Statist Realism: An Anarchist Analysis of Neoreaction — Part One
In which I begin to read through Mencius Moldbug’s Patchwork: a Positive Vision
Mencius Moldbug is a key thinker of the modern far-right. He isn’t a fascist, but only because Moldbug is whatever fascism evolved into. Call it neo- or post-fascism. It bears the same relationship to the 21st century as fascism bore the 20th.
One of his ideas, Patchwork, has caught on to some extent — and, therefore, seems to be worth some amount of analysis — and, though Patchwork was created by a post-fascist, there are reconstructions of it that are decidedly anti-fascist.
It has been recuperated by various sections of the Left, including the students of Mark Fisher, in various different ways. My own response is explained (at least partially) in brief, here:
Moldbug lays out his idea of Patchwork in his essay, Patchwork: a Positive Vision. It was the recuperated versions, by Leftists, that led me to the idea in the first place — you can only hear about how they have modified Patchwork so many times before you feel the need to slog through the original thing.
To begin with, he spends twelve fucking paragraphs talking about how clever his idea was before he explains what it even is. I’m not going to go over that, I’m not going to quote from it, and I’m not going to really address anything that he says in it.
It does feel irresponsible not to convey that those paragraphs exist, and that they are entirely unnecessary for the explanation. It’s just blind narcissism, and it doesn’t even manage to be charming.
Patchwork, is a political system in which polities are city-states run like joint-stock companies — preferably with zero overlap between shareholders and residents. It’s private government. In his words:
The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”
Y’know. Like in the stereotypical-standard cyberpunk setting. He even admits it:
(I’m not aware of any specific writer that has proposed exactly this, but it is certainly not an original or interesting idea in and of itself. I’ve certainly read about six zillion science-fiction books in which this is the general state of the future. The devil, however, is in the details. We will go into the details.)
The whole manifesto essentially reads as though he sat down and tried to write a justifying ideological argument for the institutional set-up in Snow Crash.
(Or Neuromancer, but I liked Snow Crash way better.)
It’s also worth noting that anarchism has long had variations of ideas similar to this. As I covered in my primer:
The anarchist imagination of a “post-revolution” world has almost always focused on an endless tesselation of communes, communities, cooperatives, syndicates, etc., etc., etc.. The details vary from tendency to tendency, of course — but a common thread is the multiplicity of the promised world to come.
In a sense, perhaps, the post-rev world has always been imagined as Patchwork…
Most explicitly, there is the anarchist idea of Bolo’bolo — that we should all form communes, network the communes together, starve the capitalist system of labor by inviting in all the workers, and pick up the pieces when the statist-capitalist regime collapses.
There’s even the common thought experiment of the divided island — the idea that, if you had a capitalist society and a socialist society next to each other, the capitalist society would necessarily have to provide its workers with as good of a deal as the socialist society does — effectively becoming socialist in the process.
Exit bends Left — if those on the bottom of the hierarchy are free to leave, they will. And the hierarchy will collapse. This has been seen again and again throughout history, in enumerable different ways — it would be the work of an entire article in itself to discuss it.
He then spends another 24 paragraphs telling us how smart he thinks he is for missing that the world of Gibson’s The Sprawl Trilogy was supposed to be a dystopia.
He finally stops jerking himself off long enough to tell us what he sees as the core issue of politics: security.
In his words:
…Patchwork’s philosophy of security is simple and draconian. It is built around the following axioms, which strike me as too self-evident to debate.
First, security is a monotonic desideratum. There is no such thing as “too secure.” An encryption algorithm cannot be too strong, a fence cannot be too high, a bullet cannot be too lethal.
Second, security and liberty do not conflict. Security always wins. As Robert Peel put it, the absence of crime and disorder is the test of public safety, and in anything like the modern state the risk of private infringement on private liberties far exceeds the risk of public infringement. No cop ever stole my bicycle. And this will be far more true in the Patchwork, in which realms actually compete for business on the basis of customer service.
Third, security and complexity are opposites. A secure authority structure is as simple as possible, so that it is as difficult as possible to pervert it to unanticipated ends.
These three principles reveal a lot about the sort of person that Moldbug is: extremely privileged.
- point one establishes that he has never been, or even thought about being, on the other side of fence or a bullet.
- point two establishes that he has never really worried about the state taking away what he has, nor has he ever worried about a cop harming him, nor has he even considered the very horrific practice of civil forfeiture.
- point three establishes that he has never tried to engage in asymmetric tactics. In the real world, away from the pointless masturbation of evil men, complexity is often used as the primary form of security. Confusion is a tried and true method of avoiding harm. Hell, I wrote a whole listicle that was (largely) about that:
Having completed your read of the first part of my review, you are likely wondering why you would want to continue to read it — if Moldbug’s ideas are this bad, why am I even bothering to review them? And why did other Leftists bother to recuperate them?
There are three reasons that you should continue to follow along:
- firstly, it does get better as he picks up steam. It never gets great, and frankly, I am surprised that anyone gave him the time of day at first — but it does begin to reach some sort of evil mirror-universe sense after you go deep enough.
- secondly, fascism is — up to a point — reversed anarchism. It is interesting to see Moldbug grapple with many important questions of power, from the other (evil) end — seeing what he misses and gets wrong is a great way to better understand what we grasp and get right.
- thirdly, watching me dunk on this nerd is — I hope — entertaining.
Continued here:
