The Reactionary Threat

Conspiracy Theories and Capitalist Hegemony

Morning Comrades.

This dispatch is going to be as much about Conspiracy Theories, Anti-Semitism, Racism as it is about Linguistics and identifying the tools of the ruling class. I know, a tall order, but I wanted to tie in all of these realities into the word “reactionary”, something I use often, as it was pointed out to me by a generous reader and figured, hell, I guess that wasn’t clear.

The word "reactionary" describes a political behaviour -- someone who recoils from social reform, someone who sees any kind of revolutionary and has a default stance of opposition to change. Someone who is, in their gut, against something largely because it's new.

But more and more I just see people use this in place of words like reactive, as in: "Oh, he only speaks when spoken to first, he's very reactionary."

That’s not what it means and I apologise if that wasn’t clear in the past.

To be even clearer, it is a political position that maintains a conservative response to change, including threats to social institutions and technological advances. Reaction is the reciprocal action to revolutionary movement. Reactionaries clamp down on the differences of the emerging productive forces in society, and attempt to remove those differences, silence them, or segregate them in order to keep the stability of the established order.

Now, how the hell does all of that tie into conspiracy theories, imagined threats, othering, racism, anti-semitism and all the other horrible -ism’s at the capitalists disposal. For one, reactionaries and yes, I do use that word as an insult, are those that use these ‘ism’s. More importantly, why should this matter to anyone? Well, for one it helps identifying enemies and their tools and not so importantly, I use the word a lot and figured it would help to clear it up using examples of our current reality.

Conspiracy theories of all sorts exploded during the pandemic and have captured swathes of the working class. Marx’s theory of alienation described how capitalism deforms social relations and disconnects workers from their labour and species essence. With declining community and solidarity under globalised capitalism today, individuals experience profound anxiety and inability to comprehend complex networks of power. Conspiracy theories offer alluringly simple explanations for intense feelings of powerlessness by blaming scapegoats like Jews, elites or immigrants. This displacement provides an outlet for frustration but misdirects away from critiquing underlying systemic causes like class exploitation.