Imperium Press has long been one of the more interesting projects of the Australian dissident right. Largely the work of one man, Perth-based Mike Maxwell, it has spent the past eight years reissuing long-neglected historical works of the right, while also providing a platform for a new generation of anti-liberal theorists like Neema Parvini, Nick Land and Edward Dutton. This time last year Imperium Press published one of Maxwell’s own works – Tribal Future Of The West. It is a book which deserves to be read by a much wider audience than it received at publication.
In the year that has passed since its release, what had once seemed to be a theoretical catastrophe has now become an inevitable fate for our country. Since the Bondi massacre, the regime has closed off all avenues by which Australia could be peacefully diverted from its suicidal course. Australia’s largest nationalist political party has been banned, social media censorship has been supercharged, and a veil of almost total media silence has descended on anti-immigration protests. We have found ourselves under a new legal regime, in which democratic change has been made impossible.
In such conditions, the question must be asked – now that we have no way of avoiding the fate imposed on our nation, what is the endpoint of Australia’s current trajectory? Maxwell has the answer. It is a reversion to the oldest form of political organisation – the tribe. It’s not necessarily a pretty outcome, but Maxwell’s book is intended to be a historical and sociological study not a work of polemic or a utopian idyll.
It should be noted that the analysis in Tribal Future Of The West largely stands separate to Maxwell’s other works, such as his ongoing series of folkish theory essays on Substack. In my opinion this was certainly the right choice, as that series of essays has become so sprawling that it created a virtual lexicon of new terms that would baffle the casual reader.
Sovereignty’s Great Migration
Maxwell’s central argument is simple – history is cyclical and sovereignty tends to migrate with it. In the first two sections of the book Maxwell painstakingly lays out the theoretical foundations for this view and furnishes a variety of historical examples. Elite theory and cyclical history are used to paint a picture of sovereignty as something that is not static, but ever-changing even as it remains ultimately indivisible. It is ultimately a picture deeply rooted in the concept of history as an organic process, in which political units are born and die just as inevitably as the individuals which comprise them.
Rising elites coalesce different sources of tribal power together into a centralised state, and claim the mantle of sovereign. Earlier forms of personal, charismatic power are converted into institutional power. Irregular plunder becomes regular taxation. Government based on patronage becomes government based on law. Militaries are professionalised, and new forms of social control form emerge.
Over time these factors reverse themselves, whether through institutional decay, state overreach, loss of legitimacy, pressure from external enemies, internal challenges from counter-elites or some combination of the above. Sovereignty then migrates downward as the centre collapses, and loyalties retreat to the family, the tribe, religious affiliation, and other communities based on largely immutable characteristics.
Many other thinkers throughout history have written on these trends, and Maxwell rightfully pays them credit. Where his analysis becomes original is when he applies these to the contemporary West.
This part of the book borrows openly from contemporary insurgency theorists David Betz, Richard Norton and Barbara Walter. To briefly summarise their ideas, Betz sees the UK as being one step removed from an Islamist-White British civil war, Norton produced studies on the under-governed and ungoverned “feral cities” of the third world, while Walter was part of a team that performed statistical analysis of factors that precede civil wars. Maxwell, however, takes the intellectual guardrails away and applies his framework of elite theory and sovereignty migration to the work of these authors.
For him, the groups that fill the governance void left by fragmenting states – gangs, cartels, tribes, terrorist organisations and militias – are not mere non-state actors, but para-sovereigns. Eventually, the leaders of these groups undergo the same thought processes that the warlord ancestors of Europe’s noble families did. Pillaging and exploiting the people leads to large short-term gains, but the end result is to become the owner of depopulated, economically impoverished territory full of rebellious peasants. Which both wounds the pride of the potential lords, and limits the future spoils. Why not replace plunder with taxation, anarchy with order and exploitation with noblesse oblige? Soon the new lords have taken on many aspects of the vanquished sovereign, even if the old flag and the old state still exist in a far off capital. The end result is phenomena like drug cartels ruling entire Mexican states, the Taliban reconquering Afghanistan and no-go zones in European capitals governed by Sharia law.
At the other end of the spectrum the same goes for the rich, who retreat to gated communities, hire their own armed guards and try to run their own communities free of the grasping state. Some try to break away from state control entirely, as with the seasteading movement and charter cities like Honduras’ Prospera.
Sovereignty ends up resembling a patchwork of different para-sovereigns existing within the territory of an internationally recognised state, nestled within the territorial and social niches where state power no longer reaches.
Furnishing many examples, Maxwell makes the case that these para-sovereigns represent a new political order similar to the the return to tribalism that has taken place during the decline phase of great civilisations.
Extrapolating this trend, the author then presents three alternative futures – Fragmented Tribal Sovereignty, Hybrid Sovereignty, and Re-Centralisation. In the first, state sovereignty migrates completely to geographically localised tribal groups. Broader society and the state essentially collapse. In the second option, the state and tribal groups exist in an uneasy truce, neither strong enough to extirpate the other. In the third option, the state strikes back, using modern surveillance technology and the unifying promise of caesarism to pull the West out of tribalism and into a new centralised configuration of power.
While the book is well argued and convincing on the whole, there are a number of places that I felt could have been better argued. The chapter applying Mao’s model of insurgency to the contemporary West is easily the weakest in the book, pushing tentative evidence of state fragmentation into a theoretical model of centrally-directed Communist insurgency that just doesn’t fit the facts. Even at its weakest (during Mao’s Phase 1) the Chinese Communist Party governed large swathes of territory and controlled a sizeable military force staffed with professional full-time soldiers. More importantly, it received vast amounts of financial aid, advisors and military equipment from the Soviet Union. To suggest that urban drug dealers and online shitposting communities in the West are in any way comparable is just factually incorrect.
There is also the issue that Maxwell never provides a timeline for when the outcomes he describes are expected to occur. Maxwell’s first alternative future (Fragmented Tribal Politics) resembles the world of Fallout or Mad Max. It’s certainly possible that the state could completely fragment into small tribal polities across the Western world, but if it does such an outcome would likely be beyond the lifetime of anyone reading the book (absent the possibility of a nuclear war or similar global catastrophe).
Tribal Future of the Antipodes
Maxwell primarily discusses how these trends apply to Western Europe and the US. What happens when we apply his model to Australia?
Based on the conditions that Maxwell gives for the localisation of sovereignty, Australia seems to have made quite a bit of progress towards the tribal future.
The Australian state’s paranoid search for “Nazis” and “racists” that threaten to mobilise the White population against its utopian ideology has accelerated the decline in legitimacy that began with its authoritarian response to the COVID pandemic. The laws that it created to dismantle organised resistance to multiculturalism and mass immigration are increasingly being applied to normies venting on social media, now that the primary target no longer exists. At the same time, the penalties for non-political crime have become functionally non-existent. The judicial system has come to view non-political crime in therapeutic terms, with the criminal cast as a victim who requires help from the state to overcome the “sickness” of crime rather than punishment. The convergence of these trends results in what Samuel T Francis termed “anarcho-tyranny” – the kiss of death for state legitimacy.
One need only compare two recent cases covered by this news site to get an idea of just how quickly the Australian government is burning its legitimacy. Last week an Afghan teenager who admitted planning to murder White Australians in an Islamist terror attack in Sydney was sentenced to a community corrections order. He had obtained bomb-making instructions, contacted foreign Islamists and admitted that there was a 50-50 chance he would commit mass murder. In October a middle-aged White Australian mother was arrested for allegedly reposting posts from other users on Twitter that contained so-called Nazi symbols. She faces a mandatory year in prison at minimum, and could receive a sentence as high as five years. For White Australians, it’s clear that they can no longer appeal to the state for justice.
Even as the state is proving itself unwilling to impartially enforce the law, increasingly large sections of Australian society seem to operate entirely outside of it. The government is either unwilling or unable to stop the wave of organised crime that has overtaken Sydney and Melbourne. The drive-by shootings, firebombings and demands to pay protection money are no longer confined to the criminal economy of drugs and untaxed cigarettes. Businesses in the legal economy are increasingly finding that they not only have to pay tax to the state, but also to their new para-sovereign – the gang. First it was legal tobacco sellers, then it was pubs and nightclubs. Now even aged care facilities are getting hit by drive-by shootings, with the owners forced to hire ex-soldiers to protect their lives and property.
This doesn’t even include the rising amount of violence directed against entirely random targets by the permanent underclass of seriously mentally ill and drug-addicted people that the state refuses to confine, or even to medicate. Every week brings news of another assault, stabbing or even murder perpetrated against a stranger.
Even the near murder of federal politician Helen Haines by such an individual seems to have attracted no serious response. The incident was shamelessly used to further the government’s pursuit of political crime via its social media Digital Duty of Care bill, and then promptly ignored once it was of no further political use. If the state is unable to even protect members of the ruling class from such violence, what hope do the public have? Not much it turns out, as the month after a Chinese delivery driver was allegedly stabbed to death at random in Melbourne by another seriously mentally ill man.
The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of force. Those who cannot find security with the state will find it elsewhere, fragmenting and localising sovereignty even further. A sovereign that cannot enforce its monopoly on violence is a sovereign in name only.
The point that Maxwell repeatedly turns to throughout the book is that tribalisation occurs from necessity, filling the vacuum that state failure creates. If the state can no longer provide justice, or even basic protection, then it is inevitable that people will begin to fall back on family, ethnicity and religion to provide what the state won’t.
This tribalisation isn’t confined to the Fallout-style future that Maxwell describes. It is already occurring in this country.
The Active Clubs of NSN-EAM were originally formed to provide collective self-defence against communist violence. Activists learned the hard way during Reclaim Australia that the police would stand by while Antifa bashed patriotic protestors in the streets, and that the courts wouldn’t touch leftist terrorism. In the vacuum they formed White tribes to defend their community from racist antiwhite violence.
This reaction isn’t just confined to White Australians. In the aftermath of the aforementioned alleged murder of the Chinese delivery rider in Melbourne, the Chinese community launched protests and raised money to support the victim’s family. The Chinese consulate issued a statement demanding that the state government “severely punish” the perpetrator and “safeguard the rights and interests of Chinese nationals”. The best that the authorities and media could do was fall back into their reflexive anti-capitalism and blame the delivery company that employed the rider. The perpetrator will doubtlessly plead insanity and avoid any punishment. Just as with Whites, the only real protection in 2026 Australia that the Chinese have is their tribe.
Is a tribal future really that bad?
Despite these strong trends, I am less sure than Maxwell that the end result of tribalisation will end up looking like Mad Max, or that there will be a David Betz-style civil war. Barring some major catastrophe, like nuclear war, my belief is that we’ll see a far more gradual decline. Every year things will be a little bit worse than the year before. A little less safe, a little less prosperous, and a little less White.
Tribal institutions will fill the void as the tide of state power recedes. Eventually anyone who cannot call on the protection of some tribe will find themselves exposed and helpless. They will have no one to protect them from crime, or to provide welfare in case of unemployment. No patronage network to draw on in finding a job in the tribalised economy of tomorrow. No one to protect their business from extortion. No one to school their children in an environment where they won’t be bashed and robbed by the feral children of a rival tribe. No ability to obtain a home in a “good suburb” where they aren’t surrounded by enemies 24/7. Being an “individual” will be no longer sufficient for survival.
This is already what life looks like in mixed societies across the world. For foreign groups, this is basically what life already looks like in Australia. If you’re an immigrant from China or India you can spend your entire life in Australia barely interacting with a White person or speaking English. You can work at a Chinese or Indian business, buy from the Chinese or Indian grocery store, see a Chinese or Indian doctor when you get sick, report crime to your Weixin or WhatsApp community safety group chat, communicate exclusively with the Chinese or Indian staff who work at your local bank or government office. If you’re lucky, your local politician will even put on a doo-rag or hanfu and promise your community free money to tribalise.
By this criteria, Australia is not on its way towards a tribal future – it’s already here.
The tribal future is only one pole of Maxwell’s predicted future, however. He fears that tribalism will eventually be replaced by a resurgence of the state, which will be vastly more coercive than even the managerial states of today.
This is something I’m also skeptical of. According to Maxwell, life will be so “nasty, brutish and short” in a tribal future that people will rush to embrace any alternative, no matter how authoritarian. They will trade their liberty for the security of some new Hobbesian leviathan, empowered by modern surveillance technology.
I disagree with him, just as I disagree with Hobbes and all “social contract” theories of government. Call me an anarchist, but my view is that throughout history people have managed to get along without states and centralised authority just fine. The all-powerful managerial states of today are the historical anomaly, not the other way around. A future of delegated tribal sovereignty need not be one of continual violence and economic breakdown. This is a statist worldview that ignores all historical evidence to the contrary.
Maxwell does call his midpoint hybrid authoritarian-tribal system “Neo-Medieval” but he assumes that this will only be an unstable, perennially violent temporary accommodation. Medieval Europe was no such thing. Custom and shared history ensured that the overlapping authority of emperors, monarchs, the church, city burghers, guilds and feudal lords harmonised more than they clashed. The lack of a hegemonic sovereign resulted in the development of relationships of reciprocal loyalty, which were far superior to the parasitic relationship that exists today between the state and its subjects.
Economic development was hardly restrained by the absence of central authority, but rather empowered by it. While sovereigns did level protectionist measures (such as England’s protection of the wool industry), trade was a lot freer than today. This was the world before income and corporate tax, when kings either had to draw on the wealth of their own estates or beg their nobles for funds.
Cities and principalities formed networks like the Hansa in northern Europe to facilitate trade across borders. Merchants in port cities developed the first insurance companies and international banks. Ambitious sovereigns funded voyages of discovery to find markets in the New World. Guilds enforced standards among their members, ensuring that the quality of goods and services remained high.
What’s more, under the patchwork sovereignty of the medieval world, people had the ultimate right of veto over the state – the right of exit. If you found your sovereign overbearing and corrupt, you could just move down the road and set up life in another independent polity. Today the state can just cancel your passport, charge you with a spurious crime that makes immigration impossible, or extradite you from overseas.
The lack of modern states and borders did not mean that Medieval Europe suffered from multiculturalism and mass immigration either. Common loyalty to the church united Europeans across polities to expel hostile outsiders, such as the Moors who had invaded and occupied Spain.
None of this resembles the total economic and social breakdown described by Maxwell in his tribal future and hybrid scenarios. Given his Substack essays show little sign of bias towards statism, I can only attribute this to the insurgency theorists that he draws on, who view the modern managerial state as the norm against which to measure other possible political orders.
Thus while the tribal future and hybrid scenarios will certainly differ from what we know today, it will be a difference of degrees and not a descent into the Hobbesian state of nature like Maxwell predicts.
Rather than running back into the arms of managerialist despotism, it seems more likely to me that the majority of people will actually prefer being ruled by leaders from their own ethnic group via localised tribal power. Overlapping sovereignty will mean that for the first time in many hundreds of years sovereigns will have to compete for the loyalty of their subjects, rather than treating them as captives who can be brainwashed, taxed and terrorised.
While I would hesitate to recommend the ideas of Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman-Hoppe without reservation (their residual liberalism comes through a bit too strongly), their dream of a world of localised sovereignty is at least worth considering as an imaginative balance to the pessimism of Maxwell’s work.
Conclusion
Before I conclude, however, something must be said for the quality of the book’s writing and the exhaustive referencing. I frequently forgot that I was reading a self-published work from an amateur scholar, and not something put out by a university press or think tank. The tone remains detached and academic throughout, in the best sense of the term. The copy editing and presentation are also excellent. I don’t recall seeing a single misspelled word or formatting error. It’s a true credit to Imperium Press that works by dissident intellectuals are now reaching the same quality as those of the establishment.
Despite my disagreements with Maxwell’s conclusions, I still consider Tribal Future Of The West to be a groundbreaking work for the dissident right. The author has masterfully applied the analytical frames of cyclical history, elite theory and the folkish worldview to the present, and extrapolated these trends into a convincing portrait of the future. As the book becomes more widely read, I’m sure many more will debate the implications of Maxwell’s thought. Whatever developments the future holds for the West, they’re guaranteed to be tribal.
Tribal Future Of The West can be purchased as a paperback or e-book direct from the publisher.
Author’s disclaimer: I paid for my own copy of Tribal Future Of The West, have no links to the author, and stand to make no money from sales.
Header image credit: Imperium Press.
