No, Really - What is to Be Done?

Effectiveness is the Product of Effective Organization Times Shared Ideology

Last week, in “What is to Be Done?” I discussed the revolutionary theory of Vladimir Lenin. Like most Marxists of his day, Lenin’s theory was predicated on taking power by revolution¹ rather than gradual change. According to Lenin, three things were necessary for a revolution:

1. An advanced theory of revolution must have been formulated by a revolutionary political party;

2. The revolutionary political party must have created vanguard fighters guided by this advanced theory; and

3. The social and economic conditions of late-stage capitalism must deteriorated to the point that the working class is ready to led by the vanguard fighters.

After introducing Lenin’s ideas, I pointed out that Vladimir Lenin was a nobody when he made his bold essay. I then suggested that the present-day Chadimirs of the Dissident Right should consider working on our own “advanced theory” and “vanguard.”

The essay prompted many Restacks, kind words, and sharp criticisms. While I am grateful for the former, I want to address the latter, the sharp criticisms.

The critiques I read can, I believe, be mapped closely to Lenin’s three points:

1. The Dissident Right should not develop theory (ideology) because

   1. ideology is a tool of the enemy; and/or

   2. ideology straightjackets our creativity, pragmatism, and unpredictability; and/or

   3. Attempts to create an ideology are inherently and obviously either LARPing or “glowing”

2. The Dissident Right should not develop a party organization or vanguard fighters because

   1. “6GW” demands leaderless resistance that makes organization and vanguards irrelevant or pointless; and/or

   2. Attempts to organize or to form a vanguard will be infiltrated and subverted; and/or

   3. Attempts to organize or to form a vanguard are inherently and obviously either LARPing or “glowing”

3. The Dissident Right cannot hope that conditions will deteriorate sufficiently to take power, because

   1. The elite managing society will do whatever is necessary to avoid that deterioration and will manage to do so for the foreseeable future; or

   2. The human capital of our nation is being replaced with groups that will not revolt or if they do it will be a revolt of a different peoples; or

   3. The human capital of our nation is deteriorating at the same rate as our economic conditions, such that we will be too enfeebled to revolt; or

   4. The deterioration will be so devastating as to preclude any sort of coherent nation continuing to exist (“there won’t be a United States by 2030”).

Response to the First & Second Set of Criticisms

The first group of criticisms (1a, 1b, and 1c) is, I will show, theoretically wrong for reasons that will be be evident when I address the second group of criticisms.

That second group of criticisms is not wrong so much as begging the question. All of them presume a particular “type” of vanguard and organization, then judge that type of vanguard and organization to be futile.

Let’s start with 2a, the idea that Lenin is wrong about organizing vanguard fighters because 6G warfare demands leaderless resistance. I agree! I already wrote about 6G warfare extensively in my essay “The Seven Generations of Modern War”:

6GW… will arise to counter the co-option and destruction of insurgent networks by 5GW opponents. To do this, sixth-gen warfighters will develop what I call networkless insurgency… A networkless insurgency is one where the insurgency is undertaken without any network whatsoever. An early form of networkless insurgency is known as leaderless resistance. Leaderless resistance was developed by Colonel Ulius Louis Amoss in the early 1960s as a means to counter Soviet pro-communist 5GW. Leaderless resistance eschews both hierarchical organization and clandestine cells, both of which can be infiltrated, subverted, and co-opted. Instead it favors what Col Amoss calls phantom cells, small groups or lone individuals that operate with a shared ideology but with no intercommunication or coordination between the cells, either vertically or horizontally. Contemporary gamers might call them splinter cells. If 4GW is “open source” Web 1.0, then 6GW is blockchain-based Web 3.0.

I fully believe that leaderless resistance can work, indeed, is the most likely route that will work. But the key point is that for leaderless resistance to work, there still need to be vanguard fighters (the splinter cells) and there needs to be a shared ideology that motivates the splinter cells. Without those, it’s not a leaderless resistance, it’s just random acts of political mayhem - stochastic action, pointless and undirected.

What makes leaderless resistance possible is the fact that ideology and organization are multiplicative factors. The effectiveness of a coalition is the product of the two factors. In the diagram below², the vertical axis indicates the organizational effectiveness of the coalition and the horizontal axis indicates the ideological coherence of the coalition. The red line marks the boundary between effective and futile coalition activity.

A coalition with an effective organization and shared ideology is very effective. The various Communist Party Cadres that operated in the 20th century are the exemplars of such coalitions. Today’s Democratic Party is another effective coalition, with a strong organization (the Democratic Party and its national and state apparatus) and a shared ideology (DEI).

However, a coalition with a strong organization but a nonexistent ideology can still be effective. For instance, the French Foreign Legion is made up of foreign mercenaries who enlist in order to gain French citizenship. The recruits are often shady characters with troubled pasts. There is no ideology that motivates the Legion, but it is nevertheless France’s finest fighting force because of its organization, training, leadership, and so on. Ideology-free organizations exploit the self-interest of their members, who will be rewarded for supporting the organization regardless of how their personal beliefs.

A coalition with a weak organization but a strong ideology can also be effective. The American Committees of Correspondence, established in 1764, were a loosely-organized underground network of a few thousand men, but their strong and coherent ideology united the country and paved the way towards independence.

What cannot be effective are coalitions with weak or phantom organization that lack any shared ideology. For instance, the Republican Party, while moderately well-organized, lacks the shared ideological commitments that would be necessary to succeed. The Republican Party can win elections, but can’t accomplish anything in office, because its member don’t agree on what should be accomplished. What does the Republican Party actually stand for? (Trump, obviously, stood for something - MAGA - but the massive opposition to Trump from within his own party is evidence of the problem.)

So, what does that mean for our revolutionary theory and its critiques? It means that it’s reasonable to argue against organization; and it’s reasonable to argue against ideology; but it’s not reasonable to argue against both!

There is no question that 5G warfare is already being waged against dissidents in the West, and that 7G warfare is underway. Our circumstances are increasingly similar to that of East Germans under the STASI. Any overt organization is probably already compromised to some extent, and even organizations as covert and loose as the Committees of Correspondence could be infiltrated and subverted with relative ease.

Therefore, it seems to me that, the more likely our efforts are to attract entryism, the more the focus of our efforts should be on maximizing our ideological strength. That ideology would then be promulgated through stigmergic organization. As I wrote in “The Seven Generations of Modern War”:

In a networkless insurgency, the splinter cells of the resistance would not communicate face-to-face, nor by cell phone, nor by internet contact. Instead they would rely only on stigmergy. Derived from the Greek words stigma (sign) and ergon (to act), stigmergy is the use of environmental mechanisms to coordinate the actions of independent agents. It is responsible for bird flocks and ant swarms…

[T]here are four mechanisms of stigmergy:

• Stigmergic marking. Markers left by one splinter cell influences the actions of other splinter cells. Ants leave pheromones as markers for other ants. In the context of an insurgency, the news coverage of an attack would fill the same role.

• Sematectonic signaling. Here, “environmental conditions influence the behavior of all actors in the system.” For instance, if an anti-Chinese splinter cell attacks Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Forbidden City will be given increased security thereafter. The increased security becomes a signal to other splinter cells not to attack there.

• Quantitative signaling. Here, “the environmental signals are of a single scalable type. The size of a global guerilla attack on a given location can meter the scale of the security response.”

• Qualitative signaling. “The environmental signals are of a varied type that change the message based on their combination. Different types of attacks on the same target will yield information on the type of attack that is most effective.”

Examples of Organization around Ideology

Let me give a concrete example of overt, covert, stigmergic, and non-existent organization to clarify what I mean. Let us imagine that there is a coalition of right-wing writers on Substack, all ideologically committed to ending the Federal Reserve.

If the coalition organized overtly, then the members would create a publication around this theme (EndtheFed.com), appoint an editor-in-chief to organize the publication, and contribute their shared talents to this effort by writing articles, holding live chats, organizing meet-ups, and so on. In this way they’d benefit from the network effects of scale.

Unfortunately, overt organizations attract entryists; we can easily imagine EndtheFed.com finding itself captured by socialist subversives who steer it into a criticism of capitalism as a whole. This more-or-less is what happened to The Escapist, which I founded as a magazine by gamers for gamers and which was transformed into a critical voice against gamer culture.

If the coalition organized covertly, then the members would join in private group chats on platforms such as Discord and Telegram, where they would secretly coordinate their efforts in order to amplify each other’s voices. The goal would be to benefit from network effects while keeping the network hidden.

An example of such a covert organization was the “Journolist," the private Google Groups mailing list for left-leaning journalists, academics, and policy experts created by Ezra Klein in 2007, which was used to coordinate narratives.

Unfortunately, covert organizations are also susceptible to infiltration and subversion, especially nowadays. For instance, in 2010, The Daily Caller published excerpts leaked from the list, proving that the list had been used for unethical coordination of ostensibly independent journalism. The list was subsequently shut down by Klein.

Another example of a covert organization, one I have first-hand experience with, is the “GameJourno Pros” list, a secret mailing list of game journalists from all of the major outlets which was used to coordinate action against gamers during #GamerGate, is an example. Like the Journolist, the GameJourno Pros list was infiltrated and its efforts publicly leaked.

If the coalition organized stigmergically, then the members would coordinate by exploiting environmental mechanisms to signal to each other. For instance:

• The pseudonyms or blog titles adopted by the coalition’s members could all adopt a similar aesthetic as a stigmergic mark, making it evident to “those who know” that they are aligned. For instance, they might all adopt names inspired by fantasy Conan the Barbarian, such that a name like Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, Food for Wolves, or Riddle of Steel was a stigmergic mark.

• The coalition’s members could use the same algorithm and treat the algorithm of that shared platform as a form of sematectonic signaling that empowers them to promote like-minded views and suppress opposing views. For instance, if the Substack feed shows a member an article that calls for ending the Fed, he might restack it, even if he didn’t otherwise know the writer or publication in question. He could restack it with more confidence if the article was on the stigmergically marked blog Crom, Grant me Revenge.

• The members could publicly share the traffic data from their articles as a form of quantitative signaling. That why their data would alert other members about which topics are going viral, which topics are getting suppressed, and so on, which they could use to manage their own efforts. For instance, let’s imagine that referencing Ron Paul in an article about the Fed leads to virality because his fans will repost the articles, then that would be a useful signal.

• If they publicly share data, the members can then distribute their efforts on different platforms (Substack, Blogger, X, etc.) using different modes of expression (articles, videos, podcasts) and evaluate the success of these as a form of qualitative signaling (“The environmental signals are of a varied type that change the message based on their combination. Different types of attacks on the same target will yield information on the type of attack that is most effective”). For instance, they might learn and share that Ron Paul videos on X do really well, but written essays on X fail to promote their efforts.

Note that in the example above, the members of the coalition have almost as much ability to coordinate with each other as in a covert organization, but there is no easy mechanism by which they can be infiltrated or subverted. If the enemy responds by deplatforming instead, then the deplatforming itself becomes a stigmergic signal, alerting the coalition that a particular topic is too transgressive to talk about, that a particular platform is under enemy control, and so on.

Finally, if the coalition didn’t organize at all, then the members would each wake up, sit down at their computer, and talk about ending the Fed with complete disregard for what everyone else is doing. They wouldn’t wouldn’t bother to restack articles that supported their cause; they wouldn’t like and comment other writer’s work; they would ignore warning signs such as deplatforming, and so on. I’ve absolutely been guilty of this, probably from a surfeit of independence and iconoclasm.

And, of course, if the organizationless coalition lacked a shared ideology, they’d just be randoms on the net and not a coalition at all!

Where Does that Leave Us?

The Mainstream Right is overtly organized but badly infiltrated and subverted. Factions of the Mainstream Right have a coherent ideology, but there is nothing that unites the Mainstream Right as a whole - primarily it’s just an atavistic impulse to oppose the Left, with some adhering to the populism of “America First” or “MAGA.” In any case, MAGA will not save the West because it doesn’t fundamentally address the insanity of the contemporary consensus that is destroying us.

The Dissident Right is somewhat more ideologically coherent, but not by much. It has the important virtue of being on the right track in that it is actually touching on the real problems plaguing our civilization and is actively trying to come to grips to them. It is obviously not overtly organized. There is some nascent covert organization, largely in the form of online splinter calls — very small groups of just a few people organized around topics. Since they include only a few dozen people, rather than the thousands-strong Journolist, they will be harder to infiltrate and destroy. However, my expectation is that as soon as such efforts start to become effective, most such groups will ultimately get subverted, redirected, and converged.

But they haven’t been yet. (At least not the ones I belong to, not as far as I can tell.) Therefore, what we ought to do, I think, is to use our window of opportunity to consciously build out our ideology - what do we see as the problem, what do we offer as the solution, and how will we implement it? - that can inspire leaderless resistance in a potentially more dystopian future. This can and should be done while laying the groundwork for stigmergic organization in the future, when participatory organization might be more perilous.

Response to the Third Set of Criticisms

The response to the third set of criticisms will be the topic of a future essay so stay tuned by means of stigmergic signaling for what’s coming next!

1. Lenin of course was discussing violent revolution but we need not take up arms to find value in his revolutionary theory. It’s fully applicable to the non-violent “color revolutions” of the 21st century and to participatory action in general. So please do not accuse me of fomenting armed insurrection here on my Conan-themed blog!

In any case, if I were ever to call for an armed revolution I’d be much more charismatic about it. I’d say something like “loyal soldiers of woe, now is the time to affix bayonets and topple the bougie dogs!” while driving past my assembled motorcycle cavalry in my white Charger. I would not offer a bulleted list of meta-considerations relating to 19th century theory.

2. I’m a writer, not a graphic designer. Critics of my MS Paint skills will be directed to the vicinity of my derriere.