If you are on the Left, and not angered by people like this academic, then you are not on the Left. You are part of a class that is on board with the extension of the corporate form. And you need to know it, and be made to own it and own up to it. Any pretensions at Leftism end right here.
"Same demographic..."
This is the demographic who make things, grow things, build things, transport things... The people upon whose labour society depends, whose labour has been exploited y the parasite class throughout the decades. Socialists used to be very vocal on these things. This is the demographic with a productive orientation to the world, a demographic that is socially useful. And honest and healthy. Unlike the demographic who make their living by sneering at them. The parasite class.
White working class men were heroes when emptying bins, delivering food, working in distribution during Covid lockdowns, whilst others worked from home or lived off furlough. Now, white working class men are deemed thick and uneducated again, just as they were with Brexit. Oh, our sneering classes!
Clever people in bubbles affirming and reaffirming their preferences and prejudices without looking out of the window to see the wider world.
We are witnessing the new class war, and the old political terms no longer apply in the same way as they once did.
[A note on nomenclature. I have employed different terminology throughout – new class, corporate class, symbolic class, liberal, progressive, bourgeois, credentialed elite. I note the tendency of critics to cast doubt on the existence of this class by criticising the terms (Matt Goodwin criticises the credentialed elite and yet, critics argue, he is one of them). You can argue for all eternity over names – that’s what members of the symbolic class do, turning non-realities into reality and vice versa. Reject the name and, we are led to believe, the reality itself disappears. I have throughout described the reality of the class that dare not speak its name. It exists. And its effects are all around us].
I could paper the walls with the certificates I have, both academic and vocational, degrees, City&Guilds, College of Teachers, all kinds. The only bit of paper I have framed and on display is of one the letters of notification I received when working through Lockdown. “essential worker,” “one of a limited number of essential staff members” given the “status of key worker.”
My finest hour, when my status as “local hero” was confirmed. Keeping people connected, door-to-door.
Another letter adds that I “perform a service essential to society.”
I doubt that the clever people sneering at the “uneducated” working classes today can say the same.
How Leftist politics has come to be dominated by such people requires explanation. The simplest lessons ought to have been learned during Covid:
Clearly, these new jobs would not replace the old ones, and nor should they. Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants, and private equity directors had disappeared, [and add Hollywprickingood celebrities, multi-millionaire singers, and academic-activists, lawyer-activists, media class, politicians etc] society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So, to begin with, workers need to reclaim a sense of pride and social worth. Doing so would be a big step forward in making the case that the wages and conditions of low-paid jobs must be improved in order to reflect the importance they have in all our lives.
This is a quote from the book with which Owen Jones made his name in 2011, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. The demonization continues, with anti-working class prejudice being the most acceptable form of discrimination in modern society, almost obligatory in forming the ideological foundation of an exploitative society. The Left once knew this. It now joins in the discrimination, now the working class has started to assert its independence from those who once purported to represent and defend it, but now patently does neither.
The existential threat to democracy that wins in a democratic landslide.
Told you so. But the mainstream liberal left isn't going to get it any more now than they did in 2016 or 2017 or 2019. No matter how many times this sort of thing happens, they always double-down on their delusions and call the electorate racist troglodytes. And then, once more, act shocked and surprised when they lose. How on Earth can the clever people, the educated people, People Like Us, lose at all, let alone keep losing. Must be the stupid people. Must be democracy. Down with both. And it’s all Trump’s fault. We can laugh at the delusions, but these people are dangerous and constitute a real threat to freedom and democracy.
With respect to People Like Us, I shall quote a letter sent to the Financial Times in the aftermath of Brexit in 2017.
Sir, Your pages overflow with predictions of disaster brought on by the Brexit/Trump axis. Leaving aside the depressing and repetitive pointlessness of this mass guesswork, its underlying assumption — that things were better when People Like Us were in charge — is at best dubious, at worst delusional. Under PLU rule, we have two failed wars and the Middle East in flames, China expansionist, Europe enfeebled, America ineffective and Russia resurgent. At home, we have banking crises, stagnant median incomes, uncontrolled borders, record indebtedness, profiteering by the "professional" classes, and general social polarisation. This is the Eden from which the rude and licentious electorates have expelled us?
Face it. We FT readers had our decades in charge and we blew it for everyone but us. Time for us to do what we've been telling the rest of them to do for years, and suck it up. Or go forth and earn the respect that regains power. (Keith Craig, London SW7, UK).
The problem is that People Like Us never go forth and do anything, they carry on seeking their own way, expecting to get it, knowing that it is the right way for them, and caring not a joy at the damage it does to others. Ordinary folk should know and accept their place.
Commiserations to the liberals who, despite ample warning since 2016, have not only failed to address the concerns of ‘ordinary’ people but doubled-down on the policies giving rise to those concerns: ‘woke’ nonsense and a divisive identity politics, rising crime and disorder, mass immigration, rising taxes, declining services, endless relentless chaos. That they are shocked and outraged when they lose an election indicates the extent to which they care nothing for democracy – they are autocrats who presume that People Like Us should rule. This is what happens. It’s time to look in the mirror. It was time to look in the mirror in 2016. Instead, blame was squarely laid at the door of stupid, racist, ‘uneducated’ people. That it’s the same reaction now as it was then indicates that we are dealing not with plain and simple bigotry but class instinct and class interest. Such liberals are members of a new class, a fraction of corporate class, their moralising in public serving as a cover for their material interests. Policies which ‘ordinary’ people see as plainly deleterious to social and economic health, community cohesion, and national security serve the material interests of this new class. It’s class struggle, and the ‘educated’ are seeking a privileged social position in the body politic. Rather than accept defeat, they will prefer to bring the curtain down on democracy.
‘Ordinary’ people, those wedded to place and bounded in their communities, do not want open borders, are not soft on crime, dislike high taxes when tax revenues go to anything and anyone other than things serving the public good. They don’t want rule by quangos, experts, and ngo’s, either, nor restrictions on free speech, the forever wars waged by the ruling class, nor the sexualisation of children. They don’t like to be called Fascists and ‘far right,’ either, for raising their voices in defence of their compatriots. The only people who haven’t realised the bleeding obvious on this are the people who run our institutions.
I hate to call these people ‘Left.’ I will persist in pointing out that, detached from the working class, such people are liberals and progressives riding the latest wave of capitalist development. The appeal of socialism to them lies in the institutional form detached from the democratic content. They see socialism as a vehicle of control, regulation, and governance, with People Like Us in charge and issuing the orders. This ‘Left’ has gone too far and played all its cards. They have stoked division and caused destruction. They present themselves – and are presented – as elites, but these people are best seen as constituting a class. They are not very bright, for all of the emphasis they place on education and certification. Education, like ethics, is a cover for their material interests. They earn their money and power from their social position and, of course, prefer to conceal those material motives behind a virtuous and benign public image.
What is striking about these ‘elites’ is how predictably stupid and incompetent they are, and how little they learn by way of disastrous experience.
Someone with a modicum of intelligence would have understood that calling people racists, fascists, Nazis and ‘garbage’ would have been a bad campaign strategy. Not least because it has been done before, done over and again, and not worked. But, no, rather than learn from experience, they double-down and do it all the more. Which, again, should tell us that we are not talking about actual politics here, but the assertion of class interest, a class interest which is deemed non-negotiable. People Like Us insist on having their way and brook no opposition.
This self-righteous, identity-driven moralizing is exactly why these liberals will keep losing – and keep on going in the wrong, divisive, directions when they do win. But rather than take advice and change their behaviour (which is the definition of learning), they will prefer to bring the curtain down on free speech and democracy. The anti-democratic mentality is in plain view. The electorate were abused before and during the election, and the abuse continues after the electorate. If people don’t vote for you, the problem lies with you and not the people. Those who blame electorates are plainly anti-democratic. The irony is that these were the people who repeated the line that Donald Trump constitutes an ‘existential threat to democracy.’ The irony is lost on them. Trump wins by a landslide, and the voters are damned for being ‘uneducated.’ And racist, fascist, misogynist ‘garbage’ to boot. Abusing the electorate is not the greatest campaign strategy in the world. Which goes to underline that this ‘elite’ is not an elite at all, merely a class of people seeking to get their own way, presuming others will comply and obey, without needing to be persuaded.
It is striking how many of the experts and pundits called this wrong. It was entirely possible that Trump could win the election. He’d done it before, after all. By way of contrast Harris had rose without trace. The last time she went head-to-head on the electoral stage she was embarrassed by Tulsi Gabbard. ‘Ordinary’ folk willing to call it right, without the ‘benefit’ of political filters, could have seen this coming. But the ‘experts’ and analysists simply did what all foolish people do, and fooled themselves into conflating wishful thinking with reality. And, of course, they have doubled-down in the aftermath, conceding that whilst their predictions of a Harris win was wrong, they were wrong for all of the right reasons and that Harris ought to have won. It never occurs to any of these people that a) ‘ordinary’ people exist b) they have a view c) their existence and viewpoint are legitimate d) the ‘uneducated’ might actually know a whole lot more than they do.
We have analysed the election data at length and thought carefully about how we failed to win over the hearts and minds of ‘ordinary’ people. The only possible conclusion to draw is that we didn’t call them stupid racist fascistic garbage often enough. We will not make that mistake again.
Of course they won’t.
Because, ultimately, there is more going on here than electoral politics. Behind the floor show and the outmoded concepts of Left and Right is a class war within a corporate form. The Democrats had 95% of the media coverage and the bulk of the financial backing. 83 billionaires backed Harris. The Democrats raised three times the money the Republicans did. Harris spent over $1 billion dollars on her campaign. You could run a small socialist republic on that. But that’s not the end-game. Leftists keep fooling themselves on this (as do Greens who keep demanding state control and regulation). Harris had all the celebrities. She had the entire establishment behind her. Whatever that indicates, it doesn’t indicate a radical and transformatory aimed against a corrupt and failing status quo.
If this is a ‘Left’ then it is a cultural and corporate Left, which is to say ‘progressives’ who are firmly embedded in the corporate form and utterly detached from the members of the demos (the existential threat to democracy is real, and it is coming from the midwit managerialists, who are prospective apparatchiks within the decidedly authoritarian corporate form).
It is worth noting that far more “billionaires” backed Harris than they did Trump, 83 of them. Harris raised almost 50% more money. The same thing happened with Obama. And still Leftists and liberals think of themselves as plucky outsiders fighting the system. They are an incorporated Left, establishment to the core. Hence the contempt they have for working class people.
Is anybody in the political/media/academy/activist class in any kind of touch with ‘ordinary’ people?
We are told that ‘ordinary’ people don’t exist by miscellaneous members of the political/media/academy/activist class. Not in their world, evidently. But they do exist. I have lived amongst them and worked with them my entire life. And 72,669,664 of them just voted for Trump, giving him 295 seats and counting to Harris’ 226. Trump, the existential threat to democracy, has just won with a landslide. "Trump won because he represents the views of the ordinary working bloke. The very person those left wing parties were set up to represent - but no longer do." (Rod Liddle). And they still don't get it. They still don't think that ordinary working blokes exist. We might have expected that this would have caused some self-reflection on the part of people who called it so badly, but no, they have doubled-down on the insults and abuse. Ordinary people don't exist in their world, and don't count. They simply don’t see any contradiction in defending democracy against existential threats whilst abusing the bulk of the demos.
By this stage I have tired of issuing warnings and saying "I told you so." The "new class" is not for persuading. Its members don’t learn because they don’t listen, and they don’t listen because they think they know all that there is to know – they know their own interests and that’s all that matters to them. The “new class” reserves to itself the right to organise and order the world from above and from without. Its members cannot accept that others may have other views, and that to have other views is perfectly legitimate in a democracy. Democracy is constituted by alternative and rival platforms, or is not a democracy at all. They cannot accept that individual members of the demos not only retain their inner 'yeses' and 'noes' - the stuff of conscience - but actually exercise them. The hysteria when this happens indicates something very clearly - the sense of entitlement and privilege.
Politics is dissensus, dialogue, disagreement. There is a new class among us who want only monologue. Large swathes of public life are being removed from parliamentary scrutiny and democratic control. There is a deliberate and systematic de-democratisation underway. And the loathing of members of the demos whenever they dare raise their voice against People Like Us is all part of it. There is indeed an existential threat to democracy, and it is posed by those who sought to project all threats on Donald Trump, inventing a monster so as to draw public attention away from their machinations.
I’ve written on it at length over the years.
It’s all in here.
And here.
And elsewhere.
But my audience is not the clever people who know better.
It’s the people I spent my life living amongst and working with. The people who make, move, build, and grow things and who look after people, the people constantly abused for being ‘uneducated,’ the people who keep your society functioning and who kept their constant abusers alive during Lockdown. And they don't need to be told, because they already know, and have been telling their governments since ever. (There is nothing going wrong in the world today that 'ordinary' people haven't been drawing attention to for decades, only to be ignored or abused. And to indicate just how detched liberals and progressives are, they persist in sharing a meme containing the Orwell quote on how easy it is to control the people by beer, football, gambling. I have news for the sneering liberals and progressives - they are the ones who are conformist and under control).
I’ve still never heard a Taylor Swift song. And it seems her views don’t carry anything like the sway the media bubbles think they do. Not when people are facing myriad crises, suffering the consequences of principles and policies others advance at no cost to themselves from a safe distance.
The current president Joe Biden called Donald Trump’s supporters ‘garbage.’ That’s over seventy million people, the bulk of the electorate. The political class despises the people it is supposed to serve. It is working for other priorities, as should be clear in the way our countries are imploding within. Governments have ceased to govern.
I've spent a lifetime trying to get this point across, only to find too many people wedded to political concepts and divisions that are empty. It might be one reason why political rhetoric is now so violent and extreme, with people shouting loudly over one another in the attempt to reassure themselves that their voices do actually count for something. People prefer hurling abuse at monsters to actually analysing the situation. The corporate form has engulfed all sides in politics. Each accuses the other of being an existential threat to democracy, all miss that democracy is being eclipsed by the very game they play. I've given up on social media. For all I have posted over the years, people carry on with the empty labels.
We are looking at a corporatocracy so effective, so advanced and fine-tuned, that many of its citizens still call it a democracy, still vote as if their votes count, still speak as if their voices will be heard, and rally behind the forces which pose ‘existential threats to democracy’ having been persuaded by said forces that others constitute the threat to democracy. But, every so often, there is a revolt, dismissed as ‘populism.’
I keep writing. But it would appear that people live in their own circles, and take their bearings from what others in those circles say. Or don’t say. Some things simply don’t exist, if they can’t be blamed on others. Everything is outsourced. Nobody owns anything with respect to costs and consequences – other than the poor benighted common folk who, in being place-bound and dependent on wage labour, cannot but pay the price of others’ principles.
The gushing praise for Kamala Harris since her nomination was proof that The Emperor’s New Clothes tells a truth about human nature. Harris was manifestly unfit for high office, or any office, yet the ‘elites’ pretended that she was because of the political and social cost of truth-telling. They are cowards, and so are many others, complicit in the decline of our nations and unravelling of our societies. They think more of what their friends and colleagues would think should they speak out of turn, and so parrot errant nonsense, and maybe convince themselves that it all makes perfect sense. Group think corrupts the mind and weakens the spine.
Socialism? I would prefer not to waste time on this one. These mass media cretins don't know their political arses from their elbows. They specialise in peddling lies or, more charitably, political terms void of content and meaning. Let’s call it unconscious lying. Or delusion. The socialism they refer to, whether as friends or foes, is a technocratic neoliberalism. It fails consistently, it is rejected consistently by ‘populists,’ and we live in hope that it may one day be run out of town at the point of a pitchfork. It seems that that is what it will take. Because these people refuse to listen and learn. They are out to impose their views, replacing democracy with an overt authoritarianism.
The mentality has compromised the environmental movement, too (although this didn’t take much, given that the misanthropy that has stalked ecology since its incipience has never been too far below the surface).
“It’s time for ordinary people to step up, organise and make change happen,” say Just Stop Oil.
They just did, in their millions, a bleedingly obvious fact to which liberals are oblivious. The ‘ordinary’ people went out and voted in such numbers as to deliver a landslide for Donald Trump. Oh, and it’s the ‘ordinary’ people who always have to clean up the mess made by these pampered, puerile vandals.
Shot, convicted, threatened with prison, and branded a fascist, and still Donald Trump is the people’s choice.
The shock and outrage is worth noting and worth explaining. Trump’s win can hardly have been a surprise. Trump did win the presidency before. And when he lost, he didn’t lose by much. It was entirely possible that he would win again, not least because Biden had been decrepit and Harris is utterly vacuous. It was obvious that Trump had a chance. The fact that ‘the elites’ are so shocked indicates the extent to which they think that they and their views and interests are the only ones. That a Trump win was deemed impossible is not mere wishful thinking, it is an assertion of political ownership and entitlement on the part of a class who think only their interests are legitimate. They simply cannot countenance other views and other interests. Their mentality is thoroughly anti-democratic.
“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” (William F. Buckley, Jr.)
These people are utterly deluded, yes, but most of all they are autocratic. They are aristocratic in the sense that they avoid debate, refuse to be questioned, and resist being held to account. But they are not real aristocrats, in that they are the worst rather than the best: a kakistocracy.
These people have been hating and abusing since Brexit and before and are tone deaf. They offer clear evidence of how group think rots the mind. The encouraging thing is that people are no longer paying them attention and are acting to end their nonsense.
What we are seeing here is the complete failure of the liberal elites to understand their own country, report on their country, or appreciate their country. They have nothing in common with the people, know nothing of them, would prefer to hear nothing of them, and turn to abuse and repression whenever the people raise their voices. We have seen it in Britain, Canada, France.
And can we once and for all put an end to these constant references to Nazism and Fascism. To wheel out the darkest times in human history just to peddle a politics of fear, smear opponents, and gain a political advantage is a politics so low as to be an anti-politics. Not only are the analogies and inferences completely wrong, such cynical politics is grossly offensive to the memory of those who knew what actual Nazism and Fascism was and fought those very things. Cheap and nasty. It comes as a surprise to see the people who fall for it, people who think themselves educated and intelligent. They are bigots. One of the five modules I studied for my BA (Hons) in History was Twentieth Century European Politics. I delivered a decent paper on Fascism. I studied Fascism closely, and learned to be leery of generalisations and applications. I researched deeply and studied hard, only to see people throw the term ‘fascism’ around liberally at anybody they don’t agree with. ‘Communism’ likewise.
I’ve seen more than a few ‘friends’ falling in with the use of ‘fascism’ as a political trope to be used to stigmatise their rivals. This used to be the stock-in-trade of sixth form politics, although at least then we had the imagination to use a prefix like ‘crypto-’ These people evidently have no idea what fascism is, they just throw it around as a political slogan like the infants they are. Studying fascism at degree level, we learned to be sceptical of all general references to fascism, appreciating that fascism was not a generic phenomenon, but something whose precise character related to the specific details of time and place, and that whilst it is possible to see a family resemblance, the devil is always in the detail. In learning these lessons, we were taught to be historians, checking all those who would throw the term around with abandon for political reasons. It used to be teenagers and the odd extremist who did this. There are either a lot of overgrown teenagers in the world today or a lot of extremists. But there are indeed common features in the fascist phenomenon. The thing most worthy of note was the combination of state control and corporate power, allied to industry and technology, working together to reshape society from above. All property will be oriented to the collectivist ends of the nation, as equated with the state. Now we have states working in symbiotic relation with a corporate capital that is global, with state control now exercised towards extra-national priorities. The corporate Left working for the corporate form – the entire establishment on board. And these are the people who think themselves oppositional and radical. We could say that this Left is compromised and captured, but it is more than that: their complicity reveals that they are firmly part of an emergent corporate class structure. And they loathe and fear the working class every bit as much as the fascists did.
As for the celebrities ... They have been living in their own world for so long, enjoying their millions in seclusion from reality, they can be forgiven for thinking themselves more important than they actually are. I'm not a film buff and don't watch many films, and the ones I do watch tend to confirm my view that most movies are dire, representing time I'll never get back. So I pay no attention to the words of actors and actresses, not least because I can't identify many of them. As for the pop stars, I'm afraid I have heard more than a few of these. I'll be charitable and say that it is a minor art. The endorsement of celebrities is all show and zero substance. I value film stars for the roles they play in the movies; pop stars for their ability to knock out a decent tune. I don’t look to any of them to tell me what to think or how to vote. My reaction to seeing any celebrity pontificating on any subject is to consider how pompous and self-important they are. Their views are no more relevant than any other member of the citizen body. How telling that the voices of ‘ordinary’ citizens are so easily overlooked, when not being derided, when the media class fawns over the endorsements of some name or another.
It seems that the views of Lady Gaga are not as important as she thinks they are. Nobody votes for politicians because some song and dance man or woman or Hollywood celebrity or show pony said so. The whole celebrity class have made themselves look ridiculous in the past few years, not only in being so out of touch, but in being so hypocritical, doing precisely what they tell ‘the little people’ not to do. They are not to be taken seriously. Their judgements are unerring in their inaccuracy.
If you seriously believe that Harris lost because of misogyny or racism, then you are a fool who has learned nothing. These people learn nothing for the simple reason they already think they know all that there is to know – they are experts by way of nothing but their own preferences, prejudices, and material interests. In the olden days, when socialism meant something, and politics was on nodding terms with the working class, we used to call this class struggle. The class struggle is alive and well and is being waged from above and from without by a class remote from the working class. It’s the same parasitism: people helping themselves to the labour of others – wage theft – whilst nurturing resentment against those they know they ultimately depend upon, for all that they despise them.
Wake up from wokeness and listen to what your compatriots are telling you: they are done with the censorship, the gaslighting, the race-baiting, the gender woo, the environmentalist cult and control, the thought-policing, the newspeak, the identity politics, the high taxes and no borders.
Enough by this stage is clearly more than enough.
And then we get the abuse of the ‘uneducated.’
Like some academic with a degree in “post-performative gender woo in 13th century unicorn land” is better equipped to make a political decision than a bloke who can build, plumb, and wire an entire house.
Having been on the receiving end of abuse from the ‘educated’ for decades now, ‘ordinary’ folk are entitled to hurl some back. It might be better to just reclaim labour power and reorganise it socially, cutting out the parasites, but here goes.
In The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), George Orwell notes that ‘Socialism,’ draws towards it ‘with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England.’ Cranks with a taste for margins and minorities, then. Orwell extends his tirade against such ‘cranks’ to include ‘vegetarians with wilting beards,’ the ‘outer-suburban creeping Jesus’ eager to begin his yoga exercises, and ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat.’ They are ‘progressives,’ not socialists. They are bourgeois rather than Left, joyless heirs of the Jacobins. They loathe the working class, and always have done.
These are the sandal-wearing vegetarian, now vegan, creeps and cretins who sat on their idle backsides ordering quinoa from Waitrose, hate-tweeting all day, wearing masks for safety and insisting all fell into compliance, whilst allowing themselves to be jabbed endlessly with who knows what, insisting that all be jabbed too, on pain of exclusion, whilst the working classes worked their backsides off for the entire pandemic to feed them. Permit the intemperate language. Be sure that I do indeed mean to offend. Despite being at the ‘at risk’ category, owing to chronic illness, and despite being offered sick leave, I chose to work through the Lockdown, working door-to-door, being a familiar face in the community, keeping people connected, letting people know they were not alone. I have many certificates of many kinds, degrees, City & Guilds, College of Teachers. The letters of notification which identify me as an “essential” and “key” worker performing a valuable social service are the only ones I have framed and on display at home.
There are those who thought the Conservative government would have seized upon the popular mandate that the votes in 2016 and 2019 gave them to set about the reintegration of the country around traditional conservative values. The common people now derided as ‘populists’ wanted no more than secure borders, safe streets, community cohesion, decent jobs, a stake in society, a future for their family. We were to discover that the Conservatives had as little use for ‘ordinary’ people as did Labour. The uniparty have an agenda of their own, and the wishes and desires of the common folk have no part of it, beyond being usable and disposable. It is wise to see the consistent choices being made as indicating a definite political pattern and intent. The errors that some commentators identify seem obvious, so obvious as to beg the question as to why they are never corrected. They are never corrected because those committing the errors don’t see them as errors at all, and are not remotely interested in winning the consent of ‘ordinary’ working class people who form no part of their agenda. In a former age we would have had no trouble at all here in seeing the most salient characteristics of class division and class war. What seems to confuse people is that the left-of-centre parties, supposedly socialist, supposedly on the side of the angels, are on the side of the corporate class. People seek to conceal the anomaly behind appeals to science, reason, enlightenment, atheistic humanism, human rights, libertarianism, anything. And so long as their own material interests are being served, the concealment works well enough. The vehemence of the put-down of the working class whenever its members dare break free, protest, and vote against can be explained by a deep disquiet at the clear evidence that the fantasy they tell themselves is not true after all, not everyone is prospering as they ought. It was the same reaction of neoliberals in the 1980s, who saw the poor and unemployed as contradicting their visions and promises of the beneficent properties of the free market. The response of the neoliberal ideologues was to blame the victims of harsh economic policy for their own impoverishment. The vision of a free trade enriching all simply could not be wrong. It’s the same then as now, the same liberals on course for the liberal utopia, refusing to see any flaws in the vision, and turning with a religious zeal on anyone whose plight, predicament, or standpoint contradicts the orthodoxy. It’s the same thing, for the reason it is the same liberalism. It is the tragedy of the Left that it ever allowed its principles and practices to become infected with liberalism, and the liberal middle classes who, inevitably, substituted their rule and regulation for the self-organisation, self-activity, and associational self-government of the working class. We end with Tony Blair telling the trades unions to ‘live in the real world,’ whilst saying it was a mistake for the working class to have broken away from the Liberal Party and to have formed the Labour Party in the first place. There was indeed a mistake here, and it was a mistake that the Industrial Unionists and French Revolutionary Syndicalists warned about from the very first. The mistake was to have let the bourgeois into the socialist movement and then to have let them occupy leadership positions: they have their own interests and their own agenda, and they subordinate any political and social movement to those, every single time. As an elderly man, just four years before his death, Marx cast his eyes on the newly formed social democratic parties and expressed his vehement opposition – the leaders of these parties had not so much forgotten every lesson he had sought to teach, but had never learned them in the first place, reverting once more to the elitist-educational model of change and transformation deriving from the Jacobin model of the bourgeois: “When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot, therefore, cooperate with people who openly state that the, workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois.” (Marx and Engels, Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht and Bracke and others, 17 September 1879, in FI 1974, pp.375-76).
The philanthropists are still with us. Except they are not so philanthropic, the philanthro-capitalists least of all. They and the NGOs and the acronym gang who constitute a de facto world authority are all working within the corporate form for the extension and rule of that form over all things and people. They expropriated socialism from the working class and made the working class servants of a state capitalism, and they will do likewise with environmentalism. These words written by Holman W. Jenkins are apposite with respect to the fate of socialism, the original associationalism being supplanted by a top-down bureaucratism, the working class rendered orphans of their own organisations:
Working Americans, when they voted for Democrats, were the backbone of America, saints of small-town virtue. When they didn’t, they were garbage and deplorables.
The same in the UK and elsewhere. The political leadership of these parties, the vanguards, only ever valued the working class as a vehicle for them to ride into power, and keep riding once in power. The political party committed to a governmental socialism confined socialism within an untransformed capitalist system, and disorganised and disempowered the working class in the process. And now they think they can dispense with the working class, with it long having become apparent that these reformist parties were selling a wholly false prospectus and could never deliver on their promises, they turn on the working class with contempt. I have news for those who express outrage and anger here – the contempt was always there.
Working class people are still the backbone of the country, as Lockdown made plain for the umpteenth time. The lesson is one of the dangers of misplaced loyalty. The working class needs to reclaim its power and reorganise it as a social power, recover the principle of associationalism, and network throughout society, reinvigorating the nation from within.
As for the ‘educated,’ they are no great shakes. They are now displaying the same condescending arrogance as when Trump won in 2017, the same arrogance they exhibited over Brexit too.
The election is constitutes a firm rejection of what these mainstream parties have become, the left-of-centre parties in this respect. They are elitist, authoritarian, condescending, misandrist parties filled with ideologues who don't care one jot about the working class.
Some people are genuinely shocked that liberals and ‘progressives’ are so deluded that they do not realize that their smug condescending arrogance is precisely what alienates former supporters and turns them to vote for Trump. They really do believe that their view is the only view and everyone else is uneducated scum, subhuman filth to be discarded. This gives a good indication of what members of the ‘new class’ think of ‘ordinary’ people, which is something that should be born in mind when the issue of Assisted Dying crops up. They will promise all the usual safeguards, knowing they will be ineffective. They will be more than happy to dispose of the despised. They have done precisely nothing to further the cause of assisted living, and everything to render such living well-nigh impossible for millions.
These people have no concept of what it takes to do a real job and even less of what it takes to make a nation cohesive and successful. They don’t live in the society of others, they live in an abstract world mediated by connections that transcend place. They are very much members of a global corporate class. Their moralising is a public cover for their material interests.
This is what happens when you call ordinary people bigots and racists, when you tell them they are stupid, when you laugh at their traditions and sense of family.
This is what happens when you change the meaning of words and you silence those who disagree with you. In the end, despite all your efforts to stop them … the people will decide. It’s called democracy, the very thing that those who think they already know better don’t care for. Truth is non-negotiable after all. Why dialogue with others when you already know the truth?
Pay attention politicians, ideologues, and activists because the people can see you. This is not Left versus Right, those terms are void of content and meaning. This is not even quite elites versus masses, establishment versus people, although that is how it pans out in public. It is class war.
Millions have rejected unbridled liberalisation and globalisation and have given a mandate for border control, trade protection and re-industrialisation. These are sensible policies, which should have been enacted in the 1990s, only for Clinton and the Democrats and Blair and Labour to press the pedal down hard in precisely the other direction. That should tell you that there is nothing accidental or mistaken about the political events of the age, they are attuned to the societal dynamics of the corporate form. That is why, no matter how often these neoliberal technocrats are checked by ‘populists,’ they keep coming back, imposing policies they know to be unpopular.
Ordinary decent people in all Western nations are sick to the back teeth of the way liberalisation and globalisation are ruining their way of life, destroying social cohesion, undermining the rule of law. People protest to politicians, and nothing is done, for the very reason that the political class –and the media and academy class, supported by the footsoldiers in the activist class – are working for the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. I said so in my economics masters in 1995, and I will continue to say so. I make no apologies for repetition when I am right, but too many people are absorbed in lies, delusions, and hypocrisies.
Dems: "Why did we lose?"
The Electorate: "Too much identity politics, and you won't listen to us."
Dems: "Shut up, it was obviously the cishetero Latinx and male African-American's misogynoir and rejection of intersectional transgender policies that are to blame."
They will blame anyone but themselves. The hope is that this will reverberate and other people will take this on board and throw off the straightjacket our would be controllers are placing around us. The working class will start to recover its confidence, find its voice, and cease looking for external saviours, looking instead to their own organisational forms. These have been destroyed over recent decades. It’s time for recovery, for reclaiming power.
The ludicrousness of the liberal left, its cultish lunacy, indicates a neurosis, a mind virus. I’m looking at the meltdowns and the hysteria, and consider the sheer cultish weirdness of these people to be lunatic and dangerous. These people are fanatics. In being ordinary, ‘ordinary’ people are also ‘normal.’ That kind of normality isn’t a myth, but something stable, grounded, sane, and serious. And it is fundamentally decent. That’s what people want for their families and their societies. We can now see that the neurosis is no longer on the margins but in the centre, running throughout media and culture. People are finding it frightening and want to take themselves and their children away from it, because it is clearly harmful. The extremism has been shown in sharp relief. People who can behave in that way are capable of anything or of justifying anything. They go straight to extremes without offering explanation. People are damned by definition. That these people have dominated left-of-centre (and Green) politics offers one good explanation as to why Leftist politics has been siloed, the working class abandoned. That game is now surely up. People are not only tired by this, they find it utterly bizarre, and, more than that, positively harmful. They are seeking health and healing. The liberal left are divisive and unhealthy. People see the excesses, and want their society to go in another direction entirely. ‘Haters won’ comes the response, from people whose every word, year after year, expresses hatred and contempt for all who think differently and have different views. If you want to see hate, then examine the views of the virtuous ‘Be Kind’ people: the abuse of the people they call TERFS for the way they defend women and women’s spaces, virulent anti-Semitism, the demonization and dehumanisation of the working class, giving grooming gangs a free pass, and calling anyone who dares protest deindustrialisation, globalisation, mass immigration and the concomitant destruction of their communities ‘fascist’ and ‘far right.’ We are now seeing signs that some of them, still far too few, are starting to condemn ‘woke’ idiocies, even boldly, to give the impression that they had always been against such things. They see the tide turning and now wish to put some distance between themselves and the nonsense that has prevailed. I welcome the turn, it has been a long time coming, but having finally found your voice, make sure that you continue to use it. Because this war is far from having been won. “Well done for finally finding your tongues, you cowardly toerags, keep using it!” is the vibe. Those who know better yet remain silent make it possible for those sowing division and hate to prevail. Those who have made a career out of victimhood now know that their incomes are at risk. So they are having tantrums. Don’t let them bully you into silence, stand your ground, push back. A cult cannot be self-critical. I don't know whether repeating and shouting this guff is an attempt to persuade others or just intimidate them into compliance, getting people to deny the evidence of their own senses. No more though. It’s one for people who identify as Left – you have foolishly allowed your politics to be dominated by cranks, demonising ‘ordinary’ people for their continuing to desire the things that human beings have desired for generations. And they will continue to blame anyone but themselves. It always gets back to identity politics. The perfectly mediocre Kamala Harris would have won had she been a white male. The black woman Kemi Badenoch becomes leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and she is condemned as “white supremacy in black face.” Identity politics has no unit of final account, it’s a word of words without referents, a world of endlessly malleable interpretations. It’s an upside-down worldview and they are so wedded to it they have to deny every scintilla of evidence that filters in from the real world. They have to keep repeating it, at an ever increasing volume, in order to reinforce belief in the nonsensical. The more details from the world of the senses seep through, causing them to question their beliefs, the more their world collapses. It doesn’t take much. Like the pricking of an ever-inflating bubble. They are spell bound by the power of words, thinking words create realities rather than vice versa: they are what they think, and what they think is what they invent by words and meanings. It can be destroyed in an instant by the reintroduction of reality. So they have to repeat, shout, ignore evidence, or suppress it when people determine to keep pressing it before the senses. They try to bracket out “awkward” realities that contradict their worldview, and turn to censorship and control when people persist in raising issues around them.
Trump has declared war on radical gender ideology and the abuse of our children.
Note to hapless British conservatives. This is what you should have done instead of mainstreaming woke ideology. The Conservatives are dead.
Note to British Leftists, you should never have replaced class politics with identity politics. The Labour Party and cultural Left are also dead.
This is unbelievably refreshing. The gender radicals left have been doubling down on society-destroying actions for too long, and thankfully there is now an equal and opposite reaction. Take the people with you, and the destruction of our societies may, just may, be turned around.
As a lifetime socialist who remains committed to the ideals and values of the old Social Left, I can tell you precisely what fuels this nonsense. Every identity can be mentioned except class. And class is not an identity, but indicates something real about your social position. There is a new class structure in the process of emerging, and the working class lie at the bottom of it. Identity is the top soil, malleable and plastic, fitting people within the corporate form. And the preoccupation with identity allows the corporate class to divert attention away from class and hence suppress class politics, enabling it to extent its power over culture, society, and polity. And the left liberals fall for it, especially the intelligentsia, since it appeals to their inflated sense of the power of words and education, their own. This is the elephant in the room. The reason that every identity in the world but class is mentioned is because the political/media/academy/activist class positively loathe the working class, hold them in complete contempt. They despise the working class, for its refusal to support their pathetic politics, and they fear the working class for its potential to cut their empty and inflated worldview to shreds. The assertion of ‘the educated’ over ‘the uneducated’ is an attempt to delegitimise the working class voice. They don’t want the working class to have a voice. The working class should know its place, go to work, accept taxation without representation, and be ready to be disposed of once no longer useful/exploitable. And, as one of ‘the educated’ who comes from a family of builders, bricklayers, and coal miners, and who worked in distribution for years, I can say quite clearly that the intellectuals are nowhere near as smart as they think they are – and their attempts to curtail the speech of those who think differently show that they know it. Truth needs no protection, lies do. The working class, being so ‘uneducated,’ are not under the spell of jargon and are thus immune from the nonsense. Words that conjure up meanings contradicted by realities lose their power. Those live close to reality tell the truth, and seek words that correspond to reality. The working class speak plain truth. And skew the inanities and insanities the clever people cloak their material interests in. Which makes the key point – this is a class war, relating to a new class structure. To criticise the moralising of the new class, to draw attention to the hypocrisies of their virtue signalling, to identify the positions they advance as luxury beliefs, to underline the reality-denying lunacy of their views only touches the surface of the problem. The new class are frequently condemned on account of their refusal to listen, as if they will one day learn their lesson, start to listen, and start to change. I have referred to the word ‘cult’ myself. They won’t listen, learn, and change, for the reason that they are a class, and the positions they advance correspond perfectly with their material interests. They are not a cult, they are a class. And as soon as you realise that, you stop taking your politics to them and instead start to develop your own. That’s the lesson for any Left that’s left, to restore the roots that feed a genuine Leftist politics. And that means going back to the working class and help it develop its organisational and associational capacities, thereby recovering its political identity. It is a complete waste of time and energy to keep returning to these left-of-centre parties and its ‘intellectuals’ – they are a new class fraction of the corporate class. They cannot stand that someone so ‘uneducated’ has the ability to call the lies out and state the truth; they have been educated within an ‘elite’ world in which only certain concerns matter, and you are not supposed to notice certain things. That worldview is built on a tissue of lies. Pick one away, and the rest fall. Hence whenever they are caught out, they double-down rather than listen and learn.
People are sick of identity politics infecting all parts of big government and big business, and being extended over the whole of society. And they are sick of being told that they are a bigot if they argue against men invading women’s spaces and sports. And they cleave to biological reality, and social reality, and reality as such, as against those who believe in the power of language to invert and invent.
People are sick of the endless of waves of unchecked and undocumented fighting age males flooding across the border - not knowing who they are, or what their true objectives may be.
They’re sick of a high tax, low-productivity, low-growth economics that is designed to prop up bloated and inefficient Government bureaucracies and big business. They know that mass immigration is a cheap labour strategy which politicians and business rely on in place of a genuine industrial strategy and policy. These governments abandoned training, skills, and investment decades ago, despite being warned of the deleterious economic and social consequences. They opted for a cheap labour strategy, presided over the decline of the nation’s economic profile, deskilled the working class, deindustrialised their communities, and broke the spirit and work ethic of the indigenous people. And now we have to suffer the ill-educated young snots pouring out of the destroyed universities telling us we need migrant labour to do the jobs British people can’t and won’t do. The neoliberals created the problem in the first place, to bring about a ‘free’ global market. We criticised is at competitive downsizing in the 1990s, before Clinton and Blair made it Leftist orthodoxy. And still neoliberalism prevails, the working class on the receiving end as ever.
People are sick of career politicians with zero real world experience being promoted far beyond their meagre abilities.
They are sick of diversity, equity and inclusion, and sick of being labelled ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’ for having views that contradict the official narrative. Alternate platforms are entirely legitimate in a democracy. Those who seek to deny them are not democrats. Plainly.
Despising the bulk of your own countries’ population is not a good idea. Calling people scum, garbage, fascist and Nazi is not adult behaviour.
I would hope that everyone shocked and outraged might take the opportunity, as they didn’t in 2016, 2017, and 2019, to ask themselves what the ‘othered’ other half of the population believe and why they believe it. But it is easier to presume stupidity, ignorance, and worse – it saves liberals and progressives from engaging in the self-reflection that may lead them into discovering that they are not nearly as clever as they take themselves to be. We would hope that they would stop believing that only they are right and everyone else should be despised.
But it’s not going to happen.
The legacy media, as well as our political elite, reside in an echo chamber. They are not a reliable or credible source of truth anymore, their agenda has been completely exposed.
A common error among politically-motivated people is that they presume to know what the people want, which always tend to correlate with what they think people ought to want.
The liberals and progressive who dominate the political/media/academy class have convinced themselves – and attempt to convince others – that the only people complaining about the trajectory of the times are angry old white men, many of whom are on the scrapheap, and are all going to pass away soon (and good riddance, say the nice and kind people), so they can carry on going full-speed-ahead towards the liberal utopia, sitting on a rainbow and holding hands setting course for unicorn land, the place where little boys can become little girls, and that they can enter women’s spaces and sports since biological reality doesn’t exist, only an infinite number of genders, depending on linguistic invention, including seven spirit genders that came and went yesterday morning. And this will be the future forever. It would be to debase the word to call this lunacy utopian. What made the great utopians great is that they knew reality so well as to be able to invert it in order to project future states as real possibilities. The views of the liberal progressives are on another level entirely. They are not critical, they are fanatical; their progress has the character of a fake religiosity, an earthly salvation by way of decidedly fallible means. But if they are true believers, their religion is political to the core. Their thoughts express not so much utopianism as a wishful thinking steeped in political delusion. They really do believe that they are on ‘the right side of history.’ Having studied history for my first degree, I know that anyone who says that they are on the right side of history knows no history at all – they are expressing their own political and value preferences, and attempting to buttress them with the sanction of a false inevitability. Nobody knows where history is leading, history is always in the making. Such people are merely asserting that their views are the only views that cleave to reality. Such claims are always to be checked against the test experience of real history. They speak as though history is pre-determined in accordance with standards that they, the knowledge elite, the epistocrats, know, and that the role of human agents is to understand their role on the conveyor belt, take their places, or fall off should they be out of kilter. Or be pushed off by the people in the know. They think that people like themselves, people who believe what they believe, should govern all aspects of life, from polity to culture. They live in an enclosed world of self-confirming, self-perpetuating beliefs, speaking to one another, writing for one another, agreeing with one another. They are lost in their group think bubbles which continue by way of confirmation bias. Which is why reality persistently bites them on the backside. Had they studied history properly, rather than merely raided the history books for facts to fit their pre-determined theses, and had they any grasp of political realities, they would realise how utterly detached from reality they are. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart published a book in 2019 which won the praises of academics and other members of the intelligentsia, for the way it assuaged their fears over the Brexit vote in 2016 and Trump’s election victory in 2017. The book was entitled Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, which was unfortunate – the dominant trends towards authoritarianism and de-democratisation in the contemporary world are arising principally from within liberal and progressive circles, from the kinds of people who employ the term ‘populism’ in a derogatory manner, indicating a threat to liberty. These are the same people who push for controls over free speech. ‘Populism’ is the Latin counterpart of the Greek democracy. Basically, the animus is all about people who have an agenda and want to control the narrative, free from the alternate platforms and voices of ‘the people’ (placed in inverted commas, to imply they don’t exist). ‘The danger is that populist rhetoric undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarian values actively corrode its principles and practices.’ This is disingenuous, and so tone-deaf as to indicate there is no interest whatsoever in a functioning liberal democracy. Nothing undermines public confidence in liberal democracy more than a political and media class that, decade after decade, sets its face against the express wishes of the members of the demos, pursuing priorities and agendas whose origins and ends are elsewhere. That is precisely what has been happening, hence the backlash. And the attempts to continue along these lines, in teeth of public opposition, is leading polities in the direction of a liberal authoritarianism. The explanation of the authors, esteemed Harvard academics, is telling: they blame it on angry old white men who hold all the wrong values and will soon be dead and replaced by liberals with right values like them. Problem solved. The academics loved it. The academics are clueless. But at least it reminds me as to why I abandoned the academy and never sought out the publishing houses. Incestuous in-bred morons detached from reality. And, given that state-sanctioned death in the form of Assisted Dying is in the offing, it is worth noting the underlying misanthropy – all these old and awkward people with the wrong values will shortly die and will be replaced by radical liberals. The origins of this populist backlash in decades of deindustrialisation, unemployment, and austerity – decades of economic failure grace of deliberate political choices – is never recognised. The working class don’t exist for them, they simply don’t care, and pay attention only when the working class manage enough spirit and organisation to obstruct their visions and plans. That the areas that voted for Brexit have been languishing for decades is of no concern to them. They don’t know about the ‘deaths of despair’ that afflict these areas, and don’t care. Just as they wouldn’t care if Assisted Dying comes to be abused. As it will. They don’t like the working class, and want them gone. They have been practising a form of eugenics and euthanasia for decades. And they think themselves the ones with the good genes worthy of preservation and reproduction. So the members of the awkward squad – people like me – will be disposed of. They may get their way. But before I go I shall continue to let them know how thoroughly mediocre they are (we can take their immorality and inhumanism as read). They think themselves the possessors of some higher learning, when in truth their knowledge and assurance is a function of group think and confirmation bias. Because they associate only with their own kind, People Like Us, they get a very false impression of their own numbers and normality. They think themselves as occupying a liberal middle ground defined by truth and reason. They are actually a minority. And their views are completely wrong, and based on entirely the wrong premises. When they investigate a subject, they start off on the presumptions that their views are right and then proceed to examine why so many could be so wrong. They are ‘uneducated.’ And old and white. And male. They don’t care for working class white girls and women either. Ask them about grooming gangs and see their response. They want the awkward among us dead and gone, the rest retained as a servile class to be exploited, insofar as they are exploitable. They are a parasite class and need to be moved on.
Brexit 2016, Trump 2017, the fall of the Red Wall seats in 2019. And the reaction of liberals and progressives everywhere was howling outrage, all these stupid and “uneducated” people, who let them in? Who gave them a voice? Why don’t they all go back to their hovels and tenements? And disappear. For good. These people who want a “rational debate”, does anyone really think they are remotely concerned with safeguards and the dangers to the vulnerable? They don’t give a damn. Just as they have never given a damn for the people “left behind” by decades of deindustrialisation and globalisation. They are earning, they are doing well, and they tell themselves that it will all work out in the end. They have had long enough to correct the direction of travel. They haven’t done so. They will not do so. They will carry on serving their interests, presenting a virtuous public face, and blaming others. Just another sin of omission to add to the others, so long as they can lay the blame of commission at the feet of others. It wasn’t them that deindustrialised large swathes of the country, it was others. They ignore ‘deaths of despair.’ And howl outrage when the ‘left behind’ dare protest their plight.
That kind of thing. That kind of complicity. Cowardly. Inhumanism continues apace. And it’s always someone else’s fault.
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism” (Hannah Arendt). This is an old lesson that this age is in the process of unlearning - and deliberately so. We are living in an age of technocratic nihilism and inhumanism. Everything reduces to power. It is remarkable - and worrying - seeing people who think themselves kind and enlightened complicit in a blatant inhumanism, which fits a technocratic corporate nihilism like a glove. What we are seeing here are the consequences of the neo-paganisation of our culture. Infanticide and euthanasia were common practices in the pagan world. They are returning with a vengeance in these times of technocratic gods. Max Weber wrote of old gods ascending from their graves and taking impersonal form. Now we see what these idols demanding human sacrifices are. Always, the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable are the ones who will go to the wall first, the final indignity being the claim that they go there by the free will and choice, in preservation of their liberty and dignity. We live in an immoral and inhuman age. And ‘experts’ networked throughout all the governing institutions will claim to have reason and information on their side. And that is the key point: the problem is not utopianism, liberal or otherwise, it is the fanatical self-righteous religiosity of those who think truth is on their side, and their motives are pure and benign. These people have inflicted the greatest crimes on humanity throughout history. And the point is they can’t be told: they cannot accept the possibility that they could be mistaken, least of all when it is the “uneducated” telling them so. The biggest mystery is why those still on some kind of terms with the universal ideals and principles of the Left don’t see it, and pretend not to see it, say nothing, and carry on along the road to nowhere. But maybe I am lucky. In being so socially isolated, I have no group and no group loyalty to conform to, no audience to please, no academic reputation or social position to preserve.
Here and there, one or two get the message, and seem to express it in half-hearted form, as if feeling duty-bound. For now. It is amusing to see highly educated liberal commentators say things like “you know, people just want to be treated with respect” or “they want strong borders” as though they’re sharing profound insights when, in fact, they’re just stating what is obvious to everybody else
They're quoting what most ‘ordinary’ folks have been saying for about a decade and think it's some sort of revelation.
I'm increasingly convinced that mad progressive overreach combined with the alienating effects it has had on vast swathes of the population is in the process of creating a ‘populist’ backlash that a lot of nodding-dog liberals and progressives, thinking themselves Leftists, are going to regret. I expect many of them to say, in a decade or more, however long it takes, to claim that they never went along with the culture war nonsense. Indeed, they can now be found repeatedly saying that the culture war doesn’t exist and is merely a right wing invention. When it has been time to stand up and speak out, they have been silent.
The Patrician speaking about the Plebs.
‘Educated’ doesn’t mean smart or worldly. Look at Starmer. There is not an ounce of common sense or empathy between his ears. Or intelligence.
They call people thick and stupid and one ‘ist’ or another or all of them together, and then express outrage when those people say up yours. But they never learn. It’s the nature of arrogance. And entitlement.
People who see the working class as uneducated are clueless (and often useless). They were happy for all those less educated white men to run around during Covid building stuff, farming, keeping the shops and factories going, driving lorries and delivering their food, taking care of the needy, ill, and vulnerable, whilst they sat on their ignoble behinds hate-tweeting all day. But they weren’t happy, or appreciative – that’s how a master class expects a servant class to behave. It’s pointless pointing out the hypocrisies: this is class war. They see workers as servants, to be kept around insofar as they are useful and exploitable. The working class who are in need of help and support are considered a burden, of no use, to be disposed of. Assisted Dying.
These are the same uneducated white men that beat an actual Fascism in the 1940’s, the pretend fascism of the liberals in the present day. They go around shouting ‘No pasarán’ at locals protesting the latest outrage to their community as if they are fighting the Battle of Cable Street. These liberals would be crying in a corner back in the ‘30w and ‘40s, begging for real men – and real women (can they even define one?) to come and save them.
Yet another academic who confuses education with wisdom, intelligence and life experience
These academics of the Left loved the uneducated white men when they formed the core of left parties throughout the West, and when they seemed to be the vehicles through which the socialist paradise would be achieved. They turned to hate them when they realised that the actual working class were not as their revolutionary textbooks said they were.
We should know that a university education doesn't exempt the educated from being complete idiots.
The educated think they are better than the ‘ordinary’ people but wouldn't last a day trying to do any of the jobs they think beneath them. Pure class snobbery. How these people are classed as Left is one for Leftists to explain.
Enough. I’ve wasted more than enough time and energy on issues that are plain to ‘ordinary’ and ‘uneducated’ folk. You really don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind is blowing.
‘People don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth, to a world full of people that don’t realize they’re living a lie.’ (Edward Snowden).
Progressives are actually regressive in their determination to reopen healed wounds from the past and set people fighting over old wars.
New Class
They have overreached, they have never really engaged with the electorate. Instead, they live in their own world, in their own bubbles, talking to one another in their own circles. The levels of stupidity we see are the product a) of a commitment to shared material interests, grace of belonging to the same class, occupying the same social position and b) group think. We could see them as tribal. They will fall out with people over politics, saying that if someone is a Trump supporter or a Republican (or UKIP or Reform or Conservative), they can never be my friend. ‘I have lost friends over this,’ is a cry that has been repeated since 2017, with those crying making it clear that it is the other person’s fault for not being progressive. That’s not a very useful attitude to take into politics. That attitude divides the body politic into friends and enemies, making the job of mediation in politics well night impossible.
Their idea of legitimate political agents – now that they have abandoned the working class – is some not-for-profit body funded by George Soros and some executive director who got a degree in grievance and victimhood studies at some destroyed university, and is being paid $300-500 a year. These are the people who are considered spokespersons for any group or identity, the whatever community. And the reality is that there is no community and most people can’t be categorised in this way.
The members of this new class never meet nor engage with the country they live in. They live in another world, a world so remote that it may as well be another planet. They have removed themselves from society so as to be better able to order and organise it from above in the Empyrean Heights they occupy. They are members of a new class in a new class structure, akin to feudal lords in control of the serfs. This is the classless class, the class that dare not speak its name, lest it lose its claims to neutral expertise in the service of all humanity. The members of this class recognise one another immediately, and share backgrounds, worldviews, interests, forming a tight elite. They have credentialed their way to the top of every social institution, using these to advance their material interests. They have no connection with the ‘ordinary’ members of the social world. They look upon working class people travelling to work in a white van with contempt. They have no idea of how the vast majority of working class people, even middle class people, live. And they don’t want to know. They don’t think they need to know. They don’t care for ‘ordinary’ people and their concerns, and they don’t care about democracy. They see democracy as an infringement on their own liberties, and they see others as threats to their material interests.
The result is a politics in which working class voters have been abandoned by an increasingly liberal and progressive ‘Left,’ shorn of its social and democratic commitments and priorities, and becoming increasingly oligarchical and autocratic. At this point we see the divide between the educated and the uneducated opening up. The credentialed seek to cover their traces with respect to the abandonment of working class people by condemning them as ‘uneducated.’ The ‘uneducated’ could easily hit back by pointing to their skills and training, which would seem to be far more socially useful than many of the dubious degrees and dubious colleges earned by the educated. The credentials of the credentialed ‘elite’ can be somewhat suspect. The ‘uneducated’ in this sense is merely another, sneering, derogatory way of saying blue collar – working class. It is plain class snobbery on the part of a class out to secure its material interests, seeing the working class as its class enemy. Any Leftist who retains a commitment to socialism and democracy, and can’t see how the liberal and progressive ‘Left’ is diametrically opposed to both, is a fool holding onto outmoded definitions. The ‘populist’ revolt that is resisted and stigmatised by the new class is the working class attempting to assert its class interests against its class enemy. It is demanding that the issues it raises to be taken seriously and addressed in politics – issues of trade, finance, immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation from which the new class benefits materially. Just as the new class is the classless class that dare not speak its name, so it hides its material interests with respect to all these issues behind an overt moralism. They present themselves as the virtuous angels seeking nothing but the human betterment, when in truth they gain a very definite material benefit from all these issues. It’s class war, and the remarkable thing is that many supposed Leftists are on the wrong side. All we can do is ask people to look into reality as it actually exists. But it won’t happen. The members of the new class are not only comfortably off, they live at some safe distance from the society of others. Which is to say, they don’t live remotely close to reality and don’t suffer from the issues others suffer from. They don’t live anywhere close to working class communities. The working class don’t exist on their planet, and they rather resent the intrusion of rude and uncouth voices in the political world, which they think belongs to them and should serve its interests. They are not committed to place, either in the sense of locality or nationality, and think so little of citizenship that they will give it away to anyone. They don’t believe in borders for the reason that, living in their own secluded world, they are safe and have no need of them. They are a privileged and entitled class, akin to the old Second Estate in France. Unlike the old aristocracy, they are unwilling to put their lives on the line or risk something of themselves. They like to lead at a safe distance and rule by remote control. They benefit greatly from cheap labour. Not only are they not very bright, they are also gutless.
There is a political realignment underway, with the working class abandoning the parties and politics that abandoned them long ago. Trump has forged a new working class coalition, and this really galls the left liberals and progressive who, for as much as they despise the working class and hold it in contempt, think ordinary people should remain with them, in acceptance of their subordinate position. Back in the 1990s Clinton and Blair acted directly contrary to the interests of its working class constituency, on the assumption that working people had nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, too many members of the working class did indeed ‘suck it up’ and stayed. Working class autonomy is key. It galls the members of the new class to see the working class move away, and ‘populism’ arise as a result. Trump has built a multiracial coalition of ordinary people and poor people. They think they own those people, consider those people as subordinate to them, and incapable of any existence that is independent of them.
Ordinary People
I’m out of words on this. I’ll end with this passage from Matt Goodwin on ‘ordinary people.’ We keep being told be educated people who know better than the rest of us that ‘ordinary people’ don’t exist, just as ‘populism’ is just some chimera spirited up by the ‘far right.’ I find it hard to comprehend, seeing as I have lived amongst ‘ordinary people’ and worked serving them in my local community, street by street. I see them easily enough, and hear their concerns, and wonder why the well-educated can’t. (Clue, they live far away, and keep their circles tight).
The aftermath of the 2024 presidential election has had ‘lots of people on the liberal left wondering what on Earth has happened and how on Earth Trump is stronger in 2024 than he was in either 2016 or 2020. The answer is that this is what happens when you ignore what ordinary people have been saying, thinking, and feeling for much of the last decade; this is what happens when you give them the opposite of what they asked for; this is what happens when you lose control of the borders, when you stuff record levels of illegal migration and legal migration, taxation, regulation, woke ideology, soft on crime policies down their throats. This is what happens when you talk endlessly about threats to democracy whilst at the same time berating anybody that does not share your view as a Nazi, as a fascist, as a piece of garbage while talking about changing the rules of the Supreme Court, staging a coup against the incumbent President Biden and replacing him with somebody who had no public mandate at all. This is what happens when you talk endlessly about persecuting and prosecuting the former President, keeping Donald Trump tied up in legal cases and law cases, trying to keep him off the campaign trail while using your friends in Big Tech to try and restrict and suppress or shut down the public square and the national conversation. This is what happens when you subject the working class to assault on two sides at the same time, when you invest heavily in hyper-globalisation, allowing big companies to offshore their jobs to places like China and elsewhere in Asia while also ushering in record levels of illegal migration undermining the working class in Western economies in order to satisfy the moral righteousness among the liberal left [and, most of all, satisfy the material interests of this fraction of the corporate class – the morality is a cover, a pain-free, cost-free virtue, for which others pay the price]. And this is what happens, ultimately, when the people who dominate the institutions in our society, the people who dominate the universities, the schools, the creative industries, the cultural institutions, lose touch with the people who live in that society, when they tell ordinary people that you can’t be proud of the country that you call your home, when they tell the people that you should be embarrassed about the legacy of history or you should repudiate your shared identity and your sense of values. Ordinary people don’t think like this, they don’t share the values of radical woke progressives who dominate the big cities and the college towns. Ordinary people want a very different kind of politics from that which the Left has been offering them for much of the last decade [and longer]. This is obvious to many ordinary people. In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of the 2024 Presidential election in the aftermath has been watching liberal commentators say these things as if they are profound insights, like ‘voters want to be treated with respect,’ ‘voters want strong borders,’ ‘voters want controlled and lower levels of immigration,’ as if they are profound insights when to most ordinary people they are statements of the bleeding obvious.
That’s where we are. We have got a radicalising Left that has lost touch with the country, which hopefully in the aftermath of this election will now look at itself in the mirror [it won’t and it didn’t in 2016 2017 or 2019] and will actually understand that what they are offering ordinary people is not what those people want [it’s a new class, a fraction of corporate capital, and it’s not for persuading, only checking and challenging. It’s the same people who told working class people ‘there is no alternative’ in the 1980s and that globalisation is the only game in town in the 1990s. Working class people paid the price, and complained, and were ignored. It’s class war.]
That’s why Donald Trump is back in the Whitehouse, that’s why he is stronger than ever, that’s why the political realignment is continuing, and that’s why, nearly a decade on from those initial revolts in 2016 today’s liberal left, the liberal graduate class, the people who dominate most of the institutions in our society, the group think, the censorship industrial complex, why they look as lost as they have ever been before.’
I think 'ordinary' people exist. If they didn’t, the liberal left would be a lot happier today than they are.
We have had a decade of violent extremism and people are only just starting to realise maybe the extremists were wrong. Or starting to found their voice, having known from the start, and allowed them to be cowed in silence, in the hope that it will all blow over. It won’t. it has to be blown away. Find your voice!
As for the various rulers among the acronym gang …
They lie to our faces and laugh behind our backs. And it takes plain speaking from people with a backbone to call them out and throw them out.
Or you can keep looking away and explaining away. That’s a lethal combination of class interest, delusion, and cowardice. And that won’t end well.
“White men for Harris” ???
Any politics that makes a pitch to colour I take to be racist, divisive, and sectarian.
Had we heard a movement called “white men for” anything in the past, we might well have shuddered in expectation of an avowedly racist, KKK, fascistic movement targeting people of colour. But we now live in an age of inversion. This “white men for” movement seems to be making a pitch for the votes of white males, but note well the tone and the terms of that appeal – it is demeaning and degrading and is premised on the assumption that white men are toxic and need to atone for their original sin. And the white men who are stupid and supine enough to go along with it are the ones that can afford to, being comfortably off in the social positions they occupy. If you acknowledge the existence of white men – and white people generally – in any positive way, it is automatically condemned as an expression of white privilege. And racism of course. You are only permitted to acknowledge white people in the context of contrition and shame, with white people having to accept being scolded, admonished, and lectured. You are not allowed to acknowledge the existence of white people in any positive way. Every other ethnic group is allowed to be proud. White people are expected to show shame and express contrition. Don’t do it. You will be accused of racism anyway, on account of original sin. There will be no mercy and no forgiveness. Only a permanent prostration. There is no reason to submit. Tell them to take a hike. And clear them out of your institutions. They are toxic and are presiding over the division and destruction of society. These are the people causing a massive societal division, feeding off the fury. Their talk of ‘unbridgeable divides’ is leading us to a dead-end. These are the people who turn on family, friends, and colleagues who hold different views. They are dividing society and undermining the polity. We used to have safeguards, namely our institutions. Good institutions make society function. But these have all fallen to those stoking and feeding off division. The media, police, academia, civil service, military, judiciary. All gone. Society will fall in short order, and is indeed falling.
I am now reading campaigners demanding that Remembrance Day be ‘decolonised.’ And that demonstrations are planned. I tend to use a lot of words. The world is complex, and you would be well advised to recognise its nuances. But I have only two words by way of response here, and the last one is “off.” And give the same response to the rest of the nonsense. The less words you use, the better. These lunatics feed off words, twisting and turning them every which way they can to make them mean whatever they want them to mean, and always in their favour. Don’t play that game. Instead, channel your energies positively. Recover your history, reassert it, take pride in the past, and reclaim your future from out of the hands of these people and those behind them.
What is the best way to tell your liberal leftist friends that the legacy media is lying to them and they’ve lost their minds with woke and corporate interests are pulling their strings without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist? I’m gonna have to write a book, aren’t I? Another one. Bernie Sanders says the Democrats need to recognise that they have let down the working class and ignored the problem of corporate greed. He has missed the extent to which the Democrats and the dominant class which constitutes its main constituency are fully paid up members of the corporate form. Harris had the backing of 83 billionaires and attracted three times the money of Trump, corporate money is right under their stupid noses, in plain view, and still they think they’re the good guys. Why? Rights, minority issues, and identities. Plus the not inconsiderable fact they are comfortably off, cosplaying radicalism whilst serving their material interests. They are hypocrites, true, but only in the sense of the public image they project: in terms of securing their material interests they are absolutely consistent to their cause. Like any class conscious member of a dominant class.
As a class conscious member of the working class, I have been concerned to expose the way that the middle class appropriate and vanguard everything and subordinate it to their own interest. My very first book, The Proletarian Public from 1996, was on this very theme. In this book I analysed the history of socialism and the way that the professional, educated middle class infiltrated the socialist movement, occupying leadership positions, and diverting it to their own ends of reform and regulation in their own interests. This was the political expropriation of the working class, the counterpart of its economic expropriation. In the process, socialism was relocated from the social sphere to the still abstracted, alien, and untransformed political sphere, reduced to a collectivist, bureaucratic, and regulatory form whilst being stripped of its social and democratic content. Socialism became the vehicle for the advancement of middle class interests. Working class associationalism was replaced by a bourgeois vanguardism whose antecedents go back to the Jacobins. Working class people thus come to be unrepresented and misrepresented, not least by parties and organisations which were once their own or which claim to serve them. And rival political traditions are more than happy to see the bastard forms that dominate as socialism. They are not socialism, they are the vehicles of middle class management and regulation, the people who claim to reform society from above for its betterment whilst serving its own class interest every step of the way.
The whole thing is now performative, cosplaying radicalism and rebellion in public, heading up every cause, whilst serving a naked class interest. It is a continuation of the middle class way of side-lining the working class to the margins. In this sense, the abuse that working class people receive whenever they find their voice is perfectly understandable – it is the response of the middle class to what they rightly perceive as a threat to their social, cultural, and political hegemony on the part of a rival class. The confusion here is on the part of those who take middle class ‘social justice warriors’ as being true to their word, taking them by their self-image. The public image cultivated by the middle class is easily criticised as an hypocritical moralising, what is called a luxury belief system – people advocating policies that cost them nothing, gain them much, and whose consequences are suffered by others, especially the working class. It may well be hypocritical, but only if you understand the public image as sincere. It isn’t, it is performative: cosplaying social virtue and justice and rebellion is merely a way of serving and securing material interests whilst appearing to be on the side of the angels. And it is the working class who bear the brunt of this latest example in a long history of middle class vanguardism. This is the ‘liberal elite’ or ‘credentialed elite’ that the likes of Matt Goodwin and other commentators refer to. In truth, they are not an elite, they are a class: they share the same values, believe the same things, have the same backgrounds, recognise one another immediately, share the same interests, stand in the same relation to the social world, make their money the same way. The clash between the educated and the ‘uneducated’ is merely the public face of what is a naked class war, an attempt on the part of the dominant middle class to sanitize and rationalise its ruthless determination to secure its own material interests, especially at the expense of the working class, who are elbowed out and sent to the margins of society. As ever in class society, the people who do the most get the least and are consigned to the bottom of the heap. The liberal middle classes engage in a performative radicalism whilst extending and entrenching inequalities. The working class keep calling it out, but who is listening? Far too many have been suckered into mistaking the self-image of the middle class for reality. The middle class love mass immigration and multiculturalism because they are lovers of all ‘humanity’ and seek to extend all good things to all people regardless of race, creed, and colour? Right? And other such fairy tales. Leave it for Disney, itself peddling the same bunkum. The middle class love cheap labour. They gain from cheap labour. They preside over a new caste system in which disposable servants are ever on hand to do all the dirty work, work that is beneath the dignity of the professional class, the educated, all the cooking and cleaning. They take this to be the normal way of society. It is. Class society. It never occurs to those profiting from these iniquitous arrangements that they form a dominant class, they have normalised the situation. One of the hallmarks of a dominant class is that it succeeds in concealing its exploitative and parasitic character from society and also from itself – they see themselves indeed as an elite, wealth-creators, society’s benefactors. All the time, they are serving their material interests, acting as an assertive and self-conscious class. Vocal and hyper active about ‘social justice’ in public, they are ignorant of and indifferent to the injustices they inflict on those at the bottom of the class hierarchy, and positively hostile when those upon whose labour they depend, whom they exploit, find a voice of their own and demand justice for themselves. Class war, you understand, has to be mediated and filtered through the representation of the dominant class. In their permanent performative protest, the middle class radicals insist on advancing the cause of social justice, but withhold it from the ‘uneducated’ whenever they dare claim a share of that justice, on terms they set themselves. It’s what the Left used to call class war, before it upped sticks and joined the dominant class for a performative radicalism.
There are still people baffled about Brexit and Trump and populism. There is no mystery, they just haven’t been paying attention. This is what happens when socialism is appropriated, inverted, and perverted by the vanguards, the middle class heirs of the Jacobins, emptied of content to leave a vacuum. The working class are unrepresented and misrepresented, but still seeking to press their social interests. In the name of social justice, if you please, only to find that that very thing has been claimed by the middle class, to be presented on terms it sets, terms which serve its material interests. They normalise the hierarchy, and generalise their particular interests as the interests of all, with the result that they cannot see themselves as the perpetrators of a class injustice. When the billionaires, the corporations, the mainstream media, every major institution, the bulk of the celebrity and activist class are on your side, you are not anti-establishment – you are the establishment!
The disparity between the expressed views and values of the ‘liberal left’ agitating for social justice and engaging in a permanent activism and the ignorance of and indifference to the material injustice surrounding them is hard to credit, but it is clear. The howls of protest and outrage that accompanied the Brexit and Trump votes of 2016 and 2017 indicated the extent to which the dominant liberal class either neither knew of the extent of social injustice and deprivation among those who registered their protest or, more likely, simply didn’t care. It’s never been a mystery to me. As a member of the old Social Left, steeped in working class socialism, it was easy for me to see the cultural left for what it was right from the start – not a Left at all, a performative and symbolic radicalism that enables the middle class to get what it wants whilst looking good in public. The division is between those who can see further than the hypocrisy to the class interests at its base, and those who can’t or would prefer not to. Never underestimate cowardice. The labels of ‘fascist,’ ‘far right,’ and various ‘ics’ and ‘ists’ have been invented for the purpose of silencing the working class voice on this, should it dare be raised in protest. And too many liberal leftists allow themselves to be cowed.
Given that the tangible realities of social injustice are all around, the question is begged as to why ‘social justice warriors’ neither see them nor seek to uproot them, and actively move against members of the working class whenever they are prepared to fight them. It may seem paradoxical, but really it isn’t. The surprise comes only to those who have placed language, symbols, and ideology before material reality. There is no mystery. Political economy has been replaced by the symbolic economy. In the 1980s and into the 1990s Marxist theorists like Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, and Terry Eagleton identified ‘postmodernism’ as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism.’ Klaus Eder wrote of the ‘post-materialist’ ethic of the exponents of the new class politics. Except that it is not post-materialist at all, only apparently so. It’s public image, performance. Behind the public show are definite material interests arising from a determinate class position. We are talking not about a Left but a post-Left or surrogate Left or fake Left, a cultural Left that is positions itself in the symbolic economy, the world of language and signs, whilst being firmly rooted in the political economy of corporate capital. And that explains why, whilst being ignorant of, indifferent to, and hostile towards the social needs of an oppressed and exploited working class, this new class adopt the language of social justice. They are part of the linguistic turn of the 1990s in which cultural struggle replaced socio-economic interest and struggle, accenting the role that language plays in a world of constant activism that ignores real social injustice and inequality. The language of social justice is symbolic and performative, neither substantive nor transformative. It serves both as a moralising glue and cover that enables members of the new class to advance their social position and secure their material interests within the class hierarchy, whilst posing as the good guys as they do. In other words, it is not simply hypocrisy, more importantly it is ideology, as a body of ideas that conceals true motives and interests. The use of ‘woke’ is unhelpful in the way that it focuses on the hypocrisy and lunacy, inviting abuse rather than explanation. A cool material analysis of class structure and motivation is required to reveal the true dynamics of the ‘woke’ phenomenon, avoiding the fruitless cycle of abuse and counter-abuse. The key to explaining the phenomenon lies in identifying the nature and dynamics of the symbolic economy (as I did at length and in depth in my work in 1997 and 2004, Materialist Dialectics and Praxis and The City of Reason vol 4). Such an analysis reveals the new cultural Left to be no Left at all, but symbolic capitalists who have a privileged place within the corporate form, professionals and cultural creatives who trade in symbols: language, imagery, ideas, narratives, endlessly circulating in a hyperreality raised far above the world of socio-economic production. This is a phenomenon that has been in emergence since the 1980s at least (which I examined in Europe and the Corporate Restructuring of the Global Political Economy 1995). The remarkable thing is to see the extent to which people are still using the old political terms of Right and Left as if the meanings were still as they once were, not realising the extent to which meanings have either inverted or emptied. This, of course, is to be expected on the part of those who live in and by the symbolic economy, with language as an ideology that conceals and preserves asymmetrical power relations, serving class interests in the process. In the late nineteenth century Nietzsche caused a storm with his assertion that God had died, and with it the terms of moral discourse had become void of meaning. People continued to employ moral terminology, Nietzsche contended, without realising the terms were without foundation and applied to nothing: they were projections of power, passed off as claims to truth and goodness. And here were are again, with ‘social justice’ frequently proclaimed in public, whilst being only of symbolic significance, with no social referent or outcome. And the inversion kicks in at the symbolic level, with people who think themselves Leftists – all those who work in the symbolic economy – coming to mistake the manipulation of symbols for substantive reality: they think themselves as advancing social justice, and present themselves to others as doing precisely this, when in fact they are serving their material interests as a class – a class of symbolic capitalists within the corporate form. It is easy to say that this class loathe the working class and treat it with contempt, for the reason that it is easy to see. We do well to lose the sense of moral outrage here. Moral outrage is merely the negative flip side of public moralising – beneath the morals are perfectly understandable class interests. It is not so much that the symbolic class hate the working class, although they do – it is that there is a class war underway in a new class structure, and these classes are diametrically opposed to one another. What obscures the fact is an anachronistic understanding of the nomenclature of Left and Right. Once you understand the new class, the symbolic class, in terms of their class position within the corporate form, notions of hypocrisy and betrayal and loathing of the ‘deplorable’ working class fall away – this is a consistent and entirely rational pursuit of material interest on the part of a class which, for all its pretence of being oppositional, is comfortable and complicit in the extension of the corporate form. They are not Left, not socialist, not communist – they are corporate. Once you understand that, you will stop voting for them, stop trying to persuade them to see the error of their ways, and stop appealing to them. If I may, I realised this as a young man in the late 1980s. I last voted for the Labour Party at any level in 1992, and never touched any of the mainstream parties from that moment on. It’s time for people who are genuine Leftists, people who are still on nodding terms with social reality, to examine the relation between the symbolic economy and the political economy, and start practising the politics of justice for real. And in the process expose the ‘cultural Left’ as no Left at all, merely an ideological expression of a symbolic class who trade on a cultural capital that is firmly part of the global corporate economy. Insofar as they employ the language of ‘social justice,’ they do so not to transform social relations to achieve actual justice for all – the old socialist ideal of the classless society – but to secure a dominant position for itself within the new class structure. As with the organisations of socialism and the working class, the language of the Left, too, has been expropriated and is being exploited for the private gain of a particular class. The language of social justice is used to give the appearance of a ‘progressive’ and liberatory class struggling for the downtrodden and dispossessed, whilst being focused first and foremost on a struggle for power and resources within the asymmetrical relations of an untransformed class system. I make no apologies for jargon. Plain English and simple figures – the big money that these supposed left-of-centre parties attract – have failed to remove the scales from the eyes.
Although the hypocrisy of this class is frequently commented on, paying particular attention to its luxury belief system, charges of hypocrisy miss the mark. In focusing on the extent to which public statements of virtue depart from practice, there is a danger of focusing controversy on the falsity of the self-image. The most important thing to expose, however, are the material motives and interests underlying the public moralising. Once you focus analysis on material relations and class dynamics you soon see that the supposed hypocrisy is actually an ideological cover for the constant pursuit of material interest in a way that is entirely consistent with class interest. I used ideology here in Marx’s critical sense of the term: as a set of ideas that are designed to conceal, preserve, extend, and serve asymmetrical class relations. Put simply, the dominant class of every age will project its particular interests as the general interest of all, concealing injustice and inequality behind claims to the opposite. In cultivating views and values about their public activity, the symbolic class – the professional, credentialed elite – conceal the way their social position entails material interests that run in a diametrically opposed direction to justice and equality they espouse, instead extending and entrenching inequality and injustice throughout the social and institutional fabric. Examine every major social institution, and you will find this new class there in dominant positions, its ideology reigning as orthodoxy. This is something much more than the ‘woke’ capture of our institutions, something which conservatives demand be resisted and overturned. It is something much deeper than that – it is the refashioning and rewiring of our institutions, along with our culture, in accordance with an emergent and dominant class. This class are not interlopers from the outside, ‘cultural Marxists’ who have been conspiring for decades to take over social institutions and bring capitalism down from within. The symbolic class is a class that has emerged from within the capital system, part of the shift to the symbolic economy in the 1980s, which accompanied the neoliberal hegemony. That first manifested itself in terms of the liberation of finance from manufacturing production, and accelerated as a result of the ICT revolution, becoming a liberation from place, national government, and institutional constraints, taking us in the direction of a hyperreality. Here we are, with language as ideology laying claim to justice and equality whilst preserving, legitimising, and concealing an entrenched class-based injustice and inequality. The result is a new ‘Left’ that serves and secures its own material interest as a dominant class at the expense of the exploited, oppressed, marginalized, and disposed. And should any member of the downtrodden even dare raise a protest, they are abused as ‘uneducated’ deplorables who are guilty of some combination of the myriad ‘ics’ and ‘isms’ that have been created for the purpose. Reality is what they symbols say it is. In being so ‘ordinary,’ in living close to social reality and the pressures of political economy, ‘ordinary’ people tend to be innocent of such symbols. According to members of the symbolic class that makes them stupid. But it’s the clever people, not the ‘uneducated,’ who believe boys can be girls and that there are infinite number of genders, including seven spirit genders they invent each and every morning. These people are too daft to laugh at. The solution is to avoid engagement in their symbolic world and reclaim social power within social reality. Cleave to reality and the bubble will burst. Exposing hypocrisy is not enough, that game can be played forever. Relate the hypocrisy to ideology, in the critical sense of concealing and preserving material interests and relations, then identify ‘progressives’ and ‘liberals’ as a determinate social class within the corporate form. Do that, and all the apparent absurdities of Leftist politics are explained. There really is no mystery at all: it’s a new class structure and class war within the corporate form, with all the radical and oppositional rhetoric on the part of the comfortably off and educated being a cover for the extension and entrenchment of their class position. It explains why these left-of-centre parties abandoned the working class long ago, and why the working class are now abandoning them. The only mystery is why people who remain committed to the political ideals and values of the Left still look upon these parties as Left. They are not, they are on the other side, they are establishment, vehicles for those who have a dominant position within the corporate form. It explains, too, the age’s preoccupation with the minutiae of language and the policing of language, speaking the language of justice and inequality whilst ignoring the substantive injustices and inequalities that characterise what remains a class system.
Most of all, there is a need for people to go deeper than the surface controversies of the culture war. It is easy to become trapped at the symbolic level, with critics being concerned merely to expose the hypocrisies of the ‘woke’ and their luxury belief systems. That’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel: almost every word and claim conceals a contrary practice. The real problem to address is not false claims of social justice on the part of a symbolic class, but the fact that social injustice is real and substantive and endemic to a society that remains organised around class. The ‘credentialed elite’ and ‘cultural Left’ dominating social institutions and politics is not the main problem, and to think that they are invites a reaction which in turn fails to address the material relations and class dynamics of a substantively unjust and unequal society. Both ‘woke’ and the backlash against it remain trapped at the surface level of the culture war, failing to see that this is a class war. And there is a danger that we fail to analyse and address the shifts in class structure that have led to this era of symbolic social activism. These are shifts that go back decades, taking us ever further away from the working class and its organisations, and from substantive socio-economic issues, with political activism becoming less and less transformative the more it becomes performative. It is the loss of those solidaristic movements and practices of the ‘old’ socialist politics that has paved the way for the ideological perversion of social justice campaigns through the abandonment of working-class interests. Grasping the social roots, material relations, and class dynamics of these shift is crucial if we are ever to be able to practice the politics of social justice for real.
One final note.
Trump will pull the U.S. out of Paris again, and there will be howls all round. I howled in 2017, despite being acutely aware of the inadequacies of Paris. I won’t howl this time. Environmentalism has fallen under corporate control, and environmentalists are either too naïve, too cultist, too compromised, or just plain too complicit to see it.
RFK Jr: "[The climate crisis] is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls, the same way that the Covid crisis was."
"And it's the same people... It's the World Economic Forum, it's the billionaires' boys' club at Davos, and it's the same kind of cabal of people who will use every crisis to stratify society toward greater power for the super rich... and less power for everybody else."
That’s not a denial of the crisis in the climate system, at least not on my part. It’s a warning not to betray the environment into the hands of the corporate class. I’ve warned of this in recent years, and been rewarded by being unfriended and blocked by ‘friends’ in the environmental movement. I became suspicious when people who had been associates for years not only refused to answer my questions on political economy – who has the power and resources to deliver on the ambitious climate programmes sought – but cut off all contact. There are Greens that are idealistic and naïve, and there are ‘Greens’ who, like the symbolic class, the ‘credentialed’ elite, are part of the corporate class. The idealists betray the environment into the hands of the corporate class through their naivety; the ‘elite class’ are part of the corporate appropriation of the commons. My conscience, like my intellect, is clear. I refuse all compromise with corporate forces. Far from protecting the environment, those forces will appropriate it to their own ends. The people who turned on me as a climate denier are the ones complicit in the further destruction of nature, rebooting the capital system under the pretext of saving the planet.
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