The Guardian just published an article linking the incoming Trump administration's friendlier stance towards crypto to the financing of the far-right.

Trump's promise to loosen crypto regulations may be boon for extremist groups

Trump's policies could aid terrorist and far-right groups who use cryptocurrency to help quietly finance their ends

https://www.theguardian.com

Without looking on Twitter I can already guess at what the standard crypto take on this would be: The MSM is demonising crypto as it has always done. Guardian libs are butthurt that Trump won. Etc. Etc. Elements of truth, but there's a degree of mutuality to the butthurtacity. (Imagine a graph. On the X axis is how much someone complains about other people getting triggered. On the Y axis is how often that person gets triggered. Plot a line going 45 degrees up and to the right.)

The Guardian isn't entirely wrong, of course. Crypto allows value to flow in new ways, including to hitherto off-limits places. Like the pockets of Nazis. The odd omission from the article is that, yesterday, the US overturned sanctions against Tornado Cash. Previously, interacting with Tornado Cash smart contracts would have been a violation of US sanctions. The overturning is a win for the neutrality of smart contracts. Make of that what you will.

There's good arguments for the neutrality of smart contracts, but you'd have to be pretty naive to think this won't help get capital into the hands of god-knows-who. That isn't to say that the sanctions should not have been overturned, or that Tornado Cash is bad. It just is. This is a reality of our nascent decentralised financial system.

But pause for a second. Look who The Guardian libs are raising the alarm on. It's the far-right. The "far-" prefix simply indicates that their collection of ideas aren't mainstream within the right (yet?). Consider what's missing. The left.

"Ah", I hear you begin. "That's because The Guardian is left-wing, and they're not going to talk about the far-left extremists they support!" Honey, I hate to break it to you but The Guardian isn't supporting anything much to the left of Kamala Harris. If you are convinced that Harris is a socialist, or a communist, then we've got a lot of material to work through before we can begin to have a productive conversation.

The left is missing. AFK. In the West, the Global North, the industrialised core — call it whatever you want, you know what I mean — there is no left. There's identity politics, and there's passionate activity animated around fringe issues. But there's no actual left. No counter-hegemonic movement interested in improving the lives of ordinary people by equipping them with the material means to command the world around them. Even feminism has, for the most part, been incorporated into the centrist sludge of the Cathedral (look, Moldbug coined a useful term). There are no organisations we could, if we were so inclined, funnel money to in order to attempt to catalyse Historical change. No militias. No parties worth supporting. Nothing illicit. Nothing dangerous. There are some people putting in some effort which may yield some fruit. The legacies of, say, Iberian municipalism, may prove in the long term to be worth something.

I'm not saying we need underground militias. The reality today is that the state, in the industrial core for the time being at least, is simply too strong for such a strategy to work for the left. The far-right, when it is thinking lucidly, is wise not to entertain the idea that they might themselves overthrow the state by force. Their best bet is that they can gain a critical mass and then get the military and police on their side. That's really how you overthrow states. The left obviously needs different strategies, because we tried the whole Leninist thing and it panned out pretty bad in the end, from gulags to contemporary Chinese Communism™️.

But whatever. Questions of left strategy and what has or hasn't, or could or couldn't, work are for another day. I am simply asking, who would we even send illicit funds to on the left? There is no insurgent, underground, vanguard movement which might hope to build strength and emerge as a fully fledged threat in the mid-term future. Go out east and you have some options, from Indian Maoists to Kurdish anarcho-communists hiding in the mountains (which isn't to say either of those are worth celebrating). But in the West we have absolutely nothing.

Maybe you could fund some pro-abortion advocacy. A trans charity. A soup kitchen. Whatever your opinion on these exact causes, it's obvious that they will never pose a threat to the order of things in any Historical sense. Ok, ok, there's some Gramscian take about building a plurality of institutions within civil society and bootstrapping something larger blah blah. But that's more or less been the strategy for a generation. And where has it gotten us? Some cultural advances, which are cool, but they've by now been incorporated into the status quo. We can only assume that the libs will sing the praises of the first black trans billionaire with ADHD. Some leftists now have good LinkedIn profiles. We've diversified the ruling class, and convinced ourselves that the white guy earning minimum wage is the foundation of the problem. Bravo. I also think women should have access to abortion, and if you want gender reassignment surgery to feel good about yourself then go ahead. (It's hard to shake the inclination to virtue signal.) But if things like this are the horizon of political possibility then we've already lost.

In terms of actually redistributing wealth — the foundational problem of all politics — we've only regressed since sometime around the 1960s. More properly, since sometime around 1917. JPMorgan can stomach #BlackHistoryMonth, but it will never support reappropriating the wealth of the 1%. In recent years, all vaguely left-wing movements in the West have failed, and were never radical enough to begin with (but would've still been a productive start – this is why actual fascists support Donald Trump, who is not a fascist). Bernie failed. Syriza failed. Podemos failed. Corbyn failed. No doubt elements of and ripples from these things will influence the future Movement to come, just like the ascendent right can trace threads back to prior failures, from Barry Goldwater to Oswald Mosley (hell, the Nazi Party). But we don't have any idea what our future Movement will look like. We have been defeated, and we are yet to even take account of all of our wounds. Most of us don't even know we've been defeated.

This is not to say that I think underground far-right militias will be successful in all their aims. A lot of these guys are probably just LARPing. But some of them aren't. Some of them are serious, and have sophisticated philosophical positions on what they are trying to achieve. And they have friends with lots of money: the right's greatest advantage, because it is generally not as concerned with redistributing wealth to ordinary people. The most important function of right-wing militias and other extremities is that they are the radical edge of something much bigger. The problem isn't that the left doesn't have militias, the problem is that it doesn't have, in the West, anything analogous to them. The left requires a much denser web of social relations in order to build the critical mass of networked resources, expertise, labor, and people which enable it to achieve things (remember when we used to do that?). The union movement was the crux of this in the past. The left needs more sophisticated coordination than the right because the left cannot rely on the rich giving it money because the left is (should be) primarily concerned with the problem of the rich hoarding wealth.

But we are scattered. Absolutely scattered. Our most championed causes for decades now have mostly been issues of identity. We drank the liberal Kool Aid and we choked on it. Too many leftists (whatever that Americanism even means) can't talk to half their family because they don't agree on basic issues of grammar. We lost all our collective institutions, so we retreated into individuality. And we have suffered for it.

This is a much larger topic. A paragraph or two here isn't going to convince anyone not already convinced of this sort of left self-critique (if I was willing to tell you the things I've been involved in you'd see I've been just as much a symptom of the problem). Perhaps another day.

The point here is this: Isn't it such a stark, painful sign of our terminal decline that we don't even have anyone we could illicitly funnel funds to, even if we wanted to? We can protest outside the Winter Palace, but we long ago lost the ability to storm it. Or, more preferably, to build our own. The future Movement which is yet to come will need to rediscover these abilities. Maybe then we'll make good use of crypto. The next Communist Manifesto is probably still a generation away. We're not in the 1930s. We're somewhere deep in the 1700s.

The Guardian just published an article linking the incoming Trump administration's friendlier stance towards crypto to the financing of the far-right.

Trump's promise to loosen crypto regulations may be boon for extremist groups

Trump's policies could aid terrorist and far-right groups who use cryptocurrency to help quietly finance their ends

https://www.theguardian.com

Without looking on Twitter I can already guess at what the standard crypto take on this would be: The MSM is demonising crypto as it has always done. Guardian libs are butthurt that Trump won. Etc. Etc. Elements of truth, but there's a degree of mutuality to the butthurtacity. (Imagine a graph. On the X axis is how much someone complains about other people getting triggered. On the Y axis is how often that person gets triggered. Plot a line going 45 degrees up and to the right.)

The Guardian isn't entirely wrong, of course. Crypto allows value to flow in new ways, including to hitherto off-limits places. Like the pockets of Nazis. The odd omission from the article is that, yesterday, the US overturned sanctions against Tornado Cash. Previously, interacting with Tornado Cash smart contracts would have been a violation of US sanctions. The overturning is a win for the neutrality of smart contracts. Make of that what you will.

There's good arguments for the neutrality of smart contracts, but you'd have to be pretty naive to think this won't help get capital into the hands of god-knows-who. That isn't to say that the sanctions should not have been overturned, or that Tornado Cash is bad. It just is. This is a reality of our nascent decentralised financial system.

But pause for a second. Look who The Guardian libs are raising the alarm on. It's the far-right. The "far-" prefix simply indicates that their collection of ideas aren't mainstream within the right (yet?). Consider what's missing. The left.

"Ah", I hear you begin. "That's because The Guardian is left-wing, and they're not going to talk about the far-left extremists they support!" Honey, I hate to break it to you but The Guardian isn't supporting anything much to the left of Kamala Harris. If you are convinced that Harris is a socialist, or a communist, then we've got a lot of material to work through before we can begin to have a productive conversation.

The left is missing. AFK. In the West, the Global North, the industrialised core — call it whatever you want, you know what I mean — there is no left. There's identity politics, and there's passionate activity animated around fringe issues. But there's no actual left. No counter-hegemonic movement interested in improving the lives of ordinary people by equipping them with the material means to command the world around them. Even feminism has, for the most part, been incorporated into the centrist sludge of the Cathedral (look, Moldbug coined a useful term). There are no organisations we could, if we were so inclined, funnel money to in order to attempt to catalyse Historical change. No militias. No parties worth supporting. Nothing illicit. Nothing dangerous. There are some people putting in some effort which may yield some fruit. The legacies of, say, Iberian municipalism, may prove in the long term to be worth something.

I'm not saying we need underground militias. The reality today is that the state, in the industrial core for the time being at least, is simply too strong for such a strategy to work for the left. The far-right, when it is thinking lucidly, is wise not to entertain the idea that they might themselves overthrow the state by force. Their best bet is that they can gain a critical mass and then get the military and police on their side. That's really how you overthrow states. The left obviously needs different strategies, because we tried the whole Leninist thing and it panned out pretty bad in the end, from gulags to contemporary Chinese Communism™️.

But whatever. Questions of left strategy and what has or hasn't, or could or couldn't, work are for another day. I am simply asking, who would we even send illicit funds to on the left? There is no insurgent, underground, vanguard movement which might hope to build strength and emerge as a fully fledged threat in the mid-term future. Go out east and you have some options, from Indian Maoists to Kurdish anarcho-communists hiding in the mountains (which isn't to say either of those are worth celebrating). But in the West we have absolutely nothing.

Maybe you could fund some pro-abortion advocacy. A trans charity. A soup kitchen. Whatever your opinion on these exact causes, it's obvious that they will never pose a threat to the order of things in any Historical sense. Ok, ok, there's some Gramscian take about building a plurality of institutions within civil society and bootstrapping something larger blah blah. But that's more or less been the strategy for a generation. And where has it gotten us? Some cultural advances, which are cool, but they've by now been incorporated into the status quo. We can only assume that the libs will sing the praises of the first black trans billionaire with ADHD. Some leftists now have good LinkedIn profiles. We've diversified the ruling class, and convinced ourselves that the white guy earning minimum wage is the foundation of the problem. Bravo. I also think women should have access to abortion, and if you want gender reassignment surgery to feel good about yourself then go ahead. (It's hard to shake the inclination to virtue signal.) But if things like this are the horizon of political possibility then we've already lost.

In terms of actually redistributing wealth — the foundational problem of all politics — we've only regressed since sometime around the 1960s. More properly, since sometime around 1917. JPMorgan can stomach #BlackHistoryMonth, but it will never support reappropriating the wealth of the 1%. In recent years, all vaguely left-wing movements in the West have failed, and were never radical enough to begin with (but would've still been a productive start – this is why actual fascists support Donald Trump, who is not a fascist). Bernie failed. Syriza failed. Podemos failed. Corbyn failed. No doubt elements of and ripples from these things will influence the future Movement to come, just like the ascendent right can trace threads back to prior failures, from Barry Goldwater to Oswald Mosley (hell, the Nazi Party). But we don't have any idea what our future Movement will look like. We have been defeated, and we are yet to even take account of all of our wounds. Most of us don't even know we've been defeated.

This is not to say that I think underground far-right militias will be successful in all their aims. A lot of these guys are probably just LARPing. But some of them aren't. Some of them are serious, and have sophisticated philosophical positions on what they are trying to achieve. And they have friends with lots of money: the right's greatest advantage, because it is generally not as concerned with redistributing wealth to ordinary people. The most important function of right-wing militias and other extremities is that they are the radical edge of something much bigger. The problem isn't that the left doesn't have militias, the problem is that it doesn't have, in the West, anything analogous to them. The left requires a much denser web of social relations in order to build the critical mass of networked resources, expertise, labor, and people which enable it to achieve things (remember when we used to do that?). The union movement was the crux of this in the past. The left needs more sophisticated coordination than the right because the left cannot rely on the rich giving it money because the left is (should be) primarily concerned with the problem of the rich hoarding wealth.

But we are scattered. Absolutely scattered. Our most championed causes for decades now have mostly been issues of identity. We drank the liberal Kool Aid and we choked on it. Too many leftists (whatever that Americanism even means) can't talk to half their family because they don't agree on basic issues of grammar. We lost all our collective institutions, so we retreated into individuality. And we have suffered for it.

This is a much larger topic. A paragraph or two here isn't going to convince anyone not already convinced of this sort of left self-critique (if I was willing to tell you the things I've been involved in you'd see I've been just as much a symptom of the problem). Perhaps another day.

The point here is this: Isn't it such a stark, painful sign of our terminal decline that we don't even have anyone we could illicitly funnel funds to, even if we wanted to? We can protest outside the Winter Palace, but we long ago lost the ability to storm it. Or, more preferably, to build our own. The future Movement which is yet to come will need to rediscover these abilities. Maybe then we'll make good use of crypto. The next Communist Manifesto is probably still a generation away. We're not in the 1930s. We're somewhere deep in the 1700s.