Maybe It Is The Right’s Fault

“Take off the fake deep
Take off the fake woke
Take off the I’m broke, I care (take it off)
Take off the gossip
Take off the new logic, that if I’m rich, I’m rare (take it off)”

—Kendrick Lamar, N95

Beware of those saying Putin is a communist. Beware of those saying Putin is fighting Nazis. Beware of those cancelling Amber Heard. Beware of those telling you they are cancelled when you give them a monthly subscription. There is some very spooky shit going on. Socially distance for clarity when necessary. Socially distance for health when necessary. Thank your friends. Thank your enemies but only on the inside.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is as relevant as To Pimp A Butterfly. But they missed To Pimp A Butterfly when it happened too. On a New York Times podcast Kendrick Lamar’s fans were compared to Eminem’s fans. How would the Times like it if we compared them to RT?

I’ve taken a break from writing. I was told I was an authoritarian or a Nazi. I was told Counterpunch was largely the same. I assume when people say things they mean them. Maybe it’s all performance art. I’m hoping for some new material either way.

Maybe it is the right’s fault that Roe vs. Wade is overturned. Many leftists are blaming liberals. Many liberals are blaming leftists. Most are doing neither and are out on the streets regardless. Follow them and no one else.

Still I’ll indulge. For the many leftists caught up in blaming their liberal neighbors and for the many liberals blaming their leftist neighbors I wonder why. Both groups without realizing they agree acknowledge we do not live in a democracy. And yet neighbors are still blamed.

I hear leftists absurdly arguing that by organizing for Democrats it is grassroots liberals who are to blame. So now the left, the section that is materialist, blames idealism. We need idealism.

It is liberals who are blaming the left for not supporting Democrats. So the section of society who is idealistic enough to believe in politics blames the materialist section for seeing the obvious materialist condition that the Democrats do nothing. We need materialism.

Democrats or not. It does not matter. The point is to build something and do something. Organize. Have solidarity and empathy. Once the power is built one can worry about these questions that seem to be stopping people in their tracks.

At some point blaming your friends rather than your enemies is just an excuse to do nothing. It’s easier to beat up on your friends because they won’t hurt you. If one is tired or scared it is understandable. Rather than dumping on one’s friends one could just admit that.

It’s fascinating that both liberals and leftists see a victory for the right as proving their side correct. For liberals a right wing win is a sign that lefties betrayed their unified front of gradualism. For lefties the rightward win proves that liberals betrayed the revolution and this was why it worked.

In reality one could just blame five people. Or maybe 1% of the population. Or even the broader right. But this idea that a few leftists or a few liberals disagreeing on strategy is to blame is just crazy. Does anyone believe that we were close enough?

My leftist friends might not like it but blaming the liberal base rather than the people actually in power is just as wild as blaming the leftists for breaking with the Dems. There is a lot of work to be done and if the liberals haven’t broken yet it’s because the left hasn’t built what is necessary yet.

Perhaps this is too hard on the left but if I follow the logic of blaming your friends rather than your enemies then ultimately doesn’t everyone want more left bashing?

When things go down people are forced to rely more on each other. It is not too late to do so.

That’s easy enough. Don’t blame your neighbor. Sounds nice. And by saying crap like that I sound like an asshole. Many neighbors are fascist. They aren’t hiding it and let’s stop playing dumb.

Neighbors, comrades, friends, smiling fascists. Does it not still leave the question of the Democratic Party unaddressed?

On the one hand I would say of course the Democrats are useless. But when it comes to local politics and benefits for the most marginalized it’s not always true. People may think that means I think the left gets it right and the liberals get it wrong. But I’m not sure. Is it really right to be constantly disappointed by something one claims not to be attached to?

Is it disingenuous for progressive Democrats to claim the party will protect everyday people? Yes. And that’s very bad. Similarly many, many organizations have been co-opted and openly lie about the impact they will make or even try to make on politics.

Everything is either coopted, crushed or victorious. Cooptation is cowardly and those who are crushed are courageous but ultimately without victory they bring the same result. The point is to win. That means you accept that cooptation is simply one way to lose. Getting crushed is no better. That is why organization is more important than moralization. The right claims to be moralizing when we know they are actually organizing.

Cooptation must be condemned. We agree on that. However it also must be materially addressed. In what ways is systematic cooptation a sign that the message is resonating? And in what ways is this cooptation a sign of organizational weakness and vulnerability?

Furthermore in what ways is this cooptation a result of a disorganization and confusion more generally based on the rapid changes in technology, globalization, climate and so on? How do we break out of celebrating Marxist history or the 1960s or the New Deal and move forward to something that can be measured within this new environment? How much or how little should be expected? How do we avoid disappointment and alienation?

On this last point the Democrats and progressives have been particularly devastating in their most cynical approach of saying one thing and believing in another. Any leader should be realistic about what is possible and have intentional plans about how to get there. Without this we see that confusion and disillusionment pushes people out of politics or to the other side.

Maybe this is a moment of clarity but that at best is a starting point. At worst it is the beginning of the end.

All of those people very disappointed in the Democrats right now are the same ones claiming they knew all along how bad they were. This dynamic gets even worse when it comes to the few progressives in the party. The left claims to see right through them and yet it is only the progressives who are blamed when something goes wrong. Those advocating a hard break from the Democrats are not ready to get the Democrats out of their own heads.

The Democrats live rent free in the heads of leftists, to coin a phrase. This, of all times, is quite a time to live rent free anywhere! And I would like to believe that living in a leftist’s head is high property value like an oceanfront property without climate change. Leftists must then evict the Democrats from their own psyche! Until that happens any effort to clean break from the Party will be correctly identified as an alienated and bitter individual naive of what it takes to beat the fascist forces within our country.

There is more than one irony of this situation surrounding abortion. Criminalizing abortion like any other policy really has more to do with materialist forces than political ones.

Certainly one goal of criminalizing abortion is to squeeze the poor. In this way it’s the same sort of policy as raising interest rates in order to create unemployment to lower inflation. The ruling class can say the interest rate one openly because they make the gambit that the middle class will help themselves before they help the poor but they must hide the abortion argument behind moralism because the country is divided along these lines just as much as they divided around class. What I mean by this is simply that class domination does have an ideology behind it and that many people must feel good about dominating others in order to do it.

Some would say this proves humans are good but it may only prove we are complex and therefore dishonest. The truth is hard to find but easy to grasp. Children look for the truth and adults run from it.

We aren’t talking about the children. We’re talking about fascism. Capitalism needs abortions. While it is nice for the rich that poor women will die or live in fear the idea that there will be no abortions implies that at least one “choice” is available. This is far too optimistic. The choice of having the child isn’t really even on the table because just as the regulation of abortion is necessary so will be the regulation of childbirth.

Here we go to the broader question of population. The ruling class agrees there are too many people in the world. What they don’t see is that people who are poor have many children while people who are rich have very few. What are the reasons for this? Sure, one of them is that patriarchal organization is more important but then again so is family, generally.

The other reasons may be harder to condemn. If one is poor one has many children hoping that one of them gets rich and provides for the family. In a world of inequality where no one is paid according to their need or even to their labor we have massive inequality and if one can get lucky once it is worth playing the lottery by having many kids. The other issues such as women’s education and health services are simply unavailable without money.

So there is this anxiety particularly as climate change is not addressed that the masses are birthing rapidly and the solution is to impoverish them further which ironically encourages more births with each individual born being more miserable than the one before.

So why the attempt to increase the birth rate in the United States? Let’s keep in mind that the number one distinguishing trait of those at the January 6th insurrection was the anxiety about white replacement theory. This, more than broader economic anxiety, characterizes the American right.

People like to blame women here. One can easily buy a mansion from YouTube videos if they bash women, the left or other marginalized people. Having not the charm to do that I’ll try to be honest. Women are not to blame.

“Modern sexism” is where mostly Southern white women advocate against women’s rights (see ERA) because if women are granted equal rights under patriarchal capitalism they will be worse off. Without the role of women inside the family the woman is pushed out and is left to sell their body through labor, often prostitution.

From this definition of womanhood we get homophobia and transphobia because without the woman the system collapses. Similarly the poor woman or woman of color is not a woman because she has to work and provide for the family. She even has to sell herself to the rich for sex. She should not birth, but she should also not have sex, but she also must have sex. Not for her survival, which does not matter, but rather for the class who owns property, and she is property.

Slave labor comes from wage labor because wage labor is in competition and slave labor is always more profitable than wage labor. Capitalism must have slaves but also can’t have slaves because people must buy things. To buy things one must have a wage. To have a wage is a disadvantage to your employer.

The machine is not unlike the slave for it needs not to be paid. So machines, like slavery are born from capitalism in order to gain an advantage over other capitalists.

These machines eliminate the need for the slave in one sense. Simply put the slave need not work, at least not work as much in the precense of machine. But the slave still exists and so machines to kill the slave and save the slave and jail the slave must also exist. If all the slaves were killed and we were left with only those who owned the machines there would be no way for the owners to make a profit. Without a profit there is no incentive to make a machine and no machines will be made. Therefore machines as much as slaves must be destroyed periodically and without reason.

Machines lack the consciousness of the slave except in the fantasy of the slave, in the science fiction model, where it is the machine who rebels and destroys the master. Other than that machines are our friends made from our earth and together we make the world as we destroy it. We can put little eyes on a machine or give it hands or make it talk and relate to it and this is nice. The moment we try to relate to each other through a machine we do not recognize each other because we don’t know what is human and what is machine. Let us relate to a tree as a tree, a hammer as a hammer, and a human as a human.

Back to conservative women. Who can say these women were wrong? As the family has been destroyed women now both sell their labor on the marketplace and do the housework. All while having to post online that they are free and liberated! Such a tyranny of freedom is enough to drive anyone to be a reactionary.

At home women’s labor is free and on the market she comes at a reduced price. For this reason reactionaries will attempt to keep her out of the market but they will happily accept enslaved Blacks in jail cells doing labor at a far reduced rate. Likewise cheap consumer goods from China are happily bought while immigrant labor is scorned. At home the woman can cook, clean, take care of the kids and have sex. While if the jailed man is in your house your wife is likely only doing one of these things, and doing it with her. Then you are cucked and you are sad. So you keep the wife at home and the man you fear in jail, laws of labor be damned.

The anxiety around technology is justifiable as it makes the worker expendable but it increases the standard of living for those exploited. More worrying still is that exploitation of the environment is still at the top of reactionary’s list as transitioning out of fossil fuels will surely cause a “shock” that will impoverish the masses.

And yet such a shock to the economy by massive lockdowns during a pandemic that could kill a rich person was no problem. Nor was such a shock a problem when going to war with Russia or when freezing out the Soviet Union.

So is the goal of making abortion illegal ultimately to create more abortions or simply to immiserate poor women? The goal of police funding and mass incarceration is to immiserate the poor but it also of course has the goal of increasing crime in order to justify the policy in the first place. Likewise I’m sure one goal of making abortion illegal is to increase abortion but that is only in order to create more of a so-called moral reason to justify such a policy in the first place.

Where is this type of thinking coming from? Reading Engels write about the point of the monogamous family structure being prostitution certainly helped me. By creating a system that is unsatisfactory one can easily frame someone’s predicted behavior from such a plan as their own freedom, and their own sin.

The other issue of the day has to do with the guns. In this case I’m sure the point is not the freedom to have guns or not have them but rather the mandate to get a gun or be killed, as they advocate for teachers now.

The revolutionaries on the right are even more ridiculous than the revolutionaries on the left trying to get in AOC’s DMs. In theory sure it is good to have a gun but all you guys want to do is shoot the libs. Even after you’ve done it you can’t explain what your mission was or what you were trying to achieve.

It is not good enough to simply have that revolutionary feeling. It likely simply means one was born yesterday. Life is hard for everyone. What is to be done?

Such lessons about time are necessary for one can be born yesterday and still live for a long time. The right has won because of a long, organized and disciplined approach. They do have violence, money and resentment on their side. That is no match for love but far easier to summon.

Therefore the long game must be the one as trust must be built and communities must be organized locally. We do not need more leaders. We need far less. And we must remember that love is the last thing that isn’t ironic. The rest of it is a giant grift.

Exploitation becomes more and more tenuous thanks to a declining rate of profit and a dwindling amount of natural resources. People must be exploited more and more for less and less return. Therefore increasing inequality presents itself as increasing polarization because both sides are getting more angry and frustrated despite one constantly winning. Hate eats at its host and therefore the host cannot be reasoned with for it has the same master as we do but lacks the awareness.

Now I will shut up, go away, and try to figure out what the hell is going on in this damn place. God, or anyone else, help us.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

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