Thoughts on the Coronation
Or,
It's much easier to criticise the old than to challenge the new.
"We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born."
Roger Scruton
I watched and enjoyed the Coronation of King Charles III, a fact that will confound my leftist and progressive friends, the few I have left, the few that don't dismiss me as an inveterate reactionary. Actually, I am a lifelong socialist and remain a socialist, entirely unmoved by repeated right-wing assertions that Karl Marx leads straight to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. An activism that is fuelled by doctrinaire ideological commitment and blind loyalty to fetishised principles leads to some very nasty authoritarian and repressive conclusions, but that is true generally. Whilst I continue to advocate socialism, I have grown increasingly sceptical of socialists, or Leftists, or 'progressives,' liberals, and self-styled radicals and rebels, many of whom strike me as pathologically anti-social, anti-democratic, regressive, elitist, authoritarian, and profoundly illiberal. I shall return to this in the main body of the text.
The Coronation itself was a sublime mix of ancient pageantry, history, English choral music, Handel, Crown Imperial, some woman holding an enormous and attractively decorated sword, Prince William swearing an oath of allegiance – all in the service of liberty, freedom and – important – national and popular sovereignty. This is the part that leftists struggle with – the monarch vows to protect the freedom of the people against all those forces who would encroach upon and remove that freedom. We are a free people. I shall return to this point later.
“The weather hasn’t been entirely kind,” said Huw Edwards. Maybe not. But rain couldn't obscure the glory of the day. It's interesting to hear the extent to which critics of monarchy arguing the case for republicanism and an elected leader ignore the numbers that monarchy continues to attract in support, dismissing such people as unthinking and unreasoning, as servile and brainwashed. It's a revealing attitude, indicating less a democratic respect for each and every member of the demos than a concern that people conform to the right thoughts – theirs. Vivat! Vivat! people shouted, as they tapped into the mysterious magic bond that unites the nation. People motivated by a bloodless rationalism and an atomistic conception of democracy that reduces to counting numbers have no conception of the extent to which the non-rational performs the essential functions of inspiration, motivation, and unity. They lack it in their own politics, with the result that they consistently fail to attract the numbers to their causes, which goes a long way towards explaining their taste for coercive and authoritarian imposition and regulation, legal or otherwise. For all that they insist on electing everything, in the name of 'democracy' and 'the people,' they show little of the democratic spirit and a great deal of contempt for actual people. For all that they criticise monarchy in the name of the people, they have remarkably little connection to the people, and even less love for the people, particularly those people who depart from their fundamentally correct views on everything – which is nearly everybody. It is this that troubles me most about the anti-monarchy animus that rages every time there is a royal event. My words could be construed as a defence of monarchy and a repudiation of leftist, socialist, and democratic modes of politics. That's not so. It is because I am a socialist and a democrat that I am concerned by the clear strains of anti-democratic and divisive elitism that are running through contemporary leftism.
The innovations of the ceremony worked well, and much better than the critics had feared. The Kyrie eleison in Welsh sung by Bryn Terfel was truly magnificent, as if Mount Snowdon had assumed human form. It's the first time that a coronation has featured a performance in Welsh. My mum was a huge fan of this guy, and I was lucky enough to see him at Llandudno's Venue Cymru last October. He was immense. He just walked on to no fanfare and sang without a microphone, hitting the back of the arena with natural power and projection. I'm used to rock concerts, where singers, with the best will in the world, make appointments with notes that they're never going to reach. But I admire their ambition. Bryn Terfel was truly impressive. I had to buy tickets months in advance. I spent a year waiting for the concert. And it came and went. But it was superb. I'm chalking it up as another incredible Llandudno highlight.
The Ascension Gospel Choir was true soul music. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Hindu, read the Lesson, with his, Akshata Murty, joining in with Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven. The gifts given to the King by leaders of other faiths felt like a generous addition to a Christian service, not a subtraction from it. This was the very antithesis of the narrow, reductive, divisive multiculturalism that causes so much harm and offence, and does so deliberately. Here was Great Britain being greater for being proud of everything we share. Here was a unity without uniformity and a diversity without division, everything that makes a nation one.
But, of course, the dividers and detractors were out in force, if the phrase 'in force' gives a misleading impression of their actual numbers. The fact that they are loud and relentless, like the electronic Jacobins they are, gives the impression that they are far more numerous than they actually are. It's one reason why I laugh uncontrollably at their insistence that all things be subject to election – their own electoral records when it comes to their pet peeves is pitiful. Hence their trademark political modus operandi is not democratic election but institutional encroachment, occupying decision-making positions in order to engineer change from above and from without. They are not democrats in tune with the people at all, but that most loathsome of all creatures, bureaucrats of knowledge and power. And this brings me to my point on freedom, democracy, and sovereignty, and the suspicion that monarchy may be their best defences and critics of monarchy their most efficient executioners. As a socialist, I wouldn't trust contemporary leftism any more than George Orwell, also a democratic socialist, trusted the leftists of his day. Time was to prove his political instincts and insights correct.
As the nation watched the Coronation, it heard King Charles III promise to govern according to the law. That law is our ancient common law. This is important. That promise is a promise to defend our sovereignty, as free individuals, as a people, and as a nation. This promise before God contains an implicit recognition on his part that he understands that Britain is a sovereign nation, that he affirms this sovereignty, and that he vows to protect and preserve this sovereignty. That's quite a vow. I wonder how many among both the supporters and critics of monarchy understand the implications of that vow. That is a vow to protect national sovereignty against the interference and encroachment of outsiders. These outsiders come in all shapes and sizes, large and small, the many and the few. My interest in this respect is in the way that leftist, progressive, and liberal critics of monarchy are almost universally in favour of uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism, a world without borders, and rule by extraneous international bodies such as the EU, the WEF, the UN, the WHO. Examine their backgrounds and their politics and you will invariably find people who are educators, administrators, and regulators, employed in the academy, in bureaucracies, think tanks, and 'schools' of various kinds, not-for-profit organisations, NGOs. Follow the money and power back enough and you will soon find the connections to hedge funds and corporations. They are managerialists to the core, Hegel's old 'universal class' of politically neutral bureaucrats writ large on the global stage. They are fully paid up members of one or more of the international acronym gangs currently stalking the political world, draining it of its remaining democratic content. What makes me suspect the motives, interests, and intentions of the critics of monarchy so much is that these critics show so little interest in freedom, democracy, and popular and national sovereignty in the rest of their politics. They become democrats and populists in the cause of attacking monarchy, only to express complete support for the myriad unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable bodies which are seeking to order and organise this country and all other countries. Such people further the process of bureaucratisation rather than democratisation and seek to govern people by remote control. They are not, in other words, anti-monarchist at all, merely one particular form of monarchy in the cause of instituting their own. I know these people well and they have zero connection with the people, disdain for democracy, and contempt for people – 'not enough people know enough' one told me. They prefer knowledge over opinion, their own knowledge. These are the credentialed elites who demand certification before permitting a person the right to speak.
The WHO is currently proposing to award itself superordinary political powers that are beyond democratic scrutiny and control, the power to declare pandemics or states of climate emergency, which contains the power to lock us down and lock us in whilst imposing further restrictions on our freedom as they may require to serve their ends. There, in the technocratic commitment to a centralised control under globalist imperatives is the new monarchy in the making, and the critics of the old monarchy are all on board with its principal features: Net Zero, digital ID, ESG, social credit scores, surveillance societies, fifteen minute cities. All of these and more are policies which are being actively pushed on elected governments by unelected and unaccountable bodies, all of those are erosions of our freedom. And they are all implicated in the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form on a global basis, leading to the completion of a process with which capitalism began – the enclosure of the global commons. The striking thing is that whilst the anti-monarchists style themselves leftist in some way, they are actually exciting themselves targetting and uprooting feudal remnants – church and religion are other favourite targets – in the cause of final corporate enclosure. They have mistaken riding the latest wave of capitalist development for radicalism – they are 'in' on the very 'progress trap' that has generated the crises they continually complain of. The irony is comical to political conservatives and bitter to those, like me, who are socialists. No one does greater harm to socialism than socialists. Although, to be clear, I see few socialists here, I see leftists who are really liberals on steroids, seeking to impose by force a commonality and unity that liberal individualism has unravelled. They are 'progressives' in an age when the delusions of progress ought to have become apparent. They are the last thing a radical politics needs.
I have no time for republicanism and no passion for elected heads of state. The politics of yester year is no solution to the problems of today. Completing the bourgeois revolution will do nothing to solve the problems generated by that revolution, only make them worse. And all the time and energy wasted in the cause of a past class struggle is time and energy that is not being spent to more productive political ends. More elected politicians at a time when it ought to be manifestly clear that elected chambers are empty of power vis capital and the corporations expresses not radicalism but futility, leftists exchanging the red flag for the white flag of surrender (which is fitting, seeing as they have jumped ship to become 'progressives.' They are managerialists who have yet to learn that in the corporate capitalist world the would-be regulators become the creatures of the regulated in short order. I suspect that, deep down, they know this fine well, and are consciously complict. In the course of the past century and a half, the choice between a working class self-managing socialism from below and a top-down bureaucratic socialism in the hands of the educated and the enlightened has been put many times, and every single time liberals and progressives and activists and ideologues have opted for the latter. They are still doing it. Their views are steeped in an anthropological and democratic pessimism. To put the point shortly, they are elitists who think little of the capacities of 'the masses.'
And will critics be happy should we ever get a President Blair or a President Major or a President Johnson? Of course not! Because in an era of personal preference in which people reserve the right to choose truth and goodness as they see fit, they can never accept the subordination of their choices to an aggregated number. Such people can never be satisfied by democratic choice. The slogan “Not My King” will become “Not My President” in no time at all. A “Not My” age of “Not My” self-choosing individuals is utterly incapable of organically, wilfully, and democratically constituting collective authority and commonality. And therein lies the tragedy of an age that campaigns incessently on unfolding 'global' crises and catastrophes but cannot muster the collective will and wit to do anything about them. The only road open to such people is the totalitarian one. They are prisoners of a politics of desperation, which is a fundamentally anti-democratic anti-politics. The problem with electing heads of state, whether they are politicians or ex-politicians or otherwise, is that such figureheads cannot but be captive creatures of the politics from which they spring.
We are free individuals and a free people in a free and sovereign nation, this is our inalienable birthright, which a monarch vows to protect and preserve. If the Coronation stands for anything, then it stands for principles and promises that are enduring. And which beg fundamental questions of politics – are freedom, democracy, and sovereignty substantively meaningful terms or not? This question enjoins us to hold onto our traditions and principles against the concerted force of various people, great and small, masters and servants, engineers and functionaries, who are pressuring us to throw them away as 'outdated.' That such principles and traditions are indeed out of kilter with the coming technocracy and its anti-democratic inhumanism is the very reason why we should hold on to them with dear life. The simple fact is that once alienated and extinguished, you will never be able to get those principles and traditions. Peter Laslett wrote of 'the world we have lost.' Capitalism is a story of a great disembedding, separating people from their social and communal supports and stabilizers to render them pliable, manipulable atoms on the market, forever responding to and driven by external imperatives. We are witnessing the final stages of that process, but the realization is not the promised freedom and cornucopia but the great unravelling, moral and social as well as ecological. Contemporary activists obsess over climate change and ecological destruction, entirely overlooking its roots in the social and moral climate catastrophe.
The 'radicals' and 'progressives' were out 'in force' over the Coronation period - with as much force as a rag-tag-and-bobtail can muster. In terms of actual numbers they are small, but they are loud, nasty, and aggressive and they never stop. Conservatives like to call them socialists. As a socialist, I have no problem in identifying them for what they are – Jacobins, joylous, humourless, monomaniacal, bloodless, fanatical, puritanical, totalitarian Jacobins. Vanguardists, elitists, 'people who know better,' people who claim to know the objective interests of 'the people' and the working class better than flesh-and-blood members of the poor benighted 'masses' do – and who accordingly step in to speak and act on behalf of the people themselves. It should come as no surprise that people's objective interests should coincide on every point with the political preferences of the vanguardista.
The anti-monarchists talk a good game. They are full of radical fire and fury. They make me seem positively reactionary. I can't wait to see what they have planned for corporate power and the corporate form. They are remarkably reticent on this, and what little they do propose amounts to a tired rehash of the old bureaucratic reformism and regulation of a managed capitalism. We've been there, and it failed – although it did have the merit, for capitalists, of dulling and derailing the socialist challenge. As for the socialist challenge, where are the socialists engaging in the substantive work of system change, producing viable models – and practices – of an alternative economic order?
I suppose feudal remnants are easier to challenge. Once this is over, the anti-monarchists will be back to attacking God, religion, and the church. They are the real reactionaries here, advancing political and intellectual positions which are stuck in the Enlightenment. We ought, by now, have seen how the Enlightenment has panned out. Rousseau was an awkward voice who was both in and against the Enlightenment. He may also have been a critic of church and monarchy, but he was alert to the danger of 'new aristocracies' of money and power taking their place. Rousseau was miles ahead of 'the enlightened.' He still is. It's not that present 'progressives' are ignorant of the danger so much as seeing it as a positive development : they see the threat to freedom and democracy as a promise of power for themselves and their ilk.
Meanwhile, the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich (who have now become the superrich) continues, proceeding hand-in-hand with the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form in all areas of life. We are witnessing the final enclosure of the global commons and corporatisation of public life. And there are people who think an elected head of state will make one iota of difference! Tocqueville wrote of 'the revolution of rising expectations.' A Leftism that has given way to progressivism gives evidence of a revolution of diminishing excpectations. Marx defined socialism in terms of the restitution of the power alienated to the state and capital and its democratic reorganisation as a social power. Let's be honest, the activists and ideologues of 'the Left' either don't believe this socialism is possible or, more likely, don't want it in any case, for the reason that it diffuses power and control among the citizen body rather than concentrates it in the hands of enlightened educators and managerialists like themselves.
All their performative screaming into the electronic void was wiped out by just one moment at the coronation. Penny Mordaunt holding a large and attractively patterned sword upright for long periods.
I must admit, I was wondering who the woman was with the sword and what on earth she was intent on doing with it. I had no idea who she was – I don't follow the politics of the 'ins and outs' these days, and never followed it much in the past. And I still don't know what she was doing with the sword. I have a feeling it may be one of those things that's not supposed to make much sense. It may or may not be a perfectly rational basis for governance, but the most important things holding a nation together are beyond reason. I like a bit (a lot) of ritual and pomp and ceremony. Bloodless sorts won't get it, but bloodless sorts have also proven politically inept and utterly demotivating when it comes to inspiring people with their own political visions - not that that worries them, elitists to their marrow, they are more concerned with pushing and ordering people by remote control rather than inspiring and involving them.I'm rather amused to recall that in her brief period as Prime Minister, Liz Truss made Penny Mordaunt Leader of the House in order to keep her out of the limelight. I think she rather stole the show at the Coronation. There are people who boast of never kissing a Tory. I wouldn't mind marrying one after this.
But I should be careful of being humourous in the land of the humourless. There are people out there who are intent on pressuring us all into a joyless forced march to an austerian future under their tutelage. Spare me.
The criticisms I have read strike me as pathetically bloodless and abstract, possessing zero motivational force. That, no doubt, explains the taste for coercion and authoritarian imposition and endless, extensive regulation on the part of 'progressives.'
I took a little time out over the Coronation period to challenge the anti-monarchists. Many took my arguments as a reactionary defence of monarchy. They missed the point, as I expected they would. Whilst my thinking is dialectical and multi-layered, seeking to tease out contradictions in the cause of greater clarity on principle and practice, they think in terms of simple binaries. They are anti-monarchist, I criticise their views, therefore I am a monarchist. I may or may not be a monarchist. I will certainly opt for the existing monarchy over the new monarchies these people are seeking to advance. And that's my point – I am a socialist and a democratic seeking the diffusion of power and control, they are elitists and managerialists seeking tht power and control for themselves and their political purposes. That, in a nutshell, is my objection. I look for political and democratic content and substance. It is with this concern that I spent some time calling out the anti-monarchists and their performative radicalism over the Coronation period. I was particularly concerned to seek out their view on the continuing extension and entrenchment of the corporate form on a global basis. I didn't expect much here, and wasn't disappointed. Such people have said little in the past of such things. Many are big on climate change, but small as in almost invisible on its socio-economic drivers. All too few are willing and able to address the socio-economic roots and contradictory class dynamics of the converging crises that are upon us, either because they have never been taught or, more likely, because they have never wanted to learn. For all of the talk of 'system change, not climate change,' they are reformists and regulators to the marrow, not revolutionaries. They continue to lionise a scientist like Rachel Carson, because her 'apolitical' approach fits easily with a tinkering liberal reformism; they continue to ignore someone like Murray Bookchin who, as Lewis Herber, wrote of the environmental destruction Carson wrote of, before Carson, and, importantly, related it to socio-economic causes that needed to be uprooted rather than regulated.
It may be appreciated, then, that my criticisms are not reactionary at all, they are radical and revolutionary and are concerned to call the bluff of performative and symbolic 'leftists.' I did precisely this at the time of the late Queen's Platinum Jubilee, and was promptly unfriended and blocked by those posing as system-changing revolutionaries. I don't care for fake radicals, least of all when they express such contempt for 'ordinary' people who are the lifeblood of democracy.
The material roots of the crises of the contemporary age are clear, but 'progressives' shy away from them. They seem instinctively to know the revolutionary implications of class analysis and so steer clear. What strikes me most of all is how detached from socio-economic reality, let alone the customs and mores and traditions of a people in place, 'progressives' really are. Taking radical stances against feudal remnants looks good on the surface level of electronic media, but is not serious, substantive politics. It is, of course, much easier than engaging in the effort of supplanting capital with a viable social form. Such 'radicals' are in another world, a world that is abstracted from the human roots that feed politics in time and place. The irony is that whilst many of these anti-monarchists claim to speak for 'the people' in favour of democracy, it is plain that they have no connection with real folk (above and beyond hectoring and lecturing them from the outside).
It was interesting to see Tom Paine being quoted so much over the period. I don't mind Paine at all. At the time of the bicentenary of Paine's Rights of Man, I started to write an appreciation of Paine. I must confess that, after writing a few thousand words I abandoned the piece. For all that people get excited about Paine, I found him terribly boring and predictable in the principles he was advancing. (I also found most of the details in the Rights of Man tedious and pedantic in the extreme. I never finished the book). In effect, Paine is a liberal democrat arguing for free trade and free markets, freedom of thought, a free press, the freedom of public life from religion, the freedom of the individual – the very freedom that characterised what socialist William Morris characterised as 'the great sundering' of capitalism. This liberation of the individual is also the great disembedding of human beings from the social and communal matrix they need in order to realize their collective purposes. This kind of thing may have been radical in its day, as Smith's Wealth of Nation was radical, but it's day has long been done.
Such people talk as though the completion of the bourgeois revolution would resolve all our problems. They talk as if they are anti-establishment when in fact liberalism has been the dominant culture these past couple of centuries. We've been living in Paine's world for two hundred years and more: free markets and free trade, political democracy, the disembedding of social life from custom and tradition and from moral and communal restraint, 'the death of God,' and so on.
And we have seen the result: the concentration and centralisation of capital, the corporatisation of public business, and the enclosure of the global commons. The idea that the abolition of the monarchy and the electing of the head of state will transform any of that is not merely fanciful but reactionary. And it tells me that what's left of the Left are not politically serious at all. Detached from the people and from socio-economic reality, they have given up the ghost. In truth, they are parasites on the very system they claim to criticise, presuming the existence of a viable economic order and public life in order to make claims on it and draw resources from it. They are liberals, people motivated not by public and common good, but by self-interest. We are in the presence of an organized hyperpluralism, and the result will be to overwhelm and exhaust what is left of the public realm.
The extent to which such people scotomize the political economy of public life is remarkable. Monarchy vs republicanism is such a tiny and unimportant issue, you seriously have to question either the political nous or political intent of those who are so excited over it.
Public policy in key areas of resource allocation and depletion, technological innovation, the location of enterprise, work organization, products and prices, and much more besides is routinely made by unelected corporate executives, with elected officials and public servants merely reacting to and rubber-stamping decisions in response. Large transnational "private" corporations outflank and outmaneuver government at every turn and have been doing so for decades. And yet there are people who seem to think that the end of the monarchy and an elected head of state would deliver radical change!
You'd be better off spitting in the wind: it won't make any difference, but at least it will get you out of the house and away from the computer. My suspicion is, with respect to anti-monarchy objections, is that what motivates the critics is less the commitment to an egalitarian and democratic order - my view as a socialist - than a concern that they claim power for themselves and people like them. In The Technological Bluff, Jacques Ellul warns of the rise of "new aristocracies" based on the nexus of power/knowledge, technocratic and cultural elites removed from the demos and seeking power outside of politics and law. An awful lot of the criticisms I'm seeing, coming from a very bloodless and abstract position, don't remotely smell right. My fear is that we have entered an age of public indifference and nullity in which people are crying out for public community, but lack the commonality and solidarity to be able to create it, condemning us to a future of nullification in which people are consumers rather than citizens, endlessly shouting "Not My" at any and every collective form presented before them, elected or otherwise. Radicals and progressives might cheer the demise of feudal remnants, God, church and monarchy, but it will prevent the emergence of a socialism of any substance, at best only an ersatz, surrogate and utterly empty form, another bureaucratic simulacre. More likely, we'll have the inorganic and enforced uniformity of technocracy. I don't care for a performative radicalism in the mediated world, I want to see something substantive and connected to communities of character and practice. We have been living through the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich - now supperich - in history. And people are getting all excited about church and monarchy. It saves having to challenge capital and corporate power.
I'm left wondering what Paine thought when he was arrested and taken to Luxembourg Prison for crimes against the country (that is, the French revolutionary regime), or when he was scorned and neglected in the US. I tend to be leery of overt anti-monarchists, for the reason they tend to be less concerned with advancing democratic and egalitarian principles (and polities) than with appropriating power for themselves as a new aristocracy (either of wealth or 'expertise' or class or culture). That was Rousseau's concern in the middle of the Enlightenment, too. The technocrats of today very much constitute a new aristocracy and see themselves as above law and politics (and the demos, considered an unenlightened herd). I'm not impressed by abstract statements of political principle. I like to see ideals attached to their means of realisation, not least in terms of popular support and, more than that, popular participation. I used to admire Paine, but now see him as simplistic, arguing for much of the liberal worldview that now stands revealed as self-contradictory and which is now eating its own basis. Burke, on the other hand, was alert to the dangers of the coming machine age, the fracturing of people and polities into atoms via the state machine and the mechanism of the market. Paine gave us all the claims about free trade leading to world peace. It was a noble vision, certainly compared to the history of dynastic and religious wars. I don't denigrate the ideal, merely state that it hasn't lived up to its promise. That's not Paine's fault nor the fault of liberals past. They did what they needed to do and did as much as they could. It is now our turn to be critics in our day, not reactionary defenders of a liberalism whose time has passed. There is a remarkable psychological feat being performed by liberals these days, maintaining an anti-establishment pose whilst actually being the establishment. The existence of a monarchy helps liberals maintain that pretence, but its shallowness is transparent. There are much bigger powers than hereditary monarchy governing the world at the moment. Whilst the anti-monarchists have been out in force these past few days, I note their silence on corporate power and the continued extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. Politically and economically they haven't got the first idea of how to check corporate power, let alone how to reappropriate it and reorganise it democratically as social power (that's where my radical politics lie). And they have zero connection with people as democratic agents capable of organising that power as social, people with the structural and organisational capacity to engage in transformative action. So all we get is a performative and symbolic 'radicalism,' abstracted from any real politics and devoid of social democratic content. I suppose it makes impotent people feel good. I'll take hereditary monarchy any day over any and all of the 'new aristocracies' of 'tiny majorities' lining up to appropriate power for themselves.
Edmund Burke and his criticism of mechanism and atomism, and his protests against the deliberate and systematic uprooting of organic community and tradition, seem far more timely in these days of moral, social, and ecological implosion than Paine's liberal optimism. We have seen where that liberalism ends, we are here. What is remarkable is the extent to which liberals still pose as plucky and marginalised liberators fighting entrenched power, whereas in truth liberalism has been the dominant political philosophy of the past couple of centuries. The problems that liberals most complain about are self-authored; the truly radical challenge of the age is to make liberals own the consequences of their principles.
Some of the most vehement critics of the establishment today perform the not inconsiderable psychological and political feat of being virulently anti-establishment whilst being fully paid up members of it. Listening to them, you could be forgiven for believing that we were still living in the eighteenth century, and that liberalism hasn't been the dominant culture for two hundred years. They also seem to think that an elected head of state, completing the bourgeois revolution and the great disembedding that that entailed, would somehow overcome all the problems of the day. The last thing liberals are able to see is the extent to which they are the authors of the crises they are seeking to address. Liberalism is imploding, and liberals excite themselves with attacks on feudal remnants. Of course they do. Because the individualism that is one of the key acids of modernity contains within itself an urge for a collectivist and authoritarian reconstitution of unity as uniformity - on the quite arbitrary terms of their value choices, interests, and personal preferences.
I just find the criticisms I've been seeing today as sad confirmation that 'the Left' is devoid of social democratic purpose and content. And I infinitely prefer the old monarchy to the various 'new aristocracies' lining up to claim power and authority in a technocratic culture outside of history, law, and democratic politics. Rousseau saw it coming from within the Enlightenment. And we should see it coming, too. In fact, we should know that it is already here.
As for the implosion of the Left as a meaningful political force with connections with 'ordinary' people and socio-economic concerns, we shouldn't be surprised, given the academic and linguistic turn leftism took a long time ago. A passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:
“The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself."
The only thing I would quibble with here is dating. Truth be told, the intellectuals and politicians of the Left have always been deeply disapponted by the people. By the late nineteenth century, socialist activists had come to suspect that Marx's revolutionary proletariat were somewhat less revolutionary than they appeared in the text books, and much less revolutionary than they ought to be if socialist theory was to work. Lenin's idea in What is to be Done? (1904) that socialism has to be introduced to the working class movement from the outside was actually stated earlier by the Social Democrat reformist Karl Kautsky. The Left has never been able to deal with the ineliminable, authentic, and organic conservatism that accompanies the socialistic commitments of the working class.
The tragedy of Marxism, as Clarke puts it, is that it abandoned this affirmation of working class self-emancipation and put a distance between the class subject and political organisation (Clarke 1991:328). In so doing, Marxism adjusted itself to the alienating dualisms of the bourgeois world - subject and object, theory and practice, the political and the economic - and succeeded only in introducing bourgeois modes of organisation, thought and action in the proletarian movement.
Simon Clarke is worth quoting extensively here:
“Marx was naively optimistic in his belief that socialism would inevitably arise out of the spontaneous development of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, but the tragedy of Marxism, in both its Leninist and its Western variants, was that it abandoned Marx's faith in the ability of the working class to achieve its own emancipation.”
Progressives, liberals, the enlightened of all kinds continue to abandon faith in the ability of 'ordinary' people to liberate itself and, in turn, organise and manage its own affairs. In truth, they never had any such faith in the first place. Beyond the divide of Left and Right, we are really dealing with the classic opposition between elite theory and democratic theory. Examine political regimes past, those considered successful, and you will often find a belief in the powers of 'natural aristocracies,' of wealth or intellect or judgement asserted over democracy. Take a look at the Founding Fathers of the US and their models. The process of democratisation is still in its early stages and stands far short of its potential. Clue, democracy is more than aggregating the opinions and wants of discrete individuals, but requires communities of character and practice that train individual in the moral and intellectual virtues. And that's an ancient tradition, not a modern one – the modern world that is in the process of imploding exalts the atomistic conception of democracy, which is to say, a democracy that is made in the image of the self-choosing liberal individual. Liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms and the moral and political entropy of the age shows this in no uncertain terms.
To return to the passage from Simon Clarke:
“This led Marxism to detach the liberating potential of Marx's critique of capitalism from its concrete foundations in the socialisation of the working class, to locate it not in the collective organisation of the working class, but in the alienated forms in which the socialisation of labour developed under capitalism, as the concentration and centralisation of capital.”
That is precisely what happened, and that detachment from the practical and material foundations of a self-socialisation from below is key in the supplanting of the process of democratisation with a bureaucratisation. This is happening in the contemporary world of politics, too, which is why I put the term 'Left' and 'Leftism' in inverted commas, denoting progressives who are in tune with the new phase of corporate capitalist development. In other words, such progressives are active within the alienated forms of capitalism as it moves to a new regime of accumulation. There is no sleight of hand being performed here, merely a shallow thinking which identifies a capitalism passing into history with capitalism as such, as if embracing the new forms of capitalist development identifies one as leftist and radical. Not so. There has been no economic system more transgressive of boundaries than the capitalist system, with everything being seen as plastic and malleable, to be bent and twisted in any direction in the cause of facilitating accumulation. This transgression is still underway, and is still being described as liberatory, with people and planet both being bent out of shape.
To return to Clarke:
“Socialism was then identified not with the transformation of social relations of production, but only with the nationalisation of the means of production, so that human social powers confronted the individual in the equally alienated form of the state.”
A top down bureaucratisation thus replaced a democratisation that proceeded through the organisational and intellectual forms of the working class as knowledgeable agents and citizens. Again, this inversion still characterises progressivism.
We come to the intellectuals:
“The Critical Theorists, on the other hand, detached Marx's critique of capitalism from any social or historical foundation, to reduce it to a philosophical critique whose tragedy was that it found itself increasingly in the interstices of culture and on the margins of society.”
If only that had remained the case! The intellectuals of the academy have replaced the working class subject as revolutionary agents, and are raising generations which seek to order and organise society 'from the outside.' This is the institutionalisation of the Kautsky-Lenin thesis in the academy. And it is the end of socialism and democracy.
Clarke ends by issuing a warning to both socialists and liberals:
“The collapse of state socialism, in both its Communist and Social Democratic forms, heralds the death of Marxism in the forms in which it has dominated the twentieth century. It would be naively optimistic to expect that the collapse of old orthodoxies will necessarily create the conditions for a rebirth of Marxism.”
Clarke wrote these words in 1991, the year I formulated my proposal for a PhD thesis aimed explicitly at recovering the liberatory, democratic, and normative potential of Marx's socialist critique of the capital system. To those who questioned the point, claiming that Marx, marxism, and socialism were now antiquated, I responded forthrightly that the contradictions that Marx identified at the heart of capitalist and liberal modernity were not only still with us, but were intensifying. This is Clarke's point, too:
“Nevertheless the collapse of state socialism does nothing to overcome the contradictions of capitalism, nor to resolve the antinomies of liberalism. Indeed the polarisation of wealth and power, the tendencies to the overaccumulation and uneven development of capital, the dehumanisation of culture and society, the removal of human destiny from any form of human control, have developed to an unprecedented degree and on a global scale. As the twin threats of economic and ecological crisis become ever more menacing the need to develop new social forms becomes ever more urgent. In such circumstances it may be that Marxism can recover its heritage, to resume the project which Marx initiated of linking an emancipatory social theory to an emancipatory social practice.”
Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (1991)
That conclusion is one that my Director of Studies Jules Townshend also drew in his The Politics of Marxism (1996). “As long as capitalism remains in business, Marxism as a movement and doctrine, in whatever form, is likely to remain obstinately relevant.” I recently read Jordan Peterson claim that it is hard to credit why anyone who knows the history of Stalin and Mao could still credit Marx with having anything to offer the world, beyond negative lessons as what is not to be done. It's depressing to read such views, not merely because they are crude and simplistic and wrong (Marx's words offer a superb critique of state socialism), but because it shows just how far influential thinkers are from properly diagnosing the problems of the age, let alone addressing them to seek their resolution.
That the contradictions of capitalism and antinomies of liberalism not only remain with us but are imploding with ever greater intensity on a global scale is depressing testimony to the remarkable inertia of a progressive politics that, for all of the loudness and relentlessness of its activism, seems congenitally incapable of resolving the issues it endlessly obsesses over. There is no mystery here. Such 'progressives' are not leftists at all, but extreme agonistic liberals who, confronted with the moral, social, and ecological consequences of liberalism, either cannot renounce their most cherished principles or, which seems more likely, their practices. It's the age of 'ironic liberalism,' an age in which liberals, having removed objective foundations in the true and the good and the beautiful, having discarded God in order to go it alone, suddenly realise that their own most cherished values lack grounding. They are, in the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay, “all sail and no anchor.” And they are discovering the impossibilities of the destinationless voyage. To live by an endless and empty existential choice is exhausting. In time, people see the meaninglessness and pointlessness and run out of the puff required to keep sailing.
A number of such people can be found regularly confessing their liberal sins, denouncing individualism and free choice and capitalism in broad brush terms. But in terms of actively supplanting liberalism and capitalism with modes of conduct that actually deliver the resources people need, they are silent and still. They are paralysed bourgeois, unable to go back to the past whose loss they lament, fearful of going forward beyond a liberal capitalist order they are still dependent on.
The history of the high-minded socialism of the intellectuals should also serve to caution us against notions of Enlightened Despotism. The Bolsheviks were dominated by intellectuals, thinkers, lawyers, impressive thinkers like Trotsky and Bukharin. Stalin made hay with them. Such is politics. Politics selects leaders who know what power is, who know how to gain, retain, and extend power. Those who think politics a neutral tool to be appropriated and employed to rational ends are naifs, a menace to the causes and principles they espouse and a menace to those on the receiving end of their engineering.
On balance, I'm glad I left academia and worked in distribution in the local community for so long, working street to street on foot, keeping in touch with 'ordinary' folk. I'm also grateful for the many years I spent with my dad in the building industry. To say that I got to meet 'ordinary' people is insufferably patronising. The truth is I lived and worked with 'ordinary' people as one of them. I spent years in academia, too. I have found that 'ordinary' people have far more horse sense than the 'intellectuals,' and I have found that they are far more in touch with the things that bind a community - and nation – together than are intellectuals with their commitment to abstracted principle. I have also found that intellectuals are inordinately skilful in proceeding to bad conclusions by way of impeccably good reasoning. They have long since persuaded themselves of their fundmentally correct views on everything, and are hell-bent on persuading the rest of society – by legal force and puritanical purgation if need be.
I have a very different view to liberalism. I'm not anti-liberal, mind. Liberalism has an honourable and noble history and much of its values are to be preserved and, importantly, given substantive social content – especially those values which are of pre-modern vintage and which, on closer analysis, can be seen to belong to our Judaeo-Christian heritage.
The socialism I espouse seeks to overcome the great disembedding of individuals. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx noted that in the modern age 'all that is solid melts into air.' The work of resolidification is the work of reconstruction that lies before us. In contrast, a deconstructive critique that is designed to unravel institutions is merely a continuation of an acidic modernity. That resolidification is also a resolidarisation. Above I referred to a self-socialisation that proceeds through the organizational and associational forms of working-class agency. In addition to this socialistic dimension there is also a conservative dimension, one which values the intermediary associations praised by Tocqueville. We could also refer to Burke's 'little platoons' here, also this usage needs to be clarified and qualified. Burke's actual meaning in Reflections on the Revolution in France isn't quite what conservatives take it to be:
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”
This is commonly understood to value the local communities (or platoons) that link otherwise discrete individuals to the larger state or culture. That's a view I support. But that isn't actually what Burke meant. Burke isn't referring to little communities, local government or voluntary associaitons but to class, specifically those French aristocrats who led the Third Estate against other aristocrats. Which isn't to say that the idea of 'little platoons' as intermediary associations linking the individual to supra-individual causes and commitments isn't a good one.
A patriotism and parochialism within proximal relations offers the basis of resolidifying a reality that has been fractured by capitalist development, liberal freedom, and acidic modernity. If a working class hero is something to be, then so to is a "Little Englander" – properly understood not as a narrow minded chauvenism but as people settled in place, sharing a common culture, expressing a consensual devotion to common ends, and neither wishing to encroach on others nor be encroached upon by outsiders of all kinds (least of all the meddling managerial members of the acronym gangs). Sadly, the 'progressives,' miscalled leftists, have fully embraced liberalisation, globalisation, and corporatisation.
I'm unimpressed. I'll stick with monarchy as a much sounder basis for an increasingly disempowered and denigrated democracy of an increasingly despised demos. It has been and it remains a time of pervasive displacement, demoralisation, and disorientation. We need social and moral supports and stabilisers, something familiar to hold on to, something that is ours, with roots and a past, something that nurtures a sense of belonging and continuiyt. We are a familial species and, as Burke argued, our culture is a pact between past, present, and future generations. That's the pact that present-day environmentalists are seeking, but never finding, in their scientistic and naturalistic metaphysics. They are seeking the right thing in the wrong place, and that is leading them inexorably into the arms of the technocrats and their plans to reorder the world. We need much more of the organic and much less of the engineered change.
A number of the criticisms of the monarchy referred to the stolen wealth upon which the institution is based.
Like this is news.
Like we didn't know.
As a proud historian, a historian by inclination and training, I wince at the extent to which the study of history has been supplanted by moralism and demonology in the cause of advancing political ends. Political radicals seem intent on endlessly attempts to set the historical record straight, righting every wrong they are concerned to take issue with. They are using the past as a stick with which to beat the present. And it is utterly self-defeating. The problems we face are structural, not chronological. To take radicalism down this path is effectively to duck the hard yards of politics and seek to cheat by way of a little institutional engineering.
But it's a dead-end. Instead of a genuine transformation, such a 'radical' politics is merely about redistributing resources within an unchanged status quo, further exhausting the public stock.
Channelling politics in the direction of righting historical wrongs amounts to giving up on a constructive politics oriented towards a future worth having. Historical scores can never be settled. This is a complete and utter waste of time. It is not a serious transformative politics, merely active and organized groups seeking to mug the public realm for all they can get. In other words, it is the perfect expression of liberalism's dynamic of self-interest at the group level, a liberalism shorn of its comprehensive normative commitments. Such a politics poses as radical but it isn't. Far from being a coherent response to the antinomies of liberalism, it is an almost perfect expression of them. And what's left of the Left will waste its energies going down a cul-de-sac.
Just for context, civilisation as such, going all the way back to the agricultural revolution, is based on stolen goods and exploitation. The UK has the most unequal land ownership in the world, going back to the Norman conquest of 1066. The easy part is to go through the history books and identify the expropriators. The hard part is uprootng division and restoring unity. The problem is not chronological but structural and that's where it will be resolved, not in very challengeable histories (the first people colonised in Britain were white people, separated from the commons. Slicing and dicing humanity by way of race, identity, etc is about the most stupid thing the Left could do - and it did it. It serves to mask the fact that, in terms of serious substantive politics, the Left (liberals, progressives etc) are clueless as to how to constitute a viable alternative to the capital system and, most importantly, take people with them. But maybe that's the point - we have a surrogate 'Left' that isn't Left at all, merely 'progressives' riding the wave of a new phase in capitalist development - a cultural and corporate 'Left' that pursues money and power very firmly within the corporate form. It is striking how little supposed radicals talk about capital and class these days. Race and gender and climate change - none of which require a fundamental change in social relations. Convenient. I've not seen anyone yet on the Left or elsewhere, least of all among the activists and ideologues, who have the first idea how to engage in reconstruction that brings unity without uniformity and diversity without division. Instead, they seek to impose unity in their own image and spread division in order to feed off the controversy and hatred they incite. Every time I see history lessons being delivered, I look for the end game. Now if the critics of monarchy had something to say on corporate power and the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, and some idea how to supplant capitalist forms with viable social forms - systems and relations that actually work and actually inspire sufficient numbers not merely to support them but actually put a shift in, then we would be in business. We have been living through the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich - now supperich - in history, and leftists and progressives haven't got the first idea how to check it, let alone reverse it, let alone restitute power to the social body and organise and exercise it democratically. Instead, there is a grievance industry drawing claims on an already beleagured public realm - such a Left has joined the organised hyperpluralism that is merely liberalism (self-interest vs the public realm) on steroids, and in the process of implosion. (For the record, I am a historian by training, first class honours, and much that I see presented as history is merely political preference. We might, for instance, get round to the fact that Britain formally abolished the slave trade on 25 March 1807, prohibiting British subjects from trading in slaves, crewing slave ships, sponsoring slave ships, or fitting out slave ships. Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy, West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels. The cost to the Royal Navy was heavy: one sailor died for every nine slaves freed – 17,000 men over the 52-year period – either in action or of disease. Introducing a very toxic and self-destructive US narrative into British politics would be a mountainishly stupid thing to do. Keep it, reinforce your own prejudices, and carry on destroying yourselves.)
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Civilisation as such is based on stolen goods and expropriation, all the way back to the agricultural revolution. Observations that the monarchy is built upon stolen wealth are infantile, serving to destroy particular institutions here and there, without remotely tackling the harder questions of social, economic, and political reconstruction. It's a clear hijack, of course, the Coronation offering the race grifters an opportunity to further expound their slavery narrative. Just as every event offers environmentalists an opportunity to talk about climate change. Everything that happens is treated as an opportunity to advance a narrative and a cause. It's huckstering, it's the hyperpluralism of organized groups seeking public redress. Such people draw claims on the public realm without ever having contributed anything or put anything back. The more politics takes this form, the closer we come to the exhaustion and implosion of public life. Which is why I described it as self-defeating from a leftist and environmentalist perspective. The collective aims and goods of socialism and environmentalism presuppose a strong and confident public life. Hyperpluralism could have been designed to disable the public realm, thereby preventing the possibility of pursuing and delivering common goods. Grifter is an overused phrase. But these characters are grifters and they are a blight on the Left. Instead of building a genuine public community they are more concerned to take what little public life is left for all that they can. And when there is nothing left, what then becomes of your grand socialist designs?
I've learned over the years to deeply mistrust people who make a point of picking out particular institutions for particular criticism, but who are at the same time blind to abuses that fall closer to home. Those who present themselves as brave unmaskers of power in all its forms tend to be concerned only with unmasking power in certain forms, for the reason they want to claim it for themselves in other forms. Slavery? It's been around for as long as human beings have been around (or since the agricultural revolution at least). Try ancient Greece, try the Barbary Coarsairs. Extend the notion and you will see that the capitalist parasitism on nature is a form of slavery, nature as energy slave. These erstwhile revolutionaries need to seriously start upping their game and engaging in some real politics instead of the easy performative and symbolic stuff on the surface level of media. But, of course, once we understand that this isn't serious politics, merely a narrative in furtherance of a grift, we realize why it is only the one form of slavery out of many forms that is being singled out. Truth was once considered the best friend of the poor and the powerless, those seeking justice. It still is. We shouldn't be afraid to call out leftists whose denigration of truth is a devaluation and destruction of leftism.
I don't care for a performative radicalism in the mediated world, I want to see something substantive and connected to communities of character and practice.
Some people at least attempted satire, responding to the storm Penny Mordeant caused with her upright sword with endless replays of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
King Arthur: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
Peasant Woman: “Order”, eh? Who does he think he is?
King Arthur: I am your king.
Peasant Woman: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
King Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.
Peasant Woman: Well, how’d you become king, then?
King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Arthur: [grabs Dennis] Shut up! Will you shut up?!
Dennis: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Arthur: [shakes Dennis] Shut up!
Dennis: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being repressed!
Arthur: Bloody Peasant!
I'm afraid I had somewhat lost my normal good humour by this point, and set about the odd satirist, too. You should be careful to select your targets well. But monarchy is such a soft and easy target that many prefer to keep hitting that than going after much tougher quarry.
Those who are serious about egalitarianism and democracy need to switch their targets and aim at corporate power and the continued extension and entrenchement of the corporate form. That's where you will find the new aristocracy, and it is one that makes the old aristocracy look like a kindergarten pageant. The final and complete enclosure of the global commons is on the cards, and it won't remotely matter whom you elect or what you vote for in those inherently anti-democratic and anti-political conditions. We have had universal suffrage for a long while now and it has precious few if any democratic inroads into the capital system. But since feudal remnants make for much easier targets, that is where those who want a cheap radicalism focus.
The enrichment and empowerment of large private corporations and public bureaucracies follow inexorably from the destruction of small independent producers in a market economy until eventually the commons is swallowed up entirely in a power complex that engulfs both private and public sectors. This is neither a prediction nor a warning but a statement of contemporary political economy. And supposed leftists are getting all excited over the remnants of the feudal regime having a day out at public expense. It saves having to confront real power with an effective and practicable politics. And it saves having to engage in the hard task of constituting an alternative, one that commands the support and inspires the effort of substantial numbers of citizens.
All things considered, I am persuaded that the ravages and iniquities of an untrammeled corporate capitalism pose a much greater threat to freedom, democracy, and the public good than a constitutional monarchy does. Anti-monarchists are frothing at the mouth at the embers of feudalism, completely ignoring the pernicious neo-feudalism which is emerging on the basis of the corporate form. They consider themselves progressive but the most striking thing about their politicking is just how regressive it is. Their radicalism in fighting past battles saves them from finding the nerve and nous to challenge the aristocracies of money, knowledge, and power in the present day.
"Capitalism is giving rise to a new form of techno-feudalism, with super-rich techno emperors (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg) and kings (Cook, Page, Brin) at the top, followed by lords and nobles (Sandberg, Hastings, Kalanick), and an ever-growing number of techno serfs living in poverty -- Gig economy workers (e.g. Uber drivers, DoorDash couriers, etc., Low-wage workers in technology manufacturing and supply chains, Workers in the tech support and customer service industries, Workers in data entry and content moderation, Interns and entry-level workers in tech companies. We are running out of time to bring about the change needed to save not only our amazing society and culture but also the consciousness of the distributed unconscious Universe that was born out of a near singularity that started the arrow of time. As the only known form of life capable of contemplating existence and our origin, we have a unique position and responsibility to protect all life on this planet.
The consequences of the Ouroboros are felt in the exponentially growing and rampant inequality, unaffordable housing, forced migration, climate refugees, depletion of non-renewable resources, loss of biodiversity, exploitation of workers, and the influence of dark money in politics. As we enter the AI revolution, the Ouroboros is being again supercharged with a forecast of 7% GDP increase — something not seen in 20 years, and the displacing hundreds of millions of workers that will be forced into techno serfdom. These outcomes serve as a stark warning, urging humanity to confront and overcome the insatiable beast that capitalism has become. As in the coming decades rising seas will displace coastal communities and exacerbate the challenges we are already facing, the Ouroboros, in its relentless pursuit of profit and wealth, has finally started to come to the horrifying realization — that it is consuming itself, that it is the little blue dot - a fragile and unique planet adrift in an ocean of galaxies."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/true-meaning-ouroboros-tsingulaity/?fbclid=IwAR1g8WHfSCSyre38fUrl8NnMgFE86dcfZwLiZ9aPLf3MTzKS3Nqfgj_PUgs
The past few days saw a performative and symbolic radicalism on the part of people who patently haven't got the first idea how to lay a glove on corporate power, much less check the continuing extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, still less supplant that form with an alternative - and viable - social form, one that not only has popular support, but active, participatory, structural agency at its heart. To them, system change is a slogan entirely devoid of substantive content. Ideals which are entirely lacking a means of realisation default every single time to existing power. Where else could they go?
So I called a few of them out. I wasn't so much arguing the case for monarchy back to them as calling their bluff. I wanted to see the depth of their radical commitment. I wanted to see how far their radicalism went, suspecting that it didn't go far at all. My suspicions were correct. The best responses stressed the links of monarchy to the capitalist control of social and economic life, highlighting extensive ruling class networks. The most tedious responses involved history lessons that basically reiterated the hardly unknown fact that monarchies arose on the back of the theft of land. The worst of these were simply concerned to identify this theft with slavery, effectively eclipsing the history of the common people. Given the extent to which the commons were enclosed, the indigenous people within these monarchies were the first to be colonised in history. Once a staple of radical history from below, this has all been discarded in favour of the slavery narrative. Those concerned with the histories of the common people should give this short-shrift.
The ideologues are a menace to the cause of socialism. There is nothing that puts people off socialism more than supposed socialists.I long for the day we can return to a socialism that has social, democratic, and popular substance and is something more than a plaything for bloodless intellectuals and their abstractions.
As for monarchy, I'll take it any day over the "new aristocracies" vying for power in a mediated culture and technocratic age. I read the daily screams into the social void that is the staple of the electronic mob and get the distinct impression that people are living in an unreal world. Where have people been? People have been sharing Tom Paine quotes all day, as if we are living in the eighteenth century. There is nothing remotely radical about fighting old battles, nor can the thoroughgoing realisation of modernity and modernization be considered the cutting edge of politics. It is somewhat incredulous to believe that the gravest problems we face in an age of overweening and irresponsible power are down to the remnants of the feudal order rather than the forces of commerce, capital, big tech and science, militarism, industrialisation, individualism, libertarianism.
Economic historian and Christian socialist R.H. Tawney writes well when he notes that 'the great individualists of the eighteenth century, Jefferson and Turgot and Condorcet and Adam Smith, shot their arrows against the abuses of their day, not of ours.' But if it is 'as absurd to criticise them as indifferent to the evils of a social order which they could not anticipate, as to appeal to their authority in defence of it,' it is even more absurd for supposed progressives in the present age to criticise remnants of that past order whilst ignoring the evils its capitalist and liberal successor spawned.
The simple truth is that radical politics in its dominant forms is in the hands of liberals who are incapable of escaping bourgeois modes of thought and action. Tawney continues:
'When they formulated the new philosophy, the obvious abuse was not the power wielded by the owners of capital over populations unable to work without their permission; it was the network of customary and legal restrictions by which the landowner in France, monopolistic corporations and the State both in France and in England, prevented the individual from exercising his powers, divorced property from labour, and made idleness the pensioner of industry.' (Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 1921, ch 2).
Now the problem is not simply the power wielded by the owners of capital but the systemic imperatives that engulf each and all, driving the accumulative dynamic that transgresses every boundary and limit there is in its infinity. The world has moved far beyond the capitalism of Tawney's day to a corporate-military-industrial Leviathan that is swallowing up private and public life together. Without democratic check, economic development necessarily tends toward the creation of an absolute political power wielded by a new aristocracy of financiers, managers, professionals, and technicians, a narrow class who circulate between the public and private sectors and who, elected by no-one and accountable to no-one, make all the important decisions in business and government. This class constitutes a manufacturing and financial aristocracy of the kind foreseen by Rousseau and Tocqueville, and it is an aristocracy that sees itself as above politics and beyond the law, exercising the right to command an industrial army whose individual footsoldiers are mere cannon fodder in the war for profit and endless accumulation.
The nature of our establishment has changed. When John Stuart Mill railed against orthodoxy, his targets were church-goers, traditionalists, Tories. What Edmund Burke worshipped as “the wisdom of our ancestors”, Mill damned as “the despotism of custom”. The cultural ascendancy of Christianity has, since his day, been replaced by a new Trinity: Equality, Diversity, Inclusion. Which raises a disquieting question: Might it be that what we thought of as the triumph of reason, the fitful but nonetheless steady advance of individualism, was nothing more than an interim between two different kinds of authoritarianism? Might it be that there was never really a golden age of free speech; rather, there was a moment of equilibrium when neither the old religious establishment nor the new woke establishment held the commanding heights?
On a personal note, I spent the Queen's Platinum Jubilee working to put on a Garden Party for autistic people at Livability in Deganwy. That's not an argument for or against any political form. I long for the day we can constitute an organic egalitarian and democratic community rooted in place and practice. But said folk of Deganwy had suffered an awful time during Lockdown and relished the occasion as an expression of collective joy. I had the incredibly important job of blowing up all the balloons and making sure they didn't blow away. There was a brass band and frolics. And people loved it. I returned home and switched on social media, only to see all the usual suspects making sour comments. I knew who of the two groups was the happier. It seems that others are drawing the same conclusions, too. Conservatives are more contented and happier than left-wingers. It would be easier to conclude that that is because conservatives are richer and leftists are poorer, but that does not fit the data. Immigrants are often more conservative than native born people, whilst having little privilege in relation to them. Those who are relatively poor are also often conservative and happier than leftists in exactly the same position. Further, in today's culture, the privileged are overwhelmingly left, with those of conservative views marginalised.
Jung, woke, depressiv: Die psychologische Krise der Linken by Sebastian Wessels
This article cites the researches of Musa Al-Gharbi in “How to understand the wellbeing gap between liberals and conservatives.”
In this article, Al-Gharbi shows that conservatives are more likely to be religious, patriotic and married, three factors which underscore meaning and belonging and which are associated with an increase in life satisfaction. Even excluding these factors, conservatives still have the advantage when it comes to happiness. Al-Gharbi draws the conclusion that the conservative attitude equips people with the mental tools that help them to deal resiliently and constructively with injustice and misfortune.
I argued this case strongly in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality (2020), and it seems that empirical studies are bearing it out.
Experience alone tells me it is true. Activists and ideologues are neurotics who foster division and feed on the controversy and hatred that ensues. With their connections to technocratic inhumanism, I coined the term 'neurocrats' to describe them. The cultural Left which supplanted the old Social Left of which I was a member morphs very easily into a Corporate Left, which is to say that they are not Left at all but progressives pressing their claims firmly within the corporate form. They are not socialists, either, but Jacobins. They are relentless and monomaniacal and utterly joyless and humourless. And miserable. I barely post the things I would like to post on social media for the reason I know it will attract the ire of the neurotics. Present them with a pretty parade and it is well-nigh certain they will turn up and rain on it. They do it at every public event, too. Always protesting, always boycotting, always shouting “not my” at every expression of collective joy. They don't care for sport, either, seeing it as a distraction and a diversion from politics. Politics is their life. Politics, indeed, is their God. Politics is disagreement and dissensus. If you make politics everything then it stands to reason that you will lead a miserable life. The only thing to work out is whether such people make their life politics because they are neurotic in the first place or whether it is an absorption in politics that makes them neurotic. Beyond the rights and wrongs of their actual views, their tetchy, cantankerous, miserable demeanour does nothing to suggest that they have their lives in good order. Their mentality is not merely religious but fanatical and fundamental. Their presumption is that if people no longer wasted their time and energy in sport they would come and support leftist or progressive causes. Er, no, not necessarily. Other options are available.
When critics show some signs of how to constitute the alternate social order, and re-establish connection with 'ordinary' people - like the socialists of old did – then I'll start to pay them attention. I referred to R.H. Tawney above. Tawney used the figure of good old Henry Dubb, a man of ordinary common sense, as the benchmark of political possibility. If Henry Dubb didn't care for it, then it was unlikely to run. Activists and ideologues loathe the Henry Dubbs of this world, for the reason that they are a check on political flights of fancy. Lose touch with 'ordinary' folk, though, and you are left with two ways to go: nowhere on the margins or authoritarian imposition via the bureaucratic state. Either way is the death of socialism.
Corporate capital is cleaning up, taking us headlong into the final enclosure of the global commons. But people don't seem to want to march to the sound of the guns.
I'm ambivalent about King Charles' global connections and links, it has to be said. I defend monarchy in so far as the monarch is as good as the promise to protect and preserve liberty, democracy, and national sovereignty. I defend monarchy against those most vocal of anti-monarchists who seem to be motivated less by the egalitarianism and democracy I support than by a jealousy for power for themselves. Such people strike me as members of the new aristocracy. I note how many of those who make a big point of leaders being elected are also big on the explicitly anti-democratic anti-politics of "follow the science" and "tell the [scientific] truth." In other words, they assert pre-political truths to government and citizens, leaving nothing for politics to deliberate on.
They are not egalitarian and democratic unmaskers of power at all, and have zero connection with 'ordinary' members of the demos (whom they most normally despise and abuse as unenlightened). Like the 1980s/1990s "poststructuralist" and postmodern crowd who rejected morality, law, authority, absolute truth, community etc on account of being inherently repressive of 'otherness' and 'difference,' I see them as engaged in a deliberate project of destroying standards and practices in order to be free to reconstitute them on their own entirely arbitrary terms in the aftermath. I remain committed to an egalitarian and democratic politics as part of my continued adherence to socialism. But I'll be damned if I'll join the most virulent anti-monarchists whose supposed republicanism merely reproduces the antinomies of a dominant and now demonstrably failing liberal order. And I don't care for the various new aristocracies of corporate culture vying for power and authority for themselves.
I remember the Platinum Jubilee well. FB was overrun with the anti-monarchists, claiming to speak for 'the people,' despite representing no-one but themselves. I was actually working to put on a garden party for autistic people at Livability in Deganwy, people who had taken an absolute hammering during Lockdown. On the one hand I saw sour-faced people picking away on here, on the other I saw 'ordinary' folk expressing solidarity and a collective joy. I know which is healthier. The "not my" generation sound radical enough when they are rejecting feudal targets, but their shallowness and self-defeating nature becomes apparent when it comes to sustaining other commonalities and collective goods. Socialism doesn't stand a chance in those conditions. Such people are deluded liberals still thinking that they can generate their favoured collective goods and ends on the basis of individualist, self-chosen premises. Until people realise that 'ordinary' people are part socialistic and part conservative, seeking meaning, belonging, and identity in place, culture and tradition, politics will keep circling the drain. Liberalism has eaten its own basis, as it was always going to do (parasitic on a past social and moral capital, it can do nothing to replenish the stock, only empty and exhaust the public realm with the nullification of the endless "not my" each, any, and every collective good. I'll take monarchy any day over this nullity, and certainly over any cultural or technocratic new aristocracy based on knowledge/power.
Internationalist in scope, socialism can only be secured on local and national, that is to say, patriotic, grounds. George Orwell delivered this lesson long ago. Orwell also said the biggest argument against socialism was the people who were most vocal and active as socialists.
The criticisms I have read strike me as pathetically bloodless and abstract, with zero motivational force (which possibly explains the taste for coercion and authoritarian imposition and regulation on the part of 'progressives'). I'm looking for content and substance. I've been calling out the anti-monarchists and their performative radicalism today, seeking out their view on the continuing extension and entrenchment of the corporate form on a global basis. What strikes me most of all is how detached from socio-economic reality, let alone the customs and mores and traditions of a place, 'progressives' really are. Taking radical stances against feudal remnants is much easier than supplanting capital with a viable social form. They are in another world, one abstracted from the human roots that feed politics in time and place. The irony is that many claim to speak for 'the people' in favour of democracy, but plainly have no connection with real folk (above and beyond hectoring and lecturing them). Interesting to see Tom Paine being quoted so much today. I don't mind Paine at all, but such people talk as though the completion of the bourgeois revolution would resolve all our problems. They talk as if they are anti-establishment when in fact liberalism has been the dominant culture these past couple of centuries. We've had it - free markets and free trade, political democracy, the great disembedding from tradition and communal restraint, 'the death of God,' and the result is the concentration and centralisation of capital, the corporatisation of public business, and the enclosure of the global commons. The idea that the abolition of the monarchy and the electing of the head of state will transform any of that is fanciful, and tells me that what's left of the Left are not politically serious. Public policy in key areas of resource allocation and depletion, technological innovation, the location of enterprise, work organization, products and prices, and much more besides is made by unelected corporate executives, with elected officials and public servants merely reacting and rubber stamping in response. Large transnational "private" corporations outflank and outmaneuver government at every turn and have been doing so for decades. And people seem to think that the end of the monarchy and an elected head of state amounts to some radical change. Burke and his criticism of mechanism and atomism, his protests against the deliberate and systematic uprooting of organic community and tradition, makes more sense to me these days than Paine's liberal optimism. And I infinitely prefer the old monarchy to the various new aristocracies lining up to claim power and authority in a technocratic culture outside of history, law, and democratic politics. I just find the criticisms I've been seeing today as sad confirmation that 'the Left' is devoid of social democratic purpose and content.
I'm glad I left academia and worked in distribution in the local community, working street to street on foot, keeping in touch with 'ordinary' folk. They've far more sense than the 'intellectuals,' and far more in touch with the things that bind a community - and nation - together. A patriotism and parochialism within proximal relations offers the basis of resolidifying a reality that has been fractured. To be a "Little Englander" might well be something to be, referring to people settled in place, sharing a common culture, expressing a consensual devotion to common ends, and neither wishing to encroach on others nor be encroached upon. Sadly, the 'progressives,' miscalled leftists, have fully embraced liberalisation, globalisation, and corporatisation. I'll stick with monarchy as a much sounder basis for an increasingly despised democracy. It has been and it remains a time of displacement, demoralisation, and disorientation. We need supports and stabilisers, something familiar to hold on to, something with roots and a past, we are a familial species and our culture is that pact between past, present, and future generations that Burke spoke of. We need more of the organic and much less of the engiueered change. (I must admit, I was wondering who the woman was with the sword and what on earth she was intent on doing with it. It may or may not be a perfectly rational basis for governance, but the most important things holding a nation together are beyond reason. I like a bit (a lot) of ritual and pomp and ceremony. Bloodless sorts won't get it, but bloodless sorts have also proven politically inept and utterly demotivating when it comes to inspiring people with their own political visions - not that that worries them, elitists to their marrow, they are more concerned with pushing and ordering people by remote control rather than inspiring and involving them).
You wouldn't think that liberalism has been the dominant political culture ever since. Hitting at feudal targets enables liberals and progressives to perform the awkward psychological feat of posing as anti-establishment whilst being the establishment. The problems of the corporate form and the corporate ownership are self-authored - liberals need to be made to own them. I'm calling out the performative and symbolic 'radicalism' of anti-monarchists and challenging them to find the wit and the will - and the popular support - to take on some much bigger targets.
It's a generally forgetful, and neglectful, age. TV and media have been a blight on politics, encouraging shallowness and superficiality, an electronic barbarism that produces a politics of accident and force over against reasoned reflection and rooted choice. That harms not just monarchy but pretty much all notions of common and public goods. It is significant that all that some people are able to say in face of any collective symbol or representative is "Not My" anything and everything. It seems radical but it is performative and is unable to institutionalize any power or ideal. All that there is is an endless nullification. The origins, of course, lie in liberalism as a self-contradictory politics that cannot but devour its own grounds.
All words aside ....
I am profoundly underwhelmed by people who talk big and walk small, the people who make loud radical statements and yet pick on the softest and easiest targets. It's performative and it comes at no cost and with no risk. It's an easy way to look good and sound big without actually having to do anything. It's perfect for the media age, then. This crowd are stuck in Max Weber's “steel-hard cage” and have no idea how to get out of it. Truth be told, they don't want to. To them, the “iron cage” is also a gilded cage which affords them social position and material comfort. Weber called this right:
“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
The capitalist mechanarchy has taken totalised and globalised form, and there is little indication that 'leftists' have the first idea how to resist it, let alone uproot and supplant it with alternate social forms. As things stand, 'mechanized petrification' within the 'iron cage' of the corporate Megamachine is our fate, and all that people can muster by way of a response is a 'convulsive self-importance' that is the perfect expression of the cultural logic of late capitalism.
It's much easier to maintain a pose of being against the system when ones position within it is secure. Such people are incorporated. Unlike workers past whose livelihoods, homes, families, and communities were at stake whenever they undertook industrial action, the virtue-signallers of the present age risk nothing in taking their radical stances. It's easy, it's soft, and it does nothing to make democratic inroads into corporate power. I'll take conservatism and tradition any day over parasitic performative protest.
I would love to be able to say that identitarianism is a ruling class creation designed to divide the Left, but it would be wrong. Identity politics is a free gift to the ruling class – the Left did it to itself.
When corporations are promoting your movement, you aren't the revolution. The Cultural Left tries to demonstrate its radicalism by challenging soft, easy targets; it makes big stands on little issues, all of which leaves the world unchanged. It's a mirage. Such a Left poses as compassionate and enlightened but morphs very easily into a Corporate Left. Which is to say that cultural leftists are not leftists at all, merely progressives of the kind we have seen all through history – they are on the side of exploiters, not least because their own position is a parasitism. I'm calling them out as Rousseau called them out in the middle of the Enlightenment.
So, no, I'm not remotely impressed by the main body of the anti-monarchists. It's an idle chatter that is besides the point. Monarchy may or may not go in the aftermath of a social democratic transformation of capitalist forms and relations. It's that structural transformation in furtherance of the commons that interests me. I'm not interested in sideshows.
I'll put it this way: there's a certain nobility, not to say bravery, in being idiosyncratic and going one's own merry way, repudiating all authorities, monarchs, and masters greater than one's own personal judgement. I need no lectures here, that's the way I have lived my life. Being autistic, I struggle with connection and communication and tend to avoid social engagement and commitment. I am a fully paid up member of life's awkward squad. I'm not clubbable and have tended always to be on the margin of things when not plainly outside. So I can be individual and unorthodox and exercise my own judgement when it comes to collective ties and loyalties. The ego and its own is my first nature. And I know the limitations of a fetishised 'otherness' and 'difference.' Lacking connection, community, and communication, I know their true value. As social beings, human beings need a thick welter of supra-individual ties, supports, and solidarities to give them a sense of being, meaning, and belonging. The people who have a greater wealth, range, and depth of connection tend to flourish. This connection refers to something much greater than ties of material interest and political commitment. Another way of putting the point is to say that it is easier to be against something than it is to be for something, easier to reject and repudiate than to affirm, easier to criticise than it is to construct. It is difficult to join with others in common endeavour and commit to values and principles that are greater than personal preference and interest, and sustain loyalties and solidarities over a period of time. The most difficult thing of all is to bring different individuals with their various interests and concerns together and secure their allegiance to a common identity. The easiest thing is to remain an outsider, the critical individual who is able to pick out the flaws and fictions in any collectivist endeavour. To the individualist, anything that is above and beyond subjective choice is vulnerable to rejection if it doesn't serve immediate self-interest. This exposes the fatal fault-line at the heart of liberalism's ontology. Liberalism falsely separates two aspects of human nature which belong together, pitching individuality against sociality. Very often, the collective forms of social life are inauthentic and inimical to autonomy and therefore deserve to be criticised and rejected. But as social beings, human beings require some form of public life in order to be themselves, and that means creating, committing to, and sustaining collective forms that enhance rather than inhibit individuality. And that is the most difficult thing of all. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a critic of the social order. To constitute an alternate social order, through communities of practice and character, is the hardest thing of all. And that's the challenge to those who reject certain social and political forms – create alternatives and – the most difficult thing of all – win the allegiance and adherence of sufficient numbers of others to make them viable and sustainable. Have you got what it takes to constitute a public order?
I enjoyed the show, the pageantry, being part of a living history, seeing the seven hundred year old crown which is only ever worn on this day, the ritual, the attention to detail. And I enjoyed seeing Penny Mordaunt holding a hefty 8 kilo and attractively patterned sword upright for what seemed like hours. There is a reason behind that presentation of the sword, which I don't know and maybe don't need to know, being reassured that those who do indeed need to know do so. I trust I make myself obscure. Something that struck me about the criticism on social media is what sad, empty, and miserable lives some people must lead. They didn't want to share in a national event, which is fine. But they couldn't just opt out and ignore. They just have to have an opinion and a view. Even though they had nothing to say, they just had to say it anyway. The saddest part is realising that their lives are so shallow, so needily narcissistic, that they simply cannot go a day without pouring their pointlessness into the electronic void. Surely they have something else to do if they don't want to watch the Coronation? Surely they can post on something of interest to them? Enough of such 'tiny majorities' and their obsessions. This was a day to savour our history and our belonging.
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