The following passage, describing the failure of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, has a lot of relevance for our own movement:
Drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll are not the only lasting legacy of the New Left. In fact, they accomplished considerable gains in terms of civil rights, gay rights, abortion, and changing gender roles. But ultimately they did not fundamentally alter society. They just removed obstacles for a greater pool of people to compete for a diminishing number of good jobs.
Their social gains failed to fundamentally change society in the manner in which the Old Left and the Progressive Labor Party sought. In fact, all that the New Left accomplished was giving POC, woman, and gays the same social roles as white men but with special rights – a cultural Marxist confusion of egalitarian identity mixed with ‘minority privileges.’
The effects of their cultural revolution have been disastrous: increased illegitimacy, soaring divorce rates, single parent homes, a holocaust of abortions, children experimenting with drugs, sex, and even their genders, blacks and other POC growing ever more intolerant of their special privileged status and demanding more recognition and rights, gays parading naked down the streets in a disgusting display of ‘pride.’ The legacy offered a weird contradiction of egalitarianism and special rights, “some animals are more equal than others.”
The New Left succeeded in changing society for the worse socially by not altering its economic base – rampant economic inequality has soared as billionaire usurers and economic parasites funded and fueled New Left cultural changes, increasing the carnival and Dionysian pole of daily life.
“Choice" – consumer, sexual, gender and vocational – became the battle cry of their pyrrhic victories. Rather than win the war, the progressive Left fought a scorched earth policy that destroyed the very economic base of society’s wealth, as it celebrated its inclusion of blacks, women and gays in the parades of its own self-indulgence. More carnival floats, more transgression, more Foucault, more Marcuse, more perversion, more spectacle of equality, more female CEOs in pant suits, etc.
While the New Left was against the centralism and authoritarianism of the pre-war Left, we’ve seen that the state, though inefficient in controlling the market, grows exponentially with regard to surveillance and policing. Quite simply, the New Left FAILED, FAILED, FAILED!
The Alt-Right is the New Right. What sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll were to the New Left, memes, 14/88 and Larping are to the AltRight.
Milo Yiannopoulos, is the carnival clown that is co-opting the movement, making it kosher, libertarian, and irreverent. His shtick as – in his own words – a "race-mixing k*k* f*g," allows him to mock the system while changing nothing. We could add to Milo’s heterodoxy, Zionism and George W Bush supporting centrism.
Milo has described people attracted to the Alt-Right as part of a "young, mischievous, dissent" movement, and as people who like "naughty jokes, mischievous, subversion, deviance."
There is a fine tightrope walk between serious political engagement and organization – THE WEST IS FUCKING DYING, YOU STUPID C*NTS! And the ‘creeping carnivalism’ of Milo, LARPing, and The Daily Shoah!
What is the Aristotelian golden mean here? Is it to hit the latest thought piece at Counter-Currents.com and then tune into the Merchant Minute, creating a kind of insulated sub-culture in which the ‘let them eat blog’ of the former reinforces the ‘carnival laughter’ of the latter? Is it a rotating circle-jerk of Alt-List celebrity?
How do we keep from sliding down the rabbit hole of dissidence for the LOLs that Milo seems to think the whole enterprise is meant to achieve? How do we avoid the pitfalls of the New Left yet still be able to attract those fence-sitting, shallow, attention-deficient, synthetically stimulated Last Men reared on South Park and Opie and Anthony? Do we even want them? Are the carnival lights too engaging, and are those who embody the true Alt-Right just not entertaining enough to hold our attention? Does that attention dissipate into emptiness when it is expressed flippantly?
"Ironically, just when the New Left was experiencing an unprecedented wave of support, its leading organization, SDS, which claimed almost a hundred thousand members and a million supporters, was being torn asunder by internal contradictions. Chapter meetings throughout the country degenerated into ideological squabbles as the Progressive Labor party (PL), a disciplined Old Left cadre, made a power play and tried to take over the SDS. The PL people were cultural conservatives; they wore their hair short, dressed straight, mouthed Marxist dogma, and dismissed lifestyle as a peripheral concern that diverted attention from the true working-class struggle. On repeated occasions PL castigated SDS regulars for being ‘escapist’ and ‘objectively counterrevolutionary when they spoke in favor of turning on. (Quite a few SDS members would have agreed with Arthur Kleps when he said, ‘Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes.’) PL also criticized propaganda tactics like guerrilla theater and rock bands at rallies as ‘creeping carnivalism,’ and they even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot." (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain)
Drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll are not the only lasting legacy of the New Left. In fact, they accomplished considerable gains in terms of civil rights, gay rights, abortion, and changing gender roles. But ultimately they did not fundamentally alter society. They just removed obstacles for a greater pool of people to compete for a diminishing number of good jobs.
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| Bad memes. |
The effects of their cultural revolution have been disastrous: increased illegitimacy, soaring divorce rates, single parent homes, a holocaust of abortions, children experimenting with drugs, sex, and even their genders, blacks and other POC growing ever more intolerant of their special privileged status and demanding more recognition and rights, gays parading naked down the streets in a disgusting display of ‘pride.’ The legacy offered a weird contradiction of egalitarianism and special rights, “some animals are more equal than others.”
The New Left succeeded in changing society for the worse socially by not altering its economic base – rampant economic inequality has soared as billionaire usurers and economic parasites funded and fueled New Left cultural changes, increasing the carnival and Dionysian pole of daily life.
“Choice" – consumer, sexual, gender and vocational – became the battle cry of their pyrrhic victories. Rather than win the war, the progressive Left fought a scorched earth policy that destroyed the very economic base of society’s wealth, as it celebrated its inclusion of blacks, women and gays in the parades of its own self-indulgence. More carnival floats, more transgression, more Foucault, more Marcuse, more perversion, more spectacle of equality, more female CEOs in pant suits, etc.
While the New Left was against the centralism and authoritarianism of the pre-war Left, we’ve seen that the state, though inefficient in controlling the market, grows exponentially with regard to surveillance and policing. Quite simply, the New Left FAILED, FAILED, FAILED!
Milo Yiannopoulos, is the carnival clown that is co-opting the movement, making it kosher, libertarian, and irreverent. His shtick as – in his own words – a "race-mixing k*k* f*g," allows him to mock the system while changing nothing. We could add to Milo’s heterodoxy, Zionism and George W Bush supporting centrism.
Milo has described people attracted to the Alt-Right as part of a "young, mischievous, dissent" movement, and as people who like "naughty jokes, mischievous, subversion, deviance."
There is a fine tightrope walk between serious political engagement and organization – THE WEST IS FUCKING DYING, YOU STUPID C*NTS! And the ‘creeping carnivalism’ of Milo, LARPing, and The Daily Shoah!
What is the Aristotelian golden mean here? Is it to hit the latest thought piece at Counter-Currents.com and then tune into the Merchant Minute, creating a kind of insulated sub-culture in which the ‘let them eat blog’ of the former reinforces the ‘carnival laughter’ of the latter? Is it a rotating circle-jerk of Alt-List celebrity?
How do we keep from sliding down the rabbit hole of dissidence for the LOLs that Milo seems to think the whole enterprise is meant to achieve? How do we avoid the pitfalls of the New Left yet still be able to attract those fence-sitting, shallow, attention-deficient, synthetically stimulated Last Men reared on South Park and Opie and Anthony? Do we even want them? Are the carnival lights too engaging, and are those who embody the true Alt-Right just not entertaining enough to hold our attention? Does that attention dissipate into emptiness when it is expressed flippantly?
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