We have to grasp the world-historical moment we’re in. The times may seem confusing, but the method to the madness becomes apparent when we work from a cogent theory. The anatomy of many of our common problems are often right in front of us. They just require a sense-making exercise to ascertain.
The West is witnessing an insurrection against free and open society that is primarily anarchoracist in substance with neoMarxist characteristics. It is built on a mishmash of critical theory, postmodernism, and Mao Zedong thought (see Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics and The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological. It is tribalist, Third Wordlist, and regressive. A dumb theory identifies racial identity as the pivot of history (for examples, see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste). This “antiracism” is religious in character and racist.
The campaign of delegitimation against public safety (see Heather Mac Donald’s The War on Cops) is designed to disable the police in order to further the goals of a corporatist-globalist “revolution-from-above.” Confronting racist police violence, which is a myth, is a means to a grander end. The goal of the revolution is the revolution: to establish a new socioeconomic order in the wake of late capitalism. By late capitalism I mean the perpetual realization crisis caused by overdevelopment of the organic composition of capital and the attendant redundancy of labor sufficient to threaten the wealth privilege of the bourgeoisie.
To accomplish revolution-from-above, the nation’s internal defenses have to be diminished, ideally rendered inoperable. Moral cause and street-level action are for this purpose. America is being prepared for deeper integration with the world order designed and run by transnational corporations and the international financial, legal, and political structures that serve their purposes. National sovereignty is under siege everywhere in the West, manifest in the European Union and the rise of China. Populist-nationalist resistance movements are targeted in withering delegitimation campaigns characterizing them as “nativist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” In the United States, the reaction takes the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The insurrection pursued by Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists is street-level action prepared by public education, especially including higher education in humanities and social science programming, bankrolled and directed by world financial institutions and transnational corporations, facilitated by the administrative state apparatus, pushed by progressives and neoliberals in the major party systems, and sold by the culture industry (establishment media and the entertainment industry). Those pursuing the ground game are falsely conscious and reactionary. (Reporting on this by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has been particularly useful for raising consciousness about this, especially in his airing of video, images, and speeches censored by the establishment news media.)
The youth of the West, pursing woke identitarian politics, are being used by the transnational elite as black and brown shirts to disrupt the prevailing democratic-republic order that stands as a bulwark against global neofeudalism. But be ready for this: once elites have removed Trump from office, Antifa-BLM activism will be crushed and its logic subsumed in the structure of hegemonic control. Indeed, its logic has already been largely subsumed. Ever had to attend a diversity or sensitivity training session? This is the result of a long march through the institutions by the left guided by the insights of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci who recognized in the popular rejection of Bolshevism by Western workers the need for preparing the ground for revolution by alter mass consciousness by infiltrating and then commandeering cultural institutions, cultivating intellectuals, and radicalizing the subaltern. Orwell picked up on this in his landmark Nineteen Eighty-Four (see James Lindsay’s “2+2 Never Equals 5”).
I won’t have any sympathy for the “protestors” when the hammer comes down. The spoiled children of affluent middle class parents who failed to prepare their offspring for the rigors of a dynamic world deserve what’s coming to them for being so conceited as to think they could actually supplant the power of the establishment or disrespect the great majority of working class Americans of all races who have yet to fully awaken. Regarding those who plunder and pillage alongside the cool kids, I am reminded of Marx and Engels “dangerous class” (lumpenproletariat), “the social scum, that passively rotting mass” whose “conditions of life … prepare it … for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” (At the same time, I do not agree with Marx and Engels that the petty bourgeoisie and the artisan, who they admit are in a fight against the bourgeoisie, are necessarily conservative or particularly reactionary.) The cool kids also deserve what’s coming to them for adopting the dumb theory about the world. The pivot of history is not race. Race isn’t real. It’s an illusion. Angels and devils stuff. We must return to Marx and Engels for the real dynamic of epochal change: class struggle.
The question for real socialists is whether we can preserve the republic long enough to build a working class movement capable of finally realizing liberal values for everyone in high standards of living. That doesn’t involve overthrowing democratic-republicanism. On the contrary, it requires expanding and deepening the core values of the Enlightenment. And that means opposing progressives and the Democratic Party and the globalist elements in the Republican Party in the most effect ways we can. Working class politics are not advanced by voting in Biden or by joining the Democratic Socialist of America. It won’t work to vote in Democrats and demand they move left because their function is to move the masses to the right. And it’s working.
The Democratic Party can never be a working class party. They’re sheepdogs for their global masters. Working class politics requires populist-nationalism. The Democratic Party exists on the other side of that divide. Their raison d’être is to disorganize the working class and advance the interests of the global elite. Democrats are the greater evil.
freedom and reason 