The woke (so-called) left sides with Islam and loathes Jews and Christians. They hate western civilization. They despise European culture. They loath white people. Lamis Deek tells the mob “The West is a lie.” Deek cofounded the anti-Israel Al-Awda New York chapter (Al-Awda NY). Deek is affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and the anti-Israel activist group Within Our Lifetime (WOL). See this profile from Canary Mission and follow the links. These are part of the network of leftwing groups organizing the mob I document in my recent essay: Woke Progressivism and the Party of God. Deek is a dime a dozen.
The organic intellectuals of the network see in Judaism and rational Christianity the foundations of capitalism, the economic system that intertwines with the Enlightenment—humanism, individualism, liberalism, republicanism, and scientific rationalism. This is the same culture that produced Karl Marx and his materialist conception of history. The woke intellectual isn’t wrong about the origins of the West (they are wrong about Marx, however). It’s the truth that they resent the success of the system and they promote and mobilize the resentment of others to create a power base for their own self-aggrandizement that exposes the movement as factitious. Because, in reality, the reaction is a beast of the transnationalist project to dismantle the modern nation-state. This is why its ideology is found in the corporate boardroom.
As I have demonstrated many times in the pages of Freedom and Reason, the marches and protests, the destruction and violence—Antifa, BLM, TRAs, and now clerical fascism—are street-level expressions of the destructive post-/trans-humanist monster fathered by transnational corporatism, mainstreamed for decades by progressivism and social democracy, coded as multiculturalism, pressed into popular consciousness and conscience by the administrative state, the culture industry, the education system, and captured religious institutions. This is globalism. The transnational corporation, today’s Victor Frankenstein, means to make serfs of us. The limbs of its monster work primitivisms—blood guilt, collective punishment, intergenerational trauma, racism, tribalism. These atavisms reduce the capacity of man to reason.
Islamism—clerical fascism—is the exemplary soul of such a monster. Go find and read Michel Foucault gushing over the Islamic Revolution that Jimmy Carter failed to stop, now propped up by Joe Biden, who over decades established himself as a chief operative in the managed decline of America, carrying over Obama’s balancing act rooted in crackpot neoconservatism. Yes, one party in America has been at this for a long time. Those who conditioned million to support clerical fascism, to celebrate the massacre of Israelis, are for the most part progressive Democrats in their electoral behavior. They’re the ones who smear the American patriot as a fascist even while they themselves stand with both the soft and the hard corporatism that underpins the new fascism I have described in the pages of Freedom and Reason.
Here’s the truth of the matter:
Douglas Murray is a voice of reason and moral clarity in the whirlwind of ideological distortion. Take it in. Hamas is worse than Nazis, he said. Why? Because Hamas slaughtered civilians with glee; at least the Nazis felt shame. Too many in Gaza are behind the gleeful butcher. They are Hitler’s willing executioners (to borrow the title of Daniel Goldhagen’s insightful work that people should revisit). Like the Nazis, the Party of God must be smashed. What happened to Israel on October 7 requires the elimination of Hamas root and branch in the same way the belligerence of Germany during WWII required the bombing of German cities. The Nazis were responsible for civilian deaths in Germany. The death and destruction in Gaza is on Hamas.
Today’s so called left couldn’t be more wrong—about everything. Nobody believed there wouldn’t be civilian casualties. It was the predictable consequences of Hamas’ actions. Hamas knew there would civilian deaths. They were counting on it. A cessation of hostilities will allow Hamas to remain and regroup—and Hamas has promised that the massacres of October 7 will happen again and again. It’s a genocidal death cult that cannot be negotiated with. It must be eliminated with prejudice.
Israel has learned a painful lesson. Negotiating with Hamas was a mistake. This was never about land. Hamas is motivated by a pathological hatred of Jews and a desire to impose sharia on the world. Jew-hatred is rampant in the Arab space. Muslims bring it with them to the West. And while Jew-hatred cannot be pushed out of the masses, its organized forms can be crushed, and its spread limited (close the borders and deport the enemy). The people will see that the misery many rank-and-file Arabs wish to visit on others results in misery they would never wish upon themselves. That’s also a painful lesson. Make sure the mob sees it.
Will the people in that region ever tire of losing? Who knows. But a free people cannot allow bitter resentment to win. That’s as true for the countries of the West as it is for Israel. Any anti-fascist true to the character of that label will agree. That’s the litmus test, isn’t it? One’s choice of comrades tells the truth about them. And the truth is that what passes for anti-fascism today is today’s fascism. The same is true with anti-racism. This is an Orwellian moment.
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As I have noted in previous essays, self-identified Marxists get Karl Marx very wrong an awful lot. Since the left lays claim to Marxism, straightening them out is in order. Marx was critical of attempts to turn his theories into rigid dogmas or to reduce them to a set of fixed principles. He argued that his ideas were not meant to be a dogmatic doctrine but a method for analyzing and explaining analyzing social relations. Marx’s critique of interpretations of his work doesn’t mean he rejected his core critique of capitalism and theory of class struggle. Instead, he was critical of attempts to turn his ideas into a rigid and inflexible ideology.
(What follows is in part self-plagiarized from an essay I wrote in October 2018 Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism. But as I have said before when I borrowed from myself, since these are my words, I will not place quotes around them. I wish to avoid tedium,)
In Marx’s materialist conception of history, freedom and solidarity are objectively integral, alienated under conditions of segmentation, whether in class, gender, or religious estrangement. Justice and rights demand that adequate sociocultural arrangements empower individuals to participate fully in the production and shaping of the economic and political relations of which they are an integral part. Anywhere an individual is limited in his species-being, for example by rigid religious doctrine and practice, unfreedom and injustice prevail.
Marx’s critique of capitalism represents a vigorous defense of the necessity and universality of human dignity and human rights, necessarily social rights in their fullest form, that will form the ground of what Abraham Maslow defined as self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is inspired by Marx and Engels conception of a free society as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” as they write in the 1948 pamphlet Communist Manifesto. The conditions of freedom must be established for all before all people can be free. This formulation presupposes a particular conception of freedom.
In “Zur Judenfrage,” published in 1844 (in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher), Marx argues that the freedom of conscience (the right to practice any religion one chooses) is, like private property, an expression of the bourgeois conception of liberty, based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. Religious association is reduced to personal choice, its coercive nature concealed, enabling its perpetuation under the guise of a rhetoric of freedom. Liberty of this sort is the possession of “egoistic man,” Marx contends, an individual who enjoys his rights “without regard to other men.”
Drawing a distinction between the droits de l’homie (the rights of man) and the droits du citizen (the rights of the citizen), Marx finds that “it is not man as citoyen, but man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true man.” Estranged from his species-being (the self as social being, not atomized existence), egoistic man becomes “natural man,” and the rights of man appear as “natural rights,” to be protected by the state from society, as well as from the state itself.
The bourgeois conception of freedom is a negative one in which the person moves from the unfreedom of group identity, where he is defined in racial and religious terms, to the unfreedom of isolation, where he is an individual but also alone. As Erich Fromm writes in Escape from Freedom (1941): “freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.”
Civil society, the domain of natural man, is emancipated from politics. Thus, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx writes in “Zur Judenfrage,” “man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business; he received freedom to engage in business.” The heart of Marx’s argument is this: “The political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism.”
The solution to the problem? It is not to regress to the tribalism of the woke left. A truly left wing movement cannot join with the clerical fascism of the Party of God as we see the rank-and-file progressive and socialist organizations doing today. An authentic man of the left must either be liberal (which modern conservatives largely are) or socialist. For the authentic socialist, moving beyond liberalism is not a rejection of the liberal freedoms embodied in the US Bill of Rights. It is rather moving beyond the right of a few to own and control the means of production for purposes of accumulating and concentrating value and wealth in the hands of a globe-trotting elite at the expense of everybody else.
Private control of capital by the few, a special right in the true sense of a privilege, is the negative core of liberalism that constrains the positive rights identified by the Founders of the American Republican, rights Marx wanted to bring to the people. Thus, the strict liberal conception of “freedom from” must be joined by the positive conception of “freedom to.” This was Marx’s sense of socialism, which he equated with democracy. The woke left’s sense of socialism is a regressive one. The unacknowledged paradox is that what both the ideological left and the right today describes as left wing—Antifa, BLM, TRAs, the Party of God, the religious conservative, the right-wing libertarian—is actually right wing: it seeks a hierarchy only with the roles of oppressor-oppressed—imagined or real—flipped.
This is Marx’s formulation: Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
This brings us to the role of the modern nation-state and democratic-republican politics. The notion of abstract citizen points to the historical necessity of the nation-state as the ground for organizing political action; consciousness cannot be raised among large groups of people—required for the overthrow of the capitalist state—when they are segmented by ethnicity, language, race, and religion, identities that the nation-state subordinates to shared liberties and rights, however incomplete they may be. To be sure, the modern nation-state falls short of completing the historic mission of the proletariat, but the proletariat cannot move from klasse an sich (“class in itself”) to klasse für sich (“class for itself”) without common ground upon which to move on the objective facts of structural contradictions and class antagonisms with the subjective practice of class struggle.
Marx is known for his critique of capitalism, but he finds capitalism not only impressive but revolutionary. It is in hindsight a necessary step in the struggle for human freedom. His assessment of capitalism was complex and included both recognition of its progressive features and its inherent contradictions. Marx recognized that capitalism, through the development of industrialization and technological advancements, had greatly increased the productive capacity of society. The capitalist mode of production, with its emphasis on machinery and large-scale production, brought about a level of productivity that had not been seen before.Marx saw capitalism as a progressive force that broke down traditional barriers and opened up new possibilities for human development—indeed, a force that was creating the basis for a society in which the needs of all people could be met, and necessary labor eliminated.
In its role of breaking down feudal social relations, characterized by limited technological progress, rigid social hierarchies, and serfdom, the rise of capitalism represented a radical departure from these old structures. At the same time, capitalism, while creating immense wealth and technological progress, did so on the basis of class exploitation, which produced alienation and inequality, and was moreover fraught by economic crises. Capitalism’s internal contradictions would eventually lead to the downfall of capitalism and the emergence of a new social order. today these contradictions are seen, for example, in the displacement of workers by automation and artificial intelligence.
In this, Marx was prophetic. He was hopeful that the proletariat would serve as the gravediggers who would pick up their shovels and bury the corpse of the system and face a new dawn of humanity. But the rise of corporate governance and technocratic rule intervened. The Enlightenment, rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics, was turned against the people (see Max Weber). The desire by global elites is now to establish a high-tech neo-feudal world system in which the bulk of humanity will be managed in a vast custodial state. The elite seek this because they, too, grasp the situation of late capitalism, and they wish to save their life of opulence and privilege in the face of the movement-potential to bring that technological prowess to instead work to eliminate necessary labor and provide comfort for and guarantee freedom to every man and woman. Rather than smash the proletariat movement, the capitalist-cum-lord played his greatest trick ever by coopting and misdirecting those scheduled to be wards of his new estate.
I’m repeating myself when I say that the struggle today is between, on the one side, the populist-nationalist, the patriotic man fighting for liberal values and a capitalism close to home, those things that must be preserved to continue the journey towards a greater democratic order based on human rights and individual autonomy, and, on the other side, the progressive-transnationalist who embraces the global corporate project to established a world neofeudalism that will allow a tiny elite and its managerial strata to keep the power and wealth they usurped from the people. The latter have created the useful idiots that they believe will deliver them the new world order. These are the people you see on the streets of our cities across the trans-Atlantic space. History has assigned the former the task of stopping them. Central to this task is waking the people from their walking slumber and stir them to defend humanity. I established this blog for that purpose. Thank you for reading it.
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