Afternoon Comrades.
As with every week, I spend Monday’s to work on this substack as I don’t go into the restaurant I work in and as with every Monday for what feels like an eternity, I sit down and try to map out a coherent as possible publication thread over the week, sometimes that works and sometimes it is all over the place, I know that and thank you for sticking around for the ride.
Similarly to most of you I’d imagine I pay as much attention to what is going on in the world from the geo-political to the cultural, partly as a distraction and partly to remain informed and one very dominant thought and feeling occurs for what feels like forever, every time I do so.
A massive, giant wallop of WTF.
A WTF every time I engage with legacy media irrespective of what country in the West.
A WTF every time I engage with any sort of legacy media in the west, from radio, print, TV, Social to official government press.
A massive WTF at the majority of academic material that is being published and said at conferences around the West - and sure, that is of marginal interest to a lot of us but on a personal level I have tried keeping abreast of a world I used to be a part of. If you are not involved in it, and that’s more than ok, please feel free to take my word for it that the majority of “respected” academics are beacons of crawling bootlickers.
This isn’t to say that, especially on Social Media, there is a massive swamp of bootlickers, bots and feds floating around saying some of the most bat shit insane I’ve yet come across but ever since the dominant hegemonic structures in the West forced their own deeply racist reckoning upon itself by allowing their military outpost cosplaying as country called Israel to indulge in their very own psychopathic genocide for the world to see- well, the manufacturing of the insanity they’ve called “civilisation” for the past 4-5 generations has become utterly unhinged.
Yes, this genocide in Gaza didn’t start 7 months ago, but 75 years ago.
Yes, the controlled manufacturing of self-proclaimed liberal capitalist material reality and cultural hegemony has always been utterly unhinged, especially since WW2 here in the Empire’s core - imagine what their utterly insane reality that we all swallowed for ease and consumption felt like to the rest of the world we colonized, yet, and sure this is dick riding nuance just a little bit, it’s on fucking overdrive these days.
Why?
Predominately for two reasons I’d wager.
One, they know they are losing their grip on their cultural hegemony.
Secondly, on a geopolitical level, since the end of the Cold War the West utterly succumbed to their own greed and Hubris and allowed the neoliberal idea of capitalism to run its course and boy has that been the biggest disastrous fuck up on their part. Granted, the good ol’ capitalism would have achieved the same but most likely a little slower. Considering the fact that capitalists in the West pre-Reagan and Thatcher were rich beyond belief already, and could have easily expanded worker friendly reforms throughout the West to placate all of us ( see Norway for example ) but hell no. Those self-destructive goons went all out and now have to resort to extremes to bump those quarterly bonus’.
To be absolutely clear, by extremes I refer to the reality that whatever violence we have seen so far is the tip of the iceberg, especially if the first point continues to be proven right. The more of us that reject all of their control mechanisms, work, family, heteronormativity, passivity, hate and apathy the more those bastards are going to push, and push they will.
Beneath the veneer of liberal democracy lies authoritarianism and fascism or rather, it is based on it. Liberalism is a bourgeois ideology that serves to uphold the interests of the ruling class while masking the underlying inequalities and exploitation inherent in capitalist society.
Liberals espouse values of tolerance and pluralism and their commitment to preserving private property and market forces ultimately reinforces existing power structures and nothing else. What did Biden say before he was elected? “Nothing will fundamentally change” in a world on the precipice that requires the most radical change. Liberalism serves as a bulwark against radical change and revolutionary transformation, not even offering concessions to the working class to maintain social stability and prevent the emergence of more radical alternatives.
This is where the adage "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" comes into play, “suggesting” that when the interests of the ruling class are threatened, liberals will always abandon their commitment to democratic principles and embrace authoritarian measures to protect their privilege and maintain control. Fascism, with its emphasis on nationalism, authoritarianism, and the suppression of dissent, emerges as a reactionary response to challenges to the existing order, offering a more overtly coercive means of preserving capitalist hegemony.
Both liberalism and fascism represent different manifestations of bourgeois ideology, serving to perpetuate capitalist exploitation and domination. While liberals may distance themselves publicly for decorum, and once you have watched them drink several bottles of wine without ever leaving a tip you will know how deeply racist, classist and fascist they are.
The point, or rather points, I am trying to get across are these. Being and becoming aware that whatever capitalists and the instruments they employ say, from governments, to press to celebrities, whatever tool of manufacturing consent at their disposal, serves nothing but their hold on control is good. Does it make you question reality and scares you? Shit yeah, it does me, and that also, is more than ok. What is not ok is sticking your head in the sand hoping this will blow over, because it’s the end of days comrades and this shit will not be over, more importantly, it’s coming home and we all have targets on our back. A further point though, or rather an arch let’s say is this - disengage with their reality as far as you can whilst additionally create actual realities based on the principles we all strive, a genuine egalitarian future without need or want, free from all of the shackles of capitalism.
We got this. They’re scared. We got us.
Yours, warmly,
V
❤️🧠