To the neoreactionary worldview, the improvement of governance is central, to the reactionary worldview, changing the culture is central. Both are necessary and important.
– Michael Anissimov
Addendum: Interesting development – Was informed that M. Anissimov is not longer a part of the neoreactionary council or inner circle, and that his ideas no longer represent the council’s thoughts, nor those of the membership. They also want me to be informed that their form of governmental structure is in fact opposed to both fascist and distributist. I’ll need to review the Hestia Society background in detail, as well as The Future Primaeval a blogging portal. The Society appears to be more of an oversight committee than a central command center enforcing rules and obligations, etc. : “We don’t intend to interfere directly in matters of theory; our job is to ensure that the spirit of free inquiry that makes Neoreaction so exciting will be nourished and protected.” I’ll return to this in a future post. Looks like they’re better organized than I’d assumed. The Society is an organization based on research rather than an activist system at the moment. I see they have a revised neoreactionary canon.
Strangely disquieting to read through these posts by Michael Anissimov’s “Neoreactionary Accomplishments” Series. His plan for the extreme right entails the complete takeover of the United States of America. He seeks to replace it with a neocameral corporation, privatizing government and disbanding politics for the structure of a state Corporatism. We know that the notion of a cameralist state was early on a mercantilist form of state enterprise in an early corporate type during the 17th and 18th Century. Albion Small (1909), The Cameralists. The Pioneers of German Social Policy would describe the history of this in detail. Anissimov provides an updated version based on Moldbug’s conceptions: Neocameralism:
Neocameralism: the system of government proposed by Mencius Moldbug which proposes to divvy up ownership of the state into shares based on de facto influence. The state is then run by a CEO who operates the state to maximize profit.
The idea of the State as the ultimate expression of the capitalist-machine, as a well organized profit-machine whose shareholders are none other than the citizens who also are its workers, maintainers, etc. has been tried under other variations. We might say in the early 30’s of the last century under the name of Fascism. Roger Griffin in his Modernism and Fascism makes a strong case that the technoutopiansism of fascism was in its merging the politics and economics into a total capitalism.1 As he’ll state it:
The Third Reich enthusiastically embraced the new ethos [of a strong corporatist state ] and gave it a specifically modernist dimension by conceiving planning in terms of maximizing profit along with the health of a community defined as a homogeneous racial unit in order to overcome the crisis of Modernity. (p. 328)
Of course that is key: racial unit. So far the work we see in Anissimov – at least directly does not include this component, yet the neoreactions canon has many of the elements of the fascist dynamic in place: Julius Evola would be described by Alfio Bernabei as a “NAZI-FASCIST RACIST propagandist who after the fall of Mussolini and Hitler wondered whether sufficient men of sufficient quality still remained “on their feet” to carry out his grand design of more refined and successful dictatorships is not an easy subject to tackle, especially when the man in question, Julius Evola, sought to minimise the genocide almost to the point of negation and failed to acknowledge the responsibilities of both regimes.” Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddhin considered himself a monarchist rather than fascist, and in fact thought of the NAZI regime as a strongly leftist, democratic movement ultimately rooted in the French Revolution that unleashed forces of egalitarianism, conformity, materialism and centralization. Robert Filmer another on in the canon, provided a theory in his Patriarcha is founded upon the statement that the government of a family by the father is the true origin and model of all government. Another in the neoreaction canon is the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe the primary mentor of Murray Rothbard, the libertarian. Hoppe argued that monarchy would preserve individual liberty more effectively than democracy. He believed in a fully fledged out libertarian society of “covenant communities” made up of residents who have signed an agreement defining the nature of that community would prosper. One might think of the SF series “Defiance” as based on such a libertarian model. Many of the well know SF authors have written in the libertarian vein of both capitalist and socialist forms. Such a notion seems to fit well with Anissimov’s and Moldbug’s neocameralist ideology.
So we see a mix of monarchist, fascist and libertarian sources within this pool of reading. One aspect of the Right has been this tendency between socialist and anarchic forms in politics and social practice. The Old Right was closer to the libertarian capitalist anarchic impulse, while the neocons were inching out of Mount-Pelerin Society along with the Chicago Boys: capitalist socialism. Who knows what a neocameralist solution would entail. Books like Philip Mirowski’s The Road from Mount Pelerin describes this full history of the neoliberal era. We’ll assume for Anissimov the neocameral will be the CEO as King or Monarch, responsible only to the shareholders. A sort of overpaid figurehead to give speeches to the humble masses, while administrating the empire … I meant, corporation. Either way we should not dismiss these people as fanatics and crazed right-wing nuts as many seem too. Rather we should keep an eye on their activities as the decadent spheres of our democracies slide ever onward toward either of those two poles.
As one with communist leanings such individuals will remain my ideological hit list, therefore it behooves us to keep a wary eye on their progress.
1. Roger Griffin. Modernism and Fascism The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. (Palgrave, 2007)
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 