It is tempting to just give up. I’ve been diagnosing the crisis we face for thirty years now, covering economics, ecology, history, politics, ethics, metaphysics, the lot. There is a need for wholesale reconstruction. Unfortunately, too few people see how deep the problem is and hence how deep the change needs to be. Even, and maybe especially, the people who think themselves practical change-makers are extremely shallow, seeking short-term results by pushing buttons and pulling levers. Or cultivating the rich and the powerful, as did the utopians of old. I expose the deficiencies of that approach time and again. I see no evidence that anyone actually learns anything. I write books that too few read, and fewer still understand. Too few to make a real difference. I provide abstracts and synopses by way of explanation and clarification to tempt people to read further.
The terrain is intellectually, politically, and sociologically barren. I would say that the situation is hopeless, except that people still wouldn’t believe me. They are engaged in magical thinking and are under the spell, whether I saw all things are possible or none. This is why I see myself as writing for a future generation, even a future age. For whoever comes after the wasteland. At present, as I survey the whole scene, I see scant evidence of any agency or agencies combining with the knowledge and power capable of resisting, let alone overturning, the organised, concentrated force that now confronts us. There is growing antagonism and opposition – how could there not be, given the accelerated deterioration of the societies we live in? – and more and more people are shedding their illusions with regard to business- and politics-as-usual. But at least as many who are embracing new illusions, thinking them to be alternatives when in truth they are merely extensions of the old problems. Such people are offering some form of the problems to be addressed as solutions. And the loudness of their voices makes them appear more numerous than they are, increasing the sense of hopelessness and inevitability. It’s an illusion, but people are swayed by illusions which are backed by the appearance of numbers. Numbers can be a dead weight.
Too many don't understand the nature of the crisis they face. This applies to those who understand plainly that something is wrong, and who raise their voices in protest. Many still argue as if the old authorities and institutions can be made to work as they ought, as if their malfunctioning is a temporary aberration. It isn’t. The observation applies, too, to those who think they have the solutions and demand that business and government enact them. They think they have knowledge, expertise, and know-how, and that all would be well should the world of politics simply be more rational. These people are clueless.
People may see that there is a problem, but have little or no understanding of its deep-seated nature. Many of these openly refuse to deepen their understanding. I write in great depth and detail on the nature of the myriad and converging crises we face, and people object to reading so many words. Such people refuse to go deep and wide and tall and long and instead reach for the for the tools to hand, for the short-term, for immediacy in ‘action,’ for the catchy slogan and noisy soundbite. I have experienced precisely this from the very first, with people dismissing my texts as ‘mere pondering’ and ‘idle intellectualising.’ ‘It’s time for action!’ they screamed at me, over and again. I pointed out that if you act on the basis on faulty or shallow diagnosis you will more than likely intensify and extend the problems you are seeking to resolve, reproducing them in new form. ‘Don’t act, think!’ was my response. The problem is that you are often addressing people who think that the thinking has already been done and they know what needs to be done. Again, I have been told that we have ‘climate facts’ and that there is no more thinking needs to be done.
I point out how much more needs to be done, only to see it fall on deaf ears.
People just refuse to think deeply and diagnose properly. They resort to the easy and the familiar, the things they know, even when those things are patently not working.
I frequently draw attention to the work of E.F. Schumacher, for the reasons that environmentalists know and admire him for his views on scale and alternative technology, his view of economics as if people mattered. That Schumacher is a familiar figure saves me the hard work of setting up foundations. I proceed to emphasise that Schumacher made ‘metaphysical reconstruction’ the key task of the age. I receive the same uncomprehending silence as I receive when arguing for the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues. I may as well be writing in hieroglyphs. It is possible, of course, that people – especially those raised under the bad and bogus metaphysics of scientism – understand my argument fine well and just dismiss it as plain wrong. I quote scientists like Gus Speth, who openly state that science is insufficient and that a moral, cultural, and spiritual transformation is required: ‘and we scientists don’t know how to do that.’ Again I am met with a deafening silence.
I have had the same response when engaging with ‘the common people.’ They complain about the state of the nation, the degeneration of society, the loss of community cohesion, the breakdown of law and order. I try to talk to them, only for the shutters to come down whenever you go beyond the shopping list of ills. I try to get them to read on the nature of the social and moral crisis. Instead they look for saviours. The Red Walls fell, with many ex-Labour voters voting for Boris Johnson, ‘because he’s a character,’ and because exiting the EU will enable us to ‘take back control.’ Such people haven’t the slightest idea of power and control within the global division of labour.
There is a need for an extended period of profound reading and contemplation, building a profound understanding of the nature of the problem we face and the forces we are up against. Too few are prepared to do it. They continue to look for saviours fashioned in the old familiar forms. They are gone. We need a period of metaphysical, moral, and social reconstruction. I have written extensively on this reconstruction in all its forms. My published writings amount to ten million words. You don’t have to read all of them. I approach the problem from a number of different angles – economics, ecology, human geography, politics, ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality and religion, literature. My work in Being and Place offers an integral philosophy that balances contemplation and action. It shows what needs to be done to challenge and check the inhumanism and displacement of the age. The work has attracted a number of readers, those who are prepared to analyse and think deeply. But too few. I see the protestors of all persuasions, and the practical men and women with their solutions, and see their shallowness. They have no idea.
People have very false notions of revolution. Many are leery of revolution on account of its associations with the rabble and the rabble-rousers, poor people with pitchforks and upper-crust wild-eyed demagogues. Such people are often prey to the machinations and manipulations of real revolutionaries, the slick, well-dressed, well-educated, well-heeled elites and vanguards who claim to act out of an enlightened and expert concern for the human betterment. It is as easy as falling off a log to denounce Marxists and Communists and working class socialists and conservatives do it all the time. This actually makes it far easier for the real revolutionaries to prevail. These are the people I identify as techno-bureaucratic managerialists working to entrench and extend the corporate form, expropriating the global, physical, political, and ethical commons. That’s a mouthful, when people want it straight and simple. But the notion is easy to understand. Enclosure of the commons is in the DNA of the modern capital system, starting in the early sixteenth century, when denounced by Thomas More in Utopia, and the mid-seventeenth century, when denounced by the Digger Gerrard Winstanley. The expropriation of the land, and nature in general, is a matter of historical fact At the same time the political realm, and public life, is expropriated and made to serve private interests rather than the people. And we can surely see, now, how ethics is being re-written, with the ancient taboos – and particular people - being discarded and universality being dissolved into new hierarchies. The people doing this are the revolutionaries, and they are transforming society from above via the state and the state bureaucracy. I analysed the phenomenon in depth in Regaining Democracy: The Critique of Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020). Here, I describe this managerial class as Hegel’s universal class writ large on a global scale. This class occupies the state and the state bureaucracy and sets about reordering and reorganising society from above, purportedly in the universal interest, but actually in according with a new hierarchy of preferences and identities. The work has attracted some attention, but not much. It’s not so much that people don’t understand it but that too few make any effort to understand it. It’s long and complicated, I expect – but only the shallowest of makes can think there are easy ways out of the predicament we are in. and that’s the problem.
The conservatives – and the ordinary folk – railing against socialists, communists, globalists etc. are missing their target, and by a very wide mark. It is not socialism and communism at work here – although an awful lot of deluded Leftists are so visible and vocal as to make it appear so. Those people are no more than tools and fools doing the destructive work of greater powers. Globalist and globalism are terms that need to be rendered more precise in relation to social forms, structures, and relations within the international division of labour, Simply, we are dealing with the global corporate form and its minions and servants.
Again, I analysed this in my economics masters of 1995, Europe and the Corporate Restructuring of the Global Economy 2 vols. Again, I have posted on the work, and met with zero interest and response. Again, I feel entitled to conclude that it is hopeless. But rather than say I have given up, I will say I am entirely without hope with regard to those entrenched in their political loyalties. The hope lies with those who are now active in the political realignment under way. There has to be hope, if for no other reason that the would-be universal revolutionaries are such a mediocre and inept bunch of people. Held to account, they can do no more than resort to force and fraud – and name calling on the level of school playground bullying.
There really is nothing to beat. If you are prepared to put a shift in. And there’s the rub – the revolutionaries are putting the shift in, those protesting the effects of their actions are not. And in the end that will be decisive. The real revolutionaries are not the people marching up and down the streets waving placards and parroting slogans – they are the tools and fools of the revolutionaries above, the people occupying the institutions, composing the authorities, and commanding obedience. The revolutionaries are not the scruffy, foul-mouthed, unkempt people who need a good wash (as conservatives continue to sneer, as if this is effective in any way (it isn’t)). The revolutionaries are the well-spoken, well-educated, well-connected, well-off people who have been to the elite universities and studied politics, philosophy, and economics and know how to engage in the destruction and reconstruction of society, in favour of themselves and their kind and the forces and people they serve. You need to be able to identify these people, how they operate, and who they operate for. And you need to know how to engage in the same kind of reconstruction on the same scale. That’s precisely what I have been arguing in my work. Too many people seem unable to understand that revolution is not necessarily the chaos they read in the history books, but can proceed under the leadership and control of technocrats, managerialists, bureaucrats, power/knowledge elites, whatever term you want to use to describe them (and always with labels you need to relate the nomenclature to social forms, structures, material interests, otherwise they are just general denunciations void of content).
Are people becoming more aware? Some. Too few. The pressure of events is forcing people to look a lot deeper than recent generations. These recent generations have been truly pathetic, engaging in politics 24/7 and an endless activism, and not having the slightest idea of problems and solutions. They do the easiest, point to ‘the science’ and demand ‘action’ from ‘government.’ They are the tools and fools that people tend to think are the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries are the ones ‘acting’ – for their own ends and the ends of the forces and people they serve. They are dominant in all the institutions of society, at every level. These are the ruling class that activists are empowering, little realising that they are making crisis and resolution and every principle and ideal available for appropriation.
I make this precise point in a number of books – (The Critique of Eco-Authoritarianism for one), making clear the extent to which the nature of revolution is not how people see it. When arguing for radical social transformation to deal with climate change, I was dismissed most curtly by a prominent climate campaigner with these words: ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ And I saw clearly in those words that I was being caricatured as a revolutionary of old by a member of the knowledge/power elite who are the new revolutionaries. It is about time others learned this lesson.
Many people message me and offer thanks and praise for my work – this or that book – but I see little sign that many have actually read much of my work, let alone understood it, let alone acted on it. I make all of the above points and many more crystal clear in perfectly good English. My biggest vice is repetition. I have come to call it the prophetic voice in an age that is deaf to the lessons I teach.
The work of reconstruction is key, and the truth is that those who have learned the lessons here are those who now constitute the new revolutionary class occupying our institutions. These are the people who learned long ago to stop protesting in the streets and fighting with the police in expectation of governments conceding demands. They ceased to be street activists and instead became lawyer-activists, educator-activists, journalist-activists and so on. They got inside the institutions and proceeded to reorder society from above and from without. It is remarkable – and depressing – to see how few genuine leftists see this, their oppositional stance leading them to see institutional action as conservative. I remember Kenneth Clark’s mild criticisms of the rebellious youth in 1969:
Naturally, these bright‐minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive society must somehow be made to work.
Some learned the lesson, and acted on it to secure and serve their own interests and the interests of others within the corporate form.
And the naïfs remain youthfully rebellious and hence ineffective. Those who are organised and effective and occupy positions of control get the naively rebellious to do the shouting and demanding for them. It has the appearance of social revolution but not the substance. It is the work of destruction aimed against existing society, which proceeds whilst the revolutionaries above get on with the work of reconstruction.
But who are these revolutionaries? Bureaucrats, frankly. They may appear to be winning, but they penetrate the institutions and the professions – educators, lawyers especially, journalists, media – to become bureaucrats, seceding from society to be better able to order it from a distance. They rule by remote control.
Alasdair MacIntyre argued in 1981’s After Virtue that the closer Marxists come to power, ‘the more Weberian they become.’ And that’s Marxism at its best, he states, as distinct from ‘the barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow.’
Christopher Hitchens said that the barbarians will not storm the city, we will hand them the keys. That’s not true. The keys are being handed over by others, in face of the opposition of the people. We the people never had the keys. I believe that most public understand what is happening, but feel powerless to actually do anything about it. My work going back to the 1990s on alien power, identifying capital as a system of systemic disempowerment, making the case for social restitution shows what needs to be done. Yes, it was Marxist in the main, with significant qualifications. But it’s what socialists, conservatives, and greens need to reclaim their sovereign power and preserve their values against the new revolutionaries now dominant under the corporate form.
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