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Source: Real Left
Left Lockdown Sceptics is now the Real Left
This website launched in January 2021 by republishing an article by Naomi Bridges: ‘The Feminist Case for Opposing Lockdown’. In the past two years we’ve published 160 articles and built a small community of 1,500 subscribers. We came from many different backgrounds, but we had one thing in common.
As socialists, anarchists, Marxists, feminists, left wing activists, trade unionists and allies who opposed the lockdowns carried out in the name of public health, we had been vigorously exiled by our former comrades. With one or two exceptions, the left fervently crusaded for the official narrative. UK Labour leader Kier Starmer’s constant refrain was: “I agree with the Government, but I would go further.” The radical socialist Left, religiously masked and from behind laptops, called for the brutal repression of working-class communities in the name of public health by launching the absurd zero-Covid movement.
We identified instead with the freedom movement: a pluralistic, organic and largely working-class resistance that succeeded, blow by blow, arrest after arrest, in ending lockdowns around the world.
Now, almost two years after the remaining restrictions on public gatherings were dropped, we are changing the name of our socialist collective to ‘Real Left’. This name change is as bold as it is overdue. We will continue to vigorously advocate for resistance to lockdowns and for debate and discussion, where dissenting voices are heard, in the public square. But the faultline between us and our former comrades has widened to encompass more than lockdowns. As evidence mounted that the Covid ‘vaccinations’ represent a public health disaster of criminal proportions, most of the Left fervently held to the ‘safe and effective’ narrative. Now, on every issue where public debate is framed to the point of being censored (e.g. the impact of lockdowns on the developing world, the existence of immutable biological sex, the war in Ukraine, the ‘climate crisis’) the lockdown left also permits no dissent.
Unwittingly or intentionally (we suspect in many cases, the latter), socialist left parties, trade unions, ecological activists and left wing intellectuals have mostly become no more than useful idiots to further the agenda of ‘progressive’ global capitalism. Their ‘zero’ ideology now couched as ‘the Science,’ e.g. eliminating Covid, carbon emissions, and the role of biological sex as the basis of social and legal policy – serves a clear function within the capitalist ideological system. Like the puritanical ethical codes of wider woke culture, this dissociated and corporate formula-fed belief system exists to make the actual agenda of the global capitalist class seem reasonable. In the terms of the new leftist doublethink, a global regime of surveillance, controlled speech and collapsed living standards pursued in the name of the permanence of the capitalist financial system is not only the least we can do, it is also not enough.
Radical politics has sunk to Starmer’s shrill cry: “I agree with the government, but I would go further!”
In Marxist terms, we are talking of the difference between reformists, who call only for the amelioration of the capitalist system whilst accepting its premises, and revolutionists, who reject those premises. In other words, this historical fracture in the Left is about more than lockdowns. But why the ‘Real Left’?
Does left or right even matter?
A common belief amongst the freedom movement is that a left-right political paradigm no longer has any useful descriptive power at the end of a two plus year imposition of global shutdowns of businesses and public institutions, compelled mask wearing and forcing of dangerous and ineffective MRNA injections upon the masses – with full sanction and support in the UK & worldwide of the unions, purportedly left and left leaning political parties and media, and academia.
Some have even argued that the weakening of a labour movement capable of challenging the ideologies and goals of global capital had already been largely achieved during the four decade long Western led neoliberalism project, evidenced in the failed attempt to resurrect Labour as a party ‘for the many, not the few’ with Jeremy Corbyn’s election defeat in 2019.
There is indeed a compelling case to be made that a more relevant political divide of our time is authoritarianism versus sovereignty. Or perhaps, trust vs distrust in persons and institutions of power and the cultural and political narratives they offer.
So why then carry over the ‘Left’ of ‘Left Lockdown Sceptics’ into our new name?
The common driver of issues including the unprecedented over-reach of state bio-power into our daily lives since 2020, the Russia-Ukraine war theatre, and the cost-of-living crisis, is the resuscitation of the failing capitalist super-structure into a novel and even more predatory and exploitative system in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
This agenda, heavily publicised by the World Economic Forum, continues to be rolled out in 2023 and requires the commoditisation of every aspect of human and natural life in the creation of gigantic ‘social impact’ markets to feed the new data collection based economic model. The colonisation of familial and community relationships and resources, including that of the minds and bodies of ourselves and our children (which are viewed as ‘assets’ to plug into an AI-mediated data cloud, preparing us for a future migration to largely virtual realities) must also generate ‘impact outcomes’ to be bet upon by hedge fund managers.
The end goal of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a surveillance planet where all living things, processes and relationships are transformed into commodities, mines of data, in pursuit of the construction of an endless virtual reality empire, the activation of the singularity and a ‘post human’ future which precludes privacy, autonomy, agency and free will of its monetized-token chasing and enslaved dehumanised subjects. If data can truly become the new oil, as Eric Schmidt, ex CEO of Google and Alphabet has claimed, then the billionaire class aspire to have finally transcended the ‘moving contradiction’ of the capitalist mode of production by collapsing the distinction between labourer, consumer and product.
We have little belief that this capitalist utopia of AI-mediated, commodified daily existence will come into being, especially in the short time frame predicted by the WEF. But like the imperial ambitions of the long nineteenth century and the technocratic fascisms of twentieth century globalisation, this capitalist fever dream of endless digital accumulation will exact its price in every aspect of our lives. Its new legal and social forcing mechanisms, a new global feudalism, are already asserting their strength.
Marxist or class-focused analysis provides the theoretical tools for us to clearly identify and conceptualize the nature of the underlying causes of the turbulent social, economic and political conditions we continue to experience, as neo-feudalist global governance closes in. It thereby provides us with the best chance to struggle against it, as we cannot oppose or challenge what we do not understand to be happening.
The evolving form of the unequal, exploitative, anti-human nature of imperialistic monopoly capitalism, evidenced comprehensively in the research of McDowell, represents a radical continuity (albeit in a dramatically technologically augmented form) to historic events such as the slave trade, and the colonialist ‘reservation model’, e.g. the displacement and containment of indigenous peoples away from their lands to allow for uninterrupted profit driven exploitation of an ecosystem system deprived of its rightful stewards. Far from being a relic of a bygone political-economic landscape, these critiques of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy have never been more salient or necessary.
The concept of class hierarchy and a war by the elites against the poor has been viscerally demonstrated over the last couple of years, which saw the world’s ten richest men double their wealth by 2022, whilst hundreds of millions of people were plunged into poverty worldwide.
We hold that retaining consciousness of power and power relations under capitalism is an essential discernment aid for identifying where the best interests of the majority lies, regardless of how progressive, climate friendly/’sustainable’, ‘kind,’ ‘inclusive’ or ‘communitarian minded’ the program in question is promoted to be.
As Marx himself would ask: who benefits?
In response to the (infrequently raised) charge of the potential ‘divisiveness’ of setting up our Great Reset resistance stall under a left wing banner, it is worth pointing out that we have never focused energy on criticizing those factions of the UK pro freedom movement who identify as being of the right, or are politically active in right wing politics. Rather, we view the plurality of thought and diversity of composition as a strength of said political movement. Simultaneously, we believe in the depth of the anti-capitalist analysis we offer to persuade of the necessity for bottom up class struggle, in pursuit of the creation of a radically better, fairer, and freer society for all members of society.
Standing up for ‘the Real’
In view of all this encroaching dystopic vision, we proffer a second meaning for the name ‘Real Left’.
There is a section of global society who are becoming wise to the dangers of the implantable technology and the substitution of in-person education, healthcare and meaningful work with digital assistants, digital apps and a digital gig economy. We, who oppose bots in place of face-to-face human relationships, and Meta ‘quests’ in place of soul-nourishing time spent in nature.
We neo-luddites, unsuccessfully indoctrinated into woke digital serf capitalism, which we understand is based as concretely on the current state of knowledge and technology as a pre-Copernican astrolabe, and therefore is just as transient – are instead holding fast to a philosophy of fidelity to truth, to material reality, to the innate wisdom of the human body and the pursuit of human flourishing for the sake of human flourishing itself – outside of frameworks of profit accumulation for the few.
What do our voices sound like? That is something we endeavour to develop and disseminate through our publishing platform. A place to write for those of the Left who still believe in the Real.
We hope this name change will inject some renewed energy and enthusiasm into our mission at a time where direction, focus and momentum are much needed in the UK freedom movement.
We are currently facing the challenges of resisting the rollout of smart city infrastructure and programs,[1] digitization of health services, education, workplaces and national currency, and the passage of legislation through Westminster destroying protest, free speech and data privacy rights. There is much work to be done.
If you have not already done so, please sign up to our email list on the website to receive email notifications of articles and meetings. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram. We welcome reader submissions of articles of up to 3,000 words on topics critiquing the new iteration of capitalism and leftist responses to it, including biosecurity, geopolitics, net carbon policies etc. Finally, we look forward to meeting more of you in person at face-to-face events this year, including our upcoming – not to be missed – London conference ‘The Left Case Against The WEF,’ details of which are soon to be released.
[1] See local council plans & meetings with ‘One’ in description. E.g. the ‘Bristol’ One City 2019 plan (P32) states by year 2030: ‘Bristol starts trialling 6G to provide near instant, unlimited wireless connectivity to empower citizens to utilise next generation digital applications for work, entertainment and healthy living. . . Virtual and augmented reality applications contribute to a reduction in the need to travel for work, entertainment and social activities.’
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