What does Curtis Yarvin say about class conflict? Those who regularly speak in the language of “class conflict” should want to know.
They haven’t wanted to know. But it’s not too late. Not yet.
For Moldbug there are two major classes in 21st century Western societies (but especially in the U.S.): a “Cathedral” class which has power, and a more numerous plebeian class which does not have power. Yarvin doesn’t always refer to the latter as the plebs. He uses many other terms. They don’t interest him very much at a theoretical level. He always refers to the Cathedral as the Cathedral.
What is the Cathedral? It is a decentralized ecosystem of institutions for establishing consensus within an oligarchy. Certain institutions are especially important within this consensus-formation apparatus. Harvard and the other elite universities. The New York Times and other high-prestige media outlets. These institutions are usually geographically located inside of the United States, and so the State Department is especially important in the Cathedral for channeling the consensus from the U.S. to other places in the Anglosphere-aligned world.
There are two important further dimensions to this notion of the “Cathedral.” One: all of the crappy universities and crappy NYT-imitating media outlets and low-tier NGOs are also part of it. Underpaid adjunct profs are part of the Cathedral. Some random intern at whatever hapless media outlet is in the Vox discursive tranche but at the bottom of that tranche is part of the Cathedral. There are other ways of putting this. Does your job, unpaid, low-wage, or otherwise, involve creating PowerPoints? You’re probably in the Cathedral—however low-tier/grudgingly. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably in the Cathedral. The Cathedral has its own internal status hierarchy, but being further downward in that hierarchy gets you no closer to exiting the Cathedral, at least not within this particular theory of class conflict (we can contrast this with traditional Marxism, where at some point you have so little money there’s just no way you could possibly be a capitalist).
The other important extra dimension to the theory of the Cathedral concerns where other kinds of powerful institutions are positioned within the Cathedral’s hierarchy of authority. Yarvin divides his conception of this hierarchy of institutional authority into four layers. At the top there is the Cathedral proper, the consensus-making institutions. Then there’s the “Bureau”, which are government agencies and allied NGOs which figure out how to translate that consensus into policy. This is essentially the “Deep State,” and Yarvin’s transfer of its position of authority from first-tier to second-tier status sets him apart from how people in the MAGA/QAnon cosmos tend to perceive power. At the third tier is the “Factory”, which traditional Marxists will instantly recognize as the capitalist class whom they, of course, would instead assign the top slot. And at the fourth tier is the “Castle”, which is the military and the police. When the Cathedral needs to do internal scapegoating for big problems actually generated by the Cathedral’s clumsy, uninspired rulership of postmodern society, the Castle is the easiest part of the ruling structure to scapegoat because it’s the most low-tier in terms of authority, and thus in no position to say much in its own defense.
The hierarchy as summarized by Zero HP Lovecraft:
Perhaps this scheme looks a bit arbitrary. But it maps rather well onto certain, though not all, dynamics over the past decade. Jeff Bezos, the big successful capitalist, owns the Washington Post, but when the Washington Post shifts into its most frenzied ideological mode, does that shift trace to Bezos? Is it, rather, the direction of the dynamic that the Cathedral proper, within which the WaPo occupies a prestigious booth, signals to Bezos, the mere “Factory” captain, what kinds of shows and narrative messaging Amazon Prime should amplify during certain election cycles? Another example: there didn’t seem to be much ambiguity about the chain-of-authority when Mark Zuckerburg was squirming in his chair during those Congressional hearings and agreed to a) be the scapegoat for certain election results the Cathedral proper and Bureau didn’t like; and b) make the Facebook experience less user-friendly as punishment for everything apparently being his fault.
Yarvin praises the typical Cathedral member as more creative and tasteful, on average, than the typical plebeian, but he sees this overall power structure as deeply anticreative and stagnant. He wants to see it overthrown. However, he is far from a populist, because a populist would advocate something like popular democratic plebeian seizure of power. But Yarvin sees democracy, at least done in this populist-democratic mode, as itself inherently generative of and subsumable within the oligarchical power structure. Such attempts at populist democratic takeover are neutralized in one of two ways. They can be coopted by the Cathedral—arguably the story of what’s already happened with the Berniecrats (though who knows what the state-of-play there will be by, say, 2032). Or, they can wind up trapped inside of the one or two chambers of the Cathedral they formally won via the electoral process only to find themselves completely surrounded and overwhelmed by all the of the chambers they didn’t win and which the electoral process gave them no opportunity to win (in other words, it’s not like Donald Trump could run to be editor-in-chief of the New York Times based on popular vote). Yarvin’s theory is that the class interests of the plebs, which are totally distinct from the class interests of the Cathedral, need to be protected from the domineering moral and political energies of the Cathedral; further, that at some level the Cathedral’s internal members need to be saved from the Cathedral’s oligarchical machinations as well.
Only a king can do it, he says. Yarvin’s ideas about monarchism (as distinct from fascism) trace in part to Austrian School economist Hans-Herman Hoppe, who saw property rights as flowing from rights of kingship. Libertarian and ex-libertarian Yarvinists emphasize this intellectual pedigree for Yarvin’s monarchism. However, for anyone whose first-order interest is class conflict rather than property rights, what stands out as more important in Yarvin’s thinking about monarchism is the historical analogy he relies on with Julius Caesar and the ways Caesar manipulated class conflict between the optimates and populares during the dying years of the Roman Republic to come to power and keep both classes from each other’s throats. This is not the only such historical analogy Yarvin appeals to, but it’s the one he returns to the most to convey the precedence and viability of such a process. In effect, Yarvin wants a new Caesar to come to absolute monarchical power and put a stop to the war between the Cathedral class and the plebs.
MilSocs and the Fading World of the Crash
The millennial socialists won’t like being called “millennial” socialists, I suspect. But identifying them with a specific frame of time during the recent historical process is important. Not all millennial socialists are millennials, and not all millennials are millennial socialists, but I find the generational label, with its hint of something quasi-religious and quasi-heroic (as in “millenarian”) hits the right suggestive and temporal notes. The term also allows me to set aside for the purposes of this post the somewhat older, more muckracking, less status-anxious flavor of socialist. WSWS is not milsoc. Jacobin is.
Like Yarvinism, millennial socialism takes class conflict to be the primal social dynamic. It’s an important part of millennial socialist culture to exaggerate their genealogical link with Karl Marx, but really millennial socialists are not so centrally interested in the traditional Marxist class categories of capitalist and proletariat. This was already evident prior to, say, the Canadian trucker protest earlier this year, but millennial socialists’ across-the-board disinterest in signaling any solidarity with those protesters (or at least condemnation of the extraordinary crackdown against the protesters) drove the point home. And that’s OK. Milsocs just have a somewhat different working theory of class conflict than the one that looks at a conflict like that and errs on the side of sympathy with the subversively mobile transport workers who are striking over biopolitical work conditions.
Millennial socialism is still very much interested in class conflict pertaining to income level, and the rhetoric of capitalism and the working class remains omnipresent. Support for labor unions tends to be genuine—though, we missed a chance to stress-test that support since Canadian trucker unions did not themselves support the mass-protests, which were wildcat in nature. But if a more traditional Marxist sees the issue of income disparity as much more fundamentally about two different class relationships to a modern industrial mode of production, the millennial socialist dispensation is to keep those issues of political economy at arm’s length, and instead to focus on gathering together many other kinds of social divisions—pertaining to race, gender, religion, immigration status, etc.—and on arranging them all in parallel with the socio-economic division. Thus, millennial socialists are interested not merely in capitalism but in racial capitalism and patriarchal capitalism and settler colonialism, etc., in a way that analytically aligns certain people whom a traditional Marxist would identify as proles as now actually aligned with the equivalent of capitalist class power.
What are the classes called, then, in this new scheme? Well, the scheme is arranged in a way that the classes can’t actually be formally delineated. The gathered-together social divisions do not in fact start out as parallel, and so the intellectual and political maneuver of forcing the parallelism generates constant paradoxes, or contradictions, in the resulting geometry. I think that it is looking increasingly likely that very few of these contradictions are going to wind up being productively “dialectical” (i.e. resolvable via synthesis) in the way that some sympathetic theorists had initially hoped.
This pattern of perceiving class conflict formed via a specific historical sequence of events, or layering of experiences: the end of the hyper-optimistic post-Cold War 90s; a coming-of-age via 9/11 and the disastrous Middle East wars associated with the Bush administration; the bruising of neoliberal economic assumptions via the 2008 financial crash; the post-racial, quasi-messianic promises of the 2008 Obama campaign; the angry, anarchist ethos of Occupy Wall Street and atmosphere of revived messianism in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign; the unexpected rapidity of the gay marriage culture-war victory; the shock of the Trump win. All of this is actually much more important for understanding the odd, duct-taped-together (“intersectional”) morphology of millennial socialism than is any particular “theory.” If someone else wants to define today’s version of the socialist left as premised on ideas from the Frankfurt School, that’s fine, but most millennial socialists have not read any of the major figures associated with the Frankfurt School. Whereas, most Yarvinists have read Yarvin, and have read Yarvin’s favorite authors that he constantly mentions (Carlyle, Pareto, Burnham), and have even read Yarvin affirmatively quoting Walter Benjamin.
Emphasizing the Frankfurt School is a maneuver, friendly or unfriendly, to link millennial socialists with Marx, but really the millennial socialists are no more Marxist than the Yarvinists are. Many of Yarvin’s ideas come from ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, who defined the idea of the managerial class (today updated into the clunkier term “professional managerial class”) in The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s managerial class is Yarvin’s Cathedral. From one point of view Burnham was a post-Marxist traitor turned conservative. From another (better) point of view, Burnham was doing Marxist Class Analysis 2.0, with the class-tension between bourgeoisie and managerialists superceding the class-tension between bourgeoisie and proletariat. But the Yarvinists don’t stress this genealogical link to Marx via Burnham, preferring to draw attention to other 19th century schools of thought, the Italian elitist school in particular. This is really like two Central Asian warlords one of whom would prefer to emphasize his lineage from Genghis Kahn and the other of whom thinks Genghis Kahn was actually kind of scary and the connection’s not so great to brag about, and this warlord would prefer to emphasize one of the other many useable lineages, like maybe from Buddha.
The millennial socialists’ understanding of class conflict was extremely well suited to the post-financial crash world of the late 2000s and early 2010s. This is in part because it was an earlier stage in the formation process of millennial socialism, and fewer pseudo-parallelisms were being forced together at this time. Certain optics during that time also helped. I think the millennial socialists hit an intellectual wall in the mid-2010s—and the explanation is not only the process wherein their movement was gradually, but unmistakably, commandeered by the NGO-industrial complex and big grant foundations, institutions which have deintellectualized the milsocs and reconfigured their energy around an interlocking set of middlebrow mantras (or what’s now called “copy pasta”). It was also because while the intellectuals inside of the movement certainly anticipated that forces of cooptation and deintellectualization would arrive, these intellectuals had their defenses against such cooptation arrayed in the wrong place. They expected to be invaded by Big Capital and built their Maginot Line there. Instead they were invaded by Big Prestige.
The Milsocs Should Respond—And It’s Not Too Late
Yarvinist theory would obviously predict such a thing would happen: that the prestige dynamics of the Cathedral proper are more powerful than monetary bribes from the “Factory.” The prestige net can be especially insidious because, if all you have is cultural rather than economic capital, then the idea of ever touching what’s decidedly anti-prestigious is terrifying. But, I suspect the infusion of cultural capital from the big foundations to the milsocs will prove short-term if the milsocs cannot save their aura, already dimmed, of “intellectual vanguard.” In other words, even if they are more reliant than ever upon prestige and clout, it is in the milsocs’ interest to overcome their fear and touch what’s antiprestigious.
If the milsocs had been reading Moldbug in 2015 (his most influential ideas are from Unqualified Reservations around 2009-12), they might be in a better place today. The world of 2022 more strikingly reflects the contours of Yarvin’s theory than did the world of 2012. Any millennial socialists whose desire is, still, to be a genuine intellectual vanguard should pay attention to, grapple with, perhaps even try to subsume these ideas. Dismissing him because some billionaires like him (as if no billionaires like or support leftist mags) is a weak, basically embarrassing move. It can be handy to know where some of the monetary and clout threadlines which have made Yarvin famous trace to; but it’s just as handy to know that sort of thing about, say, Jacobin or New Left Review. Getting overly hung up on these linkages winds up being evasive of the arena of ideas and thus amounts to the kind of intellectual turf-ceding one expects only the intellectually underconfident to opt for.
The better response, I think, is on the one hand to look harder at Yarvin’s historical assumptions, his philosophy of history, and on the other at the future viability of his ideas about monarchism. In other words: look at his ideas about how to use the past and about how to structure the future.
On the conception of history, Yarvin is essentially a perennialist, meaning he thinks certain core dynamics in the human condition, such as the political relationship between the one, the few, and the many, are perennial. These dynamics exist in all periods, albeit in different ways, and all historical periods are “equal” as topics from which to draw modern and future-oriented lessons. It is, of course, through this philosophy of history that Yarvin is able to linger upon the analogy of the late Roman Republic as especially important for understanding our current historical situation. This contrasts against the millennial socialist philosophy of history, which is progressivist and expects the human condition, including the human political condition, to be in a state of evolutionary or dialectical progression from period to period, such that the more relevant lessons for future-oriented planning are mainly to be drawn from relatively recent history. (And such that, within this latter philosophy of history, 1968 may loom especially large as a time from which to draw conceptual models for understanding the present, and ancient Rome might as well be a Star Wars movie.)
Perennialism has a kind of archaeofuturist ethos and aesthetic, combining the archaic or antiquarian with the science-fictional or techno-futuristic. (Archaeofuturism is, say, a future Burma which is criss-crossed by hyperloops, but also employs former logging elephants as transportation during flood season.) These aesthetics can be very based. But archaeofuturism and perennialism can also be accused of taking certain metaphysical shortcuts where more materialist philosophies coming out of the 19th century, whether Marxian or Darwinian, show a lot more rigor, and so this may actually be terrain where millennial socialists could have the higher intellectual ground. But: they’d need to return to a more authentic, less duct-taped-together mode of intellectual engagement than they’re currently caught up in.
Then there is this issue of monarchism. I think this is really the most poorly resolved area of the Yarvinist framework—and without it everything else probably falls apart. Drawing on Hoppe, Yarvin says he prefers monarchy because the monarch who is the formal owner of the entire society and its territory is likelier to engage in long-term planning for his property than is the elected representative. Due to its decentralized structure, the Cathedral itself, says Yarvin, cannot really do proper long-term planning, whereas the monarch can. If Yarvin were a climate movement activist, which I suppose he is not, then he would say that it’s an impossible problem to address without a king.
But the monarch’s motivation to do long-term planning is premised on the principle of hereditary transfer of the throne. The king wants the kingdom to be good in 200 years because he’s expecting his progeny will still sit on the throne then. That’s the lynchpin of Hoppe’s defense of monarchy. And Yarvin knows that eventually, via this system, you get to a mad king. All of his interesting recent ideas about monarchism are grasping through the shadowy technofuturist underbrush for an unprecedented techno-fix to the dilemma. One idea of his is an anonymous board whose members retain an ability via key code secured through blockchain to deprive a mad king of access to nuclear weapons. Yarvin hopes that by engineering enough structural anonymity into this system, the board could never morph into a new Cathedral, and instead it would only ever function to do the one thing it was intended to do, which is solve the occasional problem of a mad king.
Would any of this work? Does it even make sense in Hoppean terms? There should be proper debate—carried out by people who are well-informed about the relevant areas of historical precedent and technology possibility—about this question. After all, if there is no “monarchist fix” to the problems of class conflict, then the whole interesting, cutting-edge political question of the age shifts back to being a democratic question and becomes how to mitigate the self-oligarchifying tendencies of representative democracy. Optimizing income equality seems like one potential strategy (though there are presumably some others). This whole area of emerging uncertainty offers millennial socialists a resurgent intellectual-vanguardist role. If they want it. But first it’s necessary for them to actually engage with the Yarvinist vision, even attempt a personal thought-experiment of sympathizing with it a bit, before prodding for areas of strength, weakness, overlap, or potential synthesis.