this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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How useful is knowing right wing theory? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 days ago by wideopenarms@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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I've been reading Neoreaction a Basilisk and, through the books criticisms, getting more acquainted with the current theories right wing "intellectuals" are propagating. That's led me to consider reading through at least some of Nick Land's work, maybe to better grasp what theory Silicon Valley elites are huffing at the moment.

I've done this once; before I ever became more ideologically aware, I read through Atlas Shrugged not knowing what it was and after finishing, even then, walked away pissed off I spent any time on it. However, it was useful for catching right wing references and understanding the basis for libertarianism later. It's also been interesting, though not quite useful, to trace how right wing thought has evolved and what the resulting "praxis" has looked like; the Koch brothers using the tea party as an entryist/infiltration strategy for promoting libertarianism in government, the resulting frustration of those efforts leading to Steve Banon and the promotion of Trump and the beginnings of more "authoritarian" or dictatorial strategies, and now to Moldbug and Land promoting straight up accelerationism and fascism amongst the ascendant tech CEOs after they all abandoned their former siding with liberals.

But is it useful to know any of that? I feel like all that's happening as I come to understand how they think and how they implement their vision for the world, the more I understand how fucked we are (let's assume we're fucked, right?).

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[–] Juice@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

Nick Land is fucking deranged. Reading Fanged Noumena and reviewing the essays every once in a while have been useful for:

  1. Making jokes about Nick Land in my book club and to Deleuzian leftists.
  2. Understanding why Mark Fisher fell off and that he died a legend before becoming an anti-woke chuddy weirdo.
  3. Saying without a doubt that CCRU only functioned to break people's brains.

The first essay, "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" is actually kinda good, so it's interesting, but not practical, to witness the man's descent into madness. But you kinda have to already be a very strong reader, and there's like way better uses of your time.

  1. Read and really study Theses on Feuerbach - this is like the most important work in the Marxist canon IMO, esp in conjunction with The German Ideology. It's the cheat-sheet for Marxism, and hot take, a better summary of the Hegelian aspect of Marx than Anti Duhring; so we don't have to spend like 6 months cloistered and studying Philosophy of Right and The Logic of Hegel like Lenin did. 16 paragraphs, just read them over and over and look up the meaning of the passages if you get stuck.
  2. Read and study Gramsci - the right is obsessed with a caricature of him, and nobody really understands his theories. He was an incredible thinker, and his theories on hegemony and passive revolution are more of a right wing playbook than Land. But Gramsci's theories on hegemony and passive revolution also include how to counteract them.
  3. Read Laclau and Mouffe "Hegemony and Socialist Theory" this is the post-marx neoliberal playbook, all the problems with the neoliberal "left" are formulated here, and this view is widely and absolutely adopted by post-left academia. Way more insidious than any of the facades put up by the far right, which is always just putting "lipstick on a pig," the pig being fascism.
  4. Literally anything else. Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche all top contenders.

Seriously, you can skip Fanged Noumena