Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains – the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse.

"Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right bellows as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the Neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the global corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, filled and still fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other, a process that allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to justify slipping the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the looming threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The old red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

A con of the first water

The Neo-lib inspired management-governance split left local councils in New Zealand in the grip of central government by making party political divides in local governance opaque, by placing too much power in the hands of CEOs, and by imposing layers of regulation almost all of which have to funded out of rates, which residents pay out of their taxed income and on which they are then taxed again by central government via GST.

Back in the colonialist days of powerful provincial governance, some people longed for a strong central government to curb the untrammelled greed and rampant self-interest of those who controlled the provinces. 

We live in an era in which those venal, self-serving attributes are firmly in the driving seat at all levels of both the governance and the management of a socio-economic system that is rooted in exploitation in pursuit of private profit. Calls for more local power in that socio-economic landscape are a chimera.

As a case in point: I live in a district with a population of just under 14k in a land area of 8,600 square kilometres. Our rates have skyrocketed, not solely because of the abandonment of Three Waters but because of decades of poor management and governance.

We have water which meets WHO standards but due in part to a council strategy of mixing water from different sources (funded by the last government), our water is so heavy with minerals and chlorine it destroys water heaters and whiteware unless softened and filtered as most people are now forced to do at their own expense. 

The reticulated rural water supply is old in places, and leaks are frequent with untold amounts of potable water being wasted.

The bulk of the district’s roads are unsealed and poorly maintained, due largely to the inefficiencies and false economy of the Neo-lib contract culture in which local councils are firmly enmeshed. 

As a rural property we were forced to install a sewage system which, thanks to the regional government's subservience to the Neo-lib ethos, requires on-going maintenance, initially by the company which installed it, then by a large corporation which bought that company which now out-sources the job to a self-employed contractor. 

We have no rubbish collection, and the council effectively destroyed one of the country’s most advanced and innovative community-led recycling initiatives to pass a key contract onto a private sector provider. When questioned about what was widely perceived locally as a conflict of interest, the then mayor laughed and said, “This is XXX, there’s always a conflict of interest.”

All that aside, NZ’s total population is half that of Seoul. It is skewed, not just in relation to the numbers in the northern island, but in greater Auckland. 

The larger island (also the location of the great, state-funded hydro schemes which supply 60% of the nation’s now privatised electricity) is home to just 1.2 million people, half of them in one province. 

There is a pressing need for governance and management to be genuinely efficient and economic,  and to be responsive to local needs. We simply cannot afford to have deep layers of both national and local governance and management. 

The creation of the all-important buffer zone, the various strata of which have a financial and  status stake in the economic status quo, has resulted in layers of bureaucracy which are all-too often parasitic on essential front-line services. 

This is at its most obvious in the public sector, and at present it provides useful ideological cover for a crackpot coalition government to make swingeing cuts in the sector –  partly as a bone to divert some of its more rabid supporters, but mainly to fund the juicy steaks it intends to serve up to its main financial and political backers.  

They point to the layers of bureaucracy that their ilk created as a buffer zone, and to the struggling, front line service providers who have been starved of funding and ham strung by regulations, and they sacrifice some of the former, not to improve the latter, but to divert the “savings” into the pockets of the already-rich. 

Or, even more brazenly, to create new layers of bureaucracy to facilitate yet more asset stripping. 

It is a con of the first water; unparalleled in its callous impudence.

More On The Chains That Bind Us

Where and when they can, those who rule us prefer the use of ideological fetters over the sword. If they can persuade us that our economic and social chains are desirable fashion accessories which we should purchase from them and don willingly, so much the better. 

 

Capitalism is nothing if not adept at turning any threats to its existence or its profits, into money-making opportunities.

 

The sword is still there of course, often hiding inside a ceremonial scabbard, but it is wielded frequently enough against external and internal “enemies” to remind the masses of the existence of the powerful coercive apparatuses of the state, and who really controls them.

 

One of Neoliberal capitalism’s greatest victories was its destruction or weakening of any and all collectives that argue for a different social order, especially those which threaten its profit and its entrenched power. 

Up there with it, in terms of strategic importance, is having successfully lured a critical mass of left wingers into the intellectual and political shallows where they don’t have to learn how to survive in rough, cold seas, or be strong enough to swim against the current.

 

These warm shallows provide a false sense of security, and never more so than now when a tsunami of interconnected social and ecological issues is likely to drown many of us, or dash us onto the rocks. 

 

From global warming and resultant climate disequilibrium, to accelerating species extinctions, and mass plastics and chemical pollution … the interacting states of global disequilibrium have the potential to tip into whole system chaos. 

 

The possibility of a fusion of disastrous androgenic outcomes is a terrifying reality that has to be kept well-hidden, or social disequilibrium may rapidly worsen and tip into social chaos. 

 

The obfuscation and camouflaging of these realities is ordered by those whose manicured hands are on the system's controls but it is carried by the various strata of the coordinator class – the system managers who work to hide the deep fissures in the economic foundation, and disguise the various forms of rot that have spread throughout the superstructure. 

 

They continue to refine the well-tested tactics of distract, divert, divide and defame. 

1. Create and amplify social issues which distract and divert people away from the gross inequalities and the rapidly accelerating unsustainable nature of the current socio-economic system.

2. Foment divisions in, or forcibly break up any and all collectives that aim to change the system. 

3. By various forms of defamation, destroy the credibility of those who draw aside the ideological veils, especially those who call for mass collective action for immediate, structural change.

 

Apropos of this, I read a tweet from a person whose analysis of many issues, I rate highly. She was targeting those who focus on “shitting on trans people” or “shrieking about pronouns.” 

Her choice of words suggests she is focusing her anger more, possibly exclusively, on those who are narrowly focussed on opposing the current transgender orthodoxy than on those who are narrowly focussed on supporting it.

The interface between sex based, and gender identity based rights, has become a battlefield.

 

I despair when I see the principled, materialist stand that has been taken by left wing feminists being defamed by association with the religious and secular right's co-option of some of the issues. I also despair when I see people being sucked by the right into a literal hatred and fear of gender non-conforming others. 

However, I am not going to easily forgive all those leftish-liberals who flipped into witch-hunting mode so rapidly and so reflexively, there can be no doubt they harboured a pre-existing, deep-seated resentment of dissenting women.

 

Some of them called those dissenting women, “Nazis”, and refused to engage in good faith discussion. Cowardly or lazy others obediently followed suit, and with an unprecedented speed and fervour, the infantile equation of “TERF=Nazi” was accepted as left-wing political gospel.

 

It was a highly infectious ideological contagion that spread rapidly among those with a compromised socio-political immune system.

 

When various elements of the religious and secular right predictably leapt onto the gender critical bandwagon, grabbed the controls and steered it sharply rightward, the whited sepulchres of the liberal left pompously declared that to be proof they had been correct.

 

Even though the transgender orthodoxy has now lurched into the realms of self-parody, there is still a mass of largely reflexive support among leftish liberals for it. 

 

That support invariably takes the form of attacking selected women, and in my view, most of  those who indulge in it deserve as much of a smack as the other extreme. 

 

In a natural and social world at imminent risk of tipping very rapidly from disequilibrium into chaos, the gender identity issue was a master class in the use of division, distraction, diversion, and defamation.

The political left should at least be asking why and how this ideology, and the forms of praxis which flowed from it, morphed so rapidly into a powerful orthodoxy that was embraced enthusiastically by the corporate world, and by much of corporate capitalism’s compliant politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats.

We need to ask, who benefits from: 

- reducing people to isolated individuals, focussed on what they believe are their personal, and these days, bespoke “gender identity”, which effectively privileges the subjective, gendered “self” over the material, sexed body?

- worsening the conditions in which large numbers of people, especially the young, are profoundly alienated, in the sense of being socially isolated and estranged?

- replacing natural, human connection and community with the chimera of virtual or cyber-communities centred around a shared sense of individual self?

- pushing the ideal of self-improvement, of aspiring to be the best possible version of one’s self while forcing many into a struggle simply for survival? 

- dangling the false promise of appearance enhancement via various surgical procedures and chemical potions, and by so doing, creating arguably the most medically monitored and chemically corralled population in human history?

It’s obvious the capitalist system doesn’t care about the wellbeing of any of the people who have been captured by gender identity ideology, so the motive has to lie elsewhere – in the fact that it’s profitable, and currently, it is politically propitious.

We cannot get a grip on the rapid drive to provide gender affirming surgery and synthetic hormone treatments unless we locate it in the burgeoning medical-industrial complex, at the heart of which are the world’s giant chemical-pharmaceutical conglomerates. 

Gender affirming protocols could not exist without the precondition of the global trend towards medicine for profit, at its most starkly venal in the field of appearance medicine.

 

There couldn’t be all this appearance-related surgery without the Five As of modern, chemical-based medicine: anaesthetics, analgesics, antiseptics, antibiotics, & anti-inflammatories.

 

Almost every pill and potion that props up the entire medical system is produced, not for philanthropic or humanitarian reasons, but for profit, and crouching behind that vast mountain of profit, is the spectre of power.

 

For the medical-industrial complex, the gender identity market is, and will always be fairly niche – although capitalism does like the predictability of long term, captive markets, and surgically or chemically neutering people at a young age makes them dependent on synthetic hormone replacements and other treatments for many decades.  

 

The profit motive is real but I have always been, and remain of the opinion that gender identity ideology’s main utility to corporate capitalism, is its diversionary and divisive potential.

 

Everything points to the fact that if the threat–opportunity scale tilts, eg., if an ultra-conservative and far-right backlash gains sufficient momentum and starts to outweigh current market and social control advantages, gender identity ideology and all its various forms of praxis will be abandoned in a heartbeat. 

 

Surely most of us know, the same commercial, political, media, and academic forces that gave the gender identity orthodoxy so much credibility, so quickly, will be used to call it into disrepute and make it disappear just as rapidly.

 

The concern, for all people of good will, should be whether those who have been physically and/or ideologically captured by the current transgender orthodoxy will be sacrificed, and how wide the net of reaction will be flung.

 

The question then will be, where will you stand?

 

 

An Uncertain And Volatile Time

To be able to evolve, capitalism needed the legally free person who had the formal right to exercise economic choice. The creation of a class of persons cut free from the physical and ideological ties of feudalism or chattel slavery, to be able to sell their labour in a free market, always was an illusion, an ideological sleight of hand.

Such was the disparity in actual power, the only way an individual worker doing the selling could stand in any sort of equal relationship with the capitalist doing the buying, was to be in some sort of collective, i.e., to be in combination with others.

 

Those collectives enabled the sellers of labour to negotiate more equally with the buyers. This is why they always were and still are, hated and feared by the capitalist class, which will try to drive down labour costs by any means possible. (1)

 

Thus, the extension of the formal right to sell one’s labour, helped to create the modern individual and the notion of that individual's formal and social rights.

 

The strongest (2) of the working class collectives were eventually able to use the growing power of the modern state, which initially was the creation and servant of the capitalist class, to codify workers’ rights and to extend, and protect both individual and collective rights.

 

Trade unions, and other liberatory collectives, then sought to use the power of the modern state, to turn it into a force for wider social progress, or at least, to stop it from being an opponent to it.

 

This harnessing of the power of the state for social progress, reached its apogee in the decades after World War Two. 

Internationally, there was the rise in the power of the Soviet bloc, China’s emergence as a communist controlled state, and a global surge in national liberation movements as peoples sought to gain freedom from their European colonial overlords. 

 

Domestically, in the developed world, liberation movements ranged from women's, black and indigenous, gay and lesbian, and prisoners' rights, to the anti-psychiatry movement which sought to protect the rights of people with mental illness.

 

For a brief moment in time, in the affluent countries of the world, the people best placed to push past the essential iniquities and unsustainability of capitalism were diverted by the illusion of social democracy –  the idea that the modern state could and would act to control capital.

 

Concessions made by the state ensured that too many of the people who were best placed to push for structural change, bought into the illusion that those concessions meant capitalism could be controlled, even be forced into being a benign force for social progress and justice.

 

The power of the myth of capitalist social democracy resides in the people who are wedded to it because they continue to benefit from it, materially and in term of status.

 

These people were and are not the most oppressed and hyper-exploited of the world – the mass for whom the era of post war Keynsianism brought far fewer real benefits, if any; they are the members of the ruling class’s buffer zone: the managers, the professionals, the academics, the career politicians, the technocrats and commentators – all those who keep the system running.

 

And to keep the system running, the most important thing they have to do, is to destroy the belief in any viable alternative.

 

Thus, a key clause in their compact with capital is to make the argument that communism is a greater enemy than fascism; that both are extremes which end in totalitarianism, and the only safe place is in the middle, huddled around what the ruling class declares to be the social and economic fulcrum point. 

 

That the entire set of scales is owned and controlled by the same tiny, venal, power-obsessed, pathological elite it always was, is either not understood or is ignored.

 

The warning signs were posted when national liberation movements were derailed by overt and covert destabilisation and regime changes, and military action by the US and its allies even before WW2 had finally ended, and ramped up immediately after.

 

Any objective reading of history from the end of WW2 to the victory of global corporate finance capitalism with the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and the Warsaw Pact, shows there never was “peace”; and the blood-soaked foundations for the emergence of “neo-liberalism” had been laid much earlier than 1990.

 

The granting of social and legal concessions, important though they are in giving breathing space to oppressed peoples, was always, at base, in the service of the economic status quo.

 

The so-called neo-liberal era saw shifts in the way the capitalist class operates, from extremes of social and economic stratification, grossly ostentatious expressions of power and privilege, and European global domination exercised via settler and extractive colonialism, to the American empire’s apparently more democratic meritocracy, and its global domination via finance-based, neo-colonialism. 

 

There has been a seventy year long heyday for the global buffer class in the form of a steady flow of extensions of formal rights, loosening of conservative traditions, and a widening of social acceptance of previously proscribed lifestyles. 

Accompanying this was what rapidly built into a flood of various sorts of consumables, often useless, or quickly obsolete accoutrements signalling status, and serving as markers of progress for those in the coordinator class whose primary role is to convince people that an essentially predatory and unsustainable system works for the benefit of all.

 

The mass of easily repealed formal rights, the veneer of increased social acceptance, and the bribes of consumer baubles continue to help obscure the fact that the political, economic, and consumer choices available to the buffer class inside the imperial heartlands are denied to the bulk of the world’s population, and inside the belly of the beast itself, the distribution of wealth and power is grossly skewed. 

In a real sense, US corporate capitalism is a leap back, slamming shut the small windows of opportunity that had been opened for a relatively select few after WW2.

To obscure the reality that for most people, the era's social freedoms, formal rights, and consumer choices are either a trompe l’oeil, or are highly conditional and proscribed, capitalism continues to create a mass of obfuscating ideologies.

 

These encourage people to be content with living vicariously via brief, curated glimpses of the lives of the rich and powerful. By dispensing latter day fairy stories, myths, and legends, they allow the mind at least to escape the often terrifying and ugly realities confronting us every day on the screens which now surround us.

 

It is in this wider context that via the alchemists of the medical-industrial complex, capitalism dangles the illusions of body-identity alignment, and attainment of, if not eternal, at least an extended youth.

In the context of all this and a growing right-wing backlash, such things as a declaration of a state of emergency about the rights of the LGBT+ community, by the US Human Rights Campaign, may well be warranted.

It’s both tragic and ironic that in pursuit of their political aims, so much hyperbolic rhetoric and catastrophising was deployed by gender identity lobbyists and activists, many people are either no longer listening, do not believe it, or do not care.

Most worrying, is the fact that some people are now in the grip of payback fever, a virulent contagion which can lead to otherwise sensible and decent people committing atrocities, or allowing them to be committed by others.

 

Some of us have long predicted a strong right-wing and socially conservative backlash against "radical transgenderism", which, if it gains enough momentum, could sweep away everything from such advances as women's reproductive and employment rights, no fault divorce, and criminalisation of marital rape, to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and equalisation of marriage rights - i.e., an entire gamut of formal rights and the accompanying shifts in social acceptance.

 

The target of the right-wing backlash is not just trans people but everything that the growing ultra-conservative coalition includes in its definition of "gender ideology", i.e., any social shifts and formal rights it sees as destructive of the core tenets of familial patriarchy, and of wider androcentric and highly stratified forms of social organisation.

 

This is not just a resurgence of facets of male supremacy in wider society but a livening of its roots in patriarchal familial organisation – the man as head of a household based on religiously sanctioned, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, with women back in their divinely ordained and biologically proscribed place.

 

What the naifs, cowards, and payback merchants on the left/centre of Neo-liberalism (i.e., those who never had, or have given up on any hope of systemic change) failed to realise or to take account of is that we are living in an uncertain and volatile time –i.e., in a degree of wider social disequilibrium that could rapidly tip into chaos.

 

Inside the velvet glove of state granted formal rights to women and to marginalised minorities, and the heavily conditional support of a range of institutions, is the steel fist of neo-liberal corporate capitalism which has a death grip on the throat of the planet.

 

 

1.   From the anti-combination acts, military action against strikers, depictions of unions as "the enemy within", entryism and use of agents provocateurs, buying off leaders, and the use of the "contract culture", capitalism demonstrates its implacable opposition to working class collectivism.

2.  Numerically or by virtue of importance, to the enterprise, of the work being done.

 

Striking a pose

 You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Back in the day, Thatcher's bully boys in the right-wing British media coined the phrases loony Left and PC madness. They used them to label and to demonise left-wing local authorities, feminist, and anti-racist organisations, and the trade union movement that was fighting to protect jobs and services. 

The motivation was to weaken opposition in advance of the ravaging effects of the disinvestment and privatisation being ushered in by neo-liberal, global corporate capitalism.

The first thing the Thatcher government did was to remove the controls on the export of capital. That signalled the start of a massive flow of investment to places in the world where corporations could extract more profit by paying less for labour and have the bonus of being able to pollute and spoil to their heart's content. 

They did not invest to improve the lives of workers in those regions. Like the first wave of transnational corporate investment and its associated governmental aid, neo-liberal corporate investment was purely in the pursuit of profit. 

The first wave of investment had been aimed at developing infrastructure to facilitate the extraction of natural resources; the second was aimed at the exploitation of “human resources”. (1)  

Neo-liberalism has been in the driving seat for almost half a century. During that time there has been an explosion in digital technology and a dramatic rise in the living standards, choices, and expectations of the buffer class. 

The price for that is a massive increase in energy consumption, the development and use of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals, the dumping of billions of tonnes of toxic waste, along with galloping species’ extinctions and accelerating climate change. 

The threat posed by AI is yet to be fully grasped. 

Arguably neo-liberalism’s greatest harm is also its greatest ideological success – the virtual destruction of the belief in the possibility of foundational economic change. 

In this on-going process, its media game has become more subtle.

The second-wave feminist idea that structural change needs to be accompanied by attitudinal change, has been transmogrified into the idea that attitudinal change alone is sufficient to bring about such structural change as is necessary.  

For neo-liberalism’s well-padded buffer class, whose members are the most heavily invested in identity politics, what constitutes necessary structural change is radically different from that demanded by the traditional left operating in the interests of the working class.

Underlying much of identity politics (rhetorical flourishes on Twitter bios notwithstanding) is the acceptance that a radical change of the economic base is either not necessary or is unachievable.  All that needs to be, or all that can be achieved, are some accommodations for those who are disadvantaged and belong to one or more of the categories on the current list of approved oppressed-minorities. 

This locates the adherents of identity politics as the progressive wing of neo-liberalism, or the neo-liberal Left. It does not make them left-wing in the original meaning of the term. 

What worsens the situation is that for some of the neo-liberal left,  all that is needed to bring about attitudinal change is attitudinising. As a result, posturing on social media often becomes the measuring stick of what is progressive.

That attitudinising has been deemed by the Right to be left wing and the older, discredited right-wing slurs of PC madness and the loony left have been replaced by woke, the radical left, or hard left.

The neo-liberal left falls into the trap set for them by not questioning why it is that demands which question arguably one of the most universal and foundational of human understandings – that there are two sexes  – are not just accepted but are actively promoted by neo-liberal governments and the giant corporations whose interests those governments serve. 

Their narrow focus effectively privileges demands for extensions of, or even entirely new, formal rights within a politico-economic system that is either perpetuating or deepening gross inequalities and injustices in other spheres.  

Those on both sides of the Identity Question who fail to look beyond the labelling and the rhetoric, are helping to fuel the most recent iteration of capitalism’s campaign to keep divided the constituent parts of a global movement which could bring about foundational change.  

  
(1)   Human resources is a phrase that speaks to the dehumanisation of the process ­­– ­­ living human beings reduced to a factor in an economic equation aimed at increasing the obscene wealth of a ruling elite.