p.m.a.
10th October 2007, 15:01
Revolutionary Leftism and Conspiracy
An examination of the interwoven patterns of conspiracy with bourgeois hegemony, and the consequences in the post-9/11 world for revolutionary leftists, Marxist and anarchist alike.
The Spectacle, which seeks to commodify the entirety of Life, has successfully obscured one of the most useful tools of its ruling-class beneficiaries: the conspiracy. Today, anyone declared a conspiracy theorist by his or her opponent is immediately dismissed. But what, by definition, is a conspiracy? Dictionary.com’s first definition of “conspire” is such: “to agree together, esp. secretly, to do something wrong, evil, or illegal.” The taboo, then, of conspiracy, perpetuated by the bourgeoisie, is parallel that of communism: both, when taught in schools, are hidden with lies, to conceal truly subversive ideas.
Upon a materialist overlooking of history, however, one finds the pages rife with conspiracy. The slave-society played stage to the betrayal of Ceasar by Brutus, on the Ides of March. The Council of Nicea founded modern Catholicism behind closed doors, creating the Church which would become the largest land-owner and hegemonic force of the Medieval era. The French Revolution, as Marx so eloquently explicated in The Civil War in France, began as a conspiracy concocted by the bourgeoisie to replace feudalism with capitalism. In the modern capitalist era, however, conspiracy is most abundant in the study of radical class warfare.
The Communist League of 1847, for which Marx and Engels wrote their Manifesto, was a text-book secret society due to the illegality of their goals, to subvert and overthrow international capital. The oppression of political expression found in Germany at the time allowed no other organizational method to exist. In fact, Lenin and the Bolsheviks devised their paradigm under similar conditions: the Tsar had made illegal all subversive groups, so they were forced into secrecy. Subsequent vanguardist groups followed suit, the strongest examples lie in those groups which execute armed guerrilla warfare: the July 26 Movement in Cuba, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weathermen in the U.S. — these groups all functioned underground in secrecy, to commit illegal acts towards an agreed end.
Underground class warfare is, by nature then, conspiratorial. But, continually, one of the key conspiratorial powers is the state. Capitalist class warfare is far more destructive on the larger scale than the radical left, if by sheer numbers alone. Usually, these conspiracies are unmasked after a due period of time during which the public can forget the importance of these actions. COINTELPRO’s massive extralegal work was an FBI conspiracy by to subvert the left: the assassination of Fred Hampton is a textbook case in point. On the international scale: the overthrowing of Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Cuba, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Operation Gladio are just a few of the documented government-sponsored conspiracies uncovered through investigative journalism and the Freedom of Information Act. And these aren’t limited to decades in the past: it’s common knowledge the CIA instigated the attempted coup against Chávez in Venezuela, and the controversy around Louis Posada Carrilles, known CIA-bankrolled terrorist, are but two recent issues within the Left. The War on Iraq was a conspiracy: planned during the 1990s within the PNAC group, the government’s justification for the war were revealed to be lies by the mass media, bringing their actions under the definition of a conspiracy.
Capitalist class warfare must be executed in secrecy (especially in the U.S., where the “post-class society” myth is unchecked) lest the moral authority of the ruling class, and its monopoly on violence, be questioned. So why do so many leftists decry “conspiracy theorists” as reactionary? The logical assumption, at least from the Marxist standpoint, is that conspiracies can tend to over-simplify the actual forces of power, deterring one from class analysis. This is quite true: the “conspiratorial view of history” is remarkably simplistic, often anti-scientific, and only hurts the image of conspiracy as a historical tool. But just as we cannot fall into economic determinism, neither can we fall into conspiratorial determinism: instead, we must realize the dialectical relationship between the economic forces in the regime of accumulation, and the bourgeois conspiracies that riddle the mode of regulation.
Today, the largest conspiracy continuing to permeate every area of over lives is that of the “War on Terror.” This justification for the last six years of American foreign and domestic policy is a complete fabrication. Even the liberals have acknowledged how the Bush Administration has played the fear card to advance their interests. But the reality is much more grave: the entire “War on Terror,” and its political precedence in 9/11, are complete fabrications of a very reactionary faction of the bourgeoisie: the neoconservatives. Any objective analysis of September 11, 2001, and the government’s actions leading up to, during, and after the attacks reveals that many members of the Administration at least knew in advance, and thus allowed the attacks, if they did not play a direct role in their organization. One doesn’t need to buy the “no-plane theories”, or that mini-nukes destroyed the Twin Towers: one must only look at the fact that 14 different countries warned the Bush Administration in the three months before 9/11; the involvement of Pakistani ISI in funding lead hijacker Mohammed Atta; the eight different military simulations that undercut and incapacitated the trillion-dollar US defense system; and the web of lies spewed from the mouths of everyone in power afterward. Unfortunately, the 9/11 truth movement is infested with all the irrationalities of conspiracy theorists. But, again, an objective look at the media-reported facts cannot be explained any other way.
As revolutionary leftists, we are the midwives the coming revolution. Thus it is our responsibility to reveal the inherent class nature of the War on Terror: that it is ultimately capitalist class warfare, a frantic attempt by the reactionary bourgeoisie to maintain its rule when all economic analysis shows the inevitable decline of American hegemony. The anti-war movement has failed because it lacked class analysis: single-issue activism always has. It is within Marxism a meta-theory emerges connecting all issues of contention today, revealing them all to be constructs of capital’s dominion. Thus it is essential for Marxists and all other revolutionary leftists to intervene immediately, before the “War on Terror” reaches unprecedented heights, and our ability for revolution is stripped from us. We must acknowledge the role of conspiracy in capitalist class warfare, and use this to extend our own class analysis today. We are the only ones who can change the country and the world for the better.
An examination of the interwoven patterns of conspiracy with bourgeois hegemony, and the consequences in the post-9/11 world for revolutionary leftists, Marxist and anarchist alike.
The Spectacle, which seeks to commodify the entirety of Life, has successfully obscured one of the most useful tools of its ruling-class beneficiaries: the conspiracy. Today, anyone declared a conspiracy theorist by his or her opponent is immediately dismissed. But what, by definition, is a conspiracy? Dictionary.com’s first definition of “conspire” is such: “to agree together, esp. secretly, to do something wrong, evil, or illegal.” The taboo, then, of conspiracy, perpetuated by the bourgeoisie, is parallel that of communism: both, when taught in schools, are hidden with lies, to conceal truly subversive ideas.
Upon a materialist overlooking of history, however, one finds the pages rife with conspiracy. The slave-society played stage to the betrayal of Ceasar by Brutus, on the Ides of March. The Council of Nicea founded modern Catholicism behind closed doors, creating the Church which would become the largest land-owner and hegemonic force of the Medieval era. The French Revolution, as Marx so eloquently explicated in The Civil War in France, began as a conspiracy concocted by the bourgeoisie to replace feudalism with capitalism. In the modern capitalist era, however, conspiracy is most abundant in the study of radical class warfare.
The Communist League of 1847, for which Marx and Engels wrote their Manifesto, was a text-book secret society due to the illegality of their goals, to subvert and overthrow international capital. The oppression of political expression found in Germany at the time allowed no other organizational method to exist. In fact, Lenin and the Bolsheviks devised their paradigm under similar conditions: the Tsar had made illegal all subversive groups, so they were forced into secrecy. Subsequent vanguardist groups followed suit, the strongest examples lie in those groups which execute armed guerrilla warfare: the July 26 Movement in Cuba, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weathermen in the U.S. — these groups all functioned underground in secrecy, to commit illegal acts towards an agreed end.
Underground class warfare is, by nature then, conspiratorial. But, continually, one of the key conspiratorial powers is the state. Capitalist class warfare is far more destructive on the larger scale than the radical left, if by sheer numbers alone. Usually, these conspiracies are unmasked after a due period of time during which the public can forget the importance of these actions. COINTELPRO’s massive extralegal work was an FBI conspiracy by to subvert the left: the assassination of Fred Hampton is a textbook case in point. On the international scale: the overthrowing of Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Cuba, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Operation Gladio are just a few of the documented government-sponsored conspiracies uncovered through investigative journalism and the Freedom of Information Act. And these aren’t limited to decades in the past: it’s common knowledge the CIA instigated the attempted coup against Chávez in Venezuela, and the controversy around Louis Posada Carrilles, known CIA-bankrolled terrorist, are but two recent issues within the Left. The War on Iraq was a conspiracy: planned during the 1990s within the PNAC group, the government’s justification for the war were revealed to be lies by the mass media, bringing their actions under the definition of a conspiracy.
Capitalist class warfare must be executed in secrecy (especially in the U.S., where the “post-class society” myth is unchecked) lest the moral authority of the ruling class, and its monopoly on violence, be questioned. So why do so many leftists decry “conspiracy theorists” as reactionary? The logical assumption, at least from the Marxist standpoint, is that conspiracies can tend to over-simplify the actual forces of power, deterring one from class analysis. This is quite true: the “conspiratorial view of history” is remarkably simplistic, often anti-scientific, and only hurts the image of conspiracy as a historical tool. But just as we cannot fall into economic determinism, neither can we fall into conspiratorial determinism: instead, we must realize the dialectical relationship between the economic forces in the regime of accumulation, and the bourgeois conspiracies that riddle the mode of regulation.
Today, the largest conspiracy continuing to permeate every area of over lives is that of the “War on Terror.” This justification for the last six years of American foreign and domestic policy is a complete fabrication. Even the liberals have acknowledged how the Bush Administration has played the fear card to advance their interests. But the reality is much more grave: the entire “War on Terror,” and its political precedence in 9/11, are complete fabrications of a very reactionary faction of the bourgeoisie: the neoconservatives. Any objective analysis of September 11, 2001, and the government’s actions leading up to, during, and after the attacks reveals that many members of the Administration at least knew in advance, and thus allowed the attacks, if they did not play a direct role in their organization. One doesn’t need to buy the “no-plane theories”, or that mini-nukes destroyed the Twin Towers: one must only look at the fact that 14 different countries warned the Bush Administration in the three months before 9/11; the involvement of Pakistani ISI in funding lead hijacker Mohammed Atta; the eight different military simulations that undercut and incapacitated the trillion-dollar US defense system; and the web of lies spewed from the mouths of everyone in power afterward. Unfortunately, the 9/11 truth movement is infested with all the irrationalities of conspiracy theorists. But, again, an objective look at the media-reported facts cannot be explained any other way.
As revolutionary leftists, we are the midwives the coming revolution. Thus it is our responsibility to reveal the inherent class nature of the War on Terror: that it is ultimately capitalist class warfare, a frantic attempt by the reactionary bourgeoisie to maintain its rule when all economic analysis shows the inevitable decline of American hegemony. The anti-war movement has failed because it lacked class analysis: single-issue activism always has. It is within Marxism a meta-theory emerges connecting all issues of contention today, revealing them all to be constructs of capital’s dominion. Thus it is essential for Marxists and all other revolutionary leftists to intervene immediately, before the “War on Terror” reaches unprecedented heights, and our ability for revolution is stripped from us. We must acknowledge the role of conspiracy in capitalist class warfare, and use this to extend our own class analysis today. We are the only ones who can change the country and the world for the better.