The U.S. Marxist‐Humanists organization, grounded in Marx’s Marxism and Raya Dunayevskaya’s ideas, aims to develop a viable vision of a truly new human society that can give direction to today’s many freedom struggles. DiscussionArticle:IsNewtGingrichan“Invented”Imbecile?
Paulo Morel
December 19, 2011
The inane politics of Newt Gingrich and his ilk is a symptom of the degeneration of U.S.
capitalism, which has created a danger to humanity -- Editors
Answer: no, he is a real idiot. What to say of a man who, a few decades ago as leader of
the Republicans, was able to shut down Washington, succeeding in paralyzing government
agencies in a political dispute with the Democrats and the White House as a (rather
delusional) show of political power? As a consequence, Mr. Gingrich, the “antigovernment” ideologue, made everybody, that is, the public at large -- contractors,
veterans, retired people, businesses, school children, hospital workers and patients, etc. -keenly aware of how much the daily work of the government was vital for the everyday
life of the whole nation. I don’t know of a worse piece of political “strategy” than that.
Now, in an interview for a pro-Israel political group, Mr. Gingrich calls the Palestinians an
“invented” people. Not only is the man shameless in displaying his profound ignorance
and bad faith in public, which is no surprise at all considering Mr. Gingrich himself and
the party of the late Ronald Reagan and Bush, but he opens the way to the questioning of
Israel itself as an “invented” state. Invented in fact in 1948!
One might begin to think that Mr. Gingrich is an “invented” candidate, invented by the
Obama party to facilitate the reelection of a president whose politics of defending the
interests of finance capital at all costs has alienated an important part of his support base.
Beyond the episodic nature of the opinions of an ignorant right wing politician (certainly
a redundant phrase nowadays), the occurrence is a reminder of the pitiful state of the
American political scene, where a man like Newt Gingrich, with his history of private and
public scandals and demonstrated incompetence, is at this time a serious contender for the
Republican presidential nomination.
“When it rains, it pours”, as the saying goes. It appears that the current troubles of the U.S.
are only in their initial stages: a general crisis of leadership is ever more patent. It is a
crisis of the quality, intelligence and vision of those in positions of power, inside the state
apparatuses, inside the party machines, etc, but also within the more restricted or
“selective” power circles of the ruling class, right and “left,” conservative or liberal. And
when compounded with the structural crisis, it is accelerating the debasement of the once
“sole superpower.”
U.S. Marxist‐Humanists | PO Box 60061 | Chicago, IL 60060 Email: info@usmarxisthumanists.org | Web: www.usmarxisthumanists.org U.S. Marxist‐Humanists U.S. neoliberal capitalism has created its own Nomenklatura: Closed groups and closed
circuits of economic, political and media power are alienated from society at large, from
the daily troubles and struggles, from the hopes and needs of the working people. And it is
more grave and dangerous that this Nomenklatura increasingly believes in its own
fabrications and lies.
This is indeed a sign of a group of people that has exhausted its usefulness. The U.S.
ruling circles show more and more signs that they are about to or have already exhausted
their capacity to master the crises they are compelled to eternally produce and reproduce
in order to sustain their power and the structures of power they depend upon. This is a
ruling class clearly condemned – in the long run, if not sooner -- to the “dustbin of
history.” As the creator of instability for all and of insecurity and misery for the many, it
wants to make sure by all means necessary that we all will go down with it.
Just as Mr. Gingrich once paralyzed a Democratic administration, they will act out their
fantasies of omnipotence in the same “paranoid-schizophrenic” fashion as the present
Republican candidate for the presidential nomination; that is, with acts of violence against
a reality that stubbornly frustrates the final realization of their desires: the absolute and
universal empire of the commodity form.
In fact, they have already deepened the economic crisis as a matter of policy or strategy:
profit at all cost is both the means and the goal. Individuals, social groups and social
classes, institutions, countries, and states must all serve the dictatorship of global capital
or be disciplined and/or eliminated. Their unchecked power is more and more clearly a
danger to us all. Their dream they are acting out is our collective nightmare.
-- Paulo Morel is a Latin American writer
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