Established Left as Ideology Police: Now More Than Ever

Established Left as Ideology Police: Now More Than Ever

by Jack Straw

Amongst the stranger phenomena observed in the wake of revelations about U.S. government foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, we see the established Left launch a coordinated attack against those who maintain that there is a lot more to the story than mere government foreknowledge. Norman Solomon, Ed Herman, David Corn, Martin Lee, ChuckO of Infoshop, Chip Berlet, Mike Albert, Seymour Hersh, and others with similar politics, have all written articles for the usual Left magazines and websites, or have appeared on radio shows, warning their loyal flock against pursuing such lines of inquiry, and asserting that this could divert the Left from the real work that needs to be done. This has involved increasingly nasty personal attacks on those who do indeed pursue such inquiries, such as Michael Ruppert.

Like a chorus, all these supposed critics of the status-quo chime in that the Bush administration and its various agents are simply incompetent: nothing more, nothing less. It would be ridiculous, they say, to think that the administration is even capable of willful negligence in 9/11, i.e. knowing of the attacks but letting them happen so it could implement its policy of military interventions and domestic repression. And active complicity? Forget it. They uniformly voice their disbelief that any American president could be so callous about such mass loss of innocent American lives. More fundamentally, they assert that spending time trying to figure out the extent of U.S. government foreknowledge or complicity amounts to a surrender to "conspiracy theory", a method that overemphasizes bad deeds by bad people, and ignores systemic causes for events and policies. Thus, activists are diverted from the real task at hand, a challenge to the systemÅfs core structures.("Structuralism" is what they call their method.) I won't deal here with these individuals as such; others have done a great job compiling the articles and their critiques (see "The Magic Bullet Dissidents" feature section at www.questionsquestions.net). Instead, I'll focus on why I think this organized attack is happening.

The dichotomy which these so-called leftists assert exists pretty much only in their heads. No doubt, the capitalist system is what sets the context for all the actions of the state/corporate apparatus. Capital accumulation (curiously enough, *this* is left out of their "structuralism," as they have all abandoned a rigorous understanding of capitalism) has to be facilitated, for it is a process that always faces problems, and these problems mount as the accumulation proceeds to ever-larger levels. At the same time, the system must be legitimated. It isn't a very easy thing to convince the vast majority of humanity to go along with a social set-up which is based upon its own dispossession and exploitation so as to make a tiny shrinking minority ever richer, and upon the ever-wider destruction of the world's eco-system and its various human communities. The system's managers are thus obeying an objective imperative, and are not simply evil people who are out mucking up a basically good set-up. But all this involves decisions made by actual human beings, working within specific institutions whose aim is the perpetuation and expansion of world capitalism, or at least the well-being of their personal empires within that global mechanism. Capital in the abstract and institutions in the abstract only explain generalities or tendencies within which human actors have a range of choices -- including criminal behavior. Pretending otherwise, taking what is sometimes a useful conceptual and rhetorical tool and making it into a material reality -- in fact a persona which makes conscious decisions -- amounts to understanding nothing. ...

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