“The Blob” is a gargantuan, globe-spanning, capital-driven monstrosity that contains within it everything it has absorbed to this day. It is not the deep state, or the military/industrial/congressional complex, or the oligarchs that pull the strings in every absorbed country, or the Corporate Owned News that act as megaphones, or the police and other low-level operatives that sustain The Blob on a day to day basis. No, The Blob is all of those things, and more, combined into a seething mass of world-wide exploitation and corruption. A network diagram detailing all of the players, factors and connections within The Blob would be too complex for any human to fully comprehend.
Such complexity comes with drawbacks. For one, The Blob cannot act as an individual. Its myriad parts do not function as one. Unlike an individual, there are many conflicting organ systems within The Blob that prevent it from maintaining internal harmony, and slow its inexorable quest for omnipotence. Indeed, The Blob is a chimera in the truest sense; at a grand scale The Blob has two controlling halves that do not always concur. Like the human brain, with its left and right hemispheres and distinct but overlapping functions, The Blob has a Left and a Right Half which constantly vie for domination. This bilateral schism is perhaps The Blob’s greatest weakness.
The Left and Right Halves of The Blob show themselves most obviously in the form of the Democrat and Republican parties in the US. Those, of course, are the tips of the two proverbial icebergs, but they are the ugly, in-your-face parts that we hear and read about each day in the Corporate Owned News (CON).
One thing you will never hear discussed in the CON is the fact that the Democrats and the Republicans represent the conservative, oligarch class, and do not represent regular, working people or the Left. Dems and Reps both get their campaign financing from the same wealthy “donor class”, and are in fact already part of that wealthy class, or striving to get there. The Blob is a conservative/capitalist creation, and for its entire existence it has done everything possible to stifle the working-class Left. One half of The Blob is proudly far-right-wing, and the other half is also right-wing, but claims to be “liberal”; a classic good-cop/bad-cop act if there ever was one. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were wholly absorbed operatives of The Blob, and continued the majority of the right-wing policies of their predecessors. If you have been absorbed, you are, by definition, a conservative war hawk. (In fact, real peace-loving Lefties apparently taste bad to The Blob and are rejected or excreted, but that’s a topic for another discussion).
History is replete with examples of how existing power structures have waged constant warfare against the working-class and progressive Left.
Police forces are assembled by the wealthy to suppress labor uprisings, union strikes and dissent from the working class.
Overseas wars of regime change are always directed at Left wing, socialist or communist countries.
Socialism and communism have been vilified by the CON to absurd levels throughout the last century not because they are inherently bad ideologies, but because they are the bane of capitalism.
Any objective reading of history clearly shows that power structures are conservative, and resistance structures are progressive. This dynamic is usually framed as disputes between capital and labor, but there is no dispute, there is outright warfare, directed by capital against labor. The Blob will always favor conservative dictators (e.g., Mohamed Bin Salman) over democratically elected socialists (e.g., Nicolas Maduro) demonstrating that the core principle is favoring capitalism, rather than favoring democracy.
The Blob is the US-run, globe-spanning military/corporate/oligarch/media/spy/political/police/prison complex, and it is growing larger and more powerful every day. It contains many of the power structures in all absorbed nations (think NATO, the Five Eyes, the World Bank, etc.). It is entirely a hard-right, conservative endeavor, even if many of its players pretend to be “liberal” for PR purposes. It is based on capitalism and war, and it viciously opposes worker’s rights and socialism. It is “The Powers That Be”, and even though its many parts are not always in alignment, they all fear and oppose the power of the working class to rise up, resist and fight to get their fair-share of The Pie.
The easiest ways that regular working people can push back against The Blob are for them to organize and unionize at their workplace (and strike if necessary), and write or call their representatives to demand change. Mass, peaceful protest will be necessary at times. These acts of defiance can go a long way toward implementing positive change if enough workers get involved. It is a slow and tedious process, but all major improvements in worker’s conditions have been won this way. Don’t let The Blob convince you that complaining doesn’t matter and doesn’t help. The Blob wouldn’t even mention it if it didn’t matter.
Resistance is, definitely, not futile.
Well John, I finally made the time to read some of your work, and it was well spent. Your "Blob" concept provides an interesting amalgamation of the ever-increasing plethora of obtuse political babble, a pleasant and subtly humorous route to not only discovering and understanding, but actually being able to convey an accurate and honest image of the present CONservative dominance of 1st world economic and political affairs. The "Blob" may force its way through the door of my rhetoric at some point, with your permission and an appropriate footnote, of course.
My one, very minor, stumbling block, was wondering why the term "worker" made such a repetitive appearance in your prose. Its prevalence, it seems to me, could distract from the prescience
enshrined in a very timely and novel concept.
Of course this "worker" thingy could be the result of my having just had a lengthy debate/argument with a friend at the WSWS, immediately before I read your essay, who was claiming that their peerage ("workers") were the most dedicated supporters of Julian Assange.
Anyway, thanks for the reference, and good writing.
As Usual,
EA