An Introduction to the Innovationist Vocabulary
“What is Innovationism?” A basic introduction to the concepts pioneered by the Center for Political Innovation.
The Center for Political Innovation is blazing a new trail, pioneering a new movement to rescue the United States from the emerging low-wage police state and the danger of a new world war. In order to do this, we have had to develop a new vocabulary to describe a new set of principles.
The primary intellectual driving force of CPI has always been Caleb Maupin, our director and ideological leader, but he is not alone. Everything that exists is affected and influenced by everything else, and many of these concepts can really be described as the result of collective breakthroughs achieved through the joint activities of the organization. Knowledge comes from correct practical experience—learning while changing the world, and changing the world while learning in the process.
Here is some of our new Innovationist vocabulary:
Imperialism/Globalism or Globalism/Imperialism
The classical Marxist-Leninist terminology refers to an economic system in which big monopolies dominate the world and hold back development as “imperialism,” drawing from Lenin’s book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. CPI has learned, unfortunately, that the economic understanding that came from Lenin’s teaching has been usurped by a woke, primitivist narrative that opposes development, pushes identity politics, and draws from liberal conceptions rooted in Rousseau’s chauvinistic delusion of “the noble savage.” The word “imperialism” no longer has an economic definition and now makes people think of cartoonish liberal narratives.
Many conservatives and opponents of the war machine and attacks on civil liberties speak of “globalism.” They are referring to the apparatus centered around the World Bank, multinational corporations, etc. However, their understanding of who is dominating the world and impoverishing working families is mixed in with conspiracy narratives and right-wing anti-communist assumptions. They often cannot explain what is driving “globalism” except some kind of desire for “control,” and perhaps a fantastical-sounding narrative about demonic forces.
If the word “imperialism” is used by itself, it conjures up a woke, anti-development narrative. If “globalism” is used by itself, it conjures up a right-wing conspiracy narrative. However, when the two terms are combined, they can accurately refer to the economic setup which CPI actively opposes: the rule of the world’s big banks and an international financial oligarchy that is grinding the world into poverty in order to maximize its own profits and maintain its hegemonic position. This is why CPI refers to what it opposes as “globalism/imperialism” or “imperialism/globalism.”
For an understanding of this system, CPI draws from Henry Charles Carey and his analysis of the British Empire—the “English system” that propped up the Southern slavocracy. We draw from Lenin and various Marxist thinkers who explained how multinational corporations impoverish client states. We also draw from the rising school of geopolitical analysis that contrasts the Atlanticist, sea-based civilizations and empires with the more collectivist nature of land-based societies.
Four Stages of the Western System
CPI teaches that the Western system, rooted in the practice of colonialism, has gone through four distinct periods.
Primitive accumulation – when the feudal commons were turned into private property and wealth was plundered from colonized lands, laying the basis for the emergence of private property and the market economy in Europe.
Industrial capitalism – the system where factory owners hired wage workers to produce products.
Globalism/Imperialism – emerging in the 1890s, a system of huge trusts, cartels, and syndicates spreading their tentacles across the planet, extracting super-profits by impoverishing entire nations. Globalism/Imperialism is the rule of bankers rather than industrialists and involves governments closely cooperating with corporations to seize chunks of the world as captive markets.
Destructive accumulation – Starting to reveal itself in the 1930s with fascism, and later with the rise of the military-industrial complex in the West, and ultimately emerging to become the dominant form in only the recent decades; inthis fourth stage, the only way the economy is able to keep moving amid an almost constant crisis is by actively depopulating, destroying, and reducing consumption. The system becomes cannibalistic, hollowing out the Western homelands and extracting wealth primarily through war, imprisonment, addiction, and financial endeavors that reduce the amount of value created by society. This is why war is constant, the heartland of America is crumbling, and we are seeing the deterioration of Western countries from within as the globalist/imperialist system struggles to maintain its international dominance against the BRICS alternative.
The Atlanticist Pathology
We argue that the rise of globalism/imperialism from industrial capitalism spawned forms of mental illness that had never been seen before. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 revealed a kind of murderous criminality that society had never witnessed in prior times. It was rooted in Victorian culture and the way it dehumanized people and groomed young men to be colonial soldiers and overseers. As globalism/imperialism blossomed, “serial killers” began appearing in Western countries. Now, the trend of serial killers is fading and being replaced by mass shooters.
Mass shooters, like serial killers, represent a recurring trend of mental illness rooted in the globalist/imperialist system and how it drives people to become antisocial, atomized, selfish, indifferent to the suffering of others, while amping up oedipal and libidinal impulses, suppressing the superego and cultivating a mindset focused on destruction.
Khruschevism
Caleb Maupin’s book Khruschevism: A Study in Psychological Warfare laid out how the 1956 speech given by Nikita Khrushchev devastated and destroyed the global communist movement because it fit into a trend of Western liberal propaganda that was already unfolding. Leftist politics, since the time of the French Revolution, has encouraged the unleashing of impulses while fomenting rebellion against authority figures. This energy has been hijacked into a mindset widely promoted by the decaying liberal order that views all mass movements, religions, and belief systems with suspicion and promotes endless deconstruction.
This is essentially a war on the superego—an attempt to strip away the mechanism through which human beings are able to draw inner strength and become heroic. The idea is to replace passion, group cohesion, and feelings of community with lassitude. CPI is challenging this inculcation of organizational-phobia from the liberal order head-on and using the Khruschevism book to train members to push back and remain solid in the face of demoralization operations.
Value Crisis
The system of production organized for profit has a built-in problem of producing more goods than it pays out in wages. This leads to a situation where the economy suffers and businesses collapse due to the market being saturated with products that cannot be sold. Most economists refer to this problem as “glut.” John Maynard Keynes called it “underconsumption.” Karl Marx and Marxists have generally called it “overproduction.”
It is essential to understand this built-in problem of the market economy when explaining the semi-permanent economic crisis induced by computer technology and artificial intelligence. Human creativity and brilliance have outstripped the narrow limits of what the profit system can facilitate, and central planning is necessary to have long-term sustainable growth.
However, the word “overproduction” can no longer be used because when people hear it, they think of some kind of environmental critique of consumerism, or a feeling that “too much stuff is being created.” Peter Coffin originated the term “value crisis” to avoid the confusion that comes up whenever the word “overproduction” is used. The problem is compounded by the tendency of the falling rate of profit.
As a result of the widespread confusion, CPI calls the problem of poverty created by abundance—exacerbated by technological advancement—“value crisis.” CPI has a clear understanding of why the economic meltdown of 2008 occurred and why the western system has not recovered, and why the great technological advances of our time necessitate rational economic planning
Liberalism
In American politics, Democrats are called “liberals” and Republicans are called “conservatives.” However, liberalism is a much older and more universal concept in the West. Liberalism is a mindset that celebrates individualism above all else and seeks to break down notions of collectivism, group identity, or obligation.
Liberalism was the ideology of the revolutions that destroyed feudalism in Europe and brought the market into being. Liberalism won many great victories for humanity—free speech, freedom of religion, and the entire notion of human rights. However, liberalism has been taken to extreme ends, as we see throughout the decaying Western nations.
“Neoliberalism” refers to an economic school of thought that sees the market as solving all problems and rejects the notion that the state should be involved in managing the economy. Social liberalism refers to a belief system that rejects any notion of obligation to country, community, or family. The Western system seeks to break humanity down into atomized, isolated individuals who can be easily manipulated and controlled. The philosophy that celebrates and pushes this atomization to more and more extreme ends is called “liberalism.”
Degrowth
The idea that the problems created by the irrationality of the market are due to an inherent flaw in humanity itself is widely promoted by the globalist/imperialist order. The notion that “we have gone too far” and we need to reduce consumption, reduce the population, and bring the world “back into balance” is a repackaging of the sinister British imperialist economic ideas first coined by Robert Thomas Malthus, then promoted by the Rockefeller family and the Neo-Malthusians.
The idea that humans are a cancer on the planet and that depopulation and impoverishment are necessary should be fought against. The solution to ecological concerns is moving toward more efficient energy sources like nuclear power or even cold fusion. “Limited resources,” “finite planet,” and “limits to growth” are genocidal brain-worms that deny humanity’s innovative power.
If we still heated our homes by burning wood, the planet would have been deforested many times over. But the entire history of humanity is reinventing our relationship with nature and innovating. Humanity’s ability to move toward new modes of production, increase life expectancy, expand the population, and make life more fulfilling and beautiful is to be celebrated.
“Degrowth” is a pessimistic perspective that opposes the very nature of humanity. Proponents of “degrowth” frequently move the goalpost, attempting to redefine the concept, but there is no escaping that degrowth is a mindset of pessimism and anti-humanism. Growth should be sustainable. Growth should be done in a way that is in the interests of all society. But growth itself is not bad, and anyone pushing the notion that economic growth is bad, or that wealth is in and of itself bad, is peddling dangerous psychological poison.
Living Biologically
Human beings are an innovative species. While ants make their colonies the same way they did thousands of years ago, and bees make their hives the same way they have for thousands of years, in just a few thousand years humans have reinvented their relationship with nature over and over, reaching higher and higher planes.
The nature of humanity is our ability to exercise agency, ask big questions, and force the environment around us to serve us. However, there is a big push to strip human beings of their humanity and reduce them to the mode of existence defined by lower life forms. A sheep is alive. A weed in the garden is alive. But they do not ask big questions. They do not exercise agency. They do not master their environment. They do not innovate. They are merely “living biologically.” They are alive in the biological sense but not the spiritual sense.
The liberal order seeks to reduce us to living biologically so it can control us and gradually fade us out of existence as part of its plans for degrowth and stabilizing its irrational system with destructive accumulation. CPI seeks to awaken people and enable them to experience real empowerment by refusing to accept a mere biological existence—by understanding the world they live in and fighting against globalism/imperialism.
All of these concepts are unique to the Center for Political Innovation and our efforts to build an organization to rescue America from the emerging low-wage police state and the danger of a new world war. They are all concepts innovated in the course of struggling to demand a government of action that fights for working families. We hope you will join us on our exciting journey!