Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. —Nineteen Eight-Four
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” —Mao Zedong
Maoism, a blend of Marxism and classical Chinese philosophy, has caused enormous problems in the West. The Cultural Revolution, coming as it did in 1966 (lasting until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976), in part designed and rolled out to influence the youth of the West, and to encourage the Black Power rebellion, was embraced by western students and black radicals as a model for countercultural and political thought and action. (See Mao’s 1968 A New Storm Against Imperialism.)
In China, Mao called on the youth to “bombard the headquarters,” to target president Liu Shaoqi. Mao, concerned that his hold over China was waning, reassured his followers that rebellion against authority was justified. The youth were encouraged to attack Chinese institutions and traditions, to disorganize the proletariat and any academic and politicians sympathetic to it.
The globalist establishment is today concerned that their hold over the proletariat is waning. They have put forward establishment politician Joseph Biden, the Senator from Delaware who, for decades, has been the figurehead of the managed decline of the American republic, preparing the American working class for full integration with a transnational order, in which the Chinese Communist Party is the shining star (The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism).
Bureaucratic collectivism integrated with globalist corporatism—that’s the dream of the Party of Davos. This dream ends in the nightmare of global serfdom. A Biden presidency is exactly what these enemies of the working class want. NeoMaoist forces have been unleashed to storm about in the streets of Western societies to sow chaos and drive a frightened public into the arms of the establishment.
Mao Zedong thought is attractive to those embracing the concept of the subaltern in the post-colonial context. The cultural anthropology it suggests to the Third Worldists is exotic and seductive. It frees minds from the rigors of scientific thinking. Mao justifies deviating from the scientific methods of historical materialism by declaring Marxism to be Eurocentric.
Those wanting to delegitimize the capitalist, to rebel against liberal traditions, find in Mao Zedong thought useful. Mao Zedong thought shapes critiques of the institutions of Western civilization and European Enlightenment. The images of Chinese youth berating bureaucrats and parading intellectuals around in dunce caps appeals to middle class Western youth bent on rebellion in their youthful angst. They pick the same targets. The Old Left was so yesterday. Worker solidarity passé. Has it been half a century already?
Even when the Chinese Communist Party moved on from the Cultural Revolution, condemning its radicalism as an internally destabilizing force, its consequences amounting to a “lost decade,” its influence continued to be felt in leftwing intellectual circles, in the universities and the aesthetics of the West, manifest in the derangements of identity politics, political correctness (antiliberalism), cultural relativism, antiracism, and antihumanism. We see it in accusations of white privilege and in the appearance of diversity programming, what resemble the “struggle sessions” of the Cultural Revolution.
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Less than six months before Nixon made his official visit to China in 1972, Huey P. Newton visited China in late September 1971. He did not experience anti-black prejudice during his ten-day stay in the People’s Republic and walked away impressed. “Everything I saw in China demonstrated that the People’s Republic is a free and liberated territory with a socialist government,” he said. “To see a classless society in operation is unforgettable.”
As Chao Ren writes in “Concrete Analysis of Concrete Conditions,” “Huey Newton’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971 further confirmed and consolidated his acceptance of Maoist revolutionary doctrines. The trip served as his pilgrimage to the holy land of his revolutionary belief, much like Malcolm X’s visit to Mecca in 1964 to complete his Hajj.” (See also The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left; On Riots and the Postmodern Corruption of the Culture of Protest).
In China, blacks who had been imported to bolster the CCP’s bona fides as a representative of Third World people—a propaganda campaign to “win hearts and minds”—were soon exposed to virulently anti-black prejudices. See Maoism and the Sinification of Black Political Struggle. Anti-black prejudice continues.
Mao Zedong thought not only strategically flattered nonwhite Third Worlders, but smartly appealed to intergenerational tensions. Undermining the wisdom of age, delegitimizing the elder generation, weakening established institutions and the family—all this opens youth to new doctrine and encourages rebellion. It’s the way cults work (A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer). It’s the destabilizing capacity of Mao Zedong thought that attracted and continues to attract leftwing antiAmerican and antiwestern sentiment to it.
Maoism thus became an early Chinese export, an ideological weapon taken up by those living in West, constituting nothing short of a spectacular propaganda achievement—the colonization of the minds of the youth. In a conversation with Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s, premier Zhou Enlai responded to a question about the influence of the French Revolution in 1789 which, “It’s too early to say.” At least that’s the story we’ve heard for decades. Profound, if true. However, it appears that he was actually responding to a question about the French riots of 1968. More profound, actually.
Meanwhile, paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978-1992 Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” blending socialist ideology with market economics, drew the attention of Western corporations. The Western power elite saw in it an opportunity to intensify the war on labor and the left they had rolled out under the progressive presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. The radical ideas of the 1960s wormed their way ever more deeply into the administrative offices of universities and corporate boardrooms as transnational relations entrenched.
The distortions of reason are many. Under the influence of French radicalism, the developing New Left ideology incorporated postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas, drawing on such thinkers as Michel Foucault, ideas that held an affinity with Maoist thought, as well as Islamic thought. There was the odious murderous philosopher Louis Althusser and his defenders. Latter Frankfurt School Critical Theory, principally the cult of Marcuse, played a significant role. (See The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones.) But the influence of Mao Zedong thought is inescapable.
The foundations of the relationship forged by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, Western corporations outsourced their factories to take advantage of its cheap labor. Chinese businessmen acquired Western real estate. With the Soviet Union the sole anticommunist fetish, which the Reaganites vanquished to bring about the end of history, China achieved most favored nation status, a relation that in time became permanent. Cheap Chinese commodities pounded Western walls. With its Belt and Road Initiative, a global development strategy leveraging Western capital markets initiated by paramount leader Xi Jinping, China intensified infrastructure development and investments in dozens of countries. China took control of the world’s supply chains. Its influencers colonized international organizations (for example, the World Health Organization).
Joe Biden has been a the center of all of this his entire career. He supported the free trade legislation that saw China ascend to the World Trade Organization. As vice-president under Obama, Biden was tasked with getting to know Xi as part of the pivot-to-Asia strategy. In 2018, Biden bragged “I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader.” The two met over private dinners for 25 hours between 2011-2012. Biden notoriously said, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks,” he added; “They’re not competition for us.” Is that because the pipe dream is to fuse Western corporate power with the bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese Communist Party?
I’m not advancing a grand conspiracy theory in which China is taking over the world—which is not to say they do not have such ambitions. Rather, there is a convergence between the bureaucratic collectivism of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the bureaucratic collectivism of capitalism with globalist-corporatist characteristics. Occidental state monopoly capitalism is morphing into the state monopoly socialism of the Orient and vice-versa. Liberal democracy has outlived its usefulness in the West for, or is, in any case, being undermined by transnational corporate power. This is an organic development. What I have written here is a description of the situation.
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I am approaching this critique from a Marxist perspective. One can approach the topic from other standpoints. Working from a traditionalist standpoint, Joel Kotkin’s The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism warns the world of this development in a manner resonate with a classical Marxist interpretation. Kotkin is a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University who writes about demographic, economic, and social economic trends in the world. (Note: I lean on for John Loftus’ summary of the book, A New Book Warns of Our ‘Neo-Feudal’ Future for my points here. I have not read Kotkin’s book.)
Kotkin’s earlier book, The New Class Conflict, usefully notes that the political and cultural bifurcations are no longer left-right or liberal-conservative. Rather, he sees the rise of an oligarchy founded upon the high technological revolution, supported by the corporate state, academia, and media, a force I describe, following critical theory conventions, as the administrative state (Adorno’s take, not Waldo’s) and the culture industry. Kotkin’s view of the ideal society is one in which the cities will be abandoned for the suburbs and more traditional lifestyles.
(Although I am not a traditionalist, I agree that the standard bifurcation points are no longer those that should organize our thinking, albeit those around me still operate with these moribund distinctions in mine—they are useful for controlling the population. Rather than left-right, while identifying myself on the left (I am a socialist), the bifurcation points are democracy-technocracy, libertarian-authoritarian, nationalist-globalist, populist-progressive, and republican-corporatist. I identify myself as lying on the left hand side of each of those divides.)
In The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism, Kotkin identifies three estates in the new world order. The First Estate is comprised of the oligarchs who have amassed great fortunes, celebrated as “disrupters,” pioneers of a new and glorious future. They are like the robber barons of the Gilded Age who built the great factories and the transnational railroads.
The Second Estate are the bureaucrats, consultants, public intellectuals, scientists, teachers, and other members of the professional-managerial strata—the administrators and cultural managers who support the First Estate. They’re the ones who preach multiculturalism and progressivism, who frame the political and societal narratives. Kotkin writes, “Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural legitimizers.”
For example, they promulgate a rhetoric of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” not to help those the rhetoric claims suffer on account of racism, but to orchestrate hegemonic devotion to the machinations of the First Estate, thus allowing the First Estate to get richer and more power, which, in turn, finances the lifestyles or the Second Estate functionaries. The university system is the mechanism that prepares functionaries for this role.
Here I want to bring in a Marxist voice, that of Adolph Reed, Jr, who argues that identity politics and antiracism are central elements in the corporatist neoliberal project (Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism). Reed tells us in his article Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left that “antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.” Antiracism is corporatist neoliberal doctrine rationalizing capitalism.
Reed writes that “although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.”
Kotkin describes the Third Estate as comprised of those who believe in the liberal values of modernity. Thus we have the progressive attitude, informed by the developments of 1960s radicalism, accepting the legitimacy of corporate governance (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”) standing in stark contrast to the populist nationalist movement defending Western civilization, the would-be defenders of modernity.
Make no mistake, Kotkin’s Second Estate is a powerful force in the West. The practice of organizing individuals into groups based on skin color and then promoting or punishing people on the basis of identity is the more insidious manifestation of neoliberalism. This thinking has invaded our institutions, public and private, and is now treated as the ground upon which other assumptions are founded. Embracing the neoMaoist Black Lives Matter agenda, universities across the country are set to roll out reeducation camps in the fall for staff and students. Intellectuals are being conscripted into the globalist corporatist project to prepare America for completely incorporation into it.
Corporatism is like the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It means to assimilate you.
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As I have argued in other blogs, I am for the abolition of any racial classification system that has the force of policy or law. Race should never be used as a method for making decisions about the fate of individuals. Antiracism is the idea that we should consciously pick and choose people on the basis of racial classifications in order to achieve demographic proportionality. This is a racist notion.
Calling it “antiracism” doesn’t change that. But the term (like antifascism) has confused people. For a sophisticated but no less misguided paradigm of the logic of the argument in political science, see University of Chicago’s Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (I summarize it here: The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). But it’s the popular treatment of the thesis that is most damaging.
See Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist, where it is asserted: “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist’.” Kendi is of the DiAngelo ilk (along with such voices as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and Nikole Hannah-Jones). You can see DiAngelo and Kendi together in the video below.
Kendi tell the hosts of the program that there are only two explanations for racial disparities: either there’s something wrong with black people or it’s racism. It is astonishing that somebody who enjoys the level of praise Kendi does could say something like this. It’s the sort of ignorant statement that somebody just approaching this subject would say, a claim that careful researchers such as Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, or Thomas Sowell, to take three black scholars who are often marginalized in these discussions, would correct immediately. This sort of black and white claim bears no relationship to the evidence that is clearly available to any American who cares to look for it. But it is not meant to be taken as an empirical claim. It’s propaganda. That it works so well indicates a deep problem in popular understanding of American society.
Here’s the trick of antiracist rhetoric: It proceeds on the basis of a false premise that disparities automatically indicate inequities. It rebrands tokenism as diversity. It retribalizes society. Following postmodern logic, central to the problem of injustice is grouped power, and the perpetrator, defined as white, especially the white male, becomes the enemy of the people. In its quasi-religious view, all white people are the perpetrator. Identity politics is thus part of the march from liberal capitalism to corporate neofeudalism. This is the ideology of progressivism—the methods of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It also has roots in Mao Zedong thought.
According to Peggy MacIntosh, white people, whom Mao depicts as the ban of Third World peoples everywhere, outside and inside the imperialist powers, wear an “invisible knapsack” of power and privilege tools they wield as a practical matter throughout their lives. Whites have developed an apparently free and open system in order to perpetuate and entrench their racial power. The facially neutral appearance of the law is facially neutral—the doctrine of equality—is a white supremacist trick. See (Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism; You are Broken. We Will Fix You.)
The racial system, the system of white supremacy, its culture of whiteness, is global, and the West, sans the colonized subjects internal to it, is the cause of global injustice. So great is this truth that the notorious Jane Elliott is hired to hector and traumatize white students in diversity/sensitivity training sessions–with minority students looking on, encouraged to join in with the cruelty. Those who are successfully changed by the struggle sessions appear on the street eager to wash the feet of a black person or throw themselves prostrate before a group of black people or may or may not be willing to absolve them of the sins.
The latest woke scold to appear on the scene is DiAngelo, noted above, wielding the concept of “white fragility,” pronouncing all white people racist, that all of them enjoy “white privilege,” but that only some of them can admit it. (See The Psychological Wages of Antiracism; Not All White People Are Racist; Dividing Americans by Race to Keep America From Democracy.) The point is that, because of its racism, the West should be compelled to abdicate its right to cultural integrity, its structures of democracy, freedom, and human rights, as defined by the Enlightenment.
John McWhorter puts it this way: “Smart whites have learned that their job is to simply accept everything his type claims, leaving a Kendi so unaccustomed to actual give and take that he’d feel it as racist.” Obviously he means by “smart whites” whites who are either shallow or scared. As a black man, McWhorter has some grace to say these things and not be accused of racism. Of course, he can be an Uncle Tom. A self-loathing black man.
Kendi claims, like every other white privilege/fragility preacher, that there is no such thing as “nonracist” as a nonracist position. Nonracists are racists. You can only either be racist or antiracist from the standpoint of this crowd. They mean to force people into their box, which is to declare all whites racist. Whites can only at best check their privileges and be an ally. The goal of Black Lives Matter is to recenter the “black experience” (as if it’s a monolithic thing) as the pivot on which turns transAtlantic history. They need the myths of 400 years of uninterrupted racial oppression and blood guilt (collective and intergenerational guilt) to sell the politics of it all. It’s leftwing racism. New and improved racism, in fact. It’s why the management of corporations and universities eat up this shit and force teachers, staff, and students to read DiAngelo and Kendi.
People on the left who subscribe to this crap are like people on the right who think Ayn Rand has something deep and metaphysical to say. Its pseudointellectual character betrays superficial thinking in both the producer and his audience.
This is what lies behind Ilhan Omar’s recent rant that had the rightwing media buzzing for days. “We can’t stop at criminal justice reform or policing reform,” Omar said. “We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe.” “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality,” she continued. “So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
This rhetoric is in the style of Mao Zedong thought. “The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of all the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution,” Mao said in 1968. “I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against US imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”
As I noted in an essay in May of last year (“Committing the Crime it Condemns”), the scenes we are witnessing are reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At talks on university campuses minority students and their allies disrupt events chanting slogans and shaking big-character posters and mobbing speakers. Dunce caps and albatross placards feel only moments away. The struggle sessions are already here. No doubt, some of the mob would put the recalcitrant on Kafka’s Harrow if they could, etching imagined sins upon living bodies via a contrived mechanical device.
The mobilization of Youth across the Western world is directed from the grave in the possession of Ilhan Omar. It is up to classical liberals and orthodox Marxists to exorcise the Maoist demon. Given the depth of corruption in Marxist thought, the classical liberals are our best bet.
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When you say you are a Marxist people get worried. When you add “libertarian” to the tag they become confused. My goal is not to confuse you but to help you sort out things. On this much I am sure liberals and conservatives can agree: state socialism of the sort we saw in the Soviet Union, and especially that which prevails in China, represent the nightmare par excellence. I am also in agreement.
In my attempt to shake people out of the fog, I like to note George Orwell’s fear of totalitarian socialism expressed in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (China fits the description more than the Soviet Union, making Orwell something of a prophet). O’Brien tells Winston, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
I fear the boot stamping on the face of humanity forever as much as any freedom-loving person. Choosing between liberal capitalism and state socialism, I will always go with liberal capitalism. I just believe there is another way, one that will allow us to sustain republicanism, democracy, and liberalism (and here I mean free speech and expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for a redress of grievances) without the exploitation of man by man and machine. But for the sake of human dignity, totalitarianism cannot be an alternative. We have to save the republic for democracy to be possible.
To those who subscribe to New Left ideology, I am not trying to level a charge of disloyalty. My nationalism is civic, not belligerent. You are free to subscribe to any views you wish (you don’t need my position), just as I am free to critique them and try to talk you out of them. I am not trying to cancel anyone. As a free speech absolutist, I encourage people to make known their opinions so they can be discussed openly and critically. I would stand with anybody expressing New Left views against any attempt to suppress their speech by government or corporate entities.
But ideas have origins and consequences and the ideas that have gripped a large portion of the American population, as well as Europeans, threaten to destroy the civilization that gave rise to liberty, democracy, secularism, science, and human rights. My values—and objective fact and analysis—compel me to oppose the New Left narrative of America and the West, to deal with this claim that both are intrinsically colonialist, racist, and patriarchal.
I am, for these reasons, like late British philosopher Roger Scruton and American historian Victor Davis Hanson, both conservatives for the record, at odds with the New Left spirit of 1960s (why they lived through the first time around), not only as it represents Mao Zedong thought, but also because of many other warped thoughts—those of Max Stirner, Frederich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger.
Of course, I disagree with the Scruton and Hanson in their claim that New Left thinkers advance the core tenets of Marxism. In my view, the New Left is post-Marxist thought. There is no Marxist core. I resist referring to these developments as Cultural Marxism (Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory?). Rather, I see them as a deviation from a grand tradition. And that’s what makes this direction palatable to corporate power. If it were actually Marxist, CNN would not be pushing the narrative.
Indeed, while Cultural Marxism was at its core concerned with the totalitarian problematic, the New Left narrative is shot through with totalitarian desire, the desire to all see speech and thought subordinated to a particular mode of speech and thought defined by its ideology, which is corporatist, globalist, progressive, and technocratic. Just take look at the response to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s Magazine.
(Here’s the awesome thing about free speech: you don’t have to agree with J.K. Rowling or anybody else to support it. Indeed, the whole point of free speech is that you defend speech with which you disagree—you demand the protection of speech that you find offensive. Defending speech with which you agree is a different thing. We call that an endorsement. It must be terribly embarrassing to sign on to a letter in defense of free speech only to find out that you don’t actually believe in free speech.)
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The New Left narrative portrays America as having made no progress at all, as if emancipation and civil rights never happened. The United States was forged in a world where slavery and racism were commonplace. Our country freed itself from the monarchy of the British Empire and abolished the slave trade. The British Empire followed suit. Much of the world did not. In the 1860s, the United States fought a civil war to free people from bondage and preserve democratic-republicanism. Three-quarters of a million American men, the vast majority of them white, died so that black people could have rights. White men killed other white men for the sake of black men. Following WWII, the civil rights movement saw black Americans come into those rights. White people were there every step of the way. America is a story of progress. America led the way for the rest of the world. (See The Endless Relitigating of the Past as a Postmodern Condition; Monument Redux: What the Defacers and the Topplers are Really After.)
The modern left blames the West for the things the West abolished: not just slavery and apartheid, but theocracy, patriarchy, and heterosexism. What is more, they only recognize these things as having occurred in the West, never in the nonwestern countries where these practices continue to this day. They fetishize the most abhorrent practices—as long as they aren’t Western. (See The Courage to Name the Problem; Failing Women Under Islam; Islamophobia has no Place on the Left; Why I Criticize Islam; Opposition to Islam on Principle not Bigotry.)
What I regard as actual forward-leaning values of mankind—humanism, liberalism, scientific-rationalism, secularism—are dismissed by the postmodern left as the values of the white man. His ideology of individualism denies the primacy of group identity, of identity politics, where abstractions supplant concrete persons. He advances free speech because it gives him the power to control the discourse and diminish others. His scientific-rationalism denies the value of nonwestern ways of knowing and its technology is destructive. His secularism denies the right of “a people” to be defined by religious devotion.
Yet the West enshrines these values, allowing group identity, power to control the discourse, nonwestern ways of knowing, and religious devotion. All this is apparent in one short amendment to the United States Constitution: the First Amendment. Antiracism can appear because the advocate can live in a free society—and because the structures the protestors ought to be criticizing find advantage in their regressive attitudes. Alas, the Constitution is a white man’s document. Progressives, who embrace New Left ideology, declare the United States a failed state because they want the state to fail—and they strive to make the future in the image of their ideology. (The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic,)
The antiwestern sentiment of the New Left, despite its schizophrenia, has proven useful to the transnational wing of the capitalist class, to the corporatist who strives to replace citizens in a national republic to consumers in a global capitalist order. New Left ideology thus sits comfortably in Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism. It dovetails with the social logic of bureaucratic collectivism. Left and right, the people have to stop this. This is what I mean by “late capitalism” in the tagline of my blog—this is the managed decline of the American republic and the diminishment of Western civilization. The purpose of decline and diminishment is the reordering the world system by the reordering of its history, the dismantling of the Westphalian system and denationalization, and the reincorporation of the people into a global corporate neofeudalist system.
The endpoint is that humans across the planet become serfs in a transnational order run by technocrats for the sake of corporate power and profit. From the globalist corporatist standpoint, China’s apparent struggle with the United States for global predominance is not really a struggle between superpowers, but a welcome advance towards a new order of things. The aim is to submerge the individual in an authoritarian, corporatist, technocratic global order sold under cover of progressivism.
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What is happening in the United States presently—the riots and the delegitimization of an American president—must be understood in these terms. I am really merely describing the winding path that brought us to chaos. These are the ideas and developments that have brought us to the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
The uprising in America is premised on a false narrative with these features, all of which grow out of the derangement of New Left thought, which has permeated our institutions, public and private (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones): the United States and the West suffer persist systemic racism; whites are a privileged class that systematically oppresses blacks (all whites are racist); blacks are victims of lethal police force out of proportion with their representation in the population; blacks are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned relatively independent of the criminal activity in which they are involved.
The narrative of systemic racism, of which the antipolice sentiment is an expression, is not just a feature of progressive activists and the Democratic Party. It has been taken up by globalists in the Republican Party who are increasing out of favor with the Republican Party under the influence of nationalist populism (The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters).
In a recent issue of USA Today, this headline appears: “‘How do we end systemic racism?’: George W. Bush says George Floyd’s death reveals America’s ‘tragic failures’.” The former president, the man who led the United States into an illegal war and occupation of Iraq and authorized the torture of prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is quoted as saying, “It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country.”
Using Bush and others as examples, the media points to the bipartisan character of antiracism as proof of its validity. But if we are going to take as evidence for the claim that America suffers from systemic racism, and that this phenomenon is manifest in patterns found in the enforcement of law and order, then the claims of racial bias in the law and order apparatus needs to be specified. Ecumenical proclamations do not substitute for facts and objective analysis. Specifying these finds the thesis wanting of evidence. But when I have raised these studies over against media sensationalism about disparities without context, the pushback I receive from progressive antiracist types always fall back on the sensationalized media stories, as if I am unfamiliar with them—or the science that demolishes them.
I recognize that the facts can be stunning. The public has been told over and over again, for years and years, that protests and riots are justified because police are racist—because America is racist. A recent poll found a majority of Americans agreeing that burning down a Minneapolis police precinct building was a justified response George Floyd’s death. COVID-19 did not scare me at all (read my blogs on this). But a majority of Americans believing that burning down police precincts is justified? That scares the hell out of me. A lot of precinct buildings have detention cells in them. What if people had been in there? What about the evidence rooms? What about the rape kits? It’s not just that people have been fed a false narrative. They have been primed to fail to think rationally.
The #BlackLivesMatter narrative is not benign. Denying the reality of crime and justice in America risks more crime and violence. We can see this in the chaos in our communities. We see it in the rising rates of murder (Breakdown: The unwinding of law and order in our cities has happened with stunning speed; Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect; Bad Comparisons and the Call for Racially Differentiated Law Enforcement). It also advances the globalist agenda: it delegitimizes the institutions of United States and thus constitutes a step in the denationalization of a people. The lie is a weapon in the managed decline of the American republic. It means to throw the country into a legitimation crisis.
People have invested so much in the belief that the United States is marked by systemic racism that they cannot deal with reality. But truth has its own integrity. Postmodernists are wrong—truth does not care what you believe. Facts matter and it is a dereliction of duty of any rational and honest person to fail to present the facts upon which policy and action are made and taken when he knows these facts. Black Lives Matter and its white allies do not argue from facts. They operate, in the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, via bullying, hectoring, mobbing, ostracization, and shaming. This is their mythology. And it’s irrational and dangerous.
The paradox of our time is that a theory that is ostensibly opposed to racism is the major source of racism in the current period. It operates on the same false premise as racism, namely that skin color determines our thought, behavior, and moral worth. In both cases, it is the capitalist class that wields the narrative for its collective self-interests.
The truth is that black people are little more than pawns to progressives, their humanity erased for political advantage, only advantageous voices selected for airing. As Glenn Loury and John McWhorter tell us in the video below, the marginalization of black intellectuals is not a matter of quality of scholarship, but political. Conservative black scholars must make their work perfect to pass the gatekeepers and reviewed. Leftwing scholarship supportive of corporatist goals enjoys an easy path to prominence, despite it shoddy character. Biden, Clinton, Schumer, Pelosi—the political establishment take black people for granted (Democrats Pander While Managing America’s Decline). In the progressive view (the liberal-structuralist view, as Cornel West famously labeled it), the perpetrators of crime are robots driven by the systemic racism of whiteness. Marionettes dancing on strings.
Inconvenient victims don’t matter because they interfere with the America-bashing and cop-bashing narrative. It doesn’t matter to progressives that children sleep in bathtubs at night so they aren’t struck by stray bullets from gangs. The dozens of people who died in Chicago over the last several weekends aren’t even a footnote in the progressive political playbook. Why? Because they were black people killed by other black people. Because the violence is occurring in cities run by progressives. (Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors; “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities).
That’s one level. At another level, a higher level, progressives are doing the work of the globalist fraction of the capitalist class. They are preparing the republic for failure for corporate takeover. They want the nation to collapse. Not just because they hate America. With America’s collapse, the working class will lose the republican machinery that enables it to curtail the system of corporate control.
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We live in a post-factual society founded on a postmodern epistemology of truth. This is how elites have prepared the collapse. Across the nation, across Europe, university students are indoctrinated in cultural and diversity programming that trash their culture and their persons. Not only undergraduates, but graduate students, teaching assistants, teachers. They go on become high school teachers and so on. They teach the Howard Zinn version of America—not simply that America has never been great, but that American can never be great.
The cultural revolution, an expression of totalitarianism, has permeated the institutions of Western society. It envelopes them. This is why inconvenient facts are unseen or even dismissed as oppressive. All of the studies on crime and punishment I cite, all of the statistics I present—these don’t matter because truth doesn’t matter in the postmodern condition.
At a recent LinkedIn conference “racist comments” were highlighted. The press reported the controversy without questioning whether what was said was actually racist. That these observations and statements of equal justice would be considered racist is astonishing. Frightening, frankly. This attitude explains the enthusiasm among progressives for violence against society’s institutions and Western values—and against persons. Here’s a sampling:
- “As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position. Is that ok? It appears that I am a prisoner of my birth. This is not what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted for anyone.”
- “I believe giving any racial group privilege over others in a zero sum game would not get any support by others. Any thoughts on hurting others while giving privileges with the rosy name called diversity?”
- “Blacks kill blacks at 50 times the rate that whites kill blacks. Usually it is the result of gang violence in the inner city. Where is the outcry?”
- “This tragic incident that happened to George Floyd happened exactly the same to Tony Timpa (white man) by Dallas cops in 2016, and no one seemed to care then. There were no out cry for justice in his case. Why? Should we not want justice for all?”
This is a major problem confronting us as we struggle to save western civilization and the institutions of the enlightenment from global corporatism: the post-factual culture. We live in a world dominated by manufactured victimhood. We live under the thumb of a grievance industry. We’re expected to admit that we are what they say we are. If we don’t, then we prove them right. They can gaslight us because they have power they deny they have. (See Cult Programming in Seattle.)
Culture study programs are not programs that study culture. They are programs of cultural socialization, of indoctrination. They teach people to hate themselves and then emotionally blackmail them. They tell them they are racist and doubly so if they object. They prepare our youth for a life of work in the bureaucratic collective, to be cogs in a machine fed a virtual life by the culture industry. The establishment has prepared and disseminate what Orwell called “newspeak,” a radical project that shrinks the vocabulary, replacing it with terms and slogans that manufacture a reality. They mean to change the way we think by changing the way we talk.
All this we must refuse and resist. This is what needs rebelling against. These programs teach a story of oppressor-oppressed, perpetrator-victim, racist-antiracist, fascist-antifascist, with the goal of creating resentment and hostility, of ramping up conflicts between the myriad of often imagined divisions that they amplify and manufacture, disrupting the legitimacy of institutions that work for the common man and women, the citizens the corporations wish were subjects—proles—by destroying our faith in them. The mean to undermine our solidarity. Everything is determined by partisan ideology. People dismiss facts and ideas because Breitbart and Bannon and Scruton know them. That’s not thinking for yourself.
The political and cultural right has been right about so much of this because they aren’t in the academic and culture industry bubble. Standing on the outside gives them a good view of the rot. Their politics aren’t correct, of course, but that has nothing to do with the correctness of their interpretation of the forces that are threatening Western civilization. Put another way, while the right does get things wrong, they don’t often get things entirely wrong. They talk about cultural Marxism. And while I don’t, because I appreciate the Frankfurt School, there is definitely something to the argument that neo-Marxism carries the potential for danger in practice. It is, in its own way, illiberal.
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I am taking leftism to task from a Marxist standpoint. If you hear in my arguments rightwing ideology you are not putting any effort into listening to what I am saying. I am a libertarian Marxist, a left-libertarian, a democratic socialist. I am as committed to that standpoint as I have ever been because the trajectory of history confirms its validity.
Marxists are not a monolith bunch. I have long opposed the deformation of Marxian thought by the ideas of the New Left. My regret is in not publicly taking up this position sooner. But if I fail to stand up for the rational side of historical materialism, those who are deforming it will have an easier time of it and we will move further away from enjoying the class solidarity we need to build a broad-based worker movement. We cannot proceed with the socialist struggle if we are fractured by identity politics. Identity politics has a source. Its source is in the corruption of leftist thought. A major part of that source is Mao Zedong thought. We have to root it out.
We are being denationalized for the sake of transnational capitalism and dividing us racially is a key strategy in the globalization project. We are being distracted. It’s time to refocus on the problem of social class and how identitarian politics is being used to perpetuate class power. It’s time to return to a truly emancipatory politics.
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Here I am talking about this dynamic and electoral choice.
freedom and reason 