Exh imperialism

From American Thought blog post here 

 It is also extremely important to note how ‘American Thought’ benefits from American imperialism and its worldwide supremacy. American imperialism helps it spread mostly through social networks, popular culture and “independent” media, imposing itself, just like the USA, as the sharia police of this little socio-political scene on the international level. Or to put it in short: The World exists only if you look at it through the eyes of the American left.

Social networks are crucial for spreading of ‘American Thought’ not only because they promote simplified expression, but also they are simplifying language itself which suits this narrative of theoretical simplification and poverty. Also, social networks allow certain academics, who have not published anything genuine or important in their lives and that cannot even grasp the basics of their own academic disciplines, to gain attention and a following just by saying “shocking things” on the Internet. 

I am talking about cases such as George Ciccariello-Maher’s “white genocide” stunt or Michael Rectenwald’s stunt to get full time employment at New York University. Narcissistic need for constant attention is certainly one of the most important missions of ‘American Thought’, but unlike academia of the past it is unable to fulfil its basic social purpose: to educate and to develop theory. 

Even though, one could point out that they are still developing theory that serves the agenda of the ruling class in this present capitalist epoch with its identarian and individualist discourse. Also, this narcissism is present in activist circles too and one of the worst examples of that were “thinkpieces” regarding recent murder of Heather Heyer.

The phenomenon of the left on social networks was covered, among many other things, in an interesting new book by Angela Nagle called Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017). Nagle herself, while criticising both the left and the right and their approach to social networks, has found herself a victim of a leftist slander campaign which has produced numerous articles which have not even engaged a single point she made but just aimed to discredit her. Which just describes a way that ‘American Thought’ is dealing with its criticists.

Usually when somebody criticizes ideas that comprise ‘American Thought’ – especially the merging of identity politics with Marxism – he or she is marked as a phobe (short for phobic).  

In the simpleminded and black-and-white world of the left politics every criticism is unnecessary and dangerous, so there are only “good” and “bad” guys. So, a phobe is basically a new fascist – an ultimate evil and enemy or just a person who does not agree with you. 

In order to be a “good” guy one has to win the ‘Oppression Olympics’; which is basically a ritual of acceptance designed by American leftists where one has to collect all the possible identities one can find in order to hide the fact that they mostly consist of university educated white people from the USA – the most privileged people in the World.

Nevertheless, if these ideas remained locked up in the campuses of American universities nobody would care about them. But it is not the case as this approach has spread across the world.

As one of my homies pointed out jokingly: “the idiocy of American left academia can easily be explained through an example of Judith Butler, because she at the same time considers an academic essay as a violence and Hamas and Hezbollah as part of the broad left.”

In the rest of this text I will discuss why particular elements of ‘American Thought’ have nothing in common with Marxism. But before I start I just have to make a disclaimer.

Firstly, despite naming this phenomenon after the country of its origin it is important to emphasise that purpose of this text is in no way to promote any form of nationalist thought, for example anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is something that is popular among the right and the left in post-socialist countries, it is connected with conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and other forms of chauvinism and usually represents a particular nationalism in disguise. 

Also, it is popular among the anti-imperialist left worldwide as it represents, as Moishe Postone puts it, “the anti-imperialism of fools”, because their concept of anti-capitalist emancipation is not building of a “human community” (Marx) but eradication of the “global evil” – USA.[2] And secondly, I do not think that this phenomenon represents the left in “Anglo” world as a whole. There are many comrades who participate in class struggle, either through organising or intervention, but unfortunately one has to be connected with them in order to get information about and insights into their work, their successes and failures, experience and lessons as everything is suffocated by narrative of ‘American Thought’.

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