Every once in awhile someone writes something that is so amazing it makes you question your own abilities and perspective of the world. Biological Leninism, by Bloody Shovel, is one such example. Here are some pertinent passages:
Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn’t have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That’s just how it works.
Socialism though promised to change that, and Marx showed they had a good plan. Lenin then put that plan to work in practice. What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party who little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families. The same happened in China, where e.g. the 5 provinces which formed the southern Mongolian steppe were joined up into “Inner Mongolia autonomous region”, what Sailer calls “consolidate and surrender”.
The point again is, that you can’t run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don’t need to be loyal. They’ll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn’t have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they’re gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It’s worse than that really. it’s the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It’s the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.
There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn’t want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have; the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don’t even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left’s patronage. There’s a devil’s bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what’s behind Larry Auster’s First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.
Also of note:
Say what you will about the Soviet Union: the Communist Party was loyal. They got things done. Every crazy and stupid thing that the Politburo approved got done. Yes, it took a while to achieve that result. Stalin had to kill a lot of people. But it wasn’t through sheer terror and cruelty that the Communist Party worked. The Communist Party had a system. Which worked. It still works today in China. You might have noticed how people in the West today talk about China in these same terms. China gets things done, it does them fast and cheap. China got the world’s biggest high-speed rail system in the time that it takes to dig a tunnel in Boston. And for not that much more money. That’s not a coincidence. That’s Leninism at work.
hmm..If it ‘works’ it’s because they abandoned market-Communism, which was a failure, but still kept some of the nationalistic and cultural elements of it. The evidence shows Maoism to be an unequivocal failure, and even though Mao had absolute rule, economic and living condition were bad enough that progress was severely impeded.
Due to famine and other problems, the communists weren’t good at getting much done. Regarding the Three Gorges Dam, Mao didn’t begin the project – its was under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek did work begin. Shek, a Nationalist, was unable to maintain good relations with the Communists. After the 1949 Communist takeover, Mao Zedong supported the project, but began the Gezhouba Dam project nearby first, and economic problems including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution slowed progress. It wasn’t until the 80′s, after Mao and his revolution died, did planning and construction begin.
I think America’s government is sorta dysfunctional and slow by design, and instead much of the efficiency and expediency is shouldered by America’s very strong private sector as well as cognitive elite, although in crisis the fed. govt. can be very expedient. When people complain about how inefficient and slow the US government is, they are ignoring or not taking into account the private sector. With the exception of the dept. of defense and NASA, the US government doesn’t innovate much, but Silicon Valley companies such as Tesla do. In invoking supply-side economics, the best the govt. can do is create conditions and incentives conducive to innovation.
There seems to be a trend to want to return to the mores of the 50’s and 60’s (which is understandable but also impractical), or a belief that millennials and other young people are lazy and or making society worse, but the contributions of latter generations, although not as “big and obvious” as buildings and bridges, are as valuable if not more so. Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are immensely profitable; the moon landing and many of the public works projects were not. That’s not to say they had no value, but it’s more like comparing two different things (technology vs. infrastructure; private enterprise vs. govt. initiatives ).
Also, we’re sorta living in an age, especially online since 2013, of contrarianism and revisionism. A decade ago, that Communism failed and had no redeeming qualities wasn’t a controversial statement, but nowadays many, even some on the ‘right’, want reexamine what otherwise a decade ago seemed incontrovertible. As it turns out, the purported 100+ million deaths under Communism as per the Black Book of Communism (as frequently cited by Jordan Peterson), may have been an exaggeration, because it includes the unborn [people that would have existed based on extrapolated population trends had communism never occurred]. According to experts, the actual figures range from a few as 20 million to as many as 70 million deaths. Contrary to popular belief of Soviet Russia always being despotic, much of the deaths under Soviet rule occurred in the 20-30’s during the Ukrainian famine and Stalin’s purges (approx. 6-8 millions deaths), and by the end of WW2 and after Stalin’s death, conditions improved. The Khrushchev Thaw (or de-Stalinization) describes the rescindment and relaxation of many of Stalin’s polices. Under Khrushchev’s rule the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union was decreased, according to some writers, from 13 million to 5 million people. A similar deescalation occurred in China after Mao’s death.
Regarding feudalism, I agree that status is a huge motivator of behavior, but addition to status, I would add the popularity of Communism is perhaps due to how it circumvents the responsibility borne by the individual and instead makes it a collective one. However, I don’t think it’s so much that people want more power, because power comes with responsibility, but people don’t want accountability. Wealth inequality in America is wider than it has ever been, and most people have little status or net worth, yet there is very little desire to overthrow it. But also, the evidence suggests the overthrow of the Czar was due to economic weakness and food shortages as a consequence of WW1 and other factors, not due to people feeling disenfranchised. The causes of the October Revolution:
*Economic difficulties had played a major role in Nicholas II’s fall from power. The Provisional Government had very limited success in dealing with these problems. Prices went on rising, food was in short supply and the peasants’ desire for control of more land was not met. Inevitably, the continuing economic crisis discredited the Provisional Government, and strengthened the appeal of the Bolsheviks.*
This probably explains why there won’t be revolution/revolt in America, because although there is a lot of wealth inequality and dissatisfaction with the status quo, basic economic needs are still being met.