Is there Life Beyond the Left-Right Divide?

Part One: The Legacy Left Might be Redundant but Careful with that Bathwater

It is frequently declared in ‘awake’ circles and elsewhere that the Left-Right political divide has ceased to exist.

I have some sympathy with this position. It’s an affirmation of a new kind of politics that seeks to transcend the traditional binary divisions.

It is also an understandable expression of disgust with a political model that adapted itself with indecent alacrity to the precepts of the covid tyranny: for example, the mainstream political parties, Left and Right, were as one on all the important questions.

I agree that the Left-Right party model is redundant, or to put it another way, all the parties and political organisations that occupied the Left-Right spectrum at the beginning of the covid operation are redundant.

They all promoted the scam and none of them has recanted subsequently. They must be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But the underlying conditions and realities that gave rise to and shaped the Left-Right political model in the first place haven’t changed and there is a risk that serious ideological and programmatic differences are smoothed away in the rush to embrace a non-binary political model.

As a life-long socialist and trade unionist I was dismayed and disgusted by the labour movement’s cowardly, credulous and cretinous response to the covid operation.

People I had hitherto thought to be sensible and politically acute revealed themselves to be compliant covidians whose only criticism of the biosecurity state’s ‘mitigation’ measures was that they weren’t hard, fast or long enough.

The labour movement collaborated with the ruling class and scabbed on humanity.

There was not a whisper of support from the mainstream Left for the anti-‘vaccine’ mandate campaign and not a hint of solidarity with the thousands of care home workers who lost their jobs because they wouldn’t take the experimental injections.

Anti-lockdown protestors were slandered as MAGA-tinfoil-hat-wearing white supremacists who were imperilling the health of the community by congregating outdoors.

When it was time for progressive people to be triggered by the George Floyd operation and take to the streets themselves during the summer of 2020, Left politicians and theoreticians performed intellectual handstands to explain why it was now safe to go outside in numbers, with some ‘experts’ even claiming that kneeling against racism was more important than staying safe from a deadly virus.

Incidentally, the George Floyd demos provided a perfect visual representation of the mainstream Left in 2020 and today – muzzled and on its knees.

But the failure wasn't the Left’s alone. If I had been a life-long Conservative and freemason, I would have been dismayed and disgusted by the response of the Right too.

Despite the valiant efforts of a small group of mostly Tory MPs to push back on the tyranny, Conservative politicians were as craven and complicit as their Labour and Liberal Democrat counterparts.

No political organisation or civil society institution behaved with any credit during the covid operation and none of them deserves our support now. This includes major and minor political parties, trade unions, third-sector organisations, religious denominations and political issue campaign groups. They must all be replaced by new organisational formations.

The eternal ruling class

But whatever our political tradition or persuasion, everyone in the Resistance Movement* – the best term we presently have for the loose coalition of awakened people who mobilised en masse against the covid operation – must agree that we are engaged in what is only the most recent phase of a historical struggle: the class struggle.

Our enemy is the ruling class, by which I mean the power cluster that sits at the apex of the social and economic pyramid and which manages its affairs through a supporting network of globalist organisations such as the IMF and the WHO, intelligence agencies, military blocs, media houses, NGOs and national governments.

The common characteristic of the people who inhabit the highest levels of the ruling class is the ownership and management of financial power through central banks, wealthy private dynasties and investment houses.

Everything flows from this point. Our experience of reality – material and mental – is a consequence of the expression of ruling class power, as are wars, depressions, famines and plandemics.

I think that ruling class is the best term to describe this world-dominating power group. The ‘One per cent’ or any other number-based model is less appropriate because focusing on percentages isn’t as important as focusing on systems and institutions.

It also over-simplifies the division between goodies and baddies. Ultimate and absolute power over the world may sit with the One per cent but their position is dependent upon a vast and obedient sub-structure of organisations and individuals, which includes millions of people who approve of and support the ruling class’s aims and actions and whose collaborative impulses cannot be dismissed simply as the by-product of ‘false consciousness’.

These entities should also be considered class enemies.

And ‘ruling class’ has a solid Marxist pedigree. If we are to insist on the reality and validity of a Left orientation in the new politics that has taken shape within the context of the Resistance Movement, we should be confident about using traditional Left language.

It doesn't matter if you believe that Marx was a Rothschild agent (possibly) or that the implementation of Marxist ideology by national governments has been an unmitigated disaster (debatable) or that you think that the labour theory of value is wrongheaded (probably). What Marx and Engels said about ruling class power in The German Ideology in 1846 is still spot on today:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

Has a better definition of ruling class hegemony ever been formulated? Every intimation and presentiment we have about the omnipresence and ubiquity of system narratives and regime agendas is clarified and crystalised in this axiom. It should be a foundational text for Resistance Movement political theory.

It's not only about capitalism

Today’s ruling class is the legacy representative body of a ruling class that has held power for thousands of years. It is not a creation of the modern industrial age.

This is a point of departure from the traditional Left understanding of the ruling class which associates it with the ultimate expression of capitalism’s interests within the context of the industrial mode of existence which capitalism brought about; in other words, a ruling class which cannot be conceived of independently of the capitalist system.

The reality is very different. Capitalism is a facet – an important facet but not the only one – of the ultimate expression of the ruling class’s interests, which are older than capitalism and which will outlive it.

A new form of social and economic relations is emerging which, whatever your take on capitalism – i.e. whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, whether you think it hasn’t been tried properly or think it has been debased – will not be capitalism as we – or Marx and Engels – knew it.

The Left hasn’t grasped this yet, which is why during the covid operation Left voices railed against a callous boss class that wanted the workers back in the factories and offices in the teeth of a deadly pandemic, not understanding that the real boss class is seeking to bring about the collapse of Western industrial civilisation and wants most of the workers dead.

A revolutionary response to the challenge of lockdowns – properly speaking, lockouts – would have been to insist on going to work and, if necessary, to occupy workplaces.

Instead, the labour movement agitated for more stringent lockdowns and placed ever-more absurd conditions on workers returning to the workplace.

All the trade unions conspired to degrade the conditions – immediate and long term – of their members through their fanatical observation of anti-human behavioural prescriptions and proscriptions.

The worst offenders were the education unions, who directed their own cowardly neuroses onto their students and condemned millions of young people to months of disruption to their education and the nightmare of the forced masking regime.

They were complicit in mass state-sanctioned child abuse.

The failure of the trade union movement to resist the covid tyranny was a systematic failing shared by every single organisation, grouping, party and institution across the entire civil society spectrum.

Churches shut their doors to their congregations but committed blasphemy after blasphemy by opening them to the lethal injection squads.

The Humanist Society published a statement signed by 60 useful liberal asse(t)s including Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig and Jim Al-Khalili urging “as many people as possible to get vaccinated against Covid-19”.

Charities, NGOs and community organisations all fell into step behind the plandemic narrative. The traditional civil society bulwarks against state over-reach melted away leaving the People utterly naked before the Power.

Old Labour, New Labour, Same Labour

The great party of the working class capitulated at the first whiff of hand sanitiser. Almost to an MP, the Parliamentary Labour Party supported every piece of repressive legislation it was asked to vote on.

In common with the rest of the broad Liberal/Left/‘progressive’ constituency, the Labour party adopted an ultra-position on covid, summarised as “anything the Tories do, we would do harder, faster, longer”.

Now that Labour is back in power, we can assume that the government’s management of the next ‘public health emergency’, or any other confected crisis, will be much more extreme than the Tory response in 2020.

It was naïve to think that Labour might have mustered opposition to the covid programme. The Labour Party is as much an instrument of ruling class power as the Conservative Party.

It manifests many of the lineaments of contemporary ruling class hegemony, being technocratic, martial and woke. There is nothing socialist about the modern Labour Party. Its dominant ideology is a variety of extreme bourgeois liberalism.

Fifty years ago, the Labour Party may have been a less obviously extreme bourgeois liberal enterprise, certainly if we consider the class provenance of its MPs, many of whom were drawn from the working class even when the Party’s leadership was over-represented by middle- and upper-class politicians.

The old Labour orientation, with its mass base of support in working class communities, was appropriate to a party that governed an industrial society.

The new orientation, marked in time by, but not wholly due to, the Blair accession in 1997, is appropriate to an economy driven by financial and other services industries and a post-industrial political culture characterised by a shallow preoccupation with ‘modernity’, an impatience with ‘inefficient’ and ‘outdated’ modes of production and organisation, and a preponderant emphasis on feelings and surface textures.

But despite these ostensible changes to the composition and appearance of the Labour Party, it has always been a safe pair of hands for the interests of the ruling class.

It is inconceivable that a genuinely popular representative party that set itself against ruling class power and sought to run the affairs of the country in the interests of the People, would be allowed into Westminster.

The Labour Party’s role is to manage the system in a way that makes it more palatable to everyone to the left of the Tories.

The manifestos, campaigns and political programmes of the mainstream political parties sustain the fiction of electoral choice when in fact there are no important programmatic or ideological differences between any of them.

If anyone still had faith in the two-party model, they must surely have been disabused by the grotesque spectacle of the 2024 General Election which more obviously than ever was conducted according to the One Party-Two Puppets principle.

Like many other ‘progressive’ organisations, including much of what used to be called the ‘hard Left’, members of the high bourgeoisie have always b­­een over-represented in the Labour Party’s leadership.

Any organisation that has been infested by the Fabians is axiomatically suspect.

The present leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister and Warmonger in Chief of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Keir Starmer, is a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and a former member of the Trilateral Commission.

And that tells us everything we need to know about the orientation of the modern Labour Party.

Harder extreme bourgeois liberals

The parties and organisations to the left of the Labour Party, e.g. the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the People’s Assembly and the Socialist Party, are no different to Labour when it comes to the issues that really matter.

They all fell into lockdown lockstep and did what was expected of them throughout the plandemic, i.e. taking an ultra-position on mitigation policies and formulating absurd bromides such as the People’s Assembly’s Zero Covid Charter.

The ‘radical’ Left’s hysterical and inane reaction to the plandemic was characteristically obscurantist and five years on they continue to fixate on everything but the gigantic rampaging elephant that has crashed through every room in the house.

They are ignoring – wilfully or otherwise – the real fronts of the 21^st century class war.

None of them has developed a critique of the accelerating construction of the global biosecurity fascist super-state or cared to examine its component manifestations.

None of them talks about or campaigns on important issues such as the threat of central bank digital currencies, geoengineering, ‘fifteen-minute cities’ or the acceleration of MRNA-driven ‘health’ interventions.

And they go out of their way to avoid talking about the role of the banks in all of this.

Many of these Left groupuscules are in thrall to pseudo-radical ideologies, often rooted in identity politics which, rather than confound the interests of the ruling class, in fact serve them.

Did the sight of thousands of masked-up lefties ‘taking the knee’ in the Summer of BLM cause the ruling class to tremble? Of course not. It made them laugh. They had the Left exactly where they wanted them. Taking the knee? Taking the piss, more like.

These ‘radical’ Left groups, like the Labour Party and the trade unions, are wedded to ruling class orthodoxies such as the transgender agenda and the anthropogenic climate change hoax, both of which are directly linked to their transhumanist and SMART imprisonment ‘solutions’ – see for example ‘climate neutral’ cities, or the American Medical Association’s lobbying to end the registration of sex on birth certificates.

They are vaccine cultists and critical race theory advocates. They do not provide real opposition to ruling class power. Indeed, the almost wilfully perverse line these groups took during the covid operation supports the notion that many of them are deep state cut-outs and their leaders regime agents.

Notwithstanding these suspicions, so shameful was the performance of the ‘radical’ Left during the covid operation that it has lost any legitimacy to speak on behalf of the masses ever again – not that it had much before 2020, its natural constituencies being students and white-collar public sector workers.

In my opinion, the question of what is to be done about the Legacy Left – i.e. the labour movement, the Labour Party, the ‘radical’ Left, all of it, in fact – has ceased to be a live issue. They have had almost five years to figure things out and they are no wiser about the reality of the world now than they were in March 2020. We’re better off without them.

In fact, I’m glad that that the Legacy Left stayed away from the Resistance Movement. Imagine the Socialist Workers Party getting involved in ‘vaccine’ injury street stalls, Stand in the Park gatherings or Rebels on Roundabouts actions. They would ruin these organically radical initiatives with their template placards and didactic proselytising. The Resistance Movement is concerned, quite rightly, about infiltrators and controlled opposition but the problem would be a thousand times worse if the Left groups got on board.

In the revolutionary conditions created by the covid operation, the class struggle was waged on the People’s side by individuals and emergent organisations that had no connection at all with the traditional Left and the labour movement.

This was a good thing. There was no place in the struggle for the suffocating theory and practice of the Left parties and organisations.

Mass popular resistance to the covid operation was a revolutionary school attended in the main by people new to such political activism.

The experience was life-changing for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. No-one who fought in those great days could possibly return to their pre-covid habits of thought and even though, inevitably, the revolutionary ardour that drove resistance in 2020 and 2021 has cooled, and notwithstanding the political issues that have riven the Resistance Movement subsequently, the mass political consciousness that was created during the covid struggle has not gone away.

And that consciousness is not merely latent: it manifests itself in hundreds of community and activist groups; it is on Substack and Telegram; it is present in friendship circles and in spontaneous conversations with strangers.

The Resistance Movement is no less of a loose coalition now than it was in its formative days in 2020. A new ‘crisis’ similar in scale but different, almost certainly, in character to the covid operation will boost its numbers and engender a whole new phase of activism.

The energy, latent and actual, is not in doubt; the direction the Movement should take during and between crises, however, is another matter, one which cannot be addressed without considering fundamental questions of ideology and practical organisation, which I will have a look at in Part Two.

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* I’ve used ‘Resistance Movement’ instead of the more-commonly-referred-to ‘Freedom Movement’ because the term speaks to the larger struggle against the entirety of the Great Reset Agenda and the class dynamics that underpin it; not that this possibility is not contained within the Freedom Movement mosaic but in keeping with the purpose of this article and taking into account the ideological position of Real Left, we should try at all times to stay focused on the political nature of the struggle; some tendencies within the Freedom Movement frequently lack rigour in this regard.