Whoever owns language rules the world: Marx vs postmodernism

How politics twists language and shapes reality

Jul 01, 2025

Ever feel you’re living through the Act 1 climax of a science fiction movie? The fork in the road where humanity’s future gets rerouted? Will enough of us clock the Morlocks herding us into cattle pens in time to avoid the disaster mapped out before us? Or will we trudge on, mooing and bleating as surplus labour (that’s us!) culled in wars and poverty?

How we sophisticated westerners have been so thoroughly duped by a class that, to put it mildly, doesn’t have our best interests at heart is perplexing. How is the fourth estate, the media which hold up the Executive’s objectives instead of holding it to account, able to regurgitate the state’s script with such a straight face? And could they be connected?

As late-stage capitalism breaks down, it increasingly deforms language, the collective tool vital for humans to function as a society. We see this every day, in every news report, in every mainstream analysis. The more capitalism collapses, the more outrageously obvious is the elite state power’s hijacking of meaning in order to protect itself. Mass manipulation of cognition is only going to get worse with Artificial Intelligence. So let’s take stock of where we are.

Constructing reality in language

It wasn’t only Joseph Goebbels who, leading up to World War II, latched onto the importance of social engineering through propaganda. He infamously said that the big lie becomes the truth with repetition, something we see permeating the media today.

The Madison Avenue-based advertising industry advanced Goebbels’s praxis in America’s vibrantly expanding economy. This major pillar of post-war capitalism used an army of psychologists to hypnotise a nation of consumers into a highly profitable system of fear and desire. It sold war every bit as effectively as it sold washing machines.

Postmodernism took it even further, philosophically codifying a declining capitalism’s need to change the way we see reality. Empire intellectuals led the charge against 400 years of science and evidence-based Enlightenment and argued that reality is constructed in language. Centuries of challenging faith, belief, and “feeling it in my bones” through observable phenomena was under attack. Their rejection of Marxism made them essential allies in maintaining the power status quo.

Capitalism will eat itself

The philosopher Karl Marx had investigated the capitalist system within which we exist, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He applied scientific method to make visible the invisible mechanisms of capitalism in Das Kapital and other writings. In demystifying the process, he came up with the tools to enable us to look under the hood and strip it down, to see how it worked.

The beneficiaries of the system had always presented it as productive; a perennially benign dynamo benefiting humankind forever. However, Marx concluded, it divided into two contending classes: the proletariat whose labour produced wealth, and the bourgeoisie who owned the means of production and fed off the workers, always paying them less than their labour was worth. This surplus value was their profit. And the profit motive lay at the core of everything they held dear, if not inordinately expensive.

Unfortunately, this process ran in ever-diminishing cycles until the system would inevitably run out of juice. So, not only was capitalism built on the expansionist ravages of imperialism, it featured an inbuilt entropy that would prove predatory and destructive as it struggled to maintain itself. “Capitalism contains its own grave digger.”

Marx’s theory had gained traction in the post-war liberal order of the American Age. And not only in openly socialist systems with communist aims. It provided an alternative for emerging third world nations which were being plundered by the west, and for the exploited proletariat whose surplus labour was extracted by the bourgeoisie in the form of profits. At the peak of the cycle, Empire might be staring over a cliff and losing its hegemony.

The CIA romance with postmodernism

Out of the depths of the Cold War sprang an intellectual saviour of the state wielding the Sword of Words and the Shield of Language Games. The father of postmodernism, Jean Francois Lyotard, argued in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that meta-narratives such as truth, science and philosophy (like Marxism) fragment into smaller and smaller narratives until they are effectively rendered meaningless.

Unsurprisingly, as French intellectuals* rolled over and defected to the state, the state’s core defenders, the CIA, fell in love with postmodernism.

Postmodernism gave birth to a battalion of nerds drilling down relentlessly arguing why black is, in fact, white. With French philosophers in the driving seat of the Culture Wars (such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) and American literati in the rear describing the process, postmodernists took Swiss structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic division of the basic unit of language — the Sign — and smashed up meaning.

As if splitting the atom into its component parts, they stripped signifier (representation) from signified (concept), words from meaning, and shattered coherence until a Babelesque confusion of tongues beckoned.

The reins of perception: heaven, hell and hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard privileged the signifier and created “hyperreality,” where whoever has the means of production can grasp the reins of perception. Hyperreality fed into the CIA’s mind control interests, blurring the lines between reality and simulation. It placed paranoia on the same level as concrete phenomena, as we can see in the construction of political narratives today. Any opinion once expressed is given equal weight to provable fact-based reality.

So, the chief of The Better Cotton Initiative who is also head of Supima, the marketing arm of the American cotton industry, can allege forced labour of Uyghurs in Xinjiang on no evidence and the media will report it as true. Likewise, data abuser and Right-wing Christian zealot Adrian Zenz can claim a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang prisons, extrapolated from eight interviews, and the BBC will publish it as the sole truth. (See Jaq James’s scholarly analysis.)

There is, however, a concrete reality to contend with. As much as they might deny it, objective truth still exists. As someone said, if you threw Lyotard into the sea, he’d still get wet. By keeping an eye on the contradictions as they emerge, you test and challenge the enormous mind-fuck being perpetrated against the human race as the predator tries to disguise itself.

Late-stage capitalism: Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens. (The Time Machine,1960)

Hiding crisis and chaos

Few can miss that we find ourselves firmly entrenched in the “Capitalism will eat itself” stage of the game. Little works for the people. That which does is swiftly cannibalised for the benefit of the top elite.

Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades in the US are a crude example. Pauperising workers by sacking them while Trump’s billionaire backers like Charles Schwab make even more billions overnight from his tariff mayhem, illustrates the process perfectly. Britain gifting billions to the defence industry via the West’s proxy war in Ukraine and Nato, while slashing support for the weakest that capitalism left behind, is another case in point. It’s growing difficult to move without tripping over more examples as the decaying West goes belly up.

The establishment creates crisis and chows down on the resulting chaos in ever more violent waves. Meanwhile, its tame media perpetuate invisibility of the workings of the system by distraction, outright lies and a subtle Orwellian distortion of language. There are so many examples of language games flooding the zone in service to the ruling monsters. Where to start?

Satan’s little helpers

The liberal media, such as the Guardian and BBC, are among the worst exponents, as they have a ton of enlightenment to undo.

After WWII, Europeans and Americans were the best educated and informed populations in the world. They had mass access to an Alexandrian Library worth of books, information, philosophy, arts and humanities. For every savage manifestation of the feral state, there was an opposite, if not equal, eruption of freedom and liberty (when those terms meant what they said), harking back to the French Revolution and ancient Athens.

How do you unravel all that and get the population on track? It would take a humungous ideological pivot to sell willing blindness to the plebs. (The far Right doesn’t have the workload as they’re all on board the bus to hell anyway. They never had to dress up poison as Kool Aid the way our faux progressives had to do.)

Language games in action: repetition of a lie becomes the truth

Most of us, by now, have noticed how “Rules Based Order” replaced “International Law” in the post-war discourse, hammered away by Obama around the time of his Pivot to Asia. International Law is thrashed out over time by reasoned argument, the other imposed by raw power.

Similarly, Taiwan “independence” actually means dependence on the hegemon.

Just as “Mother” is turned into a dirty word in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, so “woke” becomes a trigger for hate. Although when you ask why being aware instead of asleep is so bad, no-one can offer an adequate explanation.

“Aggression” is an abused term repeatedly applied to the country defending itself from Empire predations and never to the one with a fondness and track record for aggro. For example, “aggression” used with abandon beyond satire in Israel’s claims that Iran attacked them last year, even though the strikes were a response to Israel attacking first when it bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April.

China defensively beefs up its military while the US spends more on the Military Industrial Complex than the next nine countries together, while pouring arms into Taiwan, interfering with elections and surrounding China with bases. Yet China’s sensible response is depicted as aggression: instigation rather than effect following cause. The crucial context of America waging non-stop wars, in contrast with China not having any in 40 years, is wiped.

The word “unprovoked” peppers press reports whenever an attacked country responds. Whether you condemn or support Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine in 2022, the conflict has roots in 2013 and was far from “unprovoked”. It did not start on 24 February, information that should be public for any discourse to be meaning-full.

Democratically elected President Yanukovytch rejected the IMF and VP Biden’s insistence that he smash open the economy and liberalise, slashing budgets and energy subsidies along the way. His subsequent turn towards Russia for economic support saw America continue to renege on Jim Baker’s 1998 promise, “Not as inch eastwards,” and advance nuclear Nato up to Russia’s borders, engineering the 2014 Maidan coup. “F*ck the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Ukraine. And they did. The western media, which had been reporting fairly accurately, turned on a dime and excised these foundational events from their accounts.

Liberal institutions not so liberal

Perhaps the most egregious example of institutional truth-twisting is how western media, such as the BBC, misreport Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip.

The liberal media continue to bland out mass murder and starvation, flattened cities and a whole raft of sadistic actions in a collective punishment over nearly two years since 7 October 2023. The 70-year Naqba is written out of accounts. Despite a 34 to 1 kill ratio, one side is humanised, the other dehumanised. Crime is benign and resistance is aggression. The word “genocide” is verboten even when used by victims of the Holocaust to describe what’s being done to Gaza’s civilian population. (See BBC on Gaza-Israel: one story, double standards report by the Centre For Media Monitoring.)

George Orwell at least gave us the tools to interrogate the twisted language of dictators: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Britain appeared to use his dystopian novel 1984 (written in 1948) as a manual rather than a warning, renaming the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Defence in 1964.

Today, four decades after the setting of 1984, AI is hard at work: OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, Microsoft, Carbyne, Black Cube and Pegasus are some of the outfits connected with Israel and its interests, and which control our social media. This is what our most liberal institutions have helped usher in. And this is what will shape our perception as we are herded into cattle-pens or over a cliff.

* Note: Some French intellectuals were critical, such as Alain Touraine. The “sanitized” document below, released in 2017 under Freedom of Information legislation, is no longer available. Howzat?!