The New Vampire Slayers

In my ever-tentative ventures around the surging maelstrom that constitutes the (AHEM!) dissident realms of the internet, I have seen a resurgence, or perhaps just a fortification, of derogatory echoes around the “C” word i.e. “Conspiracy”. This is a word that has been, as it were, excommunicated as the main strategy in a disembowelling manoeuvre that has been astonishingly successful.

The upsurge in the offensive against “conspiratorial thinking” is not at all surprising. That other “C” word, “Covid” signalled the unveiling of the most audaciously open propaganda exercise quite possibly of all time. And it was notable for three reasons:

• First, the claims made were obviously fraudulent from the very beginning. Very old people with multiple illnesses were dying – a fact that wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow at any previous time. Suddenly the media reacted by blowing up this commonplace fact into the realm of some malevolent supernatural phenomenon. It actually took months before the arrival of any even vaguely plausible claim that the young were affected at all – and that effect was due to the panic inducing “covid protection manoeuvres”. It was all, to be frank, a pile of steaming shit.

• Second, from the very beginning this pile of steaming shit was being shoved down everyone’s throat everywhere and from every channel. The entire global media shoved it out. The inevitable arrival of dissident voices was quashed by sidelining them and ridiculing them.

• Third, the Covid Operation was the basis for the most repressive and terroristic policies ever seen in any Western society – policies that the Nazis would have envied.

And so, to return to the second point, the vastly questionable initial claims whose threadbare credibility was practically non-existent were thundered throughout every major official organ of the global media. And the bizarre imbecility of the whole presentation constituted the most violent slap in the face to those “rational” souls aggressively resistant to all notion of conspiracy.

So, what did we have here? Only the most obvious and unavoidable indication of …yes! a global conspiracy. The Grand Pandemic Pantomime comprised the single most audaciously open evidence of any conspiracy ever.

The scarcely believable success of this phenomenon demands a little background.

Orwell That Ends Well

In his afterword to 1984, Orwell proposed the notion that, if you can control the language people use, you can influence the way they think. And effectively, the machinations of our media have “disappeared” the word “conspiracy”.

“Conspiracy” means a group making secret plans which affect others who don’t know about it. It’s practically the norm in politics.

Michael Parenti summed it up (emphasis added):

We ordinary folks are concerned about our interests. You make plans, you make calculations: should I get a part-time job when I go to school next year, where will I live, what about tuition costs, or whatever you plan about. School teachers get together and try to organize to defend their interests, farmers get together and try to organize in advance and defend their interests. But the minute we ascribe conscious organization and concern to the people who actually own most of the land, labor, capital, markets, and technology of this world (not just this country), someone will say, ``You have a conspiracy theory.’‘ The minute you ascribe conscious agency to the ruling elites, you are thought to have a conspiracy theory. It is a really interesting and rather predictable reaction. If you want to call that conspiracy, you can. I call it something else. I say they are defending their corporate interests and maximizing them at our expense.

I agree with the above apart from the last bit which shows that even Michael Parenti is making allowances for the Orwellian manoeuvre of demonising a word in order to demonise a concept.

And old Orwell’s presciently described tactic has been most fruitful. Both the C word (conspiracy) and the G word (gender) have undergone remarkable transformations which have had the effect of negating them. “Gender” has been sundered from its connection with sex i.e. the thing that alone made it meaningful. You may as well sunder the word “circle” from the word “round”.

And “conspiracy” is now bound up so much with the notion of madness, gullibility, stupidity etc. that it might be regarded as a label for a mythical creature. When you say “conspiracy”, you may as well say “unicorn”. Received wisdom says that conspiracies are as fantastical as unicorns.

Or at least, that’s how the “plebian” angle goes. The cultured erudite Marxist angle is truly something else. And that is where this tale begins.

Marxing Up

As the post-World War Two Western boom started to stretch its worryingly expanding leisure periods out, and especially after the JFK assassination provoked an increasingly large number of people to start wondering, it became increasingly necessary to go a little further than just implanting cat-calls into the minds of the less reflective.

And don’t forget that it was The Left who were popularly regarded as “the dissident side”. These verbose academic minds had to be directed onto manageable channels. And so, the most ferocious policing of the mind was applied generally to “The Left” and specifically to “The Marxists”. Thus, the reconfiguration of the C word was ceaselessly applied. And specifically targeted at The Marxists. So much so that you might as well consider the early 60s to be the moment when the C word was cast out of the heavens and all pathways to it sealed by an impenetrable labyrinth of incantations.

Anyone who has ambitions of ascending to the highest organisational platform of dissent, i.e. the hallowed area designated “Marxism”, must undergo the requisite initiation. He must kneel, cross himself, and bow his head with humility to receive the proper ordination. He must be indoctrinated into the faith whereby the banished C word must be forever barred from his thought by the designated rhetorical procedures operating like the old anti-vampire tools of wooden stake, garlic, holy water etc.

And, as it eventually turned out, the impregnable fortress of Marxist conspiracy phobia was not merely ideal but absolutely necessary for the establishment of that aforementioned most brazen of all propagandist achievements: Covid.

Epistemological Point

At which point we should clear up a (deliberately sewn) misconception. When dealing with conspiracy, we are dealing with secrecy. Conspiracies by definition are shrouded in darkness. Which means that the conspiracy-phobic who (defensively) shout out for “proof” – as in specific names and addresses and complete explication of methods – are, very much consciously, demanding the impossible.

But this does not undermine the suspicion of conspiracy.

To put it crudely, when the entire media shovels shit – and brutally repressive homicidal shit – then you don’t have to know who is doing it or how it’s done to know that someone is doing it somehow.

And now to the main feature of this essay: an update from the central chamber of the Marxist Masonic Lodge. And the following link shows a most illuminating survey of those priestly weapons to protect against The Evil C.

The Pipers The Pipers Are Calling

Marxism Contra Conspiracy

Look at that date. February 2026. Six years after all this shit began. Any sign of progress? Or some glimmer of independent thought? The title tells all:

Marxism Contra Conspiracy

Lacanian Theory and the Politics of Conspiracy

Daniel Tutt

“Lacanian Theory”! Bet you can’t wait! Daniel lays it all out right away:

The Lacanian philosopher Glyn Daly claims that conspiracy theories thrive because they parody and feed off of the ‘ambient madness’ of global capitalism. The conspiracist has found a way to disentangle the nets of madness that cloud our political present. It is important to recognize that this madness is a result of built-in limitations to our political system brought about by the structural constraints of bourgeois politics. In order for capitalism to be possible there must be a case made for its irrational elements to have some potential for mitigation and course correction. As capitalist politics ceases to provide any credible hope for basic collective improvement, conspiracy theories often take root and become increasingly prevalent.

Now isn’t that interesting? Note the imagery invoked here: “madness” repeated three time in the one paragraph. “built-in limitations … structural constraints …irrational elements… mitigation and course correction… ceases to provide any credible hope” Note the negative tone i.e. the implication that the poor capitalist system basically does nothing and seemingly cannot do anything. No planning, no foresight.

After which, stuff about bourgeois ideology’s “prohibition against naming or confronting the monstrous, structural realities of the capitalist order”. Structural realities which “must be reflexively disavowed, displaced, or rendered invisible”. See? It isn’t conspiracy that is “rendered invisible” (which is a tautology). After all, we all “know” there is no conspiracy. No, it’s all down to those structural movements.

After which, we engage automatic pilot on that old academic discourse:

Psychoanalytic theorists of the social and political such as Alenka Zupančič in her new work Disavowal have opened up new layers of epistemological understanding into these dynamics. Her work has helped us to understand the sophistication involved with these reflexive disavowal mechanisms and thus from a Marxist and socialist point of view, her work helps us understand the limits of contemporary bourgeois ideology.

Which leads on to “The Political Epistemology of Conspiracy” which “is lower and indeed more crude than the mechanistic materialist”. Ah you can already feel the gears of invective swinging into operation.

The Lacanian theorist Glyn Daly notes that conspiracy theories have a Kantian epistemology that is ‘hyper realist.’ Their epistemology is Kantian because they propose that there is a blocking of the truth behind appearances. But they are not truly Kantian because …

And so on. We tumble inevitably into “what Lacan calls the ‘big Other.’”

And then this descent into erudite vacuity:

And importantly, for the conspiracist, the big Other is embodied and is locatable—the conspiracist refuses to see the big Other as a set of effects that are not directly embodied but rather combined effects that emerge out of a series of complex relations.

We are presented with something “not directly embodied” consisting of “combined effects” and “a series of complex relations” as opposed to (God forbid!) any “tangible, identifiable agency”.

And at this point we behold an acceleration of that old conspiracy-phobic mantra in which conspiracy theory apparently posits an “all‑powerful force behind social events—one that can be filled by any number of candidates, from a shadowy world government to QAnon to the Illuminati”.

And this leads inevitably to an intensification of the old psychobabble and the damning pronouncement:

The Lacanian twist to this Manichaean worldview is as follows: what the conspiracist cannot escape is the bedrock of lack in the malevolent big Other and this refusal of lack causes the conspiracist to have an impotent politics.

“Bedrock of lack”? I confess that I have never read Lacan and so I cannot ascertain if this bizarre and frankly evasive terminology comes from him or Daniel. In any case, what this is saying amounts to:

“The conspiracist cannot accept that there is no conspiracy and thus renders himself impotent before …well, before those “structural movements” (whose downfall can presumably be potently managed by…oh, something or other).”

Yadda yadda yadda …there is, as always, much much more to all this. We get (inevitably) stuff about “fetishes” and impressive big words such as “pulsional”.

Now that my suspicions were aroused, I applied my triple litmus test on Daniel. I found the following:

In the United States, just under half of adult working age people do not have a college degree and since the COVID pandemic ….

…the accelerating catastrophes of climate change…

…our commitment to the causes we champion from Palestine to trans rights.

…people should be trusted to address transphobic views directly, and they should not be shamed for attempting to combat transphobic views.

And on a more general front:

The Lacanian Left, Self-Help, and the Family feat. Richard Seymour

Since 2013, Seymour has turned to Lacanian theory in his writing and analysis of contemporary politics. We discuss what he finds valuable in psychoanalytic theory, the recent fractures over the trans movement in the Lacanian field, the patriarchy question, Oedipal politics, family abolition, meritocracy and Richard’s next book project The Little Red Self-Help Book. We conclude with a discussion on the future of the far right.

You get the impression of a lovely cozy little chat with lots of radical sounding noises but not only no relevance but even totally playing into the memes of the media. “the recent fractures over the trans movement in the Lacanian field” comes across as the punch line to a parodistic Monty Python sketch.

Guido Gets Grumpy …And With Good Reason

Here I’d like leave the last words to Guido Giacomo Preparata of Conjuring Hitler fame. And the reason for this deviation is that Preparata suffered the consequences of offending against the Western Marxist Masonic Club. [1]

Although I don’t follow Guido all the way into a total (and vitriolic) rejection of Marx in toto I think the following remarks on Western Marxism are eminently relatable. These passages are from an afterword to the New Russian Edition of Conjuring Hitler:

The stupidities in question are those of Western Marxism, or more to the point, of that presently threadbare fringe of diehards Marxists, and their scattered epigones, who survive sparsely on both sides of the Atlantic.

… the spuriousness of Marxism-Leninism as the new-fangled liturgical Esperanto of Soviet Russia. … the Russians having to reply with soundbites of an idiom issued from a narrative made of Hegelian pseudo-spiritualism and Ricardian economics that was utterly alien to their cultural substrate.

… the Marxist way of thinking —totalizing, self-contained, and obsolete as it is— has the chief and preliminary effect of garnishing the psyche of the Vetero-Marxist with an auto-suggestion of economistic omniscience, which suggestion, precisely because economics is in Marx’s methodological hierarchy paramount, fortifies the conviction of being technically infallible.

… this psychic undercoat of delusional infallibility, the Vetero-Marxist’s aboriginal feelings of self-righteousness…

… Herein lies Marxism’s sociological wretchedness; in its utter insensitivity to psycho-sociological drifts, which prevents it, bound as it is in the torturous schematisms of a simplistic narrative core, to comprehend the subtleties of collective motion.

*

[1] for details, see here:

https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Conjuring_Hitler_-_Four_years_on