Bioleninism Revised
Spandrell’s essay on bioleninism is the worst thing to have happened to the right in a very long time. He took a great word and a more or less true concept, the idea that communism has a biological basis, and destroyed it. He completely misdiagnosed the problem, and has spun anyone looking for a solution to that problem in the wrong direction in a way that is confusing and not readily apparent. He did this because he is a blithering idiot.
I don’t mean that Spandrell is low IQ. Or that he is not successful or worthy or commendable. A person can be totally competent and smart and still be a retarded moron. That’s Spandrell.
For those unfamiliar we will do a little recap. Spandrell’s essay series on Bioleninism is an attempt to differentiate Chinese “Leninism” which he calls “classical” Leninism, from American Leninism, which he calls “Bio-Leninism.” For Spandrell, Leninism is the condition in which a single left wing party gains complete control of society, at which point leftism “disappears.” The motivating factor, the juice that makes that engine run, is desire for power. Leninism, for Spandrell, holds together because it is a coalition of the low who, by coordinating, become stronger together than they would have been apart. They have motivation therefore to stick together and display loyalty. Classical Leninism allows the economic lower class to become powerful. But in Europe and America where poverty is not as pressing, Leninism naturally organized on biological lines. The losers of the genetic lottery banded together to create what we generally now call “gay race communism.” The reason race progressivism hasn’t gone away in America as Class progressivism did in China, is because America hasn’t completed its Bio-Leninist transformation yet.
From Spandrell:
Because there’s always biology. Some people are tall, some people are short. Some look good, some are pretty ugly. Some are thin and some are fat. Some are pleasant some are annoying. Some are cool and some are awkward. Some are smart and some are dumb. Some make good choices some make bad choices. Some are law-abiding and some are criminally inclined. The latter of each pair is going to be low status anywhere on earth. Even in Soviet Communism under commander Trotsky. Some people just suck. That’s the way genes work.
And so thankfully for Leftism, even after achieving affluence, even after the working class disappeared as a thing, there was still plenty of material to work with to advance the cause of complete control. And so Leftist groups started agitating status for people of African descent. For Jews. For single women. For drug junkies. For sluts. For fat people. For homos. For lesbians. For aggressive Muslims. For the disabled. For the retarded. For the mentally insane. For the trannies. All people who are were low status in Western society. And who would be low status in any society. Because they suck. They just aren’t very productive. For no fault of their own. Some people are born tall, some short. Some smart, some dumb. Some empathic, some psychopathic. Some content with their lot, some greedy with powerlust. That’s how it is.
This theory became very popular. It became popular because it casts your perceived enemies, the “communists,” as people who are fat or lazy or stupid or short. That the searing resentment you feel from these people on a daily basis is somehow caused by how handsome and smart you are.
I’m sorry but this is fucking retarded. It’s a dangerous delusion. More than that, it obscures the actual biological basis of communism, ensuring that right wing coalitions are always themselves full of resentful, backstabbing communists and therefore doomed to fail.
“Bio-leninism” is real in that marxism has a biological basis. Bio-leninism is fake in that the biological basis for marxism comes in the form of differences between groups, not differences within groups. More specifically, marxism, socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is the biological imperative of almost every human group in the world. When there is an absence of communism, we call it WEIRD.
If you are not WEIRD, you are a communist. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means you are part of the global human universal.
“Leninism” is not when a left wing political party takes over the government. “Leninism” is the form of government that is natural to Northwestern Europeans, who were genetically forged in the crucible of Church marriage doctrine of the middle ages. The first Leninist was Henry VIII. The history of Europe after Henry VIII is one of nation after nation adopting “Leninist” governance structures in the style of Henry VIII. That’s what a sovereign state is. That’s what a joint-stock corporation is. This form of organization should not be called “Leninist” it should be called “Henrician.”
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, Cromwell and Xi are all Henricians.
Henry VIII, of course, didn’t invent hierarchy. But the Tudor dynasty certainly initiated a new, modern form of nested bureaucratic hierarchical administration that was made possible by the genetic changes and homogenization created by the eugenics (intended or accidental) of the Catholic Church.
Spandrell’s assessment, which feels good superficially, falls apart under almost any scrutiny. If we have a bio-leninist state in the west, then why do attractive wealthy trust fund kids all spout commie-gigababble? Go look at Scott Alexander’s followers on Bluesky. Every third one is fucking Fulbright scholar. These people aren’t genetic refuse. They simply have a communistic disposition. That’s it.
Conversely, why is it that all the hardcore MAGA supporters are fat and ugly and loyal, and frankly, doing pretty well economically? Is McKenzie Bezos motivated by some kind of Machiavellian strategy to hold a coalition of rational Haitians together? Or is she just a bone-resentful communist bitch?
No. All communism is biological. There is no such thing as “classical” Leninism. Marxism, gay race communism, nomos of all kinds: in communist societies they’re all just excuses to cut down the tall poppy. Hierarchy makes these people sick. It’s instinctual. They’re crabs in a bucket.
Mimesis is the secret ingredient to creating a society. People who are dispositionally prone to mimetic desire will readily copy and transfer societally beneficial technologies. If one person innovates a better way to farm for rice, the rest will follow suit, desiring what their neighbor has. That’s a fitness advantage.
But when highly mimetic people are disallowed access to something they cannot produce on their own then their desire turns to resentment. This resentment can only be alleviated by either banding together to steal what they want, or if what they want can’t be stolen, then to destroy what they want in order that they might be unburdened of their unquenchable desires.
That is what communism is. It is the human universal and its absence is extremely new. Modern genomics has made the emergence of non-communism trivially easy to track. Somewhere in ice age Siberia a single gens was born, innovated a new hierarchical form of social technology, and expanded east and west until it dominated the northern Hemisphere. These people spread from eastern China to Ireland and brought their new form of social organization with them, along with the technology of the horse. That’s why in both China and Japan you don’t get “Imperial” hierarchies until you see a simultaneous introduction of both horses and Afanasievo DNA.
Think about this: is it more likely that there was a Gramscian “march through the institutions” that is responsible for gay race communism? Or is it that the GI Bill flooded the university system with resentful nons? Has America become more communist because of theory or because it is browner now than it used to be? Do we believe Shaniqua does a lot of self-reflection on the nature of her political coalition? Or is the coalition of the left just the natural grouping of the increasingly large cohort of “westerners” who hate all Anglo-Protestants, be they tall or short, smart or dumb, fat or skinny.
The obvious reason that these people talk about anti-colonialism so much is they hate the Anglos who did the colonizing. That’s all there is to it.
The reason Spandrell can’t or won’t see the world this way is because he is a China apologist. More specifically he is a Hanophile. Spandrell is desperate to avoid the grim reality that his own Chinese Leninism is in fact just ordinary race communism. As are so many other genetic communists desperate to avoid the increasingly unavoidable reality, that non-communism is an invention of the Anglos. Let’s turn to Spandrell himself before we continue:
As I'm most familiar with China, it's very obvious what the USG line is. Appealing to women and homosexuals to become their fifth column. And it's working. Every single article you see out there by a Chinese writing about how China should be more progressive (i.e. more American) is written by either a woman or a homosexual.
I read this article a while ago, which is infuriating. It's about a particle accelerator that China is building. A Chinese-American writer interviews the head scientist there: and all she does is undermine his project, saying how Communist censorship means the whole project is tainted. The guy doesn't get it. Why are you doing this to me, aren't you a fellow Chinese?
No, she's not. You know what she is? An ugly woman on her thirties. I know China well and ugly women on their thirties are very much not high-status in China today. Unlike in the West, where they're the voluntary thought police, and you can't even look at them. So of course any Chinese, or Russian, or Saudi, or Indonesian ugly woman in her thirties is, to the extent that she's given access to US propaganda, going to become a fifth column against her country's independence. And of course the same goes for ethnic minorities, the dumber the better. You want to get funding as a China expert in Western academia? You better be researching about Uyghurs or Tibetans. Those dumb and hostile minorities. So much more important than the oldest civilization on earth.
We see on display here from Spandrell some rather unfortunate resentment. And, interestingly, his resentment is turned toward a particular set of Chinese minority populations: the Uyghurs and Tibetans. Do you know what the Uyghurs and Tibetans have in common? They are significantly whiter than the Han. In particular, they are significantly whiter than the Southern Han. Tibetans, Manchu, Uyghurs, Mongols, Northern Han: they’re all whiter than the Southern Han. Meaning they all have higher levels of Steppe admixture than the southern Han.
More interesting still, the resentment animating the bloody Chinese 20th century expressed itself, in every single instance, as southern Han violence against whiter ethnic rivals. The reason white skin is prized as a mark of nobility in China isn’t because of the sun, as the CCP wants you to believe. It’s because for centuries the southern Han have been dominated by various ethnic groups from the north.
If, as was the case in China, class and ethnicity are one and the same, then every class struggle is also a race war.
Suddenly the “classical” Leninism in China, supposedly selecting leadership from its peasant class for reasons of cohesion, begins to look a lot like run-of-the-mill anti-white race communism. Fig leaves as far as the eye can see.
The problem we see here with Spandrell, outside of the fact that this is mostly just enormous cope for why the “Asabiyyah” of the Chinese Communist Party requires a global police force that will put you in the Bodies exhibit if you step out of line — and party members are constantly stepping out of line — is that his mind is stuck in the second millennium.
If you’re reading Marx and considering his positions on Capital, if you even believe that Capital is a real thing, you need to give your head a shake. Marx was giving voice to his own resentments. The reason his work has been popular worldwide is most of humanity is extremely fucking resentful. Put down Das Kapital and pick up The Machiavellians. The only thing an ideology is, is a set of excuses for the actions you’ve already decided to take.
What we are observing when we see a coalition of women, or ethnic minorities, or whatever, is a coalition of people who are predisposed to hate you for daring to prefer to live a different way coming up with any excuse they can to rationalize their hatred.
The western blue-haired, brown-skinned coalition is not a function of a calculated recruiting strategy in the west any more than it is in China, where brown-skinned, fat headed, short-statured southern Han spent 100 years expelling and exterminating their long-headed, fair-skinned, tall northern rivals. In both cases politics of resentment stem from psychological dispositions toward resentment as such. That disposition is different, or absent, or WEIRD in northwest Europeans. In the west, among the WEIRDs it is often those same societal “dregs” that cheer their heroes loudest. The core of American exceptionalism is the ability of the lower classes to act with pride and humility regardless of their station in life.
That is a bitter pill to swallow for most people. It is especially tough for those who have fashioned for themselves a self-conception of anti-communism, which is common in communist countries. People will associate communism with whatever it is their neighbors are doing. And since they hate their neighbors they decide they hate communism. These so-called “anti-communists” come to the west, join the right wing here, and inadvertently continue to spread communism in the west.
John Locke believed that every man was a blank slate. John Locke was retarded and didn’t know what an iPhone is. The world is different now. Modern genomics can tell us exactly where and how communism entered America. It came with the Puritans, who carried non-R1b Y Haplogroups to the new world, and along with them an anti-hierarchical predilection. The Yankees, with their greater Y Haplogroup diversity, became an engine of resentment in America, creating a constant division over the degree of hierarchy which ought to be established in public affairs.
No. Spandrell’s fantasy that leftism in the West is driven by genetic differences between the short and the tall or the fat and the thin is a dangerous delusion. It would be nice to think they’re all just jealous of us for being handsome, tall, and smart. But that’s just not how it is.
There is, in fact, a genetic basis for communism. But what we see is a coalition based on ethnic differences, not on differences within and between individuals.
Spandrell is wrong about bioleninism because he is wrong about classical Leninism. He has internalized the Chinese Communist Party propaganda that the brutal ethnic cleansing of 20th century China was an “economic” phenomenon. He believes that lithe, fair, northern aristocrats were replaced by squat, chestnut-colored Austronesians because poor people are easy to bribe. No. It was ethnic cleansing. And, despite their poverty, the hallmark of these kinds of right-wing coups in ethnically communist countries is the extreme lack of party loyalty, which necessitates the brutality associated with these regimes.
Conversely, WEIRDs are so predisposed to the spontaneous formation of loyal pro-social hierarchy that there is an entire political philosophy, libertarianism, dedicated to the idea that the best way to form hierarchies in society is to step back and let WEIRDs do their thing. The obvious failure point of contemporary libertarianism is, of course, anthropomorphization: ascribing WEIRD psychology to nons.
For those who are not familiar with the story of ethnic cleansing in 20th century China: the doctrinaire position that all those killings in China were based on class is the product of the two things Boomer World is best at—institutional sympathy for communism and ethnic illiteracy. Because boomers can’t tell Chinese people apart, they assume that nobody can.
Today, your average ethnoguesser can figure out the dynamics at a glance:
In China, the bloody 20th century starts out with an explicit ethnic cleansing: the revolt of the Han against the Manchu (whiter) imperial rulers and their “banner” system, which privileged other northern (whiter) ethnicities, like the Mongols, over the Han. This system had been in place for centuries. By the time we get to the 20th century, race and class are one and the same in China.
But it wasn’t simply the banner system that separated the Chinese into an ethno-caste system. The so-called “mandarin” bureaucrats, ethnically Han imperial representatives, were overwhelmingly made up of Northern Han surrounding Beijing. These Northern Mandarins would often be parachuted from the north to occupy important positions in the south. This means that the Chinese aristocracy, even in the south, were genetically distinct and shifted toward the “steppe” profile of the north and away from the “Austronesian” profile of the south.
There is a great book called Manchus and Han that sets the record straight on the ethnic character of the early 20th century conflicts in China, dispelling the frankly absurd claims of mainstream scholars that the Manchus had become “Sinicized” to the point that ethnic differences were no longer relevant. If you read Manchus and Han, you will see wartime propaganda describing the Manchu and other banner people as hairy Russians or “wolfish” “Tatars.” For the Southern Han, who would become the power centers of the popular 20th-century revolts, the ethnic component was clearly relevant.
The ethnic differences that separated the peasants from the ruling classes for hundreds of years in China didn’t disappear suddenly after the revolution of 1911. The communist revolution, with its focus on the ethnically distinct landlord class, was another round of ethnic conflict. The same can be said of the five black categories of the Cultural Revolution. Ethnic resentment in every case.
Obviously, the Bolshevism in Russia was also a significantly ethnic affair, and recognition of this fact caused a bit of a stir in 20th century Europe.
It is never “one thing.” But if we are going to talk about the connection between “biology” and “Leninism” we should recognize that the relevant “biological” vector here is ethnicity, not individual traits. One cannot choose to become a communist. You’re born with it, whether you’re smart or dumb, good looking or ugly.
As for “Leninism,” this is a word that describes hierarchical organization applied to a population that doesn’t naturally organize hierarchically. Maybe Caesar, who whipped the genetically degenerated Roman Republic into an empire, could be considered a Leninist? Perhaps Qin Shi Huang would fit the bill as well?
The study of genomics has revealed that there is one recurring theme that underscores the major historical events of the last several thousand years: the emergence and invention of tyranny and patriarchy on the Eurasian Steppe, and the battles that have been fought between Steppe hierarchicalists and Agrarian communalists.
In China the ethnic conflict has been those with greater connection to the steppe against those with lesser. In Russia we see an echo of the same. In America, the Yankees, descended from “Old Europe” shifted East Anglians, have formed a coalition with non-WEIRDs against their natural enemies, the hierarchicalists of Rural America and the South. The ethnic conflict of the English civil war repeats itself in the American Civil war, then repeats itself again in the culture war.
That is the “biological” basis of “Leninism.”
“It came with the Puritans, who carried non-R1b Y Haplogroups to the new world, and along with them an anti-hierarchical predilection.” That’s news to me. I had ancestors on the Mayflower and my DNA results show R1B. Are you referring to the black slaves that were brought in?