Boutique society, the hipster layer in the imperial power structure, is going through a slow-motion unraveling. It’s not going to simply vanish, but it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant as a force that can actually influence history. The “No Kings” demonstrations, where the Democratic Party has mobilized its remaining base behind NATO, are not capable of reversing this decline. Our ruling class has undergone a cultural shift towards the right, choosing to promote “trad” politics above the wokeness that it had previously emphasized; the political pendulum likely isn’t going to swing back around to the Democrats, because their support has shrunk far too much. We can expect to keep living in Trump’s America for as long as the U.S. empire continues to exist.
This is the immediate outcome of the boutique left’s collapse: only the right and the far right have a truly meaningful presence in ruling-class politics anymore, making for a confrontation between fascism and the authentic left. Whether this development brings about a good outcome depends on who wins the new phase in the class war.
The NGO left retreats
When Phil Neel wrote his American materialist analysis Hinterland in 2018, it was already apparent that the Democratic Party and its appendages were not going to define the next era. Neel observed how much the established left orgs had isolated themselves, and given up any real project towards class struggle:
The left is neither strong nor stable. Liberals ignore these areas because low-output, low-population regions very simply do not matter much when it comes to administering the economy—and that is, in the end, what liberalism is about. The far left, on the other hand, has long been in a state of widespread degeneration. It has retreated from historic strongholds in the hinterland (such as West Virginia, once a hotbed for wildcat strikes and communist organizing) to cluster around the urban cores of major coastal cities and a spattering of college towns. One symptom of this more widespread degeneration has also been an inward turn, mass organizing replaced by the management of an increasingly minuscule social scene and politics itself reenvisioned as the cultlike repetition of hollow rituals accompanied by the continual, self-flagellating rectification of one’s words, thoughts, and interpersonal interactions. Theoretical rigor has atrophied, and the majority within the amorphous social scene that composes “the left” only vaguely understand what capitalism is. This condition tends to blur the border between left and right, as both will offer solutions that lie somewhere between localist communitarianism and protectionist development of the “real economy.”
Humboldt County, the area where I live, is a case study in this process of retreat for NGO leftism. Only a few years ago, the Party for Socialism and Liberation was largely running the protest scene here by proxy, using its front org the Peace and Freedom Party to stage demonstrations on Democrat-compatible issues like Roe V. Wade. Then, when the PFP Humboldt shut down in 2023 due to internal dysfunction, the PSL’s presence completely vanished from the area. It didn’t even get involved in the Cal Poly Humboldt Gaza protests. It’s apparent that the only reason why the PSL ever focused on our college town was because it viewed this place as a secondary investment; it didn’t act determined to maintain relevancy here after encountering one minor obstacle.
This is part of a larger decline that the PSL has experienced, wherein it’s come to lose its former respect on the left (especially after the irresponsible actions it carried out in this summer’s ICE protests). These developments certainly represent a victory for the communist forces which oppose PSL’s Democrat tailism; but as long as ruling-class politics get to shape our communities unchallenged, NGO leftism won’t be replaced by anything better. Without efforts to build revolutionary organizational projects, the masses will only become further disempowered. And a critical part of this constructive mission is to reach the rural masses, which the boutique left has refused to do.
Discarding the communities outside the economic center
It’s rural America that’s being left behind the most. In Humboldt, and the other places like it, capitalism has deteriorated to a more severe degree than average; this is something that Neel describes in Hinterland’s section on my area, which assesses just how long the economy here has been in collapse. It’s this bleak state of the hinterlands that speaks to the deeper issue: the NGO left’s abandonment of the rural is an extension of how our ruling elites treat the rural. Neel wrote of how
Overall, cities accounted for 90 percent of total economic output in the United States in 2011, with New York’s urban area alone producing a Gross Metropolitan Product the size of Canada’s entire GDP. Concentration is particularly strong among high-end services, such as the FirE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) industries, producer services (like law firms or marketing agencies), and the slew of high-tech and professional positions staffed by the “creative class.” This produces a “great divergence,” in which the population becomes increasingly segregated across cities and regions, signaled by trends in everything from voter participation to income and life expectancy.’ Cities farther down the chain compete to reinvent themselves as international metropoles in their own right, attractive to both the high-tech, high-finance crowd and the sensibilities of the new hipster urbanists. Local governments pay premium fees to hire quasi-mystical consultants promising to reveal the rituals capable of attracting “creatives,” whose exotic millennial culture seems somehow so far beyond the ken of the polo-wearing city administrator. Meanwhile, slums are demolished to make way for “walkable” neighborhoods peppered with cafés, CrossFit gyms, and cupcake shops.
The outcome of all these imbalances in our civilization is for chaos to increasingly replace the old hipster order. For these decadent structures to fall apart as time goes on; and give rise to forces of violent criminality, ones that the ruling “law and order” party can use to justify ever-greater state violence. When I talk about a rise in violent criminality, I’m not claiming that the organic crime rate has massively grown in recent times (this is a psyop that ruling-class media has been heavily pushing). I’m talking about a kind of criminal chaos that’s arisen inorganically, as it’s been synthetically cultivated by the state’s intelligence centers.
This is what “antifa” actually is: not an organization, but a psyop that’s being pushed by the ruling class in order to rally leftists towards reckless acts. When the feds can steer radical politics into mindless adventurism, they’ve gained the perfect narrative justification for the militarized crackdowns that we’re seeing. And the growing contradictions within boutique society, where Gen Z students find themselves often unable to even gain employment after being promised a path into the creative class, have created many more alienated young people who could be brought into such destructive activities. Of course, these very same disaffected young people could just as easily be brought into a serious revolutionary project; but in the absence of authentic revolutionary organizations, the predatory adventurist cults will be what prevail.
“Antifa” is one aspect of this emerging chaos; an even darker aspect is found within the online, post-ironic ideologies that lead people to become mass shooters. These ideologies are designed to target the young people who haven’t just become alienated, but also socially isolated. And there are potentially millions of individuals in this demographic, largely located in the many rural areas which have been robbed of their former social fabric. It’s these elements that the feds target for indoctrination into Nazi and Satanic cults, which these days people enter into through online rabbit holes; such cults are absolutely being run by the intelligence centers, and their purpose is to make shooters. The more left-behind someone has been by society, the more susceptible they are to such manipulations, which is why we must investigate how these people have become left behind.
What we need to understand about these hinterland communities is that they weren’t always places where it’s hard to form social bonds, as they increasingly are today; small communities are historically the most close-knit kinds of communities. But that connectedness has been going away, and inhabitants of these places are becoming as atomized as if they were in one of the sprawling cities which weren’t designed with community in mind.
The explanation for this is the “great divergence,” which has entailed a stark cutoff in opportunities for those who live outside the favored zones. These zones are shrinking as capital contracts, making for ever-more people who are isolated, impoverished, or “lumpenized” (as in made to subsist outside of traditional employment). These shared experiences of being ripped away from prosperity or happiness are what unite rural America with the many urban areas which have been undergoing an equivalent decline. The hinterland keeps growing, and with it America’s revolutionary potential.
To take advantage of that potential, and throw off our ruling class, we must separate the workers movement from boutique society—which is to say we must make it a real workers movement, rather than a petty-bourgeois radical movement. To make this separation, we must understand where boutique society is located in the collapsing imperial structure, and what tactics it will use to try to hold on to power.
Ultra-left adventurism as a weapon for the age of decline
Humboldt is at the intersection between boutique society and the hinterland. In the midst of Northern California’s great expanses of forested and farm territory, where MAGA has quite a substantial presence, the Humboldt Bay area is host to a large layer of boomer leftists. This is the part of the state where the “back to the landers” moved to amid the failures of 1970s radicalism, and two full generations later, the outcome is a miniature version of the metropolitan gentrification.
Especially in the walkable historic hippie town of Arcata, there are plenty of boutique establishments, which largely exist in the absence of stores that offer practical necessities. It’s this spot where the State Department and the intelligence agencies have concentrated an extraordinary amount of energy and resources around, with the university being a top recruitment college for the Peace Corps. This is indicative of a larger culture, where woke pro-NATO ideology has been very actively nurtured; and the fact that this culture is so prevalent helps explain why the pro-Palestine movement here has experienced so many setbacks, despite CPH having experienced a major Gaza student occupation last year.
One thing which can happen when social movements keep failing is that their participants become alienated from society as a whole, and resort to adventurism. Humboldt saw this at an Arcata City Council meeting a few months ago, when the ultra-left elements within the Palestine movement adopted the tactic of publicly screaming for minutes at a time. The state views such mistakes on our movement’s part as a good thing; this could explain why the police didn’t do anything to stop the disruptions, and why the mayor let the meeting become dominated by public comments.
I find that incident fascinating, because it was a movement sabotage operation done on a micro scale; the state successfully weaponized the ultra-leftists to harm the image of the mass movements they claimed to speak for, letting these activists promote their messages of pure anger and alienation while creating spectacular chaos. With the NGO left in retreat, the only way that wokeism can react is by lashing out, and the state is happy to accommodate this behavior.
These are the tactics that our enemies are going to employ within the locations where boutique society still dominates, and where the wokeist elements are still prevalent. It’s the enemy’s secondary mode of attack in our era, with the primary mode being an effort to weaponize the far right. When I say the far right, I mean the kind of neo-Nazism that’s post-ironic in nature, and therefore really represents an amalgamation between wokeness and Hitlerism. This is the ideology behind the 4Chan-inspired shooters, who’ve never taken their guidance from traditional right-wing ideology like the media has often portrayed it. The shooters we’re seeing emerge in our age, like this August’s Minnesota church attacker, are the types of people who will write down both Nazi references and trans references. This is an aspect of today’s reactionary violence that doesn’t fit into liberal framework of analysis, and that can only be properly grasped when one understands the present chaos through a class-based lens.
When we see the class dynamics that are at play in today’s America, all of the alarming social phenomena we’re seeing make sense. We are experiencing the slow death of many of the layers within imperialism, where elements in petty-bourgeois society which used to have a sturdy foundation are seeing the ground shake underneath them. Liberal propaganda promises that everyone can become urban professionals if they just go through university, but this propaganda keeps clashing with reality in an ever-more brutal way.
The modern right has largely sold itself to Gen Z by pointing out this contradiction within high education; now the far right is trying to bring conservative Gen Z-ers towards Hitlerism by appealing to their broader alienation from the capitalist order. Yet there’s an inherent weakness in the Hitlerite argument: it depends on steering people away from class struggle, which is the only practical way for the people to advance their interests. In the absence of a path towards class struggle, all that Hitlerism can offer the workers is a promise about how class collaboration will bring shared prosperity. Which is a fundamentally liberal notion, and we need to expose its absurd idealism to the masses. If what we’re tasked with is a battle against the far right, then we need to ensure that we offer the people a real program for popular, working-class victory.
Unlike the ultra-leftists, with their anti-people adventurism, we must present a route towards triumph over monopoly finance capital. This has always been our only way forward; but after how much American capitalism has devolved, many past illusions have been shattered, and the nature of our task has been made much easier to see.
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