As the British diplomat, historian, and scholar E.H. Carr argued, either religion or socialism are the two basic options confronting us in order to overcome the “crisis of modernity” which has gotten worse over the course of the last few decades. The indications of this crisis having gotten worse over the last few decades is manifest from both a psychic and statistical standpoint. These two options before us essentially challenge the status quo and are transformative in nature, not only from an economic standpoint, but also from a social standpoint, in the sense that these two alternatives to the status quo also challenge the social forces such as fascism, neo-Nazism, pseudoscience, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, male patriarchy, and sexism which shape the basic identity of what is essentially the state within the state here in America.
But despite all its flaws, the ‘deep state’ in America has one particular advantage over the public, in the sense that the ‘deep state’ does indeed wield the ‘brainpower’ that enables it to anticipate or intuit what certain individuals and groups of interest will do and say next. And that is essentially what deep reading and deep thinking is all about, namely, to anticipate and to intuit certain things. As Henry Kissinger wrote, wielding “deep literacy” and the ability to read and think deeply enables “engaging with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning.” Thus, there are certain individuals and groups who know a person better than a person knows himself or herself.
I mentioned the discreditation and delegitimization of our ‘class-based order’ as one of the main sources of the ‘crisis of modernity’ in the previous blog post, and in turn this discreditation and delegitimization stems from the imposition of this order through ‘force and fraud.’ But as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noted a long time ago in their “Communist Manifesto,” the discreditation and delegitimization of the class-based order – and thus the crisis of our day and age – not only has a moral and social dimension, but it also has an economic and political dimension which affects the elite class as well:
“The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”
Marx and Engels added:
“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.”
Hence, the current crisis has two dimensions. For one, there is the creation of the crisis by the elite class, and second, there is the backlash of this crisis towards the elite class. And as Noam Chomsky noted, what is essentially meant by “neoliberalism” is the importation from the Third World and into the Western world but especially into the United States and England of a “two-tiered society” with “extreme wealth and privilege” on one hand and “huge misery and despair” amongst the overwhelming majority of people on the other hand. And as mentioned before, the creation of a two-tiered society in the United States with extreme wealth and privilege on one hand and huge misery and despair on the other hand is not necessarily based on economics. Rather, the creation of such a society in the United States is based primarily on a type of control and domination which is now beginning to recede.
Adam A. Azim 