AIACC¶
Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating the long-standing thesis:
America is a communist country.
The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these paragraphs:
When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not personally have supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?
Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,” “change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.
‘Progressives’ aren’t called out on their all-but-overt communism for ‘reasons’ of tact, rooted in a complex structure of intimidation, which itself attests to comprehensive Left triumph. It’s rude to call a ruling communist a communist, and being rude can be highly deleterious to life prospects (it’s a communist thing, which everyone understands all too well).
Despite all this, Outside in probably won’t be stepping up its counter-communist rhetoric in any obvious way, because there’s a criticism of the AIACC analysis that remains unanswered — and which Moldbug seems averse to recognizing. Fascism is the highest stage of communism. Already in the 1930s — which is to say with the New Deal — even small-c ‘communism’ had been clearly surpassed by a more advanced model of slaving the private economy to the state.
Yes, America is a communist country, in much the same way that it is a protestant, and puritan one. The ideological lineage of its governing establishment leads through communism, in exactly the way Moldbug describes. The evolution of this lineage, however, has long passed on into politically incorporated pseudo-capitalism. This is a fact which can only be obscured by excessive attention to preliminary — and now entirely extinct — political forms.
There is absolutely nobody on the empowered Left seeking to dismantle the co-opted oligarchy in order to establish direct ‘public’ administration of the American industrial base. In this respect America is no more communist than the Third Reich (and also no less). Central planning is restricted to the monetary commanding heights, with a pragmatic apparatus of regulatory coercion enforcing political conformity among private businesses. This arrangement is accepted as far more consistent with effective direction of society through Cathedral teleology, in which the accumulation of cultural power is acknowledged as the supreme goal. Furthermore, it enables government insiders and allies to be rewarded relatively openly, economizing on the administrative, political, and psychological costs of extensive subterfuge.
Understanding that fascism is an advanced communist ideology is at least as important as recognizing AIACC, with more significant consequences, on the ‘right’ as well as the Left. Progressives progress. Communism was just a stage they went through.