The New Prince: What does Charlottesville teach about America’s class consciousness?

The Romans never liked the dictum we constantly hear from the wise men of our day, that time will take care of things. — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

The aftermath of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, VA raises very important questions about class consciousness in the United States.

Following the Occupy Movement—a subsidy of the Open Society Foundation—and January Women’s March, also linked to over 50 Soros organisations, disturbing trend have revealed that American “class consciousness” is merely the work of billionaire reactionaries.

The 11-12 August rally featured two eclectic camps, whose interactions led to the catastrophe which killed 32 year-old Heather Hayer and two police officers.

The first camp, the alt-Right, was a loose confederation of social-chauvinists, including Charlottesville’s own Proud Boy James Kessler, the League of the South, and others protesting the impending removal of a venerated Robert E. Lee statue.

Alt-Right participants were an umbrella of “pro-Confederate, National Socialist, Republican, Libertarian, Neoreactionary and other post-egalitarian viewpoints”, one observer highlighted, which worked in favour of US intelligence agencies and organisations to brand these groups as racist, extremists, bigots, terrorists, ad nauseam.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre communicated beforehand that,

“Unite the Right” is expected to draw a broad spectrum of far-right extremist groups – from immigration foes to anti-Semitic bigots, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, Patriot and militia types, outlaw bikers, swastika-wearing neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members – all of whom seem emboldened by the Trump presidency.

However, these groups were emboldened by those within the Obama presidency as well, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange noticed.

“The new face of America is eerily familiar,” he tweeted, pointing out the rally’s striking resemblance to the Ukrainian Euromaidan colour revolution.

However, the other camp was a loose confederation of “antifascists”—Leftist reactionaries and enraged Hillary Clinton supporters—some whom employ subversive, agitational tactics.

Libcom explains,

At a regional and national level, [Antifascist Action] actions were mainly based around countering known – or intelligence-indicated – fascist mobilisations. […] These militant AFA mobilisations had the desired effect – the fascists were stopped.

Contrasting American media propaganda, the US Department of Homeland Security (surprisingly) blacklisted AntiFa as an extremist organisation just two months prior to the event.  It warned

“In the past year, Antifa groups have become active across the United States, employing a variety of methods to disrupt demonstrations” 

Most notably, a 7 April video reveals an AntiFa branch taunting—who else—George Soros, after he neglected to pay them for joining the “Fight for $15/ hr.” rally.

As US president Donald Trump struggles to placate both his critics and followers, America’s dilemmatic liberal democracy has turned into a teratoma of various malignant ideologies.

Consequently, one must criticise the underlying bourgeois character of American democracy in order to assess possible outcomes of the growing conflict.

What is American democracy?

American democracy is, in reality, liberal bourgeois democracy, which is oligarchy beneath a thin veneer of republicanism. All power in America is oligarchic and the democratic expression thereof is the product and responsibility of those that wield American capital against the majority.

This democracy is still subject to, according to Marxian philosophy, the base (material) and superstructure (idealism/ immaterial). Oligarchy controls the means of production (base) and influences the American people via bourgeois propaganda (the Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc.).

The groups in Charlottesville represent superstructural expressions of this bourgeois democracy, controlled by capitalists, whose manufactured protests lead to agitation, whipping America’s emotionalist, liberal public into consent (Annuit Cœptis).

Oligarchy benefits from this dialectic process by securing its power, allowing the superstructure to progress more amicably as oligarchy (base) centralises and concentrates capital via imperialism.

Additionally, it was established in a previous Duran article why oligarchy prefers liberal democracies, where Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin highlighted that,

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

This is entirely true. To accept American (capitalist) democracy, one must accept slavery as an indivisible aspect thereof.

American democracy is a synthesis of Athenian democracy, where one-third of all Greek residents were slaves, and capitalism, a political economy advantageous to bourgeois slave owners, designed to gradually extract the greatest amount of surplus value from human labour and concentrate it within the hands of the bourgeoisie—a natural consequence of capitalism.

Economic History clarifies the following,

[It] is fair to say […] that ancient Greece was a “slave dependent society” [that] were so essential to the economy; and they became so thoroughly embedded into the every day life and values of the society that without slavery, ancient Greek civilization could not have existed in the manner it did. In Classical Athens […] there were around 120,000 slaves [who] comprised over a third of the total population and outnumbered adult male citizens by three to one.

The BBC extrapolates from this:

The architects of the first democracies of the modern era, post-revolutionary France and the United States, claimed a line of descent from classical Greek demokratia – ‘government of the people by the people for the people’, as Abraham Lincoln put it. 

Capitalist proponent Adam Smith himself focused more on the economic disadvantages of slavery (slave vs. freeman productivity), but abjured on the matter of its continued existence.  He passively lamented that 

“Slavery therefore has been universal in the beginnings of society, and the love of dominion and authority over others will probably make it perpetual” 

As in ancient Greece, American slavery is chattel slavery, and has neither been abolished nor diminished in importance. The 13th amendment industrialises slavery by entrusting the judicial system, not the people, to regulate the influx of slaves into the prison system. It states that,

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The key word is “except”, and therefore, Americans must “accept” slavery in all its instituted forms as a necessary component. Both slave institutions will not disappear as a consequence of the Left or Right because, as long as there is liberal democracy, Americans will depend on them.

What is the primary source of conflict between the Left and Right?

It is uncertain why these two camps—the alt-Right and alt-Left—are enemies, and on the contrary, their only conflict is based on competing forms of subservience to slavery.

Charlottesville was not a battle between nationalists and antifascists, but a battle between superstructures within the pre-Industrialist and post-Industrialist epochs of slavery.

A previous Duran article highlighted Karl Marx’s comments on historical materialism,

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production [which] turn into their fetters.

This is precisely what is happening. To procure new modes of slavery, the American bourgeoisie use colour revolutions to facilitate transitions of power between rulers.

Niccoló Machiavelli explains in his masterpiece, The Prince (Ch. 5),

[If] the inhabitants are not dispersed or driven into quarrelling factions, they will never forget the former government or order of things, and will quickly revert to it at every opportunity […] in republics, there is more vitality, more hatred, and more desire for revenge. The memory of former freedom simply will not leave the people in peace.

However, these “quarrelling factions” belong to the same class stratum— the petit-bourgeoisie. Had America any shred of class consciousness in its virulent 241-year existence, these two camps could unite under a proletariat vanguard.

For instance, Karl Marx clearly states in his essay, “The American Civil War”,

[The] number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline.

He continues,

Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.

So, the “Right” are nothing more than instruments of American bourgeois power, middle-managing serfs, content with the crumbs falling from the tables of oligarchy, also susceptible to the pangs of economic volatility, of wage slavery, and the crises of capitalism when they unfold.

Yet, they claim that their “racial superiority” is a “fortunate” material condition; even more than the blessings of hollowed cheeks and protruding stomachs from “their” bourgeoisie!

Conversely, the “alt-Left”, despite labelling others as fascists, no one, absolutely no one encompasses the evils of modern imperialism better than they.

If there was any “alternative” to the Left, then surely history was rife with examples around 1933.

Even the most simple of Bolsheviks could point out the three grievous sins of the “alt-Left”—spontaneity, idealism, and a lack of class consciousness—but the most fundamental flaw in Leftist reasoning is a lack of understanding of the role and function of the State.

AntiFa class consciousness is best described as liberalism—rather than scientific socialism—endangering the worker’s movement by prioritising race (idealism) instead of class (material condition), and their spontaneous, leaderless platform is antithetical to socialist development.

Lenin exposed this clearly in “What is to Be Done”,

We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.

This is handicap of the AntiFa movement; adding a “kopek to a ruble” with trade-unionist tactics, or, as Americans would say, “trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents” ($15 in this case!).

The AntiFa’s maxim is to “keep the fascists out of the streets” (but not its own treasuries), but how does it equate racism with fascism? Debunking this Leftist fallacy lies in the role of the state.

In different forms of political economy, the state wields a dictatorship corresponding to its aim:

– Fascism = dictatorship of the corporation, withers away the public wealth, establishes the primacy of private industrial and finance capital

– Nazism = dictatorship of an ethnicity, withers away other ethnicities, establishes a dominant nation-state

– Communism: dictatorship of the proletariat, withers away class antagonisms and private wealth, establishes a classless workers’ society.

– Democracy = dictatorship of the majority, withers away Federal dictatorship, establishes an liberal bourgeois society

Additionally, the best evidence against the alt-Left is to, firstly, define it. The alt-Left, in its simplest terms, is nothing more than a betrayal of Socialism—fascism itself.

A Spectator article clarifies this,

Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist, founded Fascism in 1919 as an alternative revolutionary movement of the Left: The First World War had made him, and many other European Socialists, realise an essential truth: People are more loyal to their country than their class.

The article continues, citing Benito Mussolini himself in a 1932 interview with Emil Ludwig,

‘Naturally there is no such thing as a pure race, not even a Jewish one … Race: it is a sentiment, not a reality, it is 95% sentiment. I don’t believe that it is possible to prove biologically that a race is more or less pure …Anti-Semitism does not exist in Italy. The Jews have behaved well as citizens, and as soldiers, they have fought courageously.’

With this in mind, the question remains: what exactly is fascism to the AntiFa? Fascism focuses on private wealth and state control, in which race is an integrative rather than divisive tool. However, the alt-Left remains loyal to identities and abhors State control, and this error becomes to fascism and nationalist-socialism a blade used to carve the public into warring factions.

Hypocritically, the “Left” decries Trump and any odd racist as fascists, “except” (key word) industrial-scale corporatists in the previous Obama administration and others responsible for exterminating hundreds of thousands across the Middle East, Ukraine, and Venezuela, caused by refusing to reach any consensus based on the means of production, but to liberal idealism.

Had these primitivists studied scientific socialism instead of “anti-Capitalism”—whatever that means—they wouldn’t bludgeon other sections of the working class like Neanderthals for being comparatively as ignorant as themselves, and they could explain these concepts sufficiently to raise everyone’s class consciousness and unite these two factions of the American proletariat!

Lenin mentioned in Left-Wing Communism that,

The Communists’ proper tactics should consist in utilising these vacillations, not ignoring them; utilising [these] calls for concessions to elements that are turning towards the proletariat […] in addition to fighting those who turn towards the bourgeoisie […] This is a lengthy process, and the hasty “decision”—“No compromises, no manoeuvres”—can only prejudice the strengthening of the revolutionary proletariat’s influence and the enlargement of its forces.

However, he warns that,

Of course, to very young and inexperienced revolutionaries, as well as to petty-bourgeois revolutionaries of even very respectable age and great experience, it seems extremely “dangerous”, incomprehensible and wrong to “permit compromises”.

Potential Outcomes

Charlottesville was merely one example of a long history of failures in the American (and Western) Left. It was a meeting of counterrevolutionaries, under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, for the benefit of the centralising state authority and targeting embryonic forms of resistance.

One can understand that the alt-Right are reactionary, but the corporatist support thrown behind the alt-Left, mainly the AntiFa movement, only reinforces the depravity of the postmodern “Left”.

As a result, what is certain to happen is one of two options:

1. A long-overdue civil war that will benefit the bourgeoisie exponentially.
2. Continued in-fighting amongst proletarians that will benefit the bourgeoisie dialectically.

The Left and Right are wings of the same class stratum, and things may have been different had the AntiFa not liberally applied violence in Charlottesville. In his book, “War in Human Civilisation”, Azar Gat sums up the Left-Right dialectic brilliantly, in which the opposing camps will experience,

“a ‘Red Queen Effect’ […] without gaining the advantage over their rivals or making any gain—that is, they all lost in comparison with what they might have had in the absence of conflict.”