Originally published in June of 2022
This is the age of the patriotic acceleration; the second phase in the digitisation of the production process which the neoliberal revolution birthed. This age is to be characterised by the sharp intensification of real domination over the individual by the abstract structure of domination which we know as ‘capital’. The global coronavirus pandemic response of 2020 – the crescendo of the Trump era – initiated this intensification, and ultimately defined the terms under which the control societies which have developed across the world will progress.
In particular, Bruno Maçães identifies a technological acceleration which the Covid-19 pandemic – and the lockdowns it caused – has generated. Last year, he had an article in the Spectator titled ‘After Covid, get ready for the Great Acceleration’. The post identifies, for instance, the launch of a driverless taxi service, the computerisation of the retail industry and the encoding of messenger RNA to transform immune systems. Truly, you are made to see why he envisions a ‘new age of technological wonder’, though how there will ever be an ‘after covid’ is perhaps less clear. He mentions an artificial intelligence system which can predict the underlying physical structure of proteins, though we also can look to developments in GPT technology for an idea of how the technocapital singularity is coming along. Even the financial instability of 2020 sped up the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency.
On another note, Hartmut Rosa sees a social acceleration which has recently been intensifying. The most obvious manifestation of this is in what he calls the ‘number of legitimate claims on you’, which has exploded since the adoption of the internet. Such claims include social media interaction, checking emails, consuming movies or reading books – the dual proliferation of consumer goods and digital media has expanded the number of claims on you to the point that you never have enough time in the day. Newtonian time has remained static, yet you must run ever-faster on the hamster wheel. This is directly relevant to the international ‘economic dynamisation’ he describes, in which a state’s levels of innovation and productivity must increase year after year for its economy not to stagnate. As he summarises, ‘no matter how fast you run this year, no matter how innovative and efficient and creative you are this year, as a collectivity, next year you have to go faster’.
As we know, however, productivity is largely irrelevant to value. To generate the full value of a product, its production must conform to socially necessary labour time. Accelerating productivity generates material wealth, yet the standardisation of such productivity acceleration levels out any increase in value. Wages stagnate in spite of compounding productivity increases, maintaining the value per unit of time – this is the abstract domination of capital; the domination of the individual by time. Mechanisation and automation are said to have the capacity to generate large-scale reductions in labour time, however I contend that this cannot actually happen in a comprehensive way with the current paradigm of social acceleration.
[the video which was here has since been privated]
I would like to talk about this video. This fucking advertisement has been played so many times in the last year, and I actually cannot even describe how much I detest it. The relaxed poses of the actors, the dreamy music, the nostalgic Australian traffic light noise in the background; it’s all very consciously designed to convey to you that being an Uber Eats driver is not really a job. No, being a driver is so easy, it’s like literally riding down the street on a couch. You might as well be in bed. This is the future of work; this is what the ‘work-from-home’ acceleration which the pandemic caused has entrenched: the deliberate blurring of the boundaries between work time and recreation time. Not only that, but the blurring of the line between worker and manager. Between consistency and precarity. Marx once said that the tendency of capital is ‘always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour’1. All hours are disposable time, and yet all hours are working time; at all times you are on the leash your company has tied to you. This is the logical conclusion of the ‘depersonalised capital’ described in my previous post.
The ’factors of production’ typically include the subjects of labour, the instruments of labour and the labourer. A subject of labour is typically a natural resource or raw material of some kind, where an instrument of labour is an element of the built environment, such as a tool or building. The subject and instrument together constitute the ‘means of labour’, though I think an earlier iteration of this concept – described in The German Ideology – is potentially of use. Rather than subject and instrument, we see a division between ‘natural’ and ‘built’ instruments of production. I believe, in the modern world, we can also identify a digitised instrument of production. Natural production instruments are relevant to rural space, where built production instruments are human and [sub]urban. Digital production instruments, however, are virtual in nature; they generate a space of the artificial, corresponding to a postindustrial hyperfragmentation of the division of labour.
In relation to the worker, the digitised instrument of production is the one in which every aspect of a specialised detail process is standardised and mechanised. There are still only two elements constituting the means of labour, but the contradiction between them has developed into a mechanisation, the end result of which is digitisation. The machinic systems birthed by industrial operations were the first instance of this kind of production instrument; one where the instruments of labour actively consume fuel and perform actions independent of the worker, in some sense appropriating labour from the labourer. Returning to Marx, he even directly states that ‘the development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital.’
To Yuk Hui, ‘technics’ encompasses general technical development, where ‘technology’ specifically refers to machinic processes leading into automation2 – hence, we can map the ‘technological’ onto digitised production. The technics/technology distinction is used to overcome the binary opposition of the natural and the technical, which reenforces the apparent supremacy of Western notions of scientific progress to any and all other epistemologies. Specifically, Hui advances a ‘cosmotechnics’ which would integrate the Ganying (感應) of Chinese cosmology with the cultural process of China’s technical development: ‘We will see later how it is this sense that leads to the development of a moral cosmology or moral metaphysics in China, which is expressed in the unification between the Heaven and the human. Importantly for our argument here, in the context of technics such unification is also expressed as the unification of Qi and Tao.’
Hui illustrates a view of the world in which ‘beings are joined together in a cosmic order which communicates through a consciousness common to them all; and technics concerns the ability to ‘skilfully’ bring something together that resonates with this cosmic order’3. I would like to note here that this relates to the ultimate intention of Locorumness: to generate a digitised Daoism severed and spirited away from its legalistic and Confucian counterbalances; flushed into the crevices and canyons which the Gemeinwesen has dried up in. One might indeed say that the only significant mistake Jacques Camatte actually made was to confuse the technical with the machinic – or, alternatively, to make a value judgement on the advance of the former and latter combined.
The computer, of course, represents the ultimate realisation of the machinic in relation to labour; the ultimate realisation of the digitised instrument of production. The instruments of labour relevant to virtual [computerised] space are all purely artificial. This space which the computer has created has virtualised the production process, and as such, I claim that the human security system – the ‘business enterprise’, in Veblenist terms – has been instrumentalised by capital through artificialisation. Societies of control are societies characterised by such an artificialisation, and it’s not coincidental that the reappearance of the naked Darwinian logic of the ‘free market’ coincided with their ascendence.
With virtualisation of the production process comes economic informationisation. In nominally restructuring a society to suit the framework of a ‘knowledge economy’, one consigns that society to the uncompromising ubiquity of fact which characterises the internet. The end result of this, as has often been reserved, is not one in which the average person is more open-minded or knowledgeable in any significant sense. The internet represents a space of information consolidation governed entirely by the free-market mythology of survival of the fittest. By its very nature, then, this requires the majority of the facts which are presented on it to be fictional. In this sense, the information age has led us directly into the post-truth era of ‘alternative media’ and ‘alternative facts’ which liberals deride. Of course, liberalism is all about having your cake and eating it too.
On this note, I’d like to explore the concept of the ‘firehose of falsehood’ as it’s used to describe Russia’s digital propaganda model. This 2016 RAND Corporation article goes over all the main points. Before we get into it, though, it seems irresponsible not to point out the perspective they’re coming from. I’m sure I don’t actually need to directly go and explain what the RAND Corporation is – the first paragraph on Wikipedia is accurate and concise enough for that purpose. Rather, I’d just like to clarify that in the article itself they explicitly direct their message to ‘NATO, the United States, or other opponents of the firehose of falsehood’. Now, I suppose that doesn’t technically contradict their ‘objective analysis, affective solutions’ slogan, but it’s interesting to note. One of the points consistently brought up in the article is that Russian propaganda ‘lacks commitment to objective reality’, and one is made to ask whether ‘objective reality’ has the same kind of definition as ‘objective analysis’ in this context.
That old line about how ‘a lie can get half way around the world before the truth can get its pants on’ has always had a very imperialistic undertone to me. Even if the common attribution to Winston Churchill isn’t accurate, it definitely feels like something he would say. Like, imagine the implication of a British politician from a century ago saying that, when ‘half way around the world’ meant one of their colonies in Asia or Africa. These good people don’t need lies, do they? No, they need some good old objective reality! The objective reality of The Economist and of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The objective reality of MSNBC and Al Jazeera. Don’t you understand? We, the good guys, have the objective analysis of reality, and you need to learn it!
One of the things the article appears to be disoriented about is the extent to which a Russian news broadcast might resemble an American news broadcast: ‘a broadcast that looks like a news broadcast, even if it is actually a propaganda broadcast, may be accorded the same degree of credibility as an actual news broadcast’. Unfortunately for our comrades at Rand Corp, I think the only people that actually believe that CNN is an objective source of reality these days are people that watch CNN. They go on to give their thoughts on propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik: ‘visually, they look like news programs, and the persons appearing on them are represented as journalists and experts, making audience members much more likely to ascribe credibility to the misinformation these sources are disseminating’. I was actually somewhat taken aback reading this. You’d think they were discussing peer-reviewed research papers or something, with the level of elitism on display. No, apparently, they just legitimately cannot comprehend propaganda in news media form which is not American.
The main elements to consider: Russia’s digital propaganda is rapid, it is continuous, it is repetitive, and it lacks any commitment to consistency. If you have a claim repeated to you frequently enough, you’ll come to internalise it. If such a claim seems to come from a variety of sources, and from a variety of different angles, you’ll probably believe it. With enough of such claims from a certain perspective, confirmation bias almost does the rest of the work. I’m sorry sir, you have been diagnosed with terminal Russia Brain. Please stop calling for ‘Ukkkrainian genocide’, you’re not a ‘patriotic socialist’, you’re 15.
It’s very interesting to me that Americans suddenly come to understand that the free market doesn’t exist when the subject of the media comes up. ‘We must regulate social media to stop them from deplatforming me!’ ‘We must regulate social media to stop them from spreading misinformation!’ Apparently, we can simply purge all the bots, and refute all the fake news. No, of course we can’t. That’s simply not how the internet works, much to the dismay of the baby boomer. The one thing the internet has done is to open up new avenues for proliferation of information contrary to the narratives of traditional news media. Even when media companies monopolise elements of the virtual space, social media generates entirely new spaces with new modes of engagement. In the information age, even conflict is virtualised. The terrain on which information wars are waged is that of the human mind – this is an instance of the control society’s real domination over the individual. Your task is to propagandise more effectively than the opps; to gain an advantage over them in people’s heads. A fascist spread misinformation today, did you?
Admittedly, American libertarians are consistent enough that they do not tend to favour government regulation of social media. This video by ‘Reason TV’ describes a choice between Barack Obama and Elon Musk – between government regulation and private enterprise. It defends Musk’s intention to purchase Twitter, and his proposal for dealing with bots and fake news on the site. Ultimately, the video’s argument is boils down to ‘Obama want government regulation of Twitter (bad) but Musk want private regulation of Twitter (good)’. Of course, it’s more nuanced than that. They explain that Barack Obama supports legislation for government regulation into all social media, whereas Musk only wants to regulate Twitter. Basically, Elon Musk is less powerful than the American Government and therefore he is cool and good. A compelling argument indeed,,, not that I necessarily expect anything more from libertarianism. I hope they enjoy the ‘Mises Caucus’ takeover of their political party lmao.
The distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ ownership which characterises the neoliberal interpretation of enterprise is largely fictitious in general, really. If one understands that the state is little more than the enterprise which happens to have monopolised violence in a given nation, the nation-state’s industry as a whole can be taken as a singular large-scale enterprise. A state’s relationship with the ‘free-market’ is, in essence, the level of complexity of the enterprise’s administrative structure. The market intervenes with internal operations of this enterprise by regulating the relations between companies, which can somehow internally restructure and reorient production lines entirely independent of it. The United States seeks to convolute the industries of other states by siloing off elements of their industrial enterprises with the private sector. A cornerstone of American imperial hegemony the capacity of American media, and American media outlets, to monopolise the information flows of other countries. It’s no wonder, then, that America is so protective of its traditional media outlets.
When the market regulates what a state is allowed to do, the state is not only made to rely on private enterprise, but on informal networks and intelligence agencies. In Citizen Revised, the ACDCA states of the NSA:
‘Other than the National Security Act of 1959 – which mostly outlines recruitment incentives – Congress has passed no laws specifically regulating the agency or explicitly defining its mission, even though the agency’s budget surpasses that of the FBI or CIA. Increasingly, the most basic rights of Americans are defined and redefined at will by extra-legal intelligence agencies, appointees to secret courts, and wage-earning bureaucrats following secret executive orders, rather than the actions of democratically elected representatives in Congress.’
They go on to describe the impact of what agencies connected to the government are capable of:
‘Because postings to social media services like Facebook or Twitter reside on the public Internet, these platforms can be used to effectively place somebody under retroactive surveillance. Should somebody at some point arouse suspicion for whatever reason, that individual’s personal history can be examined in great detail, and analysed by sophisticated pattern-detection algorithms as if that individual had been actively monitored for years.’
You might say that I’m being hyperbolic with the ‘post-truth era’ rhetoric, but I’d like to remind you that the Australian Federal Police are now literally capable of taking control of my social media accounts to modify and delete data if they don’t like me. Like, nothing is even real lol.
If intelligence agencies, think tanks and media networks don’t illustrate the limitations of the ‘government vs private enterprise’ lens, though, the distinction is completely obliterated in the digital sphere. For instance: whether one characterises Huawei as a ‘government’ or a ‘private’ enterprise is almost irrelevant, for we almost intuitively understand that in China, no company is truly private. Huawei’s role in the surveillance and internment of Uyghur people was utilised as justification for the recent Western sanctions on the company, but the fact is, Huawei was sanctioned because the United States knows that the Chinese state apparatus can use it for surveillance. This is just the same as how Huawei was originally promoted within China as a means of reducing dependence on Western tech companies, which China knows the American state apparatus can use for surveillance.
This brings us to one of the two(?) main subjects of this post then: China. Why China? Well, this is the only place on earth which has constructed international financial and digital institutions which operate almost entirely independently of those in the Western World. This power – the power of the Chinese state – has almost inevitably led to the development of a new cold war between China and the United States. After all, did the War on Terror not demonstrate that even if the United States seemingly has no rivals, it will go out of its way to create them? Isn’t it funny how reactionaries suddenly switched from complaining about Muslims to complaining about Chinese people as soon as Trump’s ‘trade war’ got underway? The Huawei sanctions were part of a much broader attempt to decouple the Chinese tech industry from the American one, which has also resulted in sanctions on China’s major tech companies. As such, Beijing now seeks complete technological autonomy; from the semiconductor chips of Yangtze Memory to the lithography and ion manipulation of Naura Technology.
Firstly, though, what is America? I contend that the ‘imperial core’ of the American Empire spans over two continental masses of land; American ideological and political hegemony is essentially total across North America, Oceania and all the ocean in between. Currently, the UK is also effectively part of the imperial core. The AUKUS deal last year reenforces this notion, but it’s also the only reality in which the United Kingdom joining the revamped Trans-Pacific Partnership makes any sense whatsoever, even if the US isn’t a member. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – the nations of the Anglosphere – also constitute the members of the ‘Five Eyes’ security pact.
Australia, the shining beacon of nanny-state authoritarianism that it is, essentially operates as a loophole by which US intelligence agencies collect data on American citizens in ways domestic laws might prevent. The recent fuss over the Solomon Islands also highlights the extent to which Australia operates as an American vassal state – David Llewellyn-Smith even called for Australia to invade the country to prevent its government from striking a military deal with China. This only really makes sense if you understand that the Pacific Ocean has basically been American territorial waters since World War Two. Finally, the Republican insistence on using Ardern and Andrews governments as examples of authoritarian overreach also suggests that New Zealand and Victoria effectively constitute ‘Democrat states’ from the American perspective now.
Now, what of China? Well, I don’t think the Chinese state controls an entire ocean, but it does command a significant geopolitical and ideological presence. To me, it’s blindingly obvious the extent to which the ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ we see today maps onto the ‘socialism’ of Western labour parties in the 20th Century. That is to say that it is a xenophobic, bourgeois force of vulgar productivism reliant on the displacement of indigenous peoples and the exploitation of third world countries. The global manufacturing base has shifted, and with it, the pretence at an internationalist progressivism which its new wealth allows for. China has an upper hand in this regard: where America merely seeks to cut itself off from China, China seeks to market its products to the rest of the world.
However, I don’t seek to merely oversimplify China’s current existence to the extent I just did and leave it at that. Here, Chuang describes a sense in which the Chinese state has historically been mystified and objectified to fit the Westerner’s narrow, universalist ideological lens, and I do not seek to perpetuate this:4
‘Propaganda is examined as if it were matter-of-fact description of the industrial system. Model factories are described as if they mirror the real thing. The mythos of Chinese socialism is expected to match up, one-for-one, with the actual composition of Chinese society. China again becomes a sort of mirage, this time reformatted for the new coordinates of the Cold War. The result is a Potemkin Village version of socialist China, by one side vilified and by the other held up as one of the only flickering lights in the darkness of a century lost.’
This criticism is elaborated on later in the text:5
‘Originally published as the Fundamentals of Political Economy in Shanghai in 1974, during the peak of state influence during the “long” Cultural Revolution, the book was meant as a summary of Party ideology at the time. Ostensibly describing “socialist political economy” as theorized and practiced in China, the textbook was translated and published, with accompanying essays, by American Maoists under the name Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Socialism: The Shanghai Textbook. The textbook, alongside other collections of state propaganda and reports from foreigners’ tours of model factories, has been taken as a common reference point for both supporters and detractors.’
Chuang suggests that the book is little more than a ‘sort of religious text’, and that its reliance on brief glimpses of model enterprises and readings of state propaganda reflects a general Western experience which would reenforce the ‘holy status of such texts for Western radicals’. This kind of obscuring might seem to be an issue only relevant to the 20th Century, when information regarding the internal affairs of the PRC was scarce, and was often produced by the Communist Party itself. However, it seems to me that Western analyses of China continue to be overly opaque and orientalist in nature. As with other parts of the world, China is reduced to little more than a conceptual game to support whatever point you’re making.
Jiang Shigong, a pro-Communist Party intellectual, uses Xi Jinping’s Report to the Nineteenth Party Congress as a basis to define and periodise the history of the Chinese state:
‘”Standing up” (站起来), “getting rich” (富起来), and “becoming strong” (强起来) are ways to divide the histories of our Party and our Republic, referring respectively to the Mao Zedong era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and the Xi Jinping era that we are currently entering. These divisions are not those understood by academic historians but must be analysed from a political angle. Using historical divisions to express political thought is a basic method employed by traditional Chinese philosophy.’
The first two eras roughly correspond to economic periods which historians identify in Western history: the ‘Standing Up’ era of Mao Zedong aligns with the Keynesian postwar consensus, where the ‘getting rich’ era of Deng Xiaoping corresponds to the economic liberalisation of free-marketism. If we connect 60s countercultural forces to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, we can even make the case that the origins of Deng Xiaoping’s reform era are structurally or libidinally aligned to the Neoliberal Revolution. The third era, however – Xi Jinping’s ‘becoming strong’ era – only makes sense in the context of the ‘patriotic acceleration’ which I describe.
I’m not content with simply pretending that China is on the same page as the West, though. Jiang notes that ‘the “getting rich” era of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is described by the Communist Party as “following the tide of the times”’, but it was fundamentally not of the same character as Angloid Thatcherism. Returning to Chuang, they remind us that ‘given the absence of capitalist accumulation imperatives and the rural-heavy demographics of the country, no truly proletarian class was produced in the socialist era’ (5). Neoliberalism has been characterised by the disintegration of the Western proletariat, but it’s only been in this period that a Chinese proletariat has been allowed to develop. Consequently, ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想) simply cannot be equivocated to American Trumpism in any meaningful sense (imo).
Ultimately, the American exit from the TPP set off the signal East Asia needed. This was the indication that America will no longer even pretend to support the economic development of Asian economies, and especially their integration into the Western trade system, regardless of whether China is involved or not. East Asian countries now pursue economic integration with one another – and with China – to balance out the lack of American interest. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership free trade agreement which every major East Asian economy signed onto in 2020 is all the evidence anyone needs of this. China’s export-oriented economy, and consequent reliance on capital inflows, prevents it from untethering from global markets. It’s simply a safer bet for regional powers than whatever the American economy is. This also distinguishes it from the antagonist of the original Cold War, the USSR: the Soviet Empire was uniquely economically closed and self-sufficient, allowing people to chart its rise and fall much more accurately than they’d be able to do for China.
2020 was also an extremely good year for the Chinese economy. Increased capital inflows brought up the weighting of Chinese securities, as well as securing favourable interest rates. The Financial Times declared that ‘despite a global coronavirus pandemic that began in China, 2020 has transformed into the year it all came together for the country’s capital markets, as foreign investors snapped up more than Rmb1tn worth of stocks and bonds’. By the middle of the year, China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System – a scheme transparently aimed at globalising the Yuan’s influence – had secured the participation of ‘984 financial institutions — 48 more than at the end of 2019 — from 97 countries and regions’. The majority of these participants are Asian, and rather significantly include major Japanese banks.
I don’t think this means that the RMB will somehow supplant the dollar as the global reserve currency, though. In this rather well-written article, Kathleen Tyson points out that ‘the renminbi is not free-floating or easily converted to other currencies’, and that ‘countries receiving early renminbi [Belt and Road] loans immediately swapped into dollars’. This is where the digital RMB comes in, however. China may have cracked down on cryptocurrency, but it’s gotten much closer to rolling out its own digitised form of currency than other places – by the way, digital currencies will likely be directly linked to your identity, constituting something comparable to food stamps or vouchers. This currency could potentially become a significant force in East Asia, first targeting what Tyson describes as the ‘Ant and Tencent payments duopoly within China’, and then moving into global supply chains. This future isn’t certain, though. Even Japan is considering its own digital currency, and the ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy and aggressive military posturing which has characterised the Xi Jinping era seems to be at odds with Beijing’s aim of economic integration with other Asian powers. The expansion of the ‘Digital Yuan’ would be directly facilitated by American economic isolationism and spiralling Western inflation.
In the United States, the political dominance of populist nationalism over liberal internationalism was thoroughly established with the 2016 election, and this has not shifted significantly at all under Joe Biden. The Biden Administration, particularly in terms of foreign policy, is defined in purely Trumpian terms. It’s not only that the United States has accelerated the economic decoupling with China, but also that it hasn’t even attempted to re-join or propose an alternative to the TPP. It’s not unlikely that the unfavourable economic circumstances Biden faces will lead to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, spelling out an effective 12-year period of continual Trump Administration.
Where one might once have conceived of the global predominance of free-market capitalism – as seen at the end of the 20th Century – as a universalisation of political life, from our current vantage point we can see that it was only the base structure from which a new nationalism fragments the planet into a set of economic blocs. Unlike the nationalism which the height of colonialism spawned, however, this is one which will be potentially underpinned by a genuine competition between different cultural and racial identities. In the Anglosphere, this is highlighted by the increasing antagonism of the general populous to people of East Asian ancestry. Violence against Asians is now a common occurrence in many major American cities, and in Australia, it’s basically socially acceptable to complain about how ‘the Chinese are buying up all the property’ or some other such nonsense. Just last week there was yet another 60 Minutes episode about how ‘the Choinees are on your doorstep’. I did not watch it, but I can only hope that it doesn’t implicitly suggest building Chinese internment camps like this one did.
Hopefully by now it is clear exactly what I mean when I say that this era is one of patriotic acceleration. It is the wet dream of the ‘patriotic socialist’; the fantasy of the sun-worshipping ‘fourth positionist’. An international regression into nationalist tendencies with the Communist Party of China at the helm of global technological advancement. Liberals of both the Western and Eastern varieties pursue a technologically driven society of nuclear-powered efficiency, neohumanist eugenics and unconstrained surveillance. They just don’t like each other. Simple as.
Russian influences have proliferated in the Indian media under the Modi Government, which has deepened the ties between Russian, Indian and American nationalists. The Philippines literally just elected the son of Ferdinand Marcos as president – as if Duterte wasn’t enough. Erdogan’s continual occupation of parts of Northern Syria highlights the extent to which Turkish nationalism is not constrained by ‘international law’. The Arab Spring protests across North Africa in 2011 almost foreshadowed the 2021 round of military coups in the Sahel region, from Mali to Guinea to Sudan. The ways the American Government sought to justify military intervention in Syria following events of the Arab Spring was quite ridiculous also. Just a small no-fly zone. Just a little targeted strike. A quick in-out trip. 20 minutes. Trust me.
These days they sell Coke without calories, milk no fat, war without casualties – Vents, FTM
There’s a stunning level of whataboutism which Western rightists tend to engage in now, where you are literally not permitted to bring up classical fascism or national socialism without being asked ‘what about communism?’ or ‘what about China?’ Of course, it is quite clear that one could only really be so reluctant to discuss fascism in isolation is due to one’s sympathies for fascism. No, you can’t talk about that, you must relativise and trivialise! It’s just the same as the disregard for the lives of people in Ukraine which leads sun worshippers to be unable to discuss the current invasion in isolation. It’s all tribal. It’s all a game. None of this is about stuff that actually happens; nobody actually cares.
The new international nationalist dynamic is evidenced also by how – once it was realised how little verbal ‘support’ amounts to in the context of a conflict on the other side of the world – liberal signalling regarding the war in Ukraine rapidly devolved into explicit Russophobia and accompanying Aryanisation of White Ukrainians. The strangest thing to me was that, prior to the conflict, I’d always had a suspicion that I had some kind of irrational distaste for Russian culture. In hindsight, it seems that it was likely just reasonable concern about Russia’s fascistic political climate – not that I’m under the illusion that other Eastern European states don’t have a similar thing going on. We must remember that Russia’s particular brand of aggressive revanchism, however, is not limited to peoples outside of its borders. We already know about the indiscriminate shelling, shooting and rape which occurred in Chechnya. What is now occurring in Ukraine was earlier practiced within Russia itself.
You might be tempted to suggest that the neonationalism which is now becoming ubiquitous contradicts the advance of technocapital. After all, capital itself is nothing if not a continual revolt against traditional forms of life, isn’t it? Since the development of fascism in the early 20th Century, however, capitalism been able to surgically dissect and wear down every revolt against order to appropriate and repurpose it for its own ends. Under the fascist’s ultranationalism, the state makes a show of its monopoly on violence for the purpose of reintegrating a disenfranchised proletarian class in such a way as to maintain the property relations they would otherwise look to supersede. Fascism is a cynical reactionary reconfiguration of socialism, in just the same sense as ‘laissez-faire’ economics is a cynical reconfiguration of anarchism, and organised religion is a cynical reconfiguration of mysticism. In the control society, such mirror reconfigurations of genuine ideological positions have successfully monopolised political discourse.
Yet, this is the very nature of electoral politics. Pressurised forces of political agitation are piped into the security system and redirected towards periodic events of electoral spectacle, in which power is symbolically transferred from one oligarchic commercialist junta to the other. The pressure is vented out through these events, in which the party which has been ruling, and has thereby been designated as the old party of the old socio-economic status quo, is supplanted by the new faces and new ideas of the ostensibly new party. Yet, you cannot vote to dismantle the technocratic think tanks which promote eugenics and nuclear warfare. You cannot vote the police out of their vans and stations. You cannot vote for the destruction of the prisons. But, after all, spare the gaol, spoil the gaoled! Can’t have that, can we?
I think what the Biden Administration’s Starmer-Albanese-Pelosi axis of liberalism evidences, though, is the extent to which you can’t expect electoralism to even maintain what you have. Your rent will be raised! You will marry that man! You will birth that child! You have nowhere to hide;; whether you be shopping or playing sports game or crossing border, you will have your body inspected and your face recorded! These are non-negotiable terms of the populist age, you understand? Even when the government isn’t violating your bodily autonomy, a private citizen who doesn’t approve of your existence might well do so. Even where the government hasn’t recorded your presence in a public space, someone taking a film on their phone probably has. Please wear a mask in public places.
Leftists will claim to be disgusted by this state of affairs, and yet somehow, they only ever seem to be capable of criticising authority for not being efficient enough. The Leninist party of the revolution will simply be completely different to the other parties, of course. I like to make this point often, but it’s very important to highlight the hypocrisy of their authoritarianism in connexion with issues they profess to care about. Of course, I have been in particular alluding to abortion in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision against Roe vs Wade. Now, firstly, if you think Brandon signing an executive order is the end of story there, I have a bridge to sell you – but also: the Supreme Court has expressed interest in a number of other issues which he most certainly will not respond to. In particular, this case concerning the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 will be reviewed, and for some reason I don’t have very much confidence that they’ll side with Native American tribal sovereignty. As we know, settler-colonial states have a knack for finding ways to tear children out of indigenous communities.
In this environment, I will not negotiate with lazy strawmen of the different identitarianisms. Trans advocacy entails the exclusion of non-binary people? Black nationalism entails a literal separatist nation-state which excludes non-blacks?? Land back movements entail mass deportations and genocide of non-indigenous peoples??? Why on earth would anyone want to hear from you if you believe this? No investigation, no right to speak! This is not to say that I’m unfailingly loyal to any preacher of any form of identity politics, of course. Racketeering grifters love to claim these causes, and formal groupings dedicated to them will invariably and rapidly trend towards their most reactionary constituencies. I think this is important to note specifically because there is a depressingly common tendency to make every excuse for politics which would apparently benefit one’s own identity whilst actively antagonising anything which apparently doesn’t. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to stay out of other people’s business.
THIS JUST IN, SHOCKING 6-3 SUPREME COURT RULING: CHEMICAL WARFARE, CHEMICAL WARFARE, CHEMICAL WARFARE, WARFARE WARFARE! Please wear a mask in public places.
I don’t think people necessarily tend to understand what I mean when I compare myself to anarchists. I am not ontologically anarchist. I don’t come to you with such extraneous questions as ‘should the global economy collapse’, I come with the expectation that it will. The question is not whether there should be crisis, but what opportunities you can take from Crisis when she comes. Of all the things discussed in this article, I literally haven’t even mentioned the coming economic crash, which is surely inevitable. What will you do when the American Empire collapses, its vassals are plunged into turmoil, and the people are subsumed by political repression, social instability and ecological devastation? Where will you be when the losses of your brothers and sisters, of the destitute, the disabled and the queer, hastens from a slow trickle into rivers of blood? We do not have time for children of the bourgeois ordering one another around with their make believe ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’! We don’t have a moment to waste!!
As much as I dislike them, I think the Beatles were ultimately correct in their diagnosis of the direction of the modern world. Here comes the sun. Doo doo doo doo. But it’s not alright. The kids aren’t alright. To my mind, that is our only recourse.
Endnotes
- Karl Marx – ‘Fragment on Machines’ (1858) ↩︎
- Yuk Hui – ‘Cosmos, Cosmology, and Cosmotechnics’ in ‘The Question Concerning Technology in China’ (2016) ↩︎
- Yuk Hui – ‘Dao and Cosmos: The Principle of the Moral’ in ‘The Question Concerning Technology in China’ (2016) ↩︎
- Chuang – ‘Sorghum and Steel: Transitions’ in ‘Dead Generations’ (2020) ↩︎
- Chuang – ‘Sorghum and Steel: Ossification’ in ‘Dead Generations’ (2020) ↩︎
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