We’ve reached a point in the new cold war where the methods our ruling elites have so far used to manage the narrative are proving to be unsustainable. Over this summer, the Ukraine psyop (whose influence over the American public had already been declining for months) definitively failed, with a majority of the country having come to oppose Ukraine aid. Ukraine was always seen by the U.S. empire as a disposable tool which wouldn’t ever be able to take back its lost territories; but the empire was still expecting the proxy war to succeed at destabilizing Russia, and thereby at rendering China vulnerable. Because Russia’s economy kept growing amid the sanctions; and this collapse of Eurasia thereby didn’t happen; the imperialists felt pressured to keep using Ukraine as a weapon. This only further hurt the living standards of Europeans and Americans, leading to fatigue over the Ukraine narrative. That weakened the psyop machine’s leverage over the popular consciousness, perhaps in an irreversible way.
The highest levels of capital are feeling a loss of control. They’re finding themselves unable to sufficiently sell the empire’s war operations, something that also applies to the domestic austerity policies which the elites aim to accelerate.
Because of this failure, the elites are seeking out a different method for advancing their strategic goals; this method is to turn the wars increasingly inward. To carry out a purge of dissent—namely the anti-imperialist movement—that’s sold as an effort to save our “democratic institutions” from fascism. This narrative depends on the notion that all illiberal forces are inherently fascist; which will be impossible to get most Americans to accept, given that a majority of them are now anti-Ukraine. But through censorship, repression, and warfare against targeted individuals, our ruling class aims to suppress opposition to this narrative; at least enough for such tyranny to be implemented without successful backlash. The goal of the elites is to make sure the people are too divided, confused, and terrorized to be able to fight back.
To prevent the state from achieving this, we need to learn how to identify what controlled opposition looks like under our present conditions; because there are plenty of people and groups that claim to be allies of the people, yet are fundamentally compatible with the imperial order. Their defining trait is to embrace a type of practice that’s unable to mobilize anyone outside of an activist niche; that’s based within copying the identitarian posturing of the Democratic Party, while rejecting alliances with most of the anti-NATO movement. This is a pattern of operating that’s indicative of a project to build a business, not a project to win the class war; and that’s because these conventional leftist orgs have embraced the same operating model which actual corporations have.
When you look at the methods that the biggest players in finance capital have come to utilize over the last decade or so, you see why I make this comparison. BlackRock—the company that effectively owns numerous governments and has claimed the remains of a destroyed Ukraine—is the biggest example of what I’m talking about. BlackRock is one of the corporate investment sources that’s been influencing culture by getting its employees (along with the entertainment companies which it holds financial leverage over) to adhere to a superficial aesthetic of social progressivism.
The companies within its category, that being the highest levels of capital, have shifted towards promoting an image of social awareness and inclusion. It started with a policy of manipulative corporate diversity training prograns; and has since expanded into an arrangement where companies get better rewarded with investments the more they follow a series of guidelines for inclusive conduct.
This is a hidden factor behind why popular entertainment, particularly when it comes to movies, has been so lacking in creative quality lately: Disney and the other Hollywood conglomerates have become so concerned with pleasing their investors through performative shows of alleged social progressivism, that they’ve gotten more content with neglecting to produce good entertainment. This strange dynamic, called “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG), reveals a reality which the New Left doesn’t want to confront: that the most powerful wing of capital is fundamentally compatible with the New Left’s exclusively identitarian mode of politics. Investors in BlackRock and elsewhere have gladly adopted these politics, because they provide a way for capitalism to maintain itself by adapting to a more culturally evolved new era.
These investors are the ones who hold the power where it matters in corporate America, despite the efforts to propagandize the public into thinking its “stakeholder capitalism” model represents something egalitarian. The “stakeholder capitalism” scam has been promoted in recent years by a network of paid influencers, mainly the YouTuber Johnny Harris; these influencers have been instructed to proclaim that this type of capitalism makes society more equal by turning consumers into “stakeholders,” who supposedly hold as much power over companies as executives do. This narrative is absurd, and is fitting with the efforts by the “stakeholder capitalism” companies to portray themselves as making the world more just.
I’ve described this recent corporate scam because it directly parallels the way the predominant “leftist” orgs in this country operate. These orgs have essentially the same relationship towards liberal NGOs, and towards the Democratic Party itself, that Disney has towards institutions like BlackRock: a relationship of appeasement, where the subordinate party feels compelled to adhere to a certain mode of operating or else lose the resources it depends on.
This is why the orgs I’m talking about have either ignored or attacked the anti-NATO coalition that appeared this year: they’re only going to support iterations of the antiwar movement that are viewed as acceptable by the liberal institutions which they’re beholden to. If an antiwar project doesn’t care about appealing to liberals, then it’s seen as a threat to the central goal these leftist orgs have, which is to monopolize activism.
Under this operating model, you speak and act for an audience of one: whoever is providing you with the means to keep your business going. Everyone else is irrelevant. That’s how the highest levels of capital operate: by holding a monopoly over the culture, making it so that anyone who deviates from the orthodoxy can be deplatformed, targeted with character assassination, and cut off from having any institutional influence. To avoid this retaliation, the participants in these systems stay within an isolated zone, while conditioning themselves to view everyone who challenges their business model with suspicion.
Following such an insular path naturally isolates you from the people, but the organizations that adhere to it aren’t going to abandon it; they know that the institutions they’ve aligned with are always going to keep them financially alive, so long as they please these institutions. And if you have enough financial resources, whether you have a relationship with the people doesn’t ultimately matter, as money can buy you success. It’s a way of getting guaranteed security, at least for as long as our present social system exists.
Parallel to how the people have become fatigued over the Ukraine narrative, the people have become fatigued over the shallow corporate art that Disney has been imposing upon them under this model. This year has been catastrophic for Disney, with the public showing itself to now be apathetic about its unexciting and oversaturated recent content. Which is one symptom of a larger trend in our culture: the people are getting increasingly alienated from what powerful institutions have to sell them. When you keep telling the people that they should invest themselves in your brand; and this brand doesn’t satisfy their needs; they’re going to stop being receptive to what you say. The same applies to the faux-vanguard industrial complex, which by its nature can’t provide the workers with serious leadership and therefore inevitably produces activist burnout.
That the leftist orgs with by far the most resources and members have failed to bring back the sustained mass mobilizations of the country’s past, even though today’s conditions are compatible with such a revolutionary development, has left the people without a reason to care about these orgs. As historical actors these orgs are inert, and they’re content to remain inert because it’s in their financial interests to do so. Which has created an opportunity for the pro-Russian communist orgs, and their allies in other anti-NATO forces like the Libertarian Party, to grow their presence.
From media propaganda, to popular culture, to controlled opposition groups, the ruling class is finding that it’s unable to win the cognitive war. In all three of these narrative management arenas, finance capital is using identity-based progressive politics as its central tool for influencing culture; like the “socially aware” corporations, or the compatible left, the spokespeople for the Ukraine proxy war have prioritized appealing to the left. And this strategy has failed to gain the loyalty of everyone outside the Russiagate-invested niche, revealing just how much popular opposition exists towards the war machine; and, by extension, towards the capitalist system behind this manufactured war.
Because the liberal project leads its participants towards being detached from the people; and towards lacking in ability to understand why the majority doesn’t embrace the “correct” ideas; the only way these elites can react to this consciousness shift is with spite. They aren’t interested in learning why the people are rejecting NATO’s agenda; only in advancing this agenda (along with the next phases of domestic austerity) by any means necessary.
This is why even though the hegemon is still pursuing a hybrid war against BRICS as a replacement for the Ukraine proxy war, I now believe the primary psyop we’re shifting into is one which focuses on justifying a war against dissent domestically. That the empire has lost the narrative war over Ukraine shows it won’t be able to win the narrative war over BRICS either; and because of this, the empire is having to limit how much it attacks the BRICS countries, recognizing that it must choose its next targets carefully. The only fight the empire has a real chance of winning now is the one against the USA’s own people; and the best narrative for this assault upon the masses is one which portrays them as too dumb to know what’s good for them.
The partisans of the liberal order view everyone who’s rejected their propaganda as conspiracy cranks, as bigots; as “deplorables.” These are the stereotypes we’re going to see put forth about the American workers who’ve turned against NATO, with emphasis on the idea that all these people are simply motivated by xenophobia and nativism. Which is going to require hiding the reality that Black anti-racist organizers are the first pro-Russian political actors who are being persecuted; that’s what the media seeks to do by ignoring the Uhuru case.
The narrative managers want to divert attention away from our government’s intensifying war against the people; they want to keep the repression of anti-imperialists on the margins of the discourse, so that their “only reactionaries oppose NATO” argument doesn’t get challenged. The 2024 election is the next big distraction they’ll use; after that it will be the culture war, and perhaps a rebooted version of Russiagate.
An effort to resist this purge can only succeed on the basis of rejecting the model of posturing which the Democratic Party, and the corporations that control it, are built on. If you try to run a communist organization in the way these capitalist institutions run themselves, you’re not going to get a revolution out of it; you’re only going to get a business out of it. These institutions view their work through a lens of competition, where anyone who threatens their monopoly is seen as an enemy to be crushed; and the central narrative tactic they now use within such assaults is to portray their enemies as agents of the reactionary right.
That’s the way they depicted Bernie Sanders prior to when he became fully assimilated into the Democratic Party machine, and joined the neocons in supporting the Ukraine aid project. All who don’t conform to the pressure, like Sanders did, are going to remain targets of the offensive these institutions are waging upon their rivals; an offensive that’s now escalating to the point where the targets can be raided and indicted. The next logical action is to discard the courts themselves, and start taking the lives of targeted individuals within U.S. borders; it will be like how our government wantonly blows people up with drones abroad.
At the moment, the domestic conflict between the pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist sides looks like it’s getting quieter compared to how it’s been over the last year; but that’s only because the media is burying the Uhuru case, and the empire’s propagandists are trying to distract from the Canadian Nazi incident. This conflict is truly escalating, and shifting towards new arenas of debate. What we’re seeing become the main point of contention is the issue of whether we, as organizers and as politically minded people in general, should base our thinking off of the kind of posturing the liberals engage in.
You can oppose the reactionary social agenda of the far-right, without acting like you’re a Disney PR manager trying to adhere to ESG. As an agent within the class struggle, one’s priority can’t be to appease entrenched liberal interests which don’t care about our cause; it has to be building a relationship with the majority of the people, and giving them the tools to overthrow the capitalist state.
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