Oligarchy 11

Ideological confusion and grounded alternatives

At this point, we might be compelled to ask whether our current political concepts, categories, and patterns of thought have been of any practical help or value. The answer is probably some version of yes and no, as we have seen in the broader discussion of degenerated conceptual and ideological forms, and of the dual (and really multifold and variable) character of popular concepts like private property. There is a way that our political discourse has become intentionally ridiculous and self-defeating in its insisting that regular people are accessing and using the same forms and quantities of property as billionaires and global corporations. But this is what the putatively wonky GDPists want you to keep on believing.

It is a way to take concepts we value, like freedom and equality, and make them hollowed-out symbols that obscure much more truth than they reveal. But the clarifying and emancipatory forms and uses of our claimed ideals remain available for use, and embracing them is the only worthwhile response to current elite discourse. That reality-show “debate” has been removed from reality deliberately, on the belief that the American people will accept a form of politics that has been flattened and instrumentalized for ideological purposes. As we have discussed, the ideological purposes here are those of the ruling class within an authoritarian oligarchy, not those of any particular political party or identity or ideology camp.