Merchants of Fear
How the Global Ruling Class Uses Marxist Tactics to Generate Misery, Create Crises, and Consolidate Control
I’m sure Karl Marx is turning over in his grave.
Irony or ironies. The global billionaire capital class and their technocratic lackeys are using the practical tenets of Marxism to monopolize control over workers rather than free them. There is a revolution going on all right and it is a war of attrition and manipulation using the weaknesses of Marx (who was himself a bonafide member of the bourgeoisie) to pull the wool over the eyes of the struggling working class and foster division rather than create union. It could well have been predicted by a fundamentally reactionary analysis and theory, that was always conceived in destruction rather than in creation.
Karl Marx could never have predicted the future unprecedented control of information and perception of the masses in a 21st century postmodern globalized society when he accused religion of being the “opium of the people” in the 19th century. Now, many, if not most, people in Western cultures have fallen away from the formal institutionalized religion that Marx so condemned. I wonder what he would have said about social media— the current secular, hypnotizing, soulless, amoral post-modern religion. He would probably have preferred religion a thousand times over! Literal Big Pharma addictive opiates (OxyContin, etc.) pushed on to the public in the guise of “compassionate” pain relief, have caused the vast majority of the nearly million overdose deaths since 1990, and yet no billionaire goes to jail.
More than 932,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.1 Nearly 75% of drug overdose deaths in 2020 involved an opioid.2 Opioids are substances that work in the nervous system of the body or in specific receptors in the brain to reduce the intensity of pain.
Overdose deaths involving opioids, including prescription opioids, heroin, and synthetic opioids (like fentanyl), have increased by more than eight times since 1999.1 Overdoses involving opioids killed nearly 69,000 people in 2020, and over 82% of those deaths involved synthetic opioids.2
Yet, the worst offenders, the Sackler family, retained some 11 billion dollars with no criminal charges after their multi-billion dollar “payout” to the victims. CNN declared that the Sacklers “the worst drug dealers in history are getting away with billions” even as CNN funds its operations primarily from those same “drug dealer” pharmaceutical mega-companies.
Information warfare and media consolidation have indeed allowed a small band of billionaires, technocrats, global policy makers (think World Economic Forum), to increasingly dominate the working and middle classes of the world financially, psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and culturally. This has accentuated not only a separation of wealth but a separation of justice and fairness. This includes a whole scale theft of productivity and wealth that started in the 1970s (see graph below) and accelerated into multi-trillion dollar public bailouts of privately-generated capitalist disasters, like the stock market crashes in the 1980s and 2000s, the whopping financial crash in 2008 (in which the people who caused the crash were given record bonuses right after causing it!). Now we have the overplayed Covid crisis, which has created the largest, fastest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the world.
Bread and circus
I think Marx would have grimly admired the genius of the updated economic class-based “bread and circus.” Today people are no longer given free bread in the Ancient Roman Colosseum to watch chariot races, slaves battling it out, or Christians being fed to lions. Control of media, in our present billionaire class controlled post-modern “Colosseum,” has instead incited spectators to root for their ideological “team” while booing and disparaging “the other side.” This can lead to some truly mind-bending outcomes, nearly overnight. It took pseudo-liberals only months into a Covid scare to transform from staunchly anti-corporate, anti-censorship, “my body, my choice” advocates into pro Big Pharma, pro-censorship, and pro-medical mandate cheerleaders. I have written as to the bizarre nature of this “blue anon” transformation in many previous posts. Here was an actual Facebook “updated profile picture” of a former colleague and “pro-democracy” progressive in Berkeley, California.
This is a prime example of what Mattias Desmet calls “mass formation”, in which people can be led en masse to create a fervent new group identity over and against others (and their own ostensible former morals) in the face of uncertainty and fear. Cosplaying liberals and progressives in the good times become the fascist army when things got a little uncertain, the ideological brown shirts when push came to shove emotionally. I have yet to spot a single instance or apology or admission of error among these proto-fascists cum “liberals”.
This tendency for mass formation in the face of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty allows for an excessive control over the masses by an opportunistic few, the very thing Marxist Leninism appears to RECOMMEND. The only difference was that Lenin’s “vanguard” elite were supposed to be composed of pro-working class representatives (good luck with that!).
Lenin argued that Marxism's complexity and the hostility of the establishment (the autocratic, semi-feudal state of Imperial Russia) required that a close-knit group of individuals (be) pulled from the working class vanguard to safeguard the revolutionary ideology within the particular circumstances presented by the Tsarist régime (Russian Empire) at the time.
Make the masses suffer
In an irony of ironies, the oligarchs have decided to adopt Marxist/Leninist notions to CONTROL the masses and the working classes. The economic and political “upper crust” uniparty continues to “Let us eat cake” when we are struggling to find bread. More and more out of touch these oligarchs become, less and less empathetic, to the point they are uniting real independents, real progressives, and even Trump supporters to battle this onslaught on middle and working class personal liberties and prosperity.
This is the other major tenet of Marxism besides the vanguard elite: Make the masses suffer in order to “bring on the revolution.” However, today this revolution is not for the working class, but for the oligarchs and the Klaus Schwabs of the world to create a “Great Reset” to consolidate power over the working and middle classes.
You see this deepening upper-level reliance on fear and economic distress as weapons of economic and political control in the face of a worldwide public backlash to the disastrous Covid response by these so-called “elites” in addition to their lack of accountability for their destructive and anti-scientific lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, censorship, closing of small businesses, etc. One can note a somewhat desperation-tinged effort to subvert backlash on the part of a depraved so-called elite by doubling down on oligarchic control— global health surveillance and coordinated response, digital IDs, programmable central bank digital currency, conditional universal basic income, 15-minute cities, and the list goes on. These are no longer conspiracy theories, but actual programs that oligarchs are recommending in their “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality.
In service of this new “Leninism for oligarchs” push, leaders have to create cultural division and diversion, backed by a compliant oligarch-owned mainstream media. Crisis after crisis must be maintained to jack up the fear and distraction, including George Soros CO-OPTED “for-the-people” movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Key to this effort is undermining national sovereignty in favor of a “visionary” global movement toward “we are all one” (under the thumb of a transnational, unelected technocratic dictatorship). These oligarchs, the so-called “Davos crowd” have NO loyalty to their countries, but that doesn’t stop them from using cultural and nationalist tropes to divide people and establish global control.
An impersonal, transhumanist, mechanistic vision of human future emerges, along with a certain enmity and contempt for free human life. One sees these currents in depopulation propaganda, the transhumanist version of “burn the village in order to save it.”
What, if anything, can be done with Marx?
Is there anything that can be done to rescue Marx from being taken over by the very people and upper classes Marx constructed his theories to oppose? Is Marx ultimately just another gullible and “deluded utopian”? What can be done, if anything, to extirpate a pro-human rights, pro health, pro-freedom sensibility from a counter-Marxist Marxism?
Answer: I don’t think it is possible to save Marx. I think we need to learn the lessons of Marxism and then abandon Marx altogether. Here’s why: The Achilles heel of Marxism has always been its fundamental reliance on materialism and rejection of the human spirit, its elevation of an atheist “dialectical materialism” that unwittingly reduces people to things. Martin Buber calls this an I-It relationship, and it is inherently SOULLESS. The alternative is an I-Thou relationship that recognizes human spirit, soul, and a creative presence called God. Without soul, spirit, and God, it is hard to imagine any ideology resisting eventual descent into megalomaniacal corruption, power, and inhumanity.
You see this potential slide into evil in the warnings/cheerleading? of transhumanist advisor to the World Economic Forum, Yuval Harari:
Data might enable human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself… In the past, many tyrants and governments wanted to do it, but nobody understood the technology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people… but soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack people… This will be not just the greatest revolution in the history of humanity; this will be the greatest revolution in biology since the very beginning of life four billion years ago… Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design, not some intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud. These are the new driving forces of evolution.
Notice all the Marxist tropes in this quote alone… materialism, atheism, vanguard elites driving human engineered “evolution”, revolution… Marx, you’ve come full circle, baby. I hope you like what’s gone on in your name! If humans have no intrinsic, unique, and valuable genius or worth, they become “useless eaters” (the Nazi term [Unnütze Esser] for those unworthy of life), as expendable as coal and as harvestable as cattle.
If any entity is able to succeed in reducing human potentiality into thing-ness, then we are effectively over AS human beings. As uncomfortable and unpredictable and irritating as it may be to have difference, conflict, discomfort, and contention, our very humanity and our very creativity, and, indeed our very ability to love depends upon it.
Instead of attempting to engineer all this out to create a soulless pseudo-Eden, let us endeavor to do the opposite, to welcome and learn from each others differences, to embrace unique, creative, loving, and beautiful humanity (no matter how ugly and difficult the process) so that we may evolve emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically, instead of having our contributions and decision off-loaded to machines and people who think like machines.
"The global billionaire capital class and their technocratic lackeys are using the practical tenets of Marxism to monopolize control over workers rather than free them. "
That, in fact, is why the uber-capitalists of the time created "Communism" and Marx was just another well paid clown, lackey, and mouthpiece who wrote what he was told to write.
“… men of wealth use the communist movement to bend workers to their will. So I quite willingly adopted the clichés about secrecy being necessary because of the brutality and savagery of the working-class enemies. I soon learned that the members exposed to the public were not the important Communists.”
-Bella Dodd, School of Darkness, Ch 6
https://archive.org/details/school-of-darkness
"Answer: I don’t think it is possible to save Marx. I think we need to learn the lessons of Marxism and then abandon Marx altogether."
Yup. He belongs in the ash can of history. We now seem to hear little of him any longer probably because the oligarchs have little further use of him. To them we're all disposable.