“What is to be done?”
Address to Workers League
Emanuel Pastreich
Independent Candidate for President
and
Co-Chairman of Green Liberty PAC
Sunday, September 1, 2024
It is an honor to address the Workers League today at this critical moment in American history, and in world history, a moment at which the Fukuyama fuzzy fantasy of an end of history and of a magic kingdom on Earth animated by endless growth and consumption has come crashing down after hitting a stone wall of economic disparity, ethical chaos, and social contradictions. More and more Americans must face the ghoulish trinity of accumulated capital, manufactured ideology, and brutal class warfare—it no longer matters how kind or how ethnically diverse the face of that new economic system make up of investment banks and corporate media may be.
The efforts of intellectual saboteurs, paid in blood money by the extremely rich, to launch campaigns blaming the current destruction of our economy and society on socialists, attributing the transgender psychological operation carried out by Homeland Security subcontractors to a mythical “radical left,” pinning the COVID 19 scam on the Chinese Communist Party, and attributing the corporate fascism in the Democratic Party to communism, has reached a peak.
If we thought that fascism would follow a different path this time, evolving in a manner it is not capable of, we have discovered that the planners at corporate consulting companies and private intelligence firm simply lack the imagination, or the skills, to do much more than mimic what was done in Germany and Italy one hundred years ago.
That means that we must talk seriously, scientifically, and in historical context about the true nature of politics, first among ourselves, but we must prepare also to move from the margins to the center stage of American politics. It is a form of class bias, common to the left and right, that working people are assumed to incapable of engaging in serious discussion about the economy and ideology. All citizens have been dumbed down by the commercial media and social media, whether illiterate or graduates of Harvard. We do not know which seeds will sprout from those who sow and thus we should pursue all opportunities to talk to all citizens. We should not assume, however, that those who come knocking at our door are all our friends.
We have a chance now. The chubby overfed paper tigers who frolic in the Congress are quickly losing control of the entire system and their corporate masters have grown sloppy.
The vacuum in American politics, at an ideological, and also a practical level, that was left by the death of the liberal class, can be filled by us, or filled by organized fascists. Traditional American politics has died and a new political order has yet to be established. As Gramsci put it, we are in “the age of monsters.”
I would not worry about our numbers. Numbers of supporters and opinion polls are made up in response to demands from corporations. We have the truth and science on our side—and truth and science are never democratic in nature. Numbers of people at the start do not mean much. As Margaret Meade wrote, “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of dedicated citizens to change the world. In fact, it is the only way it has ever been done.”
America, however, is still reeling from a series of betrayals that have left most educated citizens wandering in a fo, and most working Americans completely confused.
Working people are better able to identify the problems and confront them because they do not have 401K retirement accounts that demand that they accept the current fraud in order to keep living in their oversized houses.
Moreover, we must recognize that there has been a horrific betrayal by the intellectuals, a treason of the intellectuals as Julien Benda put it; intellectuals who have decided to side with the billionaires so as to advance their careers, to take vacations in Italy, and to appear in the media. I am talking about the professors, researchers, lawyers, doctors, government officials, and employees at non-profits who took the money to promote fantasies which benefit multinationals, and who refused to stand with the workers, let alone the poor, against the blatant efforts to promote bogus ideologies and a predatory, parasitic economy. Those dishonest intellectuals considered that increasing the number of women and minorities among the overpaid start up CEOs would somehow render them immune from charges of betrayal by the people.
But the harsh truth is that intellectuals have knowingly stamped the frauds of quantitative easing counterfeiting, COVID 19 military intelligence psychological warfare, 9.11secret governance and global war, nano and bio military operations at home, the administration of prisons by American and Israeli private contractors, and the “mass shooting” false flag operations of Homeland Security with the seal of their intellectual authority---an authority that was paid for with the blood taxes of working people.
Progressives refused to address the growth of class conflict, the concentration of capital, and the construction of an ideology that defends the interests of the rich, and promotes the lives of the glamorous and self-indulgent as a model for young children--while posing as defenders of an egalitarian meritocracy.
Those intellectuals are lost in the insidious hall of mirrors formed from identify politics, racial ideology, and Starbucks “think left; live right” hypocrisy. Their sense of justice has been infected with narcissism. As a result, they are afraid to admit that they were wrong; they ape the flaccid rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, saying that we need only to progressively reform this radical consumption society, to learn from Sweden and Finland (who have economies dependent on military weapons production), and that we must vote for Kamala Harris because we are in danger of losing democracy. But our economic system cannot be reformed progressively at this point, any more than slavery could be progressively ended state by state in the 1850s by the Whig Party. As for the democracy that Bernie Sanders fears may be lost in the next Trump term, it has been cold dead since the summer of 2000.
Even the best of what is left of the left, like the Socialist Equality Party, which produces some of the best analysis of economics, society, and international relations, and the most detailed reporting on labor issues, still embraces the COVID 19 and 9.11 frauds, still defends the concepts of growth as a cornerstone of the economy, and still refuses to investigate the elaborate staging of the January 6 “insurrection” and the July 13 “attempted assassination.” I personally find it to be a great tragedy that David North, a truly brilliant mind, heads the captured journal WSWS which must follow stringent directives on truth from Homeland Security.
I am grateful that we have candidates like Cornel West and Jill Stein who are able to talk about the slaughter in Gaza, the disease of imperialism, and the domination of our economy by multinational corporations. And yet they remain silent as the tomb about Israel as a hub for the fusion of private equity, private intelligence, and global IT all of which have joined hands to drive the COVID 19 operation, and now to push for world war.
The most recent, and most glamorous, betrayal of the people, was that of Robert Kennedy—a figure who stood front and center in the corporate media as an alternative.
In the midst of all the untruths, many felt that Robert Kennedy offered a way forward, an oasis in the desert, that he was the one who would march the other way as the lemmings rushed for the cliff.
But Robert Kennedy could not do what he promised to do. He could not be a truth teller, he could not be a leader, and he could take a stand.
His decision to back Donald Trump, a sad man who has degenerated from a marginal rebel to a work mule for global finance, was a betrayal. Now both are preparing to pump out a “Make America Great Again” campaign to deceive us as the nation is torn apart and sold off for scrap. The fact that the Democrats want to suppress Kennedy and Trump is not because Kennedy and Trump represent the people, but rather because they are backed by a different faction of billionaires—nothing more or less.
Of course, Kennedy and Trump sometimes tell truths that the Democrats cannot. But it is typical for a fascistic movement standing in opposition to a traditional corporate-financed political system to take a populist anti-globalist stance while all the while receiving money from the super-rich.
Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump was the political equivalent of the night of long knives, the 1934 purge of SA leadership in the Nazi Party. On that night, those who thought that the anti-globalist Nazi Party was open to progressive and leftist ideas, that there could be a marriage of left and right for a common good because of the party’s criticism of capitalism and its advocacy for guaranteed employment for workers, found out just how wrong they were. The progressives in the Nazi Party were murdered in cold blood by the right wing.
That is to say, that the decision of a large number of those fighting for the rule of law, for transparency, for justice on state crimes, and even against militarism, to accept Kennedy and Trump as their saviors, in spite of the obvious signs that these two politicians embrace a fascistic agenda, which we can see in what they say, and guess from the hundreds of millions they took from the billionaire Timothy Mellon, and other billionaires, that decision by the seekers of truth was a tragic mistake.
Kennedy’s avoided addressing real class issues, the domination of the means of production, distribution, finance, and education by a tiny minority, and he even a avoided a serious discussion of COVID-19. His book attributing this psychological operation run out of London, Washington, and Tel Aviv to a virus released from the Wuhan lab in China was laughable, at best.
Tragically, many important “truth” news sources and “truth” bloggers have accepted the Trump “attempted assassination” fairy tale at face value and they hold up the myth of Kennedy as a real alternative. Previously critical figures like Naomi Klein, whose book “Shock Doctrine” was so valuable, now think that being allowed to tell some truth about the COVID-19 scam justifies promoting the fascistic new populism created by Steve Bannon. Too many believe that this false populism will serve as a true alternative to the corporate tyranny of the Democratic Party.
I am reminded of the decision of the Social Democratic Party of Germany SPD to vote for war funding on August 4, 1914, over the objection of its membership, an act that made World War One possible. Kennedy’s intentional silence about Israel, as well as the efforts of the US, Germany and Great Britain to shift to a war economy in secret, is typical of the profound dishonesty of those who pretend to stand with us.
After all, Kennedy and Trump have kissed the ring of Elon Musk, the transhumanist who would destroy humanity using AI to degrade our brains; a certified psychopath who was a central player in the COVID 19 operation.
The citizen seeking truth finds that most of those who address the COVID 19 fraud and the 9.11 fraud also demand that citizens accept that there is no climate crisis, or biodiversity crisis, that we should blame the growing techno-totalitarianism on China, when it was developed at Stanford, and promoted by Israeli start-ups and DARPA, and that we should oppose all international institutions because they are the creations of globalists. That is no coincidence. All efforts to address state crimes are intentionally being linked to reactionary agendas by the private intelligence firms that manipulate public opinion.
We have returned to an age of revolutionary politics, whether we like it or not, and the choice we must make is between the revolution offered by the fascists, and the revolution of the socialists and the traditionalists. By “traditionalists” I mean true conservatives who promote a sustainable, self-sufficient, local community in the tradition of Tolstoy and Jesus. Those true conservatives we can work with. The false fascistic “conservatives” who suggest that corporations offer an alternative if their CEOs are nice people, those “conservatives” we cannot work with—except in the most limited sense.
If we do nothing, we are heading towards a revolution in which a tiny handful of the super-rich will take over all resources, and will reduce us to fragmented groups who fight each other in bogus color revolutions over issues that are made up for us by those with a higher security clearance. In that pre-programmed revolution, the fourth industrial revolution will be used so as to dumb down and destroy the population using smartphones and social media campaigns coordinated by supercomputers at Amazon and Google that slowly corral the entire population into the slaughter house, one algorithm at a time.
Another wind-up toy prepared for us by the billionaires is the libertarians. These political entities, whether politicians, public intellectuals, or research institutes, claim they are for the rights of the citizen and stand against the crimes of big government. They support legitimate causes, and they have at times given me a valuable platform. But their arguments are devious, and ultimately funded by the rich so as to lead potential revolutionaries astray.
First, libertarians assert that it is corrupt government, not classes, or multinational corporations, that are the source of the chaos and cruelty that we see today.
They suggest that it is bureaucrats, not billionaires, who create the problems, and that if billionaires do add to the problem, it is only Bill Gates or George Soros, men who are innately evil, who cause harm. They deny that being a billionaire in itself is a hostile and parasitic act, or that billionaires (or millionaires) are obligated by the economic principles that they embrace, to promote fascistic systems that permit capture of the means of production and of the determination of the value of money by the very few.
Libertarians propose that business unshackled can solve our problems whereas bureaucrats cannot. But this is a lie. Businesses, corporations, are the same as government, only worse. They are highly organized bureaucracies that pursue their own interests, serving stockholders, not the people, and they have no constitution or principles other than short-term profit.
Of course, the government needs to be regulated and downsized, but the power that stands in opposition to government must be organized citizens who are empowered to demand reform and revolution in society. As Frederick Douglass stated, “Power never concedes anything without a demand. It never did and it never will.” The misnamed “private sector” is a totalitarian part of the economy incapable of serving as a check on government because it is itself a form of government.
The false progressives like Bernie Sanders or AOL (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) offer us an intentional blindness to economic structures. They are opposed to wars, or at least some wars, because those wars are stupid, or unethical, or both.
But they are not willing to consider how our economic system, how the promotion of free trade, or of finance capitalism based on fake digital money, is related to those wars, or how the use of growth, consumption, and the stock market, as the ruler to measure the health of the economy feeds the drive for war.
Free trade allowed the rich to destroy the economic means of working people to respond to their predations by moving manufacturing overseas, to automate and digitalize the means of production so as to eliminate the potential for workers to oppose them, and promote a wave of immigration meant to undermine unions by providing cheap labor. Ultimately “free trade” (not free for anyone by multinational corporations) made the people dependent on a money economy because they could no longer produce their own food, or make their clothes, furniture, and other tools locally.
Moreover, free trade meant that the only well-paid manufacturing jobs left were all tied to military suppliers because most manufacturing that was not tied to the military was moved overseas. That last shift in manufacturing meant that progressives in congress have to back the military, whether they like it or not, in order to preserve jobs in their districts.
Moreover, the domination of finance capitalism, and the focus on the stock market in the newspapers, in academics, and in Congress, means that there is no consideration for the good of the nation long term, over 100 years, or 500 years, but only interest in short-term profits. And those profits are increasing cooked up through stock buybacks and derivative investments using fake money which have nothing to do with the real economy, but are rather a gold-plated form of thievery. In effect, a fraudulent GMO version of “economics” is accepted as the gospel by the vast majority of progressives with fatal consequences—they are often outflanked by the right wing which is allowed to discuss parts of the true nature of trade and finance, and the emergence of class warfare, granted that they fall back on simplistic Zionist conspiracies, Vatican and Masonic plots, and other traditional narratives that avoid the core issues in class struggle.
The result? Most everyone these days accepts the fiction that consumption and growth, and the industrial average of the stock market, are the appropriate metrics for assessing the state of the nation. That means that the United States, with its military-tilted economy, has no choice but to find ways to wage war. Progressives do so in a less visible manner—that is all. As Leon Trosky wrote, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Financial powers are drawn to war because nothing beats war for consumption of extremely expensive machinery and computers. Moreover, the budgets for defense and intelligence are classified and therefore off the record; this allows for the money laundering of hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which is used to pay off public intellectuals, bureaucrats, and CEOs who support the regime. That would not be possible on this scale, of course, without the rule by classified directives and nondisclosure agreements established by the Bush regime in 2001-2002.
Of course, we must not forget that the source of all these problems was not Nixon, Reagan, Bush or Trump, but rather the failure of the United States to return to a peace economy after the Second World War.
Central to the current strategy of the billionaires for creating political confusion, for reducing citizens to consumers in the pay-to-play political market, for creating a “politics” so divorced from reality and policy as leave citizens disgusted with the “political” without ever understanding the legerdemain to which they are subject, is the binary opposition of left and right, conservative and progressive, in all political discourse.
The terms “conservative” and “progressive” as they are used today are more about identity and feelings, not concrete policies, and there is no accurate discussion on either side of who owns what or who controls what under what pretenses. Rather we are subject to a heated debate on abortion, gun control, church and state, trans and gay ideology, and immigration that is deliberately framed by both sides so as to avoid any real understanding, or any solution. There is no solution presented because, unlike us, they are not interested in solutions.
Most citizens accept the left-right schemata promoted by the corrupt public intellectuals who are allowed to appear in the media.
At the core of this binary is an intentional flattening out of the nature of politics. The binary opposition flattens out the three-way political and ideological structures that we confront—and that act of flattening out a three-way structure into a binary serves as a source of power because it allows the rich to control how we perceive politics, and to manipulate the “left” and “right” in accepted discourse as they choose.
First, there are three kinds of politics: conservative, progressive, and revolutionary, not two. The United States started out with a revolution and the Declaration of Independence makes it clear that revolution is a critical political method in the nation as we saw in the Civil War, and elsewhere. The Declaration of Independence also makes it clear that citizens are entitled to overthrow a government when it becomes a tyranny. This central aspect of American political philosophy has been intentionally erased, and the Constitution placed in a gold coffin.
Instead, Americans are subject to homegrown domestic color revolutions, revolutions that are funded by corporations through Homeland Security, that offer us cardboard messiahs and prophets for profit like Bernie Sanders and Jeffery Sachs on the progressive side, or Donald Trump, Alex Jones, or Douglas MacGregor on the conservative side. Their phony revolutionary talk, although it includes plenty of facts, is primarily about feelings and perceptions, and does not touch on the actual means of production, the nature of money, the creation of ideology, or the concentration of wealth.
We must revive revolutionary political philosophy if we want to find a way forward.
Second, we need to recognize the three-way fight in American politics.
I am referring to Matthew Lyons article “Defending My Enemy’s Enemy” from August 2006 that describes the three-way fight in politics superbly.
Lyons writes,
“Instead of an essentially binary struggle between right and left, between the forces of oppression and the forces of liberation, three-way fight politics posits a more complex struggle centered on the global capitalist ruling class, the revolutionary left, and the revolutionary right. The latter encompasses various kinds of fascists and other far rightists who want to replace the dominance of global capital with a different kind of oppressive social order.”
The reality is that any one time, the globalists may team up with the anti-globalist left against the anti-globalist right, or the anti-globalist right may team up with the globalists against the anti-globalist left, or the anti-globalist left and right may team up against the globalists. The battle lines are constantly shifting and the system is inherently instable. The nature of this instable political dynamic must be addressed explicitly in politics if we want to get out of the current ideological quicksand and get back on firm ground.
Third, we must recognize one more triad: the three branches of government.
I am not talking about the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government that are described in the Constitution. That division of power has been rendered irrelevant by the mass privatization of government over the last thirty years.
No, I am talking about the actual three branches of governance: the politicians, the bankers, and the generals.
The politicians, not limited to elected officials, are those engaged in the political and the ideological project of giving meaning to policies that are implemented and bringing together disparate factions to reach necessary compromises to make budgets and spend money.
The bankers are those empowered to control economic relations and to create money and set its value. They have the power to determine the direction that the nation follows and to amass great wealth in the process.
The generals control the military, the branch of government that has access to officially sanctioned deadly force and that has a range of powerful weapons that can be used to intimidate and to compel at home and abroad.
In a stable political economic environment, the politicians rise to the top because they are able to negotiate between the bankers and the generals, and to offer compromises that address the needs of both. The United States has been run by politicians for a long time, granted that the other branches sometimes took direct action to defend their interests.
But when a system spins out of control, and the political economy is open for pillage, and when the citizens are ignorant (in part because of dumbed-down educational systems and smart phone algorithms) of what is being done, then the bankers rise to the top.
The bankers rise to the top because they are able to pay off the politicians and generals, and the public intellectuals, through means that are often hidden from use, and the culture thus produced is one in which everything has a price.
But when the republic reaches a state of radical institutional corruption, one in which all government agencies are but extensions of corporations, or are simply for sale to the highest bidder, then paralysis sets in and with it confusion. Government cannot be effectively run if everything is transactional because no one will be able to make difficult decisions, or give direction to the process.
At that point, as is happening right now in America, the generals start to take control of the system, and to push the bankers and politicians out (although not eliminating them). The generals can do so, and establish an effective, if invisible, military government, because in a crisis force trumps money in a broken system, and it trumps even the control of institutions of ideological authority, at least for the short term. As foolish as the generals may be, they can give orders that will be followed and thus can get things going.
Just look at the recent statements of politicians and bankers about the military and you can see its rising authority—and the emergence of a military government in camouflage.
Let us talk about what politics really means in America in 2024.
Real politics in America is worked out through contracts for surveillance between governments and multinational private contractors. Real politics is the negotiation of, and enforcement of, monopolies on production, shipping, logistics, distribution and retail sales held by the multinational corporations that control the effective economy in ways that can never be subject to a vote. Real politics is the battle between private banks and private equity to control of the determination of the value of currency, and its creation by the Federal Reserve. Real politics is the promotion of, and implementation of, war and domestic conflict by arms manufacturers, private intelligence firms, private security firms, political consulting firms, and the strategy teams of billionaires so as to create the uncertainty and instability in society that discourages resistance.
Real politics is about the control of food, water, and energy by a group of multinational firms that are owned by a smaller handful of trusts. Real politics can be found in the orders for administration given out to departments of the federal, state, and local government in the format of classified directives, secret law, and national security letters that dictate what must be done and that demand that the true power relationships cannot be made public. Real politics can be found in the domination of medical schools, hospitals, medical journals, and pharmaceutical corporations by a cluster of funds that are run by investment banks.
That is real politics in America and that real politics in America is covered by the journalists at all.
Baby fights between Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy, and others in the official political discourse, or statements by Tucker Carlson or John Mearsheimer in the approved alternative media, are not politics at all, but rather spectacle. These figures, who make up 95% of our public debate, will never touch on any of the fundamental aspects of politics in the United States and will fight forever over the scraps that the bankers and generals have approved of in advance. Sadly, previously courageous intellectuals like Chris Hedges have joined their ranks.
Politics is not practiced in the Congress or the White House, or in state legislatures at all—except in extremely narrowly defined issues like whether to build an overpass, or whether to require teachers to wear facemasks. The politicians are fed opinions and the drafts for laws by consultants who work for the bankers. The generals, although ignorant, have a bit more freedom of action because they have access to immense budgets which are not strictly regulated by the bankers.
Sadly, the analysis offered to citizens in this broken system focuses exclusively on the mythical “bad apples” with little concern for who owns what, and even less interest in the ideological structures that make this dystopia possible, or the control of information, food, and energy, and the means of production, by multinational institutions that effectively serve as the government.
It is assumed that citizens who grow their own food, care for their children and parents on their own, make their own furniture, and do not use energy or communications services offered by multinational corporations are not contributing to the economy.
“What is to be done?”
Let me turn to my title, borrowed from Lenin’s famous essay, “What is to be done?” You may have noticed that I have described the problems we face, rather than offering solutions for you for what is to be done. That is not an oversight, but intentional.
The title “What is to be done?” is not meant as a question to me that I will answer for you, but rather a question to you, to all of us, that demands an answer. I do not claim to be the best qualified to answer that question, and even if I could answer it, I think it would be a mistake to position myself as a messiah, or to create a cult of personality. If we cannot create a community, a team, and a movement, we cannot achieve anything.
I am not a political scientist, and I rely on various political texts, including those of Marx, Luxembourg, Bakunin, and Tolstoy, that I read thirty or more years ago, for my inspiration—not to mention much of the Asian traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism which I studied for three decades.
What I can say is that I have a better understanding of political philosophy than Trump, Harris, or Kennedy, and I am committed to implementing a new vision through a participatory movement, starting today, in a sense that West and Stein are not.
We need to create political movement in the United States, and around the world, that can stand in opposition to the alliance of the corporations with revolutionary rightist groups under the full control of the billionaire class. Relying on progressive Democrats who take money from different billionaires will not save us.
My book “How to Take Down the Billionaires” gives a few essential points concerning what must be done, but again, even if I get some points right, my words will not mean much unless we are discussing what what needs to be done as a group, making a short-term and long-term plan, and implementing it in the specific context of the United States in 2024.
The dark forces of the stone age, BlackRock and Black Stone, have thrown down the gauntlet; they have declared war on the citizens of the nation, and of the world. They have plans to round us up in concentration camps using armed robots and drones that will replace the more reticent policemen. The only reason they have not done so far is that the banks of supercomputers calculated those scenarios and told them that the risk is still too high, that not enough citizens have been reduced to two-dimensional thinking by social media and pornography.
Standing still is not an option for us because the move towards consolidated technofascism has already been charted out using supercomputers for the months and years ahead. We will be checkmated in any case if we play by the rules that are being set down for us.
We can only overwhelm these elites by transforming our culture and society, changing the very definition of who we are and how we relate to each other. That revolution within civilization itself is something their algorithms cannot stop. But that can only happen when we stop thinking about how to play better according to the rules of the game that we are given and we start instead to make up the rules of the game ourselves. That is the true revolution, and I suggest that it is where we must start.
We must promise to help each other for a lifetime, to share our assets, our resources, and our skills among our members, and to create a community that works in a transparent, accountable, and ethical manner among us first, and in society as a whole next.
That is to say that rather than screaming ourselves silly at plastic politicians who have no sense of the evils they do, it is more valuable to create within the Workers League a model system of government that will inspire us, and others, and that can be exported elsewhere in the United States, and around the world.
That is the strategy that Theda Skopal argues for in her book “Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.” Skopal explains that the real reason that Congress and the White House have become totalitarian is that we do not have any participatory or democratic institutions left in our daily lives, in our neighborhoods. If we establish democratic institutions in our neighborhood that bring citizens together to make policy amongst themselves, that set up organizations at the local level that are participatory, then such institutions, such a movement, will put pressure on the entire political system and slowly force the government to serve its role as a government.
But the NGOs and political organizations around us are not run democratically and they do not invite us to participate in their governance. They want us to send money, but have no use for our work or our ideas.
I hope that such a transformation in the Workers League can set off a chain reaction that will transform other NGOs and political parties, and that this chain reaction will spread throughout the United States, and around the world, showing that kindness, cooperation, and the truth, are by their nature bulletproof.
“What is to be done?”