The Real Left Year in Review
It has been nearly a year since Left Lockdown Sceptics’ reinvention as ‘Real Left’. During that time we have forged ahead with vigour and vision! Some of our biggest achievements from the start of 2023 to today were a new website and the hosting of five public meetings or conferences, involving over 200 attendees and platforming a total of fifteen speakers, including several friends who traveled from Europe to take part.
Simultaneously, we have disseminated over sixty articles by a number of dissident voices opposed to global capitalism’s emerging ‘New Normal’ on our publishing platform, which is the core of the Real Left project. We’ve dealt with a plethora of subjects: from an analysis of geopolitical tensions and conflicts to the devastating fallout of the MRNA injections, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and grassroots campaigns to keep cash and research pieces on predatory impact investing markets; from identity politics as a tool to destroy class consciousness, to the egregious failure of the mainstream left to acknowledge-let alone resist-the Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda. The critiques we’ve platformed have been both broad and radical in scope.
The Abyssal Aims of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
In the emerging transition of capitalism we recognise a global, totalising system that is organised in pursuit of constant expansion at any human or environmental cost. Having decimated swathes of the planet through industrial development in the twentieth century, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is global capitalism’s great expansionary gambit in the twenty first.
Its objectives are ambitious.
Firstly, through full spectrum digital surveillance and the normalisation of novel genetic therapies and nanotechnology, the world’s leading companies aim at nothing less than a transformation of the human body into a tradeable commodity. If many humans are no longer needed as labourers, the capitalists reason, their passive bodies can themselves be sources of value. As the now-familiar adage goes: if a service or product is free, you are the product they are selling. More speculatively, the billionaire class are now developing digital metaverses that would, in theory, create infinite virtual markets (in defiance of the economic laws of gravity). The billions of dollars flowing into ever-more powerful artificial intelligences create the possibility of entities that might continuously orchestrate virtual realities personalised to each individual. For the capitalists: it is utopia. Its true face is a fractal Dantean hell of infinite proportions; the final abolition of the human subject as an animal existing in interrelationship with nature.
Secondly, through the so-called ‘Green Transition’, global capital is intent on a fresh wave of industrialisation and transistorisation of the physical environment. Justified by a falsified crisis narrative around CO2 and climate change, the world’s largest companies are committing unprecedented crimes of environmental destruction as developing countries are strip-mined for lithium, copper and rare-earth materials, with the full support of ‘useful idiot’ activists in corporate funded left-wing death cults.
Unlike fossil fuels, network-dependent and inherently variable renewable energy sources will have to be orchestrated by vast and centralised control grids. The consumption of power will be measurable at every level, and a puritanical apocalypse narrative will justify an ongoing fall in living standards for the majority, including in Western countries. Meanwhile, the global elite, subject to none of the restraints they impose on the mass population, will continue fly around the world in private jets pontificating about sustainability and social justice.
These two emerging markets of human and natural capital are tied together by the need to measure and control the behaviour of populations, that being a central aim of CBDCs, under which all transactions will be captured and monitored according to a system of values determined flexibly, according to whatever crisis narrative is currently being pushed by increasingly centralised and automated governance. Resistance will be punished by cutting off access to means of purchase. The rise of ‘impact investment’ markets allows any observer to view these two aims in motion directly: these funds are investments in social engineering and technological transformation, predicated on the digital isolation of individuals, with the aim (and financial justification) of reducing spending on education, health and social care. Less and less for the majority. More and more for the super rich.
In Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism, Lenin theorised the possibility of a joint-stock company that held a monopoly over all industry and thus constituted a global state capitalism, transcending individual state power. While this has yet to be realised, and the underlying laws of capitalism remain in motion, it is true that certain American investment funds (specifically Blackrock and Vanguard) do now, in fact, manage a majority of the world’s assets. The possibility of dynamism in the system has been drastically curtailed by the ability of these funds, exerting huge political influence and armed with the most advanced AI prediction engines, to anticipate and reshape the future as it happens. Global events are increasingly organised and contrived. The price of participation in mainstream culture is to be immersed in a pervasive propaganda system that alters perceptions and ensures compliance with any particular narrative.
It isn’t possible to fully predict the future, but there are historical precedents we can look to for insight. Capitalism has long shown its face to be utterly barbarous for the colonised world. In the twentieth century, the entire global system descended into a total ethical collapse, culminating in the mass slaughter, destruction and inhumanity of World War Two. In the absence of any restraining checks or balances, the system is now plunging into a similar such catastrophic moral collapse.
If successful, the Fourth industrial Revolution entails the complete colonisation and appropriation of all land and natural resources, including the human body and mind, for the owner class. Under the dictates of a ‘Green New Deal’, the energy that can be harvested from the Earth will be turned largely to feeding vast assemblages of servers and software to power the ubiquitous ‘cloud’, the backbone of the digital panopticon’s surveillance infrastructure.
Ironically, there is no place for nature or traditional, non-industrial societies in this so-called green future. As ChatGPT will happily inform you, the natural and pre-capitalist world can easily be maintained as a simulation whilst its physical reality is totally obliterated. All of this destruction will be suger-coated by the sterile language and culture of pseudo- progressivism (equality, diversity and of course sustainability) through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal framework. This racket is being concocted by a tiny cabal of global, cosmopolitan elite, fake socialists; the successors to the civilised barbarians of twentieth-century imperialism, who couched their vilest wars and genocides in language of progressive utopias.
Organised political and social resistance to the Great Reset, accurately viewed, is a decolonisation struggle with all of its requisite alliances amongst the oppressed in every nation. It is therefore inextricable from indigenous people’s resistance struggles across time and space.
The Freedom Struggle is a Decolonisation Struggle
Across 2023, divisions emerged in the wider milieu of anti-lockdown/medical mandate and Net Zero opposition over responses to both the NATO/Ukraine-Russia war and the recent escalation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, following Hamas’ armed insurgency and Israel’s genocidal response. We believe the most common sentiment on war-mongering foreign policy among those actively opposing the Great Reset at the grassroots is encapsulated in the phrase: ‘All wars are bankers wars.’
But some individuals and organisations who support colonialist and imperialist narratives and programmes and comprise what critical voices have described as the freedom movement’s (self-appointed) managerial faction, have proven themselves conformist cheerleaders for Ukrainian and Israeli military policies.
At Real Left, we affirm the humanity of all and the shared class interests of the overwhelming majority. We are proud to fly the flag for ‘freedom for everyone, everywhere’. This means we stand for the freedom of every human being to flourish within a human, rather than a profit-centred society, regardless of social class, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, nationality or any other distinguishing characteristic.
We see ourselves as united in solidarity with the 99% everywhere in the world in an international class struggle against the encroaching global self-monitoring and reporting technology enabled ‘impact’ economy. By this measure, if a discriminatory and abusive apartheid society enabled through technological surveillance and digital identity passes is not acceptable for citizens of the UK, it cannot be acceptable for the people of Palestine, (or indeed the citizenry of any other country.) The inverse is equally true, and relevant to the frustrating spectacle of witnessing long time advocates for Palestinian rights on the left, who failed to stand up to medical fascism, only now rediscovering the vital importance of free speech, freedom to protest and other indispensable democratic rights.
Our stance, which upholds a universal application of human rights (whilst rejecting the false universalising platitudes of global institutions in the service of the totalising agendas of global capital), is also reflective of the majority (yet suppressed) view of the demos in the UK, both in and outside of the freedom movement.
On the Horizon: Substack Move and More Events
Looking ahead to another fruitful year, we are pleased to welcome our readership to our new Substack blog.
As a result of overt online censorship, including social media visibility filtering, reduced search engine optimisation, and the Real Left website being blocked by at least two internet providers (due to our website purportedly hosting ‘misinformation or hateful content’), the growth of our online reach has been sluggish and unreflective of the consistent quality of content Real Left offers.
Consequently, whilst we will continue to maintain and post on the website, we intend for our new Substack account to be the locus of our reader community.
Later this year, we will be continuing to explore the contentious subject of subversion of effective Great Reset resistance by the system. We will interrogate themes including: the influence of corporate money, ‘freedom pied pipers’ who are promoting 5G enabled surveillance and data gathering technologies as part of utopian ‘parallel’ societies, and a culture of destructive paranoia directed at genuine grassroots initiatives and activists, in a second meeting on this subject, this time in London. (Details to be announced in due course.)
We also hope to stage our biggest conference yet with more international speakers.
In addition, a Real Left contributor in Australia has offered a limited number of free places on her highly recommended 'History With a Why' online course, which follows the work of Chris Harman's A People's History of the World over weekly one hour lessons. You do not have to live in Australia to take part. To register your interest please email Lorrainepratley[at]hotmail.com.
We Need Your Input
Real Left’s ongoing activity is a result of many hours of unpaid labour by a core group of committed members. We welcome more hands on deck to share the load, and in particular seek additional volunteers to join our editorial and posting and events teams. We also welcome article submissions from new readers; prior writing experience is not a prerequisite.
You can reach us by sending a message through the website or emailing directly at: info@real-left.com. If you are time poor but can spare a financial contribution to cover our overheads (i.e. website hosting, banner and (business) card costs and subsidising tickets and travel for events), this too is very welcome and appreciated.
Finally, please consider sharing articles and event notifications which you find valuable to boost our online visibility and reach.
A heartfelt thank you for being part of the Real Left Community.
This move to Substack works well for me.
I read articles from both the Left and the Right perspective. Seems to me that both sides are finally fighting the same battle! Hopefully energy won't be wasted fighting each other any more - the Bad Guys are the same, whichever side of the divide you are on!