Britishism and Capitalism

For the Anglo, no principle of rationalist governance, besides possibly “free speech”, holds more of a spectral luminance than “separation of church and state”. Confirming all his prejudices about rationality and despotism, truth and illusion, he reaffirms his own judaic atheism with every repetition of the mantras of destruction, proclaiming the need to wrest political power from the cultural authority that religion offers. In doing so, the Anglo rejects not only the the theocratic temple-economy, as was common in ancient states such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the church’s role as a cultural power, being the trans-national authority which organized cultural and ideological flows, as was the function of the church in medieval Europe.

This had two ideological consequences, both of which were fundamental “battles” in the invisible war of ruling classes which ended in capitalist victory. The first was that explicated in Hoxby’s Mammon’s Music, a trend Milton was keenly aware of. By destroying the cultural signification apparatus, wealth disappeared. With cultural significance no longer being attributed to power, the old form of power, where wealth exists as an accumulation of treasures, lands, titles, orders, the harmonic resonance of personhood formed by the aristocratic blazon, was destroyed, replaced instead by an economic understanding of power as capital. In this new way, power is symbolized by sheer numerical value, which represents the amount of flows of a singular substance of value by which all the world is controlled by, the replacing of the aristocratic heraldry with the idea of the “billionaire”. The destroying nature of this notion of power was well-explored by Spengler in his essay Prussianism and Socialism (famous today for being the source of National Socialism). By recognizing the Englishman as being concerned with labor, he recognizes the nature of capital. By instituting an idea of capital, people are reduced to one single value, which can then be regimented with bureaucratic modes of control and slavery. Hence, the infinite cruelty inflicted through the workhouse and the plantation, replacing the much more lenient and organic feudal ways of controlling labor-power.

The second was Enclosure, the destruction of the nation itself. By enclosing the land, the land was reduced as humans were by wage labor replacing peasantry, where land was now made to represent not a people, a history, a cultural legacy of a “Kingdom”, but a package of resources and space, all of which is reducible as a single package to one value of capital. In their enthusiasm for this, the British gentry was thoroughly destroyed by becoming merely a rural bourgeois, as the seeds were planted for the destruction of England and all nations. In application, the manifesto of Enclosure is the political map of the Western United States, where uncannily perfect square borders show the results of this same English ideology carving a new nation from the dead body of the Americas.

It is this which is forgotten in the common reading of the concept ‘there should be no billionaires’. Riches are merely a symbolism of power. The billionaire is not an abomination for their holding of a great deal of power, the billionaire is an abomination for their power being in a form which requires a deprivation, a power that can only exist in a wasteland. By replacing the solid, aristocratic wealth, a collection of dispersed meanings each putting the powerful in a specific role, the billionaire’s power is through capital - a meaningless mathematical substance, flowing across the world, dissolving all that is solid into air.