Posted on 06/06/2023 10:55:24 AM PDT by Heartlander
The political left died in stages and then all at once:
• It died when communist workers’ parties went nationalist at the start of World War I and thus killed each other rather than saying no to bankers’ wars.
• It died during the Moscow Show Trials from 1936 to 1938 that showed the grotesque extremes of Stalin’s Russia.
• It died in 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, thus revealing that the “reforms” of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were an illusion.
• The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people in the Soviet satellite countries overthrew their rulers soon thereafter, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991.
• Formerly left political parties across the developed world pivoted away from their founding principles. The Labor Party in Australia implemented neoliberalism in 1983. In 1992, Bill Clinton made neoliberalism the central ideology of the Democratic Party in the US Tony Blair then copied this strategy in the UK from 1997 through 2007.
• By the early 2000s, the actually existing political left was mostly an artifact in history textbooks, not a viable political movement anywhere in the world.
I spent 30 years looking for the political left. Like Winston Smith in 1984, I was driven by the idealistic notion that surely a revolutionary alternative must exist.
For undergrad (1988 to 1992) I attended the most left college I could find, Swarthmore. When George H.W. Bush launched his war in Iraq there were about twenty of us who came together to oppose it. Out of that group, only about five were committed to actual political organizing to stop the war. There were no openly Marxian professors.
In 1990, I traveled to Central America where the left had been devastated by decades of authoritarian rule and outright genocide. I worked on a Sandinista cattle cooperative in the one left success story in the region, Nicaragua. I mostly encountered machismo, not some transcendent grassroots political theory. Now Nicaragua under the Sandinistas has regressed into the brutal authoritarianism it once sought to overthrow.
In the 2000s, I wanted to go to law school to study Critical Legal Theory but there were only two professors left in the country still doing work in that area and they were nearing retirement. The annual conference on Critical Legal Theory in the US had stopped meeting and there were no journals producing good work on the topic. I wrote about this a while back on my Substack.
I did a master of public policy degree at UC Berkeley from 2010 to 2012 and discovered that the revolutionary spirit left that place back in the 1960s. My public policy classes were filled with professors drawing graphs on the chalkboard showing how the minimum wage and labor unions were inefficient. The few lefty faculty still remaining at UC Berkeley were in the Geography department and they all spoke a coded language that is impossible to understand from the outside (so, no revolution from them).
I did my Ph.D. from 2014 to 2019 at the most radical political economy department I could find. There were a few Marxian faculty remaining but they mostly focused on historical projects. The newer faculty were writing postmodern meditations on time and space (so, no revolution from them) and endless critiques of neoliberalism (which functions as a sort of make-work permanent employment plan for the left that never actually threatens existing power structures).
My three-decade search for the political left revealed a series of ghost towns. Like Winston Smith, I discovered that The Brotherhood only exists as an idea, not as an actually existing political movement.
It is more than a little curious then that the left agenda is back, given that the actually existing political left contains almost no members. Everywhere one looks the left agenda is ascendant:
Everywhere one looks, it’s all leftism all the time — again with little actual popular political support to drive these changes.
So what is going on?
Almost all of the supposed “leftism” that one sees today is being driven from above by capital. The people driving this agenda are:
The billionaires, the oligarchs, the holders of capital, the richest people in the world, are driving the “left” agenda. They write about it in their annual letters to shareholders and they talk about it nonstop in public speeches — this is their vision for how they want to remake the world.
The ruling class uses a whole host of bougiecrats to implement the plan including:
No actual leftists are involved in this process at all.
At first this makes no sense. The political left and the billionaires should be mortal enemies. But somehow the billionaires are playing dress-up, pretend, cosplay leftism while the actual left base does not exist.
Okay, so let’s think through why this might be the case. Let’s look at this from the perspective of the ruling class that is implementing this agenda:
If one wants to take over the world, it helps to have a movement or at least the appearance of a movement.
The political right is bad at movement politics. For conservatives, the fundamental unit of society is the individual, not the collective. Social movements make conservatives cringe. So if one wants to take over the world, one needs to embrace the aesthetics and rhetoric of the left (while excluding any actual leftists who might get in the way). The appearance of a movement gives legitimacy to this ruling class project for world domination.
The trillion dollar grifts of the ruling class require massive government spending.
So again, one cannot run that through the political right; they are too busy trying to shrink government (they often fail at that, but that’s their stated goal). The trillion dollar vaccine grift, the trillion dollar health insurance grift, and endless multi-trillion dollar wars all around the world require a political party that believes in Big Government. So the ruling class has to run these grifts through the Democratic Party.
The corporate embrace of astroturf leftism actually makes sense from a marketing perspective.
It should be noted that none of these corporations are being forced to do anything —they are eagerly embracing the instructions from above as if they were their own ideas.
It’s a lot easier to oppress and enslave people if they do not realize that they are being oppressed and enslaved.
So the left political project now is just kitsch, a toxic mimic of its former self, deployed by the ruling class to enslave and depopulate the world.
The question is, why are so few people on the left able to see this? Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore, to name a few, should have been able to spot the Covid psyop in about 5 minutes. Instead they became rabid cheerleaders for fascism.
I have a few attempts at an answer:
But there is no reason the rest of us have to go along with this sick and twisted charade. We must speak simple truths out loud every day:
Spending years in academia chasing a secular economic model that can only kill the soul and do no good.
Talk about a wasted life.
I think from a messaging perspective he is correct. From an observational point of view, the population seems to support this new left 2 to one over conservatism. In fact, in my observations of the people under 40, leftist support seems 5:1 over conservative support.
So while it is a top down control movement, they have managed to garner massive support among the population. Conservatism is being absolutely crushed at a core generational level of those under 40.
He defines the problem well but his list of things that must be done are more like goals. Like Victor Davis Hansen (whom I admire) he leaves open the question of how.
All parts of the political right, exactly opposite what the writer claims he pursued.
The Left has always been against these things.
We are coming close to a situation similar to Spain in the 1930s, where there is no bottom-up method available to establish conservative policies, and no bottom-up method necessary to establish leftist policies.
The result is something close to a Hobson’s choice, between a tyrant who will keep the society conservative and a tyrant who will keep the society socialist, as in 1930s Spain between Franco on one side and Negrin on the other. In short, it will take a tyrant to drain the swamp, an American Augustus or an American Franco or Pinochet; the question is whether the cure is worse than the disease, but we’re going to end up with a top-down tyranny regardless.
And the left has always been top down as well. They never let the people decide. This writer gets a few critical things wrong.
That may be true, but anyone can see the world is full of problems (this author lists many). So, if "there is no political left" maybe that leads people to think that the evil Ruling Class must be "the political right" -- and that idea is just not true.
I see the world as neo-feudalist with Lords and Peasants. I'm a peasant, and I don't like it. I don't find Left-Right to be very meaningful and I wish average people could unite against the Ruling Class. In my opinion, the Woke people are lost in the wilderness, propping up a Ruling Class system that they think they oppose.
The Bolsheviks killed the Mensheviks.
I was watching 12 O’clock High the other day and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather be one of the the poor bastards on the planes than the guy who sends them out. What a job.
Welcome to the party, pal.
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“The Ship of Theseus” is a thought experiment. Over time, each part of the ship has been replaced: masts, cabin, prow, rudder, keel and all the rest. Is it still the same ship?
Somebody explained it this way. The Russian Revolution claimed to represent the industrial working class. China didn’t have much of an industrial working class, so the Chinese Revolution claimed to be representing the rural peasant workers. Today in the West, the industrial working class is declining in numbers and not very revolutionary, and we don’t have that many peasants either, so the new revolution has to represent somebody else: people of color, LGBTQ, feminist, or whatever.
It’s still a left. The French Revolution had a left long before all this and there will be a left after the current wave subsides. Is it literally Marxism? Most likely not, but it does owe a lot to Marxism.
Fascism is the left.
That's what the real left has always opposed.
It always has been. They're just more open about it now.
It’s cultural Marxism. The Frankfurt School realized that the revolution wasn’t coming from the working people — they were too well off. So they simply substituted in racial, ethnic, and other identity groups for the “proletarian” working class.
It’s not classical Marxism, but it’s neo-Marxism.
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