Sometimes I wish the world was run by a secretive elite. If it was, it would be a lot more interesting than it in fact is. There is a certain romance in believing one is facing down Bond-villains, nestled away in shadowy bunkers, in which they feed disloyal acolytes to crocodiles. This romance is lacking in Michael Gove. In fact not a single one of the British ruling class lives up to the standards of proper archetypical evil. They don't have lairs, they have villas in Tuscany. And not one of them has ever bitten the head off a live chicken. Although at a push Prince Philip has done this to a swan. We are, alas, doomed to mediocre malice in our rulers.
Nor, it has to be said, are this crowd especially secretive. Take the Conservative Party. They stood for election saying that they were going to impose massive cuts and attack trade unions. And having won the election they are proceeding to do just that. They may be bastards, but they are not sneaky bastards by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps it is a desire for a bit of excitement that drives 25% per cent of Corbyn supporters to believe that, contrary to fact, the world is run by a secretive elite. Like crazed lefty adrenaline junkies that these comrades of mine clearly are not content with nationalising the railways; they hope that they have to fight the CIA-Zionist-Lizards to do so. I'll come back to the 'Zionist' bit of that, since there's a darker side to all this conspiracy theory stuff.
'Conspiracy theory' - that's right. A striking feature of the 21st century left, which no doubt reflects a wider trend in our society, is the prevalence of so much conspiracy theoretic murk. I challenge you to go to more than a couple of demos without encountering some excitable character in a Guy Fawkes mask talking about the New World Order. If you're lucky, they might hand you a typewritten leaflet all about it. More mainstream, but in perpetual danger of slippage into conspiracy-talk, is the idea that there is an all-pervasive thing called 'the establishment' - the category, popularised by Owen Jones, has all but replaced the older, more nuanced, language of class and the state on much of the broad left. Put 'the establishment' together with an emotive topic like paedophilia, as recent news stories have done, and the crowd go wild - the number of supposed 'revelations' on this topic I've seen shared on left-wing social media is genuinely disturbing. Meanwhile the near-paranoid sense that everything is done with an ulterior motive has led numerous people to know better to support Julian Assange's attempt to avoid rape charges, on the basis that 'they' are out to get him. Indeed, the popularity of Wikileaks on the left -- the project in fact has its origins in the libertarian right -- is largely owing to the desire to know what they are hiding from us.
The striking reality of capitalist society, on contrary, is that everything is done in the open. I'm not denying, of course, the sordid reality of secret police forces and backroom deals. But the basic business of exploitation, the key structural features of the kind of society we inhabit: it's all out there in the open for everyone to see. The world is run for profit and proudly wears that fact on its sleeves, even as CEOs and Prime Ministers alike speak aloud about the need to reduce labour costs. In as much as this world is sustained by illusions, they are remarkably egalitarian illusions. The CEO and the bond trader, just as much as the shop worker and the pensioner, invest markets, currencies, and other creatures of our making, with an agency independent of the humanity that fashioned them. If you like, the system itself produces the illusions. The only secret is that there is nobody pulling the strings: we are not dealing with puppets, but with automata. The upside to this sorry state of affairs is that we are capable of distancing ourselves from it and stating the truth of the matter. As I just did.
That last paragraph is a standard old-fashioned leftist response to conspiracy theory. Why does it no longer convince a good number of people on the left? Partly, I think because, contemporary capitalist societies move at such a dizzying pace that peoples' experience of their lives is utterly disorientated and piecemeal -- the idea that 'They' are behind it all can be oddly comforting in such circumstances: there is an ultimate order and purpose, even if it is hostile. The Lizards are a Calvinist God for an unbelieving age.
Then there's the spectacular own-goal that was postmodernism. More than a generation of left-wingers have been schooled, with varying degrees of success, in the idea that reason, evidence, and the normal criteria by which we, as responsible agents, choose between competing accounts of the world are nothing more than veils worn by power. They are certainly not guides to objective truth, not least because there is no such thing as objective truth. The case for this view, which on the face of it renders any attempt at emancipatory theory and practice self-defeating, has been helped along by the fact that a certain kind of rearguard academic reaction certainly does appeal to Reason to bolster its own dubious interests. The name 'Richard Dawkins' suffices here to gesture in the direction of what I mean.
Then of course there was the decline of Marxism. In part this has to be attributed to the welcome collapse of the vile regimes that claimed it as their creed. But it's not just that: after all, there is a proud tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism. Partly it's down to postmodernism. But whatever the full reason, one searches in vain on the left for a coherent, rigorously argued, account of the world which explains events and injustices not simply in terms of individual agency, but in terms of a social whole that - far from being shadowy - is amenable to critical scrutiny. Instead we have individual campaigns, united by nothing other than anger, often couched in moralistic terms (the moralism of the contemporary left; that's a whole other blogpost...) It's a volatile brew of raw emotion, indignation and confusion. Rich pickings for conspiracy theory.
This wouldn't matter so much were conspiracy theories not utterly disempowering. If They really are pulling the strings; what can we do? If we are being kept in the dark by networks of baffling complexity, what response is there other than fear? Perhaps the best we can do is search Google, looking for clues, trying to find out about Them. It's an atomised, self-enclosed, self-reinforcing way of 'finding out' about the world, which slides easily into genuine paranoia. Contrast this with the Marxian insistence that we learn about the world through collective engagement with it, seeking to change it and reflecting together on our efforts.
Then there's the anti-Semitism. The Rothschilds, the Zionists, Goldman-Sachs: the cast list in some of the accounts is tediously familiar fare. Living, as we still do, in the aftermath of a capitalist crisis focused in the financial sector, and blamed somewhat simplistically and moralistically on 'the bankers', the ground is fertile for the anti-Jewish tropes that run deep through the Western cultural unconscious to surface. And not nearly enough is being done to stop that.
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