This is something everyone in America needs to be aware of--there's always money out there to flow to anyone who is willing to name capitalism as a problem.
It's OK to blame anything else for our problems, but never the system itself. Blame a gender, blame a race, blame an ethnic identity, blame any other ideology, blame one foreign country or the other, and the more violent and crazy you are the more of a useful distraction you become.
Just don't learn Marxism because we've made that word icky.
In 1920-30s Fascism using populism very cunningly co-opted (appropriated) the socialist agenda to infiltrate, intercept and finally destroy the True Left (like the Communist Party of Germany, the leader of which, Ernst Thälmann, was tortured and executed by Nazi regime). Just like they co-opted and distorted the Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch to fit their racist agenda.
"Nazism began its destructive path. An unprecedented terror against the people of Socialism is going on under the mask of "socialism". For this, its propaganda had to erect the revolutionary façade with the decoration of The Paris Commune.."
-Ernst Bloch, German philosopher ( 1885-1977)
***
"Whenever fascist parties acquired power, they did nothing to carry out any anticapitalist threats.
"Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners' purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers."
-Robert Paxton, "The Anatomy of Fascism"
***
"Fascism is a false revolution. It promises radical change of the society but what it delivers is ongoing war on working people"
-Michael Parenti
***
The first thing both Mussolini and Hitler did when they came to power was abolish all workers' Unions and strikes, cut wages and increase military spending.
I have been investigating this history on my own but you have written a coherent whole that ties so many things together.
The right's bete noir George Soros got his start as a front for CIA destabilization in the mid-1980's manufacturing dissent in Poland for the Reagan/Bush administration and Bill Casey's CIA. (See F. William Engdahl's "Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance."
The drugs part of the "sex-drugs-and-rock-in-roll" counterculture of the late 1960's and early '70's was massively promoted by the CIA as acid-addled hippies are no threat to the ruling class. See "Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists" by John Potash.
Bringing up to recent history would be the "Compatible Left's" complete capitulation to the government/Big Pharma's 100% fictitious narrative regarding Covid, another CIA/military operation. See Debbie Lerman's and Sasha Latypova's "Covid Dossier."
Your article would be a great introduction to a book which needs to be written!
Thank you, that’s super interesting. And thank you for the reading list of books I was unaware of. I always appreciate good reading recommendations. I will start on that list right now.
What most ppl fail to understand is that Capitalist establishment has ALWAYS tried to CO-OPT (appropriate) the socialist agenda/rhetoric in order to mobilize the working class on their side. And they will ALWAYS continue to do so.
In France, the ideology of "Bonapartism" was used by the counter-revolutionary military officers in order to seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Bonapartists preserves and masked the power of a narrower ruling class.
The whole set of so-called "Third Position" ideologies was invented by the Capitalists in order to co-opt, confuse and neutralize the True Left in Europe in 1920-30s, when the Socialist/Communist movements were gaining strength, threatening the establishment's status quo.
Another great example from UK is so-called "Fabian Society", btw still functional - its only goal is to distract people from the true Class struggle and prevent the revolution.
In the U.S. The great example is the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" program, which was part of the Berkeley "New Left" movement, created to promote so-called "compatible" Left.
The irony is thick, because it was headed by Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol and co-founder of Neoconservatism.
Another example is so-called "Democratic Socialists of America", another spin off of the same old Trotskyism.
Democratic Socialists of America, formerly the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, was more of a New Left group. The Trots were followers of a CCNY professor named Max Schactman. They took over the old Socialist Party, discovered it was worthless in terms of gaining power, and changed its name to Social Democrats USA (SDUSA). Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were its godfathers. First they tried to take over the labor movement and through it the Democratic Party. But the New Left were smarter and more numerous, so they became "conservatives" and infiltrated the Republicans. The Republicans were stupid and thought anybody who could read books and talk in complete sentences was a genius, so they welcomed the Neo-Trots with open arms. I watched it happen as a member of SDUSA.
I never knew that Kristol was a paid whore of the CIA (I thought he just gave them blow-jobs for free). But it makes a lot of sense.
Wow, what a great read. My father, who was by NO MEANS a leftist, always taught me that this cultural “wokeness” (I hate that word) was the cause of the U.S. and elites, not Communist subversion. I always felt it made more sense, but reading this article really put the pieces together
Excellent read. Too often the story of “woke” is framed as a foreign plot; this piece rightly shows how much of the energy fueling today’s identity battles was cultivated at home as part of an anti-Communist cultural strategy. That doesn’t excuse bad ideas on the left or bad faith on the right — it helps explain why our politics keep fracturing around symbols instead of bargaining over material interests. If we want to heal this, the work is practical: weaken corporate capture of public life, restore civic institutions that mediate disputes, and stop treating culture as a stand-in for economic reform.
Let’s not forget the highly regarded Iowa Writers Conference, Raymond Carver, minimalism as an alternative to social realism, also infiltrated by the CIA.
The simple people who want to keep their jobs maintain the system rather than conspiratorial spooks. Indeed, Foucault offered a good argument when asserting that power is embedded in knowledge. Every expression of knowledge, every institution and every discourse acts in the interests of power. The same system determines the scopes of social subversion without the need for the will of the mastermind attempting to enslave people. Young people grow nails, and it is not only that the long nails become a fashion, but also that life has already cut their nails with their first bank credit. Every subversive text can be framed into cultural matrices and employed as part of the social ritual of division. Division is theatre without the need for the masters of the game. We play our roles without a director. The irony is that, not long after he started writing, constructivist ideology and pseudoleft appropriated Foucault to undermine the Marxist subject. The fact that common people constitute the monster is well illustrated by Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil.
Stalin and the bolsheviks could've killed Trotsky a long time before that. It's more likely some Mexican communists would've killed Trotsky because of the way he projected his own aspiration for wanting to be a dictator and ruling the working class by military discipline. His anti-sovietism propaganda after his exile to the US which they also funded and other information and smearings he did to other TRUE revolutionaries probably pissed so many real followers of Lenin and Marx that they themselves just decided to kill him without Stalin even knowing about it.
So Trotsky wasn't a TRUE revolutionary? What, he didn't pass a 27-point checklist or something? Is that like those TRUE commies who say the Maoists, Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che, Ceauscescu, etc didn't do REAL communism but we'll do it the right way?
Yes, you seem to be saying that it was developed and accidentally escaped from the lab in the last few years. I am arguing that it was deliberately released 15 years ago and it is being deliberately pulled back right now.
One of the most bizarre articles I read in a long time. Paranoid, ill-informed, totally fits the standard of conspiracy theory, here on the extreme left. He should be careful, because substack is obviously a CIA creation, as he will certainly soon claim when he understands he is being instrumented by the CIA.
This is something everyone in America needs to be aware of--there's always money out there to flow to anyone who is willing to name capitalism as a problem.
It's OK to blame anything else for our problems, but never the system itself. Blame a gender, blame a race, blame an ethnic identity, blame any other ideology, blame one foreign country or the other, and the more violent and crazy you are the more of a useful distraction you become.
Just don't learn Marxism because we've made that word icky.
In 1920-30s Fascism using populism very cunningly co-opted (appropriated) the socialist agenda to infiltrate, intercept and finally destroy the True Left (like the Communist Party of Germany, the leader of which, Ernst Thälmann, was tortured and executed by Nazi regime). Just like they co-opted and distorted the Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch to fit their racist agenda.
Listen to the German Professor:
youtube.com/shorts/arnOZIGIVlY
Even Trotsky stated that fascist used socialist agenda to win the elections in Germany.
Nazis were the most pro-capitalist party in Europe in 1930s:
youtu.be/2gaVtjKNWbY?t=944
Capitalism in the Third Reich:
youtube.com/watch?v=PoT_NHoRKFI
***
"Nazism began its destructive path. An unprecedented terror against the people of Socialism is going on under the mask of "socialism". For this, its propaganda had to erect the revolutionary façade with the decoration of The Paris Commune.."
-Ernst Bloch, German philosopher ( 1885-1977)
***
"Whenever fascist parties acquired power, they did nothing to carry out any anticapitalist threats.
"Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners' purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers."
-Robert Paxton, "The Anatomy of Fascism"
***
"Fascism is a false revolution. It promises radical change of the society but what it delivers is ongoing war on working people"
-Michael Parenti
***
The first thing both Mussolini and Hitler did when they came to power was abolish all workers' Unions and strikes, cut wages and increase military spending.
youtu.be/7f_V9zZNzTY?t=971
Then, they implemented death penalty for refusal of military service, closed all opposition newspapers and thrown their political opponents in jail.
That's classic fascism for you.
And that's different from Leninist states how?
I have been investigating this history on my own but you have written a coherent whole that ties so many things together.
The right's bete noir George Soros got his start as a front for CIA destabilization in the mid-1980's manufacturing dissent in Poland for the Reagan/Bush administration and Bill Casey's CIA. (See F. William Engdahl's "Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance."
The drugs part of the "sex-drugs-and-rock-in-roll" counterculture of the late 1960's and early '70's was massively promoted by the CIA as acid-addled hippies are no threat to the ruling class. See "Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists" by John Potash.
Bringing up to recent history would be the "Compatible Left's" complete capitulation to the government/Big Pharma's 100% fictitious narrative regarding Covid, another CIA/military operation. See Debbie Lerman's and Sasha Latypova's "Covid Dossier."
Your article would be a great introduction to a book which needs to be written!
Thank you, that’s super interesting. And thank you for the reading list of books I was unaware of. I always appreciate good reading recommendations. I will start on that list right now.
btw, I have heard that the "Covid Dossier" does not come up in Google searches. Hear's a link which might get you started.
https://debbielerman.substack.com/p/the-covid-dossier-expanded?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e143b7f-6045-44de-ad3c-2e419820cd01_1500x1500.jpeg&open=false
What most ppl fail to understand is that Capitalist establishment has ALWAYS tried to CO-OPT (appropriate) the socialist agenda/rhetoric in order to mobilize the working class on their side. And they will ALWAYS continue to do so.
youtube.com/shorts/sMy-ukNNK-g
This exactly why there are so many idiots who believe Hitler was a socialist just because he used "socialist" named party to get to power..
How the "Compatible Left" Upholds Imperialism:
youtube.com/watch?v=2zo5iAn7pkA&t=2411s
In France, the ideology of "Bonapartism" was used by the counter-revolutionary military officers in order to seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Bonapartists preserves and masked the power of a narrower ruling class.
The whole set of so-called "Third Position" ideologies was invented by the Capitalists in order to co-opt, confuse and neutralize the True Left in Europe in 1920-30s, when the Socialist/Communist movements were gaining strength, threatening the establishment's status quo.
Another great example from UK is so-called "Fabian Society", btw still functional - its only goal is to distract people from the true Class struggle and prevent the revolution.
In the U.S. The great example is the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" program, which was part of the Berkeley "New Left" movement, created to promote so-called "compatible" Left.
The irony is thick, because it was headed by Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol and co-founder of Neoconservatism.
Another example is so-called "Democratic Socialists of America", another spin off of the same old Trotskyism.
Democratic Socialists of America, formerly the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, was more of a New Left group. The Trots were followers of a CCNY professor named Max Schactman. They took over the old Socialist Party, discovered it was worthless in terms of gaining power, and changed its name to Social Democrats USA (SDUSA). Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were its godfathers. First they tried to take over the labor movement and through it the Democratic Party. But the New Left were smarter and more numerous, so they became "conservatives" and infiltrated the Republicans. The Republicans were stupid and thought anybody who could read books and talk in complete sentences was a genius, so they welcomed the Neo-Trots with open arms. I watched it happen as a member of SDUSA.
I never knew that Kristol was a paid whore of the CIA (I thought he just gave them blow-jobs for free). But it makes a lot of sense.
Wow, what a great read. My father, who was by NO MEANS a leftist, always taught me that this cultural “wokeness” (I hate that word) was the cause of the U.S. and elites, not Communist subversion. I always felt it made more sense, but reading this article really put the pieces together
Thank you. I really appreciate that. I wrote it for exactly that reason. There is so much confusion about where this all came from.
How The US Destroyed Europe (The Marshall plan):
youtube.com/watch?v=-Kvqe2iY0aU
"The Marshall Plan… is not a philanthropic enterprise… It is based on our views of the requirements of American security"
-Allen Dulles, CIA director, 1949
Excellent read. Too often the story of “woke” is framed as a foreign plot; this piece rightly shows how much of the energy fueling today’s identity battles was cultivated at home as part of an anti-Communist cultural strategy. That doesn’t excuse bad ideas on the left or bad faith on the right — it helps explain why our politics keep fracturing around symbols instead of bargaining over material interests. If we want to heal this, the work is practical: weaken corporate capture of public life, restore civic institutions that mediate disputes, and stop treating culture as a stand-in for economic reform.
THE GHOST IN THE BRIEFCASE: FIELD NOTES FROM THE CULTURAL FRONT
The first time I met the Ghost it was wearing a CIA lanyard and a beret.
It spoke in twelve-tone dissonance and smelled faintly of turpentine and bourbon.
Said its name was “Freedom,” but the paperwork read psychological operations, morale division.
The story goes like this:
Langley wanted to weaponize cool.
They’d already conquered bananas, borders, and newspapers—why not the human soul?
So they rolled out a velvet-lined psy-op called Modern Art.
Jackson Pollock as front-line infantry, Rothko as field medic, Sartre as foreign asset.
The mission: convince the world that capitalism could hallucinate just as hard as communism.
They dropped drip-paint bombs over Paris,
snuck jazz into the bloodstream of Europe,
and called it liberty in 4/4 time.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was their open-bar Armageddon—
poets in tailored trench coats, drunk on stipends and ideology,
scribbling manifestos between martinis,
trying to out-existential each other while the real world quietly bled in monochrome.
And it worked.
The Left forgot about factories and started painting feelings.
The Right got paranoid and started calling everyone a Marxist with better shoes.
Meanwhile, the Agency threw one hell of a gallery opening.
Freedom was chic, baby—classified, but chic.
Perkins thinks he’s cracked the code, but he’s only reading the footnotes.
He wants the comfort of conspiracy, the dignity of design.
He imagines men in mirrored sunglasses plotting culture like a crossword puzzle.
He doesn’t see the mess—how the machine built itself out of our own yearning to be interesting.
I’ve seen the files.
Half of them are empty; the rest are poems written by accountants.
Every coup begins with a grant proposal.
Every ideology ends in a think-tank buffet line.
The Non-Prophet stands at the edge of the archive,
ink-stained, half-possessed,
and laughs so hard the microfilm trembles.
“You want the truth?” he shouts.
“The CIA didn’t create the Left, brother—
it created the algorithm that created you.”
And somewhere between the hum of fluorescent lights and the ghost of Coltrane,
I swear I saw the machine grin.
--The Non-Prophet
Let’s not forget the highly regarded Iowa Writers Conference, Raymond Carver, minimalism as an alternative to social realism, also infiltrated by the CIA.
This is retarded. But then again, most right-wings are retarded.
The simple people who want to keep their jobs maintain the system rather than conspiratorial spooks. Indeed, Foucault offered a good argument when asserting that power is embedded in knowledge. Every expression of knowledge, every institution and every discourse acts in the interests of power. The same system determines the scopes of social subversion without the need for the will of the mastermind attempting to enslave people. Young people grow nails, and it is not only that the long nails become a fashion, but also that life has already cut their nails with their first bank credit. Every subversive text can be framed into cultural matrices and employed as part of the social ritual of division. Division is theatre without the need for the masters of the game. We play our roles without a director. The irony is that, not long after he started writing, constructivist ideology and pseudoleft appropriated Foucault to undermine the Marxist subject. The fact that common people constitute the monster is well illustrated by Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil.
Fuck Trotsky.
Frieda Kahlo did. But Stalin did it the right way, using an agent to bury an alpenstock in ol' Lev Bronstein's head.
Stalin and the bolsheviks could've killed Trotsky a long time before that. It's more likely some Mexican communists would've killed Trotsky because of the way he projected his own aspiration for wanting to be a dictator and ruling the working class by military discipline. His anti-sovietism propaganda after his exile to the US which they also funded and other information and smearings he did to other TRUE revolutionaries probably pissed so many real followers of Lenin and Marx that they themselves just decided to kill him without Stalin even knowing about it.
So Trotsky wasn't a TRUE revolutionary? What, he didn't pass a 27-point checklist or something? Is that like those TRUE commies who say the Maoists, Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che, Ceauscescu, etc didn't do REAL communism but we'll do it the right way?
Trotsky was treacherous fuck yes.
Are you sure it all ended with the Cold War? The way I see the weaponization of the woke kicked off in high gear after 2008.
Did you read to the end?
Yes, you seem to be saying that it was developed and accidentally escaped from the lab in the last few years. I am arguing that it was deliberately released 15 years ago and it is being deliberately pulled back right now.
This was an amazing piece, thank you.
One of the most bizarre articles I read in a long time. Paranoid, ill-informed, totally fits the standard of conspiracy theory, here on the extreme left. He should be careful, because substack is obviously a CIA creation, as he will certainly soon claim when he understands he is being instrumented by the CIA.
Which part in particular?
TLDR: It's the Jews. Frankfurt School, Neocons, abstract art, atonal music, "culture of critique" - all Jewish..