Why The Communists Always Lose
Why The Communists Always Lose
In 1966, a Japanese-American couple, Michio and Aveline Kushi, founded a health food store and named it after their favorite novel, Erewhon, by Samuel Butler. Today, Erewhon Market is a chain of ten ultra upscale supermarkets, all in Los Angeles County.
Our friend and occasional guest poster here Isaac Simpson visited Erewhon's new Pasadena store recently, and came away with some thoughts about why communism is ultimately doomed. He's generously allowed me to excerpt that post here, which I have done below. Before we get to that, a brief trading note.
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Now on to Isaac's post.
Excerpted from Isaac Simpson on X
More Than Nowhere: The Meaning of Erewhon
Delicious Tacos [the pseudonym of a talented, Los Angeles-based writer] tweeted “Erewhon is women’s Valhalla”.
Indeed, the most common site in Erewhon is college girls dragging around their hicklib mothers. They gawk at prices together. The mothers’ eyes open wide, their jaws drop—but they aren’t angry. They’re excited. Impressed. Stimulated. Mother and daughter share a smirk. This is it.
Every other grocery store has become that bland, drab, grey experience in comparison. Even Whole Foods, the proto-Erewhon status symbol once known as “whole paycheck,” has plummeted in perception—now it’s known for seed oil stuffed crap and weird globalist frozen beef offerings. An Amazon-subsidiary and the very definition of “middle.”
Just opened ground beef from “Whole Foods” and it smelled awful. Sell by date suspiciously far in the future.
— Disgraced Propagandist (@DisgracedProp) September 2, 2024
“Product Uruguay or Australia.”
I don’t even want to know the global holding company that produces this. pic.twitter.com/fn4GENVntL
When global capital in the form of index funds, holding companies, private equity groups, and hedge funds own everything, competition plummets to communist-grey. Everything starts to look and taste the same. People will do anything for not only for real quality, but simply for real variety.
So the market created its own vacuum where an Erewhon should be, and that’s why its here. Still, what Erewhon has done with its brand is astounding. Girls in Michigan post TikToks asking which local stores are most like Erewhon. Erewhon bags and sweatpants are tongue in cheek status symbols. The swirling, colorful $20+ influencer-branded smoothies, one of which contains real beef, are edible artworks; master classes in modern marketing. It’s the greatest brand America has produced in many years.
And why? Because the vibe of Erewhon is elite shamelessness. A tuning out of the problems of the world. The prices are appalling, shocking really, and that’s the point. One great example is Harry’s Berries (currently my favorite brand on Earth, for reasons I’ll explain in a later article), strawberries in a clear plastic box that sell for over $20 per. Ready-made-food plates start at $29.99 per pound. Probably the biggest markup? Erewhon sells a small container of white rice for $9.
The rice says “I’m hot, I live on cigarettes and cocaine, but I just need the slightest bit of sustenance to get me through this afternoon.” It’s the opposite of the pathetic apology that Whole Foods has become. The entire operation is a giant class insult from high to low. The upper classes are abandoning “world saving” as a class signal. Healing the planet has become middle brow. The rich now show off by healing themselves.
I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life.
― Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Charles Eisenstein is a handsome Jewish Yale “expert” pop economist; in other words, he tells the upper classes how to be cool at dinner parties. Most of his work is Marx-light blabbering, but here he’s signaling something new. “Caring about the environment,” is out. Self-sacrifice is out. Being ugly for the sake of the blacks is out. What’s in? Superior aesthetics. No seed oils. Strawberries that actually look red inside like strawberries are supposed to look. Indulging in the sweet taste of a real juicy berry. And becoming one yourself.
The bored and rich always lead revolutions and now they’re leading us towards something actually genuinely beautiful. Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use tech. The private equity magnate shops at Erewhon. The meaning is the same. Slop is for the masses.
But the masses follow the rich, and thus we begin the long march towards mainstreaming trad wife naturalism in a way that could genuinely save white women, and thus American democracy. In the end, the internationalist blood sucker can indebt us to the tune of a trillion zillion dollars for educations, houses, cars, whatever. They could make that little rice container $500, women will still flock to Erewhon, if only to sit outside of it.
That American flag on Erewhon? It ain’t comin’ down. Not because of Kulak-grade middle-class “patriotism,” which will never ever be “cool” again, at least until there’s another Civil War. It’s not coming down because Erewhon simply doesn’t care. It’s not trying to change the world. It’s trying to be beautiful. Actually beautiful. And it takes enough work to achieve just that.
So what is Erewhon, you ask? Erewhon is why the communists always lose.
Isaac Simpson is the founder of WILL, a dissident marketing agency. You can follow him on X here, and check out his Substack here.