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The Establishments war on Donald Trump Title: The Collapse of the Left CHARLES HUGH SMITH JANUARY 22, 2017
The Collapse of the Left The Left is not just in disarray--it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power. The source of the angry angst rippling through the Democratic Party's progressive camp is not President Trump--it's the complete collapse of the Left globally. To understand this collapse, we turn (once again) to Marx's profound understanding of the state and capitalism. We turn not to the cultural Marxism that is passingly familiar to Americans, but to Marx's core economic analysis, which as Sartre noted, is only taught to discredit it. Cultural Marxism draws as much from Engels as Marx. In today's use, cultural Marxism describes the overt erosion of traditional values--the family, community, religious faith, property rights and limited central government--in favor of rootless Cosmopolitanism and an expansive, all-powerful central state that replaces community, faith and property rights with statist control mechanisms that enforce dependence on the state and a mindset that the individual is guilty of anti-state thinking until proven innocent by the state's own rules. Marx's critique of capitalism is economic: capital and labor are in eternal conflict. In Marx's analysis, capital has the upper hand until the internal contradictions of capitalism consume capital's control from the inside. Capital not only dominates labor, it also dominates the state. Thus the state- cartel version of capitalism that is dominant globally is not a coincidence or an outlier--it is the the only possible outcome of a system in which capital is the dominant force. To counter this dominance of capital, social democratic political movements arose to wrest some measure of control out of the hands of capital in favor of labor. Social democratic movements were greatly aided by the near-collapse of the first version of cartel-capitalism in The Great Depression, when writing down the bad debt would have brought down the entire banking system and crippled capitalism's core function of growing capital via expansion of debt. The decimated owners of capital realized that they faced a bleak choice: either resist and be toppled by anarchism or Communism, or cede some of their wealth and power to the social democratic parties in exchange for social, political and economic stability. Broadly speaking, the Left favored labor (whose rights were protected by the state) and the Right favored capital (also protected by the state). But over the past 25 years of globalized neoliberalism, social democratic movements have abandoned labor to embrace the self-serving wealth and power offered by capital. The essence of globalization is: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities. Neoliberalism--the opening of markets and borders--enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. The social democrats, in embracing open borders, have institutionalized an open immigration that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost immigrant labor that serves capital's desire for lower costs. Globalization and neoliberal financial / immigration policies signify the collapse of the Left and the victory of capital. Now capital completely dominates the state and its cronyist structures--political parties, lobbying, campaign contributions, charitable foundations operating as pay-for-play cash vacuums, and all the other features of cartel-state capitalism. To mask the collapse of the Left's economic defense of labor, the Left's apologists and PR machine have substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities to acquire economic security and capital. This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of self-described "progressives" completely bought the left's Great Con that "social justice" campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups were the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements. This diversionary sleight-of-hand embrace of economically neutered "social justice" campaigns masked the fact that social democratic parties everywhere have thrown labor into the churning propellers of globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies--all of which benefit mobile capital, which has engorged itself on the abandonment of labor by the Left. Meanwhile, the fat-cats of the Left have engorged themselves on capital's largesse in exchange for their treachery. Bill and Hillary Clinton's $200 million in "earnings" come to mind, as do countless other examples of personal aggrandizement by self-proclaimed "defenders" of labor. The Left is not just in disarray--it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power. Anyone who denies this is still in the fatal grip of the Left's Great Con. Poster Comment: "To mask the collapse of the Left's economic defense of labor, the Left's apologists and PR machine have substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities to acquire economic security and capital. This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of self-described "progressives" completely bought the left's Great Con that "social justice" campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups were the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements. " Trump has won by calling their bluff. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Trump has won by calling their bluff. Yes, Trump beat the dishonest Left. But it was labor who gave Trump the win. Now, to complete his triumph, he ALSO has to bring the capitalist Right to heel, forcing it to pay American workers American wages to be able to get its goods into the American market.
#2. To: Vicomte13 (#1) Do yourself a favor, go to this guy's website and read his ideas.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
#3. To: tpaine (#2) Hey, thanks. I agree with what he wrote on healthcare. We could literally adopt Chile's health care system and have better results than we have.
#4. To: tpaine (#0) (Edited) The Collapse of the Left The radical left is not collapsing. It is in far greater position than it ever has been. It hs won every major battle in this country for 80 years. It remains essentially intellectually unopposed.
#5. To: rlk (#4) The Left is not just in disarray--it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power. Anyone who denies this is still in the fatal grip of the Left's Great Con. --- The article. Apparently you're a victim of the 'Left's Great Con'. Get help.
#6. To: rlk (#4) (Edited) The radical left is not collapsing. It is in far greater position than it ever has been. It hs won every major battle in this country for 80 years. It remains essentially intellectually unopposed. And that is because the Left is intellectually and morally correct on a couple of key points that the Right has systematically refused to engage upon with any sort of intellectual honesty. (The same is true in reverse, by the way, but we're talking here about the persistent intellectual appeal of the Left.) The Right is not right, or even reasonable, in its approach to discussing the treatment of ill people and dealing with poverty. Both sides resort to cant, of course, and neither side's cant, if put into play, would actually WORK, but the Left, at least, has understood the need to actively DO SOMETHING to actually HELP the sick and the poor. The Right refuses to admit that, and pretends that their prescriptions - which DON't directly address what to do about people who are ill and suffering RIGHT NOW - will somehow fix it all, down the road, in a Right-wing utopia (that will never happen, because the Right won't address the very issue they dodge). Trouble is, believing Christians have to side with the Left on the matter of poverty relief and treatment for the sick - not because the Christians are leftists, but because their God commands them to take care of the poor and the sick, and the Right resists spending any money to do that. The Right does engage intellectually on the matter, but their arguments amount to laissez-faire, laissez-allez...which is to say, don't spend money on the poor and the sick. The argument is intellectual, but ultimately immoral, which is why the Left continues to hold the moral high ground (along with the Christians, whom the Left then discredits by talking about creation, abortion, and hierarchical gender roles - and past crimes and sins of the Church). Until the Right changes their mind and accepts that yes, there is a need to take care of all the sick and all the poor, that yeah, it's expensive, and that, yeah, some sort of redistribution in some guise is needed, it cannot even effectively engage in the debate with the Left. Instead, the Right divides between hard-core secular economists, and Christians. Some Christians try to straddle the line between those camps, but they just end up walking out on Christ when they do it. So there it is: matters of poverty and health care are the central issue on which the Right has, up until now, not had an acceptable intellectual basis on which to argue. With Trump, that's changing. Trump has told the country, for example, that the health care system he will sign that strikes down and replaces Obamacare will have coverage for pre-existing conditions. He gets it. You HAVE TO get treatment to those people...and in the end, many don't have the money, so you HAVE TO redistribute some wealth to do that. All the Right ever argues is NO. Which means they always lose, because "No" is a completely immoral answer. The Right tries to redefine morality but it always fails in that score, because the Left has their own (usually strange) definition of morality, and the Christians have their own commandments which they follow. So, in the end, the Right has to compromise on these subjects, and up to now, would not at all. So the Left continued to dominate. With Trump, there's a reasonableness that will allow the Right to start to argue on a basis that can win.
#7. To: tpaine (#0) I liked this but perceived a big portion of this piece as Marxist rhetoric about vulgar economic determinism. It seems stale and dated. The real world and the history of economics is so much more chaotic. I was hoping for an article that actually details the collapse of the global Left. For instance, since Netanyahu's surprise near-landslide victory in his last election (after Obama's team was dispatched to defeat him and all the "polls" predicted a 3%-5% loss for him), the Labor party in Israel is virtually extinct. Similar events seem likely to happen across the EU this year since even the EUros are finally fed up with their Lefty leadership and their failed policies, particularly with the "bad example" of Brexit staring them all in the face.
#8. To: Tooconservative (#7) rlk (#4) ------ The radical left is not collapsing. It is in far greater position than it ever has been. It hs won every major battle in this country for 80 years. It remains essentially intellectually unopposed. I'd urge all of you to go to the authors website, and read more of his articles and/or books. Quite a few of his books are free to read on Amazon.
As far as I can see, he is not a Marxist....
#9. To: rlk (#4) If Americas elementary, high school and college teachers could be deprogrammed, then we could stop the libtard indoctrination I'm the infidel... Allah warned you about. كافر المسلح #10. To: GrandIsland (#9) 9. To: rlk (#4) Reprogramming is your fooltard dream, but Trumps new education Secretary could get us back on the right track. Your own indoctrination agenda, defending the status quo in law enforcement, needs a LOT of work... Any thoughts about that?
#11. To: GrandIsland (#9) If Americas elementary, high school and college teachers could be deprogrammed, then we could stop the libtard indoctrination You are a fool as usual. Since you live in your mom's basement and all walled-upped in the basement ... I often wonder if your mom climbs down the stairs to beat the shit out of you. You need need not comment.
#12. To: buckeroo (#11) I often wonder if your mom climbs down the stairs to beat the shit out of you. When its really necessary, she lowers the ladder.
#13. To: tpaine (#12) Some of these folks don't realize the idea of "freedom." Nope, they want to argue about silly stuff.
#14. To: buckeroo, tpaine (#13) Why don't you two libtards fuk off and die... along with the patriarch of faggots, Stinky Peter Puff I'm the infidel... Allah warned you about. كافر المسلح #15. To: GrandIsland (#9) If Americas elementary, high school and college teachers could be deprogrammed, then we could stop the libtard indoctrination You're correct, but that's difficult. They can't be deprogrammed any more than Hillary and Obama can be reprogrammed. You'd need to start by imposing a curriculum in basic sciences ans philosophy of science as a prerequisite to college graduation. From there you would need to create a similar academic structure in the lower school systems. It would take about 40 years. I've outlined this in greater detail elsewhere.
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