Capitalism is a right-wing force.

This claim is the received orthodoxy of political thought across much of the world. Conservatives defend free markets and low taxes. Liberals criticize Ayn Rand, Cato, and the libertarians as “far-right”. Leftists rail against capitalism in the same breath as against church, borders, and patriarchy.

The following piece can be summed up in a simple phrase: this claim is a lie. Recognizing this fact has consequences for partisans of church, state, family, and civilization.

What does this mean? Are the factions we just mentioned involved in some grand conspiracy? Not quite—at least for the most part. But the intentionality implied by the word “lie” is there on purpose. There are interests which have benefited from this claim. All the old order which the right originally defended—throne and altar—gave way to free market ideology. At the same time, a strong coalition emerged against the forces of the radical economic Left and effectively combated them. The interests of the free market have been served well. And yet, this has not prevented the current crisis. Birthrates decline, families collapse, borders are erased, and society convulses in conflict and alienation. At the front lines, companies like Google enforce progressive norms which social activists could only dream of. This brings us to the question of capitalism.

The immediate question is: how is capitalism defined? This piece will be disregarding libertarian definitions which demand only the purest free markets. In practice, companies often and enthusiastically cooperate with government, and so this definition is not useful. Instead, capitalism in this piece is defined by the prevalence of private ownership of capital. More specifically, we are interested in those classes and organizations which control capital at a politically significant scale. This is because their interests—increasing the wealth and profits derived from capital—most directly impact the state. State power is often seen as a threat and a rival. As we will see, these groups have also most directly impacted the whole social ethos which reactionary politics attempted to defend.

We live in a world where the reigning ideology is liberalism, which became accepted among segments of the aristocracy and middle classes. Its adherents destroyed European Christendom in a long arc of coups and revolutionary violence. It begins with 1688 in Great Britain, 1776 in America, 1789 in France, and culminates in the final collapse of Christian monarchy in Europe after World War I. Since then, a global order centered on American power has woven liberalism into politics, culture, and the very consciousness of billions of people.

It has been common on the Right to critique this process on the philosophical level. From de Maistre to Richard Weaver, erudite work has been done on everything from nominalism to secularism. But this has often blinded the Right to an essential truth: an idea which gains influence does so due to the actions of power. This is not invoke relativism: ideas are true or false, better or worse. Power can be in error. However, the relations between power and ideas are immensely predictive and therefore useful. Liberalism must be analyzed by the Patron Theory of Politics. In the case of liberalism, the patrons were the rising bourgeoisie. Though the definition of this term shifts between political traditions, it generally refers to the classes who gained wealth and power through non-agrarian property. They were urban, less rooted, and not tied to the aristocratic social classes. Any attempt to understand liberalism must understand it as an ideology born in and formed by this class, and serving its interests.

This means that we must confront the major faction which has applied class analysis to critiques of liberalism: Marxism. It is not by accident that modern anti-liberals such as Alexander Dugin place themselves in a dialectic several steps in succession from Marxism. The reactionary tradition of the 19th century opposed liberalism from the perspective of an old order under attack. However, Marxism was the first powerful opponent of liberalism which lay downstream from it. While this means it shares fundamental liberal errors, it also gained the advantage of exposing many of the contradictions of liberalism from within. In particular, this makes it useful as a source of political class analysis. While the continental Right felt more at ease taking inspiration from this approach, some Anglosphere thinkers saw fit to do the same. Prominent among these was Christopher Lasch, who began in the Marxist camp but also embraced “conservative” causes such as the traditional family.

Many tomes have been written from the perspective of Marxist analysis. This piece will give only a brief overview of their examination of liberalism. One canonical work to draw from is Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Among various topics, Lenin addresses the ties between the modernizing state and the power of the rising social classes. This was true even before the great revolutions. Lenin recounts the emergence of the bourgeois state (which is to say, the modern liberal state):

The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the standing army. In their works, Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie are connected with these institutions by thousands of threads…The development, perfection, and strengthening of the bureaucratic and military apparatus proceeded during all the numerous bourgeois revolutions which Europe has witnessed since the fall of feudalism[…]

Let us, however, cast a general glance over the history of the advanced countries at the turn of the century. We shall see that the same process went on more slowly, in more varied forms, in a much wider field: on the one hand, the development of “parliamentary power” both in the republican countries (France, America, Switzerland), and in the monarchies (Britain, Germany to a certain extent, Italy, the Scandinavia countries, etc.); on the other hand, a struggle for power among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties which distributed and redistributed the “spoils” of office, with the foundations of bourgeois society unchanged; and, lastly, the perfection and consolidation of the “executive power”, of its bureaucratic and military apparatus[…]

Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

However, Lenin further predicts that the revolutionary forces unleashed by the bourgeois revolutions cannot be contained by them. The red genie is out of the bottle. He cites Karl Marx from The Eighteeneth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

But the revolution is throughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat], it had completed one half of its preparatory work. It is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up against itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it[…]

This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its vast and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.” The first French Revolution developed centralization, “but at the same time” it increased “the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery”. The legitimate monarchy and the July monarchy “added nothing but a greater division of labor”[…]

Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.

These texts make two important points. First, bourgeois revolution was preceded by the growth of their power in the state. In France, royal absolutism brought aristocratic power from the far regions (where they could govern a safe distance away from the king) to the court (where they could become threats). This required a larger and larger management structure, opening the door for ascendant classes to become a political force. By the time of the revolution, one could speak of certain parts of the state destroying others, including the center. Second, as Marx points out, each of these steps created vectors of revolution beyond rational human control. The same structures could be used against the new revolutionary elite, culminating in Robespierre’s execution and ultimately Napoleon’s capture of executive power. Across Europe and America, similar processes repeated themselves. Sometimes the revolution was not as violent or total as in France (take Britain’s earlier “Glorious Revolution”), but the consequences were no less significant.

What is not as apparent in the above texts is what actually defines this revolutionary logic. Marx and Lenin beg the question: what drives political action? In answering this, Marxist analyses invoke dialectical materialist explanations. They focus on the economic and political incentives of the bourgeoisie. The class interest of the property owners is to maximize their economic utility; therefore, the bourgeois class will exploit the workers in harsher and harsher ways. However, the Marxist response is itself based on the logic of capital. A key claim of Marxism—often ignored today—was that the direct control of capital by the workers will in fact unleash greater productivity than capitalism. When capital was liberated from incentives toward artificial scarcity and expropriation of labor, Lenin and others believed that an explosion in productivity would follow.

Rather than discussing the unfortunate results of this experiment, we will focus on the underlying logic and alternatives to it. Like the liberal, the Marxist maintains a worldview and value system determined by the interests of capital and the classes defined by it. What distinguishes the reactionary from the liberal and the Marxist is the belief in values beyond the economic. This implies the possibility of defining oneself by relations beyond those to capital. Examples of such relations are husband/wife, man/woman, priest/layman, mother/daughter, and German/French. These relations drive consciousness and human action, but are not defined in economic terms.

However, this is where the trouble begins. The valuing of non-economic ends often has economic consequences. For example, tithing to the Church makes sense as a spiritual endeavor, but may be a waste of household resources from a materialist perspective. A new opera house may often be in the red on the bottom line, but has important cultural impacts which may not be monetizable. This means that wealth will be diverted—voluntarily or not—away from the interests of profit and towards non-monetary ones.

We can easily see how this can become a threat to interests defined by material economic production. This is especially true when non-economic classes hold power over economic ones. For example, in many countries the clergy had the social authority to censor entertainment media which threatened to undermine the religion. This was done partially through voluntary adherence by people to the “thought leaders” of the day, but also through government backing. This being so, the entertainment industry suffered losses which they would not have if spiritual goals were removed from consideration. Similar examples exist in finance, technology, and other industries. Especially important was the Church teaching that capital owners had a spiritual duty to the well-being of their workers, just as workers did to their families.

While many in the economically powerful classes maintained formal adherence to the political and religious norms of the time, we see an unmistakable trend. First, the ability of crown and aristocracy to control the power of capital owners was limited – or removed through revolutionary violence. From this point on, religion was driven ever more from the public sphere with each generation. It is worth noting that this was only arrested where religion could be used against atheistic anti-capitalist movements, such as in 1950s America. By the mid-twentieth century, we reached a phase where the values of church and state were removed as limitations on the interests of capital.

This finally brings us to the progressive agenda of the modern day. The 20th century saw two of the biggest revolutions in the modern era: the entry of women into the workforce, and the growth of mass immigration. It is quite easy to see how this is in the interests of capital owners. The expansive growth of the workforce drove down labor costs and expanded production. This also undermined the family structure, which once ensured centers of political power beyond business and party. Of course, employees without families to care for do not require wages to be as high for a good standard of living, and they can work longer and more flexible hours. The resulting demographic decline can be made up for with new migrants, as is unfailingly advocated for by The Economist.

But as Marx could have warned, the breakdown of non-economic identities released revolutionary forces not easily mastered. The ideological force behind feminism and multiculturalism has also embraced everything from the redefinition of marriage to the abolition of gender. Mega corporations are not a bulwark against this, but in fact lead the charge through HR departments and internal social engineering. The ties between seemingly disparate forces like classical liberalism and modern progressivism become clear. Step by step, ever more of life has been conquered by or reduced to the economic sphere. In the words of Heidegger, human relationships take on a technological mode of being, that of the “standing reserve”. Capital and its owners increase their power via waves of unleashed ideological spiraling. Yet in the short term, profits do rise. Since economic action takes place on the margin, a large scale shift in coordination becomes impossible for private actors.

It is clear that this cannot go on indefinitely. The absence of long-term thinking government and fragmenting social coherency threatens the foundations of civilization. However, the goal of Restoration is to create a structure which can step into the vacuum rather than simply accepting a coming barbarian age. In that case, we contend with two problems. First, how can values beyond the economic actually play a role in coordinating human societies? Second, how can capital be placed at the service of civilization in a way that still ensures its productive power? Another piece will have to answer these questions in greater depth, but we can begin laying out some avenues for good solutions.

First, one must accept that there is an underlying economic reality which has to be understood. Despite Marx and Lenin’s valuable analysis of power structures, the state and revolution ends by projecting the social engineering of new human beings. Ultimately, the Worker-State itself will wither away and the higher stage of communism will be achieved. The implementation of this in history shows that the making of new men is a project best left to the Church and not revolutionary parties. This being said, it is fallacious to assume that knowing the laws of production entails the maximization of profits in all cases. The legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus is an example. Lycurgus understood the principles behind the value of currency; however, his project was an austere society dedicated to war. Therefore, he created an inflationary iron currency which made the accrual of wealth nearly impossible. Obviously our goal is not the recreation of Sparta; however, this is an example of how economics can be used toward ends other than profit. What is important here is that economics is a means for production and wealth, not a universal end.

Having understood this, those organizations which coordinate societies must actually have the power to act on values beyond the economic. This means that political power must not allow itself to be captured by economic interests. Given its institutional knowledge about economic realities, the state must have the ability to make sovereign decisions. As a microcosm, we can consider a business corporation. In any business, R&D, legal, accounting, and other departments have specific and important knowledge. Nevertheless, it is the CEO who takes these inputs and decides the ultimate course of action. This means that the CEO must not over-manage and impede the departments from performing effectively; nevertheless, no department can be allowed to undermine the course of action. Sometimes, R&D just doesn’t get to continue that pet project. Rather than blanket commitments to regulation or lack thereof, such policies are developed case by case to achieve the broader goal.

Beyond these structural realities, we must also consider the impact of capital on the mores and consciousness of the population. In addition to Heidegger, the German author Ernst Jünger was keenly aware that capital even impacted one’s mode of being in the world. This was in no small part a result of seeing the technological apocalypse of the Great War. Like Lenin, Jünger predicted the introduction of “factory discipline” to all spheres of life. But unlike the Bolsheviks, he believed that this “mass mobilization” of entire societies—and not class war—would result in the erosion of classes by a new mode of being. He explains in his essay Total Mobilization:

[Total mobilization] expresses the secret and inexorable claim to which our life in the age of masses and machines subjects us…Each individual life becomes, ever more unambiguously, the life of a worker.

In his book The Worker, Jünger expands the concept and sees this figure as representing a new mode of being and relating to the world. This mode was engendered by the uprooting power of capital and its erasure of prior modes of existence. In his review of the book, Ernst Niekisch explains the concept:

The Figure of the Worker evolves to a totally different level than the proletarian in the proper sense. The spirit of technology has very simply become second nature in it; it masters with a light hand, with an entirely natural assurance, the ensemble of technical tools. The precision of the technician, the realist imagination of the engineer, the audacity of the great builder, such are the virtues that it animates. But its most powerful motor is a will of domination that aims to organize the world in its global reach and give it a new balance. For it, the idea of planning is attached to no nostalgic aspiration for a radiant happiness, but stems from the constructive spirit of technology, thanks to which the universe will be reshaped.

This vision of Jünger is an unsettling but useful archetype of our current existence. Once the human is reduced to the pure economic manipulator, his existence becomes harsher and increasingly separated from old ideals. And yet, the heroic ethos imagined here itself gives way to manipulation. The Right goes from throne and altar to low taxes; the Left goes from interplanetary worker syndicates to more diverse HR departments. In particular, the idea that progressive ideology undermines the rule of the market is absurd when we recount the facts. Progressivism speaks in illusory terms of allowing each individual to live in their own way. What is in fact the case is that traditional identities and norms (marital, ethnic, religious, etc) have been barriers to total economic mobilization. It is no surprise that the center-left across the West took up identity politics precisely to undermine economic leftism, and the working class institutions which it had developed. Exclusion of a person from economic life due to sexual practices or national borders is simply wasted production. The real work of modern progressivism is to further the assimilation of all human life to the economic realm.

Having found ourselves in this situation, daydreams of agrarian retreat or a return to some prior era will not suffice. Retreat only delays the assimilation. Our first mission is immediate and personal. It is necessary to go to the center of this crisis—to the cities, to the places where economic life occurs, to the centers from which society is shaped—if we are going to overcome it. It is no coincidence that the thirst for alternatives has become strongest in places like the tech industry. Even communities such as traditional Catholicism have found more homes in coastal cities than, say, in the Midwest. Silicon Valley, for all its faults, is a place where young people have been willing to give up comfort and short-term wealth in pursuit of great projects. It is a place where people still hope to change the world. It is in these centers where those who might actually create and man a new structure are found.

Riding the tiger means being willing to relinquish the comforts of our grandparents in pursuit of männerbund, family, and religious community. As always, becoming worthy begins with ourselves. Finding ourselves reflected in the figure of the worker, we can also become partisans. In this way, we can begin to really live out values beyond the economic. But the partisan is traditionally part of a larger project. For this reason, restoration of the self and of our civilization are two aims for which we should strive. The greater and the lesser holy war. This is why we must retain the imperial mindset. Economic power has often served the ends of political power. We can think of American use of the entertainment industry for soft power, the more immediate direction given by the Chinese state, or even McDonald’s pledging allegiance to the Saudi Crown Prince. But as capital grows in might and reach, it ever more demands a power on the geopolitical scale to effectively master it.

As we have seen, the norms of our civilization have become ever more geared toward the short-term interests of economic production. Mastery of economic wealth requires placing it in service of civilization. As stated earlier, it is not in the interests of civilization to seize and micromanage all segments of society as the Marxists demanded. What is necessary is a sane political structure which is coherent and sovereign in its governance. It can prevent the elimination of social institutions for economic gains and intervene to defend its interests. It empowers capital and those who justly profit from its management to develop along those lines which allow civilization to flourish rather than erode.

In the analysis of bourgeois revolution—economic owners as the patrons of the liberal era—we live in a world where man is under the rule of capital. As we saw, the modes of being this created have steadily subsumed owners, workers, and all of society. Civilization demands that capital be under the rule of man. To build the machine which can accomplish this, men who embody values beyond the economic in themselves are required. They must understand what institutions and norms cannot be compromised, and how to rebuild them. They must have a clear vision and the knowledge of how to realize it.

Let a thousand such statesmen arise, and we may have the Restoration.