A friend writes that he was “an idiot” to have looked, in his disgust with the Extreme Centre, to Trump for any kind of solution. Yet millions who gained nothing from globalisation but precarity, inflation, and vanishing welfare infrastructure even as arms-spend soars are doing similar across Europe.
Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, Freedom Party in the Netherlands and Brothers in Italy continue to attract the disaffected on the back of neoliberal failure – a disaffected who rightly register the betrayal; wrongly believe neo-fascism offers hope grounded in reality.
I reply:
You weren’t an idiot. Most folk remain hypnotised by the circus put on by the tweedledum/tweedledee duopoly of an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.
I’ve seen it from both sides. In the run up to the 2016 election I was being called all manner of things by folk who assumed my detestation of Hillary meant I supported Trump.
Yes, Trump does signify an acceleration of dark forces. But he is symptom not cause of imperialism in crisis. Efforts to locate US lawlessness at home and overseas in his disjoint brain and deranged psyche are disconcertingly wide of the mark.*
A week ago I quoted Caitlin Johnstone:
Political maturity is finally admitting to yourself that the angriest, most disconcerting communist you’ve ever met was pretty much right about everything.
If you learn enough, stay humble enough, and pay close enough attention, eventually that’s what happens. You realize that, generally speaking, the really high-octane commies have the most lucid understanding of the world out of any group out there, and the only reason this wasn’t always obvious to you was because you live under a capitalist power structure which aggressively indoctrinates its populace from birth into believing that communism is No No Bad Bad.
Yesterday she was at it again – Our leaders couldn’t fix our problems even if they wanted to. (And they don’t.)
Our leaders are not wise or insightful. They’re not even particularly intelligent. Our society is led by plutocrats who only know how to make more money, by unelected empire managers who only know how to dominate and control, and by elected politicians who only know how to say the right words and make the right bargains in order to get themselves elected.
These people are not capable of curing our civilization of its dysfunction. They don’t have the necessary skills or attributes. Even if they weren’t a bunch of evil sociopaths who are only in the positions they’re in because of their willingness to collaborate with the agendas of oligarchy, war, militarism, imperialism, ecocide, exploitation, oppression and planetary domination, they don’t even have the personal characteristics necessary to do things like end poverty, rescue our biosphere, bring about world peace or give rise to human thriving. They’d have no idea where to start.
Caitlin paints in primary colours. Also yesterday, another piece, long on detail but sparkling at every turn with the force and beauty of truth incontestable, appeared on the Trotskyist World Socialist Website under the byline of WSWS chairman David North. Unlike Caitlin’s it’s no three minute read – I wasn’t watching the clock but I’d guess the best part of an hour – yet nothing it says is at odds with hers.
More importantly, it bears eloquent testimony to her claim that “the commies have the most lucid understanding of the world out of any group out there”.
When it comes to what is to be done, I see the far Left as embracing (or paying lip service to) a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose offshoring of industry eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into the social ownership of wealth creation 1 which, alone, offers a fighting chance of pulling us back from the brink of catastrophe on multiple fronts.
But on the diagnostic side that same far Left knocks the rest into a cocked hat. There’s scarcely a word in David North’s splendid analysis – Trump, the Epstein files and the putrefaction of the American oligarchy – I disagree with. Noting the inadequacy of “the bad Trump theory of history,” he asks:
What accounts for the elevation of this sociopathic individual to the most powerful political office on earth? What are the social, economic, and political processes that have produced this outcome? And what class forces are at work?
Great question. And while I still await the setting out of detailed strategies whereby labour sellers of white collar and blue, atomised in the West, can find the strength in unity to pull humanity back from the abyss our criminally insane rulers have brought us to, David North’s analysis of the state we’re in is second to none.
Meanwhile you’ll have to excuse me. Is it to be war on Iran? – part 2 – isn’t going to write itself …
* * *
- This probably goes without saying but by “the social ownership of wealth creation” I mean something immeasurably more far reaching than the nationalisation, by Keynesian mixed economies, of a few vital but unprofitable industries. I speak rather of forms of ownership, with genuinely democratic decision making, which alone can allow wealth to be created free of the life-negating distortions attendant on the dictates of private profit.
The impunity and arrogance of the transatlantic elites in soliciting a paedophile to indulge their fantasies on love islands and in the largest private mansion in Manhattan is breath-taking comparable only to the suicidal actions and policies of the European elites in wishing and attempting to dismember Russia at any cost! This extreme behaviour I suspect is buttressed by an absolute power and confidence to ultimately control any outcome by brutal and unquestioning means of a ruling class whose bedrock at day’s end is the reach and power of dead Capital.
No quarrel from me, rick – though I would add that these ‘transatlantic elites’ are beginning to experience panic at the rise of China, BRICS and multipolarity. That’s what’s making the world so dangerous now.
IMO the voices with the clearest view of this are Michael Hudson (with Richard Wolf and Radhika Desai) on the economic realities, and Brian Berletic on the geostrategic aspects.
“……What are the social, economic, and political processes that have produced this outcome? And what class forces are at work?”
The temptation is to limit the focus to the USA. However, the present POTUS, regardless of claims by too many to the contrary, is an integral part of that Transatlantic ‘Western’ elite.
An elite which does not exist by accident:
https://themindness.substack.com/p/elite-capture-and-european-self-destruction
“The answer also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions. It also lies in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.
Elite Knowledge Networks
Inderjeet Parmar (2019) terms this the soft machinery of elite knowledge networks: “flows of people, money, and ideas” that institutionalize consensus from Washington to Berlin. The Fulbright Program, the German Marshall Fund, Atlantik-Brücke, the Munich Security Conference, and the Bilderberg Meetings are formative ecosystems. They sort, school, and elevate those who can carry the worldview forward.
Critically, these networks are not passive forums. They are “American elites’ essential power technology”: a mode of knowledge production and personnel selection that is spectacularly successful at reproducing a pro-U.S. worldview globally. Elite socialization in itself is not a benign process. It hardwires assumptions, defines what is politically imaginable, and naturalizes asymmetry……
……The ideological assimilation of foreign elites is the first line of imperial defense. Thus, the maintenance of hegemony relies less on coercion than on soft incorporation. Elite knowledge networks, embedded in university programs, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks, act as vectors for this soft power. They socialize, recruit, and certify rising leaders. …….
……. these networks define what counts as “thinkable thought” and “askable questions.” The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, RAND Corporation, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for American Progress are elite integration machines where, through these processes of integration and socialization, a certain type of knowledge becomes power.”
This process self-selects and weeds out any thought independent of the elite narrative right down to the local level. In party politics; the private, public and even the voluntary sectors.
As we are seeing with the warehouses with their private security – currently used for non-whites in the USA but transferable to anyone else considered ‘undesirable’ – and the effective military style occupation of US cities, this elite is so concerned about maintaining its permanent hegemony it is quite prepared to go to war against its entire populace to crush opposition to it.