(from Acorn #64)
For a long time, our freedom and autonomy have been under attack from two sides.
On one flank is the State, which uses physical violence to impose its rules on us, to insist that we never step outside of the cage it has built for us.
On the other flank is Money Power, which constantly tries to manipulate and exploit us, to leech off our labour and to sell us the products and lifestyles from which it can profit.
For a long time, too, there has been a serious overlap between the goals of these two oppressive forces, in that Money Power depends on the State to protect its interests and to keep the people in their place.
But they have remained, on the surface at least, distinct entities, allowing some to fondly imagine that we might find refuge from one in the arms of the other.
Socialists and communists say that the State can be wrestled from the grip of Money Power and turned into a transitional force for good, before perhaps being allowed to gradually wither away in the new post-capitalist world.
Some libertarians, identifying the State as the main enemy, insist that only the “free market” economics of some kind of imaginary “pure” capitalism can free humanity from the dead hand of tyranny.
Only anarchists have understood that both State and Money Power have to be swept away if we are to reclaim the freedom and happiness that is our birthright.
Anarchists know that all power corrupts, that true authority can only come from within the heart of the individual and the collective to which they belong, and that the State, no matter how supposedly benign and democratic, can never be anything other than an obstacle to the free organic flowering of human community.
They also know that no healthy society can be built on the pursuit and accumulation of individual wealth, on selfish greed, on a commercial mindset in which quantity is favoured over quality and in which all higher values have been replaced by the lowest of financial calculations.
Today, in the 2020s, the anarchist insight that State and Money Power are one and the same enemy has been dramatically shown to be right.
Behind the scenes, the two became increasingly entwined during the neoliberal period, with decades of privatisation, outsourcing, and public-private partnerships.
Money Power has dominated the agenda of government to the point that its demands for limitless “growth” and increasing access to public funds have become unrefusable in the corridors of power.
The global coup launched under the cover of “Covid” has finally drawn back the curtain on the frighteningly advanced point which this State-Money convergence has now reached.
We are far from alone in identifying the new hybrid entity as nothing other than a 21st century form of fascism.
This should be the time for all anarchists to step forward proudly from the political shadows and declare that we were right all along, that our struggle has always been about opposing State, Money Power and fascism and that we invite everyone else to join us in slaying this monster.
However, the State-Money system has so thoroughly corrupted society with its unlimited networks of wealth and power that even this potentially powerful source of resistance has been neutralised.
Incredibly, many who have flown the flag of “anarchism” (or some half-hearted version) have chosen this crucial historical moment to back away from the principles they claim to uphold and have been aggressively insulting those few anarchists who have remained true to the philosophy.
They have abandoned opposition to the State and called for people to obey its most draconian laws, echoing its own line that to do otherwise is irresponsible and “puts lives at risk”.
They have failed to stand up to Money Power, by refusing to acknowledge its influence and by refusing to listen to those who have researched and exposed the way in which has taken over our societies, and in doing so they have again adopted the terminology of the system by branding these dissidents “conspiracy theorists”.
These anarchists, all avowedly “anti-fascist”, have abjectly failed to stand up to the New Fascism with which we are now faced.
Indeed, they will not even admit that it exists or that it presents any real threat to humankind.
Clinging to their juvenile cardboard cut-out understanding of fascism as purely a 20th-century form of authoritarian nationalism, they refuse to recognise its re-emergence in a new and even more dangerous guise.
Worse still, they direct their phoney “anti-fascism” against the dissidents who dare stand up to the real contemporary New Fascism, accepting without question the system’s strange and wildly inaccurate narrative that opposition to worldwide tyranny is the sole preserve of the “far right”.
One of the leading exponents of this approach in recent years, Alexander Reid Ross, has recently been exposed (unsurprisingly as far as we are concerned) by The Grayzone as a complete sham, now openly working with former cops and CIA agents at a militaristic think tank funded in part by billionaire Charles Koch.
These Ross-style “anarchists” (who, by jettisoning the philosophical basis of anarchism, are now indistinguishable from the rest of the fake left) are not simply failing to engage in the struggle.
By amplifying the system’s narrative, by helping it to conceal its fascistic nature, by smearing and abusing its opponents, they are actively aiding and abetting tyranny.
On top of all this there is a problem that has dogged the left since the 19th century – its largely uncritical embrace of industrial “progress”.
It has failed to see that technology is far from being “neutral”, something which could be used for the common good in certain conditions, and is instead the ever-more powerful tool with which the ruling class has gradually imprisoned and disempowered the rest of us.
It has neither understood nor accepted Miguel Amorós’s crucial insight that “factories, machines and bureaucracies are the real pillars of capitalist oppression”.
More than that, it even joins the ruling class in declaring any such fundamental critique to be ridiculous, unrealistic or “reactionary”, a threat to the “progressive” values with which it associates.
When we add to this the insidious way in which “left-wing” agendas have been realigned to suit the needs of impact investors, as exposed here and here, an ugly reality starts to emerge.
We find ourselves looking at a pseudo-left, including pseudo-anarchists, which defends both State and Money Power, disallows analysis of their inter-connections and machinations, refuses to acknowledge or challenge the New Fascism and eagerly embraces the very structures and technologies through which humanity is being enslaved.
What is the meaning of a “left” which actively supports everything that was previously associated with the right? In what way can we distinguish it from the right, other than by the self-righteous framing with which it presents the very same insidious life-denying agenda?
For real rebels, real freedom-fighters, real anarchists, this fake left has now clearly identified itself as our enemy and its Covid-reinforcing activists have been revealed as nothing other than the shocktroops of the New Fascist global dictatorship.
Authentic revolt will come neither from left nor right, but from below!