Why Nationalist Nativism and “Citizen Sovereignty” Movements Make No Sense in Late-Stage Techno-Feudalist Capitalism
Under neoliberal techno-feudalist capitalism, sovereignty is no longer territorial but algorithmic—so the march is already over before the first step is taken. This is because nationalist pageantry is rarely resistance but outsourced labour for capital’s distraction machine. So they raise flags against the wind, yet the lords of capital claim the wind belongs to them. They march for sovereignty, yet their steps are counted by the very algorithms that have already made them subjects.
The Mirage of “Citizen Sovereignty”
In an age where data, algorithmic governance, and platform monopolies mediate not only markets but our rights, behavior, and even existence, the idea that ordinary citizens can reclaim sovereignty through protests is fantastical. Sovereignty has been hollowed out—transmuted from democratic agency to algorithmic compliance. To chant “take back our country” is to play at nostalgia against a system where sovereignty lies in cloud servers, lobbying boards, and financial algorithms beyond political reach. What these movements fail to grasp is that the very terrain of power has shifted: it is no longer primarily territorial or even parliamentary, but infrastructural, coded into databases and predictive models that decide access to welfare, credit, mobility, and even speech. The citizen’s protest in the street is thus a gesture aimed at a vanished political order, one already eclipsed by techno-feudal architectures in which the true sovereigns are corporate monopolies and the state serves chiefly as their guarantor. To imagine that marching with flags can reverse this transformation is to confuse theatre with politics, nostalgia with strategy.
Nativist Nostalgia Distracts from Systemic Dysfunction
This weekend’s upcoming “March for Australia” waves the flag of a mythical past, saying “mass migration undermines unity” and calling for a return to some vague, imagined purity. Analyst reflections deeply critique this as a classic diversion tactic: the construction of an external enemy to obscure structural crises that governments and capital refuse to address. By railing against migrants, these groups deflect attention from the real forces hollowing out Australian life—runaway property speculation, monopolistic utilities, stagnant wages, and the algorithmic capture of labour and leisure alike. In this sense, nativist protest functions as a pressure valve for discontent, directing rage laterally at vulnerable newcomers rather than vertically at the entrenched systems of power. The “unity” they invoke is therefore not national cohesion but a fantasy of homogeneity, a retreat into a past that never existed except as propaganda.
Here, nostalgia obscures structural failures—unequal property systems, privatized essential services, financialized housing, and algorithmic inequality—none of which are resolved by halting immigration, but are perpetuated in globalized capitalism.
Capitalism Needs Nationalism—but Not the Populist Kind
Historical and theoretical perspectives note that capitalism often co-opts nationalism instrumentally—think developmental states or protectionist trade policies. Yet when nationalism is reactionary and xenophobic, it fractures societal cohesion without addressing class-wage disparities or systemic precarity. Indeed, such populist maneuvering doesn’t harness capitalism—it distracts from it. As noted, economic nationalism under hyperglobal capitalism is no solution to structural crisis:
“Economic nationalism... simply prolongs [capitalism’s] demise—providing neither a partial nor full solution.” https://spectrejournal.com/nationalism-and-capitals-ever-spiraling-crisis/
Now, my late wife Roya used to say, “when capitalists get into trouble, they call out the fascists!” That observation has only grown sharper in the era of techno-feudalist capitalism. Historically, whenever capitalism’s legitimacy falters—whether in the crises of the 1930s, the stagflation of the 1970s, or the neoliberal unravelings of the 2000s—the ruling class has been quick to summon reactionary forces to discipline the population. Fascism is capitalism’s reserve army: a political technology deployed to redirect popular anger away from landlords, monopolists, and financiers, and toward scapegoats cast as “foreigners,” “degenerates,” or “enemies within.” What looks like spontaneous nationalism is often nurtured or tolerated by capital itself, because it stabilizes a system that might otherwise be overthrown. In today’s Australia, as housing becomes unaffordable, wages stagnate, and services collapse under privatization, the same mechanism is at work: the far right is being courted—sometimes openly, sometimes implicitly—because its rage against migrants or minorities conveniently distracts from the structural violence of capital. Roya’s line, then, was not just a quip but a profound diagnosis: fascism does not come to destroy capitalism but to rescue it, to act as the paramilitary wing of a system desperate to maintain itself when its promises have failed.
Real-Time Extremism Watches This Closely
The rallies’ ties to extremist networks underscore how such populist gestures aren’t harmless. Groups like the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network (NSN) are already claiming these events, tainting them with white-supremacist overtones. Organisers contend “Australian heritage” does not mean race, but a livestream revealed it implicitly does. Such disavowals are a familiar tactic: public rhetoric is sanitized for broader appeal, while coded signals and insider channels communicate the real message to the base. This double-speak allows organisers to posture as defenders of “culture” while giving a wink to those who interpret “heritage” as a racial claim. The danger lies not only in explicit neo-Nazi participation but in how these events normalize exclusionary ideas under the guise of patriotism, giving cover for extremist networks to recruit and radicalize. What begins as a march draped in flags becomes a funnel into movements that openly advocate violence, turning public discontent into a pipeline for fascist resurgence.
This tactic has a long pedigree. In Weimar Germany, the Nazis initially couched their propaganda in terms of “national renewal” and “restoring pride,” masking the virulent anti-Semitism at the heart of their movement until it was safe to voice it openly. In the United States, segregationists and later the “alt-right” deployed similar language, substituting phrases like “states’ rights” or “heritage” as respectable veneers for racial hierarchy. The trick is always the same: deploy coded rhetoric that passes as civic virtue to outsiders, while insiders know the true content being signaled. By the time the mask slips, it is often too late — extremist ideas have already been normalized in public discourse. The current Australian rallies follow this script to the letter: presenting themselves as cultural defenders while giving tacit permission for fascist elements to march alongside them. History shows that once this fusion of “respectable” nationalism and extremist infiltration consolidates, the step into overt authoritarianism is alarmingly swift.
When Capitalist Legitimacy Collapses, the Far Right Resurges
Jürgen Habermas theorized that in advanced (state-managed) capitalism, the state's legitimacy erodes, creating fertile ground for reactionary backlashes. This weekend’s events reflect such a legitimation crisis—a sense that state and global capitalism no longer represent citizen interests, prompting some to cling to identity-based populism rather than redistributive justice. Instead of demanding structural remedies—progressive taxation, public housing investment, climate adaptation, or labor protections—participants gravitate toward the immediacy of symbolic politics, where waving a flag feels like reclaiming control. But this is a hollow form of resistance, one that addresses the symptoms of alienation without touching its root causes. In Habermasian terms, communicative rationality breaks down: public discourse is colonized by slogans and scapegoats, leaving genuine democratic will-formation stunted. The crisis of legitimacy thus becomes self-reinforcing, as citizens seek meaning in exclusionary identities while the system’s material injustices deepen unchecked.
The Form of Capitalism Itself is Paramount, but True Resistance Looks Nothing Like a March
We live in a stage where markets are engineered, wages are deflated, essential services are monetized, and crises are commodified. “Citizen sovereignty” under such a system is performative at best. As critics explain:
"Markets are engineered, wages stagnate, essential
needs are subscriptions, governments serve markets, every crisis is monetized"
https://mikemccready.com/2025/07/14/after-late-stage-capitalism-where-do-we-go-from-here/
Moreover, capitalism plays the religious: turning dissent and longing into consumable ideology. Yet radical change rarely aligns with performative nationalistic flashpoints. Historical parallels—from Wave Hill protests to modern Black Lives Matter campaigns—demonstrate transformative protest requires coalition-building, multi-issue engagement, and structural alternatives. What nativist rallies offer instead is ritual without substance, a liturgy of grievance that sacralizes nostalgia but refuses the hard work of building solidarity across race, class, and gender lines. Their pageantry functions like a secular mass, momentarily binding participants through symbols while leaving underlying power relations intact. In this sense, the protest becomes another commodity spectacle—captured in livestreams, hashtags, and news cycles—before dissipating without altering the conditions that produced the anger in the first place. True disruption requires dismantling those conditions, not worshipping at their altar with flags and chants. And in techno-feudal capitalism, even this pageantry is immediately absorbed: livestreams are monetized by platforms, biometric surveillance harvests data from the crowd, and the spectacle itself is fed back into algorithms that profile, predict, and police dissent. Thus, far from challenging the system, such rallies supply it with fresh content and metadata, reinforcing the very architectures of domination that protesters mistakenly believe they oppose.
Citizen Sovereigntists are By and Large Mentally Ill
That aside, many of the individuals mobilising under banners of “citizen sovereignty,” “heritage protection,” or “Australia First” often exhibit the hallmarks of collective psychological dysfunction more than coherent political thought. When faced with complex systemic crises—housing scarcity, precarity under techno-feudalist labour regimes, and algorithmic control of everyday life — they retreat into simplified, delusional narratives that assign blame to migrants, minorities, or imagined conspiracies. This isn’t political reason, but a kind of paranoid projection: the externalisation of their own sense of impotence onto scapegoats. Mental health studies on extremist adherence repeatedly highlight such movements as refuge for those with untreated anxiety, depressive hopelessness, or personality disorders that thrive on rigid binaries and conspiratorial frames.
Moreover, the rallies’ obsession with symbolic sovereignty and performative nationalism reveals a disassociative relationship to reality. Instead of engaging material causes—monopolistic rents, corporate capture of the state, climate precarity—participants obsess over flags, myths of racial purity, and fantasies of taking “our country back,” as though sovereignty were a talismanic object. This compulsive reliance on invented history and hollow symbolism reflects both flat magical thinking and collective hysteria: the attempt to conjure order through ritualised performance. Far from rational actors, many in these movements are acting out unresolved psychological trauma through political theatre. Their chants and marches are less political agency than symptomatic eruptions of untreated neurosis, dressed up in nationalist slogans.
Conclusion: A System Too Complex for Slogans
This weekend’s upcoming Australia wide rallies are neither revolutionary nor coherent. In a techno-feudalist capitalist world where sovereignty is algorithmic and citizenship is data-driven, these marches reflect not resistance but capitulation to illusion: a theatre of agency staged within a system designed to obscure, to administer, and to algorithmically anticipate every move of its subjects. To mistake flag-waving for power is to mistake spectacle for substance. What animates these movements is not genuine sovereignty but a desperate nostalgia, a longing for the comfort of simple answers in a landscape dominated by opaque infrastructures of capital, surveillance, and monopoly control.
The tragedy is that such movements siphon off legitimate anger. The cost-of-living crisis, housing precarity, environmental collapse, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions are real. Yet rather than facing those structural realities, participants chase ghosts: immigrants as scapegoats, heritage as fetish, sovereignty as a magic word. By doing so, they make themselves useful idiots for the very system they imagine they oppose, providing a convenient distraction from monopoly power and corporate predation.
If history teaches anything, it is that true transformation requires solidarity across boundaries—not the sharpening of exclusions. Wave Hill, the anti-apartheid movement, and the global anti-war mobilisations of the early 2000s remind us that durable change comes only when disparate struggles converge into common cause. By contrast, nativist spectacle isolates, fragments, and divides, ensuring that no meaningful challenge to techno-capitalist domination can ever emerge.
What is needed now is not heritage cosplay but hard work: grounded policy interventions in housing, climate, labour rights, and digital governance; the building of broad coalitions that bridge race, class, and gender; and the development of anti-capitalist alternatives capable of displacing monopoly control with democratic accountability. Only through such solidarity and structural change can anger be transformed into emancipation rather than spectacle. Until then, these marches remain hollow rituals—anxious liturgies of decline—serving not the people, but the very system that devours them.
