The War on Sharing: Thunderheads

NinaIllingworth March 9, 2021April 20, 2025 American left, analysis, anticapitalism, austerity, blog, CA4, Can't You Read, capitalism, capitalism is a cult, class analysis, class war, COINTELPRO, counter insurgency, counter intelligence, democratic socialism, FA1, fascism, fascism and the police work together, growing left, info graphics, informal writing, Journals, left wing theory, Marxism, Marxist analysis, Marxist historiographic analysis, mass surveillance, Meme, Michael Parenti, MP6, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Offsite Writing, Opinion, personal, police harassment, police state, reaction, reactionaries, reactionary violence, Socialism, ST2, state sponsored repression, stress, systemic analysis, that's why we call them reactionaries, the war against the left, The War on Sharing, Theory

The War on Sharing: Thunderheads

So why the fuck am I starting an informal meme blog? It’s complicated.

If I’m being completely honest in this space, I should start by confessing that I don’t know how to tell you the things I need you to hear. That is of course a terrifying thing for a writer to admit openly, but recent events in both my personal life, and the world at large have convinced me that I might not have as much time to perfect my revolutionary rhetoric as I had previously believed. What I have come to understand as the global capitalist war on sharing is clearly escalating; in both scope and violence. In light of a recent illness, and my own personal brush with a burgeoning Pig Empire police state, I find myself questioning the value of debunking the individual lies of the capitalist order, and the wisdom of exhausting myself in a hopeless battle against both the neoliberal, and modern fascist propaganda arms of said order. I feel a desperate, almost primary need to put these events into their proper context and reveal the larger picture, but the plain truth of it is that I’m beat up, exhausted, and frankly I don’t know how.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if I haven’t tried to communicate the horror of what our capitalist society really is and where it’s clearly heading; I most certainly have, by means both painfully earnest, and humorously circuitous as it happens. Unfortunately I am an imperfect messenger, and I have never quite mastered the trick of getting folks to understand something they know is true, but do not want to believe because it’s simply too horrible to bear. Faced with the reality that possessing a library with hundreds of books cataloguing the monstrous functions of capitalism, and the historically verified crimes, deceptions, and outrageous abuses of its enforcers, isn’t very useful if nobody who hasn’t also read those books is even willing to believe you about the established facts of history, I find my academic writing wholly insufficient to properly communicate this larger, and admittedly quite terrifying picture of the reality my studies have revealed to me.

Therefore, I need a blog, or a journal if you’ll humor my vanity, because I don’t know how to artfully tell you there’s a storm coming, or perhaps more accurately, already in progress; a violent pincer “reaction” that’s as predictable as rain after thunder, driven by the multiplying crises of capitalism and the rising public embrace of socialist alternatives. I need to tell you these things in plain language because this phase of the class war is going to be hard on folks who sincerely believe you can’t get in trouble for having ideas and I cannot allow myself to be misunderstood; the reality is that under the thumb of Pig Empire capitalism, the only truly outrageous crime is having ideas that threaten the continued dominance of capitalist extractivism, and the ruling classes it benefits.

Like clockwork the emergence of an even vaguely cohesive Pig Empire left, has already resulted in the unleashing of yet another flavor of fascist political violence, and legalized oppression by the bourgeoisie capitalist state. As we literally run out of planet to pillage, rising global inequality leads to what amounts the mass murder of the poor, and the bald-faced inhuman monstrosity of our ruling ideology (and the classes of folks who benefit from it) forces the protesting masses into the streets, there is no reason whatsoever to believe this situation is going to improve. Indeed, history says that both the reactionary right, and neoliberal police states in the Pig Empire, are quite capable of inflicting far more violence and terror in the service of protecting the capitalist order than we’ve seen so far in this particular round of the endless struggle.

The knives are out lads, and reality doesn’t actually give a fuck if you feel a way about what is and isn’t possible in a so-called “liberal democracy.” The simple truth is that the world does not work the way we have all been led to believe, and perhaps more importantly, trained to uphold. Capitalism is not an economic system; it’s a hierarchal social order, an ideological prison, and (particularly as expressed in the Anglo-American sphere of influence) a predatory cult. The extraction of wealth from the underclasses, at bayonet point if necessary, is not only the driving force of the last five centuries (and counting) of Pig Empire history, but maintaining, strengthening and obfuscating that primitive accumulation through legalized violence, is ultimately the very reason most “liberal democratic” institutions exist in the first place; from media and politics, to policing and the military.

Does that sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Well let me inform you that it’s a simplified Marxist historiographic analysis of modern society, but the fact your brain immediately told you to question my sanity demonstrates the effectiveness of the explicitly capitalist propaganda model that utterly dominates our educational and media environments – does it not? “All that is solid melts into air,” indeed.

So I’m starting a journal, because there are some things I still need to say and don’t feel I can express any other way. I’m starting it because there are some nights that I’m just too damn broken and tired to keep proving basic Marxist analysis is not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory to folks who genuinely want to believe you can topple capitalism at the ballot box. And I’m starting it because I still don’t know how to tell you the world is a fucking vampire in the proper Oxford vernacular. As it turns out, life during wartime is no place for meticulous footnotes.

This irregular feature won’t replace my regular writing, but given that I’m currently stone incapable of engaging with polite fictions and necessary illusions, it is a vital activity for the preservation of my sanity; if not other’s perceptions of the same. If I’m lucky, we’ll never do this again; but given that the other option is literally staring at a blank page with tears of frustration welling in my eyes for what feels like the fifth consecutive night, I assumed readers would prefer my emo ravings to continued radio silence.