Koos Malan: The West’s revolutionaries keep finding a new proletariat. Now they’re importing one.

This article was first published by The Common Sense.Every revolution needs foot soldiers. Prof Koos Malan argues the Western left has spent 250 years swapping them out. First the French Third Estate. Then Marx’s working class. Then the 1960s campus radicals, who later settled into law faculties and stayed. Then identity politics. As the system absorbed each group, a fresh one had to be found. The latest, he contends, is imported: mass migration. Malan, a constitutional law scholar, says the real divide isn’t rulers versus victims. It’s “civilisationalists” versus “extinguishers”. And he wants a “definitive and forceful answer”. Strong medicine. Expect it to divide readers. Which, presumably, is rather the point..By Prof Koos Malan for The Common Sense.Over the past two hundred and fifty-odd years the passion for revolution has been a persistent phenomenon in the West, so much that the revolutionary impulse, though mortally dangerous to Western civilisation, has paradoxically become one of the civilisation’s distinctive features.The revolutionary passion has been driven by multifarious goals.The Third EstateThe immediate driver of the radical liberal revolution, which we know as the French revolution, was to dismantle the ancien regime in France and elsewhere in the West, specifically Western Europe.Even though at that stage a term not yet in use, the proletariat enlisted by the Jacobin revolutionaries as articulated by Emmanuel Sieyes was the so-called third estate, that is, the common people, which excluded the clergy and the nobility.The Marxist ProletariatTowards the middle of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the labours of Marx and Engels, the goals of revolution turned Marxist. Still there was the unfinished task to demolish what remained or was partly restored of the ancien regime in France and elsewhere in Europe.But the Marxist revolutionary focus was distinctively economic. Hence, the economic substructure (and prerequisite) of the of the social superstructure (the governing political, economic, and legitimising intellectual elite) had to be destroyed and replaced by a brand-new one that could guarantee genuine material equality.Economic equality had to be enforced, under the guardianship of the revolutionary vanguard. This was now the dictatorship of the proletariat, organised in the revolutionary communist party, in place of the Jacobins of the first revolutionary phase.In the place of the third estate now came the exploited working class – the proletariat, which was the Marxian shock troop for executing the revolution. This was the force that enabled the Bolshevist-Leninist revolution in Russia in 1917.This revolutionary recipe was repeated in many places, often however markedly deviating from the supposed scientific paradigm of Marx and Engels. Advanced Western European societies, the most suitable and ripest for Marxist revolutions in terms of supposed scientific Marxism, however proved resilient and resourceful against the onslaughts of such revolutions.The anti-revolutionary leadership in these societies proved particularly resourceful in capturing revolutionary energies and canalising them into less destructive directions. Social security was the major force in this regard towards the last part of the nineteenth century, skilfully enlisted by figures such as Bismarck and various others.New Left – The Proletariat at the UniversitiesNew leftist strategists were therefore compelled to manipulate new forces of discontent, cultivating a new proletariat as vessels for revolution. The revolutionary movements at many universities in the United States and Western Europe proved to be an important such newly conceptualised proletariat, fuelling the student revolt in late 1960s.It was unsuccessful in dismantling the Western capitalist order, but did give rise to a new revolutionary vanguard, which especially since the 1980s organised itself in the social sciences, philosophy departments, and law faculties at countless universities in the West. They still play an important part in present-day revolutionary leftist politics.Revolutionary law – constitutional interpretation and legislation – forms a crucial part of their strategy, which by the way is also particularly important in South Africa.The Proletariat of Decadence – A Bad Common SenseIn time this combined with the convictions of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who highlighted the cardinal importance of a radically changed revolutionary common sense – a brand-new axiology in the place of a traditional, decent common sense. As long as the old common sense held, the prospects for successfully executing revolution remained slim. The common sense had to be decadent.The new common sense was to be the basis for a new way of life, premised on new – reversed – decadent values of good versus bad; beautiful versus ugly; decent versus indecent; achievement versus failure; logical versus illogical; consistency versus haphazardness; clean versus dirty; moral versus immoral; fair versus unfair; kind versus unkind; etc.The New Proletariat – Identity PoliticsThe emergence of so-called identity politics has in part tapped into the changing axiology and is also a further impetus to it.Under the banner of identity politics, an ever-increasing collection of minorities, the supposed victim groupings believed to suffer from exclusion, discrimination, and multifarious forms of violence, are identified or simply conjured. The wicked perpetrators – the supposed ruling class – of all these evils are powerful, mostly exploiting middle- and upper-class heterosexual white men.Together these minority identities constitute the present-day proletariat, who are being enlisted to execute the revolution against the above-mentioned powerful white male ruling class.The minority victim identities are said to be made up of a motley mixture: black people, women, all the sub-groupings of the LGBTIQ+ umbrella, and whoever may be qualified as sufferers from the malevolence of the ruling class – the callous wielders of power and perpetrators of violence.The True Opposition – Civilisationalists Versus ExtinguishersThere is, however, no substance in the revolutionary propaganda telling us that society is divided between the exploiting white male rulers and the cantankerous assortment of proletarian victims.There are most certainly deep divisions in Western society, but these are not the Marxist-like divisions propagated by the left.The real division is between those belonging and adhering to Western civilisation (the Western civilisationalists) in contrast to the Western enemies of the West balefully labouring for the West’s extinction: that is, the distinction between the civilisationalists and the extinguishers.BoundariesWithin this configuration, there is ample room for sound liberality, that is, ample room for individual expression practiced for and by Westerners in the Western sphere. This has enabled the West to accommodate and benefit from eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, and originality, even new segments within its own civilisation, thus enriching and emboldening the West.But civilisational accommodation is not boundless. Migration is a case in point. Individual trickles, willing and able to assimilate in the West and become Westerners, is feasible. But large avalanches of strangers from China, the Islamosphere, Africa, and so on, are not. That is in fact nothing but an intolerable invasion of the West exacting its de-Westernisation – and demise.Yet, not in revolutionary logic. Revolutionaries prey on any form of discontent for nourishing a new proletariat. If the working class, youthful student revolutionaries and academics, sexual and gender minorities, and whatever identities are not suitable anymore to act as the proletarian battering ram – if all these seemingly revolutionary forces have been absorbed and accommodated, then a new one must be conjured – imported. Thence, mass migration from outside the West..Read more:.RW Johnson: The politics of illegal migration in Britain.Migrants in the mind of the leftist revolutionaries are particularly suitable revolutionary tools. They are outsiders with no tradition of loyalty towards the new host countries and their long-standing institutions; they may easily be made to believe that they stand to gain from dismantling the established orders; and they are endless in number. Millions are ready to be brought into the battle.Onslaught on the WestThe enlistment of migrants has shed a bright light on the core nature of the revolutionary impulse – the annihilation of the West.This is now as clear as never before.Geographically the entire West – not only individual Western countries and societies – is under severe threat. It calls for a definitive and forceful answer. .This article was first published by The Common Sense and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Koos Malan: The West’s revolutionaries keep finding a new proletariat. Now they’re importing one.

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