Strategic Relocation and Volkish Coagulation

This piece was originally posted at Folk Wealth by Old Ms. Ramblewood

Back in the “aughts” I was a leftist — a sincere, back-to-the-land, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist leftist. My main concerns at that time were globalization and peak oil. I was a “peaknik” and a “doomblogger” desperate to extricate myself from the economic Titanic.

Sometime after 9/11 a sizable fringe of leftists came to apply itself to the problem of extrication. The leading lights in this group congealed around the concept of relocalization: the conscious, collective, community-level effort to rebuild decimated local and regional economies, in order to end dependence on goods shipped in from afar. It was the best idea I’d ever heard in my life and I immersed myself in all things relocalization for the better part of a decade.

Before too long, leadership began steering the relocalization fringe in other directions. Talk of relocalizing was replaced with talk of “Transition Towns,” global warming, and “resilience.” The figures who really understood the economic aspects of relocalization were pushed aside and new figures, full of theory and vitriol, were promoted to the fore. The relocalization scene degenerated into a glorified organic gardening club for rich exurbanites with hobby farms, hybrid SUVs, and socially responsible investment portfolios. All the great ideas and information that had been circulating just a few years earlier was forgotten. 

In the years since, worries about peak oil were put to rest by hydraulic fracturing. And, I got severely red-pilled. 

In retrospect, I can see now why the relocalization fringe was subverted. It was largely composed of white people, and of course the one thing that cannot be allowed under any circumstances is that white people group up to create something they may later wish to defend. In this case, relocalization could potentially have resulted in robust, local economic networks of mostly white people no longer beholden to the vampire squid. From the vampire squid’s paranoid perspective, relocalization looked suspiciously like lebensraum and reeked of blut und boden. It had to go.

My red-pilling came after the Trump election. I was deeply surprised to discover, during my early forays into right-wing thought, that there are such things as back-to-the-land, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist right-wingers. Who knew??

I was also surprised to discover that outside Evangelical circles, the entire middle layer of socio-political organizing seems to be completely absent from right-wing consciousness. It appears to me that the right thinks almost exclusively in terms of federal policy and personal responsibility; endless debates roil about the correct way to configure government and the safest geographic areas to which one might steal away with one’s family, but hardly anyone discusses groups of families organizing at the neighborhood, municipal, and county levels (again, with the exception of Evangelicals) in the here-and-now. The group- and community-level organizing so prevalent on the left is nowhere to be found on the right. 

This is understandable to the degree that it hasn’t really been necessary, but it is rapidly becoming necessary if white people are to have any future less horrifying than the South African template. In my opinion, the ideas hashed out under the “relocalization” banner fifteen or more years ago can and should be taken up by the Folkish right. These ideas are easily adaptable by traditionalist communities of all sorts. It is even potentially possible to work these ideas into the doctrines of religious communities such that they fall under religious protection & exemption laws.

Toward that end I intend to write a series of blog posts detailing some of the ideas that came out of the leftist relocalization scene of the early ’00s. 

Since this post is already much longer than I originally intended, I won’t get into anything specific here. Before I sign off however I do want to articulate the general, energetic pattern from which I am working.

As things currently stand, we white people — regardless of ethnic heritage, religious or political beliefs, the country we live in, or anything else by which we might claim identity — have been deeply wounded and are hemorrhaging life energy as a group. We are dying faster than anyone, we are being pushed into poverty faster than anyone, we are losing access to basic necessities faster than anyone, we face vastly more racially-motivated violence than anyone, we are being not only marginalized but completely erased from society, economy, and history. 

The antidote to this hemorrhaging is coagulation. Our Fehu is out of whack with our Isa. The fires of tropical and equatorial consciousness melt away our arctic consciousness, feeding on the life energy that drains from us in great rivers of sorrow and loss. Anything we can do to freeze, to coagulate, this draining of our life energy is to our benefit. 

We must meet fire with ice.

The term “relocalization” describes just one type of coagulation: the cessation of financial drain from our communities. It is far from the only type of coagulation possible, but it is a good starting point. I will endeavor to do it justice here at this blog, for the good of the Folk.