I was really impressed with this piece that provides an exposé of what often passes for a left perspective on the web, and how the writings of the fake-left effectively undermine genuine revolutionary writing.
...the motivations of the fake left are money and fame: the preservation of their place in their ivory towers, together with all the trimmings of an upper middle class or wealthy lifestyle. For them, the path is smoothed and the wheels of the machine are oiled for lucrative book deals, speaking tours, radio and television interviews, and articles that are infinitely reverberated through approved sites in the Internet. Their spokespeople channel political ideas toward electoral cycles and transform revolutionary musings into banalities, paralysis, and futile actions. They attack the public’s thought process itself and engender an attention-deficit disorder. Ideas are not pursued, shared, honed, and acted upon but instead displaced by fleeting slogans like “hope and change,” or “feel the Bern.” Alternatively, the ideas are muddled, branded and labeled with names like “shock doctrine,” “disaster capitalism,” or “climate capitalism,” so that they may be put away and no longer examined.I think that people of the fake-left have a number of motivations that range from the subversive to the cynical to sincere views and it is often hard to determine where on this continuum any one writer lies. I tend to think that people like Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are motivated primarily by fame and fortune while others like Soros are consciously subversive propagandists. But all these types seem to be well-funded and their articles proliferate throughout the web-world.
