Promethean City Builders vs Finance Capital Malthusians

Orientation

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article, I contrasted the differences between rising Multipolarism with a declining Anglo-American empire. Taking the side of the multipolarists of the East, I  identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone who bridged the gap between East and West.

His concept of “The American system” defends the Enlightenment as the movement to look to if the west is going to join the multipolar world. I also presented Matthew Ehret’s book The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I The Unfinished Sympathy as a concrete example of the battle between the British System and American system in the 18th and 19thcenturies. At the end of Part I, I raise questions as to where to place these advocates of the American system on the political spectrum and ask who its enemies are.

Are there times when centrism is unrealistic, ungrounded, and against common sense?

Unlike the left-wing and right-wing of the political spectrum, centrism is presented as a golden mean against the extremes. It embodied common sense, as opposed to fanaticism, pragmatism in contrast, unrealistic idealism and non-violence against violence. Yet there are times when centrism doesn’t work; occasions when centrism is not common sense, circumstances when centrism is not pragmatic, when compromise between extremes comes up empty. Not only is centrism unrealistic but the entire linear political spectrum founded at the end of the 18th century is bankrupt.

Strange bedfellows? Finance capitalists and the New Left

By the end of World War II, the financial capitalists had two enemies – the liberalism of FDR and the world communist movement. Most of us know the historical differences between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left represented the world communist movement as well as the forces of the Enlightenment. Is it possible that the emergence of the New Left with very different values driven by Romanticism was shaped by the anti-communist finance capitalists?

My claims in Part II

1)The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalists empire is centrism and it must be opposed.

2) The forces of Promethean City builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.

3) For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left, to oppose the development of a communist movement.

The first image at the top of this article includes arch anti-communists Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The second image is the founder of Democratic Socialist of America, Michael Harrington, also an anti-communist.

Poverty of Centrism

As I wrote in my article: Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description.

Today the fact that liberal and conservative parties are the same is far more significant than their differences. They have at least agreed on:

• Support of finance and military capitalism as an economic system domestically
• Never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way Marxists would
• Suppressing third-party access into political debates.
• Supporting imperialism around the world
• Supporting the instillation of right-wing dictators
• Supporting Israel elites despite 75 years of Zionist fundamentalism and their oppression of Palestinians
• Opposition to state-centered socialism around the world

What this means is that:

• There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them
• There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism

The linear political spectrum is too simple for today’s complex politics

Examples include:

• China forming alliances with non-socialist countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia
• Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists (Germany, Norway, Sweden). This goes way back to Social Democrats voting for war in 1914
• Right-wing governments like Modi’s of India supporting a socialist country (China)
• The Recent elections in France in which Le Pen (supposed fascist) has social programs to the left of Macron (a neoliberal)
• A neoliberal Democratic Party supporting fascist Ukrainian forces

Centrism is bankrupt in extreme capitalist crises

The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is compromising, pragmatic, down-to-earth and can never be unrealistic. Supposedly, centrists are moderate and not hysterical like the fascists or communists. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions the center doesn’t hold. It caves in.  In certain periods of history being moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is so overpowering that it would overwhelm its centrist structures. Under the conditions of our time extremes are the only answer because of capitalism’s failure to address its contradictions. It has brought us to the point where neither liberal nor conservative solutions can nor will work. A new model of the political spectrum must be:

• More inclusive of many more political ideologies
• Economic as well as political
• Able to account for qualitative leaps such as revolutions
• Able to decenter the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable
• Make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum, not just among those next to each other

How the left and some conservatives might work together is because both are industrializers whose goal is to expand the productive forces. They may fight about how the wealth gets distributed but they agree that real wealth should be produced. By contrast, neo-liberals, fascists, Greens, Social Democrats, and anarchists are de-industrializers who abhor the introduction of new wealth-creation, especially nuclear technologies and city building. They are Malthusians.

We are now at the point where I can reintroduce the distinctions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Part I. I want to show how the Anglo-American empire, finance capitalists and the CIA shaped the New Left into embracing Romanticism.

Below is a table I developed from my book Forging Promethean Psychology which compares what the Enlightenment stands for as opposed to Romanticism.

Table A Enlightenment vs Romanticism Compared

The Politics of the Anglo-American Empire, The British System, Romanticism and the New left

The Old Left

As many of you know, soon after World War II capitalists in Mordor set out to destroy the Socialist and Communist parties. But the CIA also wanted to create a relatively harmless alternative to Communism by recruiting leftists who were critical of the Communist Party but did it in the name of socialist democracy. As many of you know, this began with the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Along the way, it helped to craft an ideology of the New Left that would render it harmless against capitalism while at the same time keep the Communist movement from growing back.

The heart of the Old Left was the defense of countries that were at least part way towards socialism – Russia, China and Cuba. Its economic focus was on the inherent contradictions of capitalism whether it be the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, underconsumption or the profit squeeze. Very importantly, communists were committed to the belief that Communism had to be based on abundance, which meant “developing the productive forces”. If a communist society’s economy stagnated that would introduce the temptation to steal. By producing more than enough stealing would not be an issue. As different as anarchists are from Marxists, even anarchists before the 1960s understood that abundance was the foundation for socialism.

The major social category for political organization was socio-economic class. It was only the working class that had the power to overthrow capitalism. Also, the only real democracy was economic democracy in which workers control what is produced, how much is produced and how it is distributed through centralized planning and workers’ control. In terms of political parties the Old Left advocated a Leninist vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries.

While claiming that the workers were internationalists, in practice the Old Left political organization operated at the nation-state level. Whatever tiny ecology or changes in the climate movement existed it was not on the radar of communists. For communists’ growth of the human population was taken as given since by the second half of the 19th century and into the 1950s it seemed human productivity could easily accommodate a rising population.

When it came to the arts and psychology, the Old Left was fairly conservative. In the arts, socialist realist mural painting was predominant. In painting and music, the focus on working class life was its subject matter. In personal life, Communists usually did not drink and their appearance emulated working class clothes. Their personal life was relatively unimportant and their marriages were traditional. They were generally hostile to psychology, saw it as a bourgeois distraction from their main purpose was to work for the revolution. While most Communists were atheists, they understand that most workers were not, and they had to make relative peace with this “superstition” in order to organize workers. The CIA, and the Rockefellers set out to destroy the values of the Old left and replace  with a very different orientation to the world. Table B displays the values of the New Left, and what is equally important, how these values support and are beneficial to  the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers, and the CIA.

Table B How the Values of the New Left Benefit the Anglo-American

Empire, Finance Capital the Rockefellers and the CIA

 Techniques Used by the Powers that be to Undermine Communism

• If you examine all twenty categories, the purpose of the CIA and the Rockefellers was to divide and conquer:
• Existing state socialism from the New Left
• Class on the one hand, race and gender on the other
• Personal life and political life
• Clothing, physical appearance middle class hippies and the working class
• Non-Christian religions and Christianity
• Ecology movement and the working class

 Distracting people:

• With sex and drugs and nihilistic or hedonistic rock music
• With psychological preoccupations as at Esalen (The Human Potential Movement, social psychology of groups and therapy) rather than economics
• With cultural or linguistic issues (Frankfurt School, postmodernism)
• With romantic exoticism, primitivism, individualism

Fragmentation by:

• Decentralizing politics from the nation-state to local configurations
• Championing infinite diversity to weaken commonality and unity of organization
• Treating ecology as separate from a Socialist program
• Making art psychological instead socially inspiring

Demoralization

• That capitalism had no inherent limits
• Undermine belief in progress and that people should expect an abundant life
• Pessimistic anti-science
• There is no alternative to the Democratic Party

Demonization:

• Of nuclear energy
• Of all state socialist societies
• Any international leader who wants to set their own economic foreign policy

 Qualifications

I am not suggesting that the New Left was simply a creature of the CIA and the Rockefellers. The New Left was a movement that came out of the middle class which was anti-war, anti-racist, mostly anti-capitalist and a rebellion against a conservative culture. Surely the “powers that be” did not encourage this. What I am saying is that the CIA and the Rockefellers either intervened directly as in the existence of COINTELPRO or threw money at New Left projects that suited their needs.

Conclusion

In Part II I argued that the political philosophy of the Anglo-American empire is centrism. I argued that political centrists are losing elections all over the world because centrism cannot speak to the extreme crisis that finance capital has created. Also, the linear political spectrum that houses centrism no longer works in depicting political change. I identify five characteristics a new political spectrum would need in order to be workable.

Then I contrasted the multipolar values in the East and the Enlightenment in the West to the Romantic values in depth. The reason for this comparison that Romanticism is the foundation of the Anglo-American empire’s attempt to control the potential forces of Communism in the West by shaping a New Left.

I close my article with a contrast between the Old and the New left. The Old Left of the Communist Party was a great threat to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers and the CIA. All these powers attempted to support the shaping of an anti-communist New Left. I begin with the values of the Old left. Then I identified 20 characteristics of the New Left and how each served directly or indirectly to support the powers that be against the rise of Communism. All twenty characteristics used a combination of five techniques: divide-and-conquer; distraction, fragmentation, demoralization and demonization.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.