How billionaire transhumanists captured the middle-class left
I’m so old I recall when the left stood up against the ruling classes with their endless war games and knavish tricks. Now they screech against the spectre of the evil far right, amplify voguish mainstream propaganda and demand the suppression of all traditional outlooks. It only seems yesterday when the radical left championed investigative journalists like Julian Assange and Seymour Hersh and demanded greater transparency from the military industrial complex. We also instinctively distrusted any large multinationals with multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets. Many Western socialists never really forgave the working classes in the 1970s and 80s for their newfound love of cars, gadgets and package-tour holidays that only free-market capitalism seemed able to provide. They fell out of love with the great unwashed and turned their attention to new victim groups.
Broad left-of-centre coalitions may have exposed grotesque injustices and challenged the vested interests of regional elites in the great civil rights campaigns against segregation in the United States and South Africa. Yet when the international corporatocracy embraced racial and sexual diversity in the 1990s after the eclipse of the Soviet Union, affluent trendy lefties moved onto new cultural battles setting themselves at odds with the reactionary working classes, whom they held responsible for centuries of misogyny, homophobia and racism. They even blamed the underclasses of European descent for the historic wrongs of slavery and cultural imperialism. Ironically the forebears of the socially conservative lower classes in the British Isles, the kind of people who supported Brexit, endured extreme hardship and had to work ten to twelve hours a day to feed their families. By contrast, many virtue-signalling progressives can trace their roots to the well-to-do professional and missionary classes who helped administer the Empire and civilise the restless masses for the greater good. All that’s changed is the church has gone high-tech and woke, while the rebranded rainbow empire now spans the whole globe. Today’s progressive managerial classes promote LGBTQ+ Pride month and climate alarmism with the same zeal that their forebears once spread Christianity and allegiance to the monarch among pagans. Indeed, even the new British King struggles to hide his allegiance to the World Economic Forum. One could be forgiven for believing King Charles III has the same speech writer as Greta Thunberg.
The Big Switch
Many argue the Western left began to cast aside its traditional blue-collar base in the 1960s. However, most leftists still believed in a fairer and kinder world with a substantial transfer of power away from boardrooms to grassroots organisations. The Green Left, as it evolved in the 1980s and 90s, attempted to offer an alternative to unsustainable economic growth and rampant greed. They seemed to stand against the vested interests of the big corporations who wanted to expand markets and lock workers into a vicious cycle of debt and mass consumerism. Lower living standards have never been great vote winners, especially when car manufacturers, supermarkets and airlines collude to sell the dream of automotive bliss and fashion fetishism. Throughout the New Labour years (1997-2010), the economic growth mantra reigned supreme. If dissident economists dared to suggest that endless debt-driven expansion of the money supply will ultimately implode with catastrophic social consequences, they soon got shouted down. Despite all the green rhetoric car ownership and foreign travel continued to rise in Western Europe until the 2008 credit squeeze. Sales crept gradually up again until 2020. Since then, there’s been a steady decline. Twenty-twenty may go down history not just as the beginning of a virus-themed technocratic coup, but also as Peak Car. It was the year the big global banks decided to put mass motoring into reverse gear. For decades, lenders literally created money out of thin air to help young adults onto the car-owning ladder. Governments spent billions on multilane highways intersecting an urban sprawl of housing estates and retail parks hostile to humble walkers and cyclists. Now the big banks and energy cartels advertise the wonders of the green economy and our transition away from the era of material growth with effortless travel to a low-consumption digital future with compact 15-minute neighbourhoods serviced by drones. The tech giants support universal basic income because they know most monotonous clerical and manual jobs will soon be fully automated. Last but not least, the same biotech industry that facilitated covid tyranny also bankrolls the transgender and neurodiversity lobbies. The Wellcome Trust funds both the purported neurodiversity movement and transgender inclusion. While the old ecology movement backed local organic farming and herbal remedies, the new green-branded corporate left champions genetic engineering, global supply chains and lifelong dependency on dodgy pharmaceutical products.
Collectivism is the main thread that binds the old based anti-establishment left with the new woke conformist left, but they appeal to very different collectives. The old left of my youth still sought to emancipate oppressed peoples exploited as workers or colonial subjects.
We could broadly split the old radical left into two main camps. Syndicalists, who viewed workers as the main vehicle of change, and idealists, who appealed to the collective conscience through political activism and cultural vanguardism. They came in various flavours, from Christian socialists to pacifists and anti-imperialists. Many, especially in the trade unions, sympathised with the former Soviet Union, China or Cuba. Others took their lead from the disciples of Leon Trotsky or fantasised the Swedish model of luxury social democracy. Yet despite these differences, the various factions on the left agreed on the need to redistribute power from the rich to the poor. In the West, the mainstream media regularly ridiculed and smeared left-wing dissident thinkers who challenged the hegemony of vested corporate interests. I recall vitriolic media campaigns against the former leader of National Union of Miners, Arthur Scargill, and his communist ally, Mick McGahey, during the bitter 1984 Miners’ strike. The NUM leadership seriously misjudged the Tory government’s resolve. Their year-long battle, mythologised by the student left across Europe, helped the British ruling classes downsize the mining industry and clamp down on trade union rights. To add insult to injury, the Thatcher government imported cut-price coal from Socialist Poland, as it repressed strikes by the anti-establishment Solidarność movement. Yet, a hard core on the Western left still believed workers could only be masters of their destiny by seizing control of the commanding heights of the economy. Arthur Scargill remains unrepentant to this day. As the leading light in the tiny Socialist Labour Party, he speaks out against the insanity of closing coal mines, but seems oblivious to the struggles against technocracy, hailing the disputed election of Lula da Silva as a victory for international socialism. Yes, that’s the same Lula who wants to jail people for spreading counter-information about mRNA-injectables. In his heyday, Arthur represented a mainly male workforce, believed in families and seldom uttered a word about gay rights. I recall as a student visiting a group of striking miners near Swansea in South Wales. Over breakfast our host expressed his dismay over the antics of a gay rights group, who, he claimed, had brought his struggle to save his community into disrepute. While the student left yearned for a rainbow revolution, most militant trade unionists wanted to protect their communities against global corporatocracy.
The Corbynite left drew most of its active support from the social management classes angry about obvious injustices. They may have championed the Palestinian cause or protested against wars, but all too often they served as gullible foot soldiers in the woke revolution that ultimately only benefits the technocratic classes. With a few noble exceptions such as Jeremy Corbyn’s lesser-known brother, Piers, the trendy left swallowed the covid narrative hook, line and sinker, calling only for more PPE (an acronym seldom heard in everyday speech before 2020), more generous furlough pay and longer lockdowns. As usual, the BBC, Guardian and assorted high-profile influencers guided their groupthink. Not a single trade union leader called for strikes against lockdowns or opposed jab coercion. The opposition came from a new alliance of free-thinkers and social conservatives that transcends the old left-right divide, uniting small business owners, many of whom belong to Labour’s beloved ethnic minorities, libertarians and latter-day hippies who still respect mother nature and bodily autonomy. Aerial footage showed hundreds of thousands at the big London protests against vaccine passports of 2021. Yet they barely figured in mainstream news bulletins. Any reports in the legacy media referred to a few thousand antivax protesters and highlighted peripheral scuffles with the police. Unlike other large demonstrations I’ve attended over the years, there were no printed placards from the trade unions or suspect organisations such as Socialist Workers Party. On the way back from a freedom protest in Glasgow, I encountered a masked Socialist Worker seller. The SWP’s main bone of contention with Big Pharma related to the perceived shortage of their mRNA products in the developing world and not to the safety, efficacy or purpose of the multi-trillion-dollar global injection campaign. I asked whether the SWP now supports UBI (universal basic income) and, not entirely to my surprise, they do as a transitionary measure on the road to the full socialism. The next question flummoxed the humble young Trotskyist: “How could people on UBI go on strike if the managerial classes were, heaven forbid, to abuse their power?”. She had no answer other than to claim we could rise up and seize control of the means of production, but I quipped they “could just declare a health emergency and block people’s bank accounts or access to any form of transport if they protest, you know, just like they do in China”. The conversation ended there. While organised groups of essential workers may counteract the hegemony of mega-corporations, the welfare classes can only beg for more social credits.
Noam Chomsky’s support for biotech apartheid was the last straw. I could forgive him for taking different stances on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy or on the demolition of NYC’s iconic World Trade Center, but how could the author of Manufacturing Consent fail to question the extreme bias of the corporate media over medical martial law? How could libertarian socialists turn a blind to the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth and power from the working classes to a bunch of super-billionaires? Yet this is what happened. With rare exceptions, the whole conventional left from Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand to Lula Da Silvia in Brazil and from eco-vegans to the remnants of the Fourth International embraced the covid cult and, in doing so, aided and abetted Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. Pseudo-intellectual neo-Marxist rhetoric makes little practical sense if you have effectively delegated humanity’s future to BlackRock and Vanguard.
Unlike its forerunners, the new corporate left seeks to exploit racial, sexual and neurological identities to guide the masses towards a micromanaged welfare utopia in lockstep with corporate NGOs. At best the postmodern left can demand higher taxes for the rich and more generous handouts for the poor, but the workless masses cannot go on strike. They are at the behest of the technocratic classes who seek to consolidate their control not just over the means of production, but over the whole of humanity. Rather than empower the working classes, the elitist left wants to phase out the labour force altogether.
The battleground no longer pits left against right, but bottom against top or rather natural human beings against technocrats. We need to build a new movement to challenge the greatest concentration of wealth and power in human history.