Brexit: The Glory of Slaves

Fragments and Drawing

Gore Vidal referred to late modernity as “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for everyone else,” but that doesn’t quite capture the obscenity of our present. British society has all that was bad about feudalism, without any of that system’s meager benefits.

Are we captured by an intensive, undemocratic centralisation of power? Yes, yes and yes. Is political clout correlated with the amount of property one owns? Depressingly so. Have our elites initiated cynical wars with the veneer of defending something holy? No doubt.

(That is to say nothing of the City of London, a distinct feudal hangover that overwhelmingly dictates, and benefits from, the fiat money system.)

What today’s rulers lack, however, is any sense of responsibility. Noblesse oblige is long gone. The lowly hordes are on their own; ours, they tell us, is a dog-eat-dog world.

Rather than acknowledging they should be thankful, if at all, for an accident of birth, the whining 1 percenters believe, and wish everyone else to believe, that their wit, their virtue and their graft alone flung them to the top. In doing so, they don’t even allow underlings their righteous indignation.

We don’t live in a meritocracy; and, to the extent that we do, it favours sociopaths.

And, you know, there’s no such thing as society.

Margaret Thatcher

Whatever else might be said about the feudal lords of the Middle Ages, they accepted a duty to the peasantry. They were undeserving, uppity, and often sadistic, but they saw a need to contribute to the body politic. They saw that religious educations were provided, that trades were protected, and helped facilitate a socially-cementing cultural life. But perhaps more importantly, they had more than a rhetorical interest in the protection of serfs — after all, they were their serfs.

Being one of the few abolitionists who was capable of taking his opponents seriously, the Yankee Orestes Brownson understood how those condemned to chattel slavery might benefit over those on a wage. Owners, as opposed to employers, have a genuine stake in their worker’s wellbeing.

Squeamish as the idea of people as property will make you, such arrangements engender a sense of stewardship that the capitalist has no need for; commodifying toilers as much as corn.

This goes someway to explaining why our current political class enact policies which predictably undermine citizens’ security. Because from the increasingly myopic view of the masters, with their unimaginable wealth, automated labour, private security and underground bunkers, what use are you, anyway? The public, that irritating yet indispensable component of all societies until now, has been cancelled.

The private-industrial manufacturing of money in the wake of the deregulation of the ‘financial industry’ has imposed unprecedented uncertainty on entire societies, exacerbating distributional conflict within and between them and raising as yet utterly unresolved problems of global re-regulation. As to nature, or land, we have slowly been learning that the fundamental characteristic of a fictitious commodity — that its supply is not and cannot be governed by the demand for it — applies to nature with full force. Indeed, indications are that unless we find ways to protect our global commons from further commodification, the very basis of life on earth as we know it may soon be consumed in the service of unbridled progress of capital accumulation. Finally, ever-increasing flexibility of labour markets and work organization has subjected individuals and families to relentless pressures to organize their lives in line with the unpredictable demands of increasingly competitive markets. Among other things, the result is growing polarization between an impoverished surplus population of losers; overworked middle-class families living an absurdly busy life and putting in ever more, and ever more intense, working hours in spite of unprecedented prosperity; and a small elite of winner-take-all super-rich whose greed knows no limits while their bonuses and dividends have long ceased to serve any useful function for society as a whole.

Wolfgang Streeck

It is those communties we were told had the most to benefit from Thatcher’s wars of liberation, that are today those most consumed by collective violence. Gangs of modern day head hunters, seeking meaning through the obliteration of Them; and, in an critical sense, I.

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Walter Benjamin

When the liberal economic system completed its subjugation of the social domain in the early 20th century, whole, mass populations were drawn to revolutionary Bolshevism, fascism. It was in these extremes they found an antidote to individuality as defined by the market, and the collective illusion of freedom as entropy.

In those decades, Karl Polanyi certainly wasn’t alone in thinking that these outbreaks of communal and pseudo-mystical violence had cemented the demise of the “market utopianism,” which bore them, forever. Ultimately, what leader would be stupid enough to risk civilisation itself all over again?

When the real world no longer works: when your community physically breaks down, and brings with it all of the attendent problems — sexual abuse, domestic violence, struggle with substance addictions — then you seek a world of miracles and magic.

Chris Hedges

The attempt to encourage modernity’s victims back into the real world, as Hedges puts it, is met by anger and rage, “by people who feel that they are being forced into a world that almost destroyed them”. With echos of Mussolini, he tells us they want nothing more than to blow it up.

Thatcher’s national campaign against community and solidarity was calamitous on every level — including at the polls. Yet she managed to capitalise on widespread ressentiment by directing violent passions elsewhere. Taking the opportunity offered by Argentina’s junta (war being their attempt at distraction), she diverted warships and public attention to the Falklands.

In 2019, again, the same bald Tories are faced with social implosion and, as ever, there’s a whole host of official enemies to redirect ire towards. With their party in terminal crisis, an economy on the rocks, and a resurgent Left on the up, the Conservatives may very well seek to baptise Brexit in blood.

From 1979 to the present, foreign policy has grown ever more crucial for London — the era of the South Atlantic War, a protracted (and unresolved) debate over European Union, and NATO’s Balkans crisis, as well as of the advance of globalization. Status and a global presence have shown themselves to be more important to the all-British identity than the postwar welfare state, or the conventions of liberal legalism. In the end, it is foreign-policy fixations and delusions that have dragged the state into the present abyss. A feared subordination to Europe has turned into actual subservience to George W. Bush’s American neo-conservatism, and condemned the UK army (with its large Scottish contingent) to the Iraqi charnel-house, and the hopelessness of Afghanistan.

Tom Nairn

England birthed to a monster when it encouraged Pax Americana. And it will soon be entirely at its mercy (one of the great impetuses behind the Euro was the attempt to yank Europe out of America’s orbit). Although plenty will delude themselves into believing that this “very special relationship” has saved Ukania from irrelevance and infamy.

Although those with hope in their hearts ought to remember — or be informed— that Puerto Rico is as much of a precedent here, re: unofficial statehood, as is Israel.

What a pathetic bunch the UK’s ruling class have become, trailing behind the Americans of all people. Although, to be fair to the current incumbents, perhaps those green benches have always been filled with cretinous filth? Paine was writing in the 18th century when he was bemoaning the condition of Britain’s subjects: they aren’t kept scared by ravenous lions, so much as they endure asses.

The UK has built its power on two principles: keep the British Isles united and the European continent divided. Today it is close to succeeding in doing the opposite.

Adrien Jaulmes

Considering all this, an unsympathetic commentator might suggest how fitting it is that the nation which destroyed the economic viability of the once great Egypt, will itself succumb to pauperisation. How the former empire that imposed military rule of millions may, in the coming months, see the army distributing food on its streets — backed up by a surveillance state so extensive the Stasi would swoon. How the country responsible for cutting up the Indian subcontinent for short-term political gain will soon experience a breakdown of its union.

How just, he might add, that the same Britain that forced Éire, the Canadian First Nations and Australia’s Aborigines into beggary, disgrace and hopelessness is becoming the ultimate victim of Whitehall mismanagement. And all of it guaranteed by the largest democratic mandate in its history.

That same callow individual might end by claiming the only return to glory Brexit is likely to bring, is of the type that interested Milosz: irony, the glory of slaves.