Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults, Part III

So long as the workers are kept up in arms against each other over cultural non-issues like Marvel Comics turning the Spidermans gay, they can't organize together to fight their end of the class war. Meanwhile, the rich wage a pitiless, relentless class war against the rest of society, which has disarmed and demobilized itself against it in order to establish the merits of casting a black Ariel the Mermaid for all time.

There are significant differences between petties. As defenders of the capitalist order, they are motivated by payment first and foremost. The best-paid petties (cops, military officers, televangelists, famous professors, Bono) are the most loyal to the bougies. Poorly-paid petties (enlisted military, artists, writers, musicians, adjunct professors) are less loyal, and occasionally outright traitorous to the bougies. The petties as a class thus have the biggest potential for fascism, but also the biggest potential for class treason against the capitalist order.

It also stands to point out in all fairness that this propensity for class treason in the lesser-paid parts of the petty bourgeoisie is responsible for this book. As an author and an academic, as an aging military brat, my class interests are petty, yet I teach the dissolution of my own class interests. It is because I am of the part of the petty bourgeoisie that loses the great capitalist competition that I am susceptible to class treason; it is because capitalism cannot help but eventually create millions of such people that the possibility for socialist revolution is created.

Why did I lose that competition, you may wonder? If I'm a self-admitted loser, why listen to me? I'm too autistic to understand when to lie in certain social situations, and too high-functioning for this disability to be obvious to anyone who hasn't lived with it for decades like I have. Indeed, I was already older than 30 before it finally dawned on me. But my loss is society's gain. As an incredibly high-functioning autistic person, I'm excellent at analyzing whatever I set my mind to. And I can also detect others like me, the way that gay people are said to have a certain "gaydar" to suss out other gay people. So my highly-specific analytical skills born of my schizoid autism are something I've noticed I share in common with two other middle class people who failed at capitalism: Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Marx was an autistic shitposter after my own heart, and Lenin could tirelessly refute the pretensions and bullshit of the Mensheviks and Economists at length like only a true autist ever could. There is much more to say about this at length, but for now suffice it to say that autistic disabilities provide the most secure material basis for middle class treason.

It was not for nothing that I went on tangents about false consciousness while discussing the chief classes of capitalist society. The founts of false consciousness have differed in different eras; once it was priesthoods and oracles and popes, now it is journalists and pundits and televangelists. But though the methods of creating false consciousness have changed, the basic purpose and process is the same: propagandizing the proles with the values of the bougies, so that they cannot even think anti-bougie thoughts, so that they accept the bougie outlook as "just the way things are." The most successful politics is the one that does not even have to rear its head in public to get its way, and this is what money can buy.

It is rare for class consciousness to emanate from the pulpit, whose religionists are either pacified by comforting bourgeois lies themselves, or faithfully sworn to defer to others in a hierarchy that are. Religions are usually founded by people who do preach class consciousness, and then grow rapidly as the workers hear truth and believe it, and then gradually get co-opted by petty elements in the years afterwards. (This is also why there are so many back-to-the-beginning movements in many faiths; this is a proto-socialist yearning among people who cannot openly advocate socialism, from Anabaptists to Salafists.)

The quasi-socialist roots of most religions do attract many future socialist leaders, however. Both Stalin and Sankara were trained as priests before taking different sorts of vows of poverty. But it is also noteworthy that neither of them stayed within a religious framework for long. Like any social institution, the Christian churches have been a site of class struggle. This struggle occurred in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, when control of these institutions mattered a great deal more politically. But the reformers lost these struggles when the reformers were proles; the reformers were only strong enough to win when they ditched the proles for the bougies and thus was the Protestant Reformation born. Despite its socialist roots, Christianity as an institution has had two thousand years to be domesticated by the bougies. Whatever your own religious practice or non-practice, reforming society for the benefit of the proles inside the established churches' institutional structure is as much of a fool's game as doing it inside the Democrat Party, and for the same reasons. Hence the attraction of Stalin and Sankara to religion, but also hence their ultimate pursuit of the good of the proles through explicitly socialist organizations.

It is rare for class consciousness to emanate from the liberal media; truly daring reporting is and always was vanishingly uncommon because it tends to disrupt the economic interests of advertisers, and the collective economic power of the owner and their friends can usually squelch the career of any particularly nosy journalist. But such outbursts of unseemly conscience are rare too; journalists learn quickly that their economic interests lie in not making waves, and they either learn this fact or cease to be professional journalists in short order.

Continue reading with Part IV