BELGRADE, Serbia — Soldiers patrol the streets with their fingers on machine gun triggers. The army guards an exhibition center-turned-makeshift-hospital crowded with rows of metal beds for those infected with the coronavirus. And Serbia’s president warns residents that Belgrade’s graveyards won’t be big enough to bury the dead if people ignore his government’s lockdown orders.
Since President Aleksandar Vucic announced an open-ended state of emergency on March 15, parliament has been sidelined, borders shut, a 12-hour police-enforced curfew imposed and people over 65 banned from leaving their homes — some of Europe’s strictest measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Serbian leader, who makes dramatic daily appearances issuing new decrees, has assumed full power, prompting an outcry from opponents who say he has seized control of the state in an unconstitutional manner.
Rodoljub Sabic, a former state commissioner for personal data protection, says by proclaiming a state of emergency, Vucic has assumed “full supremacy” over decision-making during the crisis, although his constitutional role is only ceremonial.
“He issues orders which are automatically accepted by the government,” Sabic said. “No checks and balances.”
In ex-communist Eastern Europe and elsewhere, populist leaders are introducing harsh measures including uncontrolled cellphone surveillance of their citizens and lengthy jail sentences for those who flout lockdown decrees.
Will Coronavirus and Great Depression Two be the end of “wokeness”? I doubt it. “Wokeness” actually increased by an order of magnitude after the Great Recession. I see no evidence that the “culture wars” have subsided in the context of the present crisis. If anything, extremist movements, left and right, will become more commonplace in the context of rapid economic decline.
Historically, totalitarian revolutions have been driven by the left-wing of the middle class during times when the middle-class (or at least segments of the middle class) is rising on a socioeconomic level but has its political ambitions frustrated by deeply entrench elites. I believe this theory explains the French Revolution as well as the Marxist revolutions from the 20th century as well as any.
Today, in the West, we see that the primary constituency for “totalitarian humanism,” is among the upwardly mobile strata of the middle class, which tends to be highly educated, urban-centered, and with highly cosmopolitan cultural values. The actual proletariat (or today’s “post-bourgeois-proletariat,” i.e. the sinking “working to middle-class” in countries like the US) and the peasanty (or rural, agricultural populations generally) tend to be reactionary.
Within the context of today’s US politics, the “Center” (establishment) is comprised of the neoliberal managerial elites (represented in politics by Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer and Republicans like Romney and McConnell). The right-wing of the Republican Party (both “ultra-conservatives” and Trumpian populists) and others further to the right (white nationalists, Alt-Right, fascists, etc.) represent a coalition or agglomeration of forces that were once dominant but have been losing power for generations (the old-bourgeoisie, the post-bourgeois proletariat, WASP culture, rural culture, traditional religion, etc). While the “turn-back-the-clock” politics of these sectors may be retrograde and self-defeating, many people from these sectors can be very insightful in their critiques of what I call “totalitarian humanism” because they see its growing influence and correctly view it as a threat to their own interests.
The left-wing of the Democratic Party represents a wide range of sectors that collectively comprise the constituency of “totalitarian humanism” including:
-The left-wing of the middle class (predominantly, the urban, professional class)
-The lower strata of the managerial elites (what the neocons’ have called the “new class”)
-Elite and upwardly mobile sectors of traditional minority groups: the civil rights bureaucracy/industry (typically led by the bourgeois sectors within minority groups), “Women’s March” types(Big Pink), the gay rights establishment (Big Lavender), what Norman Finkelstein calls the “Holocaust industry”, the organized atheist movement (secular fundamentalism), rising religious minorities (e.g. bourgeois sectors among Muslim-Americans, Linda Sarsour, CAIR types, or New Age clerics like Marianne Williamson)
-Rising business interests challenging dominant business interests (the green energy industry’s challenge to the fossil fuel industry-Big Green vs. Big Oil- is an obvious example, Big Tech vs. traditional Chamber of Commerce types is another)
-What the Maoists/Third Worldists call the “labor aristocracy” (upper strata working class and the business union bureaucracy)
-Moral entrepreneurs and secular priests responsible for disseminating the ideological values of totalitarian humanism (the SPLC or Tim Wise-types, for example)
There is also the question of where those to the left of the Democratic Party stand in this paradigm. Clearly, groups like the Green Party or DSA share the same basic values as the left-wing of the Democratic Party while rejecting the Democratic Party as an organizational vehicle with which to achieve their goals. The hyper-SJW types found primarily in the academic world and the activist left might be considered ultra-fundamentalist versions of totalitarian, with the Antifa sectors simply representing “totalitarian humanism for sociopaths.” Much of the Anarchist left has been regrettably co-opted and subsumed by these sectors. Historically, the Anarchist left has had a very unfortunate tendency to attach itself to left-wing totalitarian tendencies, only to be subsequently backstabbed and purged.
Interestingly, at least some actual Marxist-Leninist tendencies (predominantly, those with Eurasianist or Third Worldist inclinations) seem to be functioning outside the paradigm of totalitarian humanism and have even embraced some criticisms of the managerial elites which overlap those voiced by the right.
Anyone who wants to understand how we got today’s uneasy alliance of corporate neoliberals and left-wing “social justice warriors” needs to read this work by a Democratic Party strategist from the early 1970s. Available at Amazon.
James Lindsay is a mathematician and academic gadfly who has made his name outside of academic circles as a harsh and witty critic of “critical social justice” theory, and of its progressive crusaders. Along with colleagues Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, Lindsay pranked “grievance studies” journals by submitting fake papers that made absurd — but politically correct — claims, and were accepted for publication. More recently, Lindsay is the founder of New Discourses, a website that aims to be “a home for the politically homeless, especially for those who feel like they’ve been displaced from their political homes because of the movement sometimes called “Critical Social Justice” and the myriad negative effects it has had on our political environments, both on the left and on the right.”
Lindsay is a man of the political left, and an atheist. He is also one of the smartest analysts of what Critical Social Justice means for our society. His 2018 Areo essay explaining why critical social justice is a religion is a fundamental text for understanding this phenomenon. I wrote Lindsay the other day and put a series of questions to him about the future of critical social justice in a time of pandemic. Dare we hope that the hard material realities of plague and economic collapse will shove these loonies permanently to the margins? Here’s our interview:
“Those always classy Antifa Femen, here nakedly endorsing genocide.” – Andy Nowicki
Today seems to be quite the day for anniversaries! Not only is this day, the 13th of February 2020, the half-century anniversary of Black Sabbath’s self-titled album—and, by extension, the whole heavy metal genre—it’s also the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, one of the least salutary acts in the Conflict Without Heroes otherwise known as World War II (or “the good war” by those with a blind belief in the victors who wrote the history books). With the latter in mind, here’s a resharable repost of a searing ‘n’ savage 2016 piece by Affirmative Right co-editor and permazucked Facebook thoughtcriminal Andy Nowicki, castigating the celebrators of said civilian conflagration. Enjoy!
A great interview that covers many topics that are relevant to ATS such as the value of “pan-secessionism” as opposed to “world domination anarchism,”and left-wing authoritarianism. Listen here.
“Since Bellamy was here at the start of The Brilliant project it is great to check in where he is at regarding the things we are talking and thinking about. Obviously Bellamy and I have been having similar experiences in the Anarchist Space over the past few years. This episode is about some dissimilar experiences and what is next with each of us and our respective media projects.”
eing a mouthy genderfuck internet personality, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing some pretty caustic shit online and I’ve generally come to except it. After the sixth or seventh time being threatened with gang rape by yet another alt-right troglodyte, the shock runs a little thin. I’ve actually become rather skilled at the digital-jujitsu that’s become a necessity for existing as an openly trans person online. I’ve even made a few hideous friends on the far-right in the process. Generally speaking, most trolls are either childish pranksters or sadistic psychopaths. If you keep a razor sharp tongue and a sense of humor, either one can be handled with relative ease. This isn’t to say that they aren’t despicable human garbage or that words don’t hurt, but there are things far worse than hate speech online and I personally have never felt more dehumanized or offended as a queer person than I have by the way Facebook treated me this past week, all in the name of policing hate speech and patronizing marginalized creatures like myself.
It began as a pretty typical week for a mildly agoraphobic gonzo visionary. Writing, volunteering, therapy, more writing, hyperventilating, more therapy. All through out this literary basket-case existence, I try to keep the handful of my very dearest motherfuckers who follow me online informed and entertained with a withering barrage of foul mouthed snark and incendiary rants. After coming home from an extra soul digging, come-to-Jesus, round of group therapy, still basking in the teary-eyed afterglow of cathartic trans sisterhood, I went to log offline for the night, only to discover that Facebook had banned me for 24 hours. Now usually this kind of authoritarian negative reinforcement would be reason for celebration. I work very hard to upset the normies in the straight world and if you haven’t been suspended from Facebook in this line of work, you’re probably not doing it right. Right? But it wasn’t simply being banned that disgusted me. What really drove the proverbial screws into my thumbs was their excuse. You guessed it, ‘hate speech’. And what heinous thing did I dare post to be deserving of such virtue signalling corporate censorship? I can’t remember the exact words because they dutifully expunged them from my permanent record, but it was something to the effect of-
Religious believers sometimes say that atheism is a “faith,” and in
that sense a religion. That’s debatable because they’re using the word
‘faith’ ambiguously, and trading on that ambiguity. But according to NYU
social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, there is a scientific sense in
which a relatively new, secular “religion” of “social justice” is
entrenching itself among students on America’s campuses.
He’s got a cogent point.
ITO has run several pieces
about Haidt’s ideas before. He’s not a conservative or even religious;
he self-identifies as a liberal Democrat. Yet he’s alarmed by “the lack
of ideological diversity” among faculty and students, which he sees as
causing a “breakdown of discourse.”
As he sees it, such stifling orthodoxy can never be good for higher
education, which thrives when opposing views are permitted and given a
fair hearing.
But, suggests Haidt, it appears that many colleges and universities are hosting what is not merely a stifling orthodoxy, but also one that exhibits a few key characteristics of religious orthodoxy.
Thus: “There is an extremely intense, fundamental social justice
religion that’s taking over, not all students, but a very strong [space]
of it, at all our colleges and universities. They are prosecuting
blasphemy and this is where we are.”
Yep. This is a pretty good analysis. It’s also important to recognize that political correctness/totalitarian humanism is not just a Left/Right conflict. It’s also an intra-Left conflict as well, with all kinds of left-wing factors shitting all over themselves to out-PC each other, or to accuse each other of some kind of heresy. ATS is a revolutionary left perspective for those who don’t give a flying fuck about this stuff, and refuse to play along with it.
This is a fantastic discussion that gets to the heart of the problem with PC/SJWs/totalitarian humanism. The discussion of “corporate leftism” is particularly important. There’s a surprisingly high level of anti-capitalism in this, which is unusual coming from an orthodox libertarian program. This comes close to my own perspective.
Apparently, my critique of the SJW ideology as a kind of theocratic religion is now becoming mainstream. The long term effects of the SJW ideology will likely be the following: centrist Democrats will be pushed rightward (thereby liberalizing the Right in the process), the traditional working class will also be pushed increasingly rightward (i.e. the ones who care about gun rights, free speech, taxes, religious liberty, etc) and more receptive to right-wing populist messages, and the Left will become more fractured among contending factions claiming victimological status, or claiming to be more ideologically pure than others.
Ultimately, my position is that the ATS approach constitutes the “true far left,” i.e. a form of far-left anarchism that embraces the panoply of anti-authoritarian ideas and movements, and rejecting Communism as the Eastern world’s version of National Socialism, rejecting social democracy as a middle class oriented managerial statist ideology, rejecting SJWs as quasi-theocratic social conservatives, and rejecting Antifa as a mere variation of the skinhead street thugs.
In an article I wrote for LewRockwell.Com 12 years ago, I introduced my theory of “totalitarian humanism” (i.e., the co-optation of cultural leftism by the state and capitalism) as the emerging ideology of the ruling class. Read the original article here. These were the core precepts of “totalitarian humanism” that I identified:
Militarism, Imperialism and Empire in the guise of ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’, modernity, universalism, feminism and other leftist shibboleths.
Corporate Mercantilism (or ‘state-capitalism’) under the guise of ‘free trade’.
In domestic policy, what I call ‘totalitarian humanism’ whereby an all-encompassing and unaccountable bureaucracy peers into every corner of society to make sure no one anywhere, anyplace, anytime ever practices ‘racism, sexism, homophobia’, smoking, ‘sex abuse’ or other such leftist sins.
The reception that Tulsi Gabbard received during her appearance on “The View” is a shining example of totalitarian humanism human being applied to the foreign policy realm. An authentic cultural leftism would be more in the vein of Thaddeus Russell or Abbie Hoffman, not this crap.
For 25-30 years, I have said that the main political issues in the USA are imperialism, widening class divisions, and use of the wars on drugs, crime, and (later) terrorism to create a domestic police state. Regrettably, most of liberal and left opinion during this time has been more focused on “identity” issues and (to a lesser degree) environmentalism or expanding the welfare state instead.
We are seeing the consequences of that now. The US has killed millions of people in …the past 20 years with wars of aggression. Class divisions are the widest they have been in a century, and incarceration rates are setting world records. In fact, it’s often been the far right (paleocons, libertarians, sovereign citizens, isolationist xenophobes) who are more in tune on many of these issues than liberal and left opinion.
Anarchism in the UK is a joke. Once symbolising hard-fought struggles for freedom, the word has been stripped bare to make way for narrow-minded, separatist and hateful identity politics by middle class activists keen to protect their own privileges. We write this leaflet to reclaim anarchism from these identity politicians.
We write as self-identified anarchists who see our roots in the political struggles of the past. We are anti-fascists, anti-racists, feminists. We want to see an end to all oppressions and we take an active part in those fights. Our starting point though is not the dense language of lefty liberal academics, but anarchism and its principles: freedom, cooperation, mutual aid, solidarity and equality for all regardless. Hierarchies of power, however they manifest, are our enemies.
