What the Hell Happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

Q: What the hell happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

A: Samizdat Chronicles is now The Alternative Left on blogger.  

Q: Why?

A: To make it easier to find, to make it among the search results when "alt left" or "alternative left" is entered into a search engine.  Ultimately, so that it's the Alt-Left itself that defines itself, since there's a lot of confusion in the media about exactly what the Alt-Left is.

Q: So what's changed?

A: The appearance.  The layout.

Q: What's stayed the same?

A: The content and the author's towering intellect. <grin>  I'd also like to bring additional writers on board, and eventually turn this blog into a sort of news and opinion forum for people with alt-left points of view.  Hard as this may be to believe, I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

Q: You're not?  Who the hell are you, anyway?

A: I get that all the time. <laughs>  My friends know who I am.  It's not hard to figure out.  I came to the Alt-Left in the spring of 2016.  I started the page Alternative Left on Facebook in April of 2016, and launched this blog and its accompanying YouTube channel around the same time.  Plus, I've been in other forums and media that host Alt-Left views.  I blog under the names Agent Commie and Ernest Everhard - if you don't know, he was the main protagonist in Jack London's classic dystopian novel, The Iron Heel.  Think of that book as a Marxist mirror image of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Ernest Everhard is to historical materialism what John Galt was to objectivism, just without the huge long author filibuster.  

Q: Is the Alt-Left Marxist?

A: Some Alt-Leftists are.  A good way to think of the Alt-Left is in contrast to the Alt-Right.  If the Alt-Right are race realists, the Alt-Left are class realists.  Meaning that we accept that class differences are real.  

This means that capitalism is a very different system for people who must sell their labor power for a wage in order to survive than it is for people who own capital, meaning productive assets, or shares thereof.  The evidence for this is that since neoliberal globalization triumphed in the 1980s and 90s, incomes and wealth have grown vastly more for high income earners and people with high levels of net worth.  For the middle and working classes, it's been stagnation or decline.  

Most people on the Alt-Left are not full fledged Marxists or communists, though.  The majority favor classic social democracy - a reinvigorated social safety net and regulatory system, modern monetary theory, universal single payer health care, stuff like that.   The Alt-Left was energized quite a bit by Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential bid.  Though he did not win the Democratic Nomination, he showed that there was measurable public support for a candidate running on an economically progressive platform and who even referred to himself as a democratic socialist.  In America.  Imagine that.

Q: This sounds like the Old Left.  Is that what the Alt-Left is?

A: Kind of.  The Alt-Left's ultimate aim is to push back against neoliberal dominance in political, economic and social spheres.  This puts the Alt-Left outside the mainstream of center left politics, which has almost completely capitulated to the right wing in economic philosophy, especially since the collapse of communism and the waning of organized labor in the wake of neoliberal globalization.  Replacing social democratic economics as the centerpiece of center leftism has been postmodern identity politics and cultural issues.  Terms such as "political correctness", "social justice warrior" and "regressive left" describe a world view and its adherents that attributes power and privilege to race and gender rather than class that has become hegemonic in academia and from there has spread into other cultural spheres.  The Alt-Left thinks this has been very harmful.

Q: The Alt-Left claims to be against identity politics.  Do you deny the existence of discrimination against women, people of color and other marginalized groups?

A: No.  This idea gets advanced by regressive leftists and SJWs, and it misconstrues what we mean when we say identity politics.  Think of Martin Luther King Jr's dream that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  This is the ultimate repudiation of identity politics, because it claims that identity should not matter compared to personal character.  This is what most Alt-Leftists favor.

Identity politics means making identity - one's race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever - a determinist characteristic.  Influenced by postmodernism, post-structuralism in philosophy and textual criticism and so on, classical liberal approaches to the issues faced by minorities was pushed back in favor of a more aggressively nationalistic approach. So concepts like white privilege, male privilege and so on were applied in a very sweeping and reductionist way, asserting that all whites/males were sexist and racist.  It was asserted that women and people of color couldn't be racist or sexist because these things were defined as power plus prejudice.  

Particularly alarming were the assertions that speech that offended so called marginalized peoples needed to be curtailed, as a necessary means of creating more inclusive and equal environments.  Academic authorities and mainstream media capitulated to this line of reasoning almost completely without question. So you're seeing more and more no-platforming on college campuses, so called safe spaces, the gross misuse of trigger warnings.  Trigger warnings were supposed to be for PTSD sufferers, and applied to very specific things.  This is gravely troubling for most Alt-Leftists.  

On the other hand, we're equally troubled by the right wing, which seems to be capitalizing on public resentment against leftist identity politics to advance reactionary agendas.  We already see this with Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the Alt-Right, and so on.    

Q: So the Alt-Left is strongly supportive of free speech?

A: Oh, very much so.  Most of us, anyway.  It is vitally important that a segment of the left stand up and speak out in favor of free speech, because the left is in very real danger of ceding the entire issue to the right.  A whole lot of people were left in political limbo, because they support free speech but don't trust conservatives and libertarians on a host of other issues, economic issues especially.  This is devastating for everybody.  Having to choose between free speech and free expression on the one hand, and protections against corporate excess and abuses on the other is an awful choice to force people to make.

Q: Another Alt-Left site calls itself 'The Left Wing of the Alt-Right' and entertains ideas of race realism.  Is the Alt-Left race realist?

A: Many of the early Alt-Leftists were race realists.  The term was first used by bloggers who had defected, or were offshoots from the Alt-Right.  They advocate race realism alongside liberal politics and leftist economics.  A tough circle to square, if you ask me.  The idea is not favored by most Alt-Leftists I've had dealings with.  The problem with it stems from the difficulties in serving two masters, so to speak.  How can we be class realists while supporting one of the harshest ways of stratifying a society that history has yet seen? 

Personally, I have no interest in or use for claims of vast differences in IQ, for example, across racial lines.  These claims are almost always advanced in the interests of puffing up white nationalist egos and the so called "science" backing up the claim is a legitimizing facade for this.  This has been my experience, at any rate.   But a growing problem has been that more and more alienated white youth are becoming receptive to Alt-Right claims.  On the surface, it's easy to be dismissive of 4chan culture, the preoccupation with meme warfare and cartoon frogs and so on.  But don't underestimate it.  It's tailored quite nicely to its target audience.  

And the regressive left doesn't help matters.  They ceaselessly lecture the young white male on his privilege, when he probably doesn't have it that good.  It goes back to what I mentioned above about class.  The regressive left is class-blind.  That's why they conflate being white male with privilege.  So they blame being white where they should blame power.  They blame being male where they should blame greed.  The descent of the mainstream left into this anti-western civilization, anti-white, anti-male hate cult ends up legitimizing the narratives of the macho and racist Alt-Right.  The two sides feed off one another.

Q: Well, that's just about it.  You mentioned earlier about turning this blog into a broader Alt-Left forum?

A: I think so.  There's a lot of ideas and enthusiasm among Alt-Leftists.  If other Alt-Left thinkers are interested in publishing articles on this forum, I'd be happy to accept submissions.  Email them to me or else indicate in the comments section either here or on Facebook, and if the submission is at all cohesive and the feedback is good, the author can become a regular contributor.  

Also on Samizdat Broadcasts

Ernest Everhard on Economics and Class Struggle, now on Samizdat Broadcasts!

Socrates talks Class and Identity

A contributor in one of the Alt-Left Facebook groups posed this question:

I only ask that this post be used for actual Socratic self analysis and discussion of issues of patriarchy, institutional racism, ableism and all the isms and oppressed groups, from addicts to poor rural whites to militant urban African Americans. Why should you? Because do you want to be known as the leftists on the wrong side of history? No of course not. Which is why we must constantly critique ourselves, understand our biases, our ignorance (aren't we all pretending to be more educated about leftism even though many here have probably never read a single book by Marx & Crew?), and privileges and ultimately fight for left solidarity and the awakening of the intersectional proletariat. Because even the dogmatically anti-SJW must acknowledge that there is a very real split in the left about this now...and at a time when the far left is growing at an unprecedented pace thanks to Bernie, as well as needed more than ever because of Trump, can we afford to not talk about these issues and instead just create groups that are echo chambers for our beliefs? Shouldn't we attempt to find common ground with the angry radical SJW? For the movements sake we must exit our echo chambers and contribute to the public sphere of leftism.

Truth be told, I don't think that class and identity are so easily separated from one another. If one is to stratify a society, than one needs legitimizing rationalizations for why some people should own and administer the wealth and capital while others should be stuck doing the leg-work required to produce it.  This brings to mind the old Platonic notion of the "noble lie" - the notion of myths used by societies to legitimize their social structures, outlined in Plato's Republic.  Since the above post does specifically request Socratic analysis, perhaps I'll allow Socrates himself to explain:

Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. 

God has created some people to be superior to others.  The superiors have blue blood, or are God's chosen people, or enjoy the divine right of kings, or God removed man's rib and made from that a subservient help-mate.  As time went on, God didn't wash any more and so "science" took his place.  Some races of people evolved to be superior to others, or the like.  Then these fell out of favor in favor of "meritocracy" - some people just work harder or are naturally more gifted than others.  That explains the difference between billionaires and famine victims in sub-Saharan Africa.

Lies like this echo down through history.  Typically, the only thing noble about them is the strata of society the tellers of the lies come from.  This is the real importance of identity in a class hierarchy.  It is important to deconstruct the lie in order to legitimize a more just and equitable social order. To remake the social order without taking apart the lie that upholds it may distribute power and wealth more equitably, but remain unjust in that it allows old prejudices based on the lie to linger unchallenged and undermine the very egalitarian aims that drove the reformation of the social order in the first place.

The problem with identity politics, though, is that divorced from class analysis, it essentially mistakes the lie for the social structure the lie was told to legitimize.  An unjust social order left intact, the deconstruction of the old noble lie merely becomes a new noble lie all its own.  You could thus end up with a Republic wherein the silver people cast down the gold with the aid of the people of brass and iron, only for the silver people to become what the gold once were.  Or maybe the gold people are left enthroned but the silver, brass and iron people periodically trade places, and are more inclined to quarrel among themselves over who is more privileged and who is more marginalized than they are to actually try to change anything.

That seems to be the problem of the present era.

I just don't think common ground with the angry, radical SJWs is possible right now. The problem is the fanaticism and the "true believer" mindset.  This is also a problem with hard-line vulgar Marxist class reductionists, but they haven't really been the problem in the last generation. The IdPol SJWs have. Back in the days of the old left, the opposite was true.

So there's a lot of frustration with the SJWs now. I don't think this frustration always stems from a mere desire to retain privilege or out of bigotry and hatred towards anybody, though it no doubt does in some cases. But this is impossible to explain to most SJWs without them turning into bitter, caustic assholes. And this is the real problem with them. Their thinking is very closed and very circular. You can't discuss anything with them because their "marginalized identities" make them infallible. Any kind of relationship with them is impossible because they're completely incapable of seeing any kind of heterosexual or mixed race relationship in anything other than ideological terms. And they're not interested in discussing. They're interested in dictating. They're not interested in equality and solidarity. They're interested in supremacy and separation. Their levels of militancy and self righteousness - glorified in the culture of radical leftism, approach Jihadist levels. What common ground can be found with this?

SJWs ask of us how we're supposed to gain the solidarity of marginalized peoples without addressing their issues, but this question can also be put to them. How do you expect cishet white males to ally with marginalized groups who think that their status as victims makes it okay to shit all over, scapegoat and shame their allies all the time? If, after a decade of tumblr and buzzfeed, after a decade of shrill screaming over "white fragility" and "mansplaining" even white male progressives (let alone moderates and conservatives) are giving feminism and BLM the middle finger, well I can't say I blame them. The constant use of the term "entitlement" by the SJWs starts looking more and more like projection all the time to me.  

Which is not to say that white cishet male progressives are without sin vis-a-vis their more marginalized counterparts.  I would counsel no one to be blind in their self righteousness.  At times I really do think my race and my gender doth protest too much.  Would it really kill us to actually give IdPol theorists a fair hearing and consider what they say, from time to time?  And can we honestly call ourselves progressives if we don't?

I'm all for common ground, but this preoccupation with being the specialist snowflake in the drift and scoring gold in the oppression olympics since this apparently implies some kind of moral superiority sure the hell isn't going to succeed where class reductionism and overlooking racial and gender oppression has allegedly failed. Hell, SJWs turn on "white feminists," declare that black cishet males are "the white people of black people" and expel white cis gay males from LGBTQ caucuses for not being marginalized enough. And they talk to me of solidarity? Please. The self righteous and completely self absorbed obsessions with ideological and identity purity on the IdPol left is what drove many of us to think left wing politics needed a reboot in the first place.

Common ground can be had, but everybody has to do their part to make it happen. And honestly, I think class politics IS the middle ground. Class solidarity is a harsh taskmaster where identity is concerned - it leaves no room for racism or supremacist views. Solidarity will fail otherwise, as has happened to tragic results multiple times throughout history. I harbor no illusions that I'm going to have to band together with people of all kinds of racial, sexual or other backgrounds if I'm to have a chance against the powers that be.  There can be no first among equals if it is to truly work. There's a place for obstinate white cishet males to play the victim themselves, and that place is on the alt-right. And if you haven't noticed, we don't like them and they don't like us either.

Class based politics promise no panacea, but offer material improvements for all based on how far down the societal ladder they are. If the lower rungs have higher concentrations of women, minorities etc., then they will be the ones to disproportionately benefit. And maybe that's the best we're going to do for now. Where I see resistance to class based politics from IdPol radical leftists, I see a lot more concern with ego and being recognized as the specialist snowflake of them all than I see interest in actually overcoming anything, and that perhaps class isn't an issue to them because that's a form of privilege they have (having attended colleges and all) and aren't willing to themselves self reflect on.

In short, SJW narratives, no less than vulgar Marxist narratives, become not-so-noble lies all their own.

Class vs Race Privilege

A question was recently put: Class privilege is real, white privilege isn't. Agree or disagree?

I think there's something to the idea of white privilege. But it's become this sweeping and reductionist idea that's been used to license shitty behavior.  Hate the white working class all you want, they have all the power because they’re white.  That makes it okay.  Upper middle class academic progressives can thereby scapegoat those stupid, unwashed rednecks for the collective historical sins of the white race. Beneath the very thin progressive veneer of this sentiment is downward punching snobbish regressivism at its ugliest.

Not that this makes racism among the white underclass okay.  It certainly doesn’t, for it erodes their capacity for solidarity with the black underclass that is so needed for both to get a better deal in the long run.  It also lends the legitimacy of “popular support” to regressive policy enacted against the black underclass by the elite.  So called "brocialists" should keep in mind that the black underclass does not have it easy, and that affirmative action and knapsacks of privilege have a funny and ironic way of being colorblind where the lower classes are concerned.  The black underclass has it worse, if anything.  So the white working class should take nothing that I say as a license to be racist towards blacks, so don’t be.  The white working class has a long history of class blindness, motivated in part by racial prejudice and in part by a US left that long ago traded in class for racial concerns and embraced neo-liberalism. This has repeatedly driven the white working class to support regressive right wing politics, as has been recently demonstrated in the US 2016 elections, and they've always ended up suffering for it. 

But for the varied segments of the underclasses to fight among each other over who has it worse is quite stupid, for reasons that should be obvious by now.  It is likewise misguided for the black underclass to despise whitey. This has been good for the black upper middle class that has arisen in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of neo-liberalism - the twin engines of the Democratic Party.  Better for them that the black underclass blame white rather than class privilege for their woes.  But this just puts them in a position oddly comparable to that of the Republican supporting white working class.  The real color of privilege is green, and this can only be challenged by white and black together.

Between class on the one hand and identity - race and gender - on the other, I do think class is the more fundamental of the two, though I don't think identity is completely irrelevant.  This is because it has been made relevant by an elite that has used race and identity as a means of dividing the underclass.  So the reality is that identity and class cannot be so easily extricated from one another.  The postmodern left likes to claim that racism/sexism is "prejudice plus power" and that powerless identities cannot oppress. But where does the power - that makes the prejudice of some groups more pernicious than others - come from?

Ownership of capital and the access to political power this inevitably entails. In short, class.

The problem with the postmodern academic left is not identity politics per-se, but how those politics have been co-opted and made to serve powerful interests. The academic postmodernist "left" refuses to see class for one simple reason: they're much higher up on the class totem pole than they'd like to admit. They're not Fortune 500 or Military Industrial Complex by any stretch of the imagination, but they do possess significant advantages over the working and middle classes. Namely that of supremely privileged access to media.

Their position can be compared to that of the clergy in a more religious era, such as that wherein Marx declared religion the opiate of the masses. They use institutions empowered by capital and backed by the state to spin the dominant cultural and social narratives. As we know from the theorists of the early Frankfurt school, Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and even from Marx himself, the ruling narrative of any era is the narrative of its ruling class. Or in this case, how its ruling class was NOT responsible for the historical atrocities brought to light by earlier generations of radicals.

Plus, you'll notice that the solutions to racial and gender inequality favored by these "leftists" always either empower capital - "fire him from his job!" - or the state - "sue for hate speech!"

As such, the SJWs - the new clergy of our secular era - are not radicals, but rather ego driven enforcers of a decidedly statist and capitalist status quo.

Sounds Regressive, but OK

"Sounds Liberal but OK" is a self described "radical leftist group" on Facebook that is based around "criticizing and mocking centrist (liberal) thought and concept through shitposting."  SLBOK has a link in its description to a "word bank" wherein its basic ideological precepts or links to them are outlined.

The word bank is a worthwhile read for the glimpse it offers of a lot of regressive left ideology in an almost perfectly distilled form.  Many of your favorite canards are there, along with typically vapid and weak definitions and defenses of these canards. But this one in particular is especially noteworthy, since it seems to be the basis of much of this group's - and the regressive left in general's outlook on relations between "marginalized" and "privileged" groups:

Just how long does one have to spend in the ivory tower in order to cultivate such absurdly reductionistic thinking?  Where does one even begin sorting this mess out?

Of course, whites can be racist towards PoC.  Of course there has been native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment during WW2, and institutionalized discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws that have targeted PoC.  None of this is good, of course, and it would be absurd to assume that mere legal equality would completely overcome the legacy of that in so short a time, relatively speaking. 

But the narrative quoted in the SLBOK word bank must necessarily leave out a good deal of history in order to maintain its integrity.  It begins to break down when you stop thinking of "white" people as a pale skinned monolith and start thinking of them the way the were often really thought of throughout history: in terms of their nations of origin.  

I make no apologies for the "whataboutism" I'm about to engage in here, because these questions work towards the undermining of the black-and-white (both literally and figuratively) narrative presented in the SLBOK word bank: but what about the Know-Nothing movement, and its attendant ideology of anti-Catholicism and anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment?  What about the fact that many Irish came to America as indentured servants: not the same as slavery, but hardly a position of power and privilege either.  What about African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade?  What about anti-German sentiment that naturally prevailed during the world wars?  What about anti-Polish sentiment?  These things aren't such concerns now, but there was a time, and it had real consequences.  Prejudice against these once despised groups played a real part in enabling mistreatment, discrimination and exploitation as sweat labor.  As bad as slavery?  Perhaps not, but slavery isn't practiced any more today either.  And what's to be gained by all of this competitive victimhood anyway?

The deeper point being that while racism against PoC has indeed been a historical ill in America, but hardly a monolithic one. Yet today's descendants of Irish immigrants (among others) are not demanding a de-facto carte-blanche to revisit ill will on the descendants of good, proper WASP Americans.  Whites in America are hardly a monolith, and were only ever treated as a homogenous block when it advantaged the elites to do so.  So called "radical leftists," of all people, should know this.  One wonders if it is because it is advantageous to elites today, particularly in academia and mass media, that so called "radical leftists" have now chosen to forget this?

But the problems with the SLBOK word bank's approach to intersectional politics don't end there.  

The entry on reverse racism seems to imply that "judging a man by the color of his skin" is not what is objectionable, but rather the historical and contemporary power to translate that prejudice into actual oppressive and discriminatory policy. This is a strange, and the more one thinks of it, troubling way of viewing racial politics.  For one thing, even if we did live in so monolithically white supremacist a society as the SBLOK word bank asserts we do, why hate the oppressor for the color of his skin rather than for the actual power the oppressor wields, above all, and the self serving rationalization of racial supremacy that is advanced to "justify" this abuse of power?  Not so long ago, most leftists acknowledged that the problem was racism, not white people.  What happened to this?  This relatively recent shift away from hating racism to hating whitey even in the mainstream center-leftist media (think The Guardian or the Huffington Post) should be raising red flags - literally and figuratively - for left leaning people.  This tumblrization of the left is among the most alarming political trends of our time, if for no other reason than that it lends credence to alt-right narratives and enables the far right to win bigly - to win so much they'll get tired of winning - if you catch my drift.

Why is prejudice based on skin color not so bad, nor are power differentials by themselves so bad, but the two together suddenly to become an uber-transcendent evil, against which all double standards and regressivism is justified?

And that all assumes that the SLBOK word bank's assertion that we live in so monolithically white supremacist a society even holds in the first place.  I would not consider it a mark of a white supremacist society that "blacks cannot be racist because prejudice plus power" be canonical dogma in the Universities and in most mainstream media discourse on racial politics.  I would not consider it the mark of a white supremacist society that to be credibly called a racist is among the most damaging allegations that could be made against someone.  If being demonstrably (or not) racist against PoC can result job loss, professional marginalization, ostracization and being the target of harassment or even violence, than I'd say it's a safe bet that we're not so monolithically white supremacist as most on the left would seem to think we are - especially since all of the above applies exclusively to white-on-black racism.

None of which is to say that we're black supremacist either.  That would be a patently ridiculous statement.  There is a soundness to the underlying logic of affirmative action - it's not reasonable to expect immediate recovery and equality for PoC from centuries of discrimination as a result of mere legislated equality of right.  Giving a hand up to those who've been unfairly treated in the past so that they may live their lives on more equal footing with those who've benefited from the unequal treatment in the past is a just and fair sentiment.  Of course, the historical reality is more complex and nuanced than that, but just the same, I'd say we live in a society that has shown itself committed to transcending white supremacy.  To a degree that looking the other way in the face of displays of hatred for whites by PoC is hardly unique to the radical left, but is actually quite mainstream.

It actually sounds quite liberal to me.  But OK.

Only it isn't OK.  It's actually a grave long term threat to both liberalism and radical leftism, and it would well behoove centrists and leftists alike to come to grips with PoC racism towards whites and start condemning it.

Not because PoC presently (or likely will in any foreseeable future) have the capacity to oppress whites in a manner comparable to the manner in which European colonialism resulted in the oppression of PoC.  But because two wrongs don't make a right, however incomparable the wrongs may be in terms of scale and harm done.  Yes, violence by PoC against whites do have "implications."  The implications for white families who lose a father and provider to PoC violence aren't appreciably different than the implications for PoC families who suffer a similar loss at the hands of a white person. Grief knows no color.  People are more than the abstract social categories to which they are ascribed, and those instances in which polities have lost sight have this have always been accompanied by mass bloodshed.

Because real white supremacy - the kind practiced in the pre-civil rights US, in apartheid era South Africa and Nazi Germany was terrible, and should not be trivialized in this manner.

Because it preserves the integrity of anti-racism as a political position.  You either think it's okay to discriminate on the basis of skin color or you don't.  If you think it's okay for some races to discriminate but not others, guess what?  You think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color.  And if you think it's okay to discriminate based on skin color, why should I listen to a word you say when you lecture me on why I shouldn't discriminate based on skin color?  Nothing sinks the credibility of a moral position faster or more thoroughly than this kind of arrogance and hypocrisy.  Just ask any washed up televangelist.

Power differentials between races and between people are vastly more complex than "whites have all the power and blacks none."  While certain overarching trends do hold when looked at from a big picture, macroeconomic perspective, context matters in individual cases.  Put your typical white dude in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson circa 1988, and who has the power in that situation?  Unless that white dude's name was Rocky Marciano circa the early 1950s, I'll tell you right now where my money's lying.  If allegations of racism on a college campus or in a human resources department threaten the livelihood of white but not PoC employees, who has the power in that circumstance?

Historically, it was asserted that the kulaks were a "privileged" class and that the Soviet Union, being a "socialist" society was incapable of being oppressive since oppression was defined as the means by which one class maintained an exploitative relation of production with another, which a socialist society was, by definition, incapable of. Violence carried out by the revolution against its class enemies was handwaved away in the familiar terms of being a "reaction" and "self defense" against power and privilege.  One wonders if SLBOK would regard the tens of millions murdered in the communist world as being less dead due to this line of rationalization?

Of course, there are many circumstances under which all other things being equal, being white would be an advantage, and that these are legitimate issues that should be tackled.  Point is, power differentials in the real world depend a great deal on specific context.  For all the criticisms of "class reductionism" prevalent in social media leftism, it is at least more solidly grounded in political and economic reality than identitarian reductionism is, though all forms of reductionism are inherently limited.

And all of this assumes that merely being lower on the totem pole of power and privilege automatically makes one morally superior in the first place.  This underlying implication that it does seems to be driving politics in increasingly caustic and decreasingly productive directions.  The popular term "oppression olympics" says a great deal about how this politics of competitive victimhood is playing out in actual practice.  But it does more damage than even pitting people against one another across racial or gender lines: it makes real social solidarity - the kind needed to win material benefits and political progress in a capitalist society - impossible.  Radical left groups like SLBOK, of all people, should know this.  It's why leftists began opposing racism in the first place - division of the white and black working classes constantly hampered organizing efforts.  The right's exploitation of white working class's attraction to reactionary politics is an ongoing frustration to the left to this day.  Their subsequent blindness to their own variations of the same divisive character thus becomes all the more frustrating and indefensible.

The sooner the left abandons privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" pseudo academic dogmas, the more effective and credible it will be.  One wonders if this is precisely why corporate backed center "left" parties, media and academic departments seem to like privilege theory as much as they do?

Racism is wrong no matter who does it.  This implies no less opposition to racism against PoC than privilege theory does, it merely prevents anti-racism from being itself a form of privilege for those PoC high enough up on the political and economic totem pole to actually make use of it. Or from being a tool used by academic and media elites at the behest of state and corporate power to promote scapegoating and resentment between the white and black underclasses, further undermining solidarity.  It actually brings anti-racism back into the philosophy of enlightenment humanism and universal human rights that was the source of its credibility in the first place.  Hopefully this can be done before said credibility is completely squandered.

That sounds liberal to me.  And that's quite OK.

My Own Alt Left Manifesto

Alternative left manifestos are springing up left and right these days.  Let's not forget some of the older mainstays, such as Rabbit's Counter Currents article and Bob Lindsay's definition of the alt left, more based on what it isn't than what it is.  Others abound, amidst a growing bevy of media exposure, most of which is getting us entirely and completely wrong.

I've wandered into these waters myself, on occasion.  Sort of.  But only in a somewhat general sense.  So some clarity then.  What follows is an abbreviated outline of what I call "My own Alt-Left Manifesto.  With Blackjack and Hookers." A treatise on Postmodern Political Economy .  

Prelude

• Since the end of WWII, the American left has been primarily concerned with anti-racism, while the American right has been primarily concerned with anti-communism.  While there are other concerns in both cases, those ones dominate.
• Both sides have therefore been successful.  Not totally successful, but more or less so.  The left has seen the passage of civil rights laws, affirmative action, an anti-racist consensus among the general public and even elected a black man for two consecutive terms in the oval office.  The right has seen the dissolution of the USSR, market reforms in China, and a retreat of ideological socialism in most parts of the world.
• Despite, or possibly because of this success, both sides of the US political spectrum have vocal factions that are more rather than less strident and fanatical, such as the paleo-cons and the Tea Party on the right and Black Lives Matter and the social justice warriors on the left.
• What typifies these strident ideologues is epistemic closure - the ideologies are marked by obsessive preoccupation with issues that are of little relevance to others (microaggressions, democrats coming to take everybody's guns away, safe spaces, tax revolt etc) refuse dialogue and negotiation and are impervious to persuasion.  All liberals are America hating cultural Marxists, all white males are racist and sexist, and so on.
• Epistemic closure and overall ideological excess has been enabled by the rise and spread of postmodern philosophy and thought: first in academia and subsequently throughout popular culture.  Postmodernism isn't an easy thing to pin down, but critical to it is a rejection of philosophical objectivism on all levels.  Postmodernists would not only claim that morality is subjective, but also that very axiomatic concepts: the nature of basic perception of reality and the foundations of thought, are socially constructed.  The resulting denial of a common reality and a common set of moral and philosophical principles binding to all has caused increased political and social fragmentation and divisiveness.
• Alternative politics have arisen out of frustration with the above and with how tepid and unresponsive mainstream centrist politics is.  Alternative politics have been further enabled by the enhanced reach and networking capability of social media.
• In response to the race-obsessed left, the Alternative Right is marked by "race realism", white nationalism and a narrative of white victimhood at the hands of a militant left enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream right too preoccupied with wealth accumulation to be at all concerned with preservation of European cultural and racial heritage.

Class Realism

• In keeping with the above, in response to the wealth and property obsessed right, the Alternative Left is marked by "class realism," working and middle class solidarity and a narrative of class war waged by a greedy right enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream left too preoccupied with identity politics to be at all concerned with the welfare of working and middle class people.
• "Class Realism" is defined as acknowledging the reality of class, in the historical materialist sense of the term.  Meaning that class is marked by relations of production - some people make their living entirely off ownership of capital through rent, interest, dividends and so on, while others make their living only by selling their own labor power, while still others are some combination of the two, with wildly varying income levels all around.  Class is best seen then in terms of income, net worth and relations of production.
• Class realism acknowledges that at least since the elections of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, western governments have been waging active class war against their own working classes.  This is chiefly marked by the exporting of jobs, importing of mass surplus labor, attacking the unions, deregulation, privatization, and the enabling of large amounts of private and public debt.
• While the right wing has been the main driver in this class warfare, it has been enabled by a regressive left that has displayed neutrality on class and economic issues and defines oppression and marginalization instead in terms of culture and identity, causing socially destructive racial and sexual strife and enabling the right's class warfare.

Manifesto of the Alt Left

• The alt left shall strive to be principled but not dogmatic.  Its primary purpose should be able to passionately and philosophically advocate on behalf of the material needs and interests of the working and middle classes, in favor of policies that materially benefit the broader portion of the population and defend them against rentier policies and economics that would only benefit the few.
• The alt left shall remain committed to full employment and worker's rights at all times.
• The alt left recognizes and opposes all forms bigotry as being socially divisive and undermining working class consciousness and solidarity.  But the alt-left does not recognize any form of systemic racial or sexual oppression as taking place in the western world, and rejects the self serving regressive left dogmas of privilege theory and "power plus prejudice."  
• The alt left recognizes no preferred racial, sexual, gender, ethnic or religious categories, and shall not hinder or oppose free expression thereof or free identification with any of them, subject of course to the laws that govern us all.
• The alt left shall value rationality, reason, free thought and other enlightenment humanist values.  The alt left should eschew dogmatism, fanaticism and be no place for the "true believer."  Conversely, the alt-left should be skeptical of postmodernism and its doctrines of extreme cultural relativism and social constructionism.  Romanticism and religion are important aspects of human nature whose free expression in the private realm should be protected, but are poor guides to governance and public policy.
• The alt left is therefore civilly and culturally libertarian.  The alt left fights for rights, not feelings.  Censorship and penalizing of "offensive" speech is dangerous in light of the fact that what is deemed offensive is subjective.  The alt-left recognizes no special prerogatives (such as past or present marginalized status) on part of any segment of society to censor or penalize expression it deems offensive.
• The Alt Left is gravely concerned about ideological capture of higher education, social media and mass media, and the abuse of organizational structures of these institutions by managerial personnel acting as ideological gatekeepers.  This should be a matter of public concern and corrective measures sought out and taken.
• The alt left believes that questions of human biodiversity across racial and gender lines is a matter best left to scientists rather than politicians, and should no way alter our commitment to the above listed principles.
• The alt left believes that intervention in the affairs of other nations does much more harm than good the vast majority of the time.
• The alt left recognizes that fossil fuels will not last forever and that their ongoing use contributes to climate change, pollution and habitat degradation.  It would well behoove us to research and convert to renewable and clean sources of energy sooner rather than later.

Class and Gender: Engendering Failure II

Anita Sarkeesian writes:

There's no such thing as sexism against men.  That's because sexism is prejudice + power.  Men are the dominant gender with power in society.

 This is a line of reasoning one encounters frequently in so called social justice circles.  But is it accurate?  And if it is not accurate, is it merely hyperbole intended to raise awareness of legitimate issues, but doing no harm otherwise?  Or is this actually a dangerous idea?  It is an idea that distorts our understanding of how power and privilege really work?  Does this idea draw our attention away from where real power and privilege lie, and scapegoat people who are actually powerless?

What is wrong with this statement.  It's based on an understanding of power that's wrong and self serving.

Since most of the very real powerful and privileged – the super rich – are white males, therefore all white males must collectively constitute an upper class?  This is bad logic on the face of it.  But to assume that males collectively constitute an elite that’s organized around recognition and defense of its privileges as a gender completely flies in the face of the behavior of corporations and governments daily.  Corporate and state power rarely meets a feminist cause it doesn’t like.  Could it be because feminist causes usually entail an expansion of state power?  Could it be because the real value that women have as far as capital is concerned, is as workers, consumers and as tax payers? 

Those who defend the concept of “male privilege” may indeed have some valid points to make overall about how men have it easier than women.  The point of my saying this is not to be yet another anti-feminist commentator to toss his hat, or should I day his fedora, into the messy dispute over gender and privilege.  Rather, I question whether or not “privilege” is actually a useful concept in describing the advantages that men do enjoy.

Privilege, by its nature and definition, implies a source of power sufficiently strong to grant special prerogatives to one segment of the population but not to another.  If there was so strong a power in our society, would this individual or body be the more logical target for the critics of institutional power and privilege?

Those who defend the notion of male privilege point out that women still make less money overall then men.  77 cents for every dollar or something like that.  The real nature of this pay gap and the reasons for it have been explained time and again and I won’t get into them in detail here.  Suffice it to say, that when your value is measured more in pure economic terms, you’ll place a higher premium on economic reward when making your career choices.  This often comes at the expense of longer hours and harsher working conditions.  But even if it were true that men were paid more money than women for the same jobs, does this make men the real bearers of privilege?  Seems to me as though those who sign the paychecks are the ones with the real power and privilege in this scenario.  Why no analysis of corporate structure and power, Ms. Sarkeesian?  Perhaps because you’re a beneficiary of it?

Which raises another question.  The narrative presented by Sarkeesian in this tweet is one that is repeated frequently, in academia and “left” leaning corporate media and disseminated very effectively by a vast network of bloggers, academics and professional activists.  It is frequently pushed on social media platforms whose multi million dollar CEOs openly embrace this line of thinking, to the point that critics of it can face blocking on these very social media sites?  Does it make sense that the truly rich and powerful would openly embrace a very real criticism of institutional power?  Does access to this kind of influence really characterize a powerless and marginalized segment of the population.  Anita Sarkeesian herself has addressed the United Nations on behalf of causes important to her.  Similar access to the UN has not been extended to her opponents and critics in social media, some of whom have many more followers than Feminist Frequency does.  Is this what we’d expect from a marginalized demographic?

Sarkeesian’s statement assumes that prejudice against powerful groups is okay - it is based upon a "two wrongs make a right" kind of mentality. Note that real, concrete measures to erode power differences are not a problem. But that is not the purpose of this statement.  Sarkeesian’s statement obscures who the real holders of power are, and therefore makes even holding them accountable, let alone fundamentally reshifting the balance of power in a more egalitarian direction, more rather than less difficult.  How can you redistribute power away from people who already have very little power, except to become more powerful than them.  Which is what this is really all about.

None of this means that it is actually men who are the oppressed class – there are plenty of both men and women out there with nothing but their own labor power to sell as a means of sustenance, and the lack of access real power and influence that this entails.  Nor is this to be taken as a denial of female mistreatment at the hands of males in many circumstances.  I do not condone this, and I would urge my male listeners not to take what I’ve said as a license to look down on or mistreat women in any way.

Sarkeesian’s statement’s real purpose is to be a self serving statement in that it enables women who agree with it to assume a stance of moral superiority vis-a-vis men, which can be exploited for personal advantage.  She does not seek to obstruct those who would enable violence against women.  She seeks to obstruct those who would bring to light and criticize female mistreatment of men, in both private and public contexts.  There is no place for either in any real progressivism worth its salt.  Any version of the left that does not have “an injury to one is an injury to all” as a core motto is not a left worthy of anyone’s support.

Her statement is a conservative; a reactionary statement in that by defining a powerless people as the ruling class, those who really are powerful escape scrutiny.  It seeks to establish gender rather than class solidarity, and the beneficiaries of this can only be the rich and powerful.

Note too that much of Sarkeesian’s social criticism is directed at the preponderance of sexual imagery in popular culture, and the portrayal of sexuality in media.  This kind of criticism has typically come from the far right rather than the left.  In light of that, and the high levels of institutional support that Sarkeesian’s variation on feminist ideals actually receives, what does this tell you about how “progressive” her agenda really is? 

With "social justice leftists" like this, who needs conservatives?

(View this Video on Samizdat Broadcasts!)

The Other Red Pill: Wake Up! Class is Back in Session!

I mentioned previously that societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists do so at a heavy cost.  But then, so do societies that fail to take materialist definitions of class into account when looking at both economic and social issues.  To say that our society has suffered enormously as a result of a lack of class in its political outlook is an understatement of grand proportions.

Historical materialism was consigned to the dustbin of history very prematurely.  The failure of the USSR was not the failure of this kind of an outlook on political economy.  If anything, we've been failing for a lack of it, as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the Other Red Pill Series.  To address numerous social problems, it must be resurrected and rehabilitated, without a lot of the other Marxist baggage it became burdened with over time.  Let's just pretend that Lenin and everything after in the east and the Frankfurt School and everything after in the west never happened, shall we?

In fact, I would go as far as to say that The resuscitation of economic class, as defined in Marx's materialist conception of history, must be THE central project of alternative-left politics.  This is what the Other Red Pill is ultimately really all about.  What we do with that knowledge, as it becomes more mainstream, is up to us. 

But the truancy of the left must come to an end.  It's time to wake up.  Identitarians of all stripes and neo-liberals have kept the wool over our eyes for far too long now.  It's time for the alt-left to take them back to school: class is back in session!

The Other Red Pill: Engendered Failure

In 1993, Warren Farrell, Ph.D. exposed us to many poignant truths about the reality of being male in America at the time.  Among them are:

• 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men.
• Every workday hour, one construction worker in the US loses his life
• Men have been the overwhelming majority of the cannon fodder in every major war ever waged.
• Most successful suicides are male, and unemployed males commit suicide at twice the rate of their employed brethren.
• 96% of the adult homeless in San Francisco are male.  The national median at the time of writing was 85%.

And more besides.  Things have not improved either.  Not for most men anyway.  Eighty percent of job losses in the 2007 to 2009 time span were male.  This led to the coining of the term "mancession", which did not end until 2015, according to some sources.  Except for black males, which must doubtlessly be the fault of white privilege.  

Some men have done quite well through it all, however.  Which ones?   Probably not the ones reading this, despite what the feminists are no doubt telling them about their male privilege.  Which all men have, regardless of race, sexual orientation or physical ability.  Or, you know, anything else that might impact social inequality.  If you're still confused, go and take a cl ... I mean course on it.  The important thing is that men as a cl ... as a group supposedly have all the power and women have none.

And the statistics bear that out, as any woman will tell you.  Women still suffer from a very real wage and wealth gap compared to men.  Which can only be explained by men, all men, hording all the money to themselves.  But not evenly.  White men, quite naturally, have the most.  Even the homeless white men referenced above?  Well, yes I suppose.  The historical reality, after all, is that blacks were slaves and were discriminated against in the Jim Crow era while whites were not.  That's the only real explanation open to us, since race and gender are the only social axes upon which wealth and power are distributed.  So all white males benefited, and benefited equally.  Or so the best social commentators of our time will tell us.  The ones who graduated at the top of their cl ... I mean, got the best marks while in college.

The Myth of Male Power was a book not lacking in power.  It quite effectively takes a wrecking ball to notions popular at the time of its writing, and still popular today, that men have gone and made everything wonderful for themselves at the expense of all women.  Which needed to be said.  It apparently still does need to be said, and even I've said it.  But not nearly as well as Dr. Farrell said it.  In some respects, The Myth of Male Power is in a cl ... a category by itself.

Men continue to be the disposable sex, and growing numbers of men continue to be mad about it.  And so they should be.  Though the mancession is over, most men are finding job prospects limited and wages stagnant.  If you take the "red pill" and go into the online "manosphere", you will find that feminism has been responsible for most of men's woes over the years.  We can only guess that all of those military and workplace fatalities and the economic struggles that working cl ... I mean just men face are due to feminism also.  Even though feminism is scarcely more than two hundred years old and men have been dying in wars and working in drudgery for a lot longer than that.  

And I don't blame the manosphere types.  They do have legitimate gripes with feminism.  No, really.  They do.  Because many feminists have been blaming all men, at least collectively, for their own struggles, which are sometimes different but quite frequently look the same as well.  Lagging wages, declining opportunities, all too frequently outright poverty.  Whose fault could all of this be?  After all, corporate profits are up again.  Who could be making it if not white men and their centuries of privilege?  It's not like there's any other cl ... I mean category of people who could be benefiting at the expense of women?

Well that's obviously preposterous, and you'll learn that quite quickly the deeper into the underworld of the internet you go.  You'll find that it goes beyond feminism.  The deeper problem is "cultural Marxism."  Or should I say, (((cultural Marxism))).   You see, this "Marxism" has to do with this guy in the 19th century who must have figured that white western civilization was a bad, BAD thing because it oppressed and colonized women and people of color.  And what's funny about it is that if you go to college and take a cl ... course on critical theory, for example, or women's or black studies, they will indeed teach you that those terrible things did happen.  And the only reason they happened was because racism and sexism.  For the benefit of white males, just for being white males!  After all, it's not like there's any other way that any other cl ... group of people could have benefited from the dispossession of indigenous people and African slavery.  

Or so the cultural Marxist colleges will teach you.  But it's all a lie, don't you know?  A (((lie!)))  Any fool worth his salt knows that white males are struggling to get by these days.  Well, most white males, anyway.  The real blame lies with the Jews, or so I've read, because I can't imagine any other cl ... category of people who might benefit from stagnant wages and unemployment among the white male working cl ...

One other thing that I've run into with all of this study of the politics of race, gender, culture and oppression.  And that's this idea of linguistic reclaimation -  a once dirty, derogatory or forbidden word being brought back into acceptable use by the communities that experienced oppression under that word, or perhaps by the absence of that word.

Right off hand, I'd say there's one word that people of all races, genders and sexual orientations have been far too afraid to say for far too long now, and our racial and sexual politics have been distorted almost beyond reason and recognition as a result.  The first task of the Alt-Left should be to reclaim that word.

A good place to start might be to take a look at what that Marx guy (Karl, not Groucho, in case you were wondering) really had to say.

The Other Red Pill: Race to the Bottom

So why bring all of this up at all?  What good is Marxist materialism in the 21st century, decades after the collapse of the USSR?  Because it is desperately needed.  The previous two entries in the Other Red Pill series describe how the lack of understanding of class in a materialist context is causing terrible distortions in racial and sexual politics, as well as enabling the widespread acceptance of neo-liberal economics.  With no understanding of class rooted in economic relations, persistent inequality across racial and gender lines can only be explained by either an entrenched culture favoring one group over the other, or an appeal to innate biological differences between the unequal groups.

Suffice it to say, these explanations are not helping racial and gender relations any.  And it's only going to get worse.  Discussions between feminists and men's rights activists, or between Black Lives Matter supporters and the Alt-Right certainly do lack class.

This isn't to say that culture and identity don't matter.  They do.  But making these factors central puts the cart before the horse, so to speak.  If you've been following the Other Red Pill series since the beginning, you should know that the most fundamental relations that people engage in boil down to physical survival and sustenance, which is most certainly material and economic in its character.  Economic relations and forces of production are therefore the base of your society.  These activities, over time, end up shaping the politics, culture, dominant belief systems, personal relationships and so on.  These more cultural and personal matters are thus the superstructure upon which the base is constructed.

Racial prejudice, for example, is commonly seen in terms of being a moral failing or the result of ignorance.  And for white people, racism against people of color is seen today as being worse than that: it is actually an instrument of oppression.  Evidence cited for this later claim is the ongoing economic inequality between whites and black people, and the subsequent poverty and social problems that result.  Therefore white people must stop being racist if blacks are to achieve equality. This necessitates the existence of a class of educated sociologists in media and government to monitor and police the words and behaviors of whites to make sure they are not racist.  Suffice it to say, many white people are not happy about this.

These views are not entirely wrong, but are but a part of a much bigger picture.  Whence comes racism and resulting racial inequality?  All forms of extractive economics - systems that work by screwing over one segment of the population to benefit another, tend to have to rationalize this conduct in a way that makes it morally palatable to its beneficiaries, victims and onlookers.  If you were a Spanish Conquistador and you just waltzed into 15th century central and south American and just took their gold and bound the natives to the land in an incredibly exploitative system of forced labor, you might feel like a bit of a prick, right?

Not if you had religion, and had God on your side and were saving the native's souls by converting them to the one true faith!  That made it okay, and that gold then becomes more guilt free.  It's easier to grow fat off plantation slave labor if you tell yourselves that your dark skinned slaves are less human than you are, and that you're really doing them a favor by having them work for you.   More compact cultures built around these kinds of rationalizations for the flagrant exploitation of whole categories of people more effectively work to ease guilty consciences.  So you tell yourselves whatever you have to: a shoehorned interpretation of the bible that refers to dark skinned people as the children of Cain and therefore cursed and deserving of mistreatment, or pseudoscience involving skull measurements and other racial characteristics to conveniently brand the slaves as an inferior race.

But the bottom line is always, well, the bottom line.

For a variety of reasons, not least of which being that the industrial mode of production made chattel slavery less competitive, though the plantation states losing the Civil War (for that reason) hastened the process, said chattel slavery fell out of use.  But the racist ideas it gave rise to (the superstructure) didn't go away because they still had a place in the underlying relations of production (base), even after slavery and later Jim Crow segregation were finally defeated: racial prejudice enabled the paying of lower wages to black workers (rationalized according to their "laziness"), dividing the working class and weakening the unions.  This resulted in all workers regardless of color doing less well as a result, though many even in the white working class were loathe to give up the ego stroking sense of supremacy over blacks that racism gave them.  As Lyndon Johnson put it:

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it: if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Due to their long period as slaves, and then as victims of legal discrimination, blacks and other minorities had far fewer opportunities than whites to accumulate capital and pass it on generation to generation.  And since capital is where wealth in a capitalist society really comes from, as I'm sure you've guessed, this compounds the problem.  Less capital means less cultural influence as well, not to mention politicians exploiting racial sentiment to keep their more economically populist rivals out of office.  So you can see now that culture ultimately flows from economy, though is also quite capable of having a life of its own that is slow to change, feeding back into the economic system incentives to keep the existing cultural system in place.

Ultimately, however, economy is the stronger of the two most of the time.  Racial prejudice gradually faded - it was removed from the core structure of the plantation economy by the abolition of slavery, and phased out politically over the next century when Jim Crow segregation was challenged by the civil rights movement.  I would not be the only one to notice, however, that when the man who's name is synonymous with the US civil rights movement - Martin Luther King Jr. began talking about inequality in terms of class and economics, even going as far as to plan a poor people's march on Washington for all races, that's when he got assassinated.

The FBI's notorious counter intelligence program may be (officially) shut down, but perhaps it's more the case that it has actually been institutionalized to an extent that it's no longer really needed.  Radicalism is perfectly fine and acceptable in the US and other western nations these days, as long as it's the right kind of "radicalism."  Provided that power is defined in terms of race and gender, media and academia that have become more rather than less corporate and beholden to corporate and advertising revenues are, in fact, quite supportive of "radicalism."

There's always space in mainstream media for cultural criticism, provided it stays cultural.  Major media conglomerates will give front page space to black nationalists who see racism everywhere.  But especially in the trailer courts and dilapidated rust belt suburban neighborhoods.  There's always room to criticize the ethnic composition of the cast of the latest Marvel superhero movie, or even the ethnic composition of the board of directors at Sony, Viacom or Time-Warner.  So long as there's no criticism of how powerful these institutions actually are outside of an identitarian context.  Firing troublemakers on the pretext of "racism" is actually a good way to keep the status quo the status quo, as a matter of fact.

But most of the time, things don't have to get so messy.  People who want to be "left" and fight oppression now have acceptable channels through which to do so: attack white people and their privilege, which all white people must have in equal measure, because ... because reasons.  And sometimes the reasons are valid.  The white man's racism is not to be condoned.  It's worked against the common interests of all of the have-nots for far too long now, as the LBJ quote above indicates.

To criticize the lower class white man for his racism when appropriate is one thing.  To charge the lower class white man as being a beneficiary in equal measure with all other white people in a system of power over which his lack of class gives him no control is quite another, and is itself an act of oppression geared towards preserving rather than undermining the real power structures.  He is made an acceptable scapegoat for the evils of an unacceptable system, despite his own very real powerlessness.  It is important that alt-leftists call this out in a manner that does not turn these tables on the poor black.  You've been red-pilled now, you should know where people's attention really needs to be focused.

One wonders if President Obama marvels in a manner comparable to President Johnson before him, over just how easy it is to pick the pockets of the lowest black man so long as he can look down on the best white man for his "racism."  Their loyalty to Obama at the polls tells the story.

But white people who rightly get annoyed by this - the white people who actually lack the power that the upper middle class sociologists define as a key ingredient to real racism - the white people who've never been that much closer to the top of the social hierarchy than blacks due to the fact that they've never owned anything more than their own labor power to sell in a country that's always been hostile to worker's rights - can then blame "the left" and its "cultural Marxism" for demonizing whites and their culture.  But the poor white must above all remember, it's the "left" and especially "Marxism" that he has to blame.  If there's anyone that both poor blacks and poor whites need to be steered clear from, it's that Marx guy.

I can't help but wonder if the souls of those dead conquistadors; the ones who were just doing God's work and the dead plantation owners who were just preserving the natural order of things aren't looking at the women's studies and black studies department theorists and shaking their heads with that mixture of admiration and shame that comes with the knowledge that you've finally been utterly and completely out-classed at your own game.

Whatever success they have from here, the SJWs have been utterly successful at what I firmly believe their true purpose was.  They've truly beaten the Ku Klux Klan at their own game.  We're to busy checking our privilege now to be the 99% any more.  And that's the important thing.

The Other Red Pill: No Class

From the 1990s onward, the left in the west found itself increasingly dependent on educated urban liberals, minorities and immigrants for its electoral support as the unions collapsed due to the loss of manufacturing jobs to places like China.  Gradually, dialectics based on race and gender would come to replace dialectics based on class - despite how monstrous a misapplication of Marxist theory this was.  

It was a new lease on life for the beleaguered leftist parties everywhere, albeit one that would come at a heavy price.

Critical theory based on race and gender begun its own "deconstruction" of western culture in academia, supported quite ironically by state and corporate cash, not to mention student debt. The organs of western culture - corporate media and academia - expressed increasing worry that racism and misogyny were "found" to be deeply embedded in western culture - the same culture that financed and enabled the spread of feminist and multiculturalist theory.

A quasi Marxist dialectic recognizing all white males regardless of class as a kind of ruling class, and women and minorities as an exploited underclass emerged, and analysis of racial and sexual relationships through this kind of lens became prominent.  In the absence of a political theory of class rooted in relations of production, such views emerged almost entirely unchallenged.  What we now recognize as political correctness emerged. 

When social media allowed for this ideology to extend beyond academia and into the broader culture, a new plague was released upon the world: the social justice warriors.  Despite their anti-capitalist pretenses, Wall Street certainly had no objections to the SJWs - better white male tears than being occupied, after all.  Silicon Valley went further, with online magazines and social media of all kinds rushing to give platforms to feminist and anti-racist concerns.  The pettier, the better, it so often seemed.  If an article got clicks, the article got bucks.  Advertising fuels it, after all, and what better way to draw attention than with manufactured controversy?  And what worked better for that than some or another instance of "political correctness gone mad."

Each day brought new excesses of social justice trivialities, it seemed.  Microaggressions, trigger warnings, cultural appropriations, the ubiquitous phrase, "check your privilege."  "Problematic" imagery and words were everywhere, from video games to the shirts worn by astrophysicists while landing satellites on comets and everything else you can think of.  A new culture war was underway, and it was much better for business than a class war - narrowly averted coming out of the Lehman Bro's meltdown, would have been.

It should not be a surprise that there'd be a backlash against the excesses of online political correctness.  Its core ideology was not new, but its means of delivery and proliferation were as modern as you could get.  Politically correct culture was viciously attacked, and mainstream conservatism held to ridicule for its failure to adequately stand up for western culture.  Their critique went back to the Frankfurt School, its Jewish-Marxist luminaries and its deconstruction of western civilization as a prelude to socialist revolution.  Conspicuous in its absence were Marx's theories of class relations.  Nor did it seem to matter to the emergent alt-right that as a meaningful force in 21st century politics, Marxist socialism was extinct; its fire has gone out of the universe.

"Cultural Marxism" was the boogeyman that the alt-right was convinced was hell-bent on destroying the west.  And we can all guess (((who))) was to be responsible for it.

The alt-right's bastardization of the cultural Marxist idea is lifted straight out of Mein Kampf, Hitler decisively and explicitly rejected the materialism of Marx, and saw instead a Darwinian struggle of races and nations instead of class struggle. Antisemitism was a common prejudice in Europe in those days, as was fear of communism. Hitler wove the two together into a narrative that he used to appeal to the anxieties of the German people. That Hitler was chosen in preference to the communists in Wiemar Germany was further proof to the Frankfurt theorists that culture went deeper than class in the psyches of the working and middle classes. Hitler differs from the SJWs and their white male counterparts on the alt-right only in that he was many decades ahead of them in his theories. Indeed, it is Hitler much more than Marx that underlies the thinking of both the SJWs and the alt-right, though not directly in the case of the SJWs.  Although it must be admitted that "My Struggle" would make a great name for an edgy teenage girl's tumblr account.

More recently, the Fuhrer's old ideas were dusted off by one William S. Lind, a paleoconservative theorist whose attribution of current year SJW political correctness directly to Marx has, along with Nazi style anti-semetic conspiracy theories been an ideological impetus behind the rise of the alt-right.  Lacking a better way to understand their declining fortunes in the 21st century, the angry white male keyboard warriors of the 4chan and Reddit undergrounds were no less vulnerable to cultural conspiracy theories than the very SJWs they condemned were.

How could any of them have known any better?  The SJWs and the Alt-Right alike cannot be faulted their lack of education.  Class had been dismissed long ago.

Western civilization has paid a dire price for the loss of class consciousness and historical materialism from its political mind. We are without a means of explaining widespread inequality except either through the lens of racial and gender discrimination, or as a natural and good outcome of some people just working harder or being naturally more talented than others.

The results greet you in your newsfeed every day.