Yes. I know. I was in the middle of writing about land reform but I have to get this off my chest before I can continue. And, like everything else on here, it is related.
The Strange Case of Michael Moriarty
In 1994, Dick Wolf dismissed Michael Moriarty from his lead role as Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, just four seasons into the original Law & Order TV series. This was not a consequence of the personnel reset NBC had forced on Wolf the previous season but the result of Moriarty’s increasing drunkenness, paranoia, domestic violence and other erratic behaviour. Moriarty had also begun to confuse certain aspects of his personality with that of his alter ego, Stone. And on the basis of this had developed an elaborate conspiracy theory of a vendetta between himself and Bill Clinton’s Attorney-General, Janet Reno. And in 1996, he settled in suburban Vancouver and became a hassle for bar owners, local cops and TV producers here.
Moriarty arrived in Vancouver in the middle of the unite-the-right movement in which the Reform Party (the beta test version of the Tea Party) and the Progressive Conservative Party were trying to merge back into the same party. For right-wingers, this task grew more urgent in 1997, when the combined vote of Reform and the Tories actually exceeded that of the Liberal Party, which won almost double the seats of its two conservative rivals combined.
Following the 1997 humiliation, Canadian conservatives made a series of bold moves to knit their coalition back together into a single party. New conferences like Civitas, new institutions, new think tanks, all sorts of things rolled out.
One of these things was the National Post. Today’s Post is a little different than the original, which was created in the image of its founder, Conrad Black, the eccentric conservative publishing magnate, polymath and white-collar criminal. Black’s original post featured individuals who had drifted too far right to be printed in Canada’s Conservative paper of record since 1844, the Globe and Mail. Contributors included Ezra Levant (now of Rebel Media), Terrence Corcoran (a Globe columnist who had become convinced of a conspiracy theory that the Sierra Club was trying to exterminate all human life) and Michael Moriarty. Curiously, by 2000, the Post had cut ties with Moriarty, scrubbed his writing from their web site and successfully convinced Salon to run a piece falsely implying that he had never written for them.
The now-pitted Op/Ed Moriarty wrote was, nominally, an endorsement of Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day for leader of the Canadian Alliance, a post Day did ultimately win. And Moriarty’s was one of the first public endorsements he received. But most of the piece was way more interesting and seemed as unhinged as the press was claiming Moriarty was. Now, I am not saying that Moriarty was sane or that what he wrote was sane but I will say what McMurphy says to Chief Bromden in their first conversation in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“I’ve been talkin’ crazy, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, Chief, you been talkin’ crazy.”
“I couldn’t say it all. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief. I just said you been talkin’ crazy.”
The Afterlife of the USSR
Moriarty was deeply disturbed by the Third Way movement, which he saw, in contradistinction to everyone else except those of us on the far left, as much more dangerous and subversive than traditional social democratic parties had been. Following a summit of Jean Chretien, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton which the three explicitly identified as “Third Way,” Moriarty argued that the USSR had only pretended to fall in 1991, that it had actually become the Third Way movement, under whose aegis a global dictatorship would be inaugurated in the early twenty-first century.
Given that we had all witnessed the USSR fall and were, daily, being treated to images of its endless looting and humiliation at the hands of the hand of capital, its last leader now the Pizza Hut mascot, Moriarty’s claims seemed just like everything else about him in the late 90s: batshit insane.
Now I am going to try to explain how Moriarty was not wrong—about the Third Way, that is—not about Stockwell Day; the world proved Moriarty wrong about Day’s suitability for national leadership.
Next stop as we go ‘round the houses: Yuri Bezmonov.
In the lead-up to the 1984 US presidential election, many believed that the corrupt and bellicose Reagan Administration would be defeated by a populace that had tired of nuclear sabre-rattling and foreign policy adventurism, not to mention the early phases of neoliberalism. But, when Reagan’s numbers bottomed-out at 37% following the 1982 midterm elections, his supporters began rebuilding his brand, not by moderating his positions but, instead, by deploying charismatic surrogates to reinvigorate the national conservative movement he had inherited from Barry Goldwater in 1968.
One of the most dynamic and striking of these characters was ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmonov. Bezmonov toured the US doing local talk shows broadcast in second-tier media markets like Scranton; he did events in church basements, fraternal organization halls and libraries. The video footage that remains of his speaking tours is now on youtube and is worth your time.
Here is the essence of the message Bezmonov delivered to all those who cared to listen, including members of the American left, whom he would often directly address and warn during his speeches:
Only 15% of the budget of the KGB, the USSR’s secret service, direct heirs to the Cheka before them, and the Oprichniki before them, was being spent on espionage. 85% of the budget had been allocated to something called “subversion,” an effort to subtly propagandize liberals and leftists in the West to adopt the values of Marxism-Leninism.
Bezmonov, when he addressed people of the left and liberal persuasions, claimed KGB subversion efforts were primarily targeting, he noted that, as a totalitarian-collectivist ideology, upon seizing power would soon turn on women, homosexuals and others the left understood itself to be representing or protecting. Once they had subverted the Anglo-American and Western European university systems, the subverted would incrementally seize control of society and grow increasingly punitive towards dissenting views and opposing social movements, chipping away freedom of speech and other values they once supported.
Bezmonov argued that, at a certain point, the educated and professional classes of Anglo American and Western European would reach a tipping point and begin carrying out this agenda on their own, without the coordination or assistance of the KGB.
Had I seen a Bezmonov video at the time, I would have seen it as even crazier than a Moriarty Op/Ed of the late 90s, because I was living through the rise of neoliberalism. There was nothing remotely Soviet, as far as I was concerned, about the impending blizzard of austerity, privatization, contracting-out and investor rights and market access trade deals.
Or was there?
Revisionism and the Problems of the Marxist Canon
I would argue that the only way to make sense of this strange tale is by engaging in something doctrinaire Marxists call “revisionism.” Unconsciously based, as it is, on Rabbinic disputation and exegesis of the Talmud and Torah, Marxism has always come packaged with a theory of canon. What kind of Marxist you are is largely determined by which authors and texts you think are part of the inalterable core canon of Marxism and which authors and texts are mere interpretation of the core texts that one can take or leave.
The USSR, and the political parties (i.e. foreign dictator fan clubs) they sponsored, saw the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin as the core canon. The writings of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Ché Guevara and other communist leaders might or might be correct. And the writings of Lev Trotsky were clearly heresy. The Marxist term for “heresy” is “revisionism,” the attempt to present a revision of the core canon as the correct interpretation of said canon.
Trotskyites, on the other hand, canonize Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and see Stalin as heretical but consider the writings of leaders like Tito as worthy interpreters who could still be mistaken. The third main faction of the orthodox Marxist movement canonizes Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania 1944-85.
While many of these differences arise from different packages of complimentary overseas beach vacations Marxists offered high-level apparatchiks in the West, at which Trotskyites found themselves at a considerable disadvantage until the rise of Hugo Chavez, they nevertheless, also represent a robust tradition of categorizing and interpreting texts.
There is no more revisionist act, in the Marxist hierarchy of sins, than revising the document that formed the foundation of the entire movement, the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Its central thesis is that history is driven by class struggle that works as follows: a ruling class controls a labouring class by controlling the means of production and the state. After a time, a new class emerges as a synthesis of the two existing classes and revolutionizes production on behalf of the ruling class, thereby gaining control of the means of production and then violently displaces the previous ruling class that needed it to revolutionize the means of production.
In this way, the patrician ruling class and the plebian labour class of the Ancient Mediterranean produced a synthesis in the form of the feudal aristocracy who then overthrew the patricians and oppressed the peasant class; a synthesis of these classes, the bourgeoisie, revolutionized production on behalf of the feudal aristocracy and then violently overthrew them and now oppresses the proletariat.
But here is where things get weird. Marx asserts, in his epilogue, that because the means of production are now wholly controlled by the bourgeoisie, enabling the infinite immiseration of the proletariat, that this final class struggle will be the last one and will be between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, breaking the very intellectual model he has used to explain reality.
But what if we were more Marxist than Marx, himself?
Let’s Do Some Revisionism
What if what has unfolded since the bourgeois liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century, his “engine of history,” had continued functioning based on the properties he so persuasively assigned to it?
Would it not follow that the class that the bourgeoisie assigned to revolutionize the means of production would seize them and turn them against the bourgeoisie? In other words, what if we understood the Russian Revolution not as a workers’ revolution but as a revolution against the owner class (i.e. the bourgeoisie) by the professional managerial class, who as predicted seized means of production from the workers that the workers had not, in fact lost? Friedrich Engels got close to seeing this possibility when he suggested that capitalism, when it had consumed the physical world, would extend into the immaterial and commodify the contents of our minds?
Is this not highly descriptive how ubiquitous forms of totalitarian mind control tended to follow the managerial class wherever it took power and found its fullest twentieth-century elaboration in the East Germany of Erich Honecker, a state where the most powerful body was not the Communist Party but the Stasi, the secret police most advanced in surveillance and mind control?
I cannot take credit for this act of audacious revisionism. I owe this idea entirely to reuniting with my comrade D’Arcy Pocklington three years ago, who has been perfecting it since the late 1990s.
My humble addition is this: if we take our Marxist seriously, it follows that the KGB, serving, as it did, as the apex of the professional managerial class, would not intellectually subvert the West to embrace a Marxist consciousness, or a worker’s consciousness but would, inevitably and axiomatically only be able to diffuse one thing into the minds of the West’s educated, liberal left: their own consciousness. They subverted the West not to, as Besmonov believed, Marxism-Leninism but instead to the class consciousness of the professional managerial class.
In other words, the mistake Moriarty and Besmonov made was in failing to see that the USSR was, unconsciously, telling a bigger lie even than it realized. Its leadership class had long since confused its own class consciousness with Marxism. And they were so convinced that even apostates like Besmonov believed they had been inculcating, in our universities, a belief in Marxism-Leninism and not, as an actual believer in Marxism must observe, the class consciousness of the managerial class.
The totalitarianism we associate with “communism” or “Marxism” has nothing to do with Marxism, with communism, with socialism. It arises from the class consciousness of the elite of the managerial class because they have been tasked with extending the reach of capitalism and their control of the means of production into consciousness itself.
Now that I think you can see where this argument is going, I’ll leave off and write a second part tomorrow.
