I used to be an anarchist. Not the cunty Antifa kind, but more the Mikhail Bakunin “rich bankers are the problem” kind. Money and stonks didn’t make sense to me. During the crash of ‘08, I saw rich people gambling with derivatives and fiat funny money. Ordinary people were losing their jobs over it while the hedge funds got rewarded with bailouts. Imagine going to Vegas, and you lose everything, and yet, you’re given fat wads of other people’s money so you can keep gambling. That’s Wall Street. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. I was justifiably angry about this, and still am. The liberals have absolutely no program to punish the people responsible. On the contrary, they protect and shield them.
The liberal centrists are pressured from both sides; from the left, who want actual communism and can only be stalled by false promises of welfare, and from the right, who are reviled by the center as “angry, selfish, racist nativists”, but are really working-class people who are justly afraid of losing their jobs and their basic human dignity to outsourcing, immigration, and the gig economy. This isn’t a two-way battle, but a three-way one, with the centthird-way corpocrat trash playing the left against the right in the hopes that they can delay them long enough to establish a totalitarian centrist neoliberal state full of technocrats and bean-counters, which is the most unspeakably disgusting thing I can imagine.
The late David Graeber, one of the architects of the Occupy Wall Street movement, had this to say about the matter, in his book,
The Utopia of Rules, where he rails against bureaucracy.
What is presented as the “moderate” Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It’s as if someone had consciously tried to create the least appealing possible political position. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftists ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of things—because surely, if they do, it’s not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.
Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger?
The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique.
Back when I was a kid, the Left had their heads mostly screwed on straight. Corporatism and warmongering were the problems of the day. Corporate colonialism, in particular, was an actual thing. Look at where the coltan in our smartphones comes from. Look at the sordid history of Rio Tinto and how they treated villagers around their mines. When I was a kid, the Left railed against the bureaucrats. It was in our fucking music. Radiohead immortalized left-wing alt-globalism in
Electioneering. Remember?
Riot shields, Voodoo economics, Cattle prods and the IMF. Rage Against the Machine protested police brutality and System of a Down criticized the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. These were all rational positions to take. Yes, America incarcerates too many druggies. Yes, our cops are too militarized. Yes, our economic policies favor neoliberal consoomerism and debt slavery. Yes, the IMF impoverishes people with structural adjustment policies that allow them to dictate austerity measures to third-world countries and lock them into years of usury and decrepitude. This should be plainly evident to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes.
Then, around the early 2010s, a funny thing happened. All of a sudden, class no longer mattered. The real problem was “whiteness” and “toxic masculinity”. Apparently, straight white men are manifestly awful and responsible for all of the evil in the world. You see how this shit works? The moment you gang up on rich cocksuckers, they reorient the conversation away from them and their unearned wealth using race and gender bugbears. For ten fucking years, the left has swallowed this shit hook, line and sinker, spewing out incomprehensible nonsense regurgitated from their college professors. They claim to be revolutionaries, but they do nothing at all to fight the system. Instead, they are its slaves. Now, if you criticize Wall Street, or the IMF, or the way George Soros funds color revolutions in the Middle East to soften them up for neoliberal invasion and tyranny, they can unironically call you Antisemitic.
Leftists vote neoliberal despots into power. The right-wing, isolationist policy of America First saved thousands of Syrian children from being bombed into fish food. So, who are the real leftists anymore? Politics in America are like those old cartoons where one critter is chasing another and after a while of this, they switch sides so that the chaser becomes the chased. If I told you I was anti-globalist, which side would you even say I was on?
Anyway, I have a brokerage account, now. Fuck it. Give me the loot, too.
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