Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is

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Part of the reason I agree with Engels and say that the final revolution will begin in America is the curious nature of the nazbol position here. America's peculiar white supremacist power structure is premised upon it, yet the country is deliberately and painstakingly unconscious of the fact, and its founding myths are painfully liberal.

In most Western liberal democracies, the nazbol position is subordinate to the liberal one, and outside of a couple cranks on the fringes of the fringe, is mostly represented in society by the professional military, especially the officers. In colonial America, the state was usually an extension of the personal power, money, and connections of the men who ran it (Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 58). Therefore, as the state was merely a way to secure the property of the rich in the first place, the rich people who owned it saved as much money as possible on its maintenance. Professional militaries were still a novelty at the time, with the first standing army in the English-speaking world, Cromwell's New Model Army, disbanded in living memory in the era of the American Revolution. So between the eternal bougie desire for low taxes and the lack of awareness of an alternative, the rich had no other choice but to lean on colonial militias for their immediate security. And though the conditions that required colonial America to start down this peculiar institutional path would change, the sheer snowballed inertial force of the institution of nazbol white supremacy upholding liberal democracy endured to the present day, despite attempts to reform or abolish it.

These militias could only take on a certain character in order to carry out the desired function of protecting the property of colonial America's rich. Workers can only be mobilized along class lines or against some threatening Other, and due to the predominantly nonwhite threats to property, these militias had a white supremacist character. In most places at the time of the American Revolution, even in the North, slavery was legal; all along the frontier were men who desired land, if only the current inhabitants could be removed. To protect white men's property, the new American Republic enshrined the notion of the white supremacist militia in the US Constitution, in the Second Amendment which guarantees the right to bear arms for the purposes of maintaining "well-regulated militias." Take a wild guess how many blacks and Natives regulations permitted in those militias.

A caveat about slavery is required before we proceed further. There were degrees of unfree labor, with Irish civilians displaced by war, Irish orphans, and Scots betrayed by their own chieftans and pushed off their own ancestral lands for money in the Highland Clearances deported to the New World as "indentured servants" legally indistinguishable from slaves. The ultimate cause for Celtic slavery was the nature of pre-Columbian white supremacy in Europe. Blacks were scarcely interacted with, except in Spain or by rich people in need of a good Moorish doctor, so the Other in that system could not be them. But there were all those people in the western fringe of the British Isles who, in the words of Churchill, "stubbornly refused to be English," and for centuries that was good enough. It was often given a sectarian tinge to hide the racial foundation of the system - the Catholic Irish for not being Protestant enough, the Presbyterian Scots for being too Protestant - but its foundation was an understanding that these working-class untermenschen were mere pawns at the disposal of London capital.

It is important to make that clarification, and to make it in full, because as any people ever discriminated against can tell you, the memory and the legacy of that discrimination lingers generations after it has ended. Celtic people were pitted by capital against black people relentlessly once we arrived on these shores. The white color of Celtic skin allowed us to escape more easily into the sparsely-settled frontier, because the liberal rich also had white skin and would in no wise ever criminalize it.

But if all American slaves at the time were not black, just about all American blacks at the time were slaves. Criminalizing black skin was much easier, and the proliferation of "black codes" in the colonies regulated every facet of their lives for the benefit of the liberal rich. And when the first police departments and runaway slave patrols were founded, they were disproportionately staffed with Celtic people desperate for work by liberal bosses eager to pin down the immigrant vote for the Democrats by doling out government jobs with the convenient side effect of pitting the most oppressed workers in America against one another. (This is why cop funerals to this day often have bagpipes and the Scots Presbyterian hymn "In Christ Alone" regardless of the ethnicity of the slain cop, by the way.)

And when slavery was abolished, blacks were recognized and associated with it in a way the Celts weren't. At first, it was because the Celts were eager to embrace their newfound whiteness now that they had it, and so hushed up about anything that might make the Sassenachs change their mind. And then later, during the civil rights era, it was because liberal false consciousness found it convenient to troll the descendants of Celtic slaves by completely ignoring them and declaring that even bringing up the subject was tantamount to minimizing black slavery. Granted, black slavery was far worse in practice, but the only people who ever win medals in the Oppression Olympics are rich liberals.

Denying this facet of history, which is straightforwardly documented by liberals of the period who saw lives with names like my mother's as just so many pounds sterling in a ledger, when we still have those ledgers, is divisive liberal bullshit. But using it to say that blacks need to sit down and shut up because Irish-Americans aren't out protesting the cops too is divisive fascist bullshit. It is the job of the socialist in situations where liberals and fascists seek to tear apart the working class to instead unite it against both liberal and fascist. And that is done by testifying to the horror of slavery in all times and places, and the wickedness of the rich and their petty little helpers in all times and places too.

With the racial nature of American slavery addressed, we can now move on to the unintended side effects of America's nazbol system. Because the whole system relied on those militiamen, nothing they demanded could be denied for long, as Bacon's Rebellion demonstrated. Like in Britain, the original thirteen colonies restricted the franchise to white men with a certain amount of property. However, between the necessity of defending settlements from the frontier, and the possibility of the disenfranchised simply setting out further into the frontier to escape social strictures, this system broke down rapidly in favor of first the universal white male franchise, then the universal male franchise, and finally the universal franchise.

The process has a parallel in the Mongol Empire, where Genghis Khan's yasa offered a sort of rudimentary democracy to the archer cavalry that carried his banner across Eurasia. In Russia and the Chaghatai Khanate, both wracked like America with pandemics that depopulated and weakened the locals for centuries against them, this Mongol nazbol democracy endured as long as Mongol military supremacy itself did. But in more populated China and Iran, Mongol nazbol democracy flipped across the lumpen nihilistic void towards liberal monarchy because there were too many locals to conquer solely by force of arms, and so the horse archers could be ignored in favor of more bougie power centers.

Continue reading Part II