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Here's How the Ruling Class USES the Left
I am writing this article for an audience consisting of all the good people who, like myself, sincerely want a more equal and democratic society and who (unlike myself), to achieve this goal, look for leadership from the prominent individuals and organizations that seem to share this goal. Most of these leaders are commonly identified either as "of the Left" or "progressive" or "liberal" or "Marxist." In this article I will refer to all of these prominent leaders as "the Left."
According to the standard wisdom, the Left is providing good leadership to achieve a more equal and democratic society and the problem is that not enough people follow this leadership, and so the enemies of the Left (led by what I call the ruling class) remain in power. The problem, in this mistaken view, is that the Left is weak. What I will show is that, on the contrary, the problem (for those who want a more equal and democratic society, that is) is that the Left is wrong. What do I mean?
The Left is wrong in its fundamental view of ordinary people, and because of this wrong view the ruling class is able to use the Left to divide and rule good people. So let's start by seeing what's wrong with the Left's view of ordinary people.
The Left's Wrong View of Ordinary People
Before discussing the Left's wrong view it helps to say what the truth is about ordinary people. The truth is that the vast majority of ordinary people (in the world, and in the United States as well) want society to be based on the positive values of concern for one another (as opposed to dog-eat-dog competition), mutual aid (as opposed to some people taking unfair advantage of others) and equality (in the sense of having no rich and no poor and in the sense of ordinary people rather than a privileged and self-serving elite having the real say in social decisions.) This is why ordinary people are the solution, not the problem, today.
The Left disagrees. The Left views the majority of ordinary people as the problem, not the solution, because their supposed values are the problem: selfishness and greed, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the list grows all the time. The Left believes that certain subsets of ordinary people (people of color, non-heterosexuals, transgender people, etc.) are oppressed by the ordinary people who are different. The solution, in this Leftist view, is to persuade the oppressive ordinary people to change their ugly ways and values.
The Marxist Left (which I have written about here) sometimes adds to the above an emphasis, more than the liberal/progressive leftists, on the issue of class: the material oppression of the working class by the capitalist class. The Marxist Left thus, sharing the liberal/progressive left's negative view of the deplorable values of ordinary people, points out that despite their terrible values working class people nonetheless have a class interest in opposing the ruling class. The solution according to the Marxist Left is, again, to persuade ordinary people to change their ugly ways and values (or, as the Marxists would say, to "become class conscious.")
The idea that the values of the vast majority of ordinary people are the solution, not the problem--that they are the values that ought to shape society and are the opposite of the terrible values of the ruling class--is the truthful idea that will enable good people to succeed in building a huge popular movement to make society genuinely equal and democratic. (A wonderful entire book about this is online here.) But hardly anybody knows how true this idea is, thanks to the ruling class propaganda against it and also thanks to the Left's rejection of it.
Perhaps you, dear reader, think this idea is false. If so, please read (here) about my experience at a pro-Trump rally asking random people there if they thought it was a good idea or a bad idea to "remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor." 86% of them (43 out of the 50 I asked) thought it was a good (or great!) idea and those 43 people all gladly took my button with that message and many pinned it onto themselves right on the spot. Watch this video of me asking random people on the streets of Boston (no cherry picking!) the same question; more than 90% said it was a good (or great!) idea.
Consider this please. If ordinary people were as selfish and vile as the Left claims, then our world would be infinitely more horrible than it actually is, with everybody stabbing each other in the back and nobody giving a damn about anybody else. This is the kind of world that it would be--a veritable hellish nightmare of a world--if the disgusting selfish competitive values of the ruling class were also those of everyody else. The fact that our world is not this hellish nightmare, but one in which people cooperate and help each other and respect one another as equals in countless ways that we take so much for granted that we don't think about them or even notice them, this fact has huge significance: it shows that ordinary people are the positive force in the world, a force that challenges capitalist values and that ought to shape all of society.
How the Ruling Class USES the Left to Divide and Rule Us
I have written a whole book (Divide and Rule) about how the ruling class uses the Left to divide and rule us. What follows is a brief summary with some links to some of my online articles treating particular issues in more detail.
Here's how the ruling class uses the Left for divide-and-rule. The ruling class takes (or invents) a "hot button" (i.e., potentially very divisive social issue) and, with its control of the mainstream (and alternative!) media, it imposes a very particular framework on the public debate about the issue. The framework is designed to be maximally divisive. The framework is made maximally divisive by defining two opposing views (I call them "camps") in a way that ensures that the people in each camp--when they hear about the opposing camp--will view the members of the opposing camp with utter contempt and possibly fear. The ruling class does this by a) providing each camp's position with arguments designed to be maximally offensive to the other camp, and b) censoring facts that, if known, would cause people in the opposing camps to see that they had far more agreement with each other than they otherwise would realize, and that the concerns of the opposing camp were quite reasonable (instead of deplorable) even if they still disagreed.
Here are some examples of how the ruling class uses the Left to make this work.
Race
The truth is that a) the ruling class for centuries has systematically discriminated against people not of European descent ("whites") and b) the ruling class did this in order to more effectively dominate, control and oppress working class people of ALL races.
The early British big property owners in the Virginia Colony instituted slavery based on race because they feared that otherwise there would be more rebellions of the working class (laborers in the tobacco plantations of bothy African and European descent) united regardless of race, as happened in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676--a rebellion that almost overthrew the British ruling elite. (Read more about this here.)
The truth is that when the ruling class singles out some working class people for harsher treatment than others, it is for the purpose of creating mutual mistrust, resentment and fear between those singled out for special discrimination and the others. Thus the racist Jim Crow laws in the South not only harmed blacks; they also harmed the poor whites, whose wages were lower than white wages in the North because Jim Crow prevented them from having strong (i.e., integrated) unions and diverted their anger at blacks instead of the wealthy whites who oppressed them.
The truth is that, among working class people, AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL.
But the Left disagrees. The Left asserts exactly what the ruling class also asserts: that racial discrimination against non-whites benefits white working class people. The ruling class asserted that slavery and Jim Crow benefited poor whites and the Left chimes right in by asserting that white working class people enjoy "white privilege" (the word "privilege" means, by definition, a benefit). The Left never says that racial discrimination against non-whites also HARMS white working class people.
The ruling class promotes (with its foundations) the use of "white privilege" rhetoric (as I show in great detail here) and counts on the Left not explaining (as I do here) that "white privilege" is a phrase designed to hide the truth that AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL. On the contrary, the Left is largely responsible for the sad fact that young people today use the horribly misleading phrase "white privilege" to describe what the Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Movement referred to with the very good phrase "racial discrimination." The result is that working class people are being effectively divided and ruled along race lines, as I discuss here.
Earlier, the ruling class promoted Affirmative Action to divide and rule us along race lines, as I discuss in more detail here. (Please read this short linked article if you believe that Affirmative Action was truly about helping non-white minority people. It was not!) Affirmative Action was the flip side of the coin of the New Jim Crow of racist prison incarceration. The latter was designed to make whites fear blacks and Hispanics as "a criminal race"; the former was designed to make white working class people fear blacks and Hispanics as job-stealers, by making sure that whites applying for a job or school admission would be told essentially, "We're sorry, we couldn't give you the position you applied for because we had to give it to a less qualified minority person." Did the Left expose Affirmative Action for the divisive strategy it was? Did the Left fight for the kind of reforms that would truly remedy the harm of past racial discrimination and also gain large white working class support (as my above linked article discusses)? No! the Left accused white working class people who very understandably objected to the new government-mandated racial discrimination of being racists. The ruling class thus used the Left to ensure that its divide and rule strategy would be maximally effective.
Feminism
In the 1970s the ruling class hijacked the traditional feminist movement (that strove for equality of men and women under the law and in the workplace) and replaced its leadership with a new breed of radical feminists who asserted that our society was one in which men--all men, by virtue of being male--were the oppressor class oppressing all women; that men, in other words, were the enemy--the patriarchy. The ruling class defined "being a progressive feminist" as subscribing to this "men are the enemy" belief. It was pure divide-and-rule. I discuss this at some length in my article here. The Left completely agreed with the ruling class's "men are the enemy" theme and accused those who disagreed of being sexist. Just as with racial discrimination, there is real discrimination against women, but it harms working class men as well because, as discussed above, AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL. The Left, however, never explained this and in fact rejected it. The result, thanks in large part to the Left, is that ordinary people feel that their only choice here is either to a) agree that all men are the enemy or else b) dismiss any effort to end discrimination against women as an attack on men.
Same-sex Marriage
Believe it or not, there is a position on same-sex marriage that would be agreeable to most people in the pro-same-sex marriage camp and ALSO to most people in the anti-same-sex marriage camp. I write about this position here; it's a position that addresses the actual concerns of both camps. You've most likely never heard of this position because the ruling class didn't want it to be known; the ruling class wanted each camp on this issue to view the other as despicable. The Left went right along with the ruling class in this regard, leading in the campaign to demonize anybody opposed to same-sex marriage as a despicable bigot or idiotic Bible fundamentalist. The divisiveness on this issue is so thorough that many people cannot even imagine joining with people in the opposing camp to fight together for anything, such as making our society more equal and democratic. Thanks largely to the Left.
Abortion
As I discuss in some detail here, the ruling class has cleverly, and dishonestly, framed the abortion issue as one in which one side is against murder and wants women to suffer, and the other side doesn't want women to suffer and has no problem with murder whatsoever. Again, as with same-sex marriage, there is a position on abortion (discussed in my linked article above) that would gain the respect of most people in both the pro- and anti-abortion camps. But the ruling class censors this position, and the Left helps to censor it. The Left simply accuses people opposed to abortion of being deplorable. This is exactly what the ruling class counts on to make its divide-and-rule strategy work.
Muslim Refugees
Key Fact: The ruling class, as I discuss in detail here, makes sure that there are domestic acts (or almost acts) of "Muslim" terrorism so that many Americans will be terrified of Muslims. The ruling class then promotes a great debate about whether to allow or not allow Muslim refugees to enter the country. The camp in favor of not allowing them in accuses the opposing camp of being, at best, suicidal idiots. The camp in favoring of allowing the refugees in (which the Left is a prominent part of) accuses the opposing camp of being inhumane racists. The Left is silent about the Key Fact. This makes the divide-and-rule work perfectly.
Immigration
Key Fact: The ruling class for a long time has been forcing ordinary people in Mexico and Central America to migrate to the United States illegally, as I discuss here and here. Because most people do not understand this key fact, the ruling class is able to orchestrate a big and extremely divisive debate about whether the illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain or not (not about whether the ruling class that forced them to come to the U.S. illegally should be removed from power, mind you, a position that would unite most of the people in either camp, not to mention the illegal migrants themselves!) Does the Left tell people about the Key Fact? No. It just accuses the people who want to deport the illegal aliens of being deplorable racists.
While the ruling class and its right-wing radio talk show hosts exaggerate the harm to American citizens caused by the massive illegal immigration, there are in fact ways that this massive influx of people either directly causes--or is used as a pretext by the ruling class to cause--harm to working class American citizens. The Left ignores this fact (also discussed in my linked article above) and simply accuses anybody who supports deporting illegal immigrants of being motivated by racism or selfishness. This is exactly what the ruling class needs to make its divide-and-rule strategy work.
Transgender Bathrooms
Key Fact: In most states (including North Carolina with its infamous HB2 law), a person can have the gender on their birth certificate changed simply by providing documentation that they had sex-change surgery. As I discuss in some detail here, the transgender bathroom issue is phony from the git-go. The status quo (prior to this becoming a big issue) regarding bathroom use was not oppressive to, or even viewed as oppressive by, transgender people. The supposedly bigoted North Carolina HB2 law is not oppressive to transgender people because of the Key Fact. But NPR (etc.) censored the Key Fact so that its liberal audience, hearing about the HB2 law and being told that it was oppressive, would believe this lie, and view those who opposed the new liberal bathroom legislation (which truly IS oppressive) as bigots. The Left, as to be expected, eagerly accuses people of being transphobic bigots if they think that a woman in a public access shower room should be able to tell a person entering that room who has male genitalia to leave. What more could the ruling class ask for?
Israel
The ruling class imposed framework for debating U.S. support for Israel is this: One camp is not anti-Semitic and therefore supports Israel, and the opposing camp is anti-Semitic and therefore does not support Israel. I have written in detail here (including the "must read" article it links to under the title) about why this framework is absolutely false. Some people in the Left support Israel and falsely accuse the other camp of being anti-Semitic, and some people in the Left do not support Israel (they may support the BDS campaign). Many of the people in the Left who do not support Israel use an argument that many people perceive as an anti-Semitic argument; this only helps the ruling class maintain its false framework for divide and rule.
The argument that many on the Left use and which is perceived to be anti-Semitic is this: "The Israel lobby controls the American ruling class so effectively that it forces America's rulers, against their will, to go against their own national interest and support Israel." This theory is often known as "tail wags dog" (the Israeli tail wags the United States dog.) As I discuss in my article linked to above, the theory is factually wrong, and is able to derive credibility (with difficulty since people know that tails don't wag dogs) only from the anti-Semitic canard that Jews have some mysterious power to control non-Jews (an idea famously espoused by the fraudulent and infamous document named "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion").
The result of the Left's role in the debate about Israel is that the false framework remains reinforced by the Left, much to the delight of the ruling class.
What Will It Take to Win?
In order for good people to win a genuinely equal and genuinely democratic society we must build a movement of the great majority of Americans that explicitly aims for an egalitarian revolutionary goal: to remove the ruling plutocracy from power to have no rich and no poor, with real democracy--not the fake democracy that will always be the case as long as our society is one in which money is power and the billionaires have virtually all of it. To create this movement it is necessary that its leaders know and assert that the great majority of Americans share this positive goal, despite secondary disagreements that the ruling class tries to maximize. And it is necessary that its leaders explicitly advocate the egalitarian revolutionary goal, because otherwise it will never be adequately fought for and the ruling class will co-opt the movement with gimmicks (such as campaign finance reform) that leave it in power.
The problem is that our current leaders in the Left do not believe that the great majority of Americans share the positive values that ought to shape society. They believe that about half of Americans are actually oppressors, and that ordinary Americans in general have quite negative values that first need to be changed before it would even be a good idea for them to have the real power in a genuine democracy.
The Left consequently does not even try to build the kind of movement that it takes to make a genuinely equal and democratic society, and it actually helps (intentionally or not, it doesn't matter) the ruling class to divide-and-rule us.
I have written in my book, NO RICH AND NO POOR, and on my website (www.PDRBoston.org) about building a movement--an egalitarian revolutionary movement--that can win what most people want. Part of what is required is that we dump the Left. The Left includes politicians such as President Obama and other leaders of the Democratic Party, pundits such as Robert Reich, and virtually all of the Marxist organizations and individuals. (The links in the previous sentence are to my articles explaining what is wrong with these people.)
The Marxists demonstrated their (to be kind) worthlessness in the way they responded to one of the most divisive actions of the Left. In 2015 a couple dozen Leftists blocked mainly white suburban commuters on I-93 in Massachusetts to deliberately piss them off, all in the name of "anti-racism." The message was that white working class people are the enemy of the anti-racist movement, the beneficiaries of "white privilege." This is exactly the divide-and-rule message that the ruling class promotes, and has been promoting since the days of slavery. The leaders we need would have sharply denounced this action as a disgusting attack on working class people. Practically all ordinary people (except for hard core Leftists) understood it to be exactly that, and they were pissed.
Many Left writers and organizations (see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here for example), however, praised (either explicitly or by reporting it uncritically as an "anti-racist" action) the I-93 blockade action, and those that did not explicitly praise it refused to say it was a bad thing to do (see here and here and here for example). No Left writers or organizations that I am aware of have said it was a bad thing to do. The Left is perfectly fine with attacking white working class people in the name of black working class people. This is how the Left, wittingly or not, foments race war in the U.S.A.
The reason good people are losing the fight against the ruling class is because we are following leaders who are actually our foes.
The Ruling Class and the Left (Even the Bolsheviks!) Were Allied from the Beginning
The notion that the Marxist Left is working to end the inequality and fake democracy so loved by the capitalist ruling class has been wrong for a very long time. As an example of how long this notion has been wrong, here's an interesting fact reported in Antony Sutton's book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, published in 1974 (and online here), from which one excerpt about a William Boyce Thompson is given below. Thompson was at the very top of the American capitalist class when the Bolsheviks were in the process of taking power in Russia. Thompson was President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (the most important bank in the Federal Reserve system) from 1914 to 1919, the years about which Sutton writes. Thompson was a very wealthy mining magnate and he was prominent in the Republican party, as one can read about in the first linked article about him above. Here's what Sutton reports:
"Thompson's contribution to the Bolshevik cause was recorded in the contemporary American press. The Washington Post of February 2*, 1918, carried the following paragraphs:
GIVES BOLSHEVIKI A MILLION
W. B. Thompson, Red Cross Donor, Believes Party Misrepresented. New York, Feb. 2 (1918). William B. Thompson, who was in Petrograd from July until November last, has made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria. Mr. Thompson had an opportunity to study Russian conditions as head of the American Red Cross Mission, expenses of which also were largely defrayed by his personal contributions. He believes that the Bolsheviki constitute the greatest power against Pro-Germanism in Russia and that their propaganda has been undermining the militarist regimes of the General Empires.
Mr. Thompson deprecates American criticism of the Bolsheviki. He believes they have been misrepresented and has made the financial contribution to the cause in the belief that it will be money well spent for the future of Russia as well as for the Allied cause." [Kindle location 1412.]
Note that Thompson was in Petrograd before, during and after the Bolshevik October Revolution. Sutton documents that Thompson's support for the Bolsheviks was far from exceptional among his class of top level capitalists, and that these capitalists had backing from the Executive branch of the Federal government. [Read the book for all the gory details!] One explanation for this apparently paradoxical alliance of capitalists and Lenin's Bolsheviks is given by Sutton. He argues that these capitalists were monopolists who made their fortunes by using the U.S. government--the biggest monopoly of all, in their eyes--as an instrument for personal enrichment, and that they saw that the highly centralized government that the Bolsheviks were creating could be equally useful to them as a government that would force the people of Russia to pay very high prices for American products.
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* I confirmed that this article truly does exist by asking the reference person at Harvard University's Widener Library to check it; she found the article, but it was in the January 31, 1918 edition, not the February 2, 1918 edition. I'm not sure why Sutton gives the latter date; maybe there were more than one edition with the article in it. If you doubt the veracity of this article, please call the library and find out for yourself what they tell you.
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