Socialists who wish to create an independent political movement or party must face the degree to which we are all hemmed in by the US bureaucracy, the security state, and the democratic party’s efforts to control, misdirect, and suppress any and all political opposition. We also have to face up to how our own past efforts have contributed to the strengthening of these counterrevolutionary forces.
Let me give a frivolous example of the sort of misdirection we should attempt to understand.
On June 6th, 2023, David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer for the NGA, told a reporter at Newsnation that US governmental agencies “are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed.”
Articles on Grusch’s announcement have appeared in the Guardian, Newsweek, New York Magazine, and the Atlantic, amongst many other publications. Most of these have, following after the original story published in an online science and technology magazine called the Debrief, labeled Grusch as a whistleblower. However, the DOD reportedly gave Grusch permission to speak out on this subject, and Grusch was formerly employed by the UAP task force, a tiny agency within the DOD that appears to be designed to lend legitimacy to the idea that Flying Saucers are real, but nothing more.
It is conceivable that Grusch is telling the truth, but given his testimony lacked any corroborating evidence and due to the wildly improbable nature of his claims, we should withhold credulity. After all, Grusch could not contain a slight smile as he explained to the camera that “there is a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the US populace that is extremely unethical and immoral.” Common sense and reason demand that we assume this former intelligence officer is pulling our leg when it comes to UFOs and telling us the truth when he speaks of the State’s efforts to fool the public.
In 1988, the French Marxist Guy Debord explained how society had become irrational or unreasonable in his pamphlet “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.” According to Debord, commodity production had penetrated every domain of social life and worked its way so thoroughly into all relations that everyone’s reasoning ability and productive activities were significantly altered and impoverished. We were, he said, ruled by the Spectacle, a term that refers not so much to a particular form of government but to a style of governing. The Spectacle is both the product and the producer of a society consisting not of citizens but passive spectators, not of political representatives but conspirators, not of free and independent reporters and intellectuals but of mediatic secret agents.
Debord told his readers that the integrated Spectacle attempted to foreclose all organizing against and criticism of the ruling system by raising the specters of terrorism and disinformation. He described our situation this way:
Never has censorship been more perfect. Never has the opinion of those who are still led to believe, in several countries, that they remain free citizens been less authorized to make themselves known whenever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never has it been possible to lie to them with a perfect absence of consequences. The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing and deserve nothing.
He went on,
People often cite the United States as an exception because there Nixon came to an end due to a series of denials whose clumsiness was too cynical: but this entirely local exception, for which there were some old historical causes, clearly no longer holds true since Reagan has recently been able to do the same thing with impunity.
Here Debord referred to the Watergate scandal that took down President Richard Nixon and the more significant dirty trick pulled by the Reagan campaign. This second trick was pulled by former CIA director and Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey. He called this trick his October Surprise. It consisted of trips to several Middle Eastern capitals where the Reagan campaign delivered a message to Iranian officials:
“Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.”
According to Debord, the need for such dirty tricks indicated that the Western nations, transformed as they were by the expansion of commodity production and the spectacular management of this production, have realized a kind of fragile perfection. Fragile because the expansion of the technocratic spectacle involved danger and was accomplished through violence, and perfect because no political force could emerge to challenge its rule.
Today the necessity for dirty tricks has intensified. For example, on July 28th, 2016, the FBI received information indicating that a low-level Trump campaigner named George Papadopoulos had told Australian Commissioners that Trump was sure to win the upcoming election and that the Russians had some dirt on Clinton that might be released during the campaign. FBI agents would later characterize this evidence of a collaboration between Russia and the Trump campaign as “thin” but nonetheless relied on it to justify a long investigation into Trump/Russia collusion. This tip was the only evidence justifying opening up what was called “Crossfire Hurricane” that did not originate from within the Clinton campaign.
The Russiagate story that convinced half of the American public that the president of the United States was a Manchurian candidate and that the Russians had infiltrated the government and perpetuated a quiet coup was a hoax. It was a dirty trick, an October Surprise, pulled off by the Clinton campaign with assistance from the FBI.
Clinton’s October surprise led to the institution of tighter mechanisms of information control, or in Debord’s terms, an intensification of the Spectacle’s rule.
As an independent journalist and editor of Tablet Magazine, Jacob Siegel noted in his essay, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” “The outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as ‘critical national infrastructure.’ The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS.”
This move included placing all of the media, and all communications infrastructure, within the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that was formed after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. At the time, the formation of the DHS met with headlines like this one from the Dayton Daily News,
“`1984′ FINALLY ARRIVES, 18 YEARS LATE.”
Whereas today, under the specter of a Russian invasion perpetrated on several fronts, and while all our communications are monitored and potentially censored, the left will not allow itself to remember the Orwellian character of the agencies that we, somewhere along the line, took up as allies.
But, even as we take in the facts, face the humiliating truth of how the struggle for Marxism has morphed into a movement to maintain the Spectacle, to protect the security apparatus from populist and reactionary movements, in other words, as we face the deeply conservative character of our own milieu and efforts, we should avoid feeling shame, avoid attributing our failure to some intrinsic fault in our individual or collective character. We were all born into a deeply unreasonable and regressive world. The forces marshaled against clear thinking and independent action are ubiquitous and violent.
In his book “Eclipse of Reason” published in 1947, the Frankfurt School Marxist Max Horkheimer wrote the following:
The individual once conceived of reason exclusively as an instrument of the self. Now he experiences the reverse of this self-deification. The machine has dropped the driver; it is racing blindly into space. At the moment of consummation, reason has become irrational and stultified. The theme of this time is self-preservation, while there is no self to preserve.
Given the Spectacular character of our time, to fully grasp Horkheimer’s meaning, we must approach this excerpt as if these words are doubly foreign. That is, while they have been translated into English, the task of translating them into terms that are comprehensible in our contemporary moment remains.
The machine has dropped the driver…
What does the word machine mean? It is not a mere piece of technology, not a literal machine. Horkheimer is pointing to a social system that both produces and relies upon technology. It is bourgeois liberal society. In the beginning, the liberalism that arose from the Reformation was based on a labor power that was itself entrepreneurial, or, as Horkheimer described it:
Merchant and manufacturer alike had to be prepared for all economic and political eventualities. This need stimulated them to learn what they could from the past and to formulate plans for the future. They had to think for themselves.
The individual reason of the entrepreneurial individual, mediated by the market and commerce, was limited by the demands of the market, but for Horkheimer this period provided a firmer foundation for the development of socialism than the forms of reason that developed as capitalism advanced. The “strong and sober” ego of the acquisitive liberal maintained interests that transcended his immediate needs, whereas the 20th-century individual experienced the world as shrinking and was no longer able to use his or her reason “to transcend [his/her] actual position in reality.”
What changed in bourgeois liberalism was the relationship both capitalists and workers maintained with the State. The entrepreneurial individual was replaced by a conformist cog. We ceased to think for ourselves but instead thought for and through the state bureaucracy.
In 1917 Vladimir Lenin’s essay “Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism” was published. In it, he explained how Imperialism was the inevitable result of the accumulation of Capital into monopoly powers and how banks and finance capital operated within the new imperial context. He explained how the world had become divided up among the great monopoly powers, the big employers who were indistinguishable from their nations of origin, competed with each other as they divided up the world.
Lenin’s essay was written as a critique of those Marxists who were refusing to support nationalist struggles for liberation. And what he said of those Marxists echoes the justifications leftists give for refusing to join in a struggle for an independent and autonomous individual reason today.
Lenin quotes from the Archives of World Economy:
We see no trace of understanding of the fact that imperialism is inseparably bound up with capitalism in its present form, and that, therefore, an open struggle against imperialism would be hopeless, unless, perhaps, the fight were to be confined to protests against certain of its especially abhorrent excesses.
Lenin claims that the logic here is as follows: since any reforms aimed at curbing the excesses of imperialism cannot in themselves go beyond capitalism and bourgeois politics, the left should instead go backward into servility to the imperialists.
Likewise, today as the imperialist project intensifies, as the Spectacle tightens its grip on nations and individuals, the Marxists claim that championing individual autonomy and free speech is naive as there has never been free speech under capitalism. The implicit suggestion is that rather than resisting censorship, resisting the overturning of civil rights, and resisting the construction of a society-wide prison, we should instead assist the censors, the police, and the wardens.
We use maximal demands in order to ward off minimal resistance. We call for the abolition of the police in an effort to increase the power of the Spectacle to police beyond the limits of the law. We scoff at the notion of a free marketplace of ideas not because we are organizing to transcend the market but because the Spectacle and its managers believe they no longer require such an archaic mechanism of social control.
The Spectacle is in crisis. Or, to put it more directly, the neoliberal order through American hegemony, as it was once known, is disintegrating. The evidence against the current managers piles up, but the left is blind to it. Whether we confront the transformation of the Department of Homeland Security from surveyors to censors, the corrupting influence of the bureaucratic state on the healthcare industry, the leveling of Ukraine in the name of Smartphone democracy, or the transformation of the threat of nuclear armageddon from horror into the last promise of freedom offered to a people who have no self-conception, many Marxists remain obstinately blind and deaf.
However, the option of opening our eyes and listening is still open to us. We might understand that what compromises the democratic party does not necessarily compromise us. We might understand that the publicly declared war on the whole of society’s civil liberties is also a war on our own project for emancipation. We might allow ourselves to realize that we’ve been lied to and that we’ve allowed ourselves to be manipulated.
To speak directly to the moment, I’ll conclude with some trivial true statements:
1. The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was not Russian disinformation.
2. The Twitter files revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are censoring social media platforms and mainstream media corporations with the aim of controlling all information received in the West.
3. The Durham report demonstrates that there never was a justification for a full-blown investigation of collusion between Trump and Russia.
4. We were lied to about the origins of COVID.
5. There was never any chance to transform the democratic party into a vehicle for socialism.
These observations are obvious and banal. But, we will never be able to move beyond banality if we leave the interpretation of them to the populist right. If we are to begin again, we must start by admitting that these statements are all true.
-Doug Lain
