By Thomas Buddenbrook

Throughout the Covid Left, there has been a hue and cry about the “bourgeois individualism” of the truckers convoys in Canada and Australia, as well as many other elements of the global medical freedom movement. In a recent article on Red Fire online, “The Straw Man: ‘Fascism’ in the Freedom Movement,” the Trotskyist Platform was given special mention in this regard: 

The Trotskyist Platform (TP), another champion of identity politics, go a step further into the arms of the super elite, despite themselves. They state that those who claim it is their right to refuse vaccines, facemasks and social-distancing rules are doing so on the basis of “extreme individualism”, which is counterposed to the collectivist spirit on which the socialist and trade union movement is based.[1]

Trotskyists, or Bargain Basement Stalinists?

But it isn’t just the identity politicians that accuse the Freedom Movement of such individualism. In a recent article in the World Socialist Web Site, not exactly known for their fondness for identity politics (IP), the following is expressed:

“Nothing about this movement is progressive, popular, or even politically repressed—in fact it is far better represented in parliament than most of the population.…They represent a current of petty-bourgeois “radical” thought, influenced by libertarianism, anarchism and Stalinism, hostile or disdainful towards the working class and seeking an alternative base for an “anti-establishment” movement. Rejecting the class struggle, they look for opposition to …, the government and the corporations in the assertion of purely individual rights and liberties—rooted in appeals to personal or national sovereignty.”[2]

Joining this chorus, attacking the U.S. Bill of Rights, is the “Class Struggle Education Workers”: a front organization for the Internationalist Group:

“Now that safe vaccines are available for all adults, youths and children age 5 years and up, [!!! When did this happen?!! What testing has been conducted on these shots to show that they are safe?!!!]  the CSEW is for obligatory vaccination for COVID-19 for everyone in the schools (teachers, staff, students, vendors, administrators) as a necessary public health measure. There must be no religious exemptions.”..[3] 

The TP’s affinity for this bilgewater is not so surprising. What is rather incredible is the fact that the SEP, and the Spartacist offshoots, have jumped on the bandwagon as well. As the Spartacist League’s Workers Vanguard, and the IG’s own Internationalist, have been fond of saying over the past few decades, “this is pretty rich”–coming out of groups, especially the SEP/WSWS, that have historically defended individual rights, against for example, the #Me2 movement’s utter contempt for the right to due process.[4]

It is also especially remarkable, coming as it does out of the Spartacists’ and its offshoots’ press, for another reason. These newspapers lampooned, with relish, year after year, “the touching faith in the capitalist state”[5] of Labor Militant (now SAlt). Ahh, but they will probably reply. “We’re not talking about faith in the bourgeois state now. We’re talking about the trained, honest, well credentialed public health officials–like ‘America’s Doctor’. Anthony ‘The Science’ Fauci, who merely work for the bourgeois state [and for Big Pharma?!]. These saints among us can walk on water! If they tell us-without any significant testing–that these shots are safe, effective, and necessary, then they must be! And the ‘right wing bourgeois elements’ in the lower classes, who resist this, who do not share our faith, who insist upon their ‘individual rights’ (oh please!) must be fiercely criticized, and, when necessary, repressed.” 

How touching is that?

Because these groups have permitted the Trojan Horse of scientism and faith in bourgeois “public health” authorities to come through their intellectual gates, their Marxist radicalism has effectively been thrown out the window. They now sound, for all the world, no more like courageously critical-minded Trotskyists, but instead, bargain-basement Stalinists, lining up whatever workers that have the misfortune of still following them, with the technocratic diktats of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. 

As Robert Kennedy, Jr. has been saying for a few months now, the Bill of Rights now serves only as sanitary paper, on which the ruling class can wipe its arse, in its fascist campaign to destroy the small business middle class, and the working class. All with the blessing of these “Marxist” groups. Freedom of speech? Not if you express a dissenting opinion from the CDC and Anthony Fauci. Of assembly? Please–and risk a super spreader event?! Religion? Sorry, no religious exemptions. Rule of law, made by representative legislature? The right to civil disobedience, and the right to a guarantee that the punishment will fit the “crime”? Are you crazy?!! It’s an emergency, and the truckers are transphobic fascists! An equal right to public accommodations, including restaurants, museums, concerts? Not if you haven’t gotten the latest mandated booster shot. The right to keep your job? See above. How about the right to determine what goes into your body, to exercise informed consent under the Nuremburg Code, with a medical experiment proven neither safe, effective, nor necessary, And all with the blessing of these so-called “Trotskyists”–?!!

The idea that people are “right wing” or even “fascist,” because they uphold such basic bourgeois rights, is to throw all such rights into a “night where all cows are black,” as Hegel might say. As I titled this piece, “there are bourgeois rights…and then, there are bourgeois rights.” Not all, in fact, very few, should be condemned (nor did these latter Trotskyist groups condemn them, but in fact, praised them and defended them–until the pandemic began. Then they ran around screaming their anxiety, and their support for Covid repression, like Chicken Littles). 

Not Even All the Rights of Man are All Bad…

In his reply to his former teacher, Bruno Bauer, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx distinguished such rights along the lines of the French Revolutionary Constitution. And he pointed out the contradiction between these “Rights of Man,” and the “Rights of Citizens.” The Rights of Citizens–freedom of speech, assembly, vote, etc. allowed one to participate in the political community created by the bourgeois state. The Rights of Man were pretty much the opposite: the right to private property, to tell others to get lost, this is mine, and I’m indifferent to your welfare, and I might use my private property to exploit you.

The former, the rights of the citizens, though they permit individuals to join a community, are still eminently bourgeois individual rights, which protect us from any “collectivist spirit” when this threatens to devolve into mindless, groupthink acceptance of bourgeois-state demagoguery: in which the professional middle class, along with most of the “Trotskyist” and “socialist” movement, seems so entranced these days. And these rights are the fruit, as the WSWS and other hard Trotskyist, anti-IP journals never have tired in the past of telling us, of centuries of struggle by the common people, and the workers. And these rights must be employed in the socialist revolution. To suppress these rights through fascism is the tendency of liberals, and especially, neo-liberals, as Ishay Landa (The Apprentices Sorcerer) has pointed out, as they grow increasingly fearful of such employment by the working class, threatening their bourgeois right to private property. And such rights must be preserved in the aufhebung of the socialist revolution–if there is to be truly a dictatorship of the proletariat, of the working class, who must democratically control their economy and society.

Yet even a differentiation must be made within the Rights of Man. Certainly, socialists have no use for the bourgeois right to own private property, by which to exploit the labor-power of the working class.

But on the other hand, there remains the right to control our own bodies, the right of self preservation, embodied both in the U.S.’s Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, and in the Nuremburg Code. Would anyone really propose to argue that Marx, as “collectivist” as he was, when he critiqued the pro-private-property, pro-exploitation aspects of the “Rights of Man” meant also to oppose this component, this basic human right? 

In the Name of the “Collectivist Spirit,” the Covid Left Kisses Off the Working Class… And Moves Into Tonytown

I would like to remind you, that the Nuremburg Code was created in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, when Nazi doctors performed fiendish medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners–much like the murderous experiments conducted by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins on children of color, just a few decades ago, with AZT. And without their consent. (See RFK, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci)[6] Have these corrupt monsters suddenly turned over a new leaf–so much so that our fake Trotskyist friends have decided we should give up our right to bodily autonomy and informed consent to them?! That doesn’t make any sense. That is a death cult, not science. We had Jonestown. Let’s call this one “Tonytown.” Or “Gatesville”? It is not Trotskyist, or socialist, either. It is based, as I said before, on the Trojan Horse of scientism, transforming science into a new kind of authoritarian religion, where the “public health” officials are treated as if they were priests and popes, whose authority, as in the Milgram experiment, must be followed without question–and without any real safety or effectivity testing. 

As Ted Reese and others has well documented, this destruction of our rights has nothing to do with public health. It has been carried on with the purpose of accumulating enormous profits by Big Pharma, Tech, Shipping, et alia., in part reaped by government payments for these shots, and partially by the expropriation of the small-business bourgeoisie–shutting them down during the phony pandemic, and stealing their consumer markets–as well as the immiseration and enslavement, via digital technology and the creation of massive unemployment, of the global working class.[7] It is the duty of the socialist movement to  support the movement by the working class, and the lower middle class, to defend our basic human individual rights against this fiendish campaign to reduce us to a state of abject misery. But not only to offer critical (anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist) support–we must lead it, take it over, toward revolutionary socialism. If we survive, as Peter Sinfield wrote, “we can all sit back, and laugh,”–and shame these fake socialists for the idiots they have become. If we do not, if we fail, it will be in large part due to their abject betrayals. The best the global working class can offer to these staunch defenders of the “collectivist spirit”–and thus, effectively, today’s ancien bourgeois regime–is what Marx and Engels wrote was offered to the “feudal socialists” (in The Communist Manifesto)

“The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.”

http://www.redfireonline.com

E:workersleague@redfireonline.com

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[1] The Straw Man: “Fascism” in the Freedom Movement – Red Fire (redfireonline.com), referring to DON’T BELIEVE THE FAR RIGHT’S DEADLY LIES | Trotskyist Platform

[2] Omar Ali, Would-be putschists and other leaders of Canada’s far-right Freedom Convoy – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

[3] Use Union Power to Keep Schools Open Safely | CLASS STRUGGLE EDUCATION WORKERS (edworkersunite.blogspot.com)

[4] The #MeToo campaign versus the presumption of innocence – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

[5] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/pamphlets/Labours_Touching_Faith_in_Capitalism.pdf

[6]  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Childrens Health Defense, 2021. The book documents exhaustively the corruptive “iron triangle” that Fauci, Gates, and others have created, to their enormous financial gain, between Big Pharma and the governmental “regulatory” agencies they control, and the massive amount of collateral damage, in terms of deaths, sterilizations, and injuries, this has created over the decades, here in the U.S., in Africa, and around the world.

[7] Ted Reese, Capital’s profitability now depends on ‘lockdowns’, acute social enclosure, and ‘medical’ tyranny (grossmanite.wixsite.com). This is why the betrayal of the Covid Left, their complete incomprehension that we are moving from wage slavery back to slavery, effectively repealing the Thirteenth Amendment, not just for people of color, but for the global entire working class including nanobot/5G technology–is so heinous. And these fakirs claim to represent the best of the Enlightenment?