Statist Realism: An Anarchist Analysis of Neoreaction — Part Three
In which Moldbug correctly criticizes liberal democracy
I started out this series with, obviously, parts one and two.
In part one, I mostly mocked Moldbug’s obvious biases and incredible narcissism:
In part two, I mocked his horrible research, as well as his internal contradictions:
This is the first part of the series where I will actually agree with Moldbug about anything — and, really, it’s here that the real point of this series will become apparent. It’s important to understand what the authoritarian right believes, so that we may understand how far we agree and where-in we differ.
The issue with declaring these far-right texts to be absolutely forbidden is that it creates a culture in which no one knows what these people actually believe. This is a climate in which it is very easy to unknowingly recreate these ideas, and leaves us with no real immunity to them — and, even worse, being unaware of the arguments of our polar opposite leaves us uncertain of what we believe. Knowing our absence, our goatee-wearing mirror-image, is (amongst other things) a way for us to better know ourselves.
And what Moldbug says in this part is eerily familiar — though, of course, he takes it in totally the wrong direction, and glosses over something crucial.
Are you ready for Moldbug to say something intelligent? Are you sitting down? You should be:
The invention of [the right of rebellion — i.e., the idea that rebellion against established power is legitimate as long as it succeeds] was perhaps the first tiny crack in the philosophical girders of the classical European monarchies. Filmer deftly points out that this is an engineering error, the ancient political solecism of imperium in imperio — which is now, in a typical democratic propaganda maneuver, lauded as that bogus political panacea, “separation of powers”:
Thirdly, [Bellarmine] concludes that, if there be a lawful cause, the multitude may change the kingdom. Here I would fain know who shall judge of this lawful cause? If the multitude — for I see nobody else can — then this is a pestilent and dangerous conclusion.
Filmer, writing for an educated audience, does not bother to remind them of the basic premise of Roman law: nemo iudex in causa sua. Meaning: “no man can be a judge in his own case.” And no multitude, either.
These political three-card monte tricks, in which sovereign authority is in some way divided, “limited” (obviously, no sovereign can limit itself), or otherwise weakened, in all cases for the purported purpose of securing liberty, have no more place in a Patchwork realm than they do at, say, Apple. They are spurious artifacts of the Interregnum[1]. Their effect on both a realm and its residents is purely counterproductive. Begone with them.
In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be “King.”
[1] “the Interregnum” is Moldbug’s term for the current period of liberal-democratic rule, between the absolutist monarchies of the past and the neo-cameralist sovcorps of his imagined future — “An interregnum is a period of discontinuity or gap in a government, organization, or social order. Archetypally, it was the period of time between the reign of one monarch and the next, and the concepts of interregnum and regency therefore overlap”.
In these five paragraphs, Moldbug has suddenly said more than he has in all the text previous to this. It feels as though he has been saving up his intelligence, to unleash it on us in a burst: one gets the feeling of a flash-flood in an intellectual desert.
What he is talking about, though I am almost 100% sure that he would under no circumstances describe it as such, is called “the problem of constituent power”. Graeber, in his essay Super Position (the expanded version of which is called ‘Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power’ — and my own essay referencing it is here) explains the matter as such:
Any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from somewhere else. In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple: the legal order was created, either directly or indirectly, by God. God, as the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, is not bound by laws or even any recognizable system of morality, which only stands to reason: if you created morality, you can’t, by definition, be bound by it. The English, American, and French revolutions changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty — declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity called “the people.”
“The people,” however, are bound by the laws. So in what sense can they have created them? They created the laws through those revolutions themselves, but, of course, revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order…
…laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then, is: how does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob?
There is no obvious answer.
Moldbug, though, is making the point that this problem of liberal democracies is also a problem of absolutist monarchies: after all, just as the people got their power from a mythologized revolution, the king gets his power from a legendary conquest.
If God is considered to be around, such as in a divine-right monarchy or a theodemocracy, this is — in both cases — an easily resolved subject: God wanted one group to have power at one time, and another group to have power at another time.
However, if you are an atheist — as both I and Moldbug happen to be — this question becomes equally muddled in either case.
This becomes a practical problem because, yes, it absolutely does justify anything that the people might wish to do — absent God, or another source of external power, then what can stop the king, or the people? If they are the ultimate source of all power then yes, they absolutely cannot be subject to that power.
As many have pointed out, liberalism and democracy are ultimately in conflict. Liberalism, in practice, is a set of promises to guarantee certain actions to all people — what it refers to as ‘rights’. Democracy is a method of group-wide decision-making whereby all people within the group have approximately equal influence on the outcome of the decision. Obviously, the conflict comes in when the democratic process decides to go against liberal rights — whatever that process, and those rights, might exactly be.
A “liberal democratic” system is either democratic — in which case, if the people decide to vote to overturn a promise, nothing can stop them — or it is liberal — in which case there are sharp limits placed upon the empowerment of the people.
All modern liberal democracies have chosen to attempt to be liberal over attempting to be democratic — they have chosen to be imperfect representatives of popular will in order to be more perfect representatives of the principles of long-dead white men. It is no coincidence that direct democracy, without the manacles of liberalism, is a popular solution among certain sections of both the far-left and far-right: direct democracy is an obvious rejection of late modernity.
The method that liberal democracy chooses to use to attempt to implement liberalism is, as Moldbug notes, separation of powers — i.e., a system in which different functions of the state are separated and left to different individuals to execute. The issue with this is that, all together, these individuals still possess the absolute powers of the state — and that they can easily subvert each other's wills. Liberal democracies have a certain known failure-state of becoming dictatorships — and nothing within the system-as-such prevents them from doing so. What most stops this from happening is the ability of a massive institutional network stop anyone who is sufficiently imaginative (due, perhaps, to coming from outside the political establishment…) as to realize that they could declare themselves dictator, from getting their hands on the levers of power.
Where this massive institutional network is weak or non-existent — say, in places:
- where America has attempted to “install” democracy — such as Iraq or Afghanistan
- that attempt to naively ape the American system such as Latin America has mostly done since the days of Simon Bolivar
- or in places that have intentionally been stripped of all internal institutions, and then had pseudo-European systems instituted, such as in post-colonial Africa (you will note that this has not happened in India, which managed to develop an educated priestly aristocracy over the course of colonial rule — it is no accident that Gandhi was a Brahmin-caste Hindu that organized along religious lines)
then liberal democracy will be unable to maintain its illusions, and will collapse into mere dictatorship.
It should be noted, non-liberal democracies existed during the middle ages that Moldbug loves so much, and — in the case of the Serene Republic of Venice — outlasted the monarchies that he focuses on.
The key differences were that Venice made no pretension towards general equality — heavily restricting voting rights — and had no intention of allowing power to be fragmented in ways that it was not already fragmented:
Instead, the Venetians created political structures that directly reflected and involved their own massive network of institutions — the merchant families were the real determiners of power, and the merchant families were the voters. It could be said that Moldbug even anticipates something like this in his proposal to transform the state into a joint-stock company and part out shares in proportion to who he believes to already hold the real power — but that is an entirely different subject.
Moldbug, of course, at least somewhat recognizes this: he calls this massive institutional network “the Cathedral” — though, where-in I agree and disagree with his model of that is an entirely different subject. I did tweet out a thread about it, though:
What he doesn’t mention — because recognizing this would require also recognizing deficiencies of the joint-stock company, and of his laughable understanding of its security forces — is the role that constitutions and norms play in all this. This massive institutional network ultimately derives its authority from the founding fathers of the revolution, which it mythologizes and fetishizes, turning them into legendary ancestors — we are not so different from “primitive” peoples. Ultimately, the constitution — let alone the bill of rights, the federalist papers, the declaration of independence — is nothing but words on a page. It has no will, it has no enforcement mechanism, it can only be used as a liturgy of a justifying ideology — our civic religion.
This presents an issue for any hope of a sovereign joint-stock company: such a thing would necessarily need its own justifying ideology, with its own myths and narratives, and its own massive institutional network.
What Moldbug forgets about the joint-stock company is that such an entity exists as an artifact of corporate law, not as some natural and free-standing happening. Without the external law-enforcement of the state, the joint-stock company would collapse in on itself — regardless of what limitations one placed on the weapons of its soldiers: surely, they would circumvent them or replace them eventually — there is no such thing as absolute security, and certainly not in the world of physical objects!
It would not be impossible for a joint-stock company to develop such a massive institutional network: most already do! We call it, at least in part, the ‘company culture’ or ‘office politics’ — and it is what is responsible, at least in part, for the phenomenon of bullshit jobs:
The issue, of course, is that such a massive institutional network would — while allowing the joint-stock company to exist and even be sovereign — subvert and fragment the idealized impossibility of absolute CEO power. Of course, this should come as no surprise — no ruler ever has power in their own right. They appear to have power by convincing others to act on their behalf, and the ruler that fails to do this can find themselves a puppet king or the victim of a coup.
Moldbug’s idea of CEO absolutism is merely a mirage — and his sovereign joint-stock companies are doomed to be merely a further expression of the pitfalls of liberalism.
This is the first part of the series in which things got remotely serious — and, thus, the first time where it became directly apparent why I was even bothering to engage with Moldbug at all. Going forward, these will basically be the two forms that future entries in the series will take — either me glossing over a bunch of what he says and dunking on it, or me hyper-focusing on a few paragraphs, and breaking down what he means, what he gets right, and where he inevitably goes wrong.
Moldbug is mostly right when he criticizes liberal democracies, and mostly wrong when he thinks that joint-stock companies are a viable replacement. It’s very important for us, as socialists, to understand that company-like and government-like organizational forms have a lot in common, and that criticism of one sort can easily apply to the other sort — this is a common theme in my own market socialism, one that I have certainly touched on before and will do again.
