalling. The UniParties are often responding to such, who they are typically not directing.
Thanks, good points. The primordial aspect is directly from the Left. There was supposedly a time before (Jewish) capitalism when all men were free, equal (so far as possible) and understood their place in the world. Marx and Engels advocated for the concept of primitive communism.
If you recall Jeremy Corbyn's endorsement of an antisemitic New World Order mural, you'll notice the hard left's explanation for the sorry state of the world is similar to that of Hitler's American mentor, Henry Ford, in the latter's book 'The International Jew'. Industrial production was supposedly hamstrung by the wickedness of string-pulling Jewish financiers, preventing The People (non-Jews) from achieving their desires.
We might also recall that in the original text of Brave New World, Ford was the god-figure, as in "Thank Ford for that!" These references were omitted from the recent TV adaptation, and a woke climax substituted. Ford's company had a Sociology Department which spied on workers, and intervened in their lives to better them. In Britain, we now call that Behavioural Insights.
In my experience, the Right's golden age tends to be more recent, a few decades ago before the Current Thing happened, not a primitive state. For Thatcher, it was eighty or more years ago at the time, understood as Victorian values. For current American conservatives, it seems to be the 1950's, before the 'sexual revolution' and civil rights, when Ford's vision of a car for every man and sociologically correct behaviour was supposedly realised.
Also, the SA miltia depended on working-class street fighters, growing to several million members and rivaling the professional military, leading to the downfall of Hitler's openly gay best friend who had fought alongside him ever since the Freikorps and the German Soviet. The reason why they wore brown shirts is that they were so poor in the beginning, they wore army surplus clothing, from the desert unit which was the only part of the German army undefeated in 1918.
There is a lot of argumentation floating about the socialist-or-not nature of Nazism - mostly fuelled by its usefulness to the commentator to advance whatever apologetics they are pushing...
One very important thing to remember is that the Germano-Prussian approach to welfare has a very different history - the assumption that "welfare = socialist/leftist" is a Western/Atlanticist one. Germany's creation of the welfare state was "from above", imposed by the patrician elites downwards - one of Bismarck's wisest policies, precisely done to preclude capture of the working classes by Marxist ideology.
In this context pro-working class advocacy by the original DAP-NSDAP progression was not inherently leftist at all. So the Roehmist/Strasserite branches of the brown tree don't necessarily imply socialism.
This is very important, and mostly unrealised by many since very few engaging with the subject actually know German history well.
Well said.
Thanks for the comment, but I wasn't relying on an argument about the German welfare state. Britain also had paternalistic anti-poverty initiatives at the time of Bismarck. Authoritarian socialism is entirely different; it does not ask for more gruel, it seizes control of the workhouse and replaces the overseer with a loyal Party official.
I don't know if I loved this so much because of its brilliance or because I agree with all of it—let's split the difference and say both.
You guys have been killing it lately.
Thanks!
Assume/hope that the worst is over where you are.
If you liked Helen and Lorenzo's latest you may like this exceptionally lucid piece by Mary Harrington. It causes the social psychology of it all brilliantly.
https://www.royst.no/post/mystifying-the-appearances?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Yeah, I love Mary H and tried that one, but I have to confess to an extreme Derrida allergy, probably from my days as a 1980s Lit major.
Just seeing that man's name makes my bullshit alarm ring so loud I can't concentrate. If he'd only been an honest and said: "The goal of my project is to cut the tongue from the mouth of Europeans, as revenge for what they did to my people," then at least I could respect him. Otherwise he's an apex charlatan.
I realize it's an anti-intellectual bias, but sometimes these things are unavoidable.
I'm sure you understand.
Cheers!
I fully understand, though Derrida's revival of radical scepticism (very much a part of the Western tradition) was not IMO motivated by ethnic resentment. More likely he was showing off to attract attention, just as Foucault admitted doing.
Worth noting that you can actually use Derrida and Foucault to make a case on behalf of Scripture and revealed religion. Was actually done by a guy in Brooklyn, though I have not read it. A reversal of the Devil quoting Scripture perhaps.
"You can actually use Derrida and Foucault to make a case on behalf of Scripture"
Makes sense, their work is kind of a handy tool like a Ginsu knife, which is why it was imported in bulk to upscale American academia.
And I guess sometimes you use a hammer to build and sometimes to tear down.
I'm all for the skeptical tradition and enjoy Pyrrho and his Pyrrhonian skeptics, plus on the Eastern side Nagarjuna and Chuang Tzu (my fave). I think the issue I have is the telos or purpose.
For Pyrrho and the ancient skeptics: ataraxia (tranquility).
For Nagarjuna: dharma/nirvana (from what I remember).
For Chuang Tzu: Tao.
For Derrida and the Deconstructionists: moving the class struggle into the Western corpus, claiming it's based on inherent oppression (power-knowledge), pouring nihilistic acid all over any text so it's stripped of beauty and meaning. Or, in his words:
“Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”
If the man cared so much about the proles that he worked in a factory or in a soup kitchen (a la Simone Weil) he'd have my eternal respect, instead he was a master con man and bullshit artist whose prose makes me reach for my wallet to make sure it's still there.
I'm with these guys:
http://www.ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/derridaletter.htm
With you all the way. My big problem with D and F was their prose. I am a style snob. Clarity requires mastery of both form and subject. Anything that is painful to read (not the same thing as intellectually difficult) is not good for you.
My teacher, David Stove (a lovely clear stylist himself) said this very firmly. If I am not clear, that is my failing. Alas, since Kant and Hegel, the notion that obscurity = profundity has been very much a thing.
amen!
I was taught by David Armstrong and Keith Campbell. Both very clear writers.
Sound instincts you have there.
lol thanks
A great piece. Very instructive. Would like to make a few points.
1. The shift from the Old Model Totalitarianism to the New is downstream from the disintegration of mass society.
Mass society grew out of the confluence of the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the political need to mobilise people en masse. The demobilisation of the masses following WW2, followed by the disintegration of traditional forms of social life (above all the nuclear family) paved the war for a more fragmented, culturally disrupted and very complex society. The old institutions that defined61 mass society (nation-states, conscript armies, workplaces that offered lifelong or at least long-term employment, trade unions, mass political parties) are gone or unable to function as before.
The new forms of totalising power are adapted to the fluid and unstable world of a rapidly emerging globally integrated economy. The Neue Gleischschaltung serves a networked oligarchy that presides over a sub-altern class of professionals and managers that is increasingly diverse, often recruited by DEI and H1B. Establishing trust and cooperation, building class consciousness, amongst this strata requires constant ideological affirmation.
The new version differs from the old in that mass society could regulate using an explicit ideology identified with a single party, while the new has to operate across partisan, ethnic and national lines without explicit identification with a specific party.
2. If you have not already read it, Adorno and Horkheimer's THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT identified the totalising character of power in their day. May be worth reconsideration.
I take your point that the Party is not as prominent as before, but we can reliably predict how people vote depending on their attitudes to matters such as DEI and open borders. Membership of the Party is no longer as important as support for the Party's programme, probably because the Party is primarily funded by trans-ideological corporations and their owners rather than rank-and-file members now.