Guess what. Now our lefty friends say they want to go back to the country:
It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer… It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.
That’s the conceit of writer Paul Klingsworth at UnHerd in “How the Left fell for capitalism.” He imagines that the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, that began in 1994, was an organic, leaderless rebellion of the rural indigenous kept down for 500 years. Even though La Wik characterizes Subcommandante Marcos as “not an indigenous Maya.”
Yep. We lefties have a new gig: noboby here but us indigenous. Only, of course, the whole Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas is soaked in lefty ideology, rhetoric, and organization. Golly Gee Willikins: how did that happen? No doubt the Zapatista indigenous all just sat down one day and started reading Rules for Radicals. Yes, but who put them onto Saul Alinsky? No doubt Quetzalcoatl appeared to the indigenous shamans in a dream.
The essence of Klingsworth’s article is that, whereas the left used to be opposed to capitalism, today it seems to be in bed with the globalist capitalists.
Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical.
And yet now it has all changed:
Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class [of Left-modernism] is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond.
Of course, all along
the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone.
But now the left is part of the Machine
deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.
I suppose that the left has always been an an ideology that imagines it can realize an oil-and-water mixture of top-down intellectual Machine and bottom-up oppressed peoples living their traditional lives. In the writings of Marx you see the intellectual arrogance of imagining a perfect society gussied up by rich kids like him and the fake tears worrying about the “useless retainers” thrown off the feudal estates when the feudal lords didn’t need them any more.
But when you combine the two, in a violent mixing operation that creates a salad dressing for just a moment, you create the biggest, most violent, and most murderous slave states in all history. Don’t you, Uncle Joe and Daddy ZeDong, old chaps.
And now Mr. Klingsworth wants a new world order, of “people, place and prayer… a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.”
Notice, with the agenda of “opposition” we still have the lefty obsession with politics, with an enemy. It’s no longer the bourgeoisie. No longer the “white oppressors.” Now the enemy is the Machine of “gigantist, destructive modernity.” And lefties will fight to demolish this monster “in all its forms.”
So, if we analyze the situation using Three Layer theories, we would say
The left started with a three layer theory of the Communists fighting for the workers against the bourgeoisie.
Then the left switched to the idea of the Allies fighting for “oppressed peoples” against the “white oppressors.”
Now the left proposes the idea of “reactionary radicals” fighting for the “populist opposition” against the “Machine.”
The more the left changes the more it stays the same. It’s always a fight. There is always an enemy. And it’s always a Great Reaction, an ridiculous attempt to go back to the Garden of Eden.
But I say that the modern era is trying to get out of the Age of Politics of, for, and by lefties and get into the Age of Emergence. All the knowledgeable people — lefties need not apply — now understand that the world does not work by a God creating the Earth in seven days. Or by Darwinian evolution of the survival of the fittest. Or by Socialism. Or by top-down globalism. Instead the world works by “emergence,” by unexpected small changes making a difference and gradually changing the world. Without the need for noble lefties, or WEF Klaus Schwabs doing a Great Reset, or wise progressive administrators regulating health care and car seats, or woke professors in the universities dutifully producing science for their political masters.
That’s my vision of the future. Your mileage may vary.