Why I Reject Patriotic Socialism

A repost, edited and compiled by Zoltanous

“Patriotic Socialism” or PatSoc for short was a thing I made back in 2018 for a blog, YouTube channel, and a Facebook page. It served its purpose, but I have decided to drop it as of 2022 because it’s honestly a very poor descriptor of my worldview. Moreover the term I created was essentially hijacked by those adjacent to the online commentator Infrared (Haz) i.e. Caleb Maupin and Jackson Hinkle. It no longer serves its original purpose and I have moved beyond it.

I am neither patriotic (nationalist) nor am I a red socialist (Marxist).

The nation is a bourgeois edifice, the opposite of an organic state based upon a higher (spiritual) principle, the nation is based upon the demos (expressed via the blood, representative democracy, workers councils, etc..). Socialism is a meaningless term used by everyone from DSA Activists in the American Democratic Party to the unofficial monarchy in North Korea.

I remain an ardent anti-capitalist and still support some form of syndicalism, where and when industry is even necessary, as a path to restoring something akin to the guilds of Medieval Europe. Yet I am increasingly convinced that industrial society, or modern technology and science, are the unique expression of Western Faustian civilization, not the inevitable outcome and epitome of all human achievement, and certainly not the universal fate of humanity, as the Liberals, Marxists, and other ‘progressives’ would have it.

Any civilization hitherto existing probably would have had the capacity to unleash the titanic forces of the industrial revolution at some point during their development, but instead directed their energies into vertical rather than horizontal development. That is to say civilizations like the Indian, Chinese, ancient Mesopotamian, Islamic, even Classical and Medieval European, have or had a metaphysical foundation, live or lived in an enchanted world, and pursued or pursue the divine. This was reflected in great works of art, architecture, theology, and more all manifested through their particular civilizations, imprinted with a unique character.

Western Faustian Civilization started out as the perversion of Medieval European civilization in the 16th century and developed gradually into an inversion of traditional civilization-foundationally materialist, totally profane, disenchanted, and in opposition to metaphysical concepts such as truth or beauty. For all of it’s talk about the Liberal Enlightenment and Western civilization, it’s responsible for more bloodshed than any hitherto existing civilization on the planet as well, not only colonizing, brutalizing and forcing the Westernization of the entire world, but inventing new, creative ways to slaughter their enemies and even each other.

If hard evidence of genocide, brutality inflicted upon non-Western peoples, constant infighting and war… two world wars, and the atomic bomb, don’t convince them they aren’t as enlightened as they claim to be, it’s likely nothing ever will.

"In particular, the West cannot count on industry, any more than the modern science that is inseparable from it, to serve as a basis for an understanding with the East; If Easterners bring themselves to accept this industry as an unpleasant and transitory necessity, it will only be as a weapon to enable them to resist the invasion of the West and to safeguard their own existence."

—Rene Guenon, Crisis of The Modern World 

Contemporary thinkers such as Alexander Dugin, Patrick Deneen, and others suggest, like Guenon, that the embrace of modern industry and technology won’t ever be able to fully Westernize non-Western peoples precisely because they ultimately stem from our civilization alone, from problems in the Western psyche and errors in philosophy that first appeared at the close of what we call the Medieval period.

In fact it’s much more likely that civilizations that are now achieving levels of industrial and tech development on par with the West such as China, India, and Latin America, will use this new found power to cut ties with and ultimately attack Western civilization. This scenario would in-effect save us from ourselves, from a grim transhumanist future wherein man is nothing more than a manufactured product in service of titanic principalities and powers beyond his grasp.

We usually understand the playing-out of the above scenario as socialism because of the oppositional role Marxism played to Liberalism within the paradigm of Modernity early-on, resulting in the creation of the Soviet Union, a bastard child of the West and traditional Russian civilization. This eventually developed into the quasi-Marxist led or inspired revolutions against colonialism in India and Southern Asia, the Chinese revolution, the Cuban revolution and others, all with aid from the Soviets, whom found themselves in an increasingly oppositional role to the West after WW2. However, there are prior examples such as the Meiji Restoration and the birth of the Japanese Empire, or the Iranian Revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic, that were not led by or significantly influenced by Marxist or quasi-Marxist revolutionaries, these revolutions are sometimes mischaracterized as nationalist.

This mistake often leads many genuinely well-meaning revolutionaries in the West to propose importing a similar model found in China, Cuba, or the late Soviet Union, focused heavily on industrial and technological development, but with a seemingly archaic social orientation based upon traditional hierarchical values with place for religion and the sacred. But this isn’t possible for the West, as industry and tech are a product of our own psyche, a technique or technical process that will unfold until it reaches Modernity and beyond, into the trans-humanist nightmare mentioned above.

The worst strains of thought that manifested within the West are the liberal humanist and Materialist worldviews. This would include the economic determinism found in Marxism as well as the racialized pseudoscience of physicalism, found within the views of personalities such as William Z. Ripley’s ‘Nordicism’. Both communism and materialist racial anthropological determinism are products of philosophical realism and overlap significantly in their character. Darwin’s focus on matter is at the heart of modern day ‘Scientism’. This is all merely de-facto humanism rooted in liberal realist nominalism. 

Of course we can trace this entire school of thought to ancient Greece as a suppressed worldview but it definitely has continuity with modern liberal humanist Western thought. Now the point I’m making is that liberal humanist nominalism is really the start of western civilization. Marxism is based upon it as are some materialist Fascisms such as that of Niccolò Giani and the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg. An example would be the genocidal views regarding inferior races found in both Marx and Engels. It overlaps not just with Rosenberg’s interpretation of Nazism but even historical classical liberalism and modern day ‘White Nationalism’. While Giani used it to justify ethnic cleansing, liberal colonizers, namely the British empire, used it to justify the conquest of the entire world as a “White Mans Burden”.

Economic determinism is something that is united in Marxism and Liberalism through the purely racialized materialism of modernist biologists. Marxism and liberalism both worship the economy and desire to reach their conceptions of ‘higher stages of development’ for their so-called ‘human prosperity’. In my view, this only results with deracination, ethnic conflict, death, and the genocidal policies advocated for by Nordicist thought. In fact, this is why Vladimir Lenin’s views on physicalism are indistinguishable from Adam Smith’s and materialist racists like Alfred Rosenberg. What we are looking at are simply different branches of the same tree, that tree is liberal nominalistic humanism. This is the great heresy that birthed the blasphemy we today call ‘Western civilization’.

It should also be noted that many racial materialists object to many things from a moral position. Why should they though? If all that matters is their idolatrous and vulgar concept of race, why should we care about the means to reach the ends? 

The hyper fixation on matter, which is but only an idea elevated and now functionally worshiped as some kind of idol independent of mind, is to detach oneself from morality.

The communist moralism against ‘racism’ is incoherent especially when we look into the Darwinian evolutionary views correlated with marxist dialectical materialism. Something that necessitated racial and class genocide while the liberal morality was simply used to justify the ever expanding nature of economic growth for self-interest. It has all ultimately resulted in the subordination of high ideas as a trinket under the idolatry of consumption and racial supremacy.

So this begs the question: why do liberals, communists, and modernist racial absolutists really hate one another? The answer is that it’s a superficial infighting within the same overall paradigm. In reality, it’s merely liberal humanistic nominalism simply walking into a room of mirrors. The reflections may be different by angles but in praxis they are the same.

How do we fight against this? Is another alternative out there that I'm missing?

Fascism and Communism are chimeras of Modernity and the traditional society wherever they manifest. At war with Liberalism yet possessing something of it in themselves. This is why both Communist and Fascist regimes can look and be strikingly similar in practice at times, both attempt to overthrow bourgeois society, both affect 'socialism' through a mix of state and corporate property, etc...

Socialism in disaffected Communist countries, like the Soviet Union during different periods or contemporary China, Cuba and North Korea, etc.. tends to reflect the morals, values, etc... of the society, culture, and civilization where it emerges as a more 'conservative' faction wins out over the 'leftist' faction inside these regimes. 

This can be and often is derailed by ideological Marxists/'leftists', ex: The Cultural Revolution, at least temporarily. In other situations (North Korea) it's embraced ever-more openly, and Marxism is scrubbed from the official state ideology altogether. I support actually-existing-socialism in disaffected Communist countries, and I think we can glean a lot from Leninism in terms of tactics and organization, but I reject ideological Marxism for the chimera it is.

Likewise, I support Fascism for the same reason, and I think we can also take a page from the Fascists when it comes to economics (corporatism) and the broader Fascist movement in terms of tactics (though it may already be a form of rehashed Leninism in this area). All this while still rejecting the modernism of Fascism.

In truth, European and American socialism, carried out by either Fascists, Communists, or someone else entirely, would effectively be a return to the guilds of the Middle Ages. The political overthrow and economic annihilation of the bourgeoisie would affect a return to traditional social structures and values here as well.

When 'Western Civilization' collapses and disappears completely the world will have a return to 'normalcy' – 'Western Civilization' believes in its own superiority regardless of professed ideology, but nothing could really be further from the truth. We have amnesia. Our capacity for inhumane, bloodthirsty conquest as barbarians through the vehicle of 'Western Civilization' has been proven. Our forms of modern technology are not the markers of an 'advanced civilization' but a façade existing only as an outgrowth of war and the weapons required for it (including the weaponized population). The United States of America is a prison-house of nations domestically and internationally for this reason. 

Revolutionaries in the West should instead seek out alternatives to modern industry, tech, science and philosophy, re-discover the sacred and the natural world, pursue localism and regionalism, and work out how to lead our civilization back to a more holistic, stable and vertically-oriented place in relative peace and harmony with the civilizations surrounding us and the natural world we live in and that’s what I plan to do here—ardently support and defend Chinese “socialism” along with Cuba, North Korea, Russian patriots, Islamic militants, and other enemies of Modern Western Civilization. But more importantly, to carry on this fight from within and seek real alternatives to Modernity as mentioned above.

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Original Article:

Why I Reject Patriotic Socialism