A few days ago I challenged the widespread thesis here that Western civilization was destroyed by neo-Marxism. It’s a widespread story, but that doesn’t make it true. Its proponents usually proceed by starting to tell the story in minute detail. The human mind focuses on those details and doesn’t ask essential questions like: Could this really have been the cause? Could the most powerful and successful civilization really have been destroyed by drugged-up students and eccentric intellectuals? If something so marginal could threaten it, then it would not be a powerful civilization. But then again, we’d have no explanation for that civilization’s success. And let’s make no mistake, West Germany or the France of the 1980s were, for all intents and purposes, the best the world has yet seen.
So what was the cause of the collapse of most industrial nation states and their replacement by the liberal system of multinational corporations?
I will unravel the mystery gradually, but today I will point out one single aspect. When the industrial nation-states emerged in Western Europe (and when a fairly similar model was being promoted in the US), their main rival was Stalinist socialism. Both the economic model and the political system were designed to be resistant to radical Marxism (hence the alliance between professional Bolshevik revolutionaries and the radicalised working class). No one thought to fortify the system against the attacks of the bankers. Yet it was the alliance of financial speculators, corporate managers and advocates of the minimal state that finally destroyed it. It wasn’t Maoist radicals who shut down the mines and factories. It was the bankers and conservative politicians.
I fear that the ability to resist this type of destruction is still not sufficient. The ability to notice attacks coming from this direction is lacking. After all, we can see this well in America, where the hot candidate for President is Kamala Harris, a puppet of the financial oligarchy, and Donald Trump’s campaign – instead of naming the situation clearly – calls her a communist! A complete inability to understand what is going on, let alone confront it.