Bamidbar 16:3 : "They assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them: ‘Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them".
Left and right are largely senseless, anti-scientific terms that only exist because modern systems of parliamentary democracy are supposed to provide the illusion of choice for the people. In most cases they don't provide even that, as in most countries there is a clearly recognizable elite with dogmas that are nearly immune to delegitimization by opposition parties. For example, I do agree with libertarians that Adolf Hitler was a genuine leftist, albeit with a nasty set of phobias and a lack of basic human empathy. Nevertheless, his economics was socialist, relying on proper, working labor unions. The Soviet Union was understandably uncomfortable in recognizing him as such, avoiding even using the term national socialism and calling him and his movement fascist instead. Western capitalists played along and two types of socialism found themselves on opposite poles of modern liberal understanding of totalitarianism. While this top-down narrative so far succeeds in pitting them against each other, the general trend is clearly a rightward one. As soon as the economic benefits of promoting the existing dogmas of the European Union disappear, we will be singing "Horst Wessel Lied" in short order since European siloviki rely on this type of socialism as their backup plan.
Although Lenin did acknowledge utopian socialism as one of the three equal pillars of communism, together with German idealism and British political economy, as a typical quantitative mind he spent much more time elaborating on the latter two. Following the Marxist logic that the proletariat will create conditions for the satisfaction of the needs of the weak, he largely dismissed the biological component which was more prominent in the works of utopian socialists, national socialists, and modern wokesters. Focused on creating a joint pan-European political space, he hoped to overcome sectarian tendencies of the European Left through radical atheist militancy, simultaneously acknowledging the positive input of non-atheist leftists and declaring them outdated. His strategy was sound at a time when no one required explanations such as what is the point of labor unions or who is more relatable to a worker - a foreign worker or a local landowner. Most modern Leninists act as if he succeeded and not failed though - still insisting on radical atheism in a time of social atomization, roleplaying the 100-year-old strategies in a very retro manner, having difficulties in explaining the future, satisfied in being agents of anti-Western influence for the benefit of Russia and China.
Rightists, on the other hand, reduce themselves to being the mirror of mainstream liberal parties, not inventing any future-proof policies of their own and merely objecting to liberal initiatives. They obediently call the centre-right liberals communists for the sake of cheap moral panics. Since my task is a reboot of the Left through its destruction, I will be helping them for now, safe in the knowledge that 90% of the modern right don't want any political power, letting the liberals have the throne in exchange for control of the streets.
To get a basic understanding of how socialism differs from its eternal half-rival/half-brother anarchism, let’s skip a bit ahead and analyze the most useful quote of one of Fourier’s acquaintances - petty bourgeois anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
“Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In property, inequality of conditions is the result of force, under whatever name it be disguised: physical and mental force; force of events, chance, fortune; force of accumulated property. In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence. This damaging equation is repellent to the conscience, and causes merit to complain; for, although it may be the duty of the strong to aid the weak, they prefer to do it out of generosity, — they never will endure a comparison. Give them equal opportunities of labor, and equal wages, but never allow their jealousy to be awakened by mutual suspicion of unfaithfulness in the performance of the common task”.
Thus we can see that before Karl Marx invented "class reductionism", an ethical imperative to solve the problem of human dignity of the weak was already relevant. What we also see is either a lack of care or a class hostility to the conclusion that the weak will never be satisfied with just equal opportunities of labor. Any employer who is focused on profit and productivity will choose the superior man in 99.9% of cases. Giving equal wages lowers productivity even further by invoking the anger and envy of the strong, who expect rewards for their superiority.
Anarchist thinking is the thinking of a middle-class craftsman, who feels okay under capitalism but longs for more free time and independence from employers. Socialist thinking is the thinking of barely employable outcasts, who won’t survive without either illegal activities or state paternalism. While squatting is a practice employed by both of them in our days, dominant anarchist communes differ from rare socialist ones immensely. Former employ the Do It Yourself principle, feed the bums, and smoke marijuana. Latter analyze mechanisms of state apparatus, create slush funds, and study strategies of urban warfare. An anarchist can definitely hate the regime, but as a highly sociable person, he is never afraid of his tomorrow, knowing he will likely have what he had yesterday. Socialists live much bleaker life, which is only rarely interrupted by lucky events. They have to plan in advance for the absence of these lucky strikes. National socialists are socialists who have capitulated before the cruelty of nature and live according to the Fuhrerprinzip, choosing a leader who will protect the pack in a wolf-like manner.
What Marx did - he rationalized biological and class inequality in a technocratic, mathematical dimension, deducing a way to transcend the division of labour in a society of continuously increasing abundance of goods and fluidity of people’s skills. He did it being a part of the German minority in a predominantly British management of the First International. By analyzing its ethnic, national, and class composition, we can conclude that originally leftism was an invention of British, French, and to a lesser extent German aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie, with Italian and Russian provocateurs as back-benchers.
What can we say about its religious and philosophical composition? It was an eclectic coexistence of atheists, Freemasons, Christian reformists, industrial accelerationists, and peasant romantics. All of them wanted to weaken the dominant churches of their countries without destroying them completely, hoping to create a much better world. Before the Hitlerian-Fordist effort to equalize Freemasonry and Jewishness, most such freethinkers were called masons by pro-Church traditionalists, regardless of whether they were actual members of lodges like Bakunin and Pushkin, or random sympathizers. The effort was far more successful than most realize, however, since it is present and was present as an intellectual trend in most post-WWII societies: the Soviet Union, the United States, and the European Union. The first meaningful collaboration between the Jews and leftists only happened when the Bund movement tried working with Russian social democrats. The much-bashed over-representation of ethnic Jews among Bolsheviks is outweighed by the fact that unlike Bundists, who were trying to avoid the issue altogether, these Jews were explicitly against Judaism as a religion, for which they are still hated by conservative Zionists. Trotsky himself wrote numerous anti-Judaic texts in Pravda, a fact which never gets mentioned by those rightist types who like to remember his true surname on each occasion. Hitler successfully used this over-representation and this anti-Judaism to gain support from scared Church-adjacent German people for his mad racism.
Freemasonry is a complex and large topic, which should not be studied by reading Wikipedia alone. Although it lists some things correctly, it seems to confuse chronology intentionally. The correct order is this. First, there were disorganized aristocratic French, then Francophile Jacobite Scotsmen, and then reactionary anti-Jacobite pro-Hanoverian Londoners. Jacobites and Louis XIV are central to understanding the nature of Franco-British masonic rivalry. Placing Stuarts on the English throne was seen as the noblest pan-European cause for quite some time and lodges served as Marxist study circles/human rights NGOs of their time. French royalty did not invent them but recognized their innovative value and tried to control them. The churches could not keep up with the rapidly increasing complexity of political intrigue. For some time Catholics and Protestants were present in lodges in almost equal measure until Grande Loge de France was hijacked from the Jacobites by Hanoverians. The Old Pretender did not like it in the slightest and ordered Pope Clement XII to do something to prevent further entrapment of Catholics there. Pope obeyed and issued “In eminenti apostolatus”, a theological justification for a pretty materialistic goal. Despite this, Freemasonry remained largely compatible with Catholicism up to 1884, when Pope Leo XIII issued “Humanum genus”. Whereas the first document tried to avoid taking the obvious side between Jacobites and Hanoverians while de-facto working in favor of Jacobites, this one was written in a post-Stuart era and targeted lodges of Grand Orient (Continental, post-Jacobite) type, on the grounds of their philosophical naturalism, pantheism, and rationalism, as well as greater revolutionary resolve than those of conservative Regular (Anglo-American, post-Hanoverian) type lodges. This happened 13 years after the birth and death of the Paris Commune, a working-class dictatorship that greatly influenced all classical Marxists. Various theories explain the location of the Commune being Paris not just as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian War, but also the greater natural predisposition of Catholicism to communism in comparison with Protestantism, which tends to produce bourgeois liberals instead. Even today, after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and its decline in prestige, radical currents of neo-communism are more popular in Catholic countries of Europe and Latin America than in Protestant ones. Whether that is because of theological differences between faiths, or because someone is still angry about the Dutch invasion of England is for you to decide.
The First International and related events of that age highlighted the behavioral division between leftist influencers which will forever accompany the movement. First, there were “talk a lot, do nothing” people like Proudhon, whom many considered a conservative who only adopted a semi-revolutionary lexicon to discourage the weak from action. Marx was considered a bit more practical in his approach, he was a decent activist, though psychologically he was still prepared to wait for what he saw as a natural ripening of conditions for an unavoidable classless society. The anarchist branch quickly degenerated into nihilism, class collaboration, and senseless terrorism. Prominent nihilist terrorist Sergey Nechayev was a formal member of the First International for a while, as well as a pupil of Bakunin. His attitudes were very common among all leftists of the time, it’s just that socialists managed to divert this energy into the creation of a state, while anarchists saw it as an end goal, a kingdom of ultimate freedom. International’s Socialists were more down-to-earth, focused on amassing the material base for a political takeover. This is largely why their English comrades invented the concept of a labour union, which was originally an intellectualized banditry disguised as philanthropism and ended up being a state apparatus tentacle, responsible for providing Soviet workers with a cheap yearly vacation in Crimea or Georgia. This leads me to believe that the best solution is a state where pro-labour bandits are able to operate independently from the state.
Unlike modern liberals, leftists of that age hated immigrants and rightfully perceived them as potential strikebreakers. Labour unions made sure that there was no or little competition in the trade of their members. The rarer and more valuable the trade was, the quicker the union appeared there. Halting the production of goods intended for the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie had bigger consequences than in the case of working-class goods.
Then were people who tried to organize a new way of life. One which will reap all the material fruits of the industrial age, keep the serenity of the pre-industrial age, and solve the natural biological conflict. The aforementioned Charles Fourier was the most successful of them and for a time was seen as a person more significant than Marx. He spent much time contemplating on ethical implications of classless society and non-capitalist reward systems, influencing not only the most talented Soviet far-left science fiction authors Ivan Efremov and Strugatsky brothers, but also people responsible for the Soviet education system like Anton Makarenko, who is still taught in Ukrainian pedagogy universities even after the adoption of decommunization laws. Fourier designed a phalanstery, a commune for people of all ages and sexes. Not random people, however, but with a mathematically pre-determined number, intended to balance them all to achieve harmonic coexistence. All of them were supposed to be in intimate relations with each other, transcending the individualist approach to sexuality and that form of accumulation of capital that is associated with nuclear families. Of course, this approach was way too mathematical and failed to take into account the different personalities of people, their evolving ambitions. Nevertheless, if one were to retry the radical socialist approach, we would have to solve the riddle of what was wrong in Fourier’s calculations. The moment we brand the nuclear family as the only realistic option we shift from revolutionary socialism to social democratic conservatism. Which isn’t a bad thing by itself, actually it is a thing I intend to work on in Ukraine, but usually, it is nice to have the people to the left of you, not only to the right. When left alone and unchallenged, the nuclear family leads society rightwards at a fast pace. When it is questioned too harshly, modern passionless “polyamory” and gender ideology appear. It is clear however that a natural biological hierarchy reasserts itself in any phalanstery over time and capitalist elements might be the only solution to help weak men, the only strata that matters to keep birth rates high, outcompete the strong men, who rarely think about fatherhood because some new successful endeavor is always ahead. Natalism is another important aspect that was not understood well enough back then. The general mood was that new people would be born anyway, albeit in a more chaotic, communal manner. By now I think we all realize that without the stimulation of explicitly heterosexual culture, we will live in a world of atomized asexual indoctrinated husks. They will be happy with having nothing, instead of both Reaganite suburban happiness modern conservatives desire or the wild orgies, Fourierists were engaging in.
Let’s hear what our old pal Proudhon has to say about all this, as his attitude is just as important here as in the definition of the relations between weak/strong and communism/property:
The disciples of Fourier have long seemed to me the most advanced of all modern socialists, and almost the only ones worthy of the name. If they had understood the nature of their task, spoken to the people, awakened their sympathies, and kept silence when they did not understand; if they had made less extravagant pretensions, and had shown more respect for public intelligence, — perhaps the reform would now, thanks to them, be in progress. But why are these earnest reformers continually bowing to power and wealth, — that is, to all that is anti-reformatory? How, in a thinking age, can they fail to see that the world must be converted by demonstration, not by myths and allegories? Why do they, the deadly enemies of civilization, borrow from it, nevertheless, its most pernicious fruits, — property, inequality of fortune and rank, gluttony, concubinage, prostitution, what do I know? theurgy, magic, and sorcery? Why these endless denunciations of morality, metaphysics, and psychology, when the abuse of these sciences, which they do not understand, constitutes their whole system? Why this mania for deifying a man whose principal merit consisted in talking nonsense about things whose names, even, he did not know, in the strongest language ever put upon paper? Whoever admits the infallibility of a man becomes thereby incapable of instructing others. Whoever denies his own reason will soon proscribe free thought. The phalansterians would not fail to do it if they had the power. Let them condescend to reason, let them proceed systematically, let them give us demonstrations instead of revelations, and we will listen willingly. Then let them organize manufactures, agriculture, and commerce; let them make labor attractive, and the most humble functions honorable, and our praise shall be theirs. Above all, let them throw off that Illuminism which gives them the appearance of impostors or dupes, rather than believers and apostles.
Guy does not propose an alternative solution, he just moralizes and tries to get these people in line with his middle-class anti-libidinal boredom. In all ages, the task of such people is the same - to chain the Overton window to what is favored by the ruling class and discourage the action. And today the ruling class on a global scale is the Democratic Party of the United States. Interesting that he worries about the possibility of phalansterians practicing theurgy, a celestial kind of magic in esoteric Christianity that is supposed to summon angels and archangels, unlike demonic Goetia. Wonder if he knew about another brief acquaintance of Fourier, a Goetian Catholic mage Éliphas Lévi, who - pay attention - left and condemned the Grand Orient de France because of what he perceived as anti-Catholic bigotry, which he saw as a betrayal of masonic ideals.
Only a handful of New Left philosophers from the Cold War era included Fourier in their discourses, in either favorable or unfavorable light. Herbert Marcuse liked his structural approach but disliked his philosophy of desire and attempt to sexualize industrial working relations. Louis Althusser criticized him from a materialist angle while Jean-Paul Sartre from an individualist one. In 2023, Marcuse is one of the most respectable people among mainstream liberals thanks to his “Repressive Tolerance” essay, where he argues that true freedom requires the suppression of intolerant and oppressive viewpoints. Althusser died an enemy of open society, viewing Popper’s paradox of tolerance as an expression of how the ruling class may manipulate the concept of tolerance to perpetuate their own ideology and suppress dissent. Sartrean existentialism is useful for loners who can’t find comrades in their geographical location, but should not be an end goal for any future post-left left.
Gospel of Matthew
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Seems like Althusser’s fruits are best, which means his critique of Fourier can be cautiously taken into account, Marcuse’s cast into the fire and Sartre’s disregarded.
By the time Fourier ceded his status of world’s main leftist to the leaders of the First International, Karl Marx denounced Proudhon in this manner:
Every economic relation has a good and a bad side, it is the one point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty (instead of seeing in it the revolutionary, destructive aspect which will overthrow the old society). He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath the economists, since as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon... He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism.
This is already a language that is familiar to those who lived in the XX century. Bolsheviks expanded on it and added a lot more quasi-religious fanaticism, which was unfashionable among those handshake-worthy, respectable Marxists who were willing to wait for the inevitable collapse of old society under the pressure of its own contradictions. Tsarist Okhrana helped Lenin against his leftist competitors for a fair bit of time because they considered him a crazy freak whom no decent citizen would ever support, while respectable Plekhanov was viewed as a real threat. Although Bolsheviks were against parliamentarian democracy because they believed that the working class would never have political agency in case stronger classes were allowed to compete, they nevertheless had a very diverse tree of people whom they recognized as legitimate contributors to their discourse. Below it is in illustrated form, compiled in 1922 during the reddest phase of the Soviet Union, and distributed among Comintern propagandists. Created under the direction of Anatoly Lunacharsky, an intellectual who supported moving the Russian language to the Latin alphabet and who was supposed to become the Soviet ambassador in Spain on the eve of their civil war. He mysteriously died en route in France. Among the names any half-serious Soviet scholar expects, like the priest who appeared on GDR banknotes and remained respectable during all atheist waves Thomas Müntzer and the father of the very concept of utopia, English Catholic saint Thomas More, there are surprises. The first one is of course the “Freemasons-Illuminati” branch in the left corner. So yes, the Soviets have officially claimed to be masonic and it is not a conspiracy theory! The only man on that branch is rather obscure in comparison with better-known activists of the French Revolution, it is “a personal enemy of God” Anacharsis Cloots. Robespierre and Cloots had disagreements on issues related to nationalism and the role of foreign-born individuals in the revolutionary government. Robespierre was cautious about the influence of foreign elements, while Cloots advocated for a more cosmopolitan and internationalist approach. Other surprising inclusions are radical egoist Max Stirner on the anarchist branch, alt-right darling Thomas Carlyle on a branch named “petty bourgeois socialists”, Mennonites, Moravian Brethren, and various Anabaptists on the branch “moralistic sects”, and Goethe on the branch “socialist educators”. The whole selection seems to be anti-Lutheran. Locke, Montesquieu, and natural law theorists are absent. And, as I said at the beginning of the text, utopian socialism is not a mere branch but a tree, a level above entire anarchism. Thus we can assume that under the perfect communism they envisioned, all future incarnations of these different people could live the way they wanted without compulsion or necessity, choosing what is best for their personal stage of development.
Thus, before the Bolsheviks slowly degenerated into Eurasian imperialists, after numerous purges and deaths, they were a pan-European movement supported by the most advanced intellectuals of their time. Arguably, the ambitions of this scale are what brought them down - Chinese communists never had the world revolution phase and began as a regional agrarian movement, becoming industrialized only thanks to the anti-Soviet intervention of Western capitalism.
The complexity of modern production makes any talk about overcoming the division of labour even more difficult than it already was. It is possible to imagine worker democracy in a furniture factory. Not so much on a microprocessor plant. Are we in for centuries of managerial fascism then? Universal basic income doesn’t provide individual agency and doesn’t lead to self-improvement. Third-wave feminism encourages Nazi-like eugenics. Warrior castes are never interested in ceding the smallest bit of power.
In such a timeline, the importance of sexuality rises above its already high levels. In the pre-Soviet era, these motives were expressed in the book “What is to be done?” by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. A bit moralist by the standards of our time, it was viewed as pornography by the standards of its time. Coincidentally, it was a favorite fiction book of both Lenin, who named this way one of his important political pamphlets, and his French mistress Inessa Armand. His waifu Krupskaya, who allegedly never had any erotic feelings for Lenin and only cared about establishing herself as the first woman in the country, did not like this book that much. Interestingly, despite Lenin giving this book much importance and also saying that cinematography is the most important of arts, no decent film adaptation was ever made in the Soviet Union, only a cheap TV version, which was hardly ever shown on said TV despite omitting most of the transgressive parts of the book and being as conservative as possible. The book was mandatory reading in Soviet schools, but school teachers never liked it much, spending much more time with their pupils on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, or in the case of Ukraine on Shevchenko and Ukrainka. Yet another reminder that the USSR was never a country populated by communists, it was a country populated by conservatives where the communist party held political power in a situation of ever-strengthening rightist sentiments. Still, the book itself was viewed as a definition of a modern, realistic, materialist, achievable utopia. It mentioned Robert Owen, phalansteries, longing for sexual experiments, and ended with a dream of glass houses, where people will no longer need any privacy because they are finally able to trust other people completely.
Some post-Soviet leftists theorized that the main cause of American anti-Sovietism was mere jealousy that Slavic “Untermenschen” dared to steal their long-term civilizational project. That Americans wanted to do almost the same, but with themselves in charge, applying their vastly superior technological and financial base. With some neo-Soviet tendencies resurfacing in American culture today, although in a highly castrated, passionless form, that is indeed a possibility. It is interesting to guess what would be different had Berlin become the capital of the Third International instead of Moscow, as it was originally planned. But that is alternate history, a subject different from utopia.
A more pressing concern is whether utopian socialism can or should be de-Sovietized. I believe that Europe and even the United States would better be interested in this, because there are only so many decades left where books about Soviet illiberalism will have their audiences. In the West, utopian hippies are dying out and are replaced with intolerant pro-market SJWs. In Ukraine, we have this. In a northern part of the “multipolar world”, there are just two options at the moment (barring a successful NATO special military operation) - Dugin’s traditionalist conservatism and a slightly more pro-Soviet Sergey Kurginyan’s conservatism. Both are highly statist, highly top-down versions of Putinist apologism. If my recent guest Roman Strigunkov is right and both of these projects won’t matter soon, we have to start thinking about post-Russian forms of socialism, If he isn’t, ways to lure Russia into the Western sphere of influence must be found.
Utopian socialism in itself cannot be the entire foundation for the post-left left, but it is useful as a spiritual center. We do need self-reliant habitats, free from mainstream culture. Discourse must be free from SJW soullessness, control of the Democratic Party, centre-left indecisiveness, far-right submission to nature, and middle-class anti-aestheticism. It must have ambitions on the level of Fourier but also a sober realization that any radicalism might lead to isolation from the West. We need to reconstruct the “tree” again, not to roleplay the experience of old Reds, but to save Europeans from the need to submit to the boring impostors who only call themselves left because the genuine left is annihilated. This means decisive separation from outdated atheism, an updated list of which religions are better than others, and a critical attitude towards such concepts as freedom and equality. A plumber is never equal to a prosecutor, which is why a plumber must have an alternate way of exerting pressure on a prosecutor. The way to deal with highly dogmatic established religious institutions who already view themselves as opposition to liberals is very obvious - let’s compete with them in the number of humiliated liberals. All this is already quite hardcore by modern standards, but if we are not ready to do that then we won’t overcome the legacies of old socialists, and won’t achieve personal agency. Even if we fail and they will find another way, they will have to release control.
Sefer Yetzirah 1:7
Ten Sefirot-Without-What: Their end is attached to their beginning, and their beginning to their end, like how the flame-tongue is bound to the coal. For the Lord is One and He has no second; before one, what do you count?