Arena Magazine is what happens when neoliberal Professional Mangerial Class sophists inbreed

https://arena.org.au/sempiternal-return

This is a perfect snapshot of the shortcomings of upper middle class, Professional-Managerial Class, corporate-captured liberalism.

They start off well enough; since the New Deal, a growing corporate reaction has sought to wind back reform and reimpose the rule of what, in more honest days, was called the ‘corrupt aristocracy of wealth;”

cf https://kimphillipsfein.com/books/fear-city/
https://kimphillipsfein.com/books/invisible-hands/

Then they’re all, the left got caught napping and is being made to look a bit like it doesn’t know its arse from its elbow:

In the very next breaths, however, Arena adds:

To the expertise of bought academics, Bernie Sanders is the epitome of left politics. Not, I don’t know, Noam Chomsky. Not Howard Zinn. Not any historical figure from Emma Goldman to Che fucking Guevara for pete’s sake.

People are confused though, especially the peasants who feel like they’re spending their lives being reduced to leased slaves and brood mares for capital raising kids to working age in a for-profit economy completely for free.

https://aifs.gov.au/research/family-matters/no-37/value-care-and-nurture-provided-unpaid-household-work

Class politics are ‘outdated,’ apparently because that’s what Arena prefers to believe, even despite just acknowledging a generalised structural crisis of a class-based system! And the midst of corporate insurgency and capture of federal politics, and the kind of trademarking of freedom and democracy it has just been talking about. Any questions lol.

cf. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/31/australias-weak-donation-laws-allowed-1bn-in-dark-money-to-go-to-political-parties-over-two-decades

Class politics are a relic of a bygone era

But then we find that something associated with capital is fucking the planet. Also we need to have a class frame for working out solutions.

What the living fuck are you on about Arena, seriously. Pick a fucking lane, Jesus fucking wept.

The conclusion is in keeping with this utter dog’s breakfast of political commentary:

We’ve got a counterterrorist genocide of people with claims over hundreds of billions of dollars worth of natural gas in the sea off Gaza, coming on top of two counterterrorist imperialist wars for oil, but simps who don’t get it are laying blame at the feet of capitalism and imperialism? What obvious flogs.

Next thing you know, simps will be complaining that the endless growth economy tries to force a fit with a finite planet in definace of causality, and that social and class hierarchies are positively sacred, but personal boundaries not so much. The mischief we get up to minus a testamur huh.

A long time ago Gilles Dauve pointed out that bourgeois liberals would pave the way for fascism by defending its root causes (capitalism) from the left.

https://classautonomy.info/fascism-anti-fascism/

That single-issue liberals try to co-opt progressivism, for the purposes of rolling class hierarchies in egalitarianism glitter, is well-known.

https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Forerunners_-Ideas-First-Catherine-Liu-Virtue-Hoarders_-The-Case-against-the-Professional-Managerial-Class-University-of-Minnesota-Press-2020.pdf
https://classautonomy.info/the-rise-of-respectability-politics/
https://classautonomy.info/virtue-hoarders-and-the-rejection-of-liberalism/

That they fuck left politics in so doing is well known.

These issues are known–long known even–to any number of people other than well-paid, big knob academics whose idea of superior intellectual praxis is name-calling and labeling. The current state of world politics, by contrast, is no reflection of failure, or any shortcomings at all, on the part of those whose commentary makes us wonder who they want to convince most.

If what Noam Chomsky said about the state school system, ie that it is a ‘system of imposed ignorance,’ remains as true as ever, then this is remains just as true the neoliberal academy in its final death rattles. If the standard of commentary in flagship academic liberal publications is anything to go by, all that remains of liberal academia is the output of those trying to retain their personal privileges and status as the world dies.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003467960-3/violent-silence-framing-social-causes-climate-related-crises-jesse-ribot

Also do you reckon intellectual inbreeding makes you dumb. Looks a bit like it doesn’t it. If you’re going to cancel people who better you, make sure you can still halfway do the work.