So having established that three fundamental classes (bougies, petties, and proles) are the basis for three fundamental ideologies (liberalism, fascism, and socialism respectively), we must now discuss the political spectrum. What does it mean to be "left"? What is the "left" anyway? And what is the proper rubric to understand ideologies in relation to one another?
The Libertarian Party of the United States has long promoted a quiz with four quadrants, depending on whether one is more or less permissive of "economic rights" (read: capitalism) and whether one is more or less permissive of "individual rights" (https://www.libertarianquiz.com/political-quiz.html). So "authoritarian communists," as they might call someone like me, go in the top left quadrant, and fascists go in the top right, and anarchists in the bottom left, and libertarians in the bottom right.
Is this true? It cannot be, because where is the fourth class to sustain such a system? The lumpenproletariat (such a potential fourth class, mostly the unemployed or workers in criminalized industries, like sex workers or drug dealers) is too tiny to provide the basis for such a four-quadrant system, and if they did their interests would be too scrambled across the bottom left and right quadrants to be the basis of an organized movement. Drug dealers in California opposed a marijuana legalization measure the entire rest of the lumpenproles supported in the name of their obvious class interests - without cops there to drive their competition away, the drug dealers would have to get a different job. Sex workers trade to rich clients that they cannot always afford to alienate, giving them a potential gateway to the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie should sex work ever be legalized and regulated. The stopgap nature of their methods of survival, and the methods meant to combat that survival by oppressors bent on criminalizing their very existence, mean that the class interests of the lumpenproles are too much in genuine conflict with one another for them to serve as anything but a pawn in the machinations of the three main classes.
However, there is a position for the lumpenproles - between all the others. Lumpenproles exist between liberals and nazbols, between socialists and conservatives, between anarchists and fascists. We will see that every class has two basic ideologies: one adopted when the class aspires for power, one when it aspires for survival. The space between victory and defeat, between hope and fear, is nihilism. Lumpenproles are natural nihilists, having rejected all other ideologies. But most people are not natural-born nihilists, and want a purpose and a class to their life. So most people in the lumpenprole position are there because of a dramatic reversal in life circumstances, and will gravitate towards a different class once those life circumstances settle down. Or if they are here ideologically, it will usually be because they lost faith in their previous ideology, and have not yet chosen a new one. Rarely do people stay in the lumpenprole nihilist position for long stretches of life on purpose, and those who do make unpredictable alliances with the other classes that make them a wash as a political force.
So if there are only three main classes, whence the libertarian division of the political spectrum into four quadrants? We have two axes: one's opinion on "economic rights" and one's opinion on "individual rights." Individual rights often, even mostly have to do with one's rights and duties in the political process. What's the point of free speech if it can't protest the government? What's the point of a gun if political power didn't grow out of it? Therefore the question posed by the libertarian test is really "what do you think about capitalism, and what do you propose to do about the people who disagree?" The "authoritarians" on left and right are then just people who have an opinion on capitalism, and are prepared to do whatever is necessary to see that opinion victorious; while the "libertarians" on left and right are people who do not believe in their convictions enough to fight for them, and occasionally people who fetishize this lack of conviction into a conviction of its own.
There's already a word for people without firm convictions; that word is "liberal." If you do not care enough about your beliefs to see them through to victory, it hardly matters whether your losing beliefs were for or against capitalism because functionally your beliefs don't matter to anyone, not even yourself. So the libertarian left and the libertarian right in that political compass test are really just the same liberal ideological trashcan buffet, seasoned with Ayn Rand or Noam Chomsky to one's preferred flavor of irrelevant liberal wankery.
Continue reading Chapter 2
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