Toward a New Barbarism, Part III

 

Green movements and green revolution. The “green movement” which emerged as a result of awareness of ecological crises through the 1980s and ‘90s is a marvel. It is a testament to how liberal capital is on one hand amorphous without shape but also polycephalic many headed. Big money and power took things like the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and bent it to their purpose. The Club of Rome now makes reports that no longer matter and celebrates the plutocratic green movement. The Limit to Growth as originally written, and as its honest cowriters state, is an indictment of how liberal capitalism had managed resources to that point (1972) and projected those trends forward. The obvious conclusion that they and deep ecologists came to is that a combination of energy and resource as well as human population limits were needed at that time to stave off ecological catastrophe. Neither warning being heeded, we are at the point of worldwide ecological catastrophe.

What has the green movement tangibly accomplished? Solar panels are great. They also don’t have much use for most of the world when you stray too far from the tropics. For instance, roughly north of Virginia in the US or north of the Piedmont in Italy and you’re too far north for solar panels to make much sense from an energy return on energy investment standpoint. Efficiency of these panels degrade without maintenance, and even with maintenance, and most panels reach 40-50% efficiency after 15-20 years if they still continue to work (where peak efficiency is still only catching ~35% of available solar energy). Wind turbines are often even more maintenance intensive and more picky in terms of placement. Neither of course are themselves without environmental costs, as wind turbines interrupt migratory paths for birds and solar panels require rare earth minerals as do the batteries required for storage – unless one is simply using natural gas for backup in which case the point of ‘green energy’ becomes dubious from the start.

Even where wind and solar are viable and do more good than harm environmentally, they often do not support current energy demands. Other “green” shills came up with “biomass” which is really just wood pellets, and has led to mass deforestation and soil depletion and erosion in certain parts of the US and Western Europe who’ve taken up the “biomass” notion. Outside of those, the only other initiatives have largely been scams. Only some of the recycling is actual, primarily for metals and durable plastics. Much of the “recycling” in Western countries amounts to incinerating waste or exporting it to SE Asia. Any serious environmental cause would have to contend with the developing world, that is namely with their population growth in the past 50 years and with their rising living standards. To paraphrase the Limits to Growth, rising living standards are synonymous with increasing energy and resource consumption given present technologies. Therefore, you cannot seriously advocate on the one hand for environmental stewardship and economic development of backward countries and really even developed countries should usually reduce energy and resource consumption some.

The so-called “green revolution” also happened around that time (1965-1975). Starting in the late ‘60s, Monsanto and Syngenta along with smaller firms began developing and marketing products like glyphosate and atrazine along with various other petrochemical fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. The advent of “RoundUp Ready” plants made these herbicides viable for mass deployment. These petrochemicals when combined with mass mechanical automation like combine harvesters and crop dusters allowed for the reduction of the agricultural labor force which happened in that period concurrent with a rise in consistent yields. The percentage of the workforce on farms went from over 50% at the turn of the 20^th century to around 8% by 1960, and by 1980 it had trended toward 2%.

How did this happen? To start with, migrant labor. Migrant labor was always big in the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt runs from the southern third of California to the Atlantic coast of Florida, skipping some sections of swamp in between. A lot of it is fertile land, some of it is very dry desert (e.g. SoCal, Arizona, SE Texas), and the parts of it than can be productive are great for all sorts of crops like citrus, tomatoes, berries, melons, almonds, and avocadoes and so on. Southern California’s problem is that it relies heavily on canals and irrigation as much of the farmland is naturally semiarid with a moderate water table. In the southwest, the migrants came from Mexico and in the southeast (namely Florida), they came from Cuba or Puerto Rico. This has been true since 1930 or 1940, and every ten years it has been more and more true. The thing that happened was sometime around 1975, that model began to be exported around the whole of the country.

Before 1960, the migrant labor model worked well and it was enforced more or less rigorously. Migrants were, well, migrants. They were made to move back home when the picking season was over. They were not allowed to be permanent residents (in other words, not fucking migrants). That changed after 1965 with the Hart-Celler act and the Civil Rights Act. Something that happened roughly ten years before – Operation Wetback – now became unconscionable. By the mid-‘60s, migrants were not merely migrants, they were not confined solely to farm labour, and their children were allowed to become US citizens if they wanted to. Their children would often move away from the barrios, and if they did they would not stay as farm labour. This meant that plutocratic capital had to keep going back to the well to dip into foreign labour pools as every generation would be partly depleted.

The second component of this was price controls. We have a free market? Hardly. The supermarket dictates terms to its vendors who often have few alternatives, and the Post-War International Order is dominated by the supermarket and the shopping mall and similar ‘conveniences.’ They dictate the prices vendors and suppliers can charge for their convenience, not necessarily for the customer’s benefit. On some goods, price controls are state policy in the US and abroad. On some goods, price controls are informal and determined at the point of the supermarket and similar institutions who determine what food ‘commodities’ are worth. There is the other wrinkle of futures markets which are also dominated by hegemonic players. For many farm products, this meant that staying in business was difficult or impossible; for the others, it meant cost cutting was a first order to comply with these price controls. This meant migrant labor for lowering labor costs, but it also meant more petrochemicals. Those petrochemicals are poisons, broadly speaking, but they reduce the marginal cost of a crop substantially by reducing spoilage and again, also reducing labor costs. It all adds up – and as far as poisons go, who’s counting?

Monsanto and Syngenta said they’re safe and these compounds aren’t roundly banned everywhere. Like DDT, they tend to be strong xenoestrogens in addition to causing various forms of contact dermatitis and cancers especially non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It is patently obvious once spelled out that one is eating oil products that the notion is shaky at its core. Indeed, one can induce autoimmunity (specifically Lupus-like syndromes) in rats by dosing them with herbicides and pesticides at a threshold that constitutes chronic rather than acute poisoning. The further obvious thing is that all of these compounds are literally poisonous, and even if they specifically target plants, fungi, or insects, it is reasonable to assume that the poisons may affect mammals too (research shows this is indeed the case).

The third component of this was tying everyone’s interests in a nice Gordion knot. The Chamber of Commerce people vouch for agribusiness firms and for big growers who want to hire more migrant labour. They cry crocodile tears about Americans not showing up to do unpleasant farm work under faggy management for bullshit pay with no benefits and very lax safety requirements. OSHA standards on farm workers has been historically very lax because since 1970 when OSHA was signed, migrant labour was substantial in the southern half of the country and has only gotten bigger and spread wider. Various tax-funded immigration attorneys, NGOs, and financial schemes like microfinance ‘popped up’ again as power projection to keep everyone invested in the immigration (Great Replacement) project.

I’ve said elsewhere I think the ideal agriculture workforce would actually be higher than the number even in 1960. Around 15-20% of total workforce on farms, and 25-30% in food production & farming total perhaps, allows one to have a partly mechanized farm labour force but eschew the whole green revolution trap. I like the idea of having a formalized and dignified peasantry of people who largely own their farmland and can invite tenant farmers and farmhands as needs be. These people would obviously be free peasants, but they would constitute a more or less fixed farming class, and they wouldn’t have to compete with globohomo megacorps who sell poison or use big mechanical monstrosities and dump crops at sub-market rates. To tell the truth, you could give a lot of people in trailer parks across North America a small plot of land and the material to build their own proper house, and that would be a more dignified life in the farming class than as a drug-addicted and unemployed or wage slaving lumpenprole.

I get emotional thinking about the lives of my countrymen and coethnics who’ve been destroyed by hypermodernity, who would be served immeasurably by a kind hand. A king or whatever in charge of the state who did not hate them and looked after them from time to time would be such a massive improvement to their lot in life.

 

https://www.mepartnership.org/counting-calories-in-agriculture/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2010.538582

https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/EROI-of-Global-Energy-Resources_SUNYNGEI1.pdf

https://www.nber.org/chapters/c1567.pdf

https://www.fb.org/issues/immigration-reform/agriculture-labor-reform/economic-impact-of-immigration (included to show some shills)

 

Response to (https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html)

The managerial class operates on a telos. That is, they have a set of assumptions and an end goal. Their telos is received, because the managerial class are intermediaries. They operate the day-to-day affairs on behalf of the ownership class, the true plutocratic capital class. Because of this dynamic, their interests and their horizons might as well be the same as the plutocracy outright.

Theirs could be described briefly as, “Fuck you.” That is how the managerial class view the working classes generally speaking. The workers are an impediment, a problem to be overcome. They are not something to be synthesized into a larger whole. Workers ask too much in terms of wages, safety, and so forth, and therefore wherever worker interests can be undermined it is fit that they should be – by whatever means. The implicit thing here is that the “worker” here is native Western workers, usually but not always men of European extraction.

It’s actually not true that American producers make more than times past. Those metrics are produced by dishonest means, as mentioned in a good article on Quora which I linked to in a past essay. There are only a handful of industries where American output is still legitimately high – microprocessors, chemicals, and that output is actually still generally lower now than Chinese even if you do not buy the official Chinese production numbers and fudge down theirs.

Americans don’t build new things for any number of reasons. One is that we are a dead culture. I agree with the Spenglerian analysis here, as I’ve said many times before. It takes a young and lively culture to do new things. By between 1900 and 1920, Western culture was completely exhausted and would produce very little new in terms of pure science, math, music, or art over the next hundred years. This would obviously impact architecture, because once the horizon shrinks or it appears that everything has been done, then we are left with only pale imitations or the endless critique. Indeed we have actually settled mostly on the latter, and our whole culture from the various modernist architectural schools which dominated after 1930 (Bauhaus, brutalism, structuralism) and art (abstract impressionism, dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art, performance art) is based fundamentally on the critique of prior modes of Western culture.

I would contend that Western civilization died and what we have now is something different, but that is my own contention. If you believe we still live an active Western civilization instead of its bones and echoes as I do, still you have to acknowledge that we see virtually nothing “Western” nor “civilized” created in the past, say, 70 or 80 years (vis-à-vis arts, architecture, music, etc).

The core element there is, there is very little new generated by the broader modernist and postmodernist movements. They are arrangements and deconstructions of prior forms precisely to mock and critique those prior forms. This is not the type of thing a young and lively culture does. It is the type of thing a dead or dying culture does. A mature person realizes that the avant-garde must either keep moving or it must collapse. When the avant-garde has itself become a recursive critique and scam for a hundred years, it clearly is not what it pretends to be. All pretense of being the cutting edge is hollow. As if we needed more proof, this is the hundredth proof that Spengler was right about Western megalopolitan civilization.

All systems tend from a low to high entropy state, all things being equal. Moving in the reverse direction requires energy. To give an example, a farmer making improvements like fences and waterworks is moving his general area to a lower entropy state. But this requires work to keep. If he or his family (or workmen) slack for too long, the area begins to revert back more toward its natural state. Maybe not quite as it was before, but more like it was before and less like its “improved” state.

That’s pretty obvious stuff and anyone who has taken basic chemistry and physics is familiar with it. That’s well and good, but entropy – who cares? Building a system, ideally, is not merely building as far as you can build out only for half of it to fall down under its own weight or otherwise beyond your ability to keep it up. Yet if one looks at post-war (post-1945) America, that’s actually more or less exactly what happened. Rather than building cities and towns which would last like European cities and towns, and rather than developing strategically in both economic and urban terms, we allowed plutocratic interests to dictate what the course of development would take for a whole continent.

On its face that’s crazy. It makes no sense to allow automobile, oil, real estate, and a handful of other interests to have a massively outsized say in how the whole continent would look. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Because of that, American cities consist primarily of sprawling cloned suburbs. One can drive from Georgia to Virginia and then across to Idaho, and one will be struck by how many towns of 20,000 to 150,000 will almost inspire déjà vu. One will also be struck by the fact that basically none of these places are walkable, bikeable, or really navigable by anything other than a car barring the very few towns under 200,000 heads with good bus routes and cable cars. One will be further struck by how much of the population has shifted into the Sunbelt, basically to accommodate anti-union corporate policy primarily as hundreds of corporations relocated from the Northeast to the Southeast and Southwest. The Sunbelt also has the secondary benefit of being easier on automobile maintenance, again proving the maxim that to a degree technology uses the man as much as vice versa. (A common complaint for the northern half of the country is driving in the snow, cleaning cars in the winter time, and shoveling snowy driveways. All of these are technology focused complaints. Who is riding who?)

The time when America was capable of building is a time firstly before Jewish control was total. Secondly, it was closer to the time of a living culture. America was founded at or near the height of Western culture (regardless of the French Revolution which soon broke out) but contributed very little to it in terms of artistic, architectural, or musical works or movements of lasting worth. By the time America reached its own apex, the broader West was in decline. It is a spooky coincidence to be sure, but it left America and Americans in a strange place. Rather than maturing in the heyday of the classical or romantic era, it matured in the modern and jazz era (both arguably degenerate forms).

Thirdly, it was a time where America was closer to the frontier. The frontier had only closed around 1890, and even in 1910 or by the time of the so-called Spanish Flu in 1917-18 you still had people who grew up in the frontier west. That alone meant people were more self-reliant. Fourth, you had a far larger farming, self-run business, and small business culture in that day. Fifth, there were fewer managerial, bureaucratic, and paperwork barriers to simply getting out and doing things – and more intact communities to actually do things. These intact communities included churches, fraternal organizations, and various social clubs. Lest we forget, all of these managerial dictates are ultimately enforced by system goons; the real reason we respect onerous zoning ordinances or other land use laws and so forth is because if you break those laws, sheriff’s deputies with carbines show up on your doorstep to have a word. The ultimate conclusion of radical self-reliance in 2010 or 2020 is a gaggle of sheriff’s deputies showing you the business end of thirty rounds of 5.56x45mm, or throwing you in jail on the threat of that force.

That’s probably the final death knell of radical self-reliance. It’ll get you killed or thrown in jail. Even if you forget the fact that communities are gone, people don’t have any practice in being self-reliant, and America’s degenerate culture has embraced the endless recursive critique, the system doesn’t want self-reliance so they actively discourage it. De Tocqueville’s America is gone and in its stead is an America of petty fiefs run by mercantile interests. The people under that regime are a mass of debt serfs, kept low by poor wages, long hours, and a culture which more resembles a yawning void than any generative force at this point.

Silicon Valley is not even a building culture. It is a culture of simulation, where so-called entrepreneurship is something between a farce and a simulation. This doesn’t mean that people don’t get wealthy, but one can’t look at start-ups and say that there is some great creative drive there or some spirit of innovation. The active drive in most of the start-ups in the past 10 or so years has been to create some product which is barely viable, acquire just enough venture capital to chug along, and get bought out by one of the monopoly firms which inhabit the Silicon Valley cartel.

As I mentioned in another piece, most of the actual innovation in computers and software is in communications and entertainment. A small amount has been in automating work like CNC machining and orbital welders. Even then, your normal modern computer has at least a thousand times as many transistors in its CPU as the standard in 1990, and GPUs have probably had similar increase. Yet they’re not a thousand times faster, and in no small part that is because software in 1980 or even 1990 had to be somewhat more graceful than now. Piles of spaghetti bullshit are accepted as standard fare because the computing power exists to run through these wasteful programs with sheer brute force. In 1990, that same program would have crashed a computer wholesale or dragged it to a crawl for days. Modern web design is a great example – for a short time web pages loaded quickly when there was an optimal intersection of bandwidth and page size for the average user, and a few years later web developers began loading pages with more and more scripts, trackers, cookies, and seemingly useless bullshit that nonetheless means despite greater bandwidth many pages do not load as quickly as they used to.

You don’t make money anymore by building stuff. For instance: if I wanted to start a company producing industrial chemicals or steel today, I probably could not. Like full stop could not. If I could, it would require massive lobbying and billions of dollars in capital up front to get it started, have everything integrated, and actually get moving. It would be years before I made a return on that investment, and even if I was rich – to the tune of $300 million – I would still need a flock of investors all of whom would probably call me an idiot for my business plan and tell me to hit the bricks. After all, I’m trying to compete with Dow Chemical or DuPont, or various American or Chinese steel conglomerates.

DuPont got started supplying powder for the Union. In a country where shit actually happens, it matters more that one has managerial or technical talent than that one has the right hall pass. A lot of the Gilded Age plutocrats were shit heels and grifters, but they made things, and most of them still had some technical or managerial talent even if they were absolute human scum. That is a world of difference from today, where you make money largely by inserting yourself into transactions and skimming. Finance is where the real money is, and failing that, the so-called “tech” industry – because in either of these one can scale a product with very little cost. What’s the unit cost for skimming on more transactions or copying software versus the unit cost for producing steel?

 

Response to https://neociceroniantimes.wordpress.com/2020/06/10/the-last-great-puritan-awokening/

Cincinnatus is correct on a lot here. I feel there are some things we could refine though. I’ll start with a quote and give a rejoinder. “Moldbug noted that the four essential creeds of this ultracalvinism as it has played out in its evolution to 21st century secularised progressive ideology are the universal brotherhood of man, pacifism, social justice, and the managed society.”

That’s generally speaking true, but the creeds listed are notably exoteric. That is, they are for the public-facing part of the weird Unitarian Universalist prog-propaganda narrative apparatus. This apparatus gives people a full map of the world. The map is laughably wrong, and not wrong in the way every world map really is (ie, three dimensions projected on two), but in a way that is clearly deliberately sabotaged. It is close enough that someone with this model of the world can function as a grunt worker or middle manager, but often no more than that. Climbing above that type of station requires updating one’s impression of the world.

            The question then: what is the esoteric creed? It clearly has nothing to do with the public message. The internal belief and the actual mode of operation seems to be centralization of wealth and power (oligarchy) under the banner of Judaism and various Judaic symbols (Kabbalah) with an emphasis on deception at every turn. Their motto is basically tikkun olam. It’s all about ethnic interest (for Jews) and class interests (cosmopolitan plutocrats). The symbol of our elite is the owl, a night predator who sits on tree branches and swoops by moonlight to pick apart hapless mice with its talons. The working classes upon whom the parasitic elites feed are the mice.

            Indeed, on one hand one can get elements of this reading of so-called ultracalvinism from the Bible. On the other, historically these elements were largely sourced from Kabbalah and orders like Freemasonry and Rosicrucians who basically embodied that liberal creed. Freemasonry allegedly extends to the deep mists of time, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of it predating Locke’s first treatises on the social contract. In other words, it clearly came after the English Civil War, and quite probably a fair bit after. The narrative implied in the Protocols of Zion seems to be true; Freemasonry and these other initiatic orders seem to have been started by ascendant Jews in the early 1700s after Cromwell and various other leaders allowed them into England and other Western European countries. The reason for these initiatic orders was to get gentiles to feel as though they were unlocking some great mystery, and at the end of the mystery was buying into the Jewish power scheme. It was an admittedly brilliant scheme and by all accounts worked as intended.

“Now certainly, Calvin himself probably would have had no truck with queer theology.  But his brand of doctrine initiated trends that, as they unfolded and followed their logical paths, resulted in today’s new secular religion, trends that were not present in other branches of the Reformation and which departed from historic and traditional Christianity.  The path from Geneva to Minneapolis was long and tortuous, but it got there eventually.”

I don’t really agree with this. I don’t think that Calvin was necessarily right, but his reading is a valid interpretation of the Bible. Reform theology could also have been a perfectly stable equilibrium I guess, but that would presume some type of oriental stasis. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a stasis like that in history. People’s beliefs do tend to alter with time. I’m sure Confucianism or Daoism at its inception was different than it was 300 years later, or 300 years after that, or 300 years again. The differences may be mild, or in the case of the switch from the 1400s Catholic Church to Reform Theology, the differences may be drastic.

“This heresy presupposes that the Christian church will “bring in the kingdom,” so to speak, by gradually working to morally improve the world until it is ready for the return of Christ at His Second Coming. This moral improvement, of course, should be augmented by the authorities both spiritual and secular, and it was out of this milieu that the progressive movement arose in the latter half of the 19th century, though by this time the doctrine itself was fast becoming secularised and emptied of all expectation of any Second Coming of Christ.”

Except that Christianity has always had this strain of trying to perfect the world. On the one hand, Christians believe the world is fallen. On the other, even since Augustin Christians have strived to create the ‘city on the hill.’ This isn’t a bad thing; better to strive and fail than to be human waste crawling through the mud, content with mere survival as various other peoples throughout history have been.

“The coming years will probably see a good deal of decentralisation, so it might be a good time for heritage Americans to start thinking about forming our own community militias to preserve order in our local areas as this process unfolds.”

If the Romans had secret police and the senate/emperor/tetrarchy used social control tactics on their population, then they would have been in an equivalent situation. We are in the unenviable position of having no land yet having organizations which command millions of people and supply chains of tens of millions more beating down any attempt we make at creating a countervailing force. You can’t form a militia or frankly any group where white men gather outside the purview of capital or the mercenary corps without the Eye of Sauron turning on you. That will change, and there will be a ‘fuck it’ point where people realize that we have to organize or we will be out-competed in the harsh times ahead by ethnic rackets and pockets of plutocratic power.

The working/middle/petite bourgeois have to view the power elites and their underlings as enemies. Their underlings include not only the managerial class and system enforcers but lumpenproles. Ideally, when rioting or other disquiet starts in an area and businesses and homes of the working/middle/petite bourgeois are threatened, these middle elements should retaliate against lumpenproles and the power elites alike. Burning homes in the Hamptons (e.g.; and ideally, occupied) would threaten those behind the operation more than nasty letters, vigorous protests, or twitter trolls. You don’t make the elites mad by sucking their cocks or pouring money into their coffers.