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Political economy and the nation This short essay is a reply, though not a direct one, to a (now deleted) question from GT on the thread to my piece Nationalism and the Money Power:
It is also a response to Leon’s recent commentary with its, for me, non-tractable Austrian presumption. Since I have tied both arms and legs to the hazy notion of an ontological nationalism - a philosophy which might be described as “a European reality” - I really ought to use it to feel for a nationalist alternative to that sterile, old liberal contest of the free market versus interventionism, as it was used (to PF’s chagrin) in the challenge to our so very free friend Perry. Economy is the process of exchange, a market the means of exchange, and money the unitary value of exchange. All forms of politics seek a realisation of some kind through exchange itself, for it is a radically transforming medium. Nationalism’s realisation - at least, an ontological nationalism’s - is or would be, technically-speaking, the increase of the ethnic genetic interests of a people. That can be a genetically qualitative or quantitative goal. But its realisation will plainly require something beyond the conventional economic goals of maximal stability and freedom and a meritocracy of opportunity and prosperity, which are universals to all Western economic models. To be worthy of the name, a nationalist political economy must be characterised by a small number of other, quite particular and inter-related goals that certainly don’t arise under a 21st century liberal regime. These include: Financial sovereignty À propos my last post on this subject, it is impossible, really, to reconcile nationalist political economy with the Money Power. There is an argument for pragmatism at the commencement of a nationalist government. International trade must be protected ... energy supply ... raw materials imports ... food imports. But nationalism is inherently revolutionary in our time, and must intend a revolution of the sovereign finance and fractional reserve systems. Even if the beast cannot be slain abroad, its hold on the nation must be broken. That is so regardless of the risks and costs of doing the deed - and they could be grave in the extreme. Self-sufficiency Again, given the West’s dependency on imported energy, raw materials, and so on, autarky is an aspiration rather than an achievable goal. Even so, it is a superior ambition to the protectionism that political nationalists so often favour. To the extent that autarky is achieved, it has no need of a defensive mentality. It does not compromise relations with the rest of the world. It is a generator of national self-confidence. By definition, a nationalist polity must seek it, and thereby minimise the nation’s exposure to factors beyond its control. The principle of ownership There are a few ways in which ownership enters into discussion of the nationalist political economy. It is an important factor. The most obvious statement on the matter was the distributive model authored by Chesterton and Belloc. The problem with distributism, as with Margaret Thatcher’s expansion of share ownership in the 1980s, is that more owners of capital only guarantees more collectors of dividends. It does not guarantee a wider governance of the economy since the running of businesses remains in the hands of the professional managers. Managerialism is a divisive force in modern business. It leads to short-term thinking, policies for the maximisation of the share price rather than investment in the business, the ransacking of company pension funds, the importing of cheap labour, the outsourcing of jobs, and a culture of scandalous mutual reward among top managers. The necessary brake on it is available through a return to family ownership, and to care for the long-term interests of the business and its employees. This, in my view, would be more useful to the employees than an annual dividend. The moral sense of ownership in one’s employer is also highly important. Loyalty matters, and cuts both ways. Lifetime employment matters. Training - real apprenticeship - matters. A revolution in management culture would be required to install these. Decent wages really matter. In the end, the strongest incentive for economic activity under any system is always financial reward. That will never change. Accordingly, the lion’s share of wealth generated by businesses should flow to the workers or to investment in competitiveness. This way the workforce and the company become the beneficiaries of labour. A coherence of all the interests in society Ultimately, right liberalism is an outcrop of the European trait of individualism, and left liberalism is an outcrop of the European trait of altruism. One trait is not “better” than the other. Both exist in us because they offered fitness gains in the European evolutionary past. We cannot ever escape from our biology, and we do indeed make our politics out of it - even though that is never understood in a thought-world in which Nature and biology are denied as bounds to the will to be broken. As political actors, the purpose of the Perry de Havillands of this world is to generate a politics for a hyper-individualist model of Man that does not exist in Nature. Ultimately, Marx was right that capitalism and the free market alienate Man from his own self. They have a disintegrating action. However, communism demonstrated an unrivalled capacity to crush the human spirit. Neither are reasonable prices to pay for a political economy. Nationalists, as political actors, desire to generate a politics for the whole nation and that, oddly enough, implies working with a model of Man that is holistic and true. It also implies a political economy that coheres all the interests in society, whether they are the interests of capital (served through debt-forgiveness and changes to ownership) or labour (served through that revolution at work). It would not, by encouraging unfettered self-expression, create antagonisms of outcome or of social class. It would not licence the expolitation of the weak by the strong. It would not, therefore, seek to resolve the situation by abolishing one set of interests as classical Marxism does, striking down the bourgeois for the working man, the consumer for the producer, the private for the public. Economic activity in the national interest The Western polities used to adhere to the principle that foreign military adventures are legitimated only if they are in the national interest. It is a good principle, a necessary, protective principle. Likewise, economic action must serve the national interest. The interests of managers and financial institutions are not greater than the interests of the people. By banishing debt, by subsequently controlling the supply and cost of capital to business, by encouraging savings (and therefore investment and r&d) over consumption, by invigorating the labour force, by revivifying the nation racially, a nationalist system would transform the political economy, and provide all the people with a new economic life. If there is a better economic goal than that, I do not know what it is. Comments:2
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:04 | # GW good starting point in defining what I would call the ‘radical centre’. I would add that investment in an excellent education and training system would be crucially important in my view. At the very top end we need really good universities with far more emphasis upon science and engineering. Equally why do we import medical staff - we should invest and train our own. Developing our own ‘human capital’ fully is vitally important. As of today there are millions of Britons with very poor literacy and numeracy skills. I firmly put the blame on our awful educational system. However the educational system should be run along the notion of a pro-active ‘democratic elitism’ - we should not write off kids from poor backgrounds before they have even started. Let me give you an example. I went to a ‘bog-standard’ - to put it kindly - school. If I have achieved anything within the educational sphere in life it was despite, not because, of my school. OK so in our music class we had to listen to music, have a go at playing instruments etc. I vividly remember the music teacher have us listen to steel drum ‘music’ and flushed with excitement she announced the school had acquired some steel drums and she would be forming a school steel drum group etc. Now this ‘teacher’ was one of those middle-class ‘radicals’ that inhabit the SWP etc., that underneath the veneer of concern for the working-classes actually loathes and despises them. How did this manifest itself? Well upon being introduced to the joys of steel drum ‘music’ I asked “why are we not listening to Mozart or Beethoven?” the response was an icy, poisonous stare and a curt “that’s not appropriate.” I thought “why?” Most of the music appreciation aspect of the lessons consisted of discussing pupil ‘responses’ to banal pop lyrics (not even decent pop – no Morrissey at all lol). Equally now in our country English literature classes often consist of pupils not reading a book or even a short story but of reading a single page extract form something like Dickens and answering ‘factual’ questions about the extract. Why cannot they actually be properly introduced to our literary culture? That Shakespeare is not part of of every young persons education is outrageous. I recall my drama teacher telling us all that ‘EastEnders’ was fantastic drama. So you know just forget ‘Hamlet’ as it is not for the likes of you ‘lower’ people. We had to enact sub-Brechtian ‘plays’ about ‘social-issues’. It makes me so damn angry. They could have tried extending the best of our culture to many of those really culturally improvised kids (even if only one or two had positively responded it would have been worth the effort) – but no, instead let’s patronise them with utter drivel. There is all the world of difference in being uneducated and culturally improvised and in being stupid. Not that this thought ever crossed the minds of the ‘radical’ teachers at my old school (there are many semi-educated idiots). That talk of literature reminds me another two dozy SWP type teachers at my old high school. In our English classes pupils had from time to time write short stories. So I was 13/14 and wrote a story about a young working class man that leaves school at 16, with no qualification etc., gets involved in football hooliganism (I think I set the story in the East End and it involved Millwall hooligans – perceived at the time to be very racist), the main character is placed into a young offenders prison etc. He ends up dead due to gang violence in the prison and as he is dying, in an internal monologue, regrets his wasted life. Anyway I had various characters involved in racial strife or using the term ‘nigger’ etc., and expressing ‘racist’ views etc. I knew this would really annoy my teachers. Anyway one of my English teachers decided to have ‘a word’ about the language I used as she was worried and concerned. She earnestly started to lecture me on how racism is evil etc., so I suggested that she surely wasn’t so naïve as to think an author endorses all of his characters values and opinions and that I was attempting to be realistic, in that a racist would use racist terms, yes? My story, I told her, was about how good people end up doing bad things. She was very annoyed indeed – she didn’t really believe in my sincerity. I thought I was going to land myself in quite a bit of hot water. Thankfully the other English teacher, again another SWP type but unusually actually from a working-class background, had read my story by the the next lesson and told me he thought it was a brilliant bit of social realism! No further action was taken. A final example of the patronising drivel and supercilious attitude that these ‘progressive’ educators have to working-class kids. One term my school had a project for pupils to each produce a poster about a heroic figure or the person from history they most admired. One girl in my class picked Isaac Newton and I think I went with Charles Darwin. Most of the other kids seemed to pick TV personalities, sports people, whatever. I asked one boy who he was going to select for his project and he said “Elton John”. I must have sneered because next thing I know is that I’ve been punched on the chin and I am on my backside. Well the teacher obviously intervenes and tells me not to mock pupil X and that all our choices were ‘equally valid’. Does anyone honestly believe that Elton John and Charles Darwin are equally important and worthy figures? It would have been much better to have had a list of serious and worthy figures and allow pupil to pick one from the list (or even draw them at random). Instead of Elton John go and find out who James Clerk Maxwell was and what he did that was important. But no let them dwell in their own, extremely attenuated, cultural ghetto because that’s ‘progressive’. To me it’s criminal to assume that working-class kids can ‘only’ enjoy steel drums and only ‘cope’ with a single page from Dickens. You would be pleasantly surprised. I have seen kids for very ‘rough’ backgrounds grow and develop in remarkable ways when given more to feed upon than the cultural slurry we presently serve them up with. We can’t afford to write of millions of our people as we presently do. With a little effort and guidance we, and they, can do much, much better. But aside from the cultural aspects of education – high standards and high quality at every stage of the education and training process is vital to developing and enhancing our economic prospects. Let alone building up our cultural immune systems to resist the post-modern, but highly profitable for those that produce it, smorgasbord of shit that passes for 90%+ of modern consumerist-driven ‘culture’. The customer can be wrong (a deeply unAmerican thought I know). And finally we, the British tribes, have a really interesting history in our island home. Can we drop the, literally months, of history lessons about WWII and the actions of the German regime of the time? I remember having to go through this at school and wondering why. I know now why. GW is the Minister for Education position going? 3
Posted by Jason on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:39 | # I love all this stuff. Just as libertarians are usually young white American-Atlantic Islander-European men in headlong flight from their whiteness, the deep thinkers operate at one, two, or three removes from offering things that can be done on the ground to enable less imaginative young white kids to push back against the anti-white narrative in a way that both destabilizes the WEJ-dominated adversaries and still stays in the white voice in a white-centric way. Something about the best minds of our age wasting away as far removed from the real fight as possible. A fight on newspaper comment lists or on blogs is not a help to anyone, especially the youngsters being brow-beaten every day with hatred. There’s a lot more to do than view with alarm or outline massive lists of things for others to do or make predictions about future outcomes. Let’s help the kids push back and teach them that it’s okay. 4
Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:00 | # [I posted this on another thread, which perhaps is petering out.] Graham, You’ve written some interesting and insightful stuff around the last several posts, but I can’t help feeling there is a lot of mutually incomprehensible barbs being bruited about ... talking at cross purposes ... (’apples and oranges’) ... I’d like to respond (to you and a few others) on matters of economics as well as the philosophical status of the individual, but I’m not exactly sure what there is for me to grapple with, as you keep destroying “straw-men”; eg, that all espousers of free market doctrines are, at bottom, anthropological liberals who (must?) hold to a belief in “self-authorship” or radical individuality, which you find factually/ontologically preposterous (I happen to agree with your rejection of the ‘autonomous self’; I disagree with the notion that love of individual liberty, or preference for juridical equality, or empirical recognition of the superior economic productivity of free (individual-directed) markets, necessarily commits one to this appropriately criticized adolescent ontological atomism). So I have some clear-the-air questions. 1. Can one be a non-liberal supporter of free markets? 2. How would you describe your preferred political economy, and in what concretely does it consist? 3. Do you believe in any juridical realm of individual liberty or autonomy? 4. Even assuming the socially constituted ‘self’, do you see any merit in centuries of classical liberal criticism against arbitrary government, against unequal applications of laws, and in favor of strong private property rights, and limited government? 5. Is there any rough percentage of government spending of GDP beyond which you would hesitate to go (outside of national emergencies; eg, the Battle of Britain)? I could probably come up with many more such boundary-setting inquiries, but I don’t wish to be presumptuous. Answering these will give me a better sense of where exactly you stand in relation to those of us you dismiss as mere “classical liberal racists” (not that that’s a bad position in itself - I have just described Thomas Jefferson, and many of America’s Founders). 5
Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:07 | # Interesting post, Graham, nice to see your pedagogical traditionalism on display. One lacuna: where does Christian instruction fit in - you know, the metaphysical superstructure which guided your land for a thousand years, and was the ‘deep background’ to the bulk of British (and European) achievement? BTW, I am appalled by your ‘educational system’ as you have described it. Thank God I was educated in private Christian (albeit ‘lay’) schools in the 70s and 80s, before attending my Jewish (Ivy) university (all the Ivies are essentially Jewish, and have been since, I believe, at least the 60s, in case anybody is wondering). 6
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:26 | # Ex-Pro White Activist, Perhaps the localist nature of your own focus allows you to write economic rules more freely than I can working at the scale of the nation. No complex modern economy can be self-sufficient, so autarky in any absolute sense is bound to be a question of degree. Beyond that, the complaints you raise concerning mediation are fair, but they are complaints about the smallness of degree, and they are complaints against the Money Power and government, and against the accepted practises of market trading. A single nationalist government could hold the nation against the Money Power. But it will take several such governments acting together to impose new trading practises on the commodities markets and thereby eviscerate our enemies. I agree that the masses will not turn to nationalism by their own volition, certainly not while the present control of public discourse obtains. Soren’s inversion of Clausewitz’s motto remains the key. 7
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:47 | # Jason, You are right, the young white kids have to know its OK to take their stand. But there are many fora that cater for them, and portals such as Amren and VDare through which they can enter into this world of ours where thinking is truly free. A very few sites, of which MR is one, are dedicated not to outreach or protest or education, or even high-grade analysis (such as one finds at OO/TOQ) but, primarily, to conceptualisation. I know it seems a long way from the world you wrote about. But it is still good and necessary in its own right. Ideas give form to action, there are not enough ideas in White Nationalism - not nearly enough. 8
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:14 | # Graham, The great advantage in a schooling during the 1950s and 60s was that there were no “educationalists” - the breed that slouched into existence after the reforms of Anthony Crossland and Shirley Williams. The music lessons in my South London secondary modern were untouched by the Marxian bent - not that I took much interest in music apart from admiring the pitch-perfect talents of Lesley England, along with the other talents she possessed. The advent of the educationalist signalled the moment when love of teaching and belief in the young went out of the window, and politics flew in. The de-Marxisation of our public life is one of the primary objectives for a sometime nationalist government. But it should be a de-politicisation too, so the true character of teaching can emerge, and teachers can rediscover their own passion for what they do. Politics has to stand back. One of my earliest political convictions, arrived at when I was in mid-teens, was that the only truly worthy peacetime professions are teaching and medicine. Both need saving somewhat. But, saved, they ought to be much better remunerated than they are. 9
Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:58 | # What were these ‘reforms’ of Shirley Williams? I ask only because I believe she is a Catholic, who, though progressive, does take her faith seriously. Even fairly liberal Catholics in the US have, if only as a matter of institutional inertia, generally not been at the forefront of facilitating Marxist pedagogicaL infiltration or influence. 10
Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:58 | #
It certain behooves us to determine what that degree can be. My reason for my “localist” focus is similar to Willie Sutton’s explanation for why he robbed banks. Housing and food account for at least 65% of the typical white family monthly budget. It looks like really low hanging fruit from my perspective. Let’s leave this aside for now. “Scale of nation”. Are you ready to discuss specifics at the scale of the nation? I am. Energy and fuels independence, or contrarily vulnerability to externally imposed embargo, is or should be at the top of the economic-security list. The Money Power was not slow to apply an oil embargo to Germany and all of continental Europe in the later 1930s.
Which of these markets are really likely to still be needed when Autarky is the guiding principle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth’s_crust The supply of almost all of these as raw materials is a function of the cost of energy and fuels required to extract and reduce them. Nearly all of them occur in nature as oxides. Aluminum is a most interesting example. It’s more abundant than iron. It’s just more chemically reactive and takes a bit more energy to reduce it. The cost of aluminum, and the utility of foreign bauxite as a source of precursor alumina, depends entirely on the cost of electricity. When watts are cheap then suitable high alumina clays found almost anywhere can be used. Which takes us back to energy and fuels. 11
Posted by danielj on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:30 | # Does anyone honestly believe that Elton John and Charles Darwin are equally important and worthy figures? I do. But that is probably because I love Elton and hate Charles. 12
Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:57 | # GW, I invite you, too, to consider the 5 questions I’ve posed to Dr. Lister. I think you’re groping your way forward, on the right track, more or less. One problem, however, is that you’re analyzing the economy from a non-scientific perspective, as you mention, that of EGI (of course, one clarificatory question pops up immediately: are you referring to white racial GI, or truly ethnic GI, and if the latter, what happens when, say, English and French GI, or German and Polish GI, etc, conflict?). So you are considering the economy instrumentally, as something elastic or amenable to rearrangement based on an outside standard (EGI) without seeming to recognize that there is a definite structure to economic behavior, that, among other significances, renders it a fit subject for discerning regularities which can form a body of knowledge. That is, economics is not merely descriptive of any particular set of political/legal arrangements; it has real, permanent, and universal truths to teach us. If such truths exist, as I strongly believe they do, you can ignore them in order to pursue some objective other than wealth maximization, but I think it important at least to learn what economics has to teach, in order to be aware of what the real costs of any given set of market constraints are likely to be. I do indeed think the Austrian School is correct, at least as a matter of value-free economics (discerning that structure of human action). This in no way necessarily entails my adoption of wealth maximization as the final standard for assessing the worth of particular economic and political arrangements, let alone of rabid and rootless libertarian ideology (Dr. Lister seems incapable of recognizing this point). 13
Posted by danielj on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:57 | # The oikos is not subject to analysis. Man is not homo economicus. Man makes irrational decisions that the market cannot account for. The biggest decisions of our lives-ones that have the greatest effect on our economic selves-are not subject to rational scrutiny. The national macrocosm is similar. If we decide to revivify the practice of human sacrifice all the market can do is use its hidden hand to give the bloodthirsty nation a reactionary reach around. Economics is a slave to the passions and fortuna. Politics is prior. 14
Posted by danielj on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:59 | # Economists are semi-useful scribes pretending to be prophets and interpreters of dreams. 15
Posted by anon / uh on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:55 | #
Isn’t like 90% of your book prophesying and parables. 16
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:35 | # Leon,
The free market is a tool for us, not an ideology. It is useful for what it can do better than anything else, and only for that.
It is not liberty but blood that I politic for. I am a son of England. I belong to a living people, not a bus-load of autonomous tourists. And what, exactly, is the use of a legal entitlement to “personal autonomy” if one’s people has had the power to live withdrawn from it?
The political goods which the people hold they hold because, once upon a time, abnormalities in the dispensation of power were squeezed out. For the reason why that happened you must look in our nature. Liberals grants themselves the laurels, but it is European nature to live free and to care for our brother.
No, the determinant of how much capital government could invest in the economy free of interest would be the usual measures of inflation and currency value. 17
Posted by danielj on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:48 | # Isn’t like 90% of your book prophesying and parables. I can’t answer in the affirmative as you would have me unless you first define prophesying and parables. 18
Posted by anon / uh on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 04:47 | #
Prophecy — The unsubtle art of anticipating another man’s downfall and one’s own long-term advantage. Parable — Making a molehill of a mountain. 19
Posted by danielj on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:07 | # There certainly is a lot of schadenfreude in the Scriptures, but, there really isn’t a ton of future-telling friend. Certainly not 90%. The Major Prophets are mostly written in a Jeremiadic vein and the Minors in somewhat similar fashion. Prophesy, on my understanding, in mostly a stern rebuke from the Lord. 20
Posted by Randy Garver on Sat, 08 Oct 2011 04:43 | # anon / uh:
Redolent of Bierce. You have an interesting wit. Post a comment:
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Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:10 | #
It is this perception that it is impossible to break the offshore addictions, that globalism is irreversible as well as being “good”, that is largely responsible for marginalizing nationalism. I’m sorry to see you accept these propositions so uncritically.
It’s not? That may be true for Great Britain. It’s absolutely not true for the USA. From my viewpoint you’ve disposed of what should be most of the daily content and focus of a Movement in one sentence of assumption.
Creating and sustaining the current dependencies is a primary source of regime power. These activities generate the massive cash flow that goes to our enemies. And chump change from that cash flow is what funds the SPLC, ADL and similar hate-filled entities. Individually the “activists” hired by these entities are canaille. But there are a good number of them and they are paid full time through a vast network of 501c3 entities.
Oil is merely one example. Who mediates this trade? Where is it mediated?
“Buy low - sell high” requires a lot of supporting policies to artificially create “market demand” that is willing to “buy high”. This is true whether we consider (not) rare earth metals, “higher” education or aluminum. The organizational level at which autarky is implementable for any class of goods and services is the primary issue. Closely following this is the question of credible results creating more political credibility.
At the current time the non-Movement’s default position is it must first receive total power, and only then can it - maybe - do great things. And this will supposedly be at great risk even according to your essay. The experience of many decades says there will be never be a moment when the “masses” turn of one unconscious accord to “us”.