The core flaw of Bronze Age Pervert, Nick Fuentes, and all other “rightist” figures is that they frame history as being a personal thing. That they look at the alienation within today’s society, and the civilizational collapse which the “collective west” is experiencing, then conclude that these developments have simply come from a conspiracy. It’s the same explanation that anarchism has for the existence of the state: supposedly, the state’s core basis is a series of myths that a minority have formulated in order to perpetuate the state. And therefore if we were to only shatter these narratives, then the state would disappear.
This is the kind of thinking that the far right has when it comes to escaping our society’s alienation, and there’s absolutely overlap here with anarchism. There’s a reason why certain foundational anarchist thinkers, like Proudhon and Bakunin, propagated the “Jewish question”: they shared the view that our modern social structures are merely the product of artificial designers, rather than of concrete historical processes.
BAP is carrying on this same tradition of thinking, even though he advocates for distancing the right from Nazism or the JQ. We know that BAP’s ideas come from the anarchist lineage because at the foundation of his arguments, there is the notion that modernity didn’t originate from technological advancement and the evolution in the productive forces. And just by denying the significance of the role which these factors hold within social change, BAP fails to correctly assess today’s conditions. This is the shortcoming within every other idealist way of thinking; and the way that these worldviews can be made to appear logical is by connecting their arguments to a feeling which many people may identify with.
BAP asserts that society has come to live under a matriarchy, one which takes away the opportunity to assert individual historical agency. And the feeling this argument speaks to is that especially for those who’ve come-of-age in the post-Covid era, the future we were supposed to have has been taken away from us. For a growing number of people in the “collective west,” it’s become out of reach to own a home, start a family, or even get employment. The way out of this situation, says BAP near the end of Bronze Age Mindset, is to carve out a series of enclaves from which the chosen will re-introduce civilizational strength:
I believe that at some point, before or after the troubles, the superior specimens are going to find each other and leave this civilization. They will form fortresses on the edge of the civilized world, in the tropics, from where they will watch the seas. The era of high piracy will return. Such men will develop above all their physical powers and their ability to wage war. They will offer the nations defense in exchange for a price. Occasionally they will send a great demagogue into the peoples, when this becomes necessary. Such men, perched atop these eagles’ nests, will have the territory of a new frontier again, and a life that suits them. Science will be liberated from the constraints of caring for comfort or entertainment. Great projects in science, the projects of private men, will once again begin. Such fortresses will possess frightful weapons to defend themselves, and will have penetrated deep into the nations their antennae and their many emissaries and watchers.
It’s another version of the path that Fuentes offers, where he urges his followers to infiltrate all levels of professional and political society so that America can be returned to tradition. If “tradition” can be brought back, though, whether it looks like the Bronze Age or any other past era, then why did this past go away in the first place?
The far right’s anarchistic explanation says that it’s because of conscious designs, which can be undone through different designs. But in reality it was because the material basis for the old world had come to no longer exist. Therefore, these changes cannot be undone, but rather built upon, with humanity progressing to a new stage on the foundations that these evolutionary shifts have created for us.
The question then becomes: how to bring our society’s “left-behinds” to the Marxist view of history, when these left-behinds are experiencing a collective tragedy that couldn’t be more personal? Marxism-Leninism is the only ideology that recognizes history as being non-personal, and if we were to adopt the personalized view, we would be giving up a vital part of Marxist-Leninist theory. Yet we must reach the left-behinds. The solution is to come to a new synthesis of thinking and practice. MLs and their allies need to present the left-behinds with a path forward which accounts for just how badly the 21st century’s upheavals have damaged the old social structures, and what effects this is having on those who’ve been left out of the lucky minority.
This is where it becomes imperative for us to break our movement out of its old dogmas, and take Marxism into the future. A future where, at least within the Global North countries which have become afflicted with imperialism’s internal collapse, the life paths that had once been the default are being taken away. If a return to “tradition” is not the right way to respond to this tragedy, and in fact isn’t even a viable solution, then what alternative does Marxism offer? What it offers is the only route forward: to investigate these conditions we’re facing with rigorous honesty, and act according to these conditions.
This is what Marxism is always supposed to do during any given moment in history. But far too many of the world’s communist parties have fallen into stagnation and complacency, with the outcome being that they’ve come to fall out of touch with the masses. This trend towards staleness has been majorly holding back the global workers movement for a long time, at least since the fall of the Soviet Union; the proof is in the failure by these established communist formations to seriously seize upon the crises of the 21st century. But with the emergence of capital’s latest crises, we have the friction which could shake the movement out from its stupor, and let it rise again stronger than ever. The accelerated disruptions that we’ve been seeing since 2020 won’t bring this success on their own; but if we respond to them correctly, we will see the rewards.
It’s within this mission, where history has tasked us with overcoming inertia, that the left-behinds can find a path which is superior to the far right’s path on every level. The right puts forth the illusion that it’s bringing revolutionary disruption; Marxism actually offers a way to make the system tremble and crumble, then be sublated into a new reality, one where society’s producers are the guiding force. To illustrate why the right represents retreat, while Marxism represents advancement, one can look to what Engels said about the perpetually incomplete nature of knowledge:
…there is absolutely no need to be alarmed at the fact that the stage of knowledge which we have now reached is as little final as all that have preceded it. It already embraces a vast mass of judgments and requires very great specialisation of study on the part of anyone who wants to become conversant with any particular science. But a man who applies the measure of genuine, immutable, final and ultimate truth to knowledge which, by its very nature, must either remain relative for many generations and be completed only step by step, or which, as in cosmogony, geology and the history of mankind, must always contain gaps and be incomplete because of the inadequacy of the historical material — such a man only proves thereby his own ignorance and perversity, even if the real thing behind it all is not, as in this case, the claim to personal infallibility. Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field.
We offer a rejection of all such types of intellectual cowardice, where defenders of the established order cling to a frozen concept of reality. The root of our crisis, of our tragedy, is that as a collective we’ve been clinging to “knowledge” which objective reality has disproven. The old ways of operating are no longer working for the average person, and the ramifications of this problem get worse all the time. The circumstances are forcing us to discard our old patterns, and formulate new plans. This is what the true defense against our modern dystopia looks like: a version of the proletarian struggle that’s actually competent and effective, because it’s recognized how much the old reality has been hollowed out. In the face of this situation, our only recourse is to evolve, and to synthesize existing Marxist theory with what the post-Covid generations are experiencing.
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