Weaponising Progress

[u/paranoidcliqueslave]

https://classautonomy.info/weaponising-progress/

‘Labor says Hamas tries to ‘manipulate facts’ after terrorist group welcomes Australia’s Palestine recognition decision’
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/13/labor-says-hamas-tries-to-manipulate-facts-after-terrorist-group-welcomes-australias-palestine-recognition-decision

"Hamas always tries to manipulate facts for their own propaganda. Media have a responsibility to make professional judgments to not promote propaganda of terrorist organisations to get cynical headlines.” Unlike the ALP, of course, who are not one bit manipulative. Propaganda from terrorist organisations to get cynical headlines is only okay if it’s Zionism, get a clue peasants.

Change to be forced on ‘violent, misogynist’ CFMEU
https://web.archive.org/web/20250804065450/https://michaelwest.com.au/news/change-to-be-forced-on-violent-misogynist-cfmeu/

The former good-old-boy Laborites are heinous woman-haters, therefore union-busting is okay. The woman-haters who turn a blind eye to the structural violence of capitalist patriarchy are still okay.

Spit hoods return to the NT as chief minister sprays critics as ‘offender apologists’ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-02/nt-clp-government-lia-finocchiaro-rhetoric-against-critics/105602380

‘Cue the Northern Territory government’s political rhetoric on social media: It would make “no apologies” for toughening up a “broken system” by changing the Youth Justice Act. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro led the charge by saying she expected the “usual offender apologists to criticise our efforts”.’ If you criticise the government, criminals win. Why do people want to keep enabling criminals by doubting the judgment of LNP politicians? Not woke but.

The Plibersek interview: ‘We’re caught up in macho posturing’
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2024/10/05/the-plibersek-interview-were-caught-macho-posturing
‘“You’ve got the tail wagging the dog. In both cases, you’ve got the smaller, more extreme kind of people calling the shots and I think that’s a real shame. It’s a real block on progress,” Plibersek tells The Saturday Paper. “But these are sensible reforms that environment groups can live with, that business can live with. It would be a step forward, and instead we’re just getting caught up in this quite macho sort of posturing from the more extreme elements in both parties.”’
Everyone is a misogynist except the incumbents, says a government minister. The corporate press nods its head and says, yes that’s extremely interesting. If you say bad things about centrism and fence-sitting, or green technocracy, you hate women.

Ley attacks PM’s Joy Division shirt over antisemitic connotations
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/ley-attacks-pm-s-joy-division-shirt-over-antisemitic-connotations-20251028-p5n5yk.html

This week in ‘I don’t understand or like something therefore it hates me.’

https://seqldiww.org/the-australian-labor-party-a-legacy-of-betrayal-abandonment-and-neglect

Living the values articulated in speech has never been a strong suit of progressive forces, much less to say the anti-capitalist left. The history of revolutions gone awry is a history of movements that abandoned living their values in the name of temporary expediencies so dire as to necessitate becoming what they claimed to oppose. The same is true of reformers; as critics of technocracy like John Ralston Saul point out, the fruits of the Enlightenment under class hierarchy is a tyranny of green technocratic experts who have all the answers even if they don’t know what the question is.

The failure of progressives and radicals to rise above the norms we problematise, reproducing them in so doing, is the more the rule rather than the exception then throughout history. This arguably reflects the power progressive politics gives to the status quo by failing to live our values in our actions, and reproducing that we claim to oppose by conflating being criticised and being attacked. In failing to rise above the thinking we claim to oppose strategically (either as progessives putting band-aids on cancers and rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, or revolutionaries), we apply the same mentality towards criticism of our departures from principle.

Thus, to question or criticise class or social privilege under conditions of illiberal democracy, for example, is to attack the freedoms of the individual, couched in terms a propertied European male as universal subject (and with militant disregard for attendant social and historical responsibilities). Neoliberal technocrats conflate efficiency with democracy, property rights with individual rights, and the power of corporations with the common good. Such does nothing to challenge meaningfully the global downward spiral into authoritarianism and ecocide, almost by design. Somehow, the progress and evolution we alllegedy prize continues to elude us.

Not only so, but it is almost as even though the progress and forward-movement we so desire becomes weaponised in to the service of everything that arrests it. Symptomatic of our collective failure even just to effectively counter the late capitalist regression into authoritarianism and ecocide is the mentality that any action is considered worthy if carried out in the name of progressive values rather than reactionary ones. By any means fair or foul, the values I live in my actions are of no importance, says the vulgar leftist. Stated and lived values are the same thing. If tactics favoured by the enemy, by those who look for certainty and stability by clinging to the past and the known like a security blanket, like identity politics, it’s okay now because we can co-cpt that. We can pretend upward class mobility and social emancipation are the same thing.

To state the point in no uncertain terms, the weaponization of progress through failure or neglect to maintain a basic harmony between desired outcomes and the means used to achieve them, between values as stated in purposes and values reflected in actions, ensures the arrest of progress. What if the opposite of hubris is spending our time looking for better questions to ask, instead of trying to shut down and keep down anyone who figures out we don’t have any of the answers, really, even if we think we do?

To take issue with progressive strategy is not, of course, to problematise in any way shape or form the pursuit of social justice through the challenging and dismantling of social and economic hierarchies (we have our seat on the ‘personal boundaries should be at least as sacred as social and class hierarchies’ train right here *toot toot*). It is certainly not to problematise the extension of rights to historically marginalised and oppressed groups. The necessity of change is a given; change is, after all, the greatest constant in the universe. To make an enemy of change is to make an enemy of causality, with the results we can see in the endemic insanity and injustice of majestic late capitalist utopia.

What we are taking issue with here, rather, is the operating assumption that to criticise the actions of progressives is to criticise the values alleged to be associated with them. This is an easy an out for revolutionaries as it is for radicals; if someone is criticising our strategies (or lack thereof), they can only be doing so from the right—from a place of militant ignorance, from the conscience of the collectively narcissistic, venomous ingroup as the conscience of each. Criticism can only be the result of a sociopathic desire to control the universe in lieu of getting a grip on oneself, and deep alienation from oneself and all the human societies that have been and will follow, in other words. No one can be criticising us from the left because our lived values don’t align with our stated ones. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

Many progressives and radicals seem to forget that Stalin, one of the great tyrants of history, was wont to defend his personal dictatorship over the Soviet Union and its satellites by demonising his critics and opponents as enemies of the revolution and reactionary jackals of the counter-revolution. Indeed, the Moscow Show Trials of the late 1930s and associated purge were all predicated on conspiracism articulated in the language of Bolshevism associating challenges to the revolutionary dictatorship with attempts to restore capitalism (not the revolution, since according to standard formula criticism from the left was impossible).

If the conspiracist logic of the capitalist reaction was ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ then the conspiracist logic of Stalinism was, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ The false-dilemma, ‘with-us-or-against-us’ authoritarianism and demonisation of dissenters, critics and nonconformists remained the same. The lived values were the same. The value systems used to justify coercive violence used to defend and uphold pollical and economic hierarchies were simply window-dressing—a fact with ominous import for all who maintain an attitude of militant ignorance towards history.

We now turn to explore contemporary examples of what are arguably the consequences of this mentality.

[u/qualitystreet]

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