Keep to the Real Left: Reflections on the Journey and the Road Ahead for 2025
With the blooming of snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils and welcome lengthening of the daylight hours that portend the arrival of Spring, the Real Left editorial group felt that a now customary end of Winter update was due to our readers.
On a personal level, our move to Substack in 2024 delivered its hoped-for effect. By countering the online censorship and suppression we had been subjected to ever since the website launched in 2021, we have been able to continue to grow our audience. We recently celebrated gaining our 2,000th subscriber and wish to thank all of you for continuing to tune in.
Real Left is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed
Beyond the digital sphere, Real Left will feature in the upcoming March issue of The Light paper, wherein we re-state our take on the ‘Left-right paradigm: is it over?’ debate and wade in on the culture wars and the contentious issue of ‘wokeness’.
Over the past year, several supporters took up the offer of Real Left member Lorraine Pratley’s free people’s history course, ‘History With a Why’, which they highly recommend. Lorraine is currently lining up a new intake for the course, which involves self-study alongside weekly seminars. To register, please email: lorrainepratley@hotmail.com
Whilst putting on a conference proved impossible last year due to unforeseen circumstances, we are pleased to announce what we hope will be our biggest and best all-day event yet is taking place in May. Keep reading for more details!
View from the windshield
Zooming out to the world at large, 2025 thus far, like its immediate predecessor, has something of a liminal feel. The restructuring of commerce and culture to fit the post-human Fourth Industrial Revolution era continues, but at a slower pace and in more surreptitious manner than that enabled by the contagion and war states of emergency of 2020-2023.
The Life-and-Liberty-Destroying-Machine has quieted to an ominous background electric hum of tightening austerity, forever war-mongering, further restrictions on civil liberties and erosion of the rule of law through a steady trickle of enabling legislation across the West, as those of us alert to the dangers await the metaphorical whistle-blow signifying the next full-frontal attack in the class war on our home ground.
Suppression of anti-Zionist speech and protest has become the sharp end of the struggle between the People and the Global-Techno-Fascist elites. Mass mobilisations of anti-genocide protestors on the street, direct action campaigns to destroy weaponry for Israel, and independent journalists speaking truth to power have triggered police state-like retaliation tactics of arrest for peaceful protest, indefinite detention without charge, and home raids and confiscation of equipment, all rubber stamped through anti-terror powers.
Meanwhile, a changing of the guard in the uni-parties and their front puppets in both the UK and US has thus far signified no more than anyone who recognises that liberal democracies are just another rich man’s trick would expect. Labour’s response to the cost of the living crisis (aka the cost of lockdowns crisis) – a hard austerity programme and renewed attacks on welfare for the sick and disabled, and on farmers’ rights – has triggered a collective penny drop amongst non-initiates that Labour represents no improvement on Tory rule for ordinary people.
Confirmation for such a ‘conspiracy realist’ view of the workings of government has come from unexpected quarters at the heart of parliament. Dominic Cummings was the latest to corroborate Nadine Dories’ and Liz Truss’s previous disclosures of a ‘deep state’ cabal secretly controlling state affairs (although the three differed on the point of whether any the seeming whistleblowers were in fact club members themselves).
At a press conference, Cummings, perhaps motivated by his ambitions to lead a breakaway party, claimed that all Whitehall meetings were “literally scripted” with conclusions determined in advance by private secretaries whose names were never in the papers, but who held one hundred times more power than any official minister. We won’t hold our breath waiting for a BBC exposé on Cummings’ dangerous radicalisation into conspiracist fantasy.
The left behind left in the rear-view mirror
Canadian academic and critic of technophilia Arthur Kroker has argued in ‘The Will To Technology and The Culture of Nihilism’ for a re-reading of Marx as a ‘dark prophet’ of virtual capitalism whose theoretical insights provide:
“. . .both a brilliant genealogy of the birth of capitalism and an equally insightful ‘futurology’ of its eclipse. Not, however, the eclipse of capitalism by its ‘objective’ historical opponent – living labour – but the overcoming of capitalism by its historical transformation into its pure (metaphysical) form, what Marx glimpses from afar as the ‘circuit of circulation’[1] and what we experience directly as the will to virtuality.”
According to Kroker:
“. . For Marx, capitalism as a relentless ‘circuit of circulation’ ultimately over-throws the commodity form understood as the universal, elementary value-form of the immediate process of (industrial) production in favour of the circulating commodity, the commodity that never leaves the circuit of circulation, never enters directly into the process of production, never ceases to be the universal, elementary form of the valorisation process. In its latest appearance as the value-form of the digital phase of Capitalist production. . .the digital commodity-form assumes the universal, elementary form of the stock market.”[2]
Kroker highlights Marx’s key insight into the essential physics of capitalism as a ‘circuit of circulation’, as illuminatory for parsing today’s transition from commodity fetishism into money fetishism – and, imminently, token fetishism – with the primacy of the circulation of commodities giving way to the circulation of knowledge-value, wherein “knowledge breaks forever with its genealogical roots in individual consciousness, becoming instead the value-form of cybernetic culture”.
This value-form, to whose inhumanly cold, intrusive, and reductive binary logic we are being forced to submit in the fourth industrial revolution epoch, are the dead-data circuits of “fully realised capital as pure will. . .a digital carceral”. (p119)
If, as Kroker asserts, “streamed capitalism achieves its purely virtual stage as an empty value-form circulating at the speed of light, then the question of value itself is the decisive storm centre of contemporary politics”,[3] then we must ask why the anti-capitalist left still dismally fails to approach the question of whether a post-privacy-and-human-rights society, constructed around the idol of valorised data, serves we the people.
A peak round the digital front door of the likes of Counterfire, The Morning Star, or Socialist Worker reveals a continued course of determined obliviousness to the approaching maelstrom, with a sprinkling of left-dyed Great Reset propaganda (the climate crisis or the ‘problem’ of the SMART city/enclosure-rooted-net-zero-‘solution’ in the problem-reaction-solution formula; universal basic income for all etc) for good measure. Elsewhere on the socialist left, ‘community control’ of block-chain and AI is underwhelmingly proposed, notwithstanding the reality that these technologies were conceived expressly for full-spectrum surveillance, commodification and control of communities by the ruling class.
We see the current peripherality of our (non-static but ever developing) critical analysis of the Fourth Industrial Revolution within left-wing discourse as just more of a reason to stay-the-course, however. We believe that Real Left, along with a small band of fellow egalitarianist and pro-freedom travelers, offer something as crucial as it is neglected. Whilst we may be ahead of the curve, given the shattering effects of reality careering into false world conceptions and plausible deniability, populist resistance to digital enslavement is likely to reach critical mass in the foreseeable future: albeit with many of the legacy left being perhaps the very last to get on board.
Wrong turnings
At the other side of the (arguably increasingly redundant) political spectrum, elements of the far right have been opportunistically recruiting from the politically disenfranchised masses, utilising wily messaging that seems to hit some of the right notes.
The amorphous space we of the freedom movement find ourselves in – not quite ‘new normal’ yet certainly not ‘old normal’ either, absent the unifying focus that resistance to contagion emergency-measures provided – has apparently caused some to lose their bearings, instead seeking refuge in the reassuring certainty of reactionary, scapegoat-blaming narratives peddled by ‘strong man’ figure racist demagogues and party leaders.
What is missing from the rhetoric of the likes of Luton’s gurning messiah (Tommy Robinson) or “pound shop Enoch Powell” (Nigel Farage) – apparently unnoticed by beguiled acolytes but certainly not by the establishment which funds and platforms them – is any aspiration towards egalitarian revolution to improve the (increasingly desperate) lot of the working class. And yet, as we continue to argue, revolutionary aspiration and activity taken up by a mass of the population is the only political project that can bring about the radical change required to throw us off the annihilatory course the ruling class has set for us.
Spending time and energy punching down at defenseless genocide victims or fellow ‘have-nots’ trying to get by in a land to which they have been economically displaced, represents a dead-end diversion from the urgent and critical task of resisting and subverting the planet-encompassing smart concentration camp that is being erected around us, as we fixate on issues of little relative consequence.[4]
Whilst the ruling class has diabolical cunning, unlimited (stolen) material resources, and ‘long game’ plans conceived and carried out over decades if not centuries, what we have – besides alignment with spiritual and natural law and the universal creative conscious force – is numbers. It is critical that this tactical advantage be harnessed to greatest effect through a unifying message that advocates for ‘freedom for all’, and a practical programme of work that builds awareness and solidarity across religious, ethnic, and political differences.
Which is a most fitting moment to announce our upcoming conference, ‘Uniting the Pro Freedom and Pro Palestine Left’.
Save the date!
This not to be missed event seeks to raise consciousness of the deeply embedded links between the powerful ruling class run entities and systems orchestrating the Palestine genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign, and that of encroaching global technocractic totalitarianism, and to build relationships between individuals and movements concerned with either or both issues
It will take place on Saturday 3rd May at a central London location from 10-6pm, with a post meeting pub social.
Confirmed speakers so far include Winter Oak’s Paul Cudenec, anti-Zionist campaigner of 50 years Yael Khan, researcher Temora Yuile, researcher, journalist and founder of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies Piers Robinson, and ex-academic and author of ‘Covid-19: Psychological Operations and the War for Technocracy’ David Hughes (who will participate remotely). We intend to film the event for oversees subscribers and supporters who cannot make the date.
You can book your ticket here or pay cash on the day. Cash ticket buyers must register at realeftevents@yahoo.co.uk as spaces are limited and we need to know numbers in advance. As always, we do not wish to exclude anyone from participating due to financial struggles, so if you genuinely cannot spare the £15 concession price, please email us at the above address.
A special thank you to paying subscribers
We extend a special thank you to those paying subscribers whose generous support has allowed us to cover necessary upfront pre-ticket revenue costs, without which organisation of this event (or any future ones) would not be possible.
We appreciatively welcome any additional contributions; in essence, the better our means, the more we can do. If you have time, rather than money to spare, and would like to become more involved with Real Left, we would be delighted to hear for you at the below email address.
Finally, we would love to receive more quality submissions from you, our readers. We re-publish from other sources in addition to hosting original content and welcome suggestions, so if you have penned a piece or come across an article you think deserves a wider audience please drop us a line at: llsinbox@posteo.net
[1] Karl Marx, Grundisse, ‘The Chapter on Money 113-238
[2] Kroker, A, (2004) The Will to Technology and The Culture of Nihilism. P144
[3] Ibid. P152
[4] This statement should not be read as an implied position on the immigration question, rather, it is a criticism of order of priority often given to this issue in the freedom movement over the incoming worldwide digital enslavement project.