Say hello to the “real left,” vehement critic of the “socialist radical left”

The ‘Real Left’ is a UK-born forum to critique ‘new normal’ societal changes from anarchist, feminist, Marxist, and socialist perspectives.

They say to stand for an informed, open debate and discussion about everything relevant to the Covid phenomenon and its related issues.

And they oppose all legislation that would weaken existing free speech rights.

The website ‘The Real Left‘ launched in January 2021 by republishing an article by Naomi Bridges: ‘The Feminist Case for Opposing Lockdown’.

In the past two years, they have published 160 articles and built a small community of 1,500 subscribers.

Read the ‘real left’ introduction text, which has almost nothing to do with the socialist radical Left under Lula, Biden, Trudeau, et al. and whose content surprised us.

“We came from many different backgrounds but had one thing in common,” they explain in their introductory post.

As socialists, anarchists, Marxists, feminists, left-wing activists, trade unionists, and allies who opposed the lockdowns carried out in the name of public health, our former comrades had vigorously exiled us.

With one or two exceptions, the Left fervently crusaded for the official narrative. UK Labour leader Kier Starmer’s constant refrain was: “I agree with the Government, but I would go further.”

The radical socialist Left religiously masked and from behind laptops, called for the brutal repression of working-class communities in the name of public health by launching the absurd zero-Covid movement.

We identified with the freedom movement: a pluralistic, organic, and largely working-class resistance that succeeded, blow by blow, arrest after arrest, in ending lockdowns around the world.

Now, almost two years after the remaining restrictions on public gatherings were dropped, we are changing the name of our socialist collective to ‘Real Left’.

This name change is as bold as it is overdue.

We will continue vigorously advocating for resistance to lockdowns, debate, and discussion where dissenting voices are heard in the public square.

But the faultline between our former comrades and us has widened to encompass more than lockdowns.

As evidence mounted that the Covid ‘vaccinations’ represent a public health disaster of criminal proportions, most of the Left fervently held to the ‘safe and effective’ narrative.

Now, on every issue where public debate is framed to the point of being censored (e.g., the impact of lockdowns on the developing world, the existence of immutable biological sex, the war in Ukraine, the ‘climate crisis’), the lockdown left also permits no dissent.

Unwittingly or intentionally (we suspect, in many cases, the latter), socialist left parties, trade unions, ecological activists, and left-wing intellectuals have mostly become no more than useful idiots to further the agenda of ‘progressive’ global capitalism.

Their ‘zero’ ideology, now couched as ‘the Science,’ e.g., eliminating Covid, carbon emissions, and the role of biological sex as the basis of social and legal policy – serves a clear function within the capitalist ideological system.

Like the puritanical ethical codes of broader woke culture, this dissociated and corporate formula-fed belief system exists to make the actual agenda of the global capitalist class seem reasonable.

In terms of the new leftist doublethink, a global regime of surveillance, controlled speech, and collapsed living standards pursued in the name of the permanence of the capitalist financial system is not only the least we can do, but it is also not enough.

Radical politics has sunk to Starmer’s shrill cry: “I agree with the government, but I would go further!”

In Marxist terms, we are talking of the difference between reformists, who call only for facilitating the capitalist system while accepting its premises, and revolutionists, who reject them.

In other words, this historical fracture on the Left is about more than lockdowns. But why the ‘Real Left’?

DOES LEFT OR RIGHT EVEN MATTER?

A common belief amongst the freedom movement is that a left-right political paradigm no longer has any useful descriptive power at the end of a two-plus year imposition of global shutdowns of businesses and public institutions.

Mask-wearing, forcing of dangerous and ineffective MRNA injections upon the masses – with full sanction and support in the UK & worldwide of the unions, purportedly left and left-leaning political parties and, media, and academia have discredited the left.

Some have even argued that the weakening of a labor movement capable of challenging the ideologies and goals of global capital had already been achieved mainly during the four-decade-long Western-led neoliberalism project, evidenced in the failed attempt to resurrect Labour as a party ‘for the many, not the few’ with Jeremy Corbyn’s election defeat in 2019.

There is indeed a compelling case to be made that a more relevant political divide of our time is authoritarianism versus sovereignty.

Or perhaps, trust vs. distrust in persons and institutions of power and the cultural and political narratives they offer.

So why carry over the ‘Left’ of ‘Left Lockdown Sceptics’ into our new name?

The standard driver of issues, including the unprecedented over-reach of state bio-power into our daily lives since 2020, the Russia-Ukraine war theatre, and the cost-of-living crisis, is the resuscitation of the failing capitalist super-structure into a novel and even more predatory and exploitative system in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This agenda, heavily publicized by the World Economic Forum, continues to be rolled out in 2023 and requires the commoditization of every aspect of human and natural life to create massive ‘social impact’ markets to feed the new data collection-based economic model.

The colonization of familial and community relationships and resources, including that of the minds and bodies of ourselves and our children (which are viewed as ‘assets’ to plug into an AI-mediated data cloud, preparing us for a future migration to largely virtual realities) must also generate ‘impact outcomes’ to be bet upon by hedge fund managers.

The end goal of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a surveillance planet where all living things, processes, and relationships are transformed into commodities, mines of data, in pursuit of the construction of an endless virtual reality empire, the activation of the singularity and a ‘post human’ future which precludes privacy, autonomy, agency and free will of its monetized-token chasing and enslaved dehumanized subjects.

If data can genuinely become the new oil, as Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google and Alphabet, has claimed, then the billionaire class aspires to have finally transcended the ‘moving contradiction’ of the capitalist mode of production by collapsing the distinction between laborer, consumer, and product.

We have little belief that this capitalist utopia of AI-mediated, commodified daily existence will come into being, especially in the short time frame predicted by the WEF.

But like the imperial ambitions of the long nineteenth century and the technocratic fascisms of twentieth-century globalization, this capitalist fever dream of endless digital accumulation will exact its price in every aspect of our lives.

Its new legal and social forcing mechanisms, a new global feudalism, are already asserting their strength.

The Marxist or class-focused analysis provides the theoretical tools to identify and conceptualize the nature of the underlying causes of the turbulent social, economic, and political conditions we continue to experience as neo-feudalist global governance closes in.

It provides us the best chance to struggle against it, as we cannot oppose or challenge what we do not understand is happening.

The evolving form of the unequal, exploitative, anti-human nature of imperialistic monopoly capitalism, evidenced comprehensively in the research of McDowell, represents a radical continuity (albeit in a dramatically technologically augmented form) to historical events such as the slave trade and the colonialist’ reservation model’, e.g., the displacement and containment of indigenous peoples away from their lands to allow for uninterrupted profit-driven exploitation of an ecosystem system deprived of its rightful stewards.

Far from being a relic of a bygone political-economic landscape, these critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy have never been more salient or necessary.

The concept of class hierarchy and war by the elites against the poor has been viscerally demonstrated over the last couple of years, which saw the world’s ten wealthiest men double their wealth by 2022 while hundreds of millions of people were plunged into poverty worldwide.

We hold that retaining consciousness of power and power relations under capitalism is an essential discernment aid for identifying where the best interests of the majority lie, regardless of how progressive, climate-friendly/’ sustainable’, ‘kind,’ ‘inclusive’ or ‘communitarian-minded’ the program in question is promoted to be.

AS MARX HIMSELF WOULD ASK: WHO BENEFITS?

In response to the (infrequently raised) charge of the potential ‘divisiveness’ of setting up our Great Reset resistance stall under a left-wing banner, it is worth pointing out that we have never focused energy on criticizing those factions of the UK pro-freedom movement who identify as being of the right or are politically active in right-wing politics.

Instead, we view the plurality of thought and diversity of composition as a strength of said political movement.

Simultaneously, we believe in the depth of the anti-capitalist analysis we offer to persuade of the necessity for bottom-up class struggle to create a radically better, fairer, and more accessible society for all community members.

STANDING UP FOR ‘THE REAL’

Given all this encroaching dystopic vision, we proffer a second meaning for the name ‘Real Left’.

A section of global society is becoming wise to the dangers of implantable technology and the substitution of in-person education, healthcare, and meaningful work with digital assistants, digital apps, and a digital gig economy.

We oppose bots in place of face-to-face human relationships and Meta’ quests’ in soul-nourishing time spent in nature.

We neo-luddites, unsuccessfully indoctrinated into woke digital serf capitalism, which we understand is based as concretely on the current state of knowledge and technology as a pre-Copernican astrolabe, and therefore is just as transient – are instead holding fast to a philosophy of fidelity to truth, to material reality, to the innate wisdom of the human body and the pursuit of human flourishing for the sake of human flourishing itself – outside of frameworks of profit accumulation for the few.

What do our voices sound like?

That is something we endeavor to develop and disseminate through our publishing platform—a place to write for those of the Left who still believe in the Real.

We hope this name change will inject renewed energy and enthusiasm into our mission when direction, focus, and momentum are much needed in the UK freedom movement.

We are currently facing the challenges of resisting the rollout of smart city infrastructure and programs, digitization of health services, education, workplaces, and national currency, and passing legislation through Westminster destroying protest, free speech, and data privacy rights.

There is much work to be done.