Is there Life Beyond the Left-Right Divide? (Part Two)

In the first part of this article, I argued the case for the continued relevance of ‘leftness’ within the context of, first, the collapse of the legitimacy of the ‘Legacy Left’ owing to its collaboration with the ruling class during the covid operation and its inveterate propensity to focus on distracting and irrelevant political issues, and, second, the emergence of a new kind of oppositional politics rooted in the mass mobilisation against lockdowns and ‘vaccine’ mandates in 2020 and 2021 which is defined – admittedly loosely but still usefully – as the ‘Resistance Movement’ (hereafter ‘RM’).

Assuming this to be the case, we go to encounter for the millionth time the eternal question: What is to be done?

Without wishing to encourage readers to finish the article now, there is no point in trying to build tension for a great reveal three thousand words down the line. The answer is straightforward: organise.

But the organising itself, that is not a straightforward task. The road ahead isn’t clear. There are opportunities but there are also impediments. I want to take a few different themes and areas of enquiry – some of them problematic – that jointly and severally play for and against the likelihood of the development of a coherent programme of political opposition to ruling class power and see where that leads us to in the end.

It’s all very well theorising that aspects of the RM’s orientation can be properly regarded as ‘Left’ (e.g. mass mobilisation against oppressive ruling class actions, community-rooted defence against pharmaceutical industry attacks, advanced critique of the financial system) and making a case for a certain amount of ‘continuity Leftism’ in the new dispensation; what really matters is whether there are practical opportunities for activism, and how differences in political culture and practice might be overcome.

Second spoiler alert – I don’t have any absolute answers. This is all a work in progress. We are in the foothills of understanding how we should orient ourselves in the new political context that erupted in 2020. (As a quick aside, if you are interested in engaging in such discussions with friendly like-minds, come along to our next meeting and we can thereafter add you the Real Left telegram group.)

By ‘we’ I am thinking of people like me who spent most of their conscious life on what they thought was the Left and who were active in trade unions, political parties and campaigns, and who now feel but a shadow of identification with that world, yet believe that there is a tradition worth persevering and that it may be adapted to new conditions. But I hope the article speaks to a broader base than that.

The following sections are not sequential and could probably be read in any order. I think that we have a way to go before we can think sequentially about our political direction and a fragmentary approach is probably appropriate right now.

Individual collectivism or collective individualism?

RM political consciousness, if it is possible to speak of such a thing, is generally individualist rather than collectivist in its orientation. Indeed, collectivism is a pejorative term for many in the movement.

By this I mean that the dominant notes of the movement’s ideology are tuned to the pitch of a highly developed sense of individual autonomy amongst its members.

In this respect, RM political consciousness is different from traditional Left political consciousness which although not unconcerned with questions of individual freedom, generally mediates such things through sectional interest ‘liberation’ rhetoric rather than emphasising the sovereign autonomy (and responsibility) of the individual; for the traditional Left, the collective interest precedes the personal and questions about the status and autonomy of the individual are only resolvable within the larger condition of the group.

In the spirit of turning things on their head and assuming that the new Left is not the same as the old Left, might it be the case that instead of the collective proceeding to the individual, the potential trajectory of the new politics embodied by the RM is of the individual proceeding to the collective?

This thought isn’t merely a neat inversion but rather an acknowledgement of the limits of individualism in building a successful oppositional movement.

Individual liberation is a wonderful thing and a starting point for radical political development. It was impossible not to feel personally affronted by the outrageous liberty-constraining diktats of the covid operation. For many of us, it was the first time that our personal freedom had been impinged upon so egregiously and this experience, which forced into the open fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the state, catalysed mass global resistance.

But individual rights-based resistance can only sustain a movement so far. Only collective action in the service of a revolutionary programme of action is capable of challenging and overthrowing ruling class power.

It doesn’t matter how awake one is, or how many people are awake. Enlightenment – even on a mass scale – without collective organisation is just an aggregation of atomised awake-ness. Hoping for a chiliastic flowering of global consciousness is not enough. The ruling class is highly organised. We need to be highly organised too. The ruling class has a plan. We also need a plan. And a development of the plan, which must be nothing less than a comprehensive programme of revolutionary change, can only be achieved collectively.

Establishing the material base

At the RM’s more esoteric end, you will hear a lot of talk about simulations, dark occultists and secret societies.

I don’t disagree with much of this analysis. For example, it is quite possible that the apex of the social pyramid is occupied by Luciferian bloodline families that trace their lineage back to the Babylonian mystery schools.

And it’s possible that what we apprehend as reality has been cooked up by a non-terrestrial AI-driven demiurge.

But the struggle still takes place primarily in the material realm. Our analysis should not become too esoteric.

Understanding this is not inimical to an appreciation of the motive power of the raw spiritual fury that characterised the eruption of opposition to the covid operation and sustained the formation of the new revolutionary base.

The RM has divine righteousness on its side. But this energy should be harnessed to a practical programme.

Any thoughts about what the post-revolutionary world might look like should always return to one critical question: who will run the sewage works?

And this one critical question could just as usefully be asked by saying, Who will drive the trains? Who will operate food transportation networks? How will the power stations be kept running? And so on. These are hard material concerns. The revolution must be built from a practical base. It should not be distracted by wild transformative visions. We may live in a simulation but we still need people to drive the simulated buses and drill for simulated oil.

Yes, the narrative drive of revolutionary transformation is necessarily visionary and even apocalyptic. This helps sustain the militant enthusiasm necessary for accomplishing revolutionary transformation. But millenarian consciousness is not a substitute for a bricks and mortar programme, and there is no hope of our ever being free from ruling class oppression if we don’t attend to the practical task of preparing for the post-revolutionary social and economic order.

The leadership question

Mainstream political culture and practice has been intentionally degraded so as to destroy the idea of politics, and the people who inhabit it, as being something worth investing in.

This is why pathetic clowns such as Sunak and Starmer are placed into leadership positions. They are compelled to participate in humiliation rituals that make them a laughingstock in front of the entire country; for example, Sunak announcing the date of the General Election outside Downing Street during a downpour and without an umbrella or coat, or Starmer being pointedly reminded of his junior partner status during a joint interview with the alpha puppet from across the Atlantic.

The physical and psychological characteristics of every leader in the Western political region default to the basest possible level. Their grotesque and risible surface behavioural manifestations hint at darker realities. It is likely that most if not all the national premiers from the recent past and at the present time have been blackmailed or otherwise threatened and are acting out their leadership roles under duress, fearing a grisly end for themselves or their families if they do not follow orders to the letter or, worse, reveal the reality of their position.

That last point is worth a digression. What a spectacle that would be, a national ‘leader’ talking candidly to the country about the reality of their position.

“I am controlled by dark forces. You cannot imagine how dreadful they are. They represent secretive power interests who do not have the interests of humanity at heart. Everything I do and say is scripted and the absurd policies I have driven through Parliament are intended to bring about the destruction of British society and the economy. The reason I do this is because these dark forces possess compromising pictures of me which were taken at a party twenty years ago when I was inadvertently high on drugs. I have been told that if I do not comply with their orders or if I speak out, as I am doing now, I will be killed and so will my family. I’m sorry about all this. I believe that many years ago I really did want to make a positive difference to the quality of life of the people of this country. I’m truly sorry.”

I don’t think that this is too lurid an interpretation of the circumstances within which national political leaders operate. Some of them may think that they have agency. It is possible that Starmer, a man who looks like he irons his underpants and harbours yet more sinister secrets than that, sincerely believes in the insane and destructive policies his government is pursuing. Perhaps he really thinks that he is in charge. It doesn’t matter. All that speaks to is the power of MKUltra-like conditioning in the political realm.

And we must not be fooled again and again by ‘radical’ and ‘outsider’ alternatives, whether they come from the Right or the Left. Reform UK and the yet unnamed continuity Corbyn bloc operate within the mainstream Parliamentary context. There is zero reason to believe that the leadership of these organisations is not as thoroughly compromised and owned as their counterparts in the big parties, however ‘alternative’ or fresh’ their policies might appear. The broadest-paned Overton Window still has a frame.

But imagine if leaders emerged who came from the People and who were fundamentally normal, who talked reasonably and effectively, who had worked in regular jobs, who could articulate the interests of the movement, who could take the battle to the ruling class and inspire people to follow them – what would that be like? Would we even recognise them? It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but it is even harder to think of a leader emerging who is not a servile instrument of ruling class power interests.

We are not waiting for a leader or leaders to direct the movement; the business of building revolutionary opposition must be conducted from the base up. The process is necessarily communal and democratic. But we should not be so jaundiced by our experience of political leadership within the only context that we have known to preclude the possibility of powerful individuals emerging who are not sell-outs, scabs and traitors but who repay over and over the faith and hope invested in them.

The importance of party organisation

If the struggle is to be directed to a successful conclusion we must organise ourselves more effectively.

This will require the formation of a new party organisation that builds a state in waiting based upon popular democratic participation ready to assume control once the ruling class has been overthrown and its agencies have been eradicated.

This is the most important point. We will not achieve anything without mass party organisation. I realise that thinking in this way is antithetical to many people in the RM, partly for the reasons associated with leadership referred to previously. Mainstream party politics has acquired a justifiably bad name and revolutionary mass movements have generally been traduced as the inevitable precursors to totalitarian oppression.

But without a mass party organisation creating instruments of popular control, it will be impossible to overthrow the ruling class and establish a social and economic order based upon the interests of the People.

The idea of a party in this context should much grander than the typical political instrument that exists to perpetuate the Parliamentary model.

It should be conceived of as a national movement predicated on the awakest possible principles and dedicated to a programme of social and economic reform that puts power absolutely into the hands of the People and extirpates the ruling class forever.

The Party should be run democratically and accountably. Unlike all other parties, mainstream and marginal, it would be administered by sensible and practical people from normal backgrounds.

Who wouldn’t want to join such an organisation?

The very idea of building a mass party outside of the mainstream political context that is capable of challenging and overthrowing ruling class power obviously comes across as somewhat fanciful, if not delusional, but I believe that it is possible to believe that such a thing might be achievable.

The growing constituency of ‘awake’ people is crying out for representation. However co-opted and compromised they might have been, history provides multiple examples of mass movements built around campaigns for social and economic change.

There are several hot political positions that could drive organisational development and bring people into the collective embrace These include resistance to the development of the biosecurity surveillance state, geo-engineering, the climate hoax and the exposure of the baseless reality of the financial system. Discourse around these subjects encourages a radical critique of ruling class power and the potential for a programme of revolutionary change.

Resistance to the covid operation stimulated the emergence of multiple groups, campaigns and activist networks. This loosely connected organisational base should be considered as the raw material for a larger representative body which pulls the disparate strands together, offering a unified model of organisation and policies.

None of this is simple and straightforward or capable of speedy resolution. To begin with, the biggest service we can offer to the cause of party building is to start to talk about it, to seed the idea within the broader RM that a mass movement constituted upon democratic principles and committed to revolutionary change is the only way that we are going to win the class war.

The ‘ism’ fallacy

A problematic aspect of the RM’s political orientation is a widespread misapprehension about the emerging global biosecurity state being ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’.

This is entirely wrongheaded. The emerging global biosecurity state is closer to fascism than communism or socialism in its fusing of corporate and state power but I think that it’s really a form of supra-national, hi-tech feudalism.

It is also a mistake to think of the ideologies associated with the ‘woke’ phenomenon as being ‘communist’, ‘socialist’ or any kind of Left.

The climate emergency cult, Black Lives Matter and the transgender agenda, to pick just three examples, have nothing to do with communism or socialism. They are species of extreme liberalism.

These distractions were created to divide the masses and to steer activist energy away from real political questions; in particular, the one issue above all others with which mainstream Left discourse rarely if ever engages: the power of the banks.

As far as communism goes, I understand it as being the working class taking control of the means of production and governing in the interests of the working class.

This has nothing to do with the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organisation, Bill Gates or Elon Musk.

The dystopian world view of the Davos deviants and their dark masters might reasonably be described as collectivist in the sense that it is predicated on ubiquity and uniformity; it offers a perverse equality whereby every individual on the planet is a tightly regulated data point with no aspect of differentiation from eight billion other data points.

But to call it communist or socialist is to render the terms meaningless. It doesn’t matter what you think about communism or socialism or any other Left political manifestation; we could not be further from a dictatorship of the proletariat; rather, we are presently living under a dictatorship of the oligarchy.

This tendency to bandy ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ as pejorative epithets speaks to the persistence of hackneyed conservative thinking in the RM, associated not exclusively but certainly preponderantly with the Daily Sceptic (formerly Lockdown Sceptics) school of political thought.

To be fair, I should note at this point the debt of gratitude I owe to Lockdown Sceptics, which was one of the few media outposts of reason during the covid operation. I was so grateful that for the best part of a year I was giving Toby Young £20 a month.

And via an unprecedented act of alt-media midwifery, Lockdown Sceptics helped bring Left Lockdown Sceptics (now Real Left) into the world.

Unsurprisingly, both outlets took new names soon afterwards.

They were heady days. It was political ecumenism gone mad. It all felt very transgressive but as I said to myself as I set up the direct debit for Lockdown Sceptics and started to explore the Conservative Woman, this is not the time for outmoded political compunctions.

Back then, outlets such as Lockdown Sceptics and the Conservative Woman were in the vanguard of dissident opinion.

The Morning Star and the Socialist Worker, meanwhile, were busy rendering the covid psyop acceptable for left wing palates.

It now seems incredible that such a disparate set of fellows should ever have shared a bed. Israel-Gaza alone has quashed the Popular Frontism of 2020 and 2021.

And the idea that the emerging global biosecurity state is ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ has become a commonplace of RM discourse.

But if we agree that we are engaged in a class struggle, the present phase of which commenced when the ruling class launched a massive attack along the covid front in March 2020, what other end point can the RM have but a form of social and economic organisation that puts the People in charge instead of the present ruling class?

This will not be achieved by rooting out all the wrong ‘uns from the Conservative or Labour Parties or the banks or the judiciary or the media houses; it won’t be accomplished through an amiable transfer of power whereby the ruling class throws up its hands, admits it has run out of road and toddles off into the sunset.

And it won’t be achieved by getting Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street.

Ruling class power will only be overthrown by mass popular action. The class struggle is real – the ruling class certainly believes this – and I would argue that anyone who has ever been active in the RM has, consciously or not, been part of that struggle. Whether this makes you a communist or socialist by definition or whether the very idea of being called such is antithetical, is ultimately unimportant. The struggle is the thing.

Realising the power of the People

Finally arriving back at the spoiler alert in paragraph three: organisation is the answer. Beyond considerations about leftness or rightness, power – latent now, actual in time – lies in the hands of the People. It is down to us to organise ourselves and prepare to wrest control from the ruling class.

Only then will it be possible to construct an order of living characterised by justice, freedom and prosperity.

This is an almost impossibly complicated task and one surely incapable of achievement in our lifetimes.

Perhaps, but if the ruling class takes a long view – which it does, because it has held power in continuity for thousands of years and lays its plans with a snooker ace’s eye for consequential actions – then so must we.

And since there is simply no other way to achieve what we want to achieve, we must either set about organising ourselves in preparation for assuming power at a point in time in the future or accept that the war is already lost.

The immediate task of the RM, therefore, is to organise collectively and unite behind a set of policies and principles capable of appealing to the mass of the population.

This might also seem like an impossibly complicated task and one surely incapable of achievement in our lifetimes.

Perhaps, but there really is no other course of action open to us – unless we are prepared to accept that the ruling class will never be overthrown and that we are to be condemned to an eternity of servitude.

One modest step in this direction – and this is all I can think of immediately by way of a practical action – would be for all the prominent dissident groups that constitute the broad RM coming together in a convention to scope out the rudiments of a programme of opposition to ruling class power. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn’t happened before.

Needless to say, this exercise should not include Reform UK or the new Corbyn/Sultana party. We are interested only in formations that eschew conventional political structures. The moment a new party passes into the Parliamentary orbit, it is dead.

Local politics, however, is a different matter.

Such a convention would only be a starting point and a clear way forward will not become apparent for a long time, perhaps years.

To begin with, it would be enough for said convention to formulate and agree upon a statement of principles. The patient work of building an organisational infrastructure would follow.

This is where Left activists in the RM have much to offer. I know that this is often dismissed as cliché but I think that it holds enough truth to bear repeating: the Left is good at organising. It understands how to campaign. No matter that this energy and aptitude has latterly been misdirected; patient committee work, leafleting, propagandising and party building are essential foundations of political organisation and whilst the Left obviously does not have a monopoly on all this, it has done more of it for longer than any other political persuasion and anyone who comes out of that tradition has an advantage when it comes to getting to grips with the practical organisational steps that absolutely have to be taken if we are to build a successful mass movement.

To repeat, it would be unlikely that the fruits of this work, if it ever should be fruitful, would be realised within the lifetime of the typical Real Left supporter.

But that is not a reason not to fight. When the alternative is to submit to the onrushing technocratic tide and go down in the flood, what else is your ordinary, decent freedom lover – Left, Right, somewhere in between or none of the above – supposed to do?