🧠🐌 British Aristopopulism | maybe the class system will be what saves us

28 Feb, 2025

The most fundamental difference between the structure of British and American society is the British class system. Its subtleties are nearly incomprehensible, practically invisible, to Western outsiders. Yet it drives all the imperceptible nuances of British culture, humour and manners. Without taking Class into account, we are baffling, especially to Americans instilled with the promises of The American Dream and the simpler status games that come with it.

There is no British Dream. No opportunity for social mobility, meritocracy or freedom. If you are born working class and become an elite billionaire, you will die a working class elite billionaire. At best, you can acquire wealth, become landed (a third of which today is still owned by the gentry), get recognition from the upper class aristocracy and send your children to elite education institutions so that your progeny have the trappings of the upper classes. Your children will be otherised and isolated, lacking the patina of a family dynasty on their Cartier Tanks - the precise Old Money signals of legacy - but they may just scrape into High Society.

🐌¹

It is of course possible for a doctor to come from a working class background in Britain. We have the numbers - 4%.² Possible but deeply unlikely, without the education, without the networking, without the moneyed support. Doctors and most other professionals go through a stress and strain mostly unliveable to anyone without loved ones who can relieve them of financial and logistical burdens. To attempt to become a doctor and fail is a life-ruining risk, made far more difficult and devastating by the trappings of poverty and the emotional and mental baggage of a difficult upbringing. You get one shot before you're a permanent fixture of the benefits death spiral.

🐌³

Yet another headwind suppressing economic mobility. Class is definitionally static, it cannot be subverted. The British government contains dozens of herditary peers earning political power by birthright down generational lines spanning centuries. Classes may differ in power relation, but they continue to exist, colouring like Caste.⁴

🐌⁵

And yet these classes aren't always antagonistic in quite the same way as wealth distribution. Their interactions differ materially from the material; they are founded in feudalism not capital.⁶ Feudalism has some interesting properties - most notably the explicit fusion of body and land. Your human resources are land resources, people do not migrate freely, they are born and die in service of a land owned by a lord.⁷ This lord's material conditions therefore contain not just land but the bodies of the people, not just their labour but their entire being. This is, unbelievably, a less myopic view than capital's raw profit motive.

Indeed we see this noblesse oblige in the early construction of critical institutions of public service - statist media like the BBC and Public Healthcare like the NHS. British Aristocracy provided a stabilizing counterweight to the worst impulses and excesses of industrialization through their influence in Parliament and in particular the Conservative Party - many lords opposing laissez faire (as much to avoid reducing the influence of their prestige and landed power) and supporting the maintenance of rural communities and national unity. The Monarchy forms an apex above commerce allowing for an alternate pole of legitimacy available to bludgeon down over-eager capital interests.

So in Britain we have three power structures: Capital Wealth, Inherited Status and Democratic Mandate. Perhaps two can be combined to combat the other.

But first, we move across The Pond.

The American Aristocracy

Although founded in Capital much unlike european aristocracies, the plutocratic robber baron dynasties of American history held enough proximity to the ancient structures that they remained shaped by them. European noblesse oblige⁸ transplanted into the paternalistic duty (The Gospel of Wealth) of The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts & Carnegies, seeking prestige by siphoning vast wealth into cultural institutions that remain today - psychic patinas. Further, they desperately sought the cultural power they lacked in comparison to the overwhelming economic power they wielded - acquiring, often in willing financial transactions, the cultural artifacts, buildings, even heiresses of the European Aristocracy.

Notably there is a rise, fall and rise in feudalistic practices in our era of Capital. From this emulation and in some cases outright recreation of european feudal practices (company towns being essentially feudal states in the early days of unchecked capital power), we see the victory of markets before a final consolidation back into the technofeudal state as digital domains were colonised by first-comers. Violent suppression of strikers and unions was eventually supplanted by the far more effective manufacturing of democratic mandates and backdoor dealings with an obfuscated power structure of media, politics and capital.

This middle period of market dominance reflects the mechanisms of capital, with early growth spreading wealth as new money injects into the market and outpaces the natural growth of existing wealth centres. As the ratio of wealth inequality increases (essentially inevitable without state intervention, and more often accelerated by it) we return to structural power centres that so outweigh the market that we return to a consolidated power structure familiar to us from feudalism, now in a digital domain. Furthermore they wield overwhelming cultural power, using monopoly rents to support monopolies on culture. The tangible assets of capital are replaced by network power flowing through platforms owned by an inherent divine right of first-comer advantage.

Where before the elites of the European Aristocracy or American Plutocracy required relations with the population to support their cultural power - proving in taste and stewardship that their legitimate right to rule should not be challenged - now technofeudal lords can leverage cybernetic power flows to directly create in the population the support directly. Elon Musk wields Twitter as a personal fiefdom and power center of memetic warfare, weaponising memes that at first seem ludicrous, like Dogecoin, until they are macheteing through bureaucratic dark forests, brutalizing the ecosystem without regard. By mobilizing a mass following through viral memetics the American Technofeudal lords and their lackeys can subvert this old relationship to populism and shape it at will.

This is an enclosure of the digital commons. Today we are haunted by the ghosts of feudalism, rising in undead technodomains, but the specter of aristocracy yet yearns for new vessels to lend it's spiritual patina.

American Aristopopulism

In the race to architect a new future in the rubble of liberalism, feudal structures have begun to re-emerge in multiple forms. Technofeudal lords sit on digital landed domains intrinsically fused to cloud serfs providing free labour to their uncontested patriarchs. American Old Money (Of the robber baron/real estate variety) fight these new Moneyed upstarts and concede capital and control to them in the form of levies to use their digital marketplaces, advertise in their digital fiefs and digest their vast reserves of digital labour.

The Far-Right has been quickest to understand this new battleground. At first contesting it in ways incomprensible to liberals (the faction most oblivious to flows of culture and power), before building alliances between the old money capitalists (Trump) and the technofeudal lords (Musk, Zuckerberg etc.) There remain great tensions between these factions (See: Psychic Warheads: Elon Musk vs Sam Hyde) that must be exploited and wedged to prevent the final fusion of capital to technocapital - An unassailable fortress of technoeconomic power that will accelerate us into catastrophe.

This is American Aristopopulism. New ideologies and methodologies are already being drafted to bring this to fruition 🐌⁹, leaning on American forms of nobility to attempt to create a new tradition. Deneen sickeningly leans on JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as an attempt to translate mythological american cultural stories into a false patina on a new brand of elites to make this possible. This results in fauxristocrats leveraging populist demagoguery using the same decentralized, instant, technocapital backed power flows that the technostructure already has a total monopoly over. American Old Money and New Money ultimately share the same profit addiction and cannot be relied upon.

Indeed Aristopopulism in America is doomed.

British Aristopopulism

However, the relationship between British Aristocracy and New Money power is more nuanced- as previously stated wealth cannot overcome class and pedigree easily. This forms a bulwark against the worst excesses of Capital by happenstance if not design. The House of Lords has nearly a hundred hereditary peers remaining in the power structure. These lords are still tied to their land and the people on them, their cultural power and recognition of their patina only apparent in relation to others. Where profit is quantifiable, patina is psychic, relational, vibes-based.

This opens them up to incentives that flow in opposition to capital, in the purchasing of the local village pub to maintain a cultural center, the restoration, protection and rewilding of lands, the opposition to financialization that wedges reality and profit apart in ways detrimental to the aristocratic power structure. Capitalism was the death of feudalism and the remainders of the feudal system still oppose it to this day. This is in many ways a revolutionary will lingering past the counterrevolutionary failure of feudalism.

As is almost always the case, the right-wing were quicker than us to pick up on this phenomenon and begin leveraging it - the face of populism in Britain is Nigel Farage. Son of a stock broker who paid for him to attend private school (very much in the vein of new money attempting to uplift their offspring to the upper classes), Farage understands this dynamic better than most, one foot in two worlds. He himself is now not far from a peerage that would cement his class identity, thanks to his successful opposition of liberal values, globalism, eurocentricism and progressivism. He is infamous for being recognised as "someone you'd get a pint with down the pub" by his base, and he carries the cultural signifiers of the upper classes, having been well trained in them. It is no surprise then, that a power structure reliant on genuine relations with a population would be valuable to an aspiring populist. Mirroring JD Vance's rise as a fauxristocratic merger of capital and mythology, and yet curiously still in contention with the current leader of technocapital Musk.¹⁰

We have then, an interesting alignment of incentives between the anticapitalist (insofar as they reject modern liberalism) majority and the minority of aristocrats, against the new money capitalist class. That Trump and Musk have bound together in this way tempts one to believe that their previous antagonisms were dangerous enough to require resolution in political marriage. The best preventative measure between two empires fully capable of mutual destruction is intermarrying.

This appears to already be in progress in the US, but suggests a genuine capacity for opposition in the aristocratic structure that conceded to this alliance, but remains potentially up for grabs in Britain. A coalition of old money and modern populism - longtermist environmentalism, multi-generational care and cultural patronage. We have here a source of localist concern, financing and cultural power untapped by the left due to very reasonable misgivings about the authoritarian feudal structure it resides in. Nevertheless, we must explore it. The hearts and minds of the people are shaped by the liberal world they live in, today this is a massive obstacle to progress, but it does also in many ways innoculate against the old demons of the past. Feudalism has been defeated and remains, in Britain, an alternative power structure.

Perhaps a Corbyn backed by aristocrats concerned about the environment, local economies and the plight of their people would have carried more weight with the backing of cultural elites smoothing over his crotchety radicalism.

Embrace aristocratic stewardship over the land as a virtue, reinforcing their incentive to maintain long term localist community, power and economic prosperity.

When extractive Technocapital flows arrive, request help from the local aristocratic elites to protect their communities and third spaces.

Leverage NIMBYism to assert local power over global foreign exploitation. Prevent the reduction of land to frictionless transactionspace and combat hyperfinancialized disruptors with protectors of heritage.

Leverage the House of Lords as a final bulwark against technototalitarianism and algorithmic governance.

Build the aristoreactionary-populist alliance, feeding elites feudal nostalgia and cultural power in exchange for their support against wealth.

🐌 maybe the class system will be what saves us. weird.

Footnotes