Why Farage And His Ilk Hate Britain

A while ago I posted a video on my page which, I didn't realise at the time, was actually cut from a Labour election video from 2019. I didn't know this because all the pro-Labour bits had been pruned from the video. This is by the by, though, and not really the point of this article. 

Whilst most comments and shares praised the content of the video, there were a couple that I found amusing until I further considered the implications. One read "Utter Marxist bollox", the other "We need UKIP as there [sic] for England".

These attitudes are unfortunately by no means uncommon and are representative of our modern and highly polarised political spirit. So what is it that has turned people to this position?

"Marxist bollox"?

Most of those reading this will have a good idea of what Marxism actually is and how it is rhetorised by figures such as Farage to mean something else. But let's cover those points anyway. Firstly and basically, what is Marxism?

Marxism is the means by which we analyse our social and economic conditions in an objective and materialist manner. First and foremost through a dialectical, materialist analysis of historical development, dialectical in this sense meaning how opposing, real-world forces shape and develop each other into new forms. This is contrary to the standard model of liberal interpretation which sees history purely as a sequence of loosely or unrelated events fuelled by ideas.

To clarify the terminology, roughly and concisely, materialism concerns the empirical sphere of human activity, the things that are observable and have an observable, real impact. Idealism, on the other hand, concerns ideas and spirituality, things that are not observable and cannot be observed to have a direct real impact. 

In short, Marxism seeks to understand the nature of our society by understanding how the prevailing economic order of the time dictates the material and hence social conditions within which we all live and rejects idealistic interpretations as unscientific.

Central to the Marxist analysis of our social and economic conditions has been that of class struggle, how the two main classes in modern society conflict in their material interests: A class of owners, capitalists, and a class of labourers, the working class.
 
What does this have to do with Farage and his ilk? 

Farage's bugbear is that socialists "hate Englishness" and that so-called cultural Marxists want to destroy or overthrow it. 

Now here's where it gets interesting. Farage firmly believes in very particular concepts of Englishness and Britishness, he's never explicitly stated what he means but it is heavily implied in his words, actions, and with whom he keeps friendly company. Rather ironically, analysing these three points would be a materialistic endeavour and hence a Marxist one.

Present in Farage's concept of, let's go with Britishness here seeing as the two are somewhat synonymous, is a curiously exclusionary interpretation of what it implies, and one that already excludes Marxists and socialists by his own words. Are Marxists and socialists born in Britain or those that have worked for citizenship not already British? Is inclusiveness not a British value?

By virtue of excluding socialists and Marxists, Farage's concept of Britishness must therefore only include the various flavours of pro-capitalists. Here we can see that this concept has already alienated a large portion of actual Brits.

The vociferous nationalist-nativist rhetoric that both spews forth from his cavernous, spittle ridden maw and is drawn from the vulgar depths of his Gammon-Mind, frames anyone who seeks to become British in some way, asylum seekers and even those who simply wish to live here for work or education, as an interloper who doesn't belong, ignoring the very real material reasons why anyone might want to come here. Instead, Farage implies other reasons which are idealist in nature - they want to Islamify the UK, they want to take jobs away from Brits, they're "economic migrants", etc.

Farage's concept of Britishness is one carefully constructed to not only be exclusionary but to also cultivate the "blue-collar worker", and subsume them into this identity by way of positioning himself as a man of the people against an also constructed "elite", which really oddly, does not include himself, an ex-banker, commodities trader and stockbroker. Not that he was incredibly wealthy by any account I can find, but he was apparently "very good" at being a salesman. Aha, another point worth keeping in mind in our analysis.

So not only has Farage constructed an idealistic nationalist-nativist, pro-capitalist British identity, he has also made huge efforts toward selling this identity to his target audience, the blue-collar worker. Another point here is that the blue-collar worker he targets is more than likely to be white because of the exclusionary parameters set out within this carefully constructed identity. These workers, who are largely patriotic and love their country, are only too pleased to consume the fruit born of the rotten seeds Farage has sown, because, for them, it explains their own circumstances in terms they're familiar with, something that no-one else has done.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how Brexit voters have also been subsumed into this conception of British identity. The EU was portrayed by many propagators of this concept of "Britishness" as being antithetical to it. This should be unsurprising considering things like the Schengen Area, free movement of people, the selling off of UK assets to European interests and so on.

So, how does this mean Farage et al hates Britain?

To summarise, Farage, a salesman and not a politician by any measure, is grifting by selling an idealist lie to those who were already occupying the same playing field as him. Now, they are also on his team and playing the same game.

Farage is playing identity politics through weaponising an idealist and exclusionary constructed conception of Britishness, and by its nature, identity politics is idealism. Through excluding a huge portion of the British population, British defined here only as "those who were born in Britain or have lived here for most of their life", Farage and his ilk have fomented the conditions for polarisation and hatred based on nothing short of a grift, a means to enrich himself at the expense of others. 

That's another materialist analysis, by the way, that he's grifting. He has undoubtedly made a metric shit-ton of cash from his various faux-political endeavours, he even overtly refused to refund the money submitted by those who wished to stand as candidates for his Brexit Party. That's very clear evidence of a grift if ever there was. 

He is however correct in one thing; socialists and Marxists do wish to overthrow and destroy this identity he has sold to many because it damages us all, and yes, we do want to replace it with a concept of Britishness that is both inclusive and serves to express the civic interests that we all hold in common as workers; because that is the material reality.

Only a Marxist fully understands this. It is only Marxists that understand we are subjugated by class rather than any narrower definition, and that we as a broad and diverse group hold interests in common, that of acquiring housing, food, water and wealth that fosters the conditions to allow all of humanity to flourish.  

Farage hates this, he hates you unless you submit to his grift, and this is why he hates Britain.

So who is it who is really in favour of the British, is it Farage and his fellow grifters?

Or is it the Marxists, socialists and anarchists?

As Che Guevara once said, it's not our fault that reality is Marxist.