Gilles Questiaux
Feb 27, 2023
The sabotage of the North Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, where the direct role of Joe Biden and a small number of senior members of his administration has just been revealed by Seymour Hersh, seems to be the exception that confirms the rule, especially since these acts of sabotage had been announced and claimed transparently. Challenging the notion of "deep state" does not mean that the intelligence services of states do not plot. That's exactly what they are for. It is to challenge the existence of a global and omniscient - and efficient - conspiracy.
Can we define, identify, and locate the brain of capitalism? Can we locate its general staff, guess its plans, to thwart its strategy? Perhaps with the mad hope of precisely launching at it some hypersonic missile?
We already know that it has no heart! The Italian Red Brigades who wanted to "strike at its heart" in the 1970s had to realize that at their expense! By attacking a pillar of Christian democracy, Aldo Moro, and therefore of the Italian capitalist state, what they did also benefited the Israeli service Mossad, which sought to weaken the pro-Arab and pro-Khadafi faction in Italian power circles. In other words, they unintentionally did the bidding of another pillar of the imperialist West. Capitalism does have internal contradictions, should we remind people?
It is certain that even today, a lot of efforts are made and often useful efforts, to unmask ad hominem international leaders, responsible for the anti-popular and imperialist policies that are being conducted in the West. Of course, it is tempting to try figuring out where the so coherent text of Western propaganda comes from, such as the one is expressed throughout the most varied of channels, like the one presently imposed on us all regarding the Ukrainian war.
So, can we thwart the plots of the wicked hedgehogs oppressing humanity? Can we slay the dragon?
These are very dangerous questions, because the wicked and the dragon if they exist, it must be by some necessity, and it is this dialectical consideration of reality that will make that these are not the questions posed by Marx, or Lenin (whose action was so great that the ideological heirs of Tsarism in Russia continue to take it for the dragon incarnate!).
The revolutionary theory of the proletariat is a theory of the bourgeoisie’s unconscious as a class. Its antagonist, liberalism, is also a theory of the unconscious, but of the bourgeois as an individual. Where liberalism tends to rely on the existence of immutable structures, of a second nature in the real to which it refers, namely the action of the market, the proletarian revolutionary wants the masses to access the awareness of what they can do and what they want to do.
In the meantime, not only does the capitalist not consciously plot against workers but he is almost sincerely convinced to act (above the market once the profits collected) for their good.
Bourgeois dictatorship is the dictatorship of a class, and in principle it is not that of individuals. It is therefore illusory to find in an individual or a group of restricted individuals the intelligent and evil principle of class action, even if some mythomaniac regularly offer themselves in the media to take on this role. Except in the particular case of fascism, a system consciously and rationally determined to destroy the USSR and the communist parties of the Third International (1919-1943), and which is the first historically dated and consciously perverse response to the Russian Revolution - hence the anachronism of the current so-called "antifa" trend that thrives in countries where fascism is absent.
That police repression be always directed in the same direction and that the same people always suffer from it is not fascism, it is bourgeois liberalism properly applied in a class society: economic, political, or moral liberalism cannot work for the benefit of all players, without cheating somewhere, and human rights have never been more than the rights of the bourgeoisie. We should only talk about fascism when the left wing of the bourgeoisie is repressed.
So, there isn’t strictly speaking such a thing as a deep state, hidden from opinion, that pulls the strings of capitalism, or if there is one, it is in the manner of the stolen letter, which is so well hidden because it is precisely visible to all, and of such triviality that everyone shrugs their shoulders when denounced. When, for example, the alienation of journalists is revealed to media owners.
The deep state is not a specific concept, but rather an image taken from an "anti-totalitarian" propagandist repertoire that dates back to Georges Orwell.
The very notion of a deep state, i.e., a state hidden from the layman, is also an oxymoron: the State is precisely the public power visible to all, which is powerful precisely because it is visible to all, it is the publicization of the general interest such as it is driven by the ruling classes, which are certainly blind to their own class determinations, but which nevertheless remains considerable effective precisely because it publicizes the collective consciousness and the intentions of society. If the State is secret, it then loses most of this power that appears almost magical. Indeed, this power allows the avoidance of the use of force to obtain consent and obedience from the masses and makes it possible for exploited individuals to give in to it. It is thanks to the magic of the state that shows itself to all as it is in its majesty that minorities can dominate the majority and that parasites can dominate producers.
Yet there are secret networks, conspiracies, and conflicts of interest; there are powerful networks of influence. We can't deny it. One of the most powerful is formed by the American neo-conservatives (the "neocons") who want the skin of Julian Assange (but it is no longer very secret at the moment).
But these networks that influence states and in particular the most powerful of them are not states themselves and even less a global state. On the one hand, these networks do not have an exact understanding of the world they are trying to lead, they are convinced, for example, that the working class and class struggle do not exist, nor do the” Western Empire,” which they are still trying to defend. And on the other hand, their objectives often remain focused on fetishized fixations, characterized most often by religious or ethnic cliques, or sometimes sexual networks, and that may range from mass in Latin, to the defense of Israel or the worldwide dissemination of "gay pride". They are composed of a double layer made up of naive and emancipated individuals, those naive who spread ideology and beat symbolic drums and those emancipated who engage in private business by taking advantage of secret territories they have laboriously developed and who are certainly not ready to take any serious risks.
Wanting to prove that all these cliques, or those one particularly hates, come together in some global plot is a waste of time and energy. The burden of proof resting in the hands of those wanting to unmask the plot, these activists who pursue this chimera end up devoting themselves entirely to it and slipping into marginality.
But in sights for all to see, everyone finds themselves basking in the unanimity of all sorts of cults, beliefs, and lifestyles in the fight against socialism, which is indeed intentionally organized in the ecumenical think tank networks promoted by multinationals, by the media and major Western universities; in short: in ideological anti-communism. And since these are practical networks, which do not understand theory but grasp practice very well and what it yields in term of personal advantage; they know very well that their only enemy is actual socialism, namely when socialism acquires influence in the masses. And this determined and very well-equipped ideological collusion dates back more than a century in history, to the visceral reaction of the bourgeoisies around the world against the October Revolution.
Ultimately, the only plan of capitalism is to do everything it can to thwart the objective forces that historically lead it to its own demise, to transform - and to preserve itself - in its opposite, socialism. Hence, the hatred of socialism commonly and significantly erroneously called "anticommunism" is the only collective spirit of capitalism. And that is an opportunity, because it has allowed the market, in this era of neoliberalism, to privatize and deregulate everything everywhere for the direct benefit of those who practice these privatizations and deregulations.
This is why we will see converge and merge into the same hateful crowd at the time action, Nazis, Takfirists, Zionists, Liberals, Conservative, communitarians of all kinds, Social Democrats, libertarians, white supremacists, anarchists, and leftists. We will witness this hatred that needs to personalize the enemy, become ever more crystallized against the figure of Stalin than against Marx or even Lenin, who remain tirelessly the subjects of attempts at cooptation by reducing them to harmless milestones in academic cultural history (three-quarters of “Marxist” intellectual who have careers working only on this).
Understanding that this ideological circus acquires coherence and concerted action only in the concrete and practical perspective of a close transition to socialism does not exempt, on the contrary, from working to dissociate it into its opposing factions, following the strategy of favoring the weakest part in each antagonistic crisis when they begin to tear each other apart. In this case now, we must obviously support Russia and its Orthodox popes against NATO and its post-modern Nazis (because only naive people can see it as a Russian war against Ukraine and not the reality of a NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
As the Korean War was a war of the United States against Korea, then China, in Korea.