It’s Not All Bad: Introduction

Sources Within Marxism for a Critique of Scientistic (Medical, Energy) Techno-Idolatry

Dec 16, 2024

I am a member of a tiny minority of socialists, all around the world, who have been guided by the writings of Marxist scholars such as Kees van der Pijl and David A. Hughes, and by our own basic Marxist “gut sense”, to come to a very negative, critical appraisal of the Great Reset, the pandemics, the vaccine mandates, lockdowns, etc. We do not believe that these “public health measures”, taken by the ruling class, are actually meant to serve the public’s health: any more than WWI was fought to end all wars, that the genocide in the Mideast today is being conducted by the Zionist government to defend the Jews who live there from ani-Semitism, that Operation Desert Storm or the War on Terror was to free the Arab people from tyranny, or that the wars in Central America in the 80s and 90s or those in Indochina in the 1950s-70s, were conducted to free those peoples from totalitarianism. Instead, the common denominator for all these operations was instead the expansion of ruling class power and profit.

What makes sense to us is the following, from an article on Red Fire Online, “Stop the Great Reset”.

Socialists are the last ones to oppose the use of technology to advance society, and in fact are its foremost advocates. However, as long as the working class does not have its hands on the reigns of state power, the capitalist ruling classes will use advances in technology for their advantage, and no one else’s. If technological advances allow capitalist state authorities to track and trace workers, to determine their ideological and political identities in an instant, to block “undesirables” (such as those who refuse what is most likely an extremely dangerous and experimental Covid vaccine) from accessing public transport or traveling overseas, then they will do it. The further the system of production for private profit drags society down, the greater the degree of political repression is required by the ruling elite. While technological improvements can make some aspects of workers’ lives easier, the agents of big capital can also use them for merciless tyranny.[i]

A source of considerable consternation for us “medical freedom” socialists is that within the socialist movement, we are such a tiny minority. Why can’t we get most of our socialist brethren to see this common denominator? As a result of this blindness, if we want to fight against the Reset, we are left working with a population consisting of right wing, anti-communist “libertarians”, Greens demoralized by their own leadership’s failure to smell the coffee, and anarchists who openly advocate irrationalism and anti-intellectualism. Because of their upper middle, or lumpen proletarian class status, they are steeped in bourgeois ideology and group- or individual-egocentric psychological, authoritarian attitudes. Few have even an inkling that the struggle against the Great Reset is part and parcel of the class struggle between Labor and Capital. Instead, in one form or another, they indulge themselves in what Wilson Carey McWilliams, in his book, The Idea of Fraternity in America, called “the old liberal utopia: a world of total private liberty and the ability to gratify [immediate] desires, in which a fraternal ‘instinct’ will [nevertheless] emerge” to make everything alright. They believe the struggle they must fight, is the same as that fought by their ancestors at Lexington and Concord: the perennial battle for “freedom against tyranny!”.

It's quite apparent that these people never read the opening paragraphs of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Not that anyone would ever expect them to; nor that the original Sons of Liberty—with the exception of Tom Paine, who died penniless, and Daniel Shays, whose later populist movement was crushed--ended their lives tragically. But the ideas of these latter day SoL’s are indeed quite farcical, nevertheless. In their minds, the tyranny they fight is directed chiefly by the Chinese Communist Party and other “Marxiocrats”, not at all by “the agents of Big Capital”. Or if they do have some conception of the fact that this whole scheme is indeed being run by eugenicist billionaires, the appearance of these billionaires onto the world stage of history, they see as merely a fluke. Get the right billionaires—like Trump--in there! Or at least end their capture of the regulatory agencies, by having honest bureaucrats appointed!

Thus the elementary exigencies of actually building a successful movement to save humanity from the horrors contemplated for us by the likes of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and Yuval Harari—the need for democratic centralist organization, the importance of debate and discussion, and of formulating a transitional program appealing to the working class—these exigencies, our new found “comrades” completely reject—some of them viciously (social ostracism, and even threatening to get the Marxist fired from his job, because they charge that his critiques of their autocratic, dysfunctional modus operandi “disrupt our [neo-LaRouchite] unity!”). A mass popular movement bent on equality will interfere with their own individual and group preservation/pursuit of superior status and the main chance[ii].

Let’s return, then (with almost a sense of relief!) to our own socialist brethren. How, for our brethren, is the ruling class able to wrap a veritable yellow police tape line, demanding that we “do not criticize medical science” around their draconian campaign to digitally control, and/or depopulate the global working class? Why is the response of our brethren to whisper instead their awe of these new (and completely untested) “lifesaving” wonder drugs? If they criticize anything, it’s the fact that the global poor don’t have access to these drugs. This is why, to them, the assassination of a Health Insurance CEO is understandable, if deplorable: and why, only deplorable, the interrogation of child and dog mass murderer Anthony Fauci by U.S. Congressional Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The former was in response to the denial of “health” care to ordinary people; the latter challenged this “care” itself.

Overcome by the ideology of scientistic (medical and energy) techno-idolatry (STI), today’s Left has betrayed that mission. Before the plandemic, vis a vis such toxic technologies as fracking, nuclear energy, and traditional vaccines, STI only crippled the Left, disabled it from fully taking on Lenin’s instruction in What is to be Done that we play the role of the “tribune of the people”, exposing every outrage perpetrated by the ruling class against any member of the general population. Becoming able to set one’s tap water on fire, suffering heightened cancer risk due to a nearby nuclear reactor meltdown, and watching one’s kids become neurologically damaged because one’s doctor assured one that the traditional vaccines, never tested against a real placebo, laden with adjutants like mercury, aluminum, et alia, were nevertheless “safe and effective”—all these are outrages: mostly ignored by the socialist Left. The victims were treated like cranks and crackpots. The Left took on the role natural to its middle class leaders, one of stifling dissent and of alibiing the evils of capitalism to the working class. Not the liberator; not the tribune.

With the Left’s support of lockdowns, social tracking, social distancing and mRNA vaccine mandates, this became yet another historic betrayal, much like, at the beginning of the last century, the Social Democratic/Labour Parties, overwhelmed by the ideology of national chauvinism, betrayed their historic mission of leading the working class to victory over their class enemies, by supporting their own nationalist side in the fratricidal mayhem of World War I. Programmed by STI, instead of critiquing these obvious attacks upon the global working class and defending this class against them, the vast majority of socialists went right along with it. As Jeremiah Hosea has said repeatedly on his Progressive Radio Network show, “The Bass Line”, if we had stood up against this horror, “our sails would have swelled”. The fortunes of the ruling class, as it resorts to such measures in its desperate attempt to hold on to its rule, swelled instead. We—or rather you—enabled a catastrophe.[iii]

With his substack article, “The Left’s Love Affair with Technology,” Vincent Kelley has done a great deed by exposing the roots of techno-idolatry within both pre-Marxist utopian socialism, and Marx and Engels’ own writings.[iv] However, his account falls short and is somewhat one sided. As I will attempt to show, and while it might shock those of our brethren who have bought into the medical-techno-idolatrous ideology decried by Kelley, there is much in the Marxist canon to be relied upon as a source for the sentiments quoted above from Red Fire Online. Those sentiments are very much in line with the First and Second Discourses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: as I will also discuss. I believe these had a far greater influence upon Marx and Engels’ thought, than did the other, more techno-idolatrous, Enlightenment and utopian socialist thinkers did.

It is not, therefore, the case by any means that Marxism’s legacy alone guides our brethren into their blinkered ignorance of the real meaning and danger of the Great Reset. As I will attempt to illustrate, there is also the more tarnished legacy of the early twentieth century Progressive ideology, popular among the upper middle class, and infecting socialist thinkers and leaders due to their own, hard-won rise into socio-economic positions of middle class and even bureaucratic ruling caste social status, power, and privilege. Thus there have also been sociological factors involved.

[i] https://redfireonline.com/2020/12/16/stop-the-great-reset/

[ii] a. See my article, “A very critical note from MC on the MFA/P”, at https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/a-very-critical-note-from-mc-on-the

b. Though he is by no means a Marxist, see John Spritzler’s article, “My Personal Experience with Upper Middle-Class Leaders of Reform Organizations Is This: They FEAR Egalitarian Revolution and Squash Democratic Efforts of the Rank-and-File Even to Express that Goal’” at