Whereas GRECE, according to Bar-On, still experimented with biological racism in the 70’s, they would thus take a cultural turn in the 80’s, launching a differentialist approach focusing on the “rights to difference” (according to the logic of which identity can only be maintained through difference).

It should however be noted that O’Meara, who is a proponent of identitarianism, tends to hold Faye in a higher regard than Benoist, and during the time that GRECE’s influence. Even though the alt-right – much like other nationalist milieus in Europe – seems to have been coalescing around a ‘metapolitical’ strategy, the finer details of this approach is less coherent in the movement as a whole.

Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. The comment section of Arktos Journal will be regulated by standards consonant to the principles of the project itself. Nevertheless, in creating nations, citizens, public spheres, parties, and politics, the bourgeoisie have laid the groundwork for toppling their rule.

It is time to step down from its back and put it out of its misery”). [16] Faye, Why We Fight – Manifesto of the European Resistance  at p. 193.

Key thinkers of the contemporary NR have, over several decades, theorized and strategically mobilized globalized economic dislocation and cultural resentment, developing a coherent sociological critique of globalization. We sometimes hear about Gramsci's strategies for achieving political success, but what we need to understand is that his strategies were the result of his interpretation of power dynamics under a democratic-liberal political order!

[3] Joseph De Maistre, Principe Générateur Des Constitutions Politiques Et Des Autres Institutions Humaines (Lyon: Imprimeur-libraire, 1833) at p. vi. However, Gramsci, who argued with anarchists and syndicalists throughout the 1910-20s, has enough good sense to refrain from reducing politics to passion. Jan Blommaert (Tilburg University) answers that question. [18] Michael O’Meara, “Prophet of the Fourth Age”, in Faye, Why We Fight – Manifesto of the European Resistance. When the word ‘metapolitics’ first seems to have emerged, it was in the context of German liberal thought, where thinkers such as Gottlieb Hufeland, August Ludwig von Schlözer and Carl von Rotteck gave to the word a meaning which Bruno Bosteels defines as a “metaphysical study into the principles of politics, its fundamental grounds and its ultimate ends”.

Metapolitical action in both these cases demands the promulgation of our ideas on the one hand, and the ceaseless promotion of the historical European qualities of nobility, excellence and virtue on the other. These Prison Notebooks, published in the 1950s and translated in the 1970s, became extraordinarily influential texts in social, cultural and political theory, and they remain essential reading in the digital era. Faye, in Why We Fight, has aught to say about this failure, in the early part of his articulated and subtle critique aimed in particular against GRECE: In our metapolitical ‘Gramscian’ strategy, we had simply overlooked the fact that the cultural battle Gramsci promoted was associated with the political and economic battle of the Italian Communist party, and as such did not take place ‘in the void’. Our general rules are as follows: As a general guideline, all contributors should imagine that they are speaking their minds aloud in a public space, unhindered by political correctness but bound to the older standards of honour and decency in speech.

And who can guarantee us that, should some generation of half-statesmen arise to put half-measures in place, merely blunting the edge of this migratory conundrum without fundamentally resolving it, then all the major gripes of the people will not suddenly vanish, and the democratic liberal order of modernity will not continue contentedly rambling along its downward way? In the “Prison Notebooks,” this concept is not reduced to any concrete organizational form, supplying them with a rather post-Fordist degree of flexibility: for example, Gramsci writes that an editorial committee or even independent individuals can play the role of the party under certain historical conditions. According to their reading of Gehlen, an individual is never distinguishable from her or his culture, and can never be more than an individuated expression of that culture – “if culture is ‘peeled away’, the only ‘nature’ remaining is animal or physiological”.

Gramsci called this form of 'soft' cultural power hegemony, and the Notebooks laid out, page upon page, an entirely new theory of hegemony as a crucial ingredient in any revolutionary strategy.