When one reads this missive entitled What is the Great Reset? by Michael Rectenwald, one is struck by the question: What is animating this fella's conflation of the "left" with corporate cultural liberals in the corporate elite, and what is behind his language about "freedom" and "liberty"? Well, the answer is pretty simple: This guy lives in abject fear of cultural liberalism and secularism. Therefore, when Apple, Google, Nike, or some other corporation embraces a form of cultural liberalism in its advertising--for the same reason, in the 1920s, American Tobacco Corporation pushed cigarettes on women as "torches of freedom"--he finds himself having to defend capitalism without its inherent cultural contradictions--particularly the cultural contradiction of where unchecked markets ultimately overpower traditional moral or cultural values.
Rectenwald can't see that a good Marxist would be against how China has operated these past forty years. A good Marxist also sees through the so-called "woke" cultural cues Nike, Apple, Google, and even Raytheon continue to articulate. See here and here for the evidence a good Marxist would cite (and when corporations donate to Dems, it is mostly corporate Democrats, not economically populist ones). A good Marxist opposes the way in which the new global corporate dominated economic order--through the various trade deals--has been beggaring workers in First World nations and, in what we used to call the Third World, is exploiting when not continuing to ecologically, morally, and economically harm peasants. Rectenwald doesn't want anyone to notice how the trade deals are merely a continuation of capitalists' imperialist and colonialists' desires that have gone on well before the capitalists decided they needed new markets among people normally shunned in society--and how corporate based power goes back to a time when capitalists were fine and dandy with chattel slavery, and later promoting race-based scientific theories. That the capitalists decided, as early as the late 1980s, to make peace with the Chinese Communist government is merely the latest wrinkle in a neater, more simplistic, Marxian theory, but the types of trade treaties created between Coca-Cola Etc. and China is much better explained as power politics and ironies of history.* Corporations are mostly structured as political dictatorships, so they obviously felt comfortable dealing with the corporatized executives of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ultimately, the good professor Rectenwald is only showing us how afraid--and I mean A-FRAID-- he is of the queers and trans folks. And speaking of ironies, I found this all quite funny because, when one looks on his Wiki entity, one finds Rectenwald did a graduate apprenticeship with none other than the ultimate cultural radical (but who was not an economic leftist in any coherent way) Allen Ginsberg! Here is the source Wiki provides, which is wild to read, considering where Rectenwald has ended up.
Professor Rectenwald, needs a course in Daniel Bell's writings, particularly Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), so as to understand how the capitalist drive for expanded markets also includes undermining of so-called traditional values. In the same book Bell discusses his "Three Realms" formulation of political philosophy, which, as my few readers know, provides a far more accurate assessment of an individual's political philosophies than simply calling one "liberal" or "radical" or "conservative" or "reactionary." Bell's formulation says there are three realms--political, economic, and cultural--and the spectrum of radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, and reactionary are better qualified within each of those realms when analyzing one's own values and evaluating others' values. When we use the realms analysis, and look at the whole person, we are able to find out why a person believes what that person believes, and what that person prioritizes.
Assuming Professor Rectenwald's good faith, and that he believes himself driven by so-called "moral" Christian theological values, I believe Professor Rectenwald could have an epiphany if he read and ingested Bell's formulaic analyses in that book. And who knows? Maybe he'll become a fan of Vijay Prashad, or dare I say it, Karl Marx. I mean it. Just read what Marx's and Engel's The Communist Manifesto says about capitalists. It sounds almost theological:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Now go back and peruse Rectenwald's writing style, his assumptions, and his outrage at corporate capitalists. There is a rhythm in not only style, but even some of the substance, that is much like Karl Marx and Frederich Engels in the 1840s, as they faced multiple workers' strikes that were turning into a potential revolution against capitalists and monarchs in Western Europe at the time. Yeah, that was the context for the manifesto, as we should recall from high school World History class.
What makes Rectenwald pathetic, to me at least, is he should already know all of this. However, it appears Rectenwald has decided he must find a way to promote his cultural conservatism in a manner that would get him gainfully employed among right wing organizations (such as his current employer, the right-wing "Christian" oriented, Hillsdale College in Michigan), which tend to be funded by big corporate capitalist class donors connected with the fossil fuel and related industries (the remaining Koch brother, and other right wing culture warriors among the corporate executive and ownership elite, such as Scaife, Mellon, etc.). I think it is why Rectenwald's analysis almost sounds Marxian in his attacks against corporate global power, including his view about how corporate executives are working hand in glove with the Chinese government--all while these same corporate executives exercise control over our nation's political discourse--and buying up politicians and political parties. However, to obscure any economic-oriented analysis that may sound anti-corporate or economically leftist, Rectenwald must conflate actual "leftist" people, such as, say, Vijay Prashad or Adolph Reed, Jr., with modern capitalists such as Phil Knight (Nike), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Meta) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon). That is Rectenwald's first principles-style of argument, which then allows him to be less specific and frankly confusing the rest of the way. As I say, if Rectenwald is writing and acting in good faith, he may find much to agree with listening to Marxist-oriented intellectuals such as Prashad or Reed, for example. But, no. Those people scare him even more, so he must not even mention them except as an amorphous "left" that is somehow telling Zuckerberg and Bezos what to do. Maybe there's a Jew somewhere, you know, George Soros....Sigh.
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* What most good Marxists won't see, though, is the conspiracy theory over COVID. As any good Marxist is a historicist, they would know, whenever humans have lots of global trade, as in the late Middle Ages, there is a major increase in deadly bacteria or viruses. They would know the previous SARS scare of the late aughts in this century scared the bejeebus--that's a Marxist term of art, ya know--out of the immunology and medical communities, and there was active research begun with multi-governmental backing. And finally it would not be surprising Bill Gates, who remains a neo-liberal in so many bad ways, did have a good side of sorts in using some of his ridiculous amounts of money to limit or stop malaria in Africa, and was therefore "up" on infectious diseases. But, somehow, a right-winger to whom Rectenwald is appealing, needs that conspiracy style theory, and darkly hint the elites created COVD.
