Conspiracy as proletarian truth
A reading of Marx's 'The German Ideology'
The West suffers from one thing most acutely: complete propaganda blackout. The misinformation in the West is so thick that any hope for any “awakening” of any kind is beyond the pale. The West can only be annihilated.
Lies begotten breed more lies. We are so far ahead historically in terms of ingesting Western lies that to regurgitate one lie risks the complete decimation of an entire Western conceptual world picture. Do you see what I mean? You must cling to the lies if, for your entire life and existence on this planet, your worldview has always been lies. You could take the lies back, say, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. All you need to do is watch seven seconds of the Zapruder film to know that gargantuan lies are afoot and maintained to this very day.
How far back do you go? Even Marx said that the disciplinary fragmentation of institutional philosophy has more to do with the division of labor and nothing at all to do with any sort of fundamental reorganization of knowledge in service of truth. I don’t mean within institutionalized philosophy though this too is a problem; indeed, you can spend your entire professional existence as a “philosopher” at a university without knowing anything about what your colleague down the hall is working on! The same intraspecific fragmentation holds for any professionalized discipline at the university.
But the fragmenting off of disciplines itself occurred under the auspices not of enlightenment thinking, but the realities of division of labor concomitant with the rise of the market. Nowhere is it written that philosophical truth arises only after philosophy is given sacred and unmediated space as a discipline responsible only to itself at a professional institution like a university. This founding condition for “truth” and the “pursuit of knowledge” is pressed upon philosophy (or any discipline) by material reality, not idealistic necessity.
The West’s first “professional” philosopher (who operated under the parameters of tenure at a University) was Kant. Kant’s transcendentalism was an effect of the capitalist division of labor itself and is thus hardly equipped to acknowledge, let alone isolate, the cause of this division. To do so would invalidate not only his own position in terms of social standing as a philosopher but also any pretense of his thinking as truth itself (which it wasn't/isn't). Meaning the material social conditions around his thoughts created his thoughts. Kant is not some philosophical God whose thinking transcends the very division of labor at the university in which his thinking thrives. His thoughts do nothing to change, let alone recognize, these conditions.
Note this bit from Marx on the division between town and country and ask yourself why universities of any repute are always located in towns (i.e. urban cities) and never in the countryside. Is it simply accident that all so-called true and objective knowledge emanates from the city exclusively?
The field (water, etc.) can be regarded as a natural instrument of production. In the first case, that of the natural instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, property (landed property) appears as direct natural domination, in the second, as domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital.[i]
Landed property entails working the land at the behest of nature. You cannot move a river. You must produce wherever the river is. The wealth gained comes at the expense of, or the collective domination of man over, nature. Capitalist property, however, entails the domination of man over man. Wealth is no longer, or not simply, that harvested off the land but that extracted from the labor of others via a third party: money.
In the first case, average, human common sense is adequate-physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity; in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must already be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third party: money.[ii]
Serfs in the Middle Ages who left the countryside to work in the city did so in exchange for money. Money translates not simply into the goods required to pay one’s tithe. Enough money accumulated gives one the ability to buy out the landlord himself, which no single harvest has the ability to do as crops are finite. Goods produced by working the land are subject to depreciation and rot; money as universal equivalent, on the other had, has no time-stamp, can be traded for anything, and can be accumulated to no end.
However, serfs flocking to the city to escape feudal bondage were likely subsumed under new oppressions at the behest of corporate guilds or a new type of organized production: merchant-manufacture. Where traditional production depended on producing goods for immediate local use, manufacture entailed not only the mobility of labor, but the mobility of production itself. Raw materials taken from the countryside could conceivably be manufactured in any city and then sold elsewhere. The class war began as “urban” merchant-manufacturers took on a “rural” landed aristocracy.
Over the course of centuries, the productive forces uprooting people from the countryside created space in the mind to equate freedom with mobility. Money as savior granted the serf the revolutionary possibility of uprooting himself from oppressive feudal obligations in the country for the chance of dominating the labor of others as a merchant in the city.
The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day. The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general.
Here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation.[iii]
The myth of this sacred, deracinating force exists today. Pursing one’s dreams never entails going to the countryside. Any clichéd story of humble beginnings to fabulous wealth always tips in the other direction. One must leave the country to find fame and fortune and never vice versa. (Scholars never visit Walden pond themselves and only validate Emerson in the city.) Moreover, Marx intimately sketches out the historical necessity for all the state apparatuses we take for granted today, which he goes on to associate with society’s superstructure (administration, taxes, municipalities, and politics).
History begins as distinct administrative units – looking to expand their ability to control and dominate the labor of others via the money form – begin to tell the story of their own rise and consolidation of power. In essence, this is a story of liberation but only of a specific class. Nations themselves are born of no other reason. A nation is the logical administrative extension of an agglomeration of cities (i.e. towns), and cities exist only to concentrate the instruments of capital in select locales that act as strongholds from which a rising merchant class can wage class war—and then by accumulating more raw materials, labor, and money in order one day to buyout and vanquish their principal class enemy: landed wealth.
This is exactly America’s revolutionary story in a nutshell. Its reactionary constitution is only reactionary in hindsight. In its present moment, America’s constitution came into being to protect the “radical” revolutionary rights of a newly founded nation of merchant capitalists that made a clean and unprecedented historical break from the English aristocracy. Moving forward, however, America necessarily becomes a citadel of class power. Therefore, no human progress is possible without first destroying America. Nor can its constitution be stripped of its surrounding historical contingencies to redeem its revolutionary potential; rather, America’s constitution guarantees it will be a reactionary force forever.
And while Marx does not mention “universities” in his list of urban appurtenances, he does state that the separation of mental and physical labor is entirely contingent on the division of town and country! What I mean to emphasize is that just as freedom is equated with mobility by virtue of material productive forces, so too is “truth” equated with intellectual deracination. One must leave the countryside in order to discover eternal truth and never vice versa.
“Truth” is often thought to transcend all the other limiting discourses human beings normally engage in. Truth, for example, is higher than “dirty politics.” Philosophy hived off institutionally at a university (or disinterested academic study overall hived off from the corrupting influence of social necessity or contingency) is a product of the same productive forces that creates town and country.
No wonder students have always been, in all ages and all times, required to go to the university to study the great works. When has it ever occurred to anyone that in order to find truth, a professor must leave the university and actually engage with the material realities on the ground, not only in the center but at the periphery as well? Why not send so-called “professors” to the countryside as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution?
The reason such a thought has never seriously occupied the minds of any philosopher is because institutionalized academic philosophy can never abandon this single material contingency of class privilege without extinguishing itself as a whole. This is the sole reason the entire collective intelligentsia, in China and elsewhere, must remember the CR as nothing other than an unmitigated disaster.
Yet the division of labor invalidates what professional philosophy believes it is in the business of uncovering—capital-T Truth. So you see how the proliferation of “objective” academic scholarship is itself a ruse. You have from the beginning been getting class-based truth that has convinced itself of its universality. Do you see how deep runs the fake news proclivity in the hearts and minds of Westerners? It isn't simply fake news; it's fake scholarship too.
At the very least, the West must continually pat-itself-on-the-back as being on the right road to truth (i.e. “the right side of history”), however temporarily misguided. The work of scholarship is to continue forward along this road thereby making “scholarly gains” and ever more scholarly contributions to existing world knowledge. Marx exposed how this entire road is itself paved with the blood and sweat of exploited labor.
I don't mean that Kant himself is being exploited per se or that he as a professor is directly exploiting others. I mean that the prior organization of labor into fragmented segments in society analogously creates scholarly “experts” in the university, philosophical or otherwise, who specialize in the most minute and insignificant research topics all the while believing they are somehow adding to the world's store of useful knowledge.
Marx exposed that scholarship does not free the laborer from the plantation. In the mean, it ties him more resolutely to the chain gang. If Kant and the coolie are equal bits of exploited labor, it becomes very easy to see what will happen over time. The Kants of the world, in order not to see themselves as coolies, will forever deny the class organization of their very profession while reaping the benefits of surplus wealth generated by the world's coolies.
Philosophers will always believe that the work they do is expressing the world's general will and not that of a class superstructure that creates the very conditions in which professional philosophy thrives. They may see the historical contingencies and limitations constraining the work of other philosophers but never their own.
The entire institutional-philosophical edifice of the West is organized to assert and preserve its own class superiority. Universities are citadels designed to forward class interests first and foremost but which brand themselves as havens of higher learning in pursuit of objective scholarly knowledge that benefits all. Such branding is carried out not to fool the people but to fool the professors themselves.
Professors are thus free to believe that their access to the truth qualifies their class position when the reverse is true. Their class position mediates what they believe and expound as universally true. Hence they must at all costs believe that the work they do is ultimately tied to some process of universal discovery. Yet we all know that the vast majority of scholarly work is useless.
Have you yourself gone to university? Have you acquired a piece of paper for adding another trifling nugget to the world’s store of such useless information? Do you really believe your research project or dissertation, vetted by an expert committee of both internal and external adjudicators, has really added anything of value to the world, either economically or socially? Have you ever used your research findings to perform any good in the world?
Even the most highly regarded within the academic profession are not required to spread their own message among the masses. They produce for the sake of circulating information through pre-existing thoroughfare not of their own making. But it is the thoroughfare itself that keeps class positions intact regardless of how radical the message. Marshall McLuhan put this in a crude but effective way when he suggested that the medium is the message.
The professional means of communication at an academic’s disposal (publishing articles in prestigious journals or publishing books with prestigious presses) are already designed to circumvent the people entirely. This position of circumvention is justified by the so-called sanctity of objective scholarship. Academics are constrained to operate within communicative channels in which their message is ultimately curtailed; they cannot hope to change the medium because changing the medium is a political (and not an academic) project.
Moreover, if someone like Jordan Peterson actually tries to get his message across via more “popular” channels (like social media outlets including podcasts, and trade publications), he is immediately met with class scorn from the elites within his chosen profession. Not because he is dumbing down academic research but because he is doing something that most academics will never do. He is crossing class boundaries.
However, “popular” means of communication are also constrained. Class hierarchies operate in a more venal way under the auspices of consumer culture. The need for celebrity (I really mean standing and recognition, which is only tangentially tied to commercial gain) means that one will rarely speak out or beyond those who own the means of communication. Therefore, one’s message has not reached, and can never reach, the people directly, to circulate of its own accord organically. It must conform to pre-set standards that are imposed on the people by a giant media superstructure and reinforced at the ground level via hired bots, trolls, and charlatans.
You can say anything you like in Western so-called “free societies.” But if you want your words to circulate, you must first please, then appease, the petty class charlatans and gods of the information superstructure. The people on the ground have no say in the matter. They themselves cannot run with any cause they like and are effectively muzzled. Michael Parenti puts it best: “It’s not that you can say what you like, its that they like what you say.”
However sincere and brave Jordan Peterson is for taking on the class snobbery of the profession, his existence in a world of popular discourse is equally mediated by class forces. Like Kant, Peterson is unable to recognize these forces and can only dismiss them cad-like by appealing to some mysterious force known as “cultural Marxism”—which is basically well-financed interests and lobby groups playing both sides. It is news to Peterson that the same ones who put him on the air are the same ones funding his detractors. This is how class war is waged and how to keep the people fighting endlessly over the message; in this way, the medium remains invisible. All the while Peterson, like Kant, can never see, let alone admit, that he himself is a cad, that he himself is being taken for a ride.
In short, “cultural Marxism,” has nothing to do with actual Marxism and is indicative of a class war being fought not at the behest of Marxists, but capitalists. So-called “cultural Marxism” and identity politics are class weapons used by elites as a means of divide and conquer. Squabbling over identity and gender rights is precisely the message that keeps the medium hidden. Supporting BLM means being unable to see, and not even bothering to ask, who is funding BLM.
Any true Communist can easily rebut that the sorts of mass brainwashing campaigns (i.e. wokeism) we see today in populations of the Western imperial core (unprecedented in human history) could only be the result of a capitalist society founded on the primary historical contingency of the division of labor.
Moreover, the founding condition for the proliferation of “science” and “knowledge” in the West has never been an incorruptible adherence to some newly discovered “scientific method.” It is, and has always been, based on harnessing class power in the name of domination.
“Nature reveals laws that are hierarchical. Domination is built into the very fabric of nature!”
What the above type of admonition reveals is the same sort of Lloyd Blankfein rationale attesting to the truth of domination not because nature first reveals domination to be true but because those in pursuit of so-called truth were never in search of truth to begin with but domination. It makes sense that they would begin to assert, upon discovery, that they had no choice in the matter. The universe made them do it because power and domination are true! This is to put idealistic cart before material horse. The material and manmade creation of hierarchy and domination leads to such poisoned and narcissistic spiritualism and not the other way around.
Fessing up to the material reality that the division of labor makes thought rather than vice versa is not simply heretic, but chimeric; the academic philosopher takes up his post in earnest believing that he can, through sheer power of intellect, will his way to truth, or yield truth from the void. He cannot understand that the truth he yields is contingent on the class forces surrounding him. His insights strike him as true, objective, scientific, rational, and universal. He cannot see how his thought must by necessity bend towards propping up a division of labor in which mental labor comes first. This revelation, of the truth of mentation, is conveniently “revealed” to the philosopher and works by necessity to maintain existing power relations of men over other men. Hierarchies seem built into the very fabric of universe; obviously, the ones who benefit most from their own position in the established hierarchy begin to see in nature “proof” of hierarchical evolution everywhere.
“What about science? Science is true!”
Let me give you a very easy historical example of how the science we pursue is based on class interest. The example is not difficult to follow. You simply have to use common sense and ask yourself honesty what you would do.
We have seen in less than a generation how Bill Gates, once the richest man on the planet, has seamlessly metamorphosed into a public health expert despite no medical training and being himself a college dropout. And since public health, “vaccines,” and things of this nature are “based on science,” don't you find it somewhat incredible that a man by virtue of enormous wealth alone has managed to become a scientist? Do you think whatever science he practices has no class basis?
Again, the narrative is very simple. To do effective class analysis, you don't need to dig deep into academic Marxist scholarship designed ultimately to fool and confuse you. You simply need to think like an animal: I have wealth. What is the best way to protect it?
Once you possess billions and billions of dollars, you don't suddenly wake up one day and start thinking about how to save humanity. Haha! The only thing you start thinking about is, how do I keep as much of what I have forever? How do I prevent the government from taking taxes from me? How do I use the money I have to make more money?
This is not complicated. Any one of us would do the same. I would do the same. If you sold your house and made a killing just by timing the real estate market, what would you do? You wouldn’t use your sudden windfall to “create jobs,” or “invest in your community.” Hah! You would try to time the market again to make more money by continuing to do no work. Do you see how the market actually rewards speculation and parasitic economic activity? Other people are building the houses and paying the rents; but somehow, you are making windfalls!
As these windfalls begin to accumulate, you too would meet with a tax advisor to come up with a way to pay less tax, move your money offshore, and design schemes to collect more passive income. Of course you would do this. This isn’t a matter of individual conscience or choice. Under the current incentive structure we have built and solidified via super-structural courts and legislation, anyone would do this, including me (and I am a diehard Communist).
Your ability to accumulate thus has nothing to do with virtues cultivated from within but the “coercive laws of competition” impressed upon you from without. Yet you continue to believe that your fortune is yours, that you earned it. These are all class lies that are somewhat biological in nature. That is, the first law of nature is self-preservation. And every class and even every individual class member’s thoughts will naturally (yes, even somewhat biologically) shift toward preservation.
The only thoughts that preserve one’s identity are those that deny class because to assert the truth of class immediately reveals the contingency of one’s thoughts and removes one’s actions from the sacred space of “individuality” and “free choice.” In short, one’s identity as a free individual exercising free choice and rationality is obliterated; one is forced to acknowledge an Other, even Others, and face a type of vulnerability because one’s identity now spills over onto, and is tied up intimately with, those Others in some manner of social relation (the idea of one’s responsibility to that Other now arises, but this is another discussion altogether).
A capitalist may outmaneuver another and thus convince himself of his “god-given” ability to do so. Thus he “earns” the capital he swindles by exercising greater conscious and rational thought. Moreover, he immediately grants his ability to exercise this sort of domination over others a type of spiritual currency. This is what Lloyd Blankfein means when he says he is doing god’s work. Having the ability to short an entire nation’s long term asset portfolio simply because one recognizes (where perhaps no one else does) the possibility of doing so is taken to be one’s higher spiritual calling.
The same capitalist refuses to see, however, that this “god-given” ability is bred of specific human contingencies and are not spiritual at all. Religion is not opiate for the masses merely. Religious fervor can lull an exploitative capitalist into believing that the “coercive laws of competition” he himself operates under are a) somehow the manifestation of his own divine will acting in accordance with god’s will and b) thus themselves holy. “God created hierarchies,” so the capitalist reasoning goes, “and I am merely exercising my god-given rights within god’s hierarchical make up.”
The easiest way for billionaires to avoid paying taxes is to set up a charitable foundation. Money donated to charities or NGOs are tax-deductible. Now, if you are really clever, you would establish and fund a charity that is actually a company in the business of buying patents. When you own these patents, you cash in on the “philanthropic” discoveries your “charity” has so graciously produced for the benefit of the world. Do you see what I'm getting at?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not a charity at all. It is a company that does vaccine research in order to create patents. They directly fund universities and research programs all over the world. If these universities want access to these funds, they need to do the “science and research” that suits not any public health agenda but the investment agenda and prerogative of Bill Gates. Any science and research hereafter unconcealed is contingent on the material reality of domination. It reflects not the true or general will of the universe or what have you but the material reality of science carried out in service of accumulation.
Science is never neutral but based on an observable sense of human purposiveness; under different material conditions, science would most certainly disclose different conclusions, or, I should say, build upon different scholarly and institutional consensuses. It is only on the basis of these tenuous consensuses that so-called objective science “progresses” at all.
When Bill Gates began what is essentially a giant scheme of tax avoidance, he found he already had a predecessor: Nelson Rockefeller. How far back do you take this “conspiracy” indeed? But it’s not a conspiracy to assume that Nelson Rockefeller himself was just another capitalist looking to protect his wealth and make it grow for him. He is behaving how any smart businessman would behave. Don't you want to be a smart businessman too?
In the early 20th century, the Rockefeller foundation began funding “germ” based medical research overturning an alternative scientific consensus coalescing around “miasma” based research. The latter says that the vast majority of human health problems can be solved via sanitation and the treatment of symptoms alone. Germ theory, on the other hand, says that whenever a health crisis breaks out, there is likely an evil, molecular culprit (a “virus”) that science has the duty to discover, isolate, and cure! Germs are everywhere and out to get you!
You can imagine why Rockefeller would fund “germ” science. It's much more lucrative. A killer germ calls for a patentable miracle cure. The cure can be bought, sold, and traded, like any other commodity on the open market. The promotion of handwashing and sanitation is not a money-making endeavor. Simple prescriptive acts to improve public health does not capture the imagination of “humanitarian” and “philanthropic” capitalists. You could say both germ theory and miasma theory are equally scientific. But you could also say, to paraphrase Marx, that between equal “sciences,” force (or profits) decides.
"But germs are real! They really exist!"
I'm not exactly saying germs are fake. I'm saying there is a class-based reason why science and scientific research coalesces around one theory and not another. Germs, in a way, did not simply emerge from the void. Focusing more on improving public health via ordinary social mobilization and practical health measures is something you are far more likely to find in socialist/Communist countries. All you get in capitalist countries that have fetishized technology is a miracle science that has “discovered” a new germ and an equally slick propaganda campaign that markets the latest-and-best that science has to offer in terms of a new poison to inject into your body as cure, i.e. a tradeable commodity. Bill Gates fully concedes that a position in pharmaceuticals is clearly one of the best investments he's ever made. Isn't that convenient?
Nowadays, taking a vaccine is far sexier than simply handwashing. And it reaffirms to an already brainwashed global middle-class their own technological superiority over all other backward people and places of the world. These global middle-class hordes must buy into the propaganda not to preserve their own bodies but to sustain an unvanquishable perception of their own class superiority and class-standing. This can never change. They can never one day wake up and “realize” what's going on; as I mentioned, lies foretold beget even greater lies (to sustain the ones previously believed and ultimately one's entire (erroneous) worldview).
This explains also the rabid middle-class hatred of anyone who refuses the vaccine. Why should a vaccinated person care at all whether someone else takes the vaccine or doesn't? It’s his funeral; and if he coughs on you, what do you care? You are vaccinated after all. But to refuse the vaccine threatens the middle-class identity to its very core. Imagine! Taking a poisonous vaccine as a type of class marker. But this could be the best way to exterminate the middle-class. Let them exterminate themselves. They are too proud not to inject themselves with poison.
I'll close with an excellent quotation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an amazing and inspirational public defender whose book, The Real Anthony Fauci (2021), is the finest example of common-sense class-analysis of the 21st century. The book is an exhaustive but very reader-friendly account of where we stand in terms of class warfare at present. Again, you need not spend countless hours poring through theoretical works by either Marx or Althusser to see what is made apparent here:
From 1900, when one-third of all deaths were linked to infectious diseases (e.g., pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea and enteritis), through 1950, infectious disease mortality decreased dramatically (except for the 1918 Spanish flu), leveling off in the 1950s to what we see today, about 5 percent of all US deaths.
Annual deaths from communicable disease dropped in the 1980s to around 50 per hundred thousand population, from 800 per hundred thousand in 1900. By the twentieth century, more people were dying of old age and heart attacks than from contagious illnesses. At NIAID [National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases] and at its sister agency, CDC [Center for Disease Control], the bug hunters were sliding into irrelevance. NIAID’s heyday was a distant memory; it had served at the forefront of the war against deadly pestilence. NIH had mobilized scientists to track the epidemics of cholera, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the 1918 Spanish flu contagion that infected and killed millions globally.
Today CDC and NIAID promote the popular orthodoxy: that intrepid public health regulators, armed with innovative vaccines, played the key role in abolishing mortalities from these contagious illnesses. Both science and history dismiss this self-serving mythology as baseless. As it turns out, the pills, potions, powders, surgeries, and syringes of modern medicine played only a minor role in the historic abolition of infectious disease mortalities.
An exhaustive 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, concluded, “Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in [infectious disease] mortality seen in the first half of the [20th] century . . . nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children.
Similarly, a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent. Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public. (Emphasis added 256-57)
Notice how the CDC cannot even mobilize to propagate the findings of its own study! If its own commissioned study suggests that its own work has made it obsolete, that should, in a public health sense, be cause for celebration. But what do you anticipate the CDC to do with this knowledge? Naturally it must be suppressed. Not suppressed as though buried; the knowledge is still freely available. I mean suppressed by virtue of simple psychological denial, in open-secret, as if by everyone voluntarily. Doing so allows the productive forces of society to recapture the narrative thereby allowing a fake history of science, vaccination, and progress to continue unfolding even when it has, in certain respects, come to an end.
Coupled with the largesse of friendly capitalists working behind the scenes and “philanthropically,” this state of collective psychological denial becomes rampant. “Truth” thus serves profits, not people, and a vast propaganda infrastructure is born and proliferates organically via the profit motive. This is how mass delusion operates in an “open” society.
Does that sound like a capitalist conspiracy to you? Maybe. But it's also business as usual, which means that under capitalism, conspiracies are afoot at all times; conspiracies are themselves business as usual.
A conspiracy means a group of people acting together to promote their collective interests in secret. Is it so difficult to believe that a class of capitalists are routinely working round the clock to devise plans to accrue more wealth for themselves and less for you? Are you really so afraid of being branded a conspiracy theorist? But you already know this is how the world works! You know conspiracies are true!
But if you relent and take conspiracies at face value, you are decimating any class standing you may have earned in your society, whether in terms of your chosen education or profession. You have not revealed yourself as someone intellectually incompetent per se, but as someone who simply wears the wrong outfit at a cocktail party. The moniker of “conspiracy theory” is a class moniker—meaning these ideas are “too far below” my class standing for me to entertain.
Most people continue to speak a certain way about President Kennedy, Oklahoma, 9/11, COVID-19, Election 2020, or vaccines not because evidence convinces them one way or the other, but because their class position skews their understanding of what evidence and truth are.
For a middle-class rewarded with minor gains and token recognition within a class hierarchy, the truth necessarily emanates from those who control the productive forces of society. Those who buy into these fake narratives do not themselves choose to cheer on these forces; they hardly know these forces exist at all. Instead, they too believe they earned their identity by wresting their thoughts from the void via their own individual choice and willed acts of transcendence, as much as Kant or any other short-sighted academic scholar.
All of them believe, that is, in the sacredness of their own uprootedness; they believe they have abandoned the collective myths of the countryside and progressed into being modern individual class elites who are inherently rational simply because they have chosen to be; how could they not be on the right side of history? Only lowly class detractors are reactionary and caught within self-reinforcing echo chambers on “alternative” Internet sites. Class contempt creates the moniker “conspiracy theorist” (Comrades, by the way, ought to embrace this moniker, which is the argument of this essay). Mass collective delusion and class denial are thus propagated as academically sound, objective, rational, and true.
And yet if you believe, as I do, that the truth lies outside of or beyond the class propaganda emanating from the genteel institutions of respectable scholarship and journalism, then there is simply no other place you can go. Your quest for truth must begin there.
[i]. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), 68.
[ii]. Ibid.
[iii]. Ibid, 68-69.