Ett särskilt tydligt exempel på hur en paleosocialism eller paleokommunism kan förstås som konservativ – i den enda meningsfulla, ambjörnssonska betydelsen, som uttryckande en de överordnade värdenas konservatism – i jämförelse med dagens vänster, den postmarxistiska vänstern eller vad Jordan Peterson och populist- och radikalnationalisterna nu på alltmer problematiskt sätt benämner “kulturmarxismen”, är en rant från Mckay (börjar 1.11.33) nyligen rörande prostitution och pornografi. Den följer upp ett helt avsnitt om Aleksandra Kollontajs uppfattning om dessa frågor från i våras. Återvändandet till ämnet föranleds av politiska förslag i Skottland om ny lagstiftning mot sexköpande män.
Termen kulturmarxism kan, tror jag, ges en legitim användning. Men den idag dominerande innebär en otillbörlig enkling, vrängning, grovning och vulgarisering av det samtida kulturkrigets fenomen och politiska innebörd, med ekon av nazisternas begrepp Kulturbolschewismus. Kritiken av sexuella missförhållanden som borgerliga är ju urmarxistisk. Freddie Engels pläderade exempelvis i Familjens, privategendomens och statens ursprung inte för familjens avskaffande, utan beskrev kritiskt den typ av familj som skapats under kapitalismen, med av denna betingade funktioner som förstörde förhållandet mellan könen. Slutsatsen blir bara att socialismen skulle möjliggöra en familj fri från dem.
Utöver analysen av kapitalismen som allmän orsak till dessa missförhållanden, brukade paleosocialister tala om den borgerliga dekadensen på detta och även andra områden, dekadensen som oundviklig allmänkulturell följd inom borgerligheten själv av kapitalismen i dess senare faser av ruttnelse. I äldre litteraturhistorisk forskning finns mycket om detta fenomen. Men idag är det vänstern som legitimerar och försvarar några av dessa problematiska företeelser, och dessutom en allt extremare vidareutveckling av dem.
Mckay vänder sig på följande sätt mot “the western left’s defence of pornography and prostitution” (jag tror att det också finns någon pamflett om detta från hans parti, CPGB-ML):
“Every time anybody tries to bring in a restriction against the loathesome sex trade or pornography you have a selection of western leftists who start screaming about restrictions on free speech and you need to stop being prudish etc., etc., what about bodily autonomy, prostitution is just the same as being exploited by any capitalist etc., etc.
And this is the just absolute guff and mental sewage that we have to f…ing troll through when it comes to the western left, and I wanted to address this. It is absolutely the case that all communists should be militantly opposed to prostitution and to pornography, both of which are hyperexploitative lumpenized trends, shall we say, which are of course – certainly when it comes to pornography – big money, big money for various capitalist interests, much of which are also of course linked to various intelligence agencies, and also big money for lumpen elements, such as organized crime.
So how is it then that the western left, including ridiculous institutions like Verso Books and the DSA, [Democratic Socialists of America] got so into this? And I think it lies ultimately in, and again, changes in the material base reflecting into ideology. What I would mean by this like the deindustrialization of the western nations that took place in the post-WWII era coincided with fundamental changes in the ideological composition of the western left, personified of course by the ridiculous figure of Herbert Marcuse, whom I’ve talked about before. Marcuse came to the conclusion in One Dimensional Man that the proletariat in the west was now no longer a revolutionary agent, and therefore only those who were excluded from the proletariat were going to be capable of making a revolution, so racial minorities and also lumpens. That was part of his analysis. Now he later backtracked on that, but this One Dimensional Man was a very big hit, and was a very big influence in the western leftist circles.
The other big influence is of course the French theorists, people like Foucault (and we’ll know about his predilections), and the wider influence which is the active promotion of what I would call left bourgeois ideology in the so-called Marxist groups. Because as these groups became more and more divorced from the proletariat, as the old communist parties decayed and degenerated into just becoming social democratic, social chauvinist organizations, as they all did become in the end, the western left stopped reflecting any proletarian values whatsoever, and certainly stopped being revolutionary, and just went into the worship of lumpenization and also lumpen culture and criminal culture.
And also became absolutely obsessed with so-called sexual freedom, meaning the active promotion of a very distorted and twisted form of human sexuality that is favoured by the left end of the bourgeoisie, which leads them to endorsing prostitution on the grounds of bodily autonomy, which is a completely ridiculous point of view. Because how is it that women – and it is mainly women, but there are some men in this cohort – who are compelled by force of economic circumstances to sell themselves by the minute and the hour to perverted men – it’s overwhelmingly men who use the services of prostitutes – how is it bodily autonomy that someone is that desperate that they allow themselves to essentially be raped? What autonomy is there, that someone is compelled by sheer poverty and desperation into doing that?
And the bourgeoisie of course has tried to dress up, sort of put a lot of window-dressing on prostitution in the last 30 years or so. If you look at things like ‘Confessions of a Call Girl’, the book and then the series with Billie Piper in it, [Mckay menar ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’] again, it’s very much about glamourizing prostitution. And this, again, is something that the western left has largely swallowed whole.
Unions these days in Britain routinely vote for the recognition of so-called sex worker unions, most of which seem to be run by pimps. And you wonder why these people have any objections to Andrew Tate, given that they are apparently in favour of his business model. But this view, this very poisonous view is now very, very common, so that the western left is dominated by groups which are pro-prostitution, pro-pornography, and ultimately this is part of what leads them to be pro-gender ideology as well.
And all of this paints a horrifically distorted picture of sexual relations between human beings. It presents a massively, horrifically commodified version of human sexuality which bears no real relation to the way human beings should relate to each other, which is producing objectively very, very harmful behaviours in – again, unfortunately – men: let’s be honest about this, it is men that mostly use the services of prostitutes, both female and male. And this is dangerous stuff and it is a ridiculous, reactionary position that most of the western left has taken that they will defend all of this stuff.
Because, again, most of the western left puts forward a point of view which is derived from the left end of the bourgeoisie. That’s where most of their points of view come from. They’re not derived from interaction with the proletariat, they’re not derived from a serious application of Marxism-Leninism to analysing our current situation. In fact most of these leftist groups are anti-Leninist and anti-communist, so therefore it should be no surprise that they are, of course, in favour of the most degenerated and rancid parts of bourgeois culture, and that they would continue to defend this even when the harm that it does is manifesting all around us just tells you how far gone the western left is.
It’s irredeemable now, absolutely irredeemable. There is no point saving it. It went into the f…ing toilet after WWII, accelerating with the influence of revisionism, and accelerated further with the influence of the individualistic forces that came to dominate after the abdication of the French and Italian communist parties from the vanguard role by 1968, when the French and Italian communist parties became reactionary social democratic, social chauvinist organizations and converted to Eurocommunism. When that happened, they surrendered all claim of revolutionary leadership. And who moved into that void in western Europe? Well it was the so-called libertines, the rabid individualists, the Trotskyites, the cartoon Maoists, all of whom of course were very big fans of the bastardization of human relations via the promotion of emptying sexual relations of all actual emotional content.
That’s very much what happened. So when you get the communist parties abdicating their leadership role, to the point where those who dominate the so-called revolutionary left are essentially people who have a point of view which is entirely derived essentially from the radical end of the bourgeoisie. And their adoption of bourgeois attitudes is what leads them to be pro-prostitution, pro-pornography and ultimately to be in favour of things like gender ideology.
Because gender ideology presents a distorted and pornographied view of women as a model, because that’s what most of these quite frankly insane or extremely disturbed men who get into this stuff, that’s the model of women that they want to turn themselves into. It is an absolutely of course bizarre pathology that these men are displaying. And, again, the left embraced it, it didn’t just indulge it, they embraced it and continue to embrace it to this day.
And so when I say that the entire western left needs essentially to be dragged out and shot, thrown in a pit, and burnt, theoretically speaking, that’s what I mean. It is an irredeemable disaster. It has endorsed the most anti-social, anti-woman, anti-proletarian trends possible. It has not strived towards a unified and revolutionary working class. It fetishizes freakishness, bizarre behaviour, and extremely damaging tendencies and seeks to promote them within the proletariat. And this is why most of the proletariat quite rightly rejects these pieces of garbage.
Because they are anti-worker, they promote bourgeois values, they promote counterrevolutionary tendencies, they will never unite the working class against the ruling class, because they’re not interested in that, that’s not their job. Their job is to continually replicate divisions within the working class.
And also it’s worth saying that as we are now in a 35 year+ long effect of counterrevolution following the collapse of the USSR, it’s worth revisiting Stalin’s words in an interview which he gave in the 30s that if the USSR collapsed the working class of the entire world would be seized by the throat. And that’s what’s happened, over the last 30 years. And instead of reckoning with that, the western left has gone down the route of obsessing over the promotion of bizarre sexual practices, ignoring the fact that the female half of the proletariat has been essentially seeing its position eroded and the gains that women workers made in previous years attacked and destroyed.
And this is, again, largely ignored by the western left, they’ve not dealt with it, they don’t want to deal with it, they would rather it be ignored. And when we say that the western left is a disaster zone that is best jettisoned, this is part of what we’re talking about. It is a complete and utter barren desert of incredibly reactionary practices from which we can learn nothing except negative examples. This is undeniable now.
The defence of prostitution, the defence of pornography, the defence of gender ideology – all of this condemns all the groups and individuals who make these defences as reactionaries, to be discarded. They are agents of the bourgeoisie. Whether the individuals in these organizations understand that’s what they’re doing or not, let’s judge them on the outcome of their actions, not what they proclaim themselves to be in favour of, but what their actions actually achieve. And what their actions objectively achieve is to destroy working class movements when the leftists move to infest them, and to create divisions everywhere and chaos everywhere.
Reject the western left. All of it. Put it in the f…ing bin.”
I ett svar till en chattare tillägger Mckay: “Human intimacy can be a genuinely beautiful thing and pornografied culture has done its best to destroy that. And also think of the mentality, think of how degenerated you got to be as an individual to value pornography over human relationships. Or to think that handing over money to rape a woman represents anything other than a crime.”
Denna paleosocialism eller paleokommunism framstår ju också som uppenbart mer konservativ än dagens höger, som åtminstone i Europa aldrig konsekvent och fullständigt diskuterar dessa frågor från perspektivet av de överordnade värdena på det sätt Mckay gör. Inte minst i Sverige gjorde den tvärtom länge allt för att gå i spetsen för vad som missförstås som “kulturmarxismen”.
Den för högern centrala, definierande, essentiella kapitalismen, dess “marknadsekonomi” och “liberala demokrati”, är förstås vad som möjliggör, framdriver och exploaterar de katastrofala missförhållanden Mckay diskuterar. Det spelar ingen roll hur mycket de höger- och kristkonservativa pratar om etik och moral – inom detta system hjälper det föga, och den i sig ofta viktiga utopismkritiken missbrukas bl.a. för att de ska kunna finna sig tillrätta med dessa påträngande fakta och denna av starka intressenter i deras eget politiska läger önskade situation. Eftersom den mänskliga naturen är syndfull är det ingen idé att göra något åt dem; däremot går det alltid, för att återvända till Engels, att värna den existerande privategendomen, i enlighet med den tolkning man gör av och det man finner politiskt väsentligt i naturrätten…
Det “kulturmarxistiska” ideologiska försvaret för och promotionen av prostitutionen, pornografin och genderideologin kommer ju också, som Mckay betonar, från samma kapitalistiska borgerlighets liberala vänsterfalang – den som numera är identisk med vänstern som sådan, är vad vänstern är.
När socialisten Ambjörnsson försvarade vad han beskrev som en de överordnade värdenas konservatism gick han inte närmare in på de värdefilosofiska frågorna, utan angav bara mycket allmänt tre stora och centrala områden där överordnade värden enligt honom måste erkännas: naturen, kulturen och samlevnadsmoralen.
Olle Bengtsson 
