The New Dark Age

Gramsci saw a war of position, where the opposition to the capitalist oligarchy not only develops a parallel cultural project but also engages in a long-term process of gaining the support of the wider population and social institutions for the alternative cultural hegemonic project, as necessary in advanced bourgeois “democratic” societies. The problem is that the most class-conscious group in society is the capitalist oligarchy and if required it will rapidly move against any such threatening project; including whatever levels of coercion and violence are required.

We see this historically in South America, where the development of any competing hegemonic project that was starting to gain a threatening level of acceptance within the general population and social institutions leads to military coups and a war of the oligarch-controlled state on the general population to eradicate the threat to their power. Such was the case in El Salvador (1931), Honduras (1932), Venezuela (1948), Colombia (1953), Paraguay and Guatemala (1958), Nicaragua (1961), Brazil (1963), Bolivia (1964), Peru and Panama (1968), Ecuador (1972), Chile and Uruguay (1973) and Argentina (1974). After varying lengths of time, sometimes many decades, a society made now fit for performative liberal bourgeois “democracy” through state terror and murder was allowed to formally move from dictatorship to “democracy”. A “democracy” usually heavily delimited through constitutions drafted during the dictatorships, a political-economy dominated by the oligarchy and foreign powers (e.g. the US), and oligarch domination of the media and political processes. This result is most evident in a Brazil, where a president that had been tortured during the years of dictatorship was removed outside the electoral process and a previous president barred from standing in elections through trumped-up charges and a corrupt legal system. The poisoned inheritance that the times of dictatorship provided is a very large reason why one South American “pink tide” after another has failed.

The oligarchies of the West are significantly more advanced in their abilities to manipulate society in relatively subtle ways, most especially through the extensive control of the means of cultural production and the penetration and manipulation of alternative political movements. But in the 1960s and 1970s even they had to engage in state violence and widespread coercion, especially in the US; with repeated political assassinations and the many politically-driven prosecutions and long sentences for activists. Even the middle-class students of Kent State felt the force of state violence. The real turnaround was done in more subtle ways though, many times through the supposed “leftist” parties that in reality act more as oligarch tools to de-energize movements threatening to the oligarchy. As with the British Labour government with its IMF agreement based on spurious economic statistics, the Carter administration that blocked the political wave for universal free healthcare and turned fully neoliberal in 1978, and the French Mitterand who betrayed his election promises to turn France toward neoliberalism. In Australia, the Queen’s courtier Governor General combined with the Australian establishment, and US and UK secret services, to coup d’etat the progressive PM Gough Whitlam.

Below, the UK British Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer of the late 1970s lying his face off with junk economics to push neoliberalism. His department was later shown to have misrepresented economic statistics and forecasts to intensify the 1976 financial crisis so that he could go to the IMF for a loan and “have to” accept the IMF neoliberal conditions. An utter oligarch tool and traitor to the members of the party that he was supposed to represent. He would have been at home within a Thatcher government. He knew that the North Sea oil and gas revenues would be soon flooding in, and the last thing that the oligarchs wanted was for those riches to be spent on industrial planning and social services; instead they went on tax cuts for corporations and the rich together with the selling of state assets at knock down prices.

Mitterand had been a right-wing functionary in the fascist Vichy regime and the interior minister under the right-wing de Gaulle. His move “left” was careerist not ideological. In addition, the French economic and financial bureaucracy had become utterly neoliberalized in the 1970s. The book by Philip Short, Mitterand: A Study In Ambiguity, provides great insight into the real Mitterand; beware the righty turned “lefty”. The Australian PM Gough Whitlam was not just threatening a much greater role of the state in the economy (universal healthcare, free universities and plans to nationalize resource extraction!) but also in moving Australia out from under US vassalage; so he had to go.

US neoliberalism is a continuum from Carter to Trump.

The full embedding of neoliberalism was carried out by the likes of Clinton (Democrat-US), Chretien (Liberal-Canada), Blair (Labour-UK) and Hawke & Keating (Labor-Australia). When Corbyn threatened to overthrow the neoliberal apple cart in the late 2010s, a successful multi-year society side project of propaganda and internal destabilization was launched. In the early 2010s, the Occupy Wall Street movement was also quickly crushed when it would not go away; followed by a sudden media, academic (funded by the US plutocratic foundations), corporate and state intensive drive to bring issues of identity, rather than class, to the fore. Within a few years OWS was a distant memory.

The Liberals came into power in Canada in the early 1990s promising to not sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to reverse the extra consumption tax (GST) that was extremely regressive in nature. Instead they signed NAFTA, kept the GST, and used a fake budget “crisis” created by a central banker that maintained ridiculously high real interest rates (they could have simply fired him for gross incompetence) to slash government spending while overseeing a massive wave of consolidation in the financial sector. When running later budget surpluses, the focus was tax cuts not rebuilding public services. Then of course we have the administrations of Bill Clinton.

Margaret Thatcher has stated that the creation of Tony Blair was one of her proudest achievements!

Because of the above, waiting for a true revolution in South America or the West is akin to waiting for Godot. Quite the opposite is happening, with an oligarch-driven move to fake populist right parties (e.g. Reform, AfD, National Rally) that will oversee more deeply authoritarian states, some possibly even fascist, that will serve the oligarchy just as Mussolini and Hitler did. So where is the viable alternative cultural hegemonic project? Not Russia, which is much closer to the West in its political-economy; it’s real crime being one of not accepting Western subjugation and exploitation. That alternative is China, which through its decades of still peaceful rise has now become the beacon of an alternative political-economic and cultural project that explicitly rejects capitalist oligarch rule. As China now starts to pass the West in so many areas it becomes a beacon of peaceful development to all of the world, one that utterly undermines the Western oligarch cultural hegemony. That is the fundamental reason for the Western oligarchies’ need to crush the future development of China, and its overwhelming angst at its inability to do so.