Class Solidarity versus National Solidarity

One divides, the other unites

One of the many things that characterises modern society is its social atomisation. In some way or another, nearly everyone recognises this problem, even if they don’t really know what to do about it. Many folks do have ideas - some good, some not so much - about how to reverse this state of affairs. The problem, however, is that many of these people don’t understand where the atomisation, the destruction of social cohesion, comes from and hence don’t know what is really needed to restore it.

Long-time readers are probably expecting me to reference demographic-structural theory (DST) as propounded by Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone, so I certainly don’t want to disappoint anyone. Indeed, DST explains quite a lot about our loss of social cohesion when it posits that as prosperity and centralisation bring a greater share of the population into the social elite, increasing intraelite competition will then produce social pressures that lead to factional strife. In our modern world, this strife manifests itself primarily as mass political party and economic rivalry, as opposed to the almost purely elite mobilisation that used to define premodern intraelite competition.

Indeed, over the past couple of secular cycles that the West has undergone, our loss of social cohesion trends with the rise and spread of liberalism. However, I believe that liberalism - from the classical liberalism that animated the American Revolution to the praesens annus woke progressivism - is a product of our demographic-structural downswings rather than the cause of them. Liberalism (in all its forms) is, after all, a vehicle for the expression of this intraelite competition, and indeed represents the revolt and overthrow of the traditional brahmana/kshatriya castes (the warriors and aristocratic elites) by the up-and-coming vaisya merchant caste using the sudra proletariat as a tool to accomplish this. In other words, liberalism exists because one set of elites desired to - and continues to desire to and has nearly accomplished this desire completely - replace another group of elites through intraelite competition and continues to perpetuate this never-ending cycle of revolutionism to this day. This wicked spirit of perpetual chaos drove the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and continues to this day as a revolt against the fabric of reality itself.

The rise of this liberalism as an expression of otherwise typical demographic-structural pressures is due to the peculiar place which individualism holds in western civilisation. Now, a certain amount of post-Axial individualism is great - it’s the reason why the West broke free of the hivemind mentality that characterises so much of the East and the gross tribalism of places like Africa. However, individualism carries within itself the seeds of a pathology that can destroy social order and cohesion if it is allowed to run rampant. And when you’re to the point where people in your society exalt their ability to kill their babies on demand and change their gender at a whim simply because it personally pleases them to do so, you’ve reached a point where that pathology is rotting the entire body politic from the inside.

Individualism, while capable of allowing much freer expression of thought in science, the arts, and so forth, also makes it significantly harder for western cultures to maintain social cohesion and resist the sort of social atomisation that makes societies fall apart. More communal societies such as those of the Far East start with much higher baseline levels of asabiyya than do western ones. While they may also go through their own demographic-structural cycles, and even endure quite violent ones accompanied by a good deal of bloodletting, their cycles don’t see the type of gross atomisation that we’ve been seeing. Their conflicts tend to be between large factions rallying around various pretenders to a throne, not communities falling apart into fragments where even families don’t stay together.

These tendencies are reflected in the distinction we see between two different motivating forces that are put forward as ways to regain lost social cohesion: class consciousness versus national consciousness. Class consciousness is most commonly associated with communism and socialism but is essentially the organising force for all of liberalism, even its original classical variant. Remember, “classical” liberal thought from the 17th and 18th centuries originated as an ideological justification for freeing the rising class of wealthy urban merchants in England, Holland, and Northern Italy from the strictures imposed upon them by both kings and social tradition as a whole. Simply put, these merchants didn’t want to have to contribute their share to society as a whole and representatives of their class created intellectual justifications for avoiding this.

As a result, the merchant classes in Europe gradually shifted from thinking of themselves in “national” terms to thinking of themselves in “economic” terms. What was “good” was what was good for them and their profit margins, not for the nation as a body. Now, the fruits of this way of thinking are seen in the modern capitalist mindset which views ever-growing corporate power as “good,” making money is the only worthwhile value, and whose representatives generally view themselves as “citizens of the world” with no national ties and who are perfectly happy to pack up and move to a different country every two years if that’s what the profit motive says to do. Keep in mind, however, that communism and socialism hold to essentially the same mindset, just directed at factional use of the state to exercise profit and power rather than “private” corporations. The same basic ideology of cosmopolitanism, economic thinking, and class consciousness applies.

The problem with using this as a means of encouraging or reestablishing social cohesion is that self-interest is a terrible way to try to get people to work together when they’re not in some kind of frontier-type of situation where you have to work together to survive. Otherwise, homo economicus is going to look out for number one, even if it means the rest of the world falls apart around him. Often the merchant class will have coinciding interests, but these are going to conflict with those of everyone else, which generates strife, not unity. When you have a situation like we have in the modern West where they’re stuffing in as many foreign economic mercenaries as they possibly can and thus adding the destabilising effects of ethnic diversity into the mix, all you’re doing is exacerbating the already deleterious effects of our demographic-structural downturn.

An affection for class solidarity and economic thinking is a great way to sort out the genuine Right from the sort of fake, “soft Right” mainstream conservatism we find in the Anglosphere (especially). How do you identify the leftie, liberal, managerial technocratic, economic way of thinking? Just ask them how they feel about the White working class in their own nation versus the hordes of (not really all that) “entrepreneurial” immigrants flooding their country.

One of StoneToss’ best comics ever

If they think Jose or Vikram are “better for America” than their WWC neighbour down the street, you’re dealing someone who has their priorities way out of whack. This is especially the case when they mistakenly think they’re clever for making some snide comment about “living in a trailer” or whatever. It’s that attitude from which arises the whole “propositional nation” idiocy that thinks citizenship and belonging come from a mere piece of paper or passing some basic civics test. Managerial technocrats and the like value “diversity” because they value cheap labour that lowers their bottom line.

Now, the converse to all of this - and something which would actually help to increase social cohesion - is the redevelopment of national consciousness. To understand what this means, though, requires us to understand what a “nation” actually is. A nation is an ethnos, a scriptural term which refers to groups of people who are bound together by common language, culture, mores, traditions, etc. Further, while it is not a specific definition of this ancient Greek term, ethnies will also have a common heritage and genetic legacy that tracks with Steve Sailer’s description of races (not the same thing as ethnies, of course) as partially-inbred extended families.

The thing about national solidarity is that it relies upon this older, more traditional and scriptural organising principle, one which God Himself essentially enforced upon mankind. National consciousness in the sense of loving your own people and wanting what’s best for them first is genuinely conservative. As such, nations are organic bodies that engender unity from top to bottom. Every station in life - from prince to pauper - should function as part of that organic whole. While class consciousness and economic thinking divide a nation horizontally, holistic national consciousness unites a nation vertically. While class thinking is fundamentally atomising and hyperindividualistic due to its materialistic nature, national thinking is cohesive and community building, built upon a spiritual sense of kinship easily recognised by traditional thinkers.

A good example of the distinction being drawn is found in the differences between medieval guilds and modern trade unions. Guilds bound together people who were involved in an area of common economic activity. This unity was from top to bottom, from the owner or proprietor of a concern down to the lowliest apprentice, the lower serving the higher and the higher protecting and watching out for the lower. To the extent that guilds conflicted with other parties, it was as whole units dealing with other whole units. Modern unions, arising within the modernistic industrial milieu, fragment these areas of common economic concern. They set the various economic players against each other, ultimately weakening the whole.

Ultimately, nationalism rightly understood is a socially stabilising element that can help to mitigate (though obviously not eliminate) the effects of our current secular downturn. This, of course, runs counter to the aims and desires of The Powers That Be who want maximal social atomisation since this renders opponents unable to work together effectively. Class rhetoric (even when disguised as a soft Right “defence of the middle class”) continues to be perpetuated by the Regime because this destroys whatever holistic unity might remain among Heritage Americans. The Left needs permanent revolution and the current collapse phase of our secular cycle enables them to ride that wave. But if we want to see a genuine restoration of social cohesion, Americans and other westerners will need to get away from a class consciousness mentality and get back to a more traditional and rational understanding of national awareness. Social cohesion requires that Heritage Americans start loving their own people again.