Most of us don’t really, consciously, know who the REAL world powers are. Most of us have been fooled and manipulated into joining a political tribe, led by bogeyman fears and empty promises, to support personalities, a party, or policies that actually don’t represent our interests, respect our human dignity and human rights, exhibit any concern for our well-being or happiness, or seek to advance our human flourishing!
If someone asks who the real world powers are and if we then reply with a list of countries, then we truly don’t understand the nature of the world and who runs things. Not understanding the nature of the true world powers leads us to bad information and even worse potential responses to the things that are going on around us.
Countries are powers in their own right, but as a coherent class with its own self-interest, most countries, or the political apparatus that rules them, aren’t represented even by their own governments. When we say, for instance, “America bombed ISIS” we assume the interests of the country, as in most all Americans, were served and the intentions and consensus of their people were represented by the action. But most of the time, since the dawn of the 21st century, and even earlier in many cases, countries like America or Germany or Indonesia aren’t represented as a coherent class with its own self-interest by their respective governments.
The true powers that use the governments of various countries as vehicles of wealth and aggrandizement for themselves alone have parochial interests that are diametrically opposed to the pure self-interest of the vast majority of the people in those countries. In short, “America” isn’t invading all these countries to fight “terrorism”, that’s just the excuse, the lie. Americans, as in service members, who have been fooled to believe they are fighting for “America” are being used in these misadventures, but “America” as a country, in its interests and informed sentiment, is actually being harmed by these things.
The true “powers” ruling most countries are non-state entities, in some cases a coherent whole, like the Communist Party of China which is essentially a mob-like operation, or, as in America and the West, mega corporate monopolies, or those aspiring to be monopolies, who have gained control over all the major political parties until almost all politicians serve on the corpostate factions.
Public sentiment, easily manipulated and exploited, often reactive to misinformation or a lack of information, is the medium of combat, but it isn’t the prime mover in events. The machinations of the true corpostate powers and all their factions is what controls, manipulates, and exploits public sentiment. Most “political contests” which we see as “right versus left” battles fought between the voters who decide who wins, are a sham. Neither the sentiments expressed nor the engagements in political debate, are the real prime mover in what is happening.
Stipulating that Trump lost the election and Democrats won all by legal means, if also helped by unethical but legal unfairness, we might think the citizenry voted for leftism over rightism, or something like that. In reality, a faction of corpostate powers defeated another faction through controlling the election outcome by various means, including using falsehoods and concealing truths so that almost every “voter” was essentially programmed by their faction to vote a certain way, and not in their own self-interest.
It’s not that voters are stupid or venile, thinking everyone who voted for a Biden or a Trump is thus and so type of person is actually fostered by the factions to keep people at each other’s throats instead of focusing on the actual forces at play. Voters only know what they know and many don’t have a few minutes a day, let alone the hours many of us who engage in political work do, to analyze or assess. Many don’t know the right questions and don’t have all the facts: none of the partisan opinion molders, left or right, even attempt to serve their audience fairly or ethically with objective truth.
Demonizing or denigrating voters, calling them names and questioning their mental acuity, is wrong-headed because those people are acting on powerfully manipulative influences that combine fear and promises and that make those people form a tribal identity with a person and/or a party. To pretend that this is inexcusable on the part of these voters is to pretend that this isn’t absolutely the normal way the true ruling class control the masses.
It is not Trump versus Biden or Democrats versus Republicans, it is multiple factions within a corpostate structure manipulating public sentiment to acheive their own parochial aims at the public expense.
Whether you declaim against “Trumpdavidian cultists” who follow Q or woke cancel culture kool-aid drinkers, you are focused on the results of what has happened, a battle to corral public sentiment and control it, rather than what is really happening. Your instinct should be to distrust and be suspicious of any mass wave sentiment or the blaring headlines which claim a crisis or serious “political fight.” When everyone in an entire camp seems to be in lockstep, consider that it is most likely everything about this is manufactured for intentions which are designed to remain hidden.
The word “corpostate” can be triggering to some who feel it sounds too “conspiratorial” or too “out there”, but it’s really a true expression of the unholy marriage between corporate bosses and the political state, with the corporate bosses having the upper hand because the political class need their money and support. And by “corporate bosses” we don’t mean CEO’s, we mean the people who directly or indirectly own the shares and who, often quietly and in shadow, call the shots.
You can name a George Soros or Warren Buffet as the poster children for the corpostate, but we suspect these front-facing actors are merely the tip of the iceberg. Making Soros a bogeyman is misguided, it may stem in part from a latent antisemitism, and it’s unproductive. His preachments and legerdemain are noxious to be sure, but he is definitely not the sole or major bad actor and the nature of his investment and financial empire means he is more likely dancing to the tune of those he depends on than his own tune.
What we call the corpostate is not a cohesive entity, they don’t have a board or secret council, it is more a description of how power is shared and used. “The corpostate” is shorthand for a system whereby corporate shot-callers engage in and control the political class and the apparent political battles that seem to be based on public sentiment are actually the seesaw battles between corpostate factions. The political class has ideology and/or their own parochial interests and tries to harness the corporate backers without ceding too much power to them while the corporate shot-callers back various politicians to essentially buy them as clients who must do their bidding.
So we have this battle between factions, including corporate and political class factions, and we also have the battle between the political class and the corporate class. The political class want to use corporations to advance their ideological and parochial interests while the corporate class want to use the political class to get the state to back their corporate interests.
It’s not as simple as saying the corporate ruling class control the politicians or that the politicians are now using corporations to do things the state cannot legally do, like spy on people or cancel their political opponents. It is essentially “both and”, and the multitude of factions and conflicting interests can seem inscrutable to the casual observer. Public sentiment expressed in polls and votes isn’t meaningless per se, but it is mostly manufactured and manipulated and isn’t the true driving force in the political or corporate spheres. It is a factor and cannot be ignored, hence the reason various factions lavish billions on the “press”, platforms, entertainment, and academia, even at great losses, in order to control that sentiment as much as possible.
The true powers are, basically, a combination of corporate ruling class factions and their corresponding but competing political class factions. The people or the country as a whole are merely the pawns all factions must seek to manipulate and control and even to fling at their opponents from time to time.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It is something that has always been present in some form but that has never, at least in America, been so obvious and prevalent. In the past, though the vote was limited to mostly wealthier white males, the voters had more power than the factions, because it was hard to conduct mass hypnosis campaigns and brainwash people. The organns of acculturation such as academia and the press were too decentralized and localized to allow such top-down control.
These factions are defined as groups of the ruling class who connect and collaborate, usually informally on on a more temporary basis, but sometimes through more permanent alliances, and who share similar interests in particular or general outcomes. For instance, those who profit from weapons and defense supplies desire endless wars to keep demand high, while others may desire a certain country be diminished because its policies hurt their bottom line. Certain political class factions may actually desire an ideological outcome and convince some corporations to alter their “community standards” to make it easier to manipulate voters in their favor, but those same platform owners may have other financial interests, including fat government contracts, that they can gain through doing the bidding of that political class faction.
The political warfare landscape is a whirlwind of competing factions, usually classified as corporate or political class shot-callers, but sometimes a single faction may include a coterie of both political class and corporate class shot-callers.
While gaining and mobilizing public sentiment is the chief field of action, and while those who oppose this corpostate hegemony over the national interest must engage in that arena, the public sentiment itself isn’t the prime mover in this battle. When we assess public sentiment our goal is to understand which faction or factions has the upper hand. Public sentiment reveals who has the upper hand, it doesn’t predict who will have the upper hand because it is acted upon more by the factions than it acts upon them.
As we assess this, a problem emerges in that we cannot readily define the factions or their “order of battle”, the factions are rarely permanent, and their alliances are shifting. If you think the political fight in America is between “Democrats and Republicans” then you are observing the after-effects rather than the causes of the conflict, you aren’t observing the actual factions per se.
Any issue, from “the virus”, to “climate change”, to communists in government, to “white supremacy” and anything else there is a crescendo of alarmism regarding should be viewed through this lens: is it TRUE and what factions benefit from whatever “solution” is presented to “solve” the so-called “crisis.” If we are ever caught on a bandwagon in which major acculturation agents all parrot the same narrative we should be deeply suspicious that we are being played because, chances are, we are.
Our concept and use of the term “corpostate” represents the true nature of the ongoing battle to harness and control the country’s resources and people for the interests of corporate class and political class factions, it doesn’t mean there is some grand conspiracy of a corpostate empire that meets every Friday to determine events and outcomes. It describes the way things are done, through the legerdemain of and competition between these often shifting and temporary factions.
If we understand this we may see that public sentiment, which is a potent tool all factions seek to harness and control, has become the field of battle but it isn’t itself the main driving force in what that battle will be over and what the objectives are. We may also see that “countries” are rarely the actors on the world stage but their resources are harnessed by corpostate factions for interests that often run countet to the interests and well-being even of those who “vote for” that faction’s candidates.
