Thursday 28th of March 2024

the graves of history: the merging of idealism and despotism with sovereignty under a covid19 pretext...

leon

Napoleon presented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society—the political idealism of its daily practice—he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires [businessmen] was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon's power. Paris exchange-brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.[1]


              — Karl Marx



Marx first used the term [Permanent Revolution] in the phrase "by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution" in this passage from The Holy Family (1844).

In this passage, Marx says that Napoleon prevented the bourgeois revolution in France from becoming fulfilled; that is, he prevented bourgeois political forces from achieving a total expression of their interests. According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the "liberalism of bourgeois society" and did it because he saw "the state as an end in itself", a value which supported his "political aim of conquest". Thus, he substituted "permanent war for permanent revolution". However, the final two sentences show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but continued to pursue their interests. For Marx, permanent revolution involves a revolutionary class (in this case, the bourgeoisie) continuing to push for and achieve its interests despite the political dominance of actors with opposing interests.

By 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase by other writers (Eugen Alexis Schwanbeck, a journalist on the Kölnische Zeitungnewspaper;[2] and Henri Druey),[3] suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution

--------------------------

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and BolshevikLeninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariatproletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky were close both ideologically and personally during the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and some call Trotsky its "co-leader".[1] Trotsky was the paramount leader of the Red Army in the direct aftermath of the Revolutionary period. Trotsky initially opposed some aspects of Leninism, but he concluded that unity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was impossible and joined the Bolsheviks. Trotsky played a leading role with Lenin in the revolution. Assessing Trotsky, Lenin wrote: "Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik."[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

---------------------

Leon Trotsky awaited the inevitable as he fed his rabbits on the afternoon of August 20, 1940. Marked for death by Joseph Stalin, the 60-year-old intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution knew that neither the armed guards patrolling the high walls of his Mexico City compound nor even the thousands of miles of land and sea that stretched between him and Moscow could completely protect him from the Soviet dictator’s deadly reach. Any thoughts of finding a sanctuary in exile had been destroyed like his bullet-riddled bedroom door when Stalinist agents stormed his villa less than three months earlier in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

Trotsky, though, had been used to dangerous enemies since his early days as a student revolutionary in Russia. The czarist government had twice exiled him to Siberia for his Marxist beliefs. In between, the man born Lev Davidovich Bronstein had escaped to London on a forged British passport, under the name Leon Trotsky, and met fellow revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he plotted a coup of the provisional government with Lenin and formed the Red Army, which defeated the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the ensuing civil war. 

 

Trotsky appeared to be Lenin’s natural successor, but he lost a power struggle to Stalin following the Soviet leader’s death in 1924. Trotsky became increasingly critical of Stalin’s totalitarian tactics, and his belief in a permanent global proletarian revolution ran counter to his rival’s thought that it was possible to have communism survive in the Soviet Union alone. Sensing a threat to his power, the Soviet dictator expelled Trotsky from the Politburo and the Communist Party before exiling him to present-day Kazakhstan and banishing him from the country altogether in 1929. After a four-year stay in Turkey and brief stops in France and Norway, Trotsky received asylum in Mexico in 1936.

 

The exiled dissident settled in Mexico City’s leafy Coyoacan neighborhood and held court with American and Mexican supporters—as well as carried on an affair with painter Frida Kahlo—while organizing the Fourth International to fight against both capitalism and Stalinism. Trotsky may have been out of Stalin’s sight, but he was never out of his mind. As the outspoken exile continued to castigate his foe, Trotsky was found guilty of treason by a show court and condemned to death. 

 

On the early morning hours of May 24, 1940, a group of 20 gunmen stormed Trotsky’s walled compound to carry out the sentence. They sprayed the house with bullets but missed their target before they were forced to retreat. The political pariah’s bodyguards, mostly young American Trotskyites, expected the next attack would come from a bomb, so they heightened the compound’s exterior walls, bricked over windows and added watchtowers with money provided by wealthy American benefactors. “Thanks to the efforts of the North American friends, our peaceful suburban house is now being transformed, week by week, into a fortress—and at the same time into a prison,” Trotsky wrote to one of his backers. 

 

Now, nearly three months later as the hunted man scattered food for his pet bunnies on an August afternoon, his guards continued work connecting a powerful siren on the roof when they noticed a familiar face at the compound’s gates. Frank Jacson had been a frequent caller in recent weeks. The boyfriend of a Trotsky confidante from Brooklyn named Sylvia Ageloff, Jacson was thought of as one of the family by the guards.

 

Along with a raincoat folded over his left arm—a strange choice of clothing on such a sunny afternoon—Jacson also carried an article that he had written and asked the revolutionary leader to review. Trotsky led the visitor to his study. Suddenly, Jacson pulled out a pickaxe with a shortened handle from inside his raincoat and buried its sharp steel tip in Trotsky’s skull. Although bleeding profusely, the expatriate managed to grapple with his attacker as guards rushed into the study. They found a dagger hidden in a secret pocket of Jacson’s blood-splattered raincoat and an automatic pistol in his hand. The bodyguards disarmed the attacker and began to beat him with the butt of his pistol until Trotsky implored them to stop, “Don’t kill him! He must talk!”

 

For all the preparations to prevent an attack from the outside, it ultimately came from the inside. After being rushed to the hospital along with his assailant, a conscious Trotsky at first appeared to be doing well after emergency surgery. The following day, however, he suddenly slipped into a coma and died on the evening of August 21, 1940

 

Distraught at the assassination, Ageloff confirmed Jacson’s real name was Mornard, but unbeknownst to her, that wasn’t his true identity either. Their relationship had been a complete ruse, part of a Stalinist plan to kill Trotsky that had been years in the making. The assassin’s real name was Ramon Mercader, a Spanish communist recruited by the brutal Soviet intelligence agency NKVD during the Spanish Civil War. Posing as the Belgian playboy Mornard, the handsome Mercader began to seduce Ageloff after meeting her in Paris during the Fourth International meeting in 1938. The Stalinist agent followed her to the United States the following year using the passport of Frank Jacson, a Canadian who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War. When he convinced Ageloff to move to Mexico City, the spy used her ties to Trotsky to gain access to the compound and earn his trust. 

 

Mexican authorities sentenced Mercader to 20 years in prison. Although the Soviet government denied responsibility, Stalin secretly bestowed the Order of Lenin upon the assassin. A year after his 1960 release, Mercader traveled to Moscow and received the Hero of the Soviet Union award. The assassin split time between Cuba and the Soviet Union before his death in 1978. Trotsky, who became one of the millions of Stalin’s victims, had his ashes interred under a large monolith engraved with a hammer and sickle in the garden of his Mexico City home.


https://www.history.com/news/the-trotsky-assassination-75-years-ago


See also:
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/936
and
being looked after with ordinary fish n' chips from the blackboard ...

global order under a virus dominion...

 

Coronavirus has sped up changes to global order and sovereignty is making a comeback


By Stan Grant, Vice Chancellor's Chair of Australian/Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University and a journalist.

 


According to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, sovereignty is in, ideology is out. Well, he is half right.

Sovereignty is certainly making a comeback. End of ideology? Not so fast.

Let's deal first with sovereignty.

The coronavirus crisis has only hastened what was already underway. 

What is known as the global liberal order has endured a blowback in recent years, with a renewed emphasis on sovereignty leading to a more assertive nationalism.

Thirty years since American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of history" — the triumph of liberal democracy over communism ushering in an ascendant global capitalism — history has most definitely returned.

How does that work in reality?

Brexit was a rejection of centralised European power and a desire for Britain to forge its own destiny. 

Donald Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, put American interests first. True to his word he has challenged the shibboleths of free trade and multilateralism.

President Trump has pushed back against NATO partners demanding they pay their way. He brought on a trade war with China to correct what he saw as Beijing's manipulation and exploitation. Simply: China was taking American jobs.

He pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.

China itself is strongly nationalistic. Xi Jinping has fostered a "China against the world" narrative, reminding his people never to forget what is seen as 100 years of humiliation by foreign powers.

Xi has asserted China's sovereignty in the disputed South China Sea defying a ruling from an international tribunal in The Hague.

Elsewhere nationalist leaders are popular: Vladimir Putin in Russia; Viktor Orban in Hungary; Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; Brazil's President Jair Bolsomaro or Duterte in the Philippines.

A blowback against immigration has fuelled a resurgent political right wing across Europe.

Conservative or right-wing politics has certainly benefitted from the nationalism wave.

National sovereignty triggers concern about a return of a survival of the fittest mentality. At its worst, critics say virulent nationalism leads to war. Nazi Germany always held up as the prime example.


The need to belong

Yet nationalism has its defenders too. Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony says nationalism speaks to a deep human need to belong. 

In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, he writes:

"Each of us in fact wants and needs something else….collective self-determination: the freedom of the family tribe or nation".

The post Cold War cosmopolitan dream of a world without borders, looks brittle right now. The coronavirus crisis has revealed the strength and weakness of nations. 

Besieged Italians did not look to the European Union but their own government for answers. Americans need American solutions. 

In Australia we have looked to our government not just to keep us safe but keep us afloat.

As philosopher Craig Calhoun writes in his book, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream, at the outset "nationalism is not a moral mistake".

As he says: "Nationalism helps locate an experience of belonging in a world of global flows and fears".

Ideology is not vanquished

National sovereignty is back. But ideology is not vanquished.

Despite what Morrison says, Australia's response to the coronavirus is ideological. 

The Government has junked traditional Liberal Party free market ideas for state control.

Paying the wages of laid off workers, free child care, rental support, all of this along with unprecedented intervention into the lives of Australians and erosion of freedom: police enforced lockdown; social distancing.


The Government has run up debt and willingly gone into economic recession because that is what it deems necessary to fight the virus.

Libertarians and free marketeers are in fits. But they are on the losing end right now.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the past four decades has been in retreat, weakened by the global financial crisis: coronavirus could bury it.

Consider the words of the father of neoliberalism, Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, social justice he once said was "a mirage".

Hayek's great disciple, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (she once produced her copy of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty and proclaimed "this is what we believe") famously said there is "no such thing as society".

Who would echo Hayek or Thatcher now?

A 'post-American world'

A return of national sovereignty raises questions about what form that will take.

Italian scholar Gianpaolo Baiocchi reminds us "the political project of popular sovereignty is not an end state".

The right's version of sovereignty he says is a "parochial separateness" that "excludes others".

Baiocchi warns that to some, sovereignty "implies closure, finality, borders, negation".

Instead he talks of a people's sovereignty. A political "we". 

It challenges western nation colonial states to contend with sovereign political rights claims of Indigenous groups for instance.

The return of national sovereignty does not mean that the limits of that sovereignty are set.

The world order is being remade. It was before coronavirus, it is accelerated now. 

Liberal democracy was already in retreat and authoritarianism on the rise. The increasing power of China was challenging American hegemony.

A decade ago, journalist and political thinker Fareed Zakaria said the "rise of the rest" could usher in a "post-American world".

New territory


A global order that centres national sovereignty requires us to chart new territory.

One hundred years ago the world was re-made after World War I. 

Before he became British prime minister David Lloyd George called the war "a deluge, a convulsion of nature … bringing unheard of changes to the social and industrial fabric". [see http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35884]

How true those words would be today.

Historian Adam Tooze, in his book The Deluge, says the break up of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires meant that "although sovereignty was multiplied, it was hollowed out". 

The one nation that emerged more powerful was the United States. By 1928 Tooze says, Hitler was warning against the growing American dominance.

He writes: "It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action".

World War I led to the Great Depression and ultimately to World War II; by 1945 Winston Churchill described the period as the second Thirty Years War.

Upheaval can breed upheaval. Changes to the global order take us into the unknown. 

From the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the 2008 global financial crash; the rise of China to now, the coronavirus crisis: old certainties have been shaken.

We are still a connected world. Globalism is not so easily unwound. Indeed, a global response is necessary in part to defeat the virus.

What will the post coronavirus world look like? Do we take an authoritarian turn? Does government continue to play a bigger part in our lives? Does the state trump free markets?

As the end of World War I ushered in American dominance, does China emerge from this moment more powerful?

Nations matter. Sovereignty matters. Especially now. The Prime Minister is right about that. But don't think for a moment ideology doesn't matter too.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-13/coronavirus-changes-to-global-ord...

 

As mentioned by Gus, the first casualties of this freedom-crushing fear has been artisans, artists of all kinds and restaurateurs — the real hearts of a free society. See: god hates us again...

 

 

fighting democracy or ignorance?

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

 

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

 

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

 

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy

 

 

 

Nothing like educating people about their democratic CIVIC constructs rather than telling them that "god loves them"... Ther are a million more "bible classes" than "politcal education courses" for kids — and the professional political charlatans love this state of protected ignorance. 

 

See also:

 

a bit more flogging of candidates would be welcome to maintain the true spirit of democracy...

having run out of ideologies to fight against...

 

By CJ Hopkins

 

So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.

I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.

What? You weren’t aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That’s OK, most other folks weren’t. It wasn’t officially announced or anything. It was launched in the summer of 2016, just as the War on Terror was ending, as a sequel to the War on Terror, or a variation on the War on Terror, or continuation of the War on Terror, or … whatever, it doesn’t really matter anymore, because now we’re fighting the War on Death, or the War on Minor Cold-like Symptoms, depending on your age and general state of health.

That’s right, folks, once again, global capitalism (a/k/a “the world”) is under attack by an evil enemy. GloboCap just can’t catch a break. From the moment it defeated communism and became a global ideological hegemon, it has been one evil enemy after another.

No sooner had it celebrated winning the Cold War and started ruthlessly restructuring and privatizing everything than it was savagely attacked by “Islamic terrorists,” and so was forced to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and kill and torture a lot of people, and destabilize the entire Middle East, and illegally surveil everybody, and … well, you remember the War on Terror.

Then, just as the War on Terror seemed to be finally winding down, and the only terrorists left were the “self-radicalized” terrorists (many of whom weren’t even actual terrorists), and it looked like GloboCap was finally going to be able to finish privatizing and debt-enslaving everything and everyone in peace, wouldn’t you know it, we were attacked again, this time by the global conspiracy of Russian-backed, neo-fascist “populists” that caused the Brexit and elected Trump, and tried to elect Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and loosed the gilets jaunes on France, and who’ve been threatening the “fabric of Western democracy” with dissension-sowing Facebook memes.

Unfortunately, unlike the War on Terror, the War on Populism didn’t go that well. After four years of fighting, GloboCap (a/k/a the neoliberal Resistance) had … OK, they had snuffed both Corbyn and Sanders, but they had totally blown the Russiagate psyop, and so were looking at four more years of Trump, and Lord knows how many of Johnson in the U.K. (which had actually left the European Union), and the gilets jaunes weren’t going away, and, basically, “populism” was still on the rise (if not in reality, in hearts and minds).

And so, just as the War on Populism had replaced (or redefined) the War on Terror, the War on Death has been officially launched to replace (or redefine) the War on Populism … which means (you guessed it), once again, it’s time to roll out another “brave new normal.”

The character of this brave new normal is, at this point, unmistakably clear … so clear that most people cannot see it, because their minds are not prepared to accept it, so they do not recognize it, though they are looking right at it. Like Dolores in the Westworld series, “it doesn’t look like anything” to them. To the rest of us, it looks rather totalitarian.

In the span of approximately 100 days, the entire global capitalist empire has been transformed into a de facto police state. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Most of us are under house arrest. Police are rounding up anyone not cooperating with the new emergency measures. They are pulling riders off of public transportation, arresting people whose papers aren’t in order, harrassing, beatingintimidating, and arbitrarily detaining anyone they decide is “a danger to public health.”

Authorities are openly threatening to forcibly pull people out of their homes and quarantine them. Cops are hunting down runaway grandmothers. They’re raiding services in churches and synagogues. Citizens are being forced to wear ankle monitors. Families out for a walk are being menaced by robots and Orwellian drones.

Counterterrorism troops have been deployed to deal with non-compliant “rule breakers.” Anyone the U.S. authorities deem to have “intentionally spread the coronavirus” can be arrested and charged as a coronavirus terrorist. Artificial intelligence firms are working with governments to implement systems to log and track our contacts and movements. As a recent Foreign Policy article put it:

“The counterterrorism analogy is useful because it shows the direction of travel of pandemic policy. Imagine a new coronavirus patient is detected. Once he or she tests positive, the government could use cell-phone data to trace everyone he or she has been in close proximity to, perhaps focusing on those people who were in contact for more than a few minutes. Your cell-phone signal could then be used to enforce quarantine decisions. Leave your apartment and the authorities will know. Leave your phone behind and they will call you. Run the battery down and a police car will be at your door in a manner of minutes …”

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, or … well, you either do or you don’t.

And that is the really terrifying part of the War on Death and our “brave new normal” … not so much the totalitarianism. (Anyone who’s been paying attention is not terribly shocked by GloboCap’s decision to implement a global police state. The simulation of democracy is all fine and good, until the unwashed masses start to get unruly, and require a reminder of who’s in charge, which is what we are being treated to currently.)

No, the terrifying part is how millions of people immediately switched off their critical faculties, got into line, and started goose-stepping, and parroting hysterical propaganda, and reporting their neighbors to the police for going outside for a walk or jog (and then sadistically shrieked abuse down at them like the Goodbye Jews Girl in Schindler’s List as they were wrestled to the ground and arrested).

They are out there, right now, on the Internet, millions of these well-meaning fascists, patrolling for signs of the slightest deviation from the official coronavirus narrative, bombarding everyone with meaningless graphs, decontextualized death statistics, X-rays of fibrotic lungs, photos of refrigerated morgue trucksmass graves, and other sensationalistic horrors intended to short-circuit critical thinking and shut down any and all forms of dissent.

Although undeniably cowardly and sickening, this kind of behavior is also not shocking. Sadly, when you terrorize people enough, the majority will regress to their animal instincts. It isn’t a question of ethics, or politics. It is purely a question of self-preservation. When you cancel the normal structure of society and place everyone in a “state of emergency” … well, it’s like what happens in a troop of chimpanzees when the alpha chimp dies or is killed by a challenger. The other chimps run around hooting and grimacing until it’s clear who the new dominant primate is, then they bend over to demonstrate their submission.

Totalitarians understand this. Sadists and cult leaders understand this. When the people you are dominating get unruly, and start questioning your right to dominate them, you need to fabricate a “state of emergency” and make everyone feel very afraid, so that they turn (or return) to you for protection from whatever evil enemy is out there, threatening the cult, or the Fatherland, or whatever. Then, once they’ve returned to the fold, and stopped questioning your right to dominate them, you can introduce a new set of rules that everybody needs to follow to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

This is obviously what is happening at the moment. But what you probably want to know is … why is it happening? And why is it happening at this precise moment?

Lucky for you, I have a theory.

No, it doesn’t involve Bill Gates, Jared Kushner, the WHO, and a global conspiracy of Chinese Jews defiling our precious bodily fluids with their satanic-alien 5G technology. It’s a little less exciting and more abstract than that (although some of those characters are probably part of it … all right, probably not the Chinese Jews, or the Satanic-Alien Illuminati).

See, I try to focus more on systems (like global capitalism) than on individuals. And on models of power rather than the specific people in power at any given time. Looking at things that way, this global lockdown and our brave new normal makes perfect sense. Stay with me now … this gets kind of heady.

What we are experiencing is a further evolution of the post-ideological model of power that came into being when global capitalism became a global-hegemonic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a global-hegemonic system, ideology is rendered obsolete. The system has no external enemies, and thus no ideological adversaries. The enemies of a global-hegemonic system by definition can only be internal. Every war becomes an insurgency, a rebellion breaking out within the system, as there is no longer any outside.

As there is no longer any outside (and thus no external ideological adversary), the global-hegemonic system dispenses with ideology entirely. Its ideology becomes “normality.” Any challenge to “normality” is henceforth regarded as an “abnormality,” a “deviation from the norm,” and automatically delegitimized. The system does not need to argue with deviations and abnormalities (as it was forced to argue with opposing ideologies in order to legitimize itself). It simply needs to eliminate them. Opposing ideologies become pathologies … existential threats to the health of the system.

In other words, the global-hegemonic system (i.e., global capitalism) becomes a body, the only body, unopposed from without, but attacked from within by a variety of opponents … terrorists, extremists, populists, whoever. These internal opponents attack the global-hegemonic body much like a disease, like a cancer, an infection, or a virus. And the global-hegemonic body reacts like any other body would.

Is this model starting to sound familiar?

I hope so, because that is what is happening right now. The system (i.e., global capitalism, not a bunch of guys in a room hatching a scheme to sell vaccines) is reacting to the last four years of populist revolt in a predictable manner. GloboCap is attacking the virus that has been attacking its hegemonic body. No, not the coronavirus. A much more destructive and multiplicitous virus … resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology.

If it isn’t already clear to you yet that this coronavirus in no way warrants the totalitarian emergency measures that have been imposed on most of humanity, it will be become clear in the months ahead. Despite the best efforts of the “health authorities” to count virtually anything as “a Covid-19 death,” the numbers are going to tell the tale. The “experts” are already memory-holing, or recalibrating, or contextualizing, their initial apocalyptic projections. The media are toning down the hysteria. The show isn’t totally over yet, but you can feel it gradually coming to an end.

In any event, whenever it happens, days, weeks, or months from now, GloboCap will dial down the totalitarianism, and let us out, so we can go back to work in whatever remains of the global economy … and won’t we all be so very grateful! There will be massive celebrations in the streets, Italian tenors singing on balconies, chorus lines of dancing nurses! The gilets jaunes will call it quits, the Putin-Nazis will stop with the memes, and Americans will elect Joe Biden president!

Or, all right, maybe not that last part, but, the point is, it will be a brave new normal! People will forget all that populism nonsense, and just be grateful for whatever McJobs they can get to be able to pay the interest on their debts, because, hey … global capitalism isn’t so bad compared to living under house arrest!

And, if not, no problem for GloboCap. They’ll just have to lock us down again, and keep locking us down, over and over, indefinitely, until we get our minds right. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to do anything about it … right? Didn’t we just demonstrate that? Sure, we’ll bitch and moan again, but then they’ll whip out those pictures of mass graves and death trucks, and the graphs, and all those scary projections, and the Blockwart-hotlines will start ringing again, and …

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/15/brave-new-normal/

 

Read from top. Read also:

being looked after with ordinary fish n' chips from the blackboard ...

 

what about a novel?...

 

a patent away from a catastrophic covid19 disaster...

 

the dogs of coronavirus as seen from the other side of the planet...

 

meanwhile you might die of a displaced health-attention syndrome and/or idleness...

 

the aussie spirit of larrikinism is about to die...

 

the new world order...

 

amusing creative side-effects of your panic...

 

an uncomfortable notion: the coronavirus is an escaped/released bioweapon...

 

no escape...

 

the gates of hell in a coronavirus epoch...

 

 

and many more...

the poor get done over, one more...

The talk in New York is about when to return to normal. But that misses the point; normal never really left, it just changed clothes. We traded economic disparity expressed through poverty for economic disparity expressed through viral death. The real problem isn’t when we’ll return to normal, it is that we will.

All the energy that made this city more than livable, made it desirable, is gone. It’s just a big, empty place now, all the seams showing. The closed stores still have St Patrick’s Day decorations. Time stopped in March. I am a native New Yorker by birth, seven years now returned. I don’t know how many times we can all stand on the ledge and not jump. 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Super Storm Sandy, and now this. Today the city feels more like the gray of post-war East Germany than the white hot panic of late WWII Berlin.

New York state has more corona cases than any other country in the world. About half of all U.S. deaths are here in the broader New York area. Sure, there are other hot pockets but while NYC counts the bodies in the thousands there are some states still in single figures and most others in the hundreds. The stars may soon again hold benefit concerts for us, echoing post-9/11’s “ferocious tenderness of how desperately America loves New York.” When the city talks in its sleep what many remember most is the kindness people showed toward one another that blue September, little courtesies of holding doors and allowing someone to cut the line, half smiles from total strangers in a place where such vulnerability could have made you prey just days earlier.

Not with the virus. We snap at each other, enemies now, each a potential carrier. This is a not a city which lends itself to personal space without a flash of aggressive eye contact. Walk without a mask and someone will snap at you. Two guys hissing something in Spanish at an Asian woman. Lines to enter the food store with everyone watching like North Korean border guards for sneaks. SNL and late night never mocked Bush in the immediate 9/11 aftermath. If we ever were One we are not now. Because we are for certain not all in this together as Governor Andrew Cuomo said: “Everyone is subject to this virus. I don’t care how smart, how rich, how powerful you think you are.”

That is not true. The virus is highly concentrated in the poorest Hispanic and black neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx. The viral death rate for Hispanics is 22 people per 100,000; for blacks 20 per 100,000 while the rate for whites is 10 per 100,000. For whites even that is deceptive, given the hot spots in the isolated Hasidic Jewish enclaves of Brooklyn versus the lack of white deaths in high-income areas. Poorer people are more likely to die at home than in a hospital, and so the surge in at-home deaths, most never tested, suggests the death rate for the virus is being under-counted. Overall the virus is twice as deadly for Hispanics and blacks than whites in NYC.

In New York we speak hundreds of languages but not to each other. A map of viral cases neighborhood-by-neighborhood tells the tale. America’s most diverse city, America’s most sanctimonious city about that, is also one of her most segregated on the ground. 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rich-and-healthy-vs-poo...

 

Read from top.

remembering…….

Eighty-two years ago, on August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. Trotsky's assassination was the greatest political crime of the 20th century. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was the leader of the 1917 October revolution in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, and the preeminent strategist of world socialist revolution.

In 1923, Trotsky founded the Left Opposition to oppose the growth of a nationalist bureaucracy, headed by Joseph Stalin, as it usurped power in the Soviet Union. In 1933, following the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, facilitated by the disastrous policies of the Comintern that Trotsky had opposed, Trotsky began to work toward the building of the Fourth International, which was founded in 1938 as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

In a new period of revolutionary upheavals and imperialist wars, the political and historical principles and perspectives that Trotsky fought for are of immense relevance to workers today. They are embodied in the history and daily political work of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. In this exhibit, we are publishing a selection of major statements and essays about the enduring political significance of Leon Trotsky, and the investigation by the ICFI into his assassination, known as Security and the Fourth International. 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/anniversary-assassination-leon-trotsky.html

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW................