Well, it's happened, the unthinkable has been thunked (I know there is no such word because I've just made it up). The Anglo-Saxon world is now dominated by the forces of reaction and irrationality. Both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote were purchased by appealing to our lowest common denominator, by fostering bigotry, a corrosive and divisive xenophobia, appealing to the huge racist underbelly of both Britain and the US by the demonising of immigrants, Muslims and foreigners in general. This highlights in graphic detail the nonsense of seeing human beings as fundamentally rational beings aware of their best interests, the bedrock of free market economics.
I know there will be endless speculation as to the reasons for these quite revolutionary changes, but let me give you Kommirat's. These will be familiar to you if you read this blog, but they will be quite different from anything you will read from your British and US established commentators because in order to properly understand it you will have to connect with the big bogeyman, Karl Marx, whose name is never mentioned by commentators in either nation as a source of information or enlightenment, he being of course the ultimate demon. It was Marx however who showed us how the political and social superstructure of any society is built upon, and is a reflection of, its economic base. I argue that Marx's description of the relationship of base and superstructure has become so obvious in our modern societies that I find it difficult why anyone would question it, but of course the answer is self-evident, it's by Marx and so must be wrong. However, as Marx shows us, erected upon the economic base of a society, are all the legal, political and social structures within that society that are required to maintain, sustain, protect, nourish, expand and develop the full potential of the economic infrastructure. As a result, in a slave economy for example, the legal system will produce laws to protect the ownership and exploitation of slaves. The belief system will produce a set of beliefs that justify slavery (God meant certain racial and ethnic groups to be slaves and white people to be the masters). The education system will promote these ideas to the young people and teach them that the law, and therefore the system of slavery, is good and just, and the political system will be designed to protect all of the above, with only the ‘correct’ people being allowed decision-making powers. For example, when the Founding Fathers sat down in Philadelphia to design the American political system, they had to decide how to elect a government. This required them to decide who should have a vote. This was a slave economy, and so the same people who had just written in the American Declaration of Independence that “It is self-evident that all men are created equal” decided that, for electoral purposes, a slave only equaled three-fifths of a human being. Ironically, the man who wrote that it was self-evident that all men are created equal was himself a slave-owner.
Similarly, in a capitalist economy such as ours, the legal and political system will be structured to protect, sustain and expand an economic system based on private property. All of the social institutions will similarly reflect that. The belief system will teach that this system is right and proper and good. It will also teach that any beliefs that challenge these assumptions are dangerous, wrong, misguided etc. Such sentiments will be portrayed in the mass media, and the whole political, legal and social system will be structured on a system of social class. This class system will also reflect the ownership and control of the economic infrastructure and the education system will design the curriculum around all of the latest technology in order to prepare young people to enter the world of work and meet the needs of the system, whilst the political system will provide the schools, colleges and universities with the technological equipment necessary for such training. In this way Marx showed us how society reflects the system of economic production upon which it is erected.
The superstructure also reflects the ideology of the economic base and thus it is the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism that has produced both the Trump presidency and the Brexit vote. The economic model of the free market has determined the ideological approach to all public policy for the last forty years and so our political structures must be designed to support this model regardless of whether it is fit for purpose or not. That is the principal reason for the British Labour Party embracing the free market. All the standard explanations we are getting are actually manifestations of and the consequences of, free market neoliberalism, because the exclusivity of our societies have also scrupulously excluded any other possible narratives. As I have been warning you for years, this is an ideology that is first and foremost exclusive, designed to reward a small sector of society at the expense of the rest. Significantly, the most excluded have been the working classes in both societies along with their representative organisations, the unemployed, the sick and disabled, but, as the greedy got greedier and the exclusive nature of public policy got more intense, a greater proportion of society, particularly the middle classes, found themselves being excluded as well, as the rapacity of the elite and their policy making lackeys broke all bounds of decency. These were people who had hitherto applauded the exclusion of the workers and the destruction of the union movement, but now found that they had unleashed forces that were out of their control, protected by a political class that had lost all sympathy with the rest of the nation, driven by a malignant ideology that told them that the poor and disadvantaged deserved their poverty, it was their own fault.
The free market is an ideology that is devoid of any moral content and has no ethical boundaries, producing a class of elite gangsters for whom enough is never enough. This has had profound implications for the moral and ethical structures in both the USA and Britain. It is an ideology that promotes greed and selfishness as 'goods' with social concerns for other people as 'bads' because such concerns require resources to be raised and distributed to what this ideology labels the undeserving, the shirkers and scroungers of Tory and Daily Mail mythology, but most importantly, immigrants and refugees. Trump and Brexit are the logical conclusion of Thatcher/Reaganism and the spread of the free market poison that has been destroying our respective societies slowly from within for the past forty years. This has resulted in the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the excluded, reacting as all such groups have done throughout history. They have turned to a messiah, a saviour that is going to lead them to the promised land of milk and honey. In Britain it was 'taking back control' 'sovereignty' and looking to the prophets who were promising that once this was achieved everything would be alright whilst salving their conscience with a scapegoat propaganda that their misfortunes were the fault of 'the other'. In America it is the same message, this time labelled 'making America great again'. My complaint is that if these people have pinpointed not only the solutions, but the original problem, why did they have to gain their victories by barefaced lying, bullying, demonising and creating fear and hatred? Answer, because they are false prophets, a fraud.
The source of their problems are not of course immigrants, Muslims etc. it is an ideology, an intellectual disease, and there can be no solution unless we inoculate the body politic against this poison, provide an intellectual antidote, and look to people who not only understand this, but can articulate solutions. There can be no solution within Britain because we are trusting in the biggest set of free market imbeciles imaginable, people who are intellectually incapable of seeing the problem, let alone attempting to solve it. However, I see a couple of potential silver linings in Trump's victory. His campaign and his proposals to make America great again contain hints that he may be prepared to abandoned the free market model. He does not understand the problem, but appears to be hitching his wagon to a solution similar to Roosevelt's approach to the Great Depression. I hope I am right. In addition, he actually seems to take a far more sane view of relations with Russia than our dominant western narrative, discarding the traditional 'he's a bad man' approach to Vladimir Putin, although I suspect he is doing it for the wrong reasons. Regardless of his motives this must surely lessen tensions and the possibility of conflict. I apologise for the length of this post, and if you have read this far you have my sincere gratitude. There is obviously much more I could write on this subject but trust that I have given at least a flavour that will make you think. In any case, you have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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