I’m going to go into the imposter critiques:
It’s the System (it’s God’s will)
It’s the Plot (it’s Satan’s work)
which the larouchoids and all these spooky pseudo dissidents like Grayzone are actually promiscuously combining now; their point is to mimic and deform the understanding of class war and to displace the POLITICAL, Marxist grasp of it, which is the only unifying truth that can organize us to fight and win, potentially liberating our species from overlords forever.
But first, here’s an old blog of mine:
VENDREDI, DÉCEMBRE 09, 2005
Nozze di Figments
The same people, I've noticed, gravely warning against the eerie, protean, elusive bogey populism are also sedulously cautioning against the gnomic, comical bogey conspiracy theory.
These phantoms are a holy couple; their chymical wedding engenders the new, cure-all reaction, the reactionary philosopher's stone of which the ruling elite has, at the moment, real need.
The target of these soothing, sophisticated pseudo-analyses, dissecting and bravely denouncing their perpetually undefined menaces - undefined but not unqualified: what they are actually we can't say, but what proximity to them is we can say: it is in bad taste, vulgar, outré, déclassé, unfashionable because too popular - is a growing consciousness in the rich countries that the current global arrangements of power and property are intolerably hideous, violent beyond imagining, incalculably destructive, worsening at a terrifying pace, and our own little sphere of comfort and safety within them is leaking the torture, starvation, murder, maiming, poisoning, imprisoning that surrounds us; that this is all abominable beyond any excuse, that our own exceptions are unsustainable, and that the unprecedented, unrivalled power enjoyed by the current ruling elite has emboldened them beyond even their predecessors degrees of risk tolerance and ruthlessness and must somehow be checked, its rampage arrested, at once, in any way we can.
So the message of the respectably retained flaming Rome palace orchestra is that this growing awareness and creeping determination is all really sparked by an illusion, a devious, unauthorized spectacle being generated somehow - on the internet perhaps - by a rogue rival of the official spectacle providers, an untrustworthy agent, suspiciously operating without the comforting trademark or brand possessed by the official tv reality purveyors whose reputation must be guarded through reliability and thus inspiring of trust.
We the people, unlicensed, untrained, unbrevetted, unregulated, generating this nightmare on the other channel, the pirate network, broadcasting and consuming this horrifying, unbearable, inexcuseable, unjust, bloody, exploding rival spectacle of our world are not to be trusted. People are never to be trusted.
Pay no attention that howling, we are advised by the calm, imposing radicals behind the podia; they're mad, hysterical, irresponsible, dupes of busy tricksters who want to stir things up for their own greedy - (but not profitable) - schemes. The current world rulers are nothing out of the ordinary, and oughtn't worry us any more than Imperial Rome or Britain; the widespread belief that this is not the case, that we have already entered a period of unprecedented crises, that people are poorer, more controlled and more terrorized than ever, that there is little hope of anything but worse tomorrow, will henceforth be dispelled with a talisman - monstrance, incense, and the magic incantation: populism. Between populism and conspiracy theory, intellectuals have provided the ruling class with a fantastic brain cleanser, with everything it needs for a defensive, television-suitable, thought killing ideology whose fundamental knowledge is this: humanity is laughably credulous and pitiably paranoid.
Gullible and trusting as newborn babes but at the same time psychotically suspicious.
Thus it is easy for evil elite to conspire to dupe them into believing in the existence of evil elites conspiring to dupe them.
Best to trust the authorized spectacle. The Cool Spectacle. (Beware of warmth.)
According to which cool spectacle: there is no crisis; nothing is urgent; nothing could be done anyway if it were; and as Hardt and Negri assure us, everything will turn out for the best.