GloboCap’s Red Guard
It is now a truism that the so-called Left is dead.
Our contemporary history books remember essentially two periods during which a visible movement of dissent within Western society rose against the established order: the aftermath of World War 1 and the Sixties. Both pangs of revolt in their beginning appear genuine; how they came to be derailed or perverted, neutralized and suppressed by the authorities is another (important) story. But something like the original spirit of protest that animated both events appears to many, on this day, irrecoverable.
The significant difference between “then” (especially the late nineteen-tens which saw the campaigning of socialist leader Eugene Debs in America) and “now” seems to have been the Left’s appeal to the universal value of cooperation, whose virtue is that of engendering union across divides. This is an essential binding factor, which today seems virtually dissolved. A quarter of a century of postmodern habituation – in academia, at schools, and in the workplace – has so managed to corrode and break the sentiments of togetherness that such a bond appears, with every passing day, ever more beyond repair. This phenomenon is conspicuous in the United States, less so in Europe, in which nonetheless similar forces are at work – given, indeed, that postmodernism is through and through a European construct.
-Guido Giacomo Peparata, The Ideology of Tyranny
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
-Karl Marx
Conservatives are attacking capitalism
Four new books show how the reactionary right and left have converged
The angriest critiques of global capitalism come increasingly from the populist right. Their critiques target two villains: corporations and liberalism.
-The Economist
My political awakening came with 9/11 and the questions raised by that event. These questions led on to a realization that the incident was thoroughly manufactured from the inside. This led on to a discovery of Marx which built up a historical background. And that led on to the perplexing discovery that what now passed for Marxism didn’t have a clue what happened on 9/11. Worse still, this “Marxism” worked very hard indeed to bury the truth about that attack.
This never changed. And with the covid turn of 2020, it was déjà vu but on a much larger scale. And with something new. Indeed, that something new was epochal – as I have said before. Covid marked a fundamental propagandist transformation. We had suffered through four decades of excoriation of “The Loony Left” and an unceasing neoliberal pep talk encouraging everyone to become an entrepreneur. All of that was suddenly ditched for “people before profits” and “we’re all in it together”.
The grinding of transitional tectonic plates is signified in The Economist article linked to above. The article continues with the most candid confession of Overton Window shift I’ve ever seen:
Two decades ago Johan Norberg, a Swedish liberal, wrote a bracing polemic called “In Defence of Global Capitalism”. Leftists hated it and sniffed that he was “on the ‘crazy right’”. Now, when he makes exactly the same arguments, people on the right accuse him of being “woke left”. “I’m not the one who’s changed,” he writes.
You can practically hear the ground screech below you as “Right” becomes “Left”. Norberg’s defence of global capitalism (GloboCap) once considered Right by Leftists is now considered Left by Rightists! Implication: We are now all Right Leftists!
And the continuation of that pushes us further into Wonderland:
The angriest critiques of global capitalism come increasingly from the populist right. This is true in several Western countries, but especially so in America. Republicans used to extol the benefits of free trade and free markets. Now, following Donald Trump’s lead, Republican candidates demand higher barriers, especially to goods from China, and berate corporations for their “wokeness” in supporting greenery and diversity. Four new books illuminate this shift, which fans of economic liberty find alarming.
In other words, Trump and the Republicans are making Leftist noises in opposing this “free trade” lingo. But don’t worry because opposing free trade is now “Right”. Free trade is now “Left”. And to emphasise this, free trade is now linked with “wokeness” which is, of course, always “Left”.
And The Left jumped on it. No hesitation. They snapped into place as the new agents of the system.
And so there it was. A transformation which suggested the rhetorical reversal in 1984 when Oceania was at war with Eurasia … and then …
On the sixth day of Hate Week …and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium …at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.
… The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.
… The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
-George Orwell, 1984
Admittedly, the covid show was far more dramatic. But the sudden elevation of “Left” to the centre of the mainstream and the subsequent banishment of “The Right” to the loony outer fringe was comparable to the instantaneous reversal of the Orwell tale.
I spent six years trying to find one voice on the Left that showed any awareness of this bizarre turnaround. I found some hopeful signs and then realised that such signs were entirely the product of hope. None had a clue.
And so, what I had previously suspected after 9/11 was now sadly confirmed i.e. that the closer anyone adhered to the classic Marxist theories, the more awry they went as they came up to date. And this peculiar aspect also suggested the answer to another question i.e. Why had the aforementioned reversal been so slickly facilitated?
Right beneath our goddamn feet!
The system’s new “progressivist” makeover was only possible because it could rely on a Leftist formation that was already there. At some point in the past – and over a considerable period – there had been a process of absorption similar to the assimilation that produced one of those pod people in Invasion of The Body Snatchers. The new organism looked the part and made the right noises. But the function of the interloper was deflection, redirection and, in short, the initiation of dupery.
Thus, whatever liberatory potential there was in the classic Marxist texts had been neutered through their jealously guarded appropriation by an academic elite functioning as a fossilized clergy of gatekeepers.
There is nothing organic about this. It is part of a longtime intelligence moulding by an order who, on realising that all that Marxist stuff wasn’t going to go away, drilled Marxism into their services. The result of this alchemy was Western Marxism. And the whole purpose of this novel chimera was to protect capitalism. Indeed, it now seems to me to be incontrovertible that Western Marxism is the most powerful prop holding up the entire capitalist order.
The ossification of the Marxist texts was supplemented by a logical “updating” manoeuvre whereby the old active mode directed outwards was replaced by a passive mode directed inwards. Which goes a long way towards explaining why the cluelessness of The Left was disguised behind a droning nomenclature about fetishes and reification and fascist tendencies and shockingly reactionary this and that.
This rich brand of defensive rhetoric owes much to that synthetic replacement whereby the very much active revolutionary political movements of the pre-World War 2 world were switched for a sedentary cultural and psycho analytical “Leftism” in the post-war period.
It is significant that the focus turned from Marx to Freud as we are now concerned with
…the preoccupations of psychological man, who in our time has succeeded economic man as the dominant moral type of Western culture. Once again, history has produced a type specially adapted to endure his own period: the trained egoist, the private man, who turns away from the arenas of public failure to re-examine himself and his own emotions. A new discipline was needed to fit this introversion of interest, and Freudian psychology, with its ingenious interpretations of politics, religion, and culture in terms of the inner life of the individual and his immediate family experiences, exactly filled the bill.
-Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of The Moralist
In the Golden Age of the boom period of The West, “economic man” could take a back seat. The affluent individual could afford an “introversion of interest” and turn “away from the arenas of public failure to re-examine himself and his own emotions”. Note those “arenas of public failure”.
GloboCap now had its very own “Red Guard” to corral the dissidents into a suitable pen of navel gazing introspection and eject those who insisted on being troublesomely outgoing in their critique. The designation “Red Guard” for this capitalist protecting Left was used in this connection by Simon Elmer who had supplied some good analysis of the covid scam before he turned into Enoch Powell. Indeed, perhaps The Red Guard was partially responsible for that odd transformation. Preparata’s hostility to Marx may also be down to the shabby treatment dished out to him by the academic wing of The Red Guard. But many others have failed to demonstrate acceptable credentials for access to this Western Left.
And many of the genuine Leftists down the line have been aware of the grim illusory game. One litmus test is to survey publishing accessibility. Michael Parenti was one worthy figure. Parenti wasn’t at all taken in by the demonisation of the term “conspiracy” and ceaselessly claimed (rightly) that there was nothing mutually exclusive about a Marxist analysis and conspiracy theory. Consequently, to date I have never found a Parenti book in any bookshop other than the second-hand ones – and even then, only on remote shelves. Meanwhile Noam Chomsky practically has a section to himself.
The Demon Gabriel
One of the first writers to have “gone large” in accusing the Western Left of fraudulence is the Italian Domenico Losurdo whose book Western Marxism is an excellent introduction to the matter. This was followed by Gabriel Rockhill’s more specific Who Paid The Pipers of Western Marxism. Rockhill is particularly valuable in outlining one of the central devices of the system i.e. the encouragement of an individualistic “pop star” culture in which various figures are elevated into a pantheon of “Big Names”, each operating as a brand label in delivering their own style of verbiage for a small partisan audience who spend their time slapping each other on the back for being “hip”.
Gabriel Rockhill. Don’t let his charming smile fool you! And always wear a crucifix when reading his book!
Needless to say, the “star names” of e.g. Marcuse, Adorno, Foucault etc. are easily accessible in the book stores, each one of those conjuring up a delicious aura of the forbidden even as they radiate from a high profile gladly provided for them. Adorno apparently offers such a threat to Western interests that the publishers are even happy to deliver his lecture notes.
Ironically, one such awestruck follower of these gurus unwittingly confirmed the pop-star thesis by complaining that Rockhill “hasn’t produced a single original idea”. Clearly uncovering the truth is irrelevant. Rockhill should have been cultivating a snazzy hairstyle, a zippy dance routine, and a catchy pop jingle to inaugurate and promote a new line of lucrative merchandise.
Now, as Rockhill himself pointed out, this doesn’t mean that “The Big Names” in question have nothing to say. It’s just that the glamourous prestige around them is invariably accompanied by a ferocious denunciation of any other approach as the followers truculently eject any perceived slight of their hero. Should you resist the allure of the worshipped name, you will break their toys and they’re not coming out to play anymore.
Summary and Conclusion
Preparata’s baleful pronouncement has been unmistakeably confirmed. This Doppelgänger Left has been operational for a long time now and was an indispensable accompaniment to the development of Western capitalism. Furthermore – and most ominously – this Cuckoo Left went instantaneously from protectors to main agents of the system with the covid turn of 2020. The system pirouetted onto its Left foot and this Western Marxism deftly and unhesitatingly obliged with the show.
And so the old show that was so reassuring pre-covid is now undergoing a more “collectivist” organisation as a variant of state-run capitalism beckons and has already embarked on its grand depopulation scheme along with a new eugenics programme based on a sly voluntary basis via the transgender theology that invites its adherents to neuter themselves. All of this is merely the beginning. But it will be several decades before a sizable portion of this Red Guard start to experience odd twitchings in their skulls as the eerie fact that they have been duped starts to register. And you can bet that such awakening will be furiously resisted by those now permanently welded to the comfortable Freudian couches in the corridors of academia.
And this latter contingent will continue the petty bickering over the permissible methods that were lovingly sculpted on stone tablets handed down through that halcyon Golden Age.
As for what is to be done, all we can currently hope for is the continuation of something so “twee” as basic civility over internet exchanges. To try and keep the channels as open as possible is the only human endeavour I can contemplate at the moment.
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