The question is: Why is the ruling class trying to implement its agenda via this path?
I. The death of the political left
The political left died in stages and then all at once:
- It died when communist workers’ parties went nationalist at the start of World War I and thus killed each other rather than saying no to bankers’ wars.
- It died during the Moscow Show Trials from 1936 to 1938 that showed the grotesque extremes of Stalin’s Russia.
- It died in 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring thus revealing that the “reforms” of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were an illusion.
- The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people in the Soviet satellite countries overthrew their rulers soon thereafter, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991.
- Formerly left political parties across the developed world pivoted away from their founding principles. The Labor Party in Australia implemented neoliberalism in 1983. In 1992, Bill Clinton made neoliberalism the central ideology of the Democratic Party in the U.S. Tony Blair then copied this strategy in the U.K. from 1997 through 2007.
By the early 2000s, the actually existing political left was mostly an artifact in history textbooks, not a viable political movement anywhere in the world.
II. Witnessing the death of the left up close
I spent 30 years looking for the political left. Like Winston Smith in 1984, I was driven by the idealistic notion that surely a revolutionary alternative must exist.
For undergrad (1988 to 1992) I attended the most left college I could find, Swarthmore. When George H.W. Bush launched his war in Iraq there were about twenty of us who came together to oppose it. Out of that group, only about five were committed to actual political organizing to stop the war. There were no openly Marxian professors.
...
My three-decade search for the political left revealed a series of ghost towns. Like Winston Smith, I discovered that The Brotherhood only exists as an idea, not as an actually existing political movement.
III. The curious resurrection of a movement that does not exist
It is more than a little curious then that the left agenda is back, given that the actually existing political left contains almost no members. Everywhere one looks the left agenda is ascendant:
- climate change;
- corporations being brought into alignment with leftist values via the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) scores;
- 15 minutes cities;
- green energy;
- Black Lives Matter;
- Pride clothes, parades, marches, month, politicians…
Everywhere one looks, it’s all leftism all the time — again with little actual popular political support to drive these changes.
So what is going on?
Almost all of the supposed “leftism” that one sees today is being driven from above by capital. The people driving this agenda are:
- the big investment managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street);
- the World Economic Forum;
- the CIA; and
- Big Philanthropy (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc.).
The billionaires, the oligarchs, the holders of capital, the richest people in the world, are driving the “left” agenda. They write about it in their annual letters to shareholders and they talk about it nonstop in public speeches — this is their vision for how they want to remake the world.
The ruling class uses a whole host of bougiecrats to implement the plan including:
- the management consultants (McKinsey, PWC, Booz Allen);
- the PR Firms (Edelman, Weber Shandwick, Hill+Knowlton, Ogilvy); and
- the thoroughly corporate Democratic Party.
No actual leftists are involved in this process at all.
At first this makes no sense. The political left and the billionaires should be mortal enemies. But somehow the billionaires are playing dress up, pretend, cosplay leftism while the actual left base does not exist.
...
