A Great Replacement? No, it’s capitalism eating your baby

Part 1 – The overview

Scratch just under the surface of Reform UK’s relentless bombardment of violent rhetoric on immigration, and you’ll find something even more sinister.

Most of us have heard of it: the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ authored by French far-right white supremacist Renaud Camus, and popularised by Musk during Trump’s election campaign. Camus claims that white populations across Europe are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white people. And that is on purpose, with the complicity and cooperation of ‘replacist elites’. 

These are the ‘elites’ whom Nigel ‘Four Homes’ Farage and his chief propagandist Matt Goodwin call The Uniparty, whom they blame for mass immigration into the United Kingdom. (Distracting you from knowing they are part of this elite too.) It’s also why we need to get this analysis on the record now, as Reform UK ramps up their anti-migrant rhetoric stained with these deeper racist undertones.

The Great Replacement, thinks Camus, is just the next iteration of a ‘white genocide’ perpetrated by governments setting out to eliminate white people. 

Hold on, does the Reform leadership really think that? They wouldn’t admit it straight out. But has it anything to do with Four Homes Farage and Reform’s anti-immigrant campaigns? Well, yes. It is alive and active in the conspiracy Telegram chats that surged with support for Four Homes Farage at the last election. And it’s constantly simmering in MiniMart Goodwin’s newsletter. When racist Renaud Camus had his visa revoked for entering the UK in April, MiniMart Goodwin gave him airtime on GBNews. Minimart called Camus “a very important and influential French intellectual”.

Why governments made up of white people might want to exterminate white people isn’t explained by this “very important and influential French intellectual”, although he hints it’s so that they too can have their share of the wealth hoarded by huge corporations who want cheap immigrant labour. 

Which is ironic, when you understand why this racist theory re-emerged: as a cover story for capitalism’s extraction of maximum profit from ordinary people.

The fact is that, yes, the population of European countries is changing.

It’s because we’re in the midst of a global and profound relationship recession.

Millions more people are staying single, or are single for longer, and relationships aren’t lasting as long. These single people don’t have as many children. But you’d never know this is the reason for European population change from Four Homes or Goodwin. 

Why are people staying single, or single for longer? Well, singledom is more expensive, which means more profit. Especially the profits of those pedlars of loneliness and isolation, the tech and social media companies.

Capitalism, whose only rule is to maximise profit for shareholders, has realised it can do so by maximising the number of single people. So where neoliberal capitalism is at its most embedded – the US, Europe – the relationship recession is at its most profound, as capitalism structures life into atomised, isolated, and expensive units. 

 The problem though, as in The Matrix, is if we figured this out, we’d start to question why we were all so skint and lonely. And do something about it. Especially if we’d been through a global financial crash, and when the climate crisis is forcing millions to migrate, making many people’s lives unbearable.

Enter, another useful story: The Great Replacement. Its purpose was always to distract you from the theft of your livelihood and freedom by capitalism, by blaming shadowy elites and brown people. Which is what Four Homes Farage is doing right now, copying the Trump playbook for power. Let’s unpack this.

Part 2 – The data

White European populations are falling, driven by a relationship recession.

Data shows that populations in dozens of places, from the US, Finland and South Korea to Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand are falling. As John Burn-Murdoch wrote in the FT a few months ago, singledom is the challenge now to people worried about some populations falling (and some aren’t worried about falling populations, of course). He wrote:

Even the term “birth rates” itself … implies the goal is the same today as it was in the past: finding ways to encourage couples to have more children. A closer look at the data suggests a whole new challenge. … The central demographic story of modern times is not just declining rates of childbearing but rising rates of singledom: a much more fundamental shift in the nature of modern societies. Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile.

As Burn-Murdoch shows us from the data, if rates of relationship coupling had stayed the same, then birth rates would not have tumbled anywhere near as much, and in some countries such as the US, stayed stable. 

So, what has driven this? The timing and location of falling birth rates globally as a worldwide phenomena, alongside the explosion of loneliness, has all come at once, and coincided with the rise of smartphones and social media:

Geographical differences in the rise of singledom broadly track mobile internet usage, particularly among women, whose calculus in weighing up potential partners is changing. This is consistent with research showing social media facilitates the spread of liberal values (notably only among women) and boosts female empowerment. The fall in coupling is deepest in extremely-online Europe, east Asia and Latin America, followed by the Middle East and then Africa. Singledom remains rare in south Asia, where women’s web access is more limited.

We have changed the patterns of humanity on this planet, by allowing neoliberal capitalism’s structuring of our lives into separation from one another. And we’ve done this to such an extent that the populations most structured by the zenith of capitalist market capitalisation – tech and social media – are now characterised not by family, relationship and community, but by loneliness and a loss of meaning. The far-right elites blame ‘woke’, ‘feminism’, ‘immigrants’ or the European Court of Human Rights, but, really, it’s their intensely concentrated hoarding of wealth and power to blame.

Part 3 – Capitalism loves singletons

Or, you might ask, is it all about women being freer? Empowered by knowledge, single for longer and not having as many children? Yes. But we know capitalism is brilliant at devouring threats to its power and regurgitating those threats as features that support its extractive structure. Feminism is one of the best examples. The empowerment of women over the last 60 years has always been seen as a threat to the white, male capitalist system of ownership and property. It is a major factor in the rise of singledom and falling birthrate in European countries, yes. But, okay, says capitalism – we’ll allow some of this, but we’ll turn feminism into a commodity. And you’ll pay more (in Britain it’s £3,844 more per year on household bills) for foregoing a husband. Cheap at half the price, you might say! Bearing in mind single women are now realising they can be less depressed, more financially stable, and live longer than married women. 

So single women are tolerated by capitalism and commodified, even those childless cat ladies, as long as they continue to be super profitable and not win political races. That is, to repeat the point: single people are much more profitable than couples (or intentional communities). It’s often known in banal ways as the ‘single tax’ or ‘single surcharge’. It also costs atomised people in mental wellness too, especially the Incel men who don’t understand why capitalism has brought them such loneliness, and who have turned that into rage against the freer women.

Single people pay more, and so give landlords, tech shareholders, fossil fuel bosses, and even governments, more profits: especially through living alone. Via advertising, marketing, and other means, capitalist brands drive the profit line by commodifying the loneliness and isolation, by associating them with positive values such as freedom. You’re meant to be ‘happy’ to give more to the system! Here, eat your own suffering in both real and virtual candy as a prize.

This isn’t new. Michel Houellebecq wrote Atomised in 1998. The Matrix was 1999. Zygmunt Bauman analysed capitalism’s purposeful breaking of relationships in Liquid Love in 2003. So the number of relationships has been falling for decades, leading to falling birthrates in these countries. And they’re falling not because of a shadowy conspiracy, but because neoliberal capitalist corporations and their neoliberal, right- or far-right governments, have structured our social and economic lives to maximise their profits by separating us from each other.

Part 4 – Enter the conspiracy, enter Reform

Then came the 2008 global financial crisis, a coulda-been-existential threat to neoliberalism. The ways in which capitalism was atomising people for profit became fair game for interrogation. Those benefiting most from keeping capitalism alive, especially the old white racists (Camus lives in a castle, and Four Homes Farage has… well, four homes, none of them in Clacton) needed to fight back. 

So in 2010 and 2011 Camus wrote his crackpot racist theory, and the white superrich elites, cognisant of the history of conspiracy theories as a method for distracting populations from the real reasons for their pain and impoverishment, jumped on this regurgitation of racisms. The new Great Replacement Theory (as opposed to the old one) materialised as a cover story to distract people from the factual social and economic reasons why they were suffering, by twisting people’s heads to focus instead on population threats, using migration as the handy whipping boy (or, actually, girl).

And yet, isn’t it strange that every time MiniMart Goodwin releases another ‘bombshell!’ newsletter about the disappearance of ‘white host’ Brits, he never mentions the economic realities driving the falling birthrates. Why would that be?

And when Four Homes Fadja wants to ‘help’ British people (i.e.: women, single or not) have more children, he’s tricking you into looking one way so distracting you from looking the other. (He also thinks same-sex marriage is wrong. But who has he got hidden away in those four homes, hey?!)

Let’s never forget: Four Homes Farage is a paid up member of the elite. He is part of the far-right world of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and others. They are all defenders of the ratchet-system that hoards power and wealth known as capitalism. Of course he’s going to blame the immigrants for your poverty. Of course he’s going to take donations by Crypto. He’ll definitely take Musk’s money. And Four Homes loves Zuckerberg – oh yes, “Facebook is Back”.

To recap, this relationship recession coincides exactly with the rise of smartphones and social media. And who are the most profitable companies on the planet right now, whose CEOs lined the front row at Trump’s inauguration and who accompanied him on his Oil-and-AI trip to Saudi Arabia? The broligarchy of course, the white men who have become the richest hoarders on the planet through their… smart phones and social media (the six largest companies in the world by market capitalisation are Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta/Facebook).

Profiting off singledom, impoverishment, isolation and loneliness – as company policy and political manifesto.

It all sounds like a conspiracy, right? But if it were the case, these men would really love to distract you from the truth of it. Right? What might they do about that? Give old Camus a call in his chateau? Fund the politicians who support profiteering?

Part 5 – Joining the dots

The links aren’t hidden. The magnificent New Yorker profile of racist philosopher Curtis Yarvin ends with his ‘pilgrimage’ to see Camus in his castle. Yarvin is closely connected to tech billionaire Peter Thiel and claims great influence over the U.S. Deputy President J.D. Vance. Four Homes has visited Trump in America many times more than hosted a surgery in his constituency. The dots aren’t hidden.

Population decline is one of the most powerful forces shaping our world. But, let’s be really clear about what has always been shaping it. Neoliberal capitalist atomisation.

Immigration into Europe isn’t the cause of declining European birthrates. It’s just the scapegoat. And this is not to ignore people’s felt concerns around immigration. But it is to refocus on the factors involved, and their drivers. Capitalism wants us single. It wants us lonely. It’s more profitable. It also wants cheap labour on the move. The falling white birthrate is just an unplanned (ironic) and worrying (for the old white male capitalists) side-effect of the extraction of profits from our lives.

The blame placed on immigrants for the changing demographics of European countries has always ignored multiple other factors, of course: 

• that immigration to Europe is the obvious legacy of all that colonialism (just what did the imperialists imagine was going to happen when, for example, the British Council spent decades forcefully impressing on Africans and Caribbeans and Indians that the Yookay was the best place in the world to live and they should be grateful to be part of the Commonwealth?!)
• the climate crisis forcing millions to leave their homes for safety
• global economic demands for cheaper labour, often slave labour

The rise of singledom does have some knock-on benefits for the wealthy elite, bearing in mind the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest. They can kill off the poor, and Boris and Jacob can have their four or six or nine kids no problem…

Changing birthrates in Europe shouldn’t be ignored. And yet the real reason can’t be admitted by those peddling division for their own gain. Capitalism, good at what it does, helps proliferate another conspiracy theory to distract us from capitalism’s evil, while a tiny handful make huge tech-tainted profits.

Four Homes Farage is doing quite nicely out of it, too.