BEYOND EVEN TOM WOLFE'S ABILITY TO PARODY?

During the previous Consciousness Revolution, it was Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers at some event for the High Society types.

These days, there's the Met Gala, and we're not talking about a baseball team.

The Dacquoise is iced. The warm rhubarb tortes are in the ovens. The guest list has been personally curated by the Vogue Editrix Anna Wintour herself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the East Side of Central Park in the 80’s, is perfectly lit. The red carpet is rolled out. The theme, “Garden of Time”, is magical. And, oops, it’s “Day of Rage”. Here come the “Free Palestine” hippies. This could get good.

We are not jealous that we are never invited. I think all of the Victory Girls Goddesses would rather get our teeth cleaned than attend the Met Gala to benefit the Costume Institute. We do write about the Gala every year. There is always something that arrives at the corner of High Art and Idiocy. Remember the year that AOC wore that “Tax the Rich” dress? This year, the Costume Institute is debuting “Sleeping Beauty: Reawakening Fashion” so Garden of Time is an apt theme. Unfortunately, the Upper East Side was double-booked with the Day of Rage. Oops!

It doesn’t look like too many protestors got over to the Met Gala during Red Carpet time. On X (Twitter), actress Patricia Heaton said that there is more police protection for the celebs at the Gala than Jewish students trying to get to class. Ain’t that the truth. Then, Anna Wintour has more pull with the cops than the Jewish students.

No, apparently neither Leonard Bernstein nor Squeaky were available to comp the lot into the event. Victory Girl Toni Williams warns us not to laugh. "We really shouldn’t laugh at these historically ignorant little turds. They are truly dangerous."  She's right, though: radical chic is still with us.  "Every single person who walked that red carpet is responsible for these Day of Rage hippies. Every. Single. Solitary. One. Of. Them. Enjoy the warm rhubarb tarts fools."

The "days of rage hippies," however, have an authenticity that Daily Beast propagandist Kali Holloway lacks.

Even in an era filled with the horrors of late-stage capitalism run amok—bipartisan support for genocide; rolling back of reproductive, civil, and voting rights; a threadbare social safety net; decades of wage stagnation; tax cuts for the the rich; the crushing of unions and labor rights; expansion of the militarized police surveillance state; creeping techno-authoritarianism; untested, unregulated, and unchecked A.I.; entrenched racial inequality and injustice; right-wing and white supremacist extremist violence; and Boeing jet parts falling from the sky like so many dead whistleblowers—that kind of frivolous urgency promises that this year’s event nonetheless will stand out as a vainglorious display of self-congratulatory decadence and tone-deaf extravagance.

As opposed, I suppose, to the self-congratulatory ignorance and tone-deaf posturing that that "late-stage capitalism" connotes.  Whenever I see that expression, I see some sort of secular eschatology at work; the end times are upon us, and the fetus of socialized labor is about to burst the water of the capitalist integument.  Ms Holloway takes in the Marie Antoinette of it all: "I think the Met Gala offers some moments for fun to interrupt the endless doom-scroll that is our times."

Read João Camargo and Leonor Canadas in Common Dreams, though, and apparently it is still up to the vanguard to induce that labor.  "The Global Left Must Dare to Win on a Tight Deadline."  The fetus, however, has not yet quickened.

It is time we—the left in social movements as well as the left in unions or political parties—come to terms with our own failures and face the present and future head-on, with courage and confidence. If we don't organise for revolt and rebel now, there very simply might not be a chance to do it in the future.

The left is facing tremendous crises. These crises are visible in its lack of vision, its lack of excitement for the future, its lack of plans for power, its lack of confidence in the possibility of victory, and an overall fear of taking risks. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The less we believe and the less we risk, the less chances we have of actually succeeding. These crises then manifest in reduced mobilization capacity, mobilizing without transformational objectives, poor electoral results, and simply accepting to play within the rules of a game which we were never supposed to play, a game we were historically responsible for breaking. General alienation, apathy, and poor material analysis in regards to the meaning of our combined crises is of huge concern. This isn't a pathway to move forward; it has no possibility of succeeding.

We've seen enough of what "transformational objectives" in a game the vanguardists are "historically responsible for breaking" looks like.  It's not pretty.  You'd think, also, that nearly two centuries of attempting to frighten people with doomsday scenarios that never materialize would give the vanguardists some modesty.

Decades have gone by since we have first heard about the environmental and climate crises and the need for a productive transition away from fossil fuels and the destruction wreaked by constant expansion and intensification of production. Almost 20 years have gone by since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 shook the world and the neoliberal hegemony, and since we witnessed and joined with hope, rage, and excitement the beginning of years full of popular discontentment turned into rebellions, uprisings, occupations, mass protests, and other mobilizations, calling for structural changes, from the Arab Spring to Occupy and Indignados.

Each of those events was supposed to bring on the End Times.  A Millerite preacher would be more honest.  Not these indignados.

In that period we needed more ambition and less compromise, more radical vision and bold proposals, revolutionary programs and practices. We had almost none of it. We were lulled by the siren's song of incremental change and got pushed further back than in decades. We are still being pushed back, but this time toward a cliff.

It's the End Times, with all the implications of the Revelation according to Karl.  Or is it the Revelation according to John?

The far-right occupied the anti-system space and rhetoric that has been left mostly vacant. It is irrelevant that the far right is the frontline of the defense of capitalism; narrative power is power and it has a material expression. They have taken an important part of that rhetoric, with the left standing defending decrepit institutions of late capitalism and letting itself be equated with the status quo.

The years ahead will be years of mass social discontent and unrest. The only way for that to not become fuel for fascism and the far right is if new power arises on the left, setting up ruptural programs of social and productive transformation and adopting compatible strategies and tactics, pushing for system change and the revolution required to achieve it. If the political and social left doesn't step up, any existing polarization will be between the far right and the extreme center, which will result in the collapse not only of capitalism, but of the material conditions for large scale human civilization.

Wherever there is mass social discontent and unrest, there the Angry Left will be, with their purity tests and their sectarianism. It will not be pretty.  The potential for faction fighting and recriminations seems even greater this time around than it was in the days of radical chic.

An ecosocialist left must emerge now, ready to step-up and plan for power, articulated at the global scale. This must be an internationalist ecosocialist left, which is anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and trans-feminist. It must be a left that is not willing to give up on a new future and is ready to imagine and build the pathways to win it.

The struggle continues, but it won't continue forever. The environmental and climate crises set deadlines for change to happen. We must be honest and serious about what climate collapse means to our struggles for justice, peace and wages, bread, housing, education, and health for all: It means we need strategies to win these battles in the short term, not in the long run. These strategies are beyond the horizon of elections and electoral cycles, they must refuse any role of mere conciliator of class interests.

The struggle ahead is a class struggle. The elites of capitalism have declared a war to the death on humanity by perpetuating an economic system dependent on fossil fuels. No other war will bring about as much death, destruction, and violence as the war waged by them on the working people, under fossil-fueled capitalism. No amount of propaganda around green transition can hide the simple fact that there is no transition happening, there is only a share of renewables entering a continuously expanding energy system used to destroy everything, while pushing many territories over the threshold of livability.

The task ahead is system change—a full and radical transformation of our socioeconomic system in the short term. For that, an ecosocialist revolutionary left is essential.

Sure, throw in all the culture studies buzz-words.  It will play well in the common room.  Fortunately, it will be harder to draw up on the blackboard, let alone implement in practice, than the farcical reprise of the Welfare Economics Paradigm the Jarrett regency is inflicting on us.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.  The ecosocialist revolution will bring death, perhaps on a scale that would make Stalin or Mao look like amateurs.