Late Capitalism in Weimerica Pt. 4—To Arms

Urban Dictionary:

Late Capitalism:

The advanced stage of unmanaged capitalism in which corporations and the wealthy, having run out of quick and easy paths to profit and economic growth, begin cannibalizing the societies in which they operate instead of investing in them.

Features: Declining wages for workers, privatization of government, dismantling of social services, sale of cultural & national heritage, debtor’s prisons, corporate invasion of people’s personal lives, and punishment (and ultimately enslavement) of the poor.
A: Did you hear that Zuckerberg is tearing down the national park to build his new fortified megamansion?
B: Yeah dude, wanna go to the Pepsi™-sponsored protest against it later?
A: Truly, late capitalism is the best system to live under.

Occidental Dissent:

Weimerica: White America Is Giving Up On Democracy

…The Alt-Right has always hated cuckservatism. What did these people do after Trump won the Republican nomination? They have spent 6 months viciously fighting their own presidential nominee and his voters in order to virtue signal to the media that they are “one of the good ones.” They have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are too weak to resist the Left and much more interested in attacking Right. They have proven that the two parties have essentially the same agenda on wars, immigration, trade.

Once again, we have already won a lot in this presidential cycle.

It should be mentioned first and foremost, that the Congressional Baseball Game Shooting was perpetuated by a moderate leftist.  It was, like the MAX Slayings, an act of an individual amped up on the idea of political rhetoric.
The Marxist abhors individual acts of terrorism for the following reasons:

This latest Fenian exploit [an act of individual terrorism] in Clerkenwell is a great folly. The London masses, who have shown much sympathy for Ireland, will be enraged by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to let themselves be blown up for the benefit of Fenian emissaries. Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general, more or less doomed to failure.


Communists do not hide their faces or furl their banners.

They present themselves openly to the working people as a party. The workers and peasants have come to know the Communists in action, by experience and in hard struggle. It is precisely for this reason that the party of Communist-Bolsheviks has acquired a decisive influence among the masses, and thereby also in the Soviets.



The Baseball Killings were lamentable, counter-productive at best, and had no hope of leading to anything greater.  But it was predictable based on an increase of rhetoric—and it is worthwhile to mention that this single instance represents the most violent opposition from the left.  He represented a policy that Connolly would recognize as, “utterly disorganized and divided.”  The action was horrific, but there is no advancement.
The Right
This is not true of the weaponized tactics of the right.  Rather than decreasing in numbers with a Republican president, the militia movement that backed up the Bundy Revolt is continuing to organize and unify:

“I started to realize that I got very angry because the system has been so abused over and over and over again, making rights out of thin air for people who don’t deserve to get anything,” said John DeMaria, who goes by the nickname Rooster J.

While it is impossible to track all the groups that often are no more than a handful of men gathering in woods, experts says that militia activity tends to fall off under Republican presidents and ramp up under Democrats. But just as last year’s election upended conventional models, those who watch militias say life in the Trump era may not follow the same patterns.

In Oregon, the GOP is considering turning their backs on civil authority and using these types of paramilitary groups as their own security.  The Bundy Revolt not only succeeded, but it has been all but endorsed and made official.
As the right increases to organize, arm, and feel victimized, one may ask what the left should do.  The answer, for the most part, seems to be peaceful protests.  This, in turn, becomes a two-stroke engine of the right coming to the brink of demanding violence to suppress said protests:

And demanding their own protests.
Which takes us to the Right-wingers marching on Portland. June 4th was set up.  Since it was on Federal land, the city could do nothing as—after a prominent set of slayings by a notorious rightwing protesters—decided to try and provoke a battle.
Little came from the conflict, though there was national interest in it.  There were some arrests, but the two big take-aways were dependent upon which side of the protest you joined.
One the one hand, the Trumpites saw their freedom of speech being challenged:
The free speech rally ended that day in Portland with Antifa hurling bricks, rocks, marbles, tampons, urine and feces. It ended with graffiti messages left behind for the ralliers, including: “STAB A NAZI, TWICE :)” It ended with the counter-protesters shouting at their adversaries, calling them racists and bigots. To the Trump supporters, it was clear that the left did not really want dialogue but just wanted to showcase its anger. To the counter-protesters, the fear in the community had reached a level that compelled them to send a clear message: Portland won’t tolerate bigots.
For the right, this is a question of whether they feel comfortable expressing their political feelings. This becomes interesting as the far right in the United States does have a history of expressing these feelings, most notably the Westboro Baptist Church
Most on the right would turn their nose up at protesting a military funeral.  And there were parents of soldiers that died in action that, unsurprisingly, felt emotional distress while trying to bury their children while extreme right-wingers protested the funerals. One set of parents sued for this emotional distress.
The case went to the Supreme Court, where it was decided that the suit could not take place. In short:
The First Amendment protects from tort liability those who stage a peaceful protest on a matter of public concern near the funeral of a military service member.
This is to say, you are not allowed to be distressed by this kind of speech.  There was, so far as I know, no argument that Freedom of Speech was to be abridged—simply that there were consequences to your actions of your speech.
In a sense, we might be able to shrug our shoulders at this if all things were equal.  However, as pointed out in a previous piece, all things are not equal. For all the huffing and puffing about a leftist conspiracy in the media, the fact remains that the bosses—the companies that own the publications—are mostly interested in perpetuating a system where their bottom line will be taken care of. Take, for instance, Pecker: The owner of the National Enquirer who is hellbent on taking the journalistic standards of that publication and applying it to other media:
Pecker is now considering expanding his business: he may bid to take over the financially strapped magazines of Time, Inc., which include Time, People, and Fortune. Based on his stewardship of his own publications, Pecker would almost certainly direct those magazines, and the journalists who work for them, to advance the interests of the President and to damage those of his opponents—which makes the story of the Enquirerand its chief executive a little more important and a little less funny.
This, again, becomes the issue.  The right sees this as fine because, in theory, everybody does have the same access and rights and whatnot.  For the left, this is problematic as not everybody does have the same access and rights to everything.  Not everybody can just buy a bunch of news sources with the intention of producing propaganda. Not everybody has the money or leverage to take a case to the Supreme Court.
The Left

To return back to the Portland protests, the PBS piece above contextualized Portland and, in doing so, shed some light on why many on the left are sensitive about rightists coming to march in their city:

Conversations around race can be especially charged in Portland, which has a fraught racial history. It has not been forgotten that Oregon’s early founders adopted exclusion laws that barred blacks from moving to the state, that the state was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, or that more recently, in the 1990s, Portland was dubbed “skinhead city” for its large population of neo-Nazis, and for having birthed the white supremacist gang the Volksfront.

Today, Portland continues to have among the whitest populations of any city in the country. On the ground floor of City Hall, a large exhibit asks the question: “Is Portland racist?” Many of the Post-it responses say “yes.”

A city with a very racist past, on the one hand, is attempting to recognize and condone it; and it (arguably) does this by being hyper-sensitive about it and addressing the issue.

However, as with the focus of these pieces, the worrying part for the left was watching the rightwing militia protesters collude with federal law enforcement to arrest leftists.
On the left, the accusation was that Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, a rightinger from the suburb of Vancouver, has a history of assaulting leftists at these events. Video exists that shoes “Tiny” tacking a left-winger, then him, another rightwing protester, and federal troops working together to arrest the victim.
For a leftist this would speak volumes. A few anarchists threw tampons on right-wingers marching on the city to deliberately start trouble, and the result is rightwing militias and the government teaming up to take action against the left.  The power dynamic here, the argument would go, is clearly displayed.  You may have the right to say something, to even take action, but the left does not have the same rights extended to their political adversaries. To protest a soldier’s funeral is beyond reproach—to dare to disrupt a rightwing protest is an offense needing to be arrested by rightwing paramilitary groups that seem to be, for some reason, given the authority to make arrests.
If a rightest is reading this, he or she is assuredly opposed to this interpretation.  This rightest does not want the funerals of soldiers protested, does not necessarily think that extremist paramilitary groups should be allowed to arrest people, does not think that society is as complicated as I’m hinting, etc, etc, etc.  But that is the tension within the paramilitary movement itself, where there is a battle between the more youthful fascists and the older deep conservatives.
A Conclusion
I do not know what should be done.
But it is clear that society is dividing, and it is dividing along lines that were already there sixty years ago.  Generally my assumption is that the Cold War helped to paper over a lot of the legitimate differences that existed within the West for generations.  Now that the reason to join hands and be good imperialists is gone, things are reverting to a more natural state for parliamentary tactics.  Going back to the 19th century is full of Congressmen fist fighting each other, and that may be our future now.
The difference is that we are playing this 19th century game with 20th century ideologies. Not many will come out and say that they are Luxemburg socialists or Hitler fascists.  But that appears to be the tension.
However, another tension resulting from the Cold War comes from kneecapping the left.  There were many reasons for this, some more legitimate than the others.  The result, however, is that the anarchists with their tactics (at the beginning of this article discussed) are the forefront of the movement.  On the forefront of the right are increasingly radicalized armed soldiers unwittingly protect oligarchs pumping out propaganda.
Individual acts of terror, no matter how juvenile, are counterproductive against such a threat.  The left should be disciplined, educated, and armed.
The other side wanting to crush them already are.

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