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Guerrilla Economics:
Alex
Kurtagic
In my
previous article I discussed
the respectable conservative, a populous species whose existence I consider to
be one — if not our main — obstacle in the battle to inspire our constituency
into oppositional action against a hostile establishment.
I stated
that, as the archetypical homo oeconomicus, his status-conscious nature
causes him to prefer making small concessions to political correctness over a
long period of time, than to engage in risky non-conforming, insurrectionary
action with an uncertain outcome. Thus, fearing loss of employment, income,
or/and status, he will agree with our analyses, but will not act in consequence,
and will even keep his views and opinions strictly private, confined (if voiced
with any degree of honesty, or at all) to a small circle of family and friends.
While — if we make the effort to think selfishly and short-sightedly — we can
perhaps understand his motivations, the fact remains that the respectable
conservative is a craven species, ostensibly critical (where allowed), but
(where it matters) ultimately obsequious and subservient to a class of
individuals who despise him and who are actively involved in his extinction.
Because in so doing he removes himself as an obstacle to the utopian liberal
(and those who inspire, deceive, and/or manipulate the latter), it is he
that makes the liberal dystopia possible, for the utopian liberal is left to
pursue his agenda unopposed.
In my
novel, I direct
the thrust of my criticism against the respectable conservative, and
sadistically subject one of their number to all manner of grotesque reverses and
inconveniences. In real life, however, I think that it is incumbent upon us to
not simply complain and criticize (which is easy enough to do), but to provide
an alternative. After all if the respectable conservative is what makes the
liberal dystopia possible, the lack of an alternative is what makes possible the
respectable conservative.
It is
important to remember that respectable conservatives are not obsequious out of
choice: They are so out of necessity. The phrase “Well, I won’t be around by the
time things get that bad, so I may as well enjoy the good life while it lasts,”
is not merely a rationalization designed to protect a coward’s self-esteem. It
is also proof that an effective counter-offensive on the information
battleground is a necessary condition for inspiring effective resistance among
respectable conservatives.
This is due
to a lack of economic autonomy. Being dependent on the toleration and
munificence of a hostile elite for the acquisition of resources, open acceptance
of our data and our arguments promises no material advantage. I contend that
were there sufficient economic and professional opportunities outside the system
for our constituency, our main problem would no longer be the respectable
conservatives’ lack of backbone. The latter would be happy in the quiet pursuit
of wealth without the need to sell themselves and everyone else out.
This is
important, for the ability to tap into the respectable conservatives’ wealth to
fund an inimical system is presently one of the enemy’s principal advantages. It
follows, therefore, that the effective facilitation of moral independence
through economic autonomy would reduce the enemy’s pool of wealth, limit their
ability to fund their programs, restrict their capacity to reward conformity,
diminish their overall credibility, and thus reduce their overall authority.
Moreover,
such an economic and status assault would likely generate progressive dynamics.
The visible prosperity of system-autonomous non-conformists would likely
motivate their system-dependent counterparts to defect. In this scenario, the
result would be a progressive erosion of the ability of hostile elites to
perpetuate their power, and a concurrent progressive enhancement of our
life-chances: Put plainly, we would stop funding the enemy and start funding
ourselves.
Guerrilla
Warfare as a Cultural Strategy
Respectable
conservatives believe in nothing except their own impotence before an
establishment that is powerful enough to appear invincible. The success of the
Left’s “long march through the institutions” during the 20th century,
however, has shown that a culturally hegemonic incumbent can be defeated by even
a tiny, unrepresentative minority through the use of guerrilla
tactics.
Guerrilla warfare makes a virtue of the guerrilla’s small size compared to that of its military enemy: It is fast and agile, while its enemy is slow and rigid; it is cheap and ubiquitous, while its enemy is expensive and monolithic; it is invisible and highly mobile, while its enemy is visible and largely stationary. It also has access to the best and most appropriate weaponry, because it tends to steal it from its enemy; and it is able to cause disproportionate damage to enemy morale by focusing attacks on the enemy’s weakest point. As a result, and as Robert Taber has pointed out, the guerrilla
fights
the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too
much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips
with.
It is easy
to forget that the ideas of the Left were once marginal, criminal, and
outrageous. That they have achieved the status of orthodoxy in the face of a
reluctant public that never asked for them and never needed them owes to the
fact that the radical Left in the West concentrated their efforts on noisy
campaigns over small, winnable issues. In so doing they distracted, bogged down,
and claimed successive victories over the White majority that progressively
increased the radical Left’s prestige. In addition, because they are a coalition
of heterogeneous minority activists with ostensibly different agendas (feminist,
gay, anti-racist, pro-immigration, etc.) and because they engaged in numerous,
fleeting campaigns with constantly moving goalposts (with one concession
resulting in new campaigns demanding more), they could not be neutralized with a
single, crushing blow. Faced with the cultural guerrilla of the Left and the
various Jewish intellectual movements that inspired and informed Leftism in the
20th century, the old establishment proved slow to realize the
threat, slow to react to it, and slow to adapt to, and adopt, the Left’s
innovative forms of cultural warfare. As Kevin MacDonald has argued, if the
latter proved irresistible for the Western consciousness, it is because radical
criticism of traditional Western institutions and cognitive structures were
couched in universalist, enlightened, moral language — a language that resonated
with Western moral sensibilities. This is another way of saying that the
cultural guerrilla men identified our sensibilities, stole them, and used them
as weapons against us.
Guerrilla
Economics in a Consumer Society
It is
typical of commentators on the Right to condemn the consumer culture, and to see
it as weapon of mass distraction. And it is certainly true that a society
comprised of materialist hyper-individualists who define themselves through, and
derive their social status from, the goods that they own and consume, is a
society comprised of citizens who are reluctant to rock the boat: Rocking the
boat could lead to loss of employment, which could lead to loss income, which
could lead to loss of assets, which would lead to loss of self.
To this
extent, it is perhaps the establishment’s most effective weapon, and a reason
why, despite their socialist leanings, they obsess about economic growth (or
lack thereof). Yet, whatever we may think of it and those who sponsor it, the
consumer culture is not going away anytime soon, for our entire economy and
institutional apparatus are structured around it: There are thousands of
millions of people with a vested interest in it — as tycoons, small business
owners, or ordinary employees — and none are prepared to overthrow what
Tomislav Sunic has called
“the dictatorship of well-being.” It may be that the consumer culture is
unsustainable, since it is predicated on perpetual, linear growth that will
eventually demand resources in excess of those available on the planet before we
are able to begin colonizing others. Yet, there is no guarantee that a
sufficiently severe crisis point will be reached before social, cultural,
economic, political, and demographic trends reduce Whites to a disenfranchised
minority in their own traditional homelands.
Rather than
condemning it, and/or waiting for it to implode, therefore, perhaps a more
effective, more pro-active approach would be to embrace the consumer culture and
attack the enemy from within by appropriating the consumer culture’s weaponry
and deploying it in the service of our collective interests and
self-preservation. Doing so effectively is necessary to enable our side to
adequately fund the creation and development of an alternative cultural,
economic, institutional, media, and political infrastructure with which we can
offer material advantages to our fellow constituents. Being presently outmanned
and outgunned, however, guerrilla economics may be the only realistic
option.
They Don’t
Make Them Like They Used to
Geoffrey Miller has pointed
out that since the 1950s, the consumer economy has been predicated on a model of
continuous innovation and inbuilt obsolescence: This is because mass-producing
low-quality, technically-complex goods that people need (or feel the need) to
replace or upgrade frequently not only guarantees a steady flow of profits, but
is indeed vastly more profitable than making high-quality goods that are durable
and can be indefinitely maintained and repaired. For someone who values quality,
durability, and artistry, this is a source of frustration, because it means that
as the existing model is pursued to its logical extreme, with companies racing
against each other to find new shortcuts and discover the cheapest labor and the
cheapest materials, it becomes ever more difficult to find high-quality products
that are new. If you want high-quality these days you either have to buy
pre-1950s antiques or spend exorbitant sums on heavy-duty, industrial- or
army-grade equipment.
The lament
“they don’t make them like they used to” suggests that the desire for an
alternative approach exists beyond our constituency. I say approach, without
adding “on this front”, because I see a given economic model as the phenotypic
expression of an underlying genotype, which in turn finds compatible expression
on the values and cognitive structures that shape the different aspects of
society, culture, politics, and demographic flows at a given point in space and
time. Thus, a culture of throw-away consumerism is organically linked to
low-wages and non-White labor (they are needed to make cheap consumer goods),
which are linked to bogus green taxes (they are
needed — allegedly — to combat the waste), which are linked to political
correctness (it is needed to protect the non-White workers), which is linked to
pro-egalitarian academic fraud (it is needed to justify political correctness),
which is linked to bloated government (it is needed to ensure conformity to
political correctness), which is linked to predatory general taxation (it is
needed to fund bloated government), and so on.
What
should our approach be?
I suggest
that we can carve a niche, and develop a market, for ourselves by emphasizing
values and qualities which the present system rejects and could not easily
emulate without dismantling or discrediting itself — by, in other words,
attacking their weakest point. Whereas the system offers giant corporations,
faceless standardization, low quality, low wages, low aesthetic value, rapid
obsolescence, superficiality, rootlessness, and cultural vacuousness, we could
offer small businesses, distinctive craftsmanship, high quality, high wages,
artistry, durability, emotional depth, historical tradition, and cultural
richness.
Specifically,
those within our constituency with a good idea and an entrepreneurial spirit
could start up and grow businesses predicated on these principles. They could
offer goods and services designed to suit the specific needs of our
constituency. And they could ensure to always trade, whenever the option exists,
with similar businesses, while selling to the wider public. By emphasizing the
highest standards of excellence, a highly distinctive, culturally resonant, and
aesthetically superior style; and the long-terms savings of purchasing a
high-quality item once rather than a low-quality item many times,
such small businesses could prove very appealing to consumers fed up with the
tacky, ugly, flimsy, throwaway junk that they find cluttering modern malls and
supermarkets. As such businesses thrive and proliferate, they could eventually
offer sufficient opportunities to afford our constituency a healthy measure of
economy autonomy from a system configured to extinguish European-descended
populations. And as that economic autonomy grows, our constituency would be
better able to fund self-conscious ethnic lobbying and activism, congenial legal
representation, non-hostile education programs, and cutting-edge alternative
media. Jewish success on these fronts in the West since the 19th
century, despite widespread anti-Semitism during a large part of this period,
has shown that this is technically possible.
Indeed, when
awarded the Jack London Literary Prize in 2004, Kevin MacDonald proposed in his
acceptance speech that we
learn from Jewish success.
There will
be those who worry about politically correct legislation designed to frustrate
such efforts. But I return to a theme that has been running through a number of
my articles: examples of, and indeed the seeds for, a parallel,
anti-establishment economy already exist, in the shape of a group of
inter-related, pro-European music scenes: Black Metal,
Neo-Folk, and
Martial Industrial. These
scenes are relatively insulated from political correctness because no one who is
politically correct would ever be interested in, or even heard of, that kind of
music. Of course, t-shirts and CDs are still produced by manufacturers within
the wider economy, but this is also gradually changing, for as these scenes have
grown and gained momentum, record labels have entered the manufacturing,
printing, and distribution arenas.
Greater
degrees of economic autonomy may be possible in other areas of the economy, such
as, for example, food production or textiles. At the guerrilla end of the scale,
some of us could, for example, grow our own fruit, make jam, and sell it at
village fairs, complete with a culturally resonant brand name and distinctive,
highly artistic labeling, inspired on Victorian, Mediaeval, or Old Western
aesthetics. Everybody prefers natural, homemade food to chemical-ridden,
factory-made junk, so even a cottage enterprise like that could quickly find a
reliable market and expand, given sufficient energy, intelligence, expertise,
and determination. Far fetched? Let us remember that Tesco, the British
supermarket giant, which currently rakes in annual profits in excess of
£2,000,000,000, began as Jack Cohen standing behind a stall in the East End of
London, selling surplus groceries. Marks and Spencer also began as a single
market stall.
Marks
and Spencer began as a single market stall.
Don’t
Have to Go to Antarctica
The liberal dystopia I present in Mister is certainly not a foregone conclusion. Our hostile establishment normalizes itself by presenting current trends as modern, commonsense, and inevitable, but this is simply an effort to maintain its cultural hegemony. In Mister I imagine global warming making Antarctica somewhat less frigid, and its coastal and peripheral areas becoming the new Old West, where White migrants, following the example of their 17th, 18th, and 19th century predecessors in North America, re-settled in order escape the collapse of European civilization.
A more
detailed exploration of this scenario — an elaboration of the Nazi UFO legend —
is the topic of my next novel, currently in the works. But the Jewish experience
indicates that we do not have to immigrate to Antarctica to build an alternative
society: we can do this here and now, from within our present society, enabling
the moral independence of ordinary White citizens by establishing economic
autonomy, and then launching our own march through the institutions. This could
prove an efficient, and certainly much more satisfying and pleasant, way of
dealing with the respectable conservative and the utopian liberal alike. But if
it is to prove a viable approach, it must be remembered that present demographic
trends in traditional White homelands have set a finite time horizon. Should an
effective economic counter-offensive take too long to gain the required
momentum, should the establishment manage to retain their credibility long
enough for us to become a tiny disenfranchised minority, nothing short of
Vril-powered UFOs will save us.
Alex Kurtagic
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