Response to Aurelien's "The Revolt of the Outer Party"

We agree on consequences and visible effects, not on ultimate causes

Here I respond to the article "The Revolt of the Outer Party" published yesterday on Substack by

Aurelien

.

I got my school education in the UK. Its purpose was overt: to subsidize the industries that need staff. The government pays for schools from the public purse so that literate and numerate young people who know some geography and history and perhaps a foreign language would be available for hire to businesses and public offices. I received also a higher education and here the subsidy was even more obvious with the need for engineers, dramatists, medics, musicians, lawyers, scientists, you name it.

International competition for industry, trade and culture is a given that the people understand so strategic subsidy of education was a big-budget policy all political parties has to support no matter their color. It is necessary for the good of the nation, in which the nation itself is another given.

Where you and I depart, as usual, Aurelien, is how we understand the decline over the last 50 years in the USA and UK and followed a bit later at different times in different parts of Europe. I see it as the consequence of the corruption of strategic national purpose by an international capitalist class that has no loyalty to any nation and whose interests are independent of any nation's interests. Since politicians are easily influenced, the education infrastructure was made available for privatization, outsourcing and financializing.

Education is just one example of each nation’s strategic infrastructure (commons) that was sold for extraction. Others include transport, electricity, water, and sewer systems but education is unique among these strategic systems because of how it builds deep interconnections between the individual, the family, the community and the nation. Common knowledge, so long as it is mostly right and useful, can be seen as a national capital project. And it builds connections and belonging. When deciding to leave the UK for good at age 25 I had to process a sense of guilt at turning away from the nation that had educated me.

Turning back to the corrupting force of international capital, the political systems and bureaucracies of Europe’s international organization were similarly open to co-option. Or perhaps it’s not really corrupt if the motive for a European initiative comes mainly from international capital, as they clearly did in many cases (most? idk).

Liberalism is a good political story for prosperous times. It’s pretty easy for people to live and let live and tithe to the community when what’s theirs isn’t threatened. If sufficient prosperity is there to be more-or-less shared and people believe it will continue or return soon then liberalism is a theory you can sell. It served well as a quasi-political theory/cover-story for capitalist progress for anyone who’s ethically uncomfortable asserting old-school conservative property rights as capitalism’s justification.

However, extraction from the commons within each nation was always a limited business plan. The UK is now a transparent case study in finding those limits. In international business the advantages Western nations had over the rest of the world were already fragile in 2022 when they were suddenly and dramatically curtailed. Economic declines nobody knows how to manage at the national level have begun. Since 2022 we can see daily in the news the change in relative confidence of nations within and without what Pepe Escobar calls NATOstan. The crisis in Israel seems to be accelerating this differentiation.

While liberalism sells in the good times, is a useless political story in these times because liberalism was always a luxury. Talk of freedom, democracy and human rights won’t count for much when people feel their family and household is fundamentally insecure within their society.

This is why the Western political elite and PMC (professional and managerial class, see Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!) are useless now. Their beliefs didn’t _cause_ the crisis; instead liberalism _allowed_ this cohort to manage affairs on behalf of international capital. We know that capitalism always lurches from crisis to crisis so giving it ever more freedom and rewarding its criminals, as we have since the 70s, just produces ever bigger crises. Now we will have to get used to watching international capital cut its losses, short the West, and abandon us to our worthless liberal apparatchiks.

It’s easy to be angry at the PMC and their nonsense. I am too. For my own part, I believe that the special contempt I feel comes from understanding that I was betrayed. My parents and I were indoctrinated into the liberal social democratic consensus that existed in the UK’s reconstruction period (yielding for example the OU, as you mentioned Aurelien). Now I have to figure out what to repudiate and what to keep from this system of thought. It is a difficult intellectual task and is emotionally wrenching. It requires reevaluating so much and so many things and people. I resent having to do this but defending my core values requires it.

Unfortunately if we want to fix our crisis and rescue something from our cultural heritage, fixing what’s broken in liberal thought isn’t enough. We need to go beyond that to the thing that bought and corrupted liberal thought and values. Backrock is now so powerful that it can negotiate as a peer or superior power to many nations. It’s not the only such nihilistic psychopathic entity. Regaining some freedom, democracy and human rights will require disciplining that exorbitant privilege and fixing PMC nonsense follows naturally from that, not the other way around.

We were deceived into believing that our interests separately and consequently collectively were served by those of capitalism. Now, with the onset of the decline phase, it is becoming apparent that it’s the other way around and our separate interests depend on the collective. Liberals and conservatives both sold out our national interest.

So what’s it going to be? We can either discipline international capital and reinvest in democracy, as FDR did, or we can allow authoritarians to exploit the coming nationalist moment, as various Europeans did mid 20th c.

Who won the Western neoliberal game 1979-2022? Not the PMC. The real enemy lies beyond them (see David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism) and our only chance now is broad-based popular class power that takes control back from the international oligarchs.