Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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It’s an article of faith for today’s Marxists that capitalism (or “Neo-Liberalism”) is about to collapse due to its “internal contradictions”, and that it will take down the USA with it. I don’t need to repeat my stance on this matter, but they are a vocal lot and are very confident in the the correctness of their catechism.

Marxists have had a bad run these past few decades beginning with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc through to capitalism’s continued refusal to fall apart. “It’s coming, it’s coming…believe me!”, they insist. After all, it’s a matter of science, and to them, the science was settled a long, long time ago.

You have to feel for them in a way. It’s got to be painful to try and win new converts based on the performance of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and such (almost no western Marxists will defend North Korea, it seems). Neither Venezuela nor Bolivia are communist regimes, but they will take what they can get it, and the gettings have been meagre since 1989. Doctrinaire Marxism seems to be out, with a pragmatic and increasingly fashionable hammer and sickle funnily enough making inroads with youth in places like the USA these days.

University to me was a culture shock: I arrived from a self-contained suburb into a new world where half of the undergrads that I would soon meet would describe themselves as Marxists, and with faculty staff easily surpassing that number. “Have any of you ever lived in a communist country? Do any of you have family from communist countries?”, I would think to myself.

That was the 1990s, and the 90s are now a different world. Back then, China was just the place that made cheap junk…even if they were beginning to develop a bit of a military bite. “How will China react?” was a question that was not frequently asked with respect to international issues outside of East Asia, but you were beginning to hear it.

Today’s western Marxists have firmly ensconced themselves in the so-called “Anti-Imperialist movement”, one in which the Global South is the victim of the predatory Global North and its rapacious Neo-Liberal economics. Even though Marxists are very prone to a religious fanaticism when it comes to their faith, pragmatism is not alien to them. One need only look at the Popular Front strategy of the second half of the 1930s as a best example. This pragmatism manifests itself today in strategic support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, etc……any country or grouping that is a target of US foreign policy.

The best example of this pragmatic approach within a larger Marxist framework is western support for China against the USA. The recent defeats of Hezbollah and Iran and the inability (or studious avoidance) of Russia to deliver a knock-out punch in Ukraine leaves China as the Marxists’ only hope in their holy war against capitalism and its American mother ship. Sure, China is a one-party state led by a communist party, but it is communist-in-name-only and is one of the two main pillars holding up global capitalism today. I guess it’s true that you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

It’s becoming more and more clear that the rest of this century (or at least the next two decades) will be dominated by the rivalry between the USA and China. But where Marxists insist on seeing (or hoping for) an ideological clash between the two, my view is that the fight will strictly be a battle for turf, wholly non-ideological beyond the realm of propaganda. Marxists tell us that there is no God. I tell them that their faith in Marx is misplaced.

I’m sharing this essay with you that comes courtesy of an American Marxist who resides in Shanghai. It has a “stream of consciousness” quality to it as it has the tendency to wander and meander, but there are some interesting bits to make you think:

Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market. To the extent that, within modern Chinese history, “Right” means to be aligned with the interests of capital (and the Kuomintang), and “Left” means to be aligned with the interests of labor (and the CCP), Hu Jintao–era critics of the direction China was going were considered voices from the Left.

Such figures ranged from Cui Zhiyuan, the Chicago PhD and one-time MIT professor who worked on land reforms in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing; to Gan Yang, whose essay on “three traditions” sought to integrate socialism, Confucianism, and Dengist reforms into a holistic blend; to Wen Tiejun, whose fiery advocacy of rural Chinese made him persona non grata in some Beijing circles. For these thinkers, it felt like the interests of rich, out-of-touch Westernized types from coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou were drowning out everybody else.

This last line represents the majority or dominant impression regarding today’s China among westerners these days.

More on Wang:

Wang critiqued liberalism as a tool of global capitalism, arguing that China’s post-1978 reforms had led to inequality, depoliticization, and elite dominance. He advocated for a return to socialist ideals, with greater political participation, state intervention, and resistance to Western ideological hegemony. In his 2008 tract, “Depoliticized Poli­tics” (去政治化的政治), he argued that liberal intellectuals had aligned with market elites, promoting a vision of democracy that ultimately served capital rather than the people. In 2009’s “The End of the Revolution,” Wang argued that China’s problem wasn’t an oppressive government, but its integration into globalist capitalism. In those years, he jousted with the liberals, like Xu Jilin, and those advocating social democracy and an accountable state, like Qin Hui; his leftism was partly borne of an emotional allegiance to the journey China had been on and to the collective experiences of Chinese people, and partly a localized version of the same backlash to globalization that we’ve experienced in the United States, Russia, western Europe, and, indeed, everywhere else. Wang just got there first.

Purists vs. Pragmatists. A story as old as time itself.

Wang curates a tradition of Chinese indigenous theorists of modernity, essentially an alternate narrative to that of a modern West colliding with a primitive China: in developing this historical understanding, he has given valuable intellectual ammunition to Chinese leaders in search of a positive story to tell about China’s rise. He has helped to rehabilitate Maoist thought, in parallel with Xi’s government, while his emphasis on finding a Chinese genealogy of thought has dovetailed with a rejection of American political structures and economic frameworks; without ever joining the government, many of his arguments have been adopted by a Chinese regime that needs to explain itself.

The Xi era has posed a question to would-be leftists, those who sought to rehabilitate Mao’s era: what would you do if China really did become communist? Wang is cautiously supportive of the moves China has made in the past decade. His work bridges the gap between Chinese nationalism, the idea of communism (and its Chinese form), and Western philosophy and discourse. You could say that he is a friendly, or palatable, face for these ideas, capable of articulating China’s historical—and perhaps future—trajectory. In other words, he’s still in the game.

If you read the above two paragraphs carefully, you can tease out how this Marxist hopes that the increasing rivalry between the USA and China will lead the latter to re-think at least some elements of its economic modernization, turning back to at least some forms of Marxist organization.

The crux of the matter:

What had really begun was the history of modern China, which was a figment of some intellectuals’ imaginations until it became flesh. It was as if a frozen world had melted, and statues came to life. The dithering of the ancien régime, the bribes and treachery and pardoning of one’s children—that was all over. It was time to get moving. Those persons you saw in the street had become comrades; this street you’ve always walked down had become the homeland. That solidarity allowed China to start the process of capital formation, building human capital—the only capital that it had—in places like Daqing and Dazhao, slowly seeing life expectancy, literacy rates, and internal organization go up during the Maoist years, even as the country remained desperately poor. When the time was right, and Mao’s death gave way to a new era, every element was in place for an economic takeoff.

In the China of today, however, the memories of shared struggle are almost lost; propaganda billboards and kitschy TV shows say “don’t forget the struggle.” Red Tourism is the CCP’s stations of the cross: historic sites like Zunyi in Guizhou, Shaoshan in Hunan, and, of course, Yan’an in Shaanxi, attract tour groups. Wang remembers, and cherishes, this struggle, along with the CCP, the vehicle of the radical change: from the total fragmentation and failure of the late Qing dynasty, to the search for a way out, to the creation of a new collective consciousness, to the creation of a new physical structure—the oil company, the train station, the factory, the research lab—that became what the CCP calls “New China.” In the process of change, how did China stay true to itself? What even is China as a historical constant? What’s the thing that keeps repeating?

The author is asking whether today’s China is really China at all, equating “real China” to that of the revolutionary era under Mao. Are the people China? If so, then China is shifting like sand due to modernization, and massive internal migration.

For Wang, Chinese Communism manages to stay Chinese, even though communist theory is universal, similar to how America proclaims universal human rights but is still a specific set of places, experiences, universities, types of food. In Wang’s discourse, China is sort of the axle of contemporary history, where the tide finally turned: the largest population group declared fealty to the state, not the market, as an organizational system. Shortly afterwards, at the Bandung Conference of 1955, they signaled that they were on the side of the downtrodden “Third World.” But the Chinese nation, as we understand it now, is still an artificial creation, contingent upon historical coincidences.

Is China being “on the side of the Third World” nothing more than a result of how the world lines up today? You have to find allies where you can.

Now that the revolution has succeeded, and become entrenched—even as one angry young Chinese leftist told me, become a ruling party rather than a revolutionary party—preserving the fighting spirit is tough. Wang’s adversary Qin Hui’s 2015 book 走出帝制》(Breaking Away from Imperial Rule) argued that China had reverted to a nouveau feudalism, which in today’s China might be a more powerful critique than the liberal one. If China’s government system is a powerful tool, it is one that can undo inequality or cement it, root out corrupt elites or entrench them.

If global capitalism is the predator, then China needs a strong state to protect it, but if the state and associated elites are the predator, then maybe capitalism can save them. In this narrative, it can be difficult to disentangle America and its government, liberal world order, and the like from capitalism itself. If China’s comparative advantage is labor and manufacturing, America’s comparative advantage is capital. And yet, some Chinese new leftists, who follow Trump and Vance closely, see the Americans as the biggest victims of the process. How can you say “Yankee, go home” in Boston? Multinational capitalism has no home­land; Manhattan is the mountain; the capitalists are the vultures who have made their nests there. Maybe someday, they will fly somewhere else.

I do not share the author’s belief that there is a possibility that China pivots back to some form of socialism in reaction to increasing American attention being given to it.

For me, it’s the Siamese Death Embrace locking China and the USA together that is most fascinating, making any attempt to unwind the relationship incredibly complex.

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I was doing quite a bit of business in London up until two years ago, and I spent a good deal of time in different hotels across the city, particularly in South Kensington.

During one trip I had to find a new hotel to extend a stay, and I managed to land in a Scandinavian-type one. This hotel prided itself on being very ecologically conscious, meaning that much of the interior was made from re-used material, especially wood. The rooms were very, very small, but I did not mind the size as I would only be there to sleep. What bothered me most was the shower because the water pressure was very low….low like a dribbling baby.

My thoughts immediately turned to the concept of economic de-growth; the idea that economic growth should be jettisoned for the sake of planet’s health. It’s an idea that has gained currency in some quarters (mainly elite academic circles), but remains an incredibly tough sell. Who wants to purposely lower their own living standards?

We humans are the custodians of the flora and fauna of Earth and we have a duty to be environmentally conscious and protect our planet. It’s the only home that we have. Duty can be abused for selfish or for political reasons, which is why so many people are wary of climate alarmism, seeing sinister agendas lying behind it. I think that this hesitancy to radically re-orientate our lives to protect the planet is valid in the light of the history of elite-driven campaigns.

This reluctance to jump aboard the de-growth train is made all the more easier when it is championed by open communists such as Japan’s Kohei Saito and his philosophy of “de-growth communism”:

The economist and statistician E.F. Schumacher did not know what, exactly, would cause “society’s collapse”. But, he said, “I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.” He delivered that grim assertion in 1974, as the postwar economic boom was giving way to stagnation. A generation of heterodox economic thinkers—including Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Dennis Meadows, and others in the informal circle known as the Club of Rome—were coming to believe that economies could not grow forever and that the goal, perhaps, should be “degrowth.”

Fast Forward:

Fifty years and around $130 trillion in global GDP growth later, intellectuals in Europe, North America, and Japan are again proposing that societies abandon economic growth as their primary aim. The crisis this time is climate change. In a March 2023 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that, within several decades, human-caused planetary heating is likely to overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, beyond which lies deadlier heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes, plummeting crop and fishery yields, and cascading ecosystem collapses that will turn forests into deserts. Avoiding that fate, according to the IPCC, “would require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”

How far would these transitions take us? Back to a pre-industrial agrarian society? That would effectively kill off billions of people.

Among the most prominent of those thinkers is the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. In 2020 Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene, a shinsho, or small paperback, often designed to introduce readers to a subject. Today’s ecological crises are driven by economic growth, he wrote, and growth is driven by the compulsion to profit, capitalism’s motivating force: “It’s capitalism—nothing more, nothing less—that lies at the root of climate change and the other global environmental crises that come with it.” Saito considers several proposals to rein in capitalism—taxing wealth, tightening environmental rules, nationalizing certain industries—but ultimately finds them wanting. He instead proposes “degrowth communism,” a system of common ownership—to be managed by local assemblies and worker cooperatives—in which every person has a responsibility to care for the Earth and a right to enjoy its productive capacity. For Saito, treating the Earth as a “commons” means using its resources more prudently and distributing them more equally.

The book—translated into English last year as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto—was a breakout success in Japan, selling around 400,000 copies in 2020. Academic celebrity followed. For months the face of Saito, a thirty-seven-year-old professor at the University of Tokyo, peered at Tokyo straphangers from advertisements promoting his televised lecture series on Capital.

“It’s capitalism”. It’s always capitalism for the Marxist. This monomania is what makes many people suspicious of such types as Saito, seeing a sinister political agenda lying underneath an altruistic blanket.

The capitalist counter:

For decades debates over the social and ecological merits of capitalism have therefore turned in part on the costs and benefits of growth. In his classic 1974 study In Defence of Economic Growth—written as a response to critics like Schumacher—Wilfred Beckerman portrayed rising GDP as a thin black line between freedom and “soul-destroying toil.” Growth, he argued, creates wealth and forestalls class conflict; as long as the pie keeps growing, no one is likely to complain about their slice. More recently, the Oxford economist Max Roser, founder of the open-source “Our World in Data” project, has correlated growth—defined as “an increase in the production of goods and services”—with declining poverty rates in industrialized countries over the last two hundred years. But even if existing wealth were distributed more equally, Roser argues, substantially reducing the penury that still plagues much of the world would require the global economy to grow at least five times over.

Decoupling economic growth from environmental impact:

So while Roser does not doubt growth’s social virtues, the real question, he thinks, is about the relationship between growth and the health of the planet. If “we want to achieve a future in which global poverty is substantially lower than today and in which humanity has a smaller negative impact on the environment,” he writes, we would need “to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts.” Is that possible?

Some economists believe it is. Researchers such as the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Robert Pollin and the World Bank’s Stéphane Hallegatte have argued that as economies gain access to renewable fuels and more efficient production techniques, they can grow while still reducing carbon output. This “green growth” thesis hinges on the idea that states can achieve an “absolute decoupling” of growth and CO2 emissions by improving efficiency and substituting renewables for fossil fuels in sectors like transportation, manufacturing, and electricity generation.

There is some evidence for this view: data from eighteen OECD countries suggest that, after an initial period of industrialization, CO2 emissions do not rise with GDP. Even if you count certain externalized emissions toward a nation’s total—for instance, emissions associated with their imported goods—some developed nations, such as Denmark and the UK, seem to have managed to decouple GDP and CO2 (although per capita emissions in these countries remain high). Prominent defenders of the green growth thesis—some of them associated with the Breakthrough Institute, an “ecomodernist” research center in Berkeley—argue that there is no reason every nation should not be able to achieve similar results.

Would be nice.

Saito ain’t buying it:

But Saito believes it is a perilous delusion to imagine that capitalist growth can be decoupled from environmental degradation in general and CO2 emissions in particular. One reason is that the overall scale of production grows even as particular processes become more efficient. “Companies will always find a way to reinvest any surplus capital they produce,” he writes, “and there’s no guarantee this investment will be green.” Here he echoes an observation Marx made at the height of the Industrial Revolution: the laws of competition require firms to reinvest productivity gains back into the process of production itself. If a company churning out one hundred smartphones an hour buys a machine that allows it to make one hundred phones in half an hour, it will attempt to double production. These phones must find buyers, but demand can usually be manufactured, and when it cannot be, investors move on to more profitable ventures. In the aggregate, capitalist production requires more resources the more efficient it becomes.

Not all Marxists are aligned on this matter, with many proving to be Saito’s most fiercest critics:

Saito’s synthesis of Marxism and degrowth might seem intuitive, since they both critique capitalism. But the two theories have historically clashed; as Saito puts it, there has been “a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green.” Some proponents of degrowth take the Soviet Union’s environmental record as proof that Marxism abets ecocide. For others the orthodox Marxist theory of history—which sees capitalism as a necessary step on the path to communism—affirms ecological destruction in the present as a condition of collective abundance in the future. Readers of The Communist Manifesto will find Marx marveling at “the Subjection of Nature’s forces to man” achieved by British industry; elsewhere he describes British colonialism as “the unconscious tool of history,” “regenerating” stagnant Asian societies. For critics, such views commit Marxism to an ecologically ruinous “Prometheanism” that aspires to dominate the nonhuman world, as well as a Eurocentric “productivism” that equates human progress with industrial development.

Plenty of Marxists are no less suspicious of degrowth theories, which the geographer Matthew T. Huber has panned as “mish-mash ecologism.” Critics like Huber see degrowth as a Luddite fantasy, motivated by middle-class consumer guilt, that rejects modern technology without thinking seriously about how to feed the four billion people who lack independent means of subsistence, much less guarantee them sufficient resources to live well. Degrowth for these thinkers is at worst a recipe for painful contraction and at best what one of its founders, the French economist Serge Latouche, reportedly called a “slogan in search of a program.”

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Let’s move away from the Marxism 😉

The politics of group identity to me are ceaselessly entertaining. Whether it be the genesis of an identity, its trajectory over time, or even cases where an identity fails to take hold despite efforts to construct it and firm its foundation. Yes, identity can be fluid, but in my opinion not all identities are valid (we’ll leave this for another time).

One of my favourite debates to watch (and to dip my toe into from time to time) revolves around the question of “Who is an American?” I have no skin in the game, but the temptation to take part in these debates is more often than not too strong to reject. It’s a great subject after all: do certain Americans have more claim to American identity than others? Birthright citizenship vs. Jus Soli, new vs. old, colonial descendants vs. Ellis Islanders….Natives, American Descendants of Slaves…..this topic has it all.

takes the liberal view that today’s immigrants in the USA are just as American as those of colonial stock:

Social Studies

America Isn’t a Heritage

I wrote this for UnHerd, where it was published yesterday…

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11 days ago · 37 likes · 4 comments · Leighton Woodhouse

What’s being said is this: some Americans are more American than others. Specifically, those who can trace their lineage in the United States back many generations are more American than naturalised US citizens, or even the native-born American children of immigrants.

The word “heritage” is the giveaway. Among nativist-leaning American nationalists, the term “Heritage Americans” refers to those who can trace their lineage in the US back to the genetic stock of colonial America. To its proponents, Heritage Americans constitute an “American ethnicity” — basically WASP, with a smattering of German, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Some would also count black descendants of slaves as Heritage Americans, though others would not. Those who cannot claim this lineage are presumed to be somehow less American than those who can.

What about hyphenated-Americans? To me, it appears to be a case of having your feet in two different ponds simultaneously. If I were an American, I’d definitely describe myself in hyphenated terms, but when I look at it objectively, I see hyphenization as an error as it creates more categories of identity, and therefore more division. I like to joke around and tell Americans that the entire Ellis Island Cohort should have been assigned names from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel upon arrival in their new land. Instead of Gino Esposito, it should be Young Goodman Brown….all the while still looking and sounding like Gino Esposito from Queens, NY.

While DHS can’t say this outright, MAGA influencers such as Jack Posobiec can. A few days ago, at a Turning Point USA conference, Posobiec, aping Trump, claimed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a naturalised US citizen, is not, in fact, an American. “This idea that if you just hand someone a piece of paper that makes them American,” he said, referring to US citizenship, “guess what, it’s failed. It’s wrong. It’s not true.” “You are fake Americans,” Posobiec growled, “and we are going to smoke you out, every single one of you.”

There is the matter of citizenship, and there is also the matter of belonging to a nation (very extended tribe). The two often get confused, but they shouldn’t, as they are separate categories of identity. One is legal, the other is not. Many people will resent arrivistes telling them how to live their lives or how their city/country/etc. should be run. This is a normal reaction.

A couple of days later, Posobiec’s “fake Americans” net grew even wider. Referring to Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, he tweeted: “This is clearly not an American.” Fateh was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Somalia. There is no question of his citizenship status, though Trump’s executive order purporting to repeal birthright citizenship could conceivably change that. (When I asked Posobiec to explain exactly what separates a real from a “fake” American, he replied: “Everyone knows what an American is.”)

The jist of Leighton’s argument:

What Mamdani and Fateh have in common is that neither of them are “Heritage Americans” — a term that isn’t just legally meaningless, but also historically delusional. The conceit behind it is that the early Americans shared a common culture and set of values. This is because they were mostly English and universally Christian. Therefore, the narrative goes, they were united in their belief in such core Anglo-American virtues as democracy, rule of law, and limited government. Later waves of migrants, like those who went through Ellis Island, were further removed from these shared Anglo-American folkways, but not entirely so, as they were almost entirely from Europe. Since Americans opened their country to the rest of the world in the later 20th century, however, the nation has been inundated with people who are completely alien to American political and moral culture. From that began the dissolution of American society. This is roughly JD Vance’s point of view.

This is all ahistorical mythmaking. There was little that was culturally unifying across Colonial America. Just because the colonists were English and Christian didn’t mean they all got on — in fact, it meant the opposite. In the Old World, Christianity had been the source of endless fragmentation and war for 100 years, while England had been torn apart by those divisions more than perhaps any other country in Europe. These hatreds found their apotheosis in the bloodbath of the English Civil War, whose ripples spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American eastern seaboard. There, the colonists of Virginia and the greater Tidewater region were faithful servants of the deposed King — many of them had fought for him as Cavaliers. Meanwhile, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared the Puritan faith of those who had chopped off the King’s head. What the two colonies had in common wasn’t “shared values”, but deep mutual contempt.

and

In the Old World, the various regional populations of England despised one another. In the American colonies, they could live apart in mutual disdain. With their newfound isolation and political autonomy, the differences between them became even more pronounced. In New England, the Puritans established a flat, communitarian social order topped by a strong and sometimes authoritarian government. Meanwhile, the Tidewater gentry reproduced the fixed hierarchical order of the English aristocracy as best they could. They in turn were loathed by the anti-statist Ulster Scots of the Appalachian backcountry, who for centuries in Britain had fought for what they regarded as their natural, God-given liberties against the constant oppression and predations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Deep South idealised a Roman-style slaveocracy ruled by oligarchs, while the Quakers of Pennsylvania established a pacifist society based on tolerance and Christian love.

These disparate cultures could not have been more hostile to each other. The unification they achieved under the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was the result of painstaking horse trading and compromise in the face of a common enemy. Even that wasn’t enough to prevent secession and an American civil war a century later. What finally cohered American civilisation, if anything, was the dilution of regional and sectarian identities in the bloody mess of westward expansion — a historical process that involved not just Americans of European ancestry but people from all over the world, from Sweden to Peru to China.

plus

This may sound like postmodern revisionism to the Right, but the fact is that the United States has always been a multicultural society. It’s only through the distortion of our modern eyes that we fail to perceive the cultural and political diversity out of which we forged a nation.

“Heritage” is a relic of feudal Europe, in which social status was a function of one’s bloodline. America was founded specifically to leave all that behind. What united us was not a common history or language or tradition, but a shared drive to seek prosperity for our families through hard work, rather than resign ourselves to our stations of birth. In this commitment, the immigrants who seek opportunity in the US today are as American as those who landed on the Mayflower. It’s those who would replace this American self-conception with an anachronistic caste system based on ancestry who betray the founding ideals of the country.

Do you agree with

?

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I haven’t shared much of anything from Aris Roussinos on here in some time, so here’s an essay from him on how sectarian politics is on the rise in England, something that was considered to be relegated to the economic basket case known as Northern Ireland up until recently:

In his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, the socialist and Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn titled his chapter on the United Kingdom’s then-most restive province “Northern Ireland: Relic or Portent?” On this, as with so much else, Nairn may have been prescient. A year ago, it was natural to speculate on whether anti-migrant disturbances would become a feature of the English summer, as those deriving from the province’s traditional, and now largely ceremonial, ethnic conflict are in Northern Ireland. Today, it appears that “rioting season” has become England’s new routine. Rather than a freak occurrence, to be dealt with by harsh sentencing, the mixed protests and clashes in Epping, like the demonstrations in Diss and now Canary Wharf, still seem like only tremors before a greater earthquake. When Nigel Farage warned this week that “nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience”, the response from Left-liberals, confused and frightened by a predictable course of events nevertheless incomprehensible to their worldview, was to cast him as a sort of English Ian Paisley, threatening violence at a safe remove for political gain.

This isn’t the England of 1994, that’s for sure.

Is it going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterisation of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders, one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have. Like the PSNI, the English police is being criticised for its handling of disorder by a mobilising ethnic community, with the latter enjoying the tentative support of two political parties. One of those, Reform, increasingly appears to be poised to swap roles with what was famously dubbed, until Cameron, “Britain’s natural party of government”. As with the SDLP and UUP in Northern Ireland, respectively replaced by the more radical Sinn Fein and the DUP through a process of what analysts of such conflicts call “ethnic outbidding”, the dynamics in mainland Britain are adopting uncanny echoes of Ulster’s once-unique dysfunction. The DUP is now being threatened from its Right by an even more explicitly ethnic party, Traditional Unionist Voice, though this has not happened in Britain or England. The dynamics of the next decade — what remains of Labour’s capacity to govern the country, and the unknowable, but not immediately reassuring possibilities, of a Farage-led Britain — will surely determine this question.

This unforced error of mass immigration that began under Tony Blair is colouring and will continue to colour English (and UK) politics for the next decade or two, or even longer.

An Irish element to the story:

In the summer of 1914, mainland Britain was only spared a civil war spreading from Ulster by the outbreak of the First World War, just as 1640s Protestant settler refugees from Ulster fleeing to London helped spark the conditions for England’s only civil war the state chooses to refer to as such. The Glorious Revolution, still referred to as such for its foundational role in the wavering modern liberal-democratic order, is still celebrated for its climactic Boyne victory every summer by Ulster Loyalists, albeit for their own Irish reasons. Unlike a growing number on the Right, or even in ordinary life, I believe the modern British state is very far from outright conflict. Yet disturbances of a lesser kind, for being less grave in their consequences, are surely more likely to spread, and to become our new, so easily avoidable, normal.

Many of last year’s English rioters, given the epicentre of the disturbances in northwest England, were of Irish descent and may, like that other child of the Irish diaspora, Tommy Robinson, have kept up with events across the water. Even the English movement’s two political martyrs, Lucy Connolly and Peter Lynch, bear good Gaelic surnames, just like Reform’s Epping candidate and female organiser, as well as many of the Homeland Party’s public faces. Whether this signifies successful Irish diaspora assimilation into Britishness is perhaps a deeper question than you might initially think. Similarly, the “No Surrender” slogan on the English flag borne by masked Canary Wharf protestors nods to the interest in Ulster Loyalism apparent in some London football firms, something also true of the British radical Right in the Seventies and Eighties.

This SCR is already very, very long, so read the rest here.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with an entry that showcases postcards from 1920’s Palermo, Sicily:

The Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection

Francesco Verderosa’s Palermo, c. 1920

And we’re so baaaaack at doing “postcarding from the past”, and today I’d like to take you to one of my favourite places I’ve ever visited: welcome to Palermo, Italy, the capital of the autonomous province of Sicily. Locally also known as Paliemmu or Palèimmu, here’s some basic information …

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2 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Stephan Sander-Faes

As it happens, and while I have a wealth of colourful picture postcards from the Cold War, too (which I’ll show you in a second posting), today we’ll be talking about one Francesco Verderosa, a native of Palermo. and photographer-publisher extraordinary.

Who was Mr. Verderosa? Well, according to this dedicated website, he

published local topographicals into the divided-back era, many of them produced by Purger of Munich. In 1920 he was at 364 Corso [now via ?] Vittorio Emanuele. Palermo is the capital of the Italian island of Sicily.

Hence, Mr. Verderosa’s activities—much like the postcards of Mexico by Hugo Brehme—cover the final years of what academics have dubbed the “Golden Age” of the picture postcard (c. 1880-c. 1920). According to this dedicated postcard auction site, his postcards sell for some 3.90 to 7 Euros apiece.

Recommend Fisted by Foucault to your readers

You’ll never think of Foucault the same way again