Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism II

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7 responses to “Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism II”

1. 

   Mike

   April 11, 2023

   Hi Bill,
   Mattias Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” offers some good insights how what he calls ‘mass formation’ starts and what it leads to.
   Just a quibble, if you admit that idolatry is present in the New Left, couldn’t one say that it is like a false religion? Idolatry is worshiping a god, or it might be worshiping any thing not God.
   Thanks,
   Mike

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2. 

   Vito B. Caiati

   April 11, 2023

   Bill,
   I would like to propose a modification of your first point: “Both the Old Left and the New Left were hostile to capitalism, whereas the Woke Left finds it a useful tool. Today corporations big and small have become “woke” and are friendly to the Woke agenda. Any corporation insufficiently sympathetic to the Woke agenda is bullied until it wakes up.”
   Specifically, it portrays the cooperation of capitalist corporations with the Woke Left as the consequence of either (1) the internal ideological transformation of the former or (2) the pressure that the latter exerts on the former. Now, while the accuracy of this depiction of the capital/Woke alliance cannot be denied, it does not illuminate the forces at work within corporate capital that inclines it to permit either such an ideological transformation or to acquiesce to such pressure.
   In other words, why has the American ruling class, which possesses the most massive productive and financial resources of any ruling class in the history of the world, and which possesses them in a period free from extreme crisis, either economic, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, or social and political, as in the crises of 1789, 1848, 1860-65, and so on, walked away from its–at least verbal—longstanding support for more traditional American beliefs and values? Obviously, we have witnessed in the last century moments in which big capital threw its support to political movements of the Radical Right in order to repress a perceived threat by the Left, as in Italy of the 1920s or Germany in the early 1930s, but where in the modern world do we find a robust ruling class and its corporate minions brush aside its natural allies, moderates and conservatives of one kind or another, the pillars of social, political, and legal order on which capital accumulation depends, to embrace those forces who undermine this order, chief among which is the Democrat Party?
   Perhaps the answer to this historical enigma lies in the coincidence of interest between corporate capital and the Woke Left, rather than in the consent to being turned into a “useful too.” In what ways? First, while one can argue that the latter is “hostile to capitalism,” this hostility is, in fact, not directed against the mode of production but only at certain features of it. We hear nothing from the Woke Left about the “exploitation of wage labor,” the alienation of workers in the productive process, the monopolization of entire sectors of the nation’s economy by large corporations, or the growing concentrations of wealth in the hands of the ruling class and the relative immiseration of the working and middles classes. Rather, it, at most, wants to clean up capital around its edges—green energy and so on, which inadvertently opens new avenues of accumulation for capital itself—while remaining silent about the massive powers of its elites. At the same time, it works tirelessly to undermine the unity of the working classes, by placing racial division and hatred at the center of its ideological program, all the while keeping its absurd obsession with sex and gender at the center of national politics, thus masking the actual economic and social problems of the day. Thus, in all these ways, the Woke Left ensures the fracturing of any potential opposition to Capital, making it a prickly but ultimately useful movement in the preservation of the existing class structure.
   Second, for many decades and never more so than today, the interests of American capital are global. Its entire process of profit and accumulation depends on its investment in and penetration of international markets and on its access to ready, relatively cheap supplies of labor. When economic interests of the nation contradict these requirements, they are ignored (generally with the acquiescence, until the rise of populism, of both political parties). In this way, entire sectors of production, from textiles to computer chips, have been sent aboard over the last half century, leading to a massive decline in industrial employment, along with decay incumbent of civic life in many communities; valuable intellectual and industrial resources have been shared with economic competitors and political enemies in the pursuit of their markets; and the unrestricted and illegal entry of cheap labor into the country has won wide corporate backing. To all of this, the Woke Left, entirely committed to internationalism and the undermining of national sovereignty, is acquiescent or supportive. Indifferent to the working class and hostile to the middle class, it allows the corporate elites to go about their relentless search for profit without protest, concentrating all its resources on racial and sexual politics and the construction of a police state to crush all opposition.
   Now, in the long term, the grave harms perpetuated by the Left to the nation’s constitutional and civic order—from the massive riots of 2020, to the rise of crime and anarchy in cities following its push to defund the police and pamper criminals, to the repeated attacks on the integrity of the rule of law, to the destruction of schooling at all levels, and to the transformation of the state into an apparatus of oppression—will work against the interests of American capitalism; however, the ruling elites of the present moment are emersed in all the reassuring certainties of presentism and the consuming passions of immediate utility. Blinded or indifferent to secular trends, they will continue to make use of the Woke Left, as it makes use of them, with nation as we once knew it as their shared victim.

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3. 

   Michael Brazier

   April 11, 2023

   GCWL is, at root, the response of the technocrats who control the West’s welfare states to the public’s discovery that said technocrats are incapable of fulfilling the promises their predecessors made. Its purpose is to declare that complaints against the technocrats’ policy errors are illegitimate, because the complainers are immoral. All of its sophistries are designed to put the ordinary citizens in the dock, so they will not presume to call their rulers to account for their failures.
   As such, the “woke Left” hasn’t just penetrated the state – it began within the state. It’s an ideology as Marx defined that word: a false doctrine propagated to support the ruling class against the other classes of society. And it’s reactionary in Marx’s sense as well: it’s how the ruling class reacted to a serious threat to their position.
   At the same time it’s a clear heir to the Marxist tradition, by way of the Frankfurt School and its “critical theory”. The trend of Leftism toward irrationality, misanthropy and power worship was clear by 1948 – it’s what Orwell warned against in 1984. GCWL differs from the Old Left merely by developing that trend to its furthest limit, unchecked by any considerations of popular appeal or practical results.

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4. 

   BV

   April 11, 2023

   Vito,
   The quotation you begin with is not from me but from Soriano. But your point is well-taken: >>it does not illuminate the forces at work within corporate capital that inclines it to permit either such an ideological transformation or to acquiesce to such pressure.<< Your answer to the >>historical enigma<< seems right to me, but I would like to hear Soriano's response to it. Both halves of your explanation are very plausible. Part of what you are saying is that it is the globalism/internationalism of current capitalism that aligns it with wokery which is virulently and viciously anti-nationalist what with its conflation of nationalism with white nationalism and its leukophobic slander of whites as racists and white supremacists. Your prediction in your final paragraph is spot on. Are they blind to what they are bringing about? Possibly: their ability to think straight is swamped and suborned by their greed. But many of them are simply evil and here is whether appeal to the demonic makes some explanatory sense. I don't think most of the corporate greed-heads actually believe in the 'woke' nonsense.

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5. 

   BV

   April 11, 2023

   Michael Brazier,
   Yours are penetrating comments as well. It’s a sort of classically Marxist analysis of wokery, a sort of classsically Marxist analysis of cultural Marxism.

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6. 

   Vito B. Caiati

   April 12, 2023

   One further point: The ground was prepared for the Woke Left to propagate gender confusion and deviant sexuality among very young children, through brainwashing in school, pornographic books, and lewd “entertainments” and without parental knowledge or consent, by corporate capital’s commodification of the human body and sexuality for decades. In the relentless chase after profit, all that once considered immoral or immodest are proffered in print, film, the Internet, musical lyrics, and advertising. Thus, human concupiscence had already been encouraged and hitched to the market long before the arrival of the current Woke insanity regarding the human body and sexuality. In fact, this latest development offers capital but one more path to facilitate the process of accumulation. For instance, one sees all of this in the arrival of “trans” persons as spokesmen for the most established corporations of American capital. Targeted culturally by both these bad actors, many of the young of our country have little chance of coming to know and live by the liberating spiritual and moral values of the past.

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7. 

   BV

   April 12, 2023

   Vito,
   I fully agree. Example: Anheuser-Busch marketing Bud Lite with the face of tranny Dylan Mulvaney. Vito will perceive the ambiguity of this Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/04/07/how-trans-tiktok-star-dylan-mulvaney-became-a-far-right-target-after-scoring-deals-with-bud-light-and-nike/?sh=1ee5bc2d26ee
   A really deep and adequate analysis of our decline and fall — which probably cannot be reversed at this late date — will be many-sided, e.g., the role of post-war affluence in the development of our culture of narcissism (C. Lasch was hip to this years ago), as exemplified by Mulvaney and AOC and a vast cadre of Facebookers and Tik-Tokkers. And that is just one of the many sides.

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