Less than a century ago nobody was surprised by the popular front policy adopted by the main parties of the left in Europe (France, Italy, Germany, Spain); a line of political collaboration between communists, socialists and “progressive” bourgeois factions, encouraged by Stalin and the CPSU, whose main objective was to combat “fascism” electorally. I use quotation marks because neither in France nor in Spain, from the end of the 1920s until the mid-1930s, was there a real fascism to combat; the core of those coalitions was, as always, the conquest of power and was then seen.
Of course, the bourgeoisie and the parties of the left, throughout recent history, have come together on many occasions, in conjunctural moments and in medium-term projects, not only in their electoral interests but in the prevalence of the general discourse on what is necessary for the development of the societies in which they develop their political/ideological action. There is no more powerful and undisputed discourse in Western Europe, since 1945, than anti-fascism.
The unfortunate countries that suffered the Soviet dictatorship—including Russia itself—hardly see themselves legitimized to declare anti-communism as a democratic value. In Russia, for example, it is a crime of opinion to publicly maintain, through any medium, something as obvious as that Nazism and communism were totalitarian ideologies, first cousins and equally disastrous for the countries that suffered them. Despite even the declaration of the European Parliament (September 19, 2019) on the importance of historical memory for the future of Europe, a text that condemns without palliation the crimes committed by the Nazi and Communist regimes throughout the twentieth century, maintaining an anti-communism, let’s say, as a warning, is considered in bad taste and suspected of reactionarism by the official bien-pensants.
No doubt, this curious phenomenon is due to the fact that Stalin’s Russia, that is, the Soviet Union, although it took its first steps in World War II in coalition with Hitler to invade Poland, ended up as an ally on “the side of the good guys.” Since the enemies of my enemies are my friends, Western Europe and the United States remained impassive and looked the other way, as far as the Central European regimes were concerned, during the long half century in which, after the fall of Nazism, the communist dictatorial agony in those countries was prolonged. The position of European and North American intellectuals is best left unsaid.
Once again, the coincidence of interests between the bourgeoisie and the left imposed its logic. Nothing new—“marching together to strike together” was the beginning of the agreement; “marching apart and striking together,” the ideal of the left; “March separately to the same place and move away if they get close,” that of the right-wing factions. Be that as it may, the main tie of the knot never loosened. Until today.
In spite of all this, some conservative media, some opinion makers, some propagandists of the right are surprised at the assimilation by the national and globalist oligarchies of a large part of the leftist discourse that defines the new paradigm of domesticated citizenship, as well as of social articulation around shared common principles.
They cry out: “Big business, banks, insurance companies, the media… have been influenced and “infected” by the leftist agenda, the 20/30-20/50 agendas and other communist aberrations!”
That is what they complain about—and they are wrong. The agenda of social transformations, with special incidence in the key factors of energy consumption and the new structuring of the labor force, is not an ideation of the left but a bet on the future of the most active capital and the globalist elites.
In short, because the project is more than defined, it would be a matter of gradually transforming the old and impractical “welfare society,” which the working and middle classes in the West have enjoyed since the end of World War II, to reconvert it into a globalized and precarious collectivity, where once determining factors such as roots, cultural identity, family and the possibility of personal progress are diluted for the sake of a group of people without history, without tradition or future, impoverished and whose basic needs are taken care of by the State. That is the plan.
And as the situation ,under normal conditions, would seem difficult to digest for the capricious masses, the discourse is structured around the urgent eco-environmental crisis, a fallacious but very efficient doctrine due to its rapid penetration in the collective ideology, according to which the planet is about to collapse, or worse, be devastated by climate change, which is why we all have to sacrifice, work less, consume less, spend much less, have less money and less of everything, eat insects, and similar claptrap.
And of course, the best way to alleviate the environmental deterioration that many sad economies in Asia and Africa are experiencing is to relocate huge masses of workers from those countries to Europe. The United States, Canada, Australia and other partners are not much for setting an example in this policy of civilizational transmigration, but they look favorably on Europe becoming a multiracial and multicultural wagon; that is to say: de-racialized and de-culturized, though, yes, crammed to the point of vertigo. Again, that is the plan.
As a result, there is no company advertisement that does not use the same tiresome and tedious concepts: sustainability, respect for the environment and all the eco-friendly jingosim already known. Savers in a bank are no longer people who invest their savings in anticipation of profits, but conscientious citizens who help the social and cultural work of the financial institution; the members of a private health company are, no less, “health activists.” And so on, to the point of absurdity.
No, undoubtedly, the plan does not belong to the left. The future is pre-designed by the usual suspects—those who rule and control the economic framework. The fact that the left, for conjunctural convenience, responds marvelously to the approach and goes along with the ruse, does not mean, not by far, that they have the upper hand in this comedy.
Another thing, of course, is that the neo-progressive minds think, with more or less conviction and success, that in the troubled river of scarcity and uprooting, they will find a perfect breeding ground to postulate themselves as optimal managers of the swamp. This is another debate and another problem. The current view of the conflict, however, directs us to a minister of consumption who encourages ordinary people to feed on six-legged critters. That is the greatest achievement, in the realm of practicality, that they have achieved so far.
Since 2008, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, when the model of popular complicit capitalism, where everyone wanted to have a lot of money, all at the same time, and everyone had been convinced that this nonsense was possible, was discredited forever, the idealization of the system migrated to other paradigms. Among them, the fundamental one, leads us to societies resigned to poverty, because the alternative means the destruction of the planet. Therein lies the crux of the matter.
In future installments, we will try to unravel the various “attack” fronts of the great transformative plan orchestrated by the New Moral Order. Little by little, there is no hurry.
José Vicente Pascual is a writer and novelist, living in Madrid. La Hermandad de la Nieve (Brotherhood of the Snow) is his latest work of historical narrative. This articles appears through the kind courtesy of Posmodernia.
Featured: The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, by Jan Steen; painted ca. 1677.