I do not know the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications, but I do know that many choose to avoid placing certain key historical events at the center of their analyses. In fact, they either avoid them like the plague, dismiss them as inconsequential, or use the CIA’s term of choice and call them “conspiracy theories” and their proponents “conspiracy nuts.” The result is a powerful propaganda victory for the power elites they say they oppose.I'd like to attempt an answer to Curtin's excellent article, specifically to his lack of understanding of "the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications"...who are fall prey to the intellectual disability of "Crimestop". It's capitalist culture, stupid!
Orwell called it “Crimestop: [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short means protective stupidity.”
Culture is like water that fish swim in. Fish, like most people, are not perceptive enough to realize that there are other waters to swim in, waters that are not polluted with extreme individualism like the one we live in. Capitalist culture has ensured that we as humans do not recognize ourselves as being social animals. No, we are mostly self-seeking animals who exist only for ourselves and our material interests. Margaret Thatcher was lying twice when she argued that there was no such thing as society, only families. Have you observed extended families fighting over the distribution of wealth from a rich relative? I have. In reality under capitalism all individuals are competing against all the other individuals for material rewards. Thus, capitalist culture has almost completely eliminated the social from our identity and replaced our sense of selves, through their comprehensive indoctrination system, as merely self-seeking animals.
The ruling capitalist class has done this with their 24/7 indoctrination campaign to lure us into thinking that we don't need each other, even worse, that we should distrust each other, and seek only material rewards in form of money, homes, careers, and the most important of all, the ability to establish a family. Thus, one must not resist the diktats of the ruling capitalist class or else we shall have none of these rewards.
Left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and left media people like Amy Goodwin have succumbed to these enticements and conditioning. They serve to limit the analysis of news and events by refusing to question the ruling class interpretation of those events. And they are rewarded for their refusal. Chomsky gets invited to many campuses to speak and Goodwin enjoys a very comfortable salary.
People like socialist John Bellamy Foster who is a full professor at the University of Oregon and heir to serious socialists like Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and Paul Baran at the Monthly Review, is known academically as a "Marxian" specialist. This is a label that our ruling class attaches to academic people who are experts on the studies of Karl Marx's writings. Such academics are labeled "Marxian" because they must not stray too far from the merely academic study of Marxism, such as into activist politics--those that do are labeled as "Marxists" and are banished into poverty. Foster has been rewarded with a wife (Carrie Naumoff) and a three-child family, a comfortable salary, and respectable academic standing, and this will continue if he keeps his nose clean and out of activist practice. So what if he writes in obscure journals that nobody reads about capitalism that is in deadly conflict with the health of the biosphere? Of course, he will never be interviewed by any respectable mainstream media corporation for his views on capitalism or the ongoing destabilization of the climate. He is rendered quite harmless to the system of capitalism. He has become thoroughly domesticated.
Capitalist culture denies that there is any such thing as society because capitalists want full license to plunder societies across the world for their riches and to gain more power. That is what neoliberalism, an advanced form of capitalism, is all about. The point is that true revolutionaries--and that is what is so desperately needed right now--do not have families, they have dedicated their lives to the overthrow of capitalism because they know that the system is in the process of killing us all.
