America is still young and, so far, remains the core of the proverbial ‘New World’. A brand-new world might, for some, require new thoughts and ideas taken from the ‘Old World’, or potentially, nearly new and separate religions. One might think of Mormonism or Scientology, but the rise of the Old World, emerging in the New, has found a solid foundation from the Anabaptists in the form of the Amish.
Finding their origins in the world of Dutch Calvinism, the Amish started as a series of small communities that spread rapidly. These communities were found within the Midwestern states, but in recent years, due to rapid population growth, have spread to over thirty states. This population growth in such a short space of time has left many wondering just how big the Amish population will be within the next few years across the United States.
As noted by Lyman Stone in 2018, it remains highly unlikely that the Amish will ever become a majority within the US largely due to structural factors relating to modernisation within certain groups and shifts from farming towards manufacturing. This is compounded by a lack of available farming areas for which they can use to move across the US. Most likely, in the coming decades, they will slowly become significant minority groups within many states, with Holmes County, Ohio most likely to become the first majority Amish County in the US this year, which will soon be followed by LaGrange County, Indiana.
For the Amish, all non-Amish are called ‘the English’. For the rest of this article, I will use the Amish’s own terminology (for my own sick amusement, knowing this article’s intended audience). The importance of this is because, at its core, what remains important is the examination of whether the Amish will bend to the knee to the English World or if the English World will learn anything from the Amish.
Will the Amish become fashionable as a cultural force that the English in America can rally around? Will they become fashionable, and can they not offer to help guide America back to its traditional roots? These are all important questions, which I hope might spark some debate amongst people and The Mallard readership. The good thing about writing online about the Amish, is knowing they will probably never see this.
Even prior to Covid, we have seen vast internal migration from around the US, from people fleeing states like California and New York towards that of Florida and Texas. Additionally, we are seeing a gradual return from the major built up cities towards the countryside. These trends are not unique to the US but it would seem that some kind of return to a more ‘tranquil’ and, dare I say, ‘traditional’ lifestyle has applied to many. Alongside this return to the countryside, the Amish have always, in one form or another, received attention from the body politic and general cultural zeitgeist of America. A friendly, devout, and non-violent group of Christians that merely wish to be left alone.
Following this, knowing that you have a high-trust, self-sustaining, and low crime faction of the population, may start paying dividends within certain states that have large major cities which suffer from various modern social ills (crime, drug abuse, etc.). As the Amish population grows, so too will the cultural weight they can throw around locally. Of course, we will never see Amish Congressman or Presidents. Instead, we will see a strong and firm cultural base in which a growing traditionalism-seeking group of people can find support within.
Will the Amish way of life ever become, by contemporary definitions, ‘popular’? Certainly not. However, similar to how people become Priests or Nuns, such paths may not be for them, but can be respected and admired. That admiration, the idea that such a group can do so much, may itself become fashionable; the Amish may come to symbolise a desirable form of of social stability, one situated in contrast to increasingly stormy issues emerging within American cities. As such, whilst the ‘full’ Amish way of life is not purely feasible for much of the population, elements may be worth emulating. A strong sense of local community identity, sustainability, and solidarity, as well as emphasising family and family-building; something that most agree is drastically needed.
In summary, will the Amish become a massive cultural force? It’s too soon to say. If demographic trends continue on their current trajectory, then within the next few decades, we may see the Amish become, not just a major cultural force, but the foundation of a parallel society; one providing an alternative to the excesses and drawbacks of globalised modernity.
It is entirely possible that the Amish, more than just playing a role as an increasingly culturally-influential Christian group within America, will come to provide a full-bodied blueprint for revitalising American ‘rugged individualism’. However, what is known for certain is that, in some distant rural parts of America, there still exist those who believe in the core values which made America into America – the will to flourish on the frontier of a new world.
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What I’ve Learnt as a Revolutionary Communist
This article was originally published in November 2021.
I have a confession to make.
A few months ago I was made an official member of the Revolutionary Communist Group after being involved as a participating supporter for about a month and a half. The RCG are, in their own words, Marxist-Leninist, pro-Cuba, pro-Palestine, internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist. They believe that capitalism is causing climate change, which they refer to as the ‘climate crisis’, and that socialism/communism is the only way to avert catastrophe.
They believe that the twin forces of imperialism and capitalism work today, and have been working for hundreds of years, to enrich the Western capitalist class by exploiting the labour of the proletariat and plundering the resources of the ‘Global South’. They publish a bi-monthly newspaper entitled ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ which acts as an ideological core around which centre most of the groups discussions.
After two months of twice-weekly zoom calls, leafleting in front of busy train stations and protesting in front of embassies, I was finally invited to become an official member. I rendezvous-ed with two comrades before being taken to a door which was hidden down a dark alleyway and protected by a large iron gate – certainly a fitting location for a revolutionary HQ. Inside was an office and a small library stocked with all manners of communist, socialist and anti-imperialist literature including everything from Chavs by Owen Jones to The Labour Party – A Party Fit For Imperialism by Robert Clough, the group’s leader.
I was presented with a copy of their constitution, a document about security and a third document about sexual harassment (the RCG has had issues with members’ behaviour in the past). It was here, discussing these documents for almost three hours, that I learnt most of what I know now about the RCG as an organisation and the ecosystem it inhabits.
The RCG is about 150-200 members strong with branches across the country – three in London, one in Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Glasgow and Edinburgh and possibly more. In terms of organisation and decision-making they use what they call ‘democratic centralism’ – a sprawling mess of committees made up of delegates that appoint other committees that all meet anywhere between once every two weeks and once every two years. They’re also remarkably well funded, despite the fact that their newspaper sells for just 50p. They employ staff full time and rent ‘offices’ up and down the country. They draw income from fundraising events, members dues, newspaper and book sales and donations (both large and small).
Officially, the RCG is against the sectarianism that famously ails the Left. However, one zoom call I was in was dedicated to lambasting the Socialist Workers Party who, I soon learnt, were dirty, menshevik, reactionary Trots. We referred to them as part of the ‘opportunist Left’ who routinely side with the imperialists.
The RCG doesn’t generally maintain good relations with many other major leftist groups. Central to RCG politics is the idea of a ‘labour [small L] aristocracy’ – a core of the working class who have managed to improve their material conditions just slightly and so work against the interests of the wider working class, suppressing real revolutionary activity in order to maintain their cushy positions. The RCG sees the Trade Union movement as the bastion of the labour aristocracy. They see the Labour party also as their greatest enemy – ‘the single greatest barrier to socialism in Britain’.
The RCG takes issue with the SWP specifically over their attitude to Cuba. They believe that most Trotskyists are too critical of socialist revolutions that have occurred in the past and so are not real communists – after all, no revolution will be perfect. The RCG’s issue with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is that they resent how the CPGB claims to be the main organisation for communism in this country and uses its coziness with the trade unions as a signifier of legitimacy. However, the RCG believes that this makes the CPGB not much more than an extension of the Labour party, which it despises.
The CPGB-ML (Communist Party of Great Britain – Marxist-Leninist), on the other hand, are much closer politically to the RCG. They also share the same view on the Labour party. However, the CPGB-ML has recently taken a loud anti-trans position and so the RCG wants nothing to do with them.
Socialist Appeal are a group that has organised with the RCG in London before but the two do not get along due to, once again, the former’s (until recent) support for the Labour party every election. The RCG also shares views with Extinction Rebellion but XR now no longer wants anything to do with the RCG because of the RCG’s insistence on selling its communist newspaper at every event its members attend. The RCG insisting on trying to recruit members at every event it attends, including events co-organised with other groups, is a major source of friction and one of the reasons nobody wants to organise with them. It’s also one of the reasons why the RCG has stopped organising with LAFA – the London AntiFascist Assembly.
LAFA, I was told, are a chaotic bunch. They staunchly oppose all forms of hierarchy and make decisions on a ‘horizontalist’ basis. In true anarchist fashion, there are no official leaders or ranks at all in LAFA and decisions are made sort of by whoever takes the initiative. Unfortunately this means that those who become unofficial leaders in the group are accountable to absolutely no-one because they are not technically responsible for anything, and naturally issues arise from this quasi-primitivist state of affairs. Ironically, this makes the London AntiFascist Assembly kind of based.
Interestingly, one organisation with which the RCG has never had any problems is Black Lives Matter. The RCG and Socialist Appeal were (apparently) the only two groups out on the streets in solidarity with BLM last summer – BLM even allowed RCG members to speak at their events. The RCG enjoyed quite a close and amicable relationship with BLM right up until BLM decided at the end of last summer to effectively cease all activity, with the reason given to the RCG being just that ‘the summer has ended’. Presumably, the bulk of BLM’s activist base either had to go back to school or just got bored.
Although the RCG strictly prohibits any illegal activity at any of its protests, one clause of the constitution is ‘a revolution clause’ requiring members to leave their jobs and move house at the discretion of the RCG. I was told this clause has never been invoked and isn’t expected to be invoked for decades at least but is there in case a genuine communist uprising were to take place somewhere in the country and RCG leadership decided that it needed members to move into the area to help. The RCG is intent on staying firmly on the right side of the law for the foreseeable future – supposedly until class consciousness is raised to such a level that the time for revolution arrives. Whether or not history will pan out the way they think it will, only time will tell.
Perhaps most curious was the group’s confused stance on lockdowns. They are fiercely pro-lockdown and pro-mask, but also highly critical of the government’s approach for reasons that are quite vague. Why a communist organisation would want to place unprecedented power in the hands of a government – a Tory government no less – that it thinks operates as the right arm of global capital is beyond me. When I brought this up, a lone voice of dissent in my branch, I was told I had made a ‘valid point’ and that the group needed to discuss the matter further, but that was it. The only explanation I could arrive at was that unfortunately the RCG, and I think the Left generally, are deep in denial about being anti-establishment.
The RCG’s modus operandi is the weekly stall: three or four communists will take a table and a megaphone to a busy location and try to hand out leaflets and sell copies of the FRFI newspaper. The idea was that people whose values loosely align with those of the groups could be contacted and organised by way of these stalls. The law of large numbers means that these stalls are curiously successful – one two-hour stall at the weekend can sell a dozen newspapers and enlist a handful of people to be contacted by the group at a later date. The process of collecting people and funnelling them down the contact-member pipeline is a slow one with a low success rate, but they’re relentless.
Interestingly though, I believe their decades-old activist tradition is actually one of their biggest weaknesses. Ironically, so-called progressives are stuck in the past. The RCG has a very minimal online footprint – it uses its profiles on twitter and Instagram only to post dates for upcoming events. The RCG have so much faith in their traditional method of raising ‘class consciousness’ (translation: spreading communism) that they’re losing the internet arms race and thus their grip on young people – their traditional base. The fact that the group has a large proportion of older members might have something to do with it.
However, Leftists are good at street activism – they’ve been doing it for decades. Leftist activist groups have ingrained in their traditions social technology – sets of practices, behaviours and attitudes – that have developed over time and that their opponents would do well to familiarise themselves with, like looking at the homework of a friend (or in this case, an adversary).
The RCG believes that it is one of very few, maybe even the only, Leftist group in Britain today committed to maintaining a substantial street presence. One of the conditions for membership, after all, is promising to attend at least one street protest a week. The RCG no doubt take their activism seriously, with a comrade even describing the group to me as being made up of ‘professional revolutionaries’. They believe that they are growing and will continue to grow in strength, propelled by financial and then ecological crises. They are very excited for the collapse of the Labour party, which they believe is all-but imminent, because they think it will cause swathes of the Left to lose faith in a parliamentary means of achieving socialism and take to the streets, where the RCG will be waiting for them.
My time as a revolutionary communist has been challenging but what I’ve learned is no doubt valuable. I strongly encourage others to do as I have, if only just for a few weeks or so. Join your local leftist organisation – pick a sect, any sect! Expand your knowledge, see a different perspective and gain skills you might not gain anywhere else. Speak to people with a completely different viewpoint from yours and learn how they think, you’ll be a slightly better and more knowledgeable person for it.
Quote: Leftists are good at street activism. They have ingrained in their traditions social technology that have developed over time and that their opponents should familiarise themselves with.
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The Worst Case Scenario
It may actually be possible for the right to be sleepwalked back into the arms of the regime. This might strike you as an impossibility, but I am increasingly unconfident in the rigidity of our opposition to the regime and the system it imposes on us. I still believe it to be highly unlikely that this occurs, but its absolute incredibility as a vision of the future has ceased. But how exactly are they working towards this aim, unknowingly or not, and what exactly am I referring to? I will try and articulate myself as clearly as possible, lest we continue to mope around in the gloomy shadows of doomed projects, forever dissatisfied with our lack of meaningful progress. As someone who continues to self-assuredly profess the inevitability of revolution in Britain, what I fear most are attempts to delay this eventuality – and more importantly attempts to prevent it. A nominally right-wing, authoritarian government could quietly emerge, restore popular comfort with the idea of Britain being a diverse, liberalised country and resolidify the British people’s pessimistic, defeated attitude towards politics, race, and the fundamental structure of the economy. More importantly, it could cause the right to accept the improvements as “enough”, maybe even claim them as the final victory (the battle that has been “won”), and see us de-escalate our efforts. We are entering stage three, the bargaining stage, and many wish to go, cap-in-hand, with offers to negotiate. This is the regime’s perestroika moment, and it absolutely must not succeed.
When you have a non-democratic and ideological regime, as we do in Britain – as most White countries also do, there are many things that it will do before compromising on its ideological tenets. To undo the core pillars that define the regime would be to invalidate the legitimacy of the regime itself, so – despite the societal breakdown and rapid deterioration in living standards – things continue on as they always have, irrespective of popular sentiment. Public services rot at the bone, the police stop functioning beyond their utility as apparatchik tools, etc. So long as the Pravda and Stasi remain competent and efficient the rest can wither and die and those in power won’t care. The Chinese Communist Party was able to transition their country into a quasi-nationalistic yet fundamentally capitalist country whilst preserving the iconography of Karl Marx and the hero worship of Chairman Mao. For many reasons, I doubt that our regimes in the west could have this kind of fluidity of form to persevere – but they may be able to work within the restrictions of their own resolute determination to maintain mass-immigration and the liberal, capitalist status quo.
Since 2016, the western establishment has become more totalitarian in its governance of the countries it occupies. The Leave vote in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA made our establishment paranoid and defensive (a defensiveness Rory Stewart alluded to in his own deluded way). Those in power will continue to try their best to maintain the status quo to the letter, down to every last miserable and humiliating detail. For that purpose, the Brezhnevian conservative Keir Starmer has been appointed as our Prime Minister to do absolutely nothing but maintain progress at its present pace, no faster no slower and without a single railroad switch change in site. But there will be those that work in the shady halls of power more fidgety than the rest who are especially concerned about the future of their project (the project being a global, totalitarian, technocratic panopticon where a small corporate elite rules over a coffee-coloured serf class – forever). They will be playing wargames where we win and they lose and considering how to defang the right before we are capable of animating the British away from their agenda and towards a fundamentally different trajectory (which ultimately is what Brexit actually represented but, thanks to Dominic Cummings and the December 2019 General Election, that rebellious movement in the zeitgeist was snuffed out and forgotten to history). What is hypothetically possible is a small concession to dissident right positions on race and inequality to refine the status quo, just as communist regimes historically used fascist methods and policies to keep their countries afloat in times of, usually self-inflicted, crisis. This would mean a form of multiracialism that is genuinely “fair”, or at least as fair as it sells itself, that is more palatable both to the general population as well as the right. A truly colour-blind and meritocratic system that punishes criminals adequately, rewards hard work and enacts planning reform to end many of the negative externalities mass immigration is causing – does this sound familiar? It is the outcome ‘ProgNats’ and the like are agitating for – a more effective and efficient Presidium-operated country that will have accomplished making it even harder for people to articulate a legitimate case for an authentic nationalist position.
There is reason to believe that the average person will go along with this soft transformation of society from an overtly egalitarian and explicitly anti-White one to a society that has quietly resigned itself to accepting some degree of hereditarianism (but a society that has only done so to preserve the globalist project). In fact, this transformation is already happening in real time, without any input from above causing it. I had the misfortune of being at a McDonald’s in Leeds just off a motorway and was shown a small microcosm that represented this trajectory. It was a grimy, dirty, noisy square with bright white lights and three interactive telescreens for ordering from. I decided to go forward into the open space between these telescreens and the counter to talk to one of the cramped Maccy’s girls and asked if I could order from her directly with physical cash (a request which she granted me). What I soon realised; stood in my Argosian slumber awaiting the proclamation of my order number, was that there were actually two queues. One had a huddle of immigrant slaves with their corporate rucksacks ready for retrieval (rucksacks which I feel are brightly coloured either to be demeaning or to mask the repulsiveness of the services they are having to render) and the other had a larger group of dishevelled, unkempt White Britons, awaiting their own personal orders. I stood in disbelief, wondering to myself “Are people okay with this? Are liberals okay with this?” and then went on with the rest of my day. Those immigrant wage slaves will work those jobs, and jobs like it, for the rest of their lives – their children will be born into slavery arranged by a Darwinian free-market. They have denied themselves the dignity of working in their own homeland as part of their own strata and been granted their monkey’s paw wish of better wages and better living for themselves – serving in heaven.
There may be the odd moment where someone finds the old liberal, egalitarian conditioning bubbling up again from their subconscious – a White woman might be stood at a bus stop and witness a panting, emaciated Somali riding a bike with one of the aforementioned rucksacks at 6AM and think twice about what is happening to our country (that is a real anecdote) – but ultimately “the bulk of people conform to the energies and pressures that they now feel themselves living under”, and our people will either accept the newly-imported caste of service sector slaves but not collaborate or they will actively, decadently indulge this newfound luxury. The point of bringing these things up is to say that if the right-wing can be made to feel comfortable with, and accepting of, a multi-ethnic society that is allowed to be freely arranged along racial lines, they will have done so with the same impulse as the lumpenaristocrat normies who subconsciously enjoy ordering slaves to their door. It might not even solely be contentment either, given that the right is increasingly unprincipled and no more moral in personal actions than the average person, they too may enjoy the illusion of prosperity that this new feudalism grants them just as much as anyone else. The only possible difference is that the act of a right-winger ordering a Caribbean Wecasa maid to their home may also come with it a post-service “ironic” gigachad tweet boasting of how cool and racist they just were.
As is increasingly pointed out, the liberal consensus is becoming one of ambivalence to the natural order. Likewise, there is no considerable pushback against any of this from those on the left who enjoy the costume of performative socialism. This is because of the very obvious fact that the left’s primary cause at the present is anti-Whiteness; it participates in an inter-ethnic conflict which is ongoing, rather than a class struggle that has been lost. Any criticism of these trends might be construed (rightly) as a critique of mass-immigration itself, might nudge open the heavy eyelids of the sleepy Saxon. We can’t have that, can we? Even if it means pretending the squalor that third-world immigrants create for themselves and the barbarism they make our own people suffer under is an acceptable arrangement for everyone. Because of this fevered fear of the “far-right”, we have a left-wing in Britain and elsewhere that is religiously dedicated to defending everything the liberal status quo does – doing so to quell their own anxiety about a legitimately anti-establishment force from the right which would unravel the regime’s fundamental underpinnings.
Brought to its inevitable conclusion, you end up with a strange consensus that everyone is generally happy with. The left-wing gets their “post-colonial” dissolution of whiteness, the liberals get their Pret a Manger serfs, and the right-wing gets their… [pending peace treaty]. We are hurtling into a rerun of 20th century liberalism where Whites and non-Whites of all political walks all enjoy the zany sheninigans of KSI and Kai Cenat but for very different reasons. This is different to what has been the norm currently, what I am describing is a society where hierarchy is more apparent, in which group differences are more apparent and part of an unconscious acknowledgement of what makes the status quo acceptable to everyone; a hierarchy sustained by a shared sense of relief among those who sit above lowest-of-the-low in the new economic caste system. Maybe liberals are the real slave owners, or maybe we are the real liberals for seeing anything wrong with this so-called progress. This Brave New, Bell Curve-ambivalent, World… a Libtartheid state.
Let us go into the dreams of the compromisemaxxers, those who wish to retain our present texture of life, our liberal, capitalist economic structure and even Britain’s current affliction. Ponder a future in which there is, with the gracious consent of some Bill Ackman-like figure, an end to the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion that the 2010 Equality Act, 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1965 Race Relations Act have brought – but also the continued assurance that Britain would continue on with its current course of Brazilification. This timeline, though delusional and unlikely – is more likely than mass-immigration slowing or being halted without a meaningful revolution. This alternative world where a government comes to power and makes our national demographic transformation as acceptable as possible is a recipe for turning revolutionary fervour into consigned resignation that the future is impenetrable and our fate sealed – save only for the hope that a White Bumiputera system could be implemented someday. “Okay, a homogenous, White British Britain might be over, but maybe we can have a Rhodesian style government” is essentially a sentiment being passed around now in once-nationalist circles, as the new generation works to dilute opposition to the demographic problem. “Okay, well maybe the American Empire will allow us to be like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan or Israel even! We’ll still bow down and maintain occupation policy on the economy and migration, but the immigrants will be guest workers without rights” – as appealing as a British Gastarbeiter might conceptually be to our friends in middle-class management jobs who work adjacent to power in the centre of London, this silver bullet is in fact a poison pill. This immigration policy might have failed West Germany and lead to Germany having a large and expanding Turkish minority, but I am sure we could make it work here with our own immigrant population. I can see it now, Prime Minister ProgNat declares all immigrants as now being non-citizens, but residents in perpetuity – no push to return Britain to the state it was in when our grandparents were born, but instead the beginning of a giddy rock throwing competition with hornets’ nests as targets. This would transition us to the most tolerable post-majority arrangement but would further breed resentment in the immigrant population – assuring our doom as a people further down the line. Do we want done to us here in Britain our very own Zanzibar revolution? Having delayed the radicalisation of the masses by several decades, it would degenerate inevitably back to the present status quo but with much worse demographics to contend with. We would be scattered specs of diasporic blood across the global windscreen of progress, without any hope of homogeneity ever returning, the final nail in the coffin which holds within it our distinction from every other nation in the world, especially what defines us – our root-nation homeland in Europe. This is not the kind of country I want to live in, or the kind of country I want my descendants to live in. Whole areas lived in exclusively by immigrants – guest workers or not. Bus systems, roads, infrastructure all constructed and maintained to facilitate a large immigrant population – guest workers or not. The status is not the issue, their rights and position as citizen-equals is not the issue, the issue is these enclaves being here at all. Again, compromises are dreamt up in the hope of mitigating the problem, of dampening its consequences and the issues that come with it. But if the problem continues to exist it will endure, and if it endures it will win. Reform will not lead us to victory.
It is as if all revolutionary thought and visions of a brighter future are incomprehensible now to most, to such an extent that even within the realm of a hypothetical fantasy of taking over our country, we still affirm even within our own minds the promontory confines of what can and cannot be done – as rigidly set by the establishment. For the last four years or so we have seen the emergence of a Menshevik/Bolshevik split on the right, a split between those who wish to reform the current system and those that wish to see it all swept away – driven by (I would argue) a widening class divide. This class divide is a new one, caused by the excesses of 21st century capitalism, the continued fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 Lockdown policies – all of which led to the consolidation of plutocratic power over Britain. To further pursue liberalisation of the economy (as if everything that came before now “Wasn’t Real Growth”) would only sharpen the worsening quality of life and living standards of the White British working class. The necessity is greater now than at any other point in our nation’s history for a radical, class-collaborationist economic system that puts the interests of the nation as a whole first – perhaps a form of Corporatism or a modern rendition of Syndicalism. The details are less important than the essence, which is that nationalism is no longer compatible with capitalism (if it ever had been). We need an economic system that doesn’t just benefit the middle class in the South of England (a section of our population that continues to successfully avoid radicalisation due to being economically shielded from most of the repercussions of capitalism).
What might often seem like ankle biting on the Twitter timeline is at its core a division over the basic fundamentals of how our nation should be organised. I am trying to make the case that a middle class-dominated right is currently leading us down into dead ends, pitfalls and off ramps to deradicalisation. There is now within the right a reframing of the issues that places Whites (in the pan-European, London-centric demographic sense) as an exclusively middle-class demographic (comparatively), pitted against a disproportionately black and brown underclass beneath them – a top-down class war with total disregard for the White working class caught in the market forces crossfire. From this line of reasoning, Thatcherite arguments have intruded themselves into our circles – with a broad racialism as their justification. Many on the right now seem to be willing to throw poorer, less-intelligent Whites into a third-world underclass wilderness to compete and struggle against the new slave caste (imported here to undercut them as workers and replace them as people). An example of what I describe occurred not too long ago, when a redpill on the racially-disproportionate occupancy rates of social housing in London was contorted into a dilution of the anti-immigration agenda and support for “selling off of social housing”. Not to state the obvious, but selling off social housing would only accomplish a geographic integration of the immigrant population, in line with explicitly stated regime aims, softening the urban BAMElaw which acts as an eternal reminder of the glaring incongruence between the Britain that was and the Britain that now is. This factitious right-wing continues to be fuelled by centre-right establishment journalists such as Sam Ashworth-Hayes and propped up with power-adjacent backhand deals granting them access to – maybe not the halls of power – but the cloister outside of them.
Our future depends upon reconnecting with the severed ends of our endangered White British working class. The remnants of them that are still out there have been deprived of everything but their blood – their nation is all they have left. Their country, their communities, their jobs, their trade unions, their dignity – all stripped from them as if they were no longer needed. So they wander the post-industrial wastelands, as they have for over thirty years, Ahasverus’ of Albion – longing for the homeland they knew when they grew up, constantly being told that it is not only dead but that it was evil and that it never really existed anyway. What is the liberal right’s answer to these people? What of the generation of White British people born into this post-industrial wasteland? Many have now become Gridlockian, Macra-like shadows of their former glory – anti-social, loutish; addicted to drugs, alcohol, and readily-available techSoma. It follows that the liberal right identifies more with their class than their nation. This is one sign among many that capitalism is ultimately a left-wing force, as is liberalism – perpetuating a materialist worldview that breaks down national bonds and turns individuals with homelands into consumers with shopping malls. This goes back to my earlier point about the desire to make the displacement process “fair” rather than to abolish it entirely; the result is a people that identify more with their class in a revitalised capitalist hierarchy. The new right-wing rejection of any and all criticisms of capitalism as a system comes from an animosity towards the White British working class for still being able to perceive things through a communitarian lens, which is itself a holdover from the trade union movement – which had kept the White British working class economically collectivist in their outlook (with that same tribalism now increasingly taking a populist orientation). Poorer, less-intelligent Whites could only have deportations, an end to immigration in principle and the abolition of capitalism as its survival/victory condition – this solution can never become conscious if the issues are allowed to be oriented around a middle-class class-consciousness purely driven by personal, material self-interest. An atomised, materialist right without a communal and spiritual element, regardless of form or flavour, continues to be stillborn because it lacks the ability to evoke a higher calling or bond that calls the people upwards. A higher calling that would offer higher values beyond their personal, material self-interest is something the White British working class is more open to now due to having had their class-consciousness broken by liberal capitalism. By giving up national economic decision making to shareholder capitalists and market forces, we have cut off our legs to spite our body, the national body, and the liberal right retroactively justifies the real economic contractions and trauma of deindustrialisation as a necessary (even positive) act of policy.
Britain, by every real metric, has ceased to have a meaningful, sovereign national government. We are now an economic zone with the apparition of a state attached – a state which on paper has the absolute authority to do anything in the country through parliament, but which in practice has no such authority. Government bankruptcy is irrelevant to a system that will always want an ever-expanding pool of labour to increase the number of consumers, keep the value of labour down and chill workers’ rights. We once had a mercantilist economic system, with the Navigation Acts and Corn Laws – great guarantors of our national wealth, until the Manchester vision of our country took hold and facilitated the creation of an international business elite that would eventually become greater in power and influence than the nation states themselves. This is the essence of capitalism – a materialist, internationalist system that values only money, productivity and growth – could this really be preferable to communism? It sounds identical to communism, actually. Mass immigration being, in part, not only a symptom of the finance capital growth model but a policy which this system depends upon (especially as it breaks down and self-cannibalises) is proof enough that we must strive for a fundamental alternative. The liberal right can write this off in little quips as much as they like but their solutions are evidently not workable for meeting the current moment. We are capable of organising a new system beyond the EconGrad consensus. We can step over the noxious vision of a nominally right-wing Britain that would be using a vaguely racialised comparative advantage theory of labour to justify the necessity of third-world slaves, second-world professionals and first-world transnational elites.
We are up against self-professed liberals who are incapable of answering their own version of the breakfast question – “What if liberal capitalism and nationalism were mutually exclusive?” – even though it is plainly obvious by now that they are. But maybe the globalists will grant them a scrap from the table down to their comfortable tier on the ivory tower, above the sea of sludge they are generally free from interacting with – like the limousine driving through the favela. Is this not what Milei and Wilders represent? These are surely establishment plots to sell artificial right-wing figures that are still controlled by the interests of capital so that liberalism can be maintained but with an authoritarian update that cleans up the bugs and issues. This only works if the right allows itself to become part of the regime apparatus of control, by the co-opting of dissident online right-wing culture and its domestication into a harmless playpen on the fringes – a playpen where naive, grumbling, headline-quote-tweeting toy soldiers cooperate unwittingly with the status quo. It seems to me the right-wing has found itself desiring only to be pandered to again, wishing for superficial wins to brag about online: like videogames having sexy female characters again or the adverts being trad. The shattered, retreating sentiment of “Maybe we never really wanted a meaningful change to the social, cultural and economic status quo, maybe the texture of our lives in modernity is fine, maybe multiracialism is okay – for they have stopped humiliating my people and our beliefs daily and have begun nominally cooperating with us” completing the total political convergence of left and right on a reformed regime that a depoliticised population can receive some newfound benefits from. That is what I mean when I warn of the perestroika of our time. We must hope and pray this stalls, failing at the hands of conservative figures such as Keir Starmer or prevented by reactionary figures such as J.K. Rowling.
It is time to acknowledge a paradox of 21st century politics, one which only figures like Matthew Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have alluded to – we are the heirs to the socialist cause despite not believing in equality or a materialist worldview. There has been a “collapse of the far left in the last 20 to 30 years”. Communism as a conscious, ideological force no longer exists. It fell as if it were a cursed ring, melting into the Soviet Union’s now-extinct volcano. The mantle which we take up now is the conservative tribalism which the trade union movement represented in Britain – which once organised workers and communities to struggle against the shifting sands of progress imposed by capital. Just as such tribalism must return to our people through a deeper pulse that reaches beyond the defeat at Hastings to our Anglo-Saxon primordials, the right must also return to the radical anti-capitalism aspired to in previous right-wing movements before its compromises whilst in power. We must now move away from the eternally sliced pie where oligarchs expect their tithe and piece of the nation to run amok with. To meet this moment, it is crucial for us not to lose the thread of working towards an authoritarian, centralised state power – a state that would be mounted firm across the whole of the British Isles, shielding the British people and their liberty from the volleyed shots of moneyed interests. The plunder will end.
Our people can do better than this. We do not have to settle for anything. We do not have to make the most of a bad situation. We certainly should not delight in occupation delicacies. By present trends, our people might earnestly snatch at any offer for improvement without undoing the principles that are baked into our being which caused the problems in the first place. That for me is The Worst Case Scenario – where not only the apolitical masses, but the left, the liberals and even the right reach a pitiful mindbreak akin to the conclusion of Winston’s journey in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The quiet deflowering of our stagnant present into something far more dangerous – a system that can survive long into the future – is something we must reject with all of our energy no matter how spent we may feel currently. A genuine alternative is possible, it always has been, that is what they fear the most – our recognition of this fact – and why there is any talk at all of the possibility of, or desire for, reform within the establishment. The revolution can and will happen irrespective of potential economic and social turbulence. We can triple the wages and double the pensions of policemen and soldiers; we can do what is demanded of our country even if it will likely hurt our country in the medium-term. A fox gnaws at its leg when it is caught in a trap. The civil strife which is coming is inevitable, but luckily the establishment won’t succeed in its hypothetical reforms – our society might transmogrify into one which is more ambivalent to ethnicity as every group recedes into their own private spaces away from each other – but our western governments are far too dug in to ever consider a change to the present course, even if it could mean the perpetuation of their power (even in spite of suspicious actors on the right trying to make this a reality). Given the foreign policy ongoing in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, it seems to me that those presently in power would rather see total nuclear oblivion to human civilisation than see their ideological and political grip on the world slackened in any way.
Let us go forth with wind in our sails, with our own form of ambivalence – ambivalence to the radical solutions which we take to be self-evidently necessary. Imagine the spectacular and triumphant scene of a fresh-faced vanguard declaring victory at the signing of a British Lausanne Convention; imagine the sensation of crossing the threshold into a restored nation and rebalanced world, one free of the impending burden of serfdom in a foreign land. We must stamp out the cockroach-like pessimism of skirted-edge 20+ year projects. Embrace the greater you that exists beyond your consciousness and reach within for the fated Anglo-Shintoism that will lead us home to sweeter pastures. The Samurai turned to Ceorl, the Wakizashi turned to Seax – meet your greater form with outstretched arms and welcome yourself back into the fold as a true Englishman, ready to step over this purgatorial dichotomy and the squabbles of then and now and forge something entirely new and yet also distinctly old and true to ourselves. Reject this world in its current form and not only break free of each and every one of its tentacles but severe them like the second labour of Hercules so that our progeny may be freer, safer and more prosperous than we ever will be. Survival depends on the sheer will of men willing to dedicate themselves to the cause, men who we know not the names of now but who will emerge in the eleventh hour and forge the new England, the new Britannia, summoned up as reincarnated spirits of forgotten heroes. All was once over in the 9th century too when all was to be lost and yet was then formed anew. No man is willing to suffer or die for planning reform and means-tested pensions; much less the privatisation of social housing or the lowering of corporate taxes for Tesco and Amazon. Reject the pending peace treaty; reject those that wish to negotiate with power to help it kick our can further down the road. This is our struggle, not our children’s or children’s children’s. Our time is now, and everything is on us. Believe in yourselves and believe in Britain.
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Reading Kant’s Significance in the History of Political Ideas
The purpose of this short enquiry is into the significance that Immanuel Kant’s essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) played in the development of political thought. It is widely known and remarked upon that the Answer is a major intervention in the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, and its remarkable brevity has provided great philosophical inspiration. My concern here, however, is the specifically political implications of Kant’s observations and the wider Enlightenment (Aufklärung in Kant’s native German). The fact that German is the original language might seem a minor point, but in reality is the central issue to my enquiry: German is famously difficult to translate directly into English, the most common philosophical examples being Geist (Hegel) and dasein (Heidegger). Kant is, quite obviously, not spared this.
The opening lines remark that Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. Immediately we are faced with a semiotic problem: some translations of Kant’s phrase are “self-imposed nonage”, whilst some also use the more evocative minority. In this sense, “immaturity/nonage/minority”, might seem interchangeable but in the history of political ideas hold varying degrees of weight: immaturity is the most commonly used term because of its relationship to the wider Enlightenment’s project of reason, rationality and clarity of thought, which is a state of achievement of the intellect. Nonage and minority, however – which is the chosen translation of Columbia University and, as Mary J. Gregor shows, was Kant’s intended meaning – mean more specifically a state of dependence, as Kant quickly moves onto, arguing that it is the “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction of another”.
The reason minority is more appropriate than immaturity is that the latter implies a lack of critical faculties, whereas the former implies a denial of their existence. It is not that “man” or “the human” cannot make use of rational thought, but that he is not allowed to do so – in a state of self-imposition, of course. Kant is not claiming that the human race has been enslaved, but that it has thus far displayed a “lack of resolution and courage” to use its own powers of intellect. None of this is particularly original or insightful commentary: indeed, Kant deals with it in the first paragraph of the Answer. What matters, however, is the historical context of political thought which was inevitably in the back of Kant’s mind.
As the Answer moves on, Kant claims that it is unlikely individuals in their own lives will be able to embrace this rational freedom fully, and that those who do will “only make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch”. Kant directs, instead, his call to courage to “a public” (ein Publikum) which has made the mistake of allowing its thinking to be done by a minority (and here the word is specifically denoting a numerical minority) and not itself. “Publikum” offers another linguistic indeterminacy, unfortunately, on both sides of the linguistic barrier: in translation, for instance, “publikum” might mean people, or public, or audience; in English, meanwhile, ‘people’ might mean several individuals, a single mass, a multitude, a greater entity than merely the sum of those alive, and so on. Here, we can reasonably assume, due to Kant’s context, he means “the public” in the pre-democratic tradition, of the wider numbers of individuals who are not “fit to rule”.
It is this proto-democratic move that makes Kant so significant, and his comment on “minority” often passed over by political theorists. To understand why, we must take a brief detour to the medieval jurists. In late-twelfth and early-thirteenth century England, there arose the idea of a specifically public realm that belonged not to the King, but to the wider entity of the public world; again, not public in the sense of the multitude of undifferentiated people, but the “eminent domain” that, as Ernst Kantorowicz observed, belonged to the continuity of a domain whose matters”touched all”.
At the same time in history was the slow transference of ideas from the religious to the secular, specifically the application by Baldus de Ubaldis of St. Augustine’s idea of the “mystical body” (corpus mysticum) of the Church, to the public, using the same terminology – a corpus populus mysticum, a mystical public body. The first, emergence, and then alignment of the public with the “political realm” is significant when we read Kant’s appeal to the public, as he was speaking to a surprisingly recent development of political thought, which was still much-resisted by monarchs and republics across Europe (it is important to remember ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonymous).
Before understanding Kant’s significance fully, however, there was another major development by Baldus that requires explanation: the idea of the public as a legal minor. Indeed, “the public” was more a legal creation than anything else, but its legal definition and status was as yet undetermined. As Joseph Canning details, Baldus argued in the fourteenth century, that the populus could not possess a “legally valid will”, as it was incapable of acting entirely on its own. Instead, it “acts and wills” through its representative: the King (as in a monarchy) or council (as in a city-republic), whose actions are taken as synonymous with the realm. It was following a rediscovery of a Roman Law Edict, moreover, that the legal terminology which anticipated Baldus’ claim arose in the thirteenth century. This Edict observed that those people “under the law” were “madmen, children, and cities”. The conflation with children and madmen implied that a public had no mental maturity that would allow it to govern alone. It did not merely require a King – it depended on one.
This is why Kant’s use of the word “minority” holds so much significance in the history of political thought up to the Enlightenment; Kant directly and boldly refuted the very basis of anti-democratic thought, by claiming that man – in the public sense – was not a minority but in fact did possess the rational intellect capable of making its own choices and, therefore, ought to be given the freedom to exercise that intellect.
There is, however, a short comment to make in conclusion. Kant’s proto-democratic claims did not prevent the nineteenth century thinker, John Stuart Mill, from making the argument that whilst some “publics” (to use Kant’s term) had achieved maturity, others had not – and it was therefore the responsibility of the mature publics to guide the immature publics to civilisation in a benevolent imperialism that, illiberally enough, would influence the imperial project for the rest of its existence. As Jennifer Pitts makes clear, in Mill’s eyes, “progressiveness, the cardinal human quality, was also the monopoly of a select group of societies”.
