Nothing Marxist About This Revolution

For some time, I dismissed the female Archbishop of Canterbury and the near-simultaneous graffiti installation at Canterbury Cathedral as irrelevant -- the Church of England itself probably became irrelevant around the time C S Lewis died (November 22, 1963); the great uncle of the current Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church abdicated over whether he should marry a divorced woman, a religious issue that never remotely disqualified his grandnephew, whose marital situation was identical.

In fact, there was a time when designating a woman bishop of any sort would have been the province of medieval Lords of Misrule. If it's done now with even a faded aura of seriousness is an indication of how things have changed -- but this isn't the world proletarian revolution that loomed over the leisiured class for more than a century. Communist regimes dynamited churches. The 1911 Mexican revolution aimed to destroy the Catholic Church. The current revolution doesn't want to destroy religion as its enemy -- it wants to retain it as something farcical.

Key to this is the use of public space. Let's keep in mind that central to Marxist regimes was the ceremonial public space, in the Soviet Union Red Square, in Beijing Tiananmen Square. Anyhone who defaced either space would be severely punished. Under current Western regimes, there are no such sanctions; homeless people, street thugs, needles, and condoms abound, as well as graffiti, in major public spaces. The deterioration of Washington's Union Station, in many ways an eqwuivalent national space, despite repeated attempts over seven decades to restore it, is a good example.

I think this is behind the deliberate installation of graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, a major UK public space. In effect, the ruling class is symbolically turning it over to the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's underclass of street criminals, prostitutes, pimps, and vagabonds. It isn't dynamiting it or maybe turning it into a secular museum, which a socialist regime would do -- it's just turning it into a slum alleyway. Meanwhile, the quasi-archbishop whose seat is at that same cathedral is about as close as decorum will currently allow to a drag queen. Under a socialist revolution, that archbishop would face a firing squad.

So what's happening in Anglo-America is not a Marxist-Leninist or socialist revolution. Let's look at what's currently happening in the US. The vanguard cities of the revolution right now are Portland and Chicago. The current mayor of Portland is also head of a family business he inherited. His most recent predecessor, who in many ways turned Portland into what it is now, is a member of a multigenerational rentier family.

The Governor of Illinois, J B Pritzker, is a member of an extremely wealthy rentier family; his sister is the head of the Harvard Corporation. Pritzker is one of the most vocal opponents of Donald Trump. Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, is a member of another wealthy and influential family closely associated with the rentier Getty fortune. He's also one of Trump's most vocal opponents.

Gordon Getty, the son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, and Newsom's father, William Newsom III, were lifelong friends. The Getty family provided support to Gavin Newsom as a teenager and invested in his business ventures; they also have funded his political career.. William III was an attorney and advisor to the Getty family, delivering the ransom money during the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty's grandson.

But the single issue right now that's driving the revolution that wealthy Oregonians, the Pritzkers, and the Gettys via the Newsoms support is illegal migrants. In Portland, Chicago, and California, they're difficult to distinguish from the homeless and street criminals, simply because so many illegals are also homeless and street criminals. There's a natural alliance among them; we can probably update Marx's definition of the Lumpenproletariat to include illegal migrants, especially since this is a worldwide phenomenon.

So what we're in effect seeing, as I've been saying here for a while, is an alliance between the upper bourgeoisie, the wealthy rentier class and the closely associated upper managerial class, with the Lumpenproletariat, which in the 21st century includes illegal migrants, and also, if we give the matter some thought, sexual deviants. This is why we see so many trans people associated with violence against the lower bourgeoisie -- Tesla dealers, churchgoers, conservative activists.

Where is this headed? It's certainly an uneasy coalition and hardly a natural alliance. On the other hand, what's also developing is that the traditional working class, hourly laborers, is being forced into a natural alliance with the lower bourgeoisie, IT workers, small business people, clerical workers, and the like.

I think this is the tendency that links what we're seeing in the US with what we're seeing in the Church of England -- the alliance of the upper bourgeoisie with the Lumpenproletariat seems to have as its goal, whether or not its final goal, a simple increase in overall disorder. How this benefits anyone is beyond me.