Wall Street Primitivism: Nicaragua, China, The Middle East & Charlottesville

Posted on September 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Caleb Maupin

Wall Street, London, and the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund claim to support development and the eradication of poverty around the world. They also claim to support scientific progress and raising the global standard of living. However, often they seem to make friends and allies with very different goals. As Nicaragua proceeds with a huge construction project that has dynamic global implications, one can see a certain international pattern repeating itself, with quite dangerous implications.

“Native Activists” Fighting To Preserve US Maritime Dominance

Control of the Panama Canal by the United States has been vital in asserting control over the world economy. The US military has intervened militarily in Panama on many occasions to secure its control of this vital global shipping and transportation hub.

While the USA currently allows vessels to pass through, this could easily change in the case of a military confrontation. With so much of the world’s industrial shipping passing through this vital point, control of the canal gives the USA a level of unchecked power in the global economy. At any point they could “veto” a country’s economy by stopping ships.

However, a construction project currently in the works in Nicaragua could change that. The Chinese government and corporations based in China are cooperating with the socialist government of Nicaragua to construct a new canal, parallel to the Panama Canal. This canal will not be under US dominion, but under the dominion of the Sandinista government and the People’s Republic of China.

The announcement of the project was followed by all kinds of reports in western media claiming it would be an ecological disaster and contribute to global warming. Now, as the project proceeds, voices of the establishment are crying crocodile tears for the indigenous people who will be forced to move by the project. The Guardian has run stories bemoaning their plight. Amnesty International is warning Nicaragua not to interfere with their protests.

The USA is in the process of putting sanctions on Nicaragua, for their support of Venezuela. A bill currently in the US congress called the NICA Act aims to cripple the socialist government.

While it is ignored in US press reports, the Sandinista government has done a great deal to improve the lives of its population, a large percentage of which is indigenous. Poverty in Nicaragua has been reduced by 30%. The United Nations World Happiness Index reports the great increase of happiness in any country in 2016, as having taken place in Nicaragua.

The socialist government is asserting public control over major industries, guaranteeing jobs, housing, and education to the population, and moving toward a centrally planned economy. The Sandinistas are cultivating a layer of patriotic small business owners, who cooperate with the state to develop the economy with foreign investment. Their methods are similar to those employed by Deng Xiaoping when opening up China during the 1980s.

Though the Sandinistas are widely popular, the forces who oppose the canal project have found a number of indigenous leaders to align with. 76% of people in Nicaragua have some indigenous ancestry. The overwhelming majority of the country is ethnically “mestizo” meaning it has a mixture of European and native ancestry.

However, the forces being rallied to oppose the project are not from the overwhelming majority of the population which has indigenous ancestry, but rather to a specific group of just over 4% of the population, which is described as “unmixed indigenous inhabitants.” These are individuals who have cut themselves off from Nicaraguan society at large, and much like the Amish or Mennonites in the USA, maintain a lifestyle without technology, immersed in religious tradition. While the majority of Nicaraguans are Christians, these forces are Shamanists and practitioners of polytheistic faiths. They reject all “european” concepts and lump Marxism, dialectical materialism, and Christianity into the same basket.

The relationship between this isolated minority in Nicaragua and the US Central Intelligence Agency is not a new development. During the 1980s contra war, the CIA supplied weapons and military training to the indigenous Mosquito peoples to fight the Sandinistas. In addition to the weapons and funding they received from the USA, a number of Anti-Communist US Native American activists such as Russell Means joined with them. Many of these indigenous, anti-technology, and anti-science fanatics stood against what they called the “Racist European Marxism” of the Sandinista government, which was made up largely of dark skinned people with indigenous blood. While they claimed to oppose both “capitalism and communism” as European concepts, they quietly and sometimes not-so-quietly, worked with the Pentagon and the CIA.

Just as they took up guns in the 1980s in alliance with Washington, they now get promoted by pro-US Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-Profits, who conveniently see maintaining US maritime dominance as the latest, trendy, ecological, liberal cause, done to rescue some “mystical people” with “beautiful ancient traditions” being crushed by “racist” “dogmatic” Marxists.

“Traditionalist” CIA-Allies in China

Western utilization and manipulation of primitivist, conservative, and reactionary social forces in order to stop economic development is not restricted to Latin America. The political allies of the United States on the Chinese mainland, who work against the People’s Republic, often while spouting rhetoric about “human rights” are a rather interesting bunch.

The Chinese government has just cracked down on an extremist cult known as “Eastern Lightning.” The group is also known as the “Church of the Almighty God” and worships a woman who they claim is the second coming of Jesus Christ. They are reported to torture, mutilate, and even execute members who attempt to leave. Members of the group famously murdered a man in a Mcdonalds restaurant for refusing to allow his daughter to give her phone number to them.

While some would dismiss this simply as an obscure religious cult, it is important to note that the lead minister of the Church, along with the woman who claims to be Jesus Christ, both currently live in the USA. In 2001, they sought “political exile” in the United States, and while millions of people die attempting to cross the US border, the US government happily grants visas to anti-China activists, order to help them escape “persecution” from the US government.

Another friend of the USA in China is the Falun Gong, a strange buddhist sect. The group calls for the public execution of homosexuals and opposes inter-racial marriage. Li Hongzi, the group’s founder, lives in Queens, New York. His organization has been presented with awards by the Heritage Foundation.

Much like Eastern Lightning, the Falun Gong preaches that the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, in particular its policies advancing the position of women, are harmful to society. The Falun Gong argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s rule represents a “Dharma Ending Period” and that its efforts to include women in government positions is one of its most grievous crimes. The group is also known for separating young people from their families, and threatening ex-members.

Following this pattern, the USA has worked endlessly to promote the deposed feudal theocratic monarchy of Tibet. The Dalia Lama, who ruled Tibet with an iron fist and executed and tortured all who questioned him, is presented as a harmless self-help, spiritual guru in US media.

While he is presented as a man of peace, it is widely known that his brother was given military training in Colorado, and air dropped into the Tibet Autonomous Region in the 1950s. With guns and weapons from the USA, the Tibetan separatists waged a violent proxy war in the mountains for years. This is all boasted about in the right-wing, anti-China book “The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.”

All these bizarre religious groups aligned with the USA in China seem to glorify feudal, pre-Communist China. They all oppose the Chinese Communist Party for its modernization. While they speak different languages, and glorify different traditions, they probably would agree a lot with the Nicaraguan, US-backed “indigenous activists” who oppose the socialism of the Sandinistas. Meanwhile, it is a similar crowd of western liberals who admire them, and would accuse any who criticized them of “racism” and “white-splaining.”

Not only does Washington have a history of aligning with primitivist and feudalist forces, so do European fascists. Julius Evola, the Italian far-right ideologue who spoke of a “revolt against the modern world” had a particular admiration for feudalism and primitive societies around the world. In his book “Man Among Ruins” he speaks of “the demonic nature of the economy” in western countries, which people are always trying to advance, create, and become more prosperous. He admires pre-capitalist civilization for its poverty and “stability” amid starvation.

As members of the European far-right, the Nazis also admired primitivism and poverty. Heinrich Harrier, the author of the beloved “Seven Years in Tibet,” practically a holy book for advocates of Tibetan seperatism, was actually an SS officer. The Nazis believed Germans to be descended from Tibetans, and sent scientists to measure ancient skulls in order to somehow prove this. The Nazis had similar admiration for the caste system in ancient India, and adopted the swastika as their symbol for that reason.

CIA Loves Islamic Extremists

It was the British empire that first discovered the political value of Wahabbism. The Saudi monarchy owes its origins to a cleric named Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab. His interpretation of Islam in 1700s enabled the Saudi royal family to establish its brutal, repressive theocratic monarchy. The British cooperated with the Saudi royal family, which conveniently allowed them access to oil in exchange for propping up the barbaric regime. In 1945, the USA joined with the British is coddling the Saudi autocracy.

Today, Saudi Arabia is one of the only countries in the world where housing in bedouin tents, not modern buildings is widespread. The lack of infrastructural development accompanies a government that outlaws women from driving cars, conducts public floggings and beheadings, and punishes crimes with mutilation. Every person and everything in Saudi Arabia is the property of the King. Citizens are routinely executed for “insulting the King” or “sorcery” among other crimes. Sometimes bodies are crucified and left on public display after execution.

A large percentage of the Saudi population are guest workers who live as slaves with no human rights. Even among the Saudi born population, the Shia oil workers face brutal discrimination and exploitation on the job, with their religious freedom often denied.

While the western economic institutions and governments all claim to support “poverty alleviation” and “development” in the third world, they embrace the Saudi Monarchy in all its horror and backwardness. Meanwhile, the targets of the USA and NATO in the Middle East, are not the primitive oil autocracies, but rather, regimes that work toward modernization.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 deposed western capitalism, and established a government under the slogan of “not capitalism, but Islam.” After the revolution, even in the context of a massive war with Iraq, Imam Khomeni launched a “construction Jihad.” In this effort inspired by Stalin’s Five Year Plans and the rapid industrialization of socialist countries, Iranians were mobilized to build highways, schools, hospitals, power plants, and so much else in order to bring the country out of poverty. Despite sanctions and attacks from the west, Iran has utilized oil revenue and central planning to construct a highly modern country, with a comparatively prosperous population. The Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged from the 1979 revolution, and has made huge strides toward modernization, is now the target of western leaders.

The Syrian Arab Republic, born in the Baath Socialist revolution, is also targeted by the west. This is a government that has multiple parties in office, and has worked with Russia and China to construct huge power plants and highways. Syrian industrial workers are organized into labor unions, and have legal protections on the job. The Communist Party and the Communist Party (Baghdash) are permitted to participate in the government process. Religious freedom is guaranteed with Sunnis, Shia, Alawi, Christians, Druze, and other religious groups all freely practicing their faith. The achievements of Syria’s state controlled healthcare system are widely praised by international bodies, with many doctors and medical professionals trained the state run Universities.

Fitting with this pattern, western leaders are now arming and training Wahabbis, a force representing primitivism and barbarism of the Saudi variety, in the hopes of toppling the Syrian government. It is worth noting that prior to 2011, when the USA began working to foment civil war in the context of the Arab Spring, Syria had begun constructing an oil pipeline, connecting Iran to Mediterranean.

Prior to its destruction by NATO bombs in 2011, Libya was the most prosperous country on the African continent. It had the highest life expectancy, and had constructed a huge irrigation system in order to spread water across this dry, desert country. The forces backed by the United States to topple the Islamic Socialist government in Libya were Wahabbis. Now ISIS and Al-Queda have set up shop in the country, and citizens are fleeing on rafts trying to reach Europe.

Different Definitions of Imperialism

In his 1917 book “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin argued that capitalism had entered a globalist phase. He talked about the rise of “monopoly capitalists” in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. He spoke of how bankers had triumphed over industrial capitalists, and described how wealthy financial elites in the west teamed up with governments to battle against each other, carving out “spheres of influence” in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. He described how third world countries were utilized as “captive markets” in which western countries could sell commodities without competition.

Imperialism, as Lenin understood it, was about keeping the world poor, so that western bankers could stay rich. Furthermore, imperialism meant dividing the working class within the western countries. A “labor aristocracy” of well paid workers was created. These were working class people who could be cultivated to identify with the western capitalists against the colonized people. With their rising standard of living, they would see their interests as identical to the interests of the monopolists that controlled their governments.

This understanding of imperialism was developed by Lenin, and adopted by figures like Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Huey Newton. Even non-Marxists like Michel Aflaq, Juan Peron, and Moammar Gaddafi studied and came to understand imperialism this way. For various anti-imperialist figures of the 20th century, third world revolutions against imperialism were about raising their countries up from poverty, modernizing, and developing.

However, a large section of the modern political left has abandoned this understanding. The understanding of “imperialism” taught in Universities across the USA and western Europe is quite different.

Starting in the 1950s, the New Left, specifically beloved “cultural critics” in the Frankfurt School and elsewhere, began speaking about “cultural imperialism.” Suddenly, among western academics and leftist activists, imperialism wasn’t about holding back development and keeping people poor. Rather, it was about eroding “beautiful” “traditions” and “ways of life” and “imposing” supposedly “western” values.

So-called “Mcworld” & Wahabbi Extremists Work Together

When describing the supposed leftist critique of imperialism in his book “On Paradise Drive” New York Times Columnist David Brooks said that “anti-American” and anti-imperialist forces oppose “McDonalds, Barnes and Noble, and boob jobs.” Those who object to Wall Street running the world are depicted as Native American mystics, Islamic fanatics, or others who object to the industrialization, commercialization, and sexual freedom of western life.

This misrepresentation is widespread. The false dichotomy is often stated as “Mcworld vs. Jihad,” and was widely promoted in the USA, prior to, but especially after 9/11. In this “Clash of Civilizations” narrative, the forces said to represent “Jihad” were the Saudi Monarchy and Osama Bin Laden, while the forces said to represent “Mcworld” were the IMF, the World Bank, and Wall Street.

In reality, Mcworld globalizationists and the forces represented as “Jihad” are on the same team. They have never been enemies. Washington has been on friendly terms with Saudi Arabia since 1945. The CIA worked with Wahabbi extremists in Afghanistan to topple an independent, modernizing government called the People’s Democratic Party. The USA and Saudi Arabia worked with Wahabbis in Chechnya to fight against the Soviet Union and afterwards the Russian Federation. The USA currently funds and arms Wahhabis in Syria, and cooperated with these forces in Libya to topple the Islamic Socialist government.

The conservative forces in the Middle East that oppose modernization and development, and embrace the Wahabbi ideology of the 1700s are not enemies of Wall Street or the London Stock Exchange. Unlike the Shia revolutionaries, or the Baath Socialists, which represent legitimate resistance, the Wahabbi forces do not wish to modernize or industrialize the region. They want to keep it a mess of impoverished oil plantations ruled over by autocratic vassals. Wall Street has no objection to this setup, and it can largely be traced back to the Sykes-Pickot agreement, crafted by western colonizers.

However, in the west, especially in circles considered to be “progressive” there is a strange mystical and cosmopolitan admiration for the forces of primitivism. For example, those who defend the Syrian government, and point out the terrorist nature of the anti-government forces are labelled “Islamophobic.” Liberal crowds in the United States swoon over the pro-Saudi demagogue named Linda Sarsour as she wears a headscarf, uses exotic sounding Arabic words, accuses those who oppose her of racism, and holds rallies calling for the USA to topple the Syrian government.

This degeneration of leftist politics has been a long time in the making. In the 1960s, the Hare Krishna movement, an extremely right-wing Hindu sect in India, suddenly became a beloved staple of Peace Marches. Gurus from India, figures who promoted drug use for “spiritual” purposes, all suddenly became the fixture of the left. Previously these kinds of bohemian elements had been embraced by the far-right and fascists.

In the 1950s, it was Republicans and the “China Lobby” that rallied support for the Dalia Lama and his insurgency in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Republicans accused the democrats of “losing China.” However, in the present context it is liberals who sport “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, while the right-wing is less interested in foreign meddling and applauds to the words “America First.” No matter what region is being discussed, in the present context, it is the liberals, not the conservatives, whose hearts bleed the loudest for US proxy fighters around the world.

While in the 1980s, it was conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Oliver North who championed the fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it is now liberals who moan for the “indigenous cultures” that are supposedly being “oppressed” by the Marxist government, which dares challenge the hegemony of the Panama Canal.

The US Central Intelligence Agency is probably the most involved with supporting forces of primitivism around the world, as they work to battle independent modernizing governments that threaten the monopoly of western capitalism. It should be no surprise, that since the 1950s, the CIA has also been heavily involved in supporting the anti-communist political left, which seems now fully dedicated to their latest crusade.

The CIA began its infamous “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in the 1950s, hoping to direct anti-capitalist activists and artists away from the pro-Soviet Communist Parties in the USA and Europe. The CIA funded the art of Jackson Pollack, experimental music, and all kinds of cultural strata intended to clash with Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism and socialist realism. The CIA also launched a program called “MK-Ultra” which involved distributing drugs on college campuses.

The Monument Fights in the USA

The media in western countries, as it champions various primitivist forces, has essentially embraced Julius Evola’s critique of the “demonic nature of the economy.” Like Mother Teresa who infamously said “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” the non-Marxist, “liberal” element now sees social, economic, and technological progress as its enemy, and looks on poverty, ignorance, and primitivism in a condescending admiration.

While once it was the right-wing that pushed malthusian ideas about “overpopulation” it is now billionaire liberals like Bill Gates that work to decrease the global population. Often in the name of ecology, liberals will boast about how they refrain from shopping, and live frugal lives.

Now in the USA, a political clash that is very dangerous is unfolding. The fight involves monuments to various historical figures who did reprehensible things, such as owning slaves or fighting for the Confederacy in the hopes of preserving the slave system.

While it easy for anyone who hates racism and the racist mythology of films like “Gone With The Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation” to celebrate the destruction of Confederate Monuments, and they are absolutely right to do so, the context of their destruction, and who is destroying them, presents a new danger.

The forces that seek to defend the Confederate monuments are white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, admirers of Hitler, traditionalists, and others. These are forces that want the USA to return to segregation, racial division, and other things overcome through decades of struggle. These forces are known to use violence, and they are widely hated and unpopular, though their prestige is slowly growing due to the absurd political context.

The problem is not that reactionary symbols are being destroyed. This is a positive thing. The problem is rather that the forces who line up against them do not seek to replace their hateful ideology with something new. In Charlottesville and elsewhere, the battle is taking place in which bigots who think Robert E. Lee was a hero are facing and off and violently clashing with those who believe society should have no heroes at all.

Racism Battles Post-Modernism

While the racist, hateful messaging and views of White Nationalists fill the airwaves, and become the subject of debate, what does Anti-Fa believe in? The media refers to crowds opposing the “Alt Right” as “anti-racist activists.” The White Nationalists are quick to call them “Communists.” But what ideas does “The Resistance” believe in? What alternative vision do they hold up to combat the right-wing?

The crowds of post-modern, non-ideological leftists largely do not seek to replace statues they destroy with statues of progressive figures like Frederick Douglas, Huey Newton, or William Z. Foster. Rather, they rally around the concept that “no one should be worshipped” and “there is no truth.” Images of Abraham Lincoln, the man who defeated Robert E. Lee and led the fight against slavery are now being destroyed, alongside the Confederates.

While “Anarchists” and liberals who destroy monuments are quick to point out and emphasize these leaders real crimes, the slogan they rally in opposition with is “No Gods and No Masters.” They fall back on concepts like “think for yourself” “question everything” and more subtly: “don’t believe in anything” “there is no truth.”

As media eulogized Heather Heyer, who was murdered by a white nationalist in Charlottesville, very few reports mentioned that she was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, an anarcho-syndicalist labor union formed in 1905, also known as “the wobblies,” indeed has an ideology and belief system of its own. The IWW believes in creating a society in which the major industries and workplaces are controlled by those who work in them. Throughout its history, it was known for working in favor something, it syndicalist vision, not simply for the destruction the old. Not surprisingly, US media, which largely cheers for the opposition to the Alt-Right, obscures this important aspect of the woman who recently died opposing them.

As the media champions the fight against the Alt-Right, they work to obscure any solid ideology that would oppose them. The primary voices opposing the Alt-Right are post-modernists from middle class backgrounds, trained at elite Universities. They tear down the statues of confederate monuments as they cheer for the “Syrian revolution” that reduces Syria to chaos, or the various “oppressed” primitivist groups that fight against China or the government of Nicaragua.

Bill Maher, a left-wing TV commentator interviewed Leah Remini about her painful history in the Church of Scientology. In the interview, Maher outrageously compared scientology to Communism. The outrageous comparison was in reference to the low income of scientology practitioners.

As the polarization continues, the dangerous reality is that this is not the 1930s. The fighting fascists are not armed with Marxism-Leninism and guided by the Soviet Union, fighting for the ideal of Communism. Unlike the anti-fascist of the 1930s, anti-fa and the liberals who support them are not fighting to impose their own ideology onto society. Rather, they are fighting in the hopes of destroying ideology itself.

This is a hopeless mission. Every society since the dawn of agriculture has involved ideas, religions, and some concept morality, however, incorrect or distorted they may have been. These things are the foundation of human civilization. Even pre-historic tribes of hunter gathers had some rules or beliefs to guide their actions. Post-modernism and relativism cannot lay the foundations of a healthy society.

Western capitalism now rallies around the belief that “there is no truth.” At home it promotes free market capitalism and austerity, an economic model in which selfishness rules, and many people are left in poverty and misery. Meanwhile, it emphasizes a social liberalism based on hedonism and shallow values. Internationally, the west aligns itself with forces that seek to stop economic and technological progress, and freeze their societies in poverty and ignorance, so that Wall Street can maintain its monopoly.

As Americans, like all human beings, long for something to believe in, and long for their lives to improve, not get worse, they are likely to rally around forces who offer them such things. If no alternative is presented, only the now marginal far right-wing will be available to offer such things.

While its easy to call Trump a fascist, something far more deadly, and far closer the reactionary regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy could gain support. A population told to chose between either anarchy, chaos, and nihilism, or the hateful “truths” of reaction, could be pushed toward a very dangerous trajectory.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Globalisation: Hyperstition, Surveillance, and the Empire of Reason

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By S.C. Hickman

Source: Techno Occulture

Edmund Berger in his essay Underground Streams speaking of various tactics used by the Situationists, Autonomia, and the Carnivalesque:

“Like the Situationists the Autonomia would engage with the tradition of the Carnivalesque alongside a Marxist political analysis. Bakhtin had described the carnival as “political drama without footlights,” where the dividing line between “symbol and reality” was extremely vague, and the Autonomia had embodied this approach through their media-oriented tactics of detournement. But under a regime of emergency laws a great portion of the Autonomia was sent to prison or into exile, leaving its legacy through an extensive network of radical punk and anarchist squats and social centers.”

One of the things we notice is that the Autonomia movement actually struck a nerve at the heart of Power and forced their hand, which obligingly reacted and used their power over and dominion of the Security System to screen out, lock up, and exclude this threat. That’s the actual problem that will have to be faced by any emancipatory movement in the present and future: How to create a movement that can be subversive of the system, and yet chameleon like not rouse the reactionary forces to the point of invoking annihilation or exclusionary measures?

A movement toward bottom-up world building, hyperstition, and exit from this Statist system will have to do it on the sly utilizing a mirror world strategy that can counter the State and Public Security and Surveillance strategies. Such Counter-Worlds of Exit and Hyperstitional instigation will need to work the shadow climes of the energetic unconscious, triggering a global movement from the shadows rather than in direct opposition.

In many ways as I think we need a politics of distortion, allure, and sincerity, one that invents a hyperstitional hyperobject among the various multidimensional levels of our socio-cultural systems, calling forth the energetic forces at the heart of human desire and intellect, bypassing the State and Corporate filters and Security Systems of power and control. Such a path will entail knowing more about the deep State’s secret Security apparatus and Surveillance methodologies, technologies, and tactics than most thinkers are willing to acknowledge or even apprehend. Like the Hacker movements of the 90’s up to Anonymous one will need to build shadow worlds that mimic the stealth weapons of the State and Corporate Global apparatus and assemblages; but with one caveat – these weapons are non-violent “weapons of the mind”, and go unseen and unrecognized by the State Security Systems at Local and Global levels.

A global system of mass, warrantless, government surveillance now imperils privacy and other civil liberties essential to sustaining the free world. This project to unilaterally, totally control information flow is a product of complex, ongoing interplay between technological, political, legal, corporate, economic, and social factors, including research and development of advanced, digital technologies; an unremitting “war on terror”; relaxed surveillance laws; government alliances with information technology companies; mass media manipulation; and corporate globalism. One might say it as the Googling of the World.

The United Stats internally hosts 17 intelligence agencies under the umbrella known as the Security Industrial Complex. They are also known for redundancy, complexities, mismanagement and waste. This “secret state” occupies 10,000 facilities across the U.S. Over the past five years the total funding budget exceeded half a trillion dollars. The notion of globalization which has its roots in the so called universalist discourses of the Enlightenment had as its goal one thing: to impose a transparent and manageable design over unruly and uncontrollable chaos: to bring the world of humans, hitherto vexingly opaque, bafflingly unpredictable and infuriatingly disobedient and oblivious to human wishes and objectives, into order: a complete, incontestable and unchallenged order. Order under the indomitable rule of Reason.1

This Empire of Reason spreads its tentacles across the known world through networks and statecraft, markets and tradecraft, war and secrecy, drugs and pharmakon. The rise of the shadow state during Truman’s era began a process that had already been a part of the Corporate worldview for decades. The monopoly and regulation of a mass consumption society was and always will be the goal of capitalist market economies. In our time the slow and methodical spread of the American surveillance state and apparatus has shaped the globalist agenda. Because of it the reactionary forces of other state based control systems such as Russia and China are exerting their own power and surveillance systems as counters to Euro-American hegemony.

Surveillance is a growing feature of daily news, reflecting its rapid rise to prominence in many life spheres. But in fact surveillance has been expanding quietly for many decades and is a basic feature of the modern world. As that world has transformed itself through successive generations, so surveillance takes on an ever changing character. Today, modern societies seem so fluid that it makes sense to think of them being in what Bauman terms a ‘liquid’ phase. Always on the move, but often lacking certainty and lasting bonds, today’s citizens, workers, consumers and travelers also find that their movements are monitored, tracked and traced. Surveillance slips into a liquid state.

As Bauman relates it liquid surveillance helps us grasp what is happening in the world of monitoring, tracking, tracing, sorting, checking and systematic watching that we call surveillance. Such a state of affairs engages with both historical debates over the panopticon design for surveillance as well as contemporary developments in a globalized gaze that seems to leave nowhere to hide, and simultaneously is welcomed as such. But it also stretches outwards to touch large questions sometimes unreached by debates over surveillance. It is a conversation in which each participant contributes more or less equally to the whole. (Bauman)

Our network society has installed its own “superpanopticon” (Mark Poster). Such a system is ubiquitous and invisible to the mass of users. As Poster states it “The unwanted surveillance of one’s personal choice becomes a discursive reality through the willing participation of the surveilled individual. In this instance the play of power and discourse is uniquely configured. The one being surveilled provides the information necessary.” For Poster, this supply of self-surveillance is provided through consumer transactions stored and immediately retrievable via databases in their constitution of the subject as a “sum of the information in the fields of the record that applies to that name.” The database compiles the subject as a composite of his or her online choices and activities as tracked by IFS. This compilation is fixed on media objects (images, text, MP3s, Web pages, IPs, URLs) across the deluge of code that can be intercepted through keyword pattern recognition and private lists of “threatening” URLs.2

Our so called neoliberal society has erased the Public Sphere for the atomized world of total competition in a self-regulated market economy devoid of politics except as stage-craft. As authors in the Italian autonomist movements have argued for the past fifty and more years, this “total subsumption” of capital upon the life-sphere has been accomplished through “material” and “immaterial” means. According to these authors, capital in late capitalism and neoliberalism has attempted to progressively colonize the entire life-sphere. Resistance, they argue, comes through the “reserves” to capital that remain as the social and intellectual foundation from which capital draws, including through “immaterial labor” using digital means. Gradually during modernity, such theorists have argued, life itself has been taken as a target for capitalist subsumption, through the cooptation of communication, sexual and familial relationships (Fortunati 1995), education, and every other sphere of human activity, with economic exchange and survival as the ultimate justification for all relationships.3

Capital’s “apparatus of capture” has become increasingly efficient and broad in its appropriation of selves as subjects of its political economy through the combination of appropriating governmental functions such as: buying off political actors and agencies, cutting public funding to modernist institutions and infrastructures, redefining the agenda of education and other cultural institutions toward capitalist values, owning and narrowing the focus of the media, forcing family structures and individuals to adapt to scarcity economies, and using government police and surveillance forces and economic pressures to crush resistance. In short, it is said that neoliberalism has advanced by the totalitarian institutionalization of national and international capitalism, one nation after another, using domestic means to force compliance in domestic markets and using international pressures (economic, military, cultural) to do the same to other countries, cultures, and peoples. (Day, pp. 126-127)

The increased accuracy (or believed accuracy) of increased surveillance and feedback targeting through the collection of social big data and its analyses and social and political uses (ranging from drone predators to state surveillance in both democratic and communist/ authoritarian governments to consumer targeting— for example, the targeting done by Target Corporation, as described in a 2012 New York Times article [Duhigg 2012])— belong to a conjoined mechanism of cybernetic and neoliberal governmentality, which crosses governmental and corporate databases and organizations. Social big data seeks to demarcate trends, which then directly or indirectly act as norms, which further consolidate individual and group action within market-determined norms (Rouvroy 2013). People are forced into competition, into a “freedom” that is monitored and checked within systems of feedback control. As Norbert Weiner suggested in the Cold War period (Wiener 1954, 1961), communicative control can be used toward a discourse of “rationality”; a rationality that is seen as proper to a given political economy. The documentary indexing of the subject provides the codes for the subject’s social positioning and expressions by others and by itself. Thanks to networked, mobile devices, the subject can attempt to continuously propose him- or herself to the world as the subject of documentary representation. (Day, pp. 132-133)

Those of us in the West who use mobile devices are becoming hooked into an elaborate datasociety in which every aspect of our lives is conditioned to enforce a self-regulatory system of choices and taboos. The surveillance is done at the level of individuals, who are monitored and whose actions are predicted throughout key moments of their consumption or production, marking changes in trends and phase states, and recalculating the trajectory of entities according to these new parameters and relationships. Our algorithmic society is splicing us all into a grid of total control systems from which it will become increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves.

As Douglas Rushkoff said recently digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. It is not too difficult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.4 More and more our mass society is being programmed through an immaterial grid of datafied compliance and surveillance that captures our desires and regulates our choices. In some ways we’ve become the mindless generation, unable to stand back from the immersive worlds of our technosphere in which we live and breath. We’ve become enamored with our Mediatainment Industrial Complex that encompasses us to the point that those being born now will not know there ever was a word without gadgets. In fact we’ve all become gadgets in a market world of science fiction, our desires captured by the very gadgets we once thought would free us from the drudgery of time. Instead we’ve been locked within a world without time, a timeless realm in which the very truth of history has been sucked out of it and instead we live in a mythic time of no time, prisoners of a cartoon world of endless entertainment and false desires. In such a world the virtual has become actual, we wander through life caught in the mesh of a fake world of commodity cartoons, citizens of a dreamland turned nightmare. Shall we ever wake up?

Modern radical thought has always seen subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization, social desire and political activism, expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our age, energy is running out and desire, which has given modern social dynamics their soul, is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean Baudrillard argues in his 1976 book, Symbolic Exchange and Death. In this book, Baudrillard analyzes the hyperrealistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation.

The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. […]

The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious.

Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 71-72, 2).5

We’ve all become simulations now. It’s not our bodies that matter in this digital universe of data, but rather the dividual traces we leave across the virtualized world that can be manipulated to produce profit. In the sphere of semiocapitalism, financial signs are not only signifiers pointing to particular referents. The distinction between sign and referent is over. The sign is the thing, the product, the process. The “real” economy and financial expectations are no longer distinct spheres. In the past, when riches were created in the sphere of industrial production, when finance was only a tool for the mobilization of capital investment in the field of material production, recovery could not be limited to the financial sphere. It also took employment and demand. Industrial capitalism could not grow if society did not grow. Nowadays, we must accept the idea that financial capitalism can recover and thrive without social recovery. Social life has become residual, redundant, irrelevant. (Bifo)

Those of us of an older generation still remember what existed the other side of the virtual screen, but the mass of young being born now will not have that luxury and their minds will be completely immersed in this new virtual actuality with no sense of the Outside.

While those on the Left still ponder outmoded political worlds the world of capital has abandoned both the political and the social. It’s time to wake up … I wanted to say, “before it’s too late”. My problem, my despair is that it is already too late. And, yet, I continue throwing out my little posts in hopes that someone is listening, that someone will awaken from their dogmatic slumber and act… is that you?

Bauman, Zygmunt; Lyon, David. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (PCVS-Polity Conversations Series) (pp. 79-80). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
Raiford Guins. Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Kindle Locations 1304-1308). Kindle Edition.
Day, Ronald E.. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (History and Foundations of Information Science) (p. 126). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
Douglas Rushkoff. Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 1363-1367). Kindle Edition.
Berardi, Franco Bifo. After the Future (Kindle Locations 2276-2294). AK Press. Kindle Edition.

Sweat Shops, GMOs and Neoliberal Fundamentalism: The Agroecological Alternative to Global Capitalism

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Global Research

Much of the argument in favour of GM agriculture involves little more than misrepresentations and un scrupulous attacks on those who express concerns about the technology and its impacts. These attacks are in part designed to whip up populist sentiment and denigrate critics so that corporate interests can secure further control over agriculture. They also serve to divert attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty and genuine solutions, as well as the self-interest of the pro-GMO lobby itself.

The very foundation of the GMO agritech sector is based on a fraud. The sector and the wider transnational agribusiness cartel to which it belongs have also successfully captured for their own interests many international and national bodies and policies, including the WTO, various trade deals, governments institutions and regulators. From fraud to duplicity, little wonder then the sector is ridden with fear and paranoia.

“They are scared to death,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds: “They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

War against reason

Global corporations like Monsanto are waging an ideological war against not only critics but the public too. For instance, consider that the majority of the British public and the Canadian public have valid concerns about GM food and do not want them. However, the British government was found to have been secretly colluding with the industry and the Canadian government is attempting to soften up the public to try to get people to change their opinions.

Instead of respecting public opinion and serving the public interest by holding powerful corporations to account, officials seem more inclined to serve the interests of the sector, regardless of genuine concerns about GM that, despite what the industry would like to have believe, are grounded in facts and involve rational discourse.

Whether via the roll-out of GMOs or an associated chemical-intensive industrialised monocrop system of agriculture, the agritech/agribusiness sector wants to further expand its influence throughout the globe. Beneath the superficial façade of working in the interest of humanity, however, the sector is driven by a neoliberal fundamentalism which demands the entrenchment of capitalist agriculture via deregulation and the corporate control of seeds, land, fertilisers, water, pesticides and food processing.

If anything matters to the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry, contrary to the public image it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts and displacing existing systems of production: economies are “opened up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished” (Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty, p16).

Critics are highlighting not only how the industry has subverted and debased science and has infiltrated key public institutions and regulatory bodies, but they are also showing how trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small/peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

Critics stab at the heart of neoliberalism

By doing this, critics stab hard at the heart such corporate interests and their neoliberal agenda.

According to Eric Holt-Giménez:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food… The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

The geopolitics of food and agriculture has played a significant role in creating food-deficit regions. For instance, African agriculture has been reshaped on behalf of the interests described in the above extract. The Gates Foundation is currently spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness. And in India, there has been an ongoing attempt to do the same: a project that is now reaching a critical phase as the motives of the state acting on behalf of private (foreign) capital are laid bare and the devastating effects on health, environment and social conditions are clear for all to see.

Any serious commitment to feeding the world sustainably and equitably must work to challenge a globalised system of capitalism that has produced structural inequality and poverty; a system which fuels the marginalisation of small-scale farms and their vitally important cropping systems and is responsible for the devastating impacts of food commodity speculation, land takeovers, rigged trade and an industrial system of agriculture.

And embedded within the system is a certain mentality. Whether it is the likes of Monsanto’s High Grant, Robb Fraley or Bill Gates, highly paid (multi-millionaire) white men with an ideological commitment to corporate power are trying to force a profitable but bogus model of food production on the world.

They do so while conveniently ignoring the effects of a system of capitalism that they so clearly promote and have financially profited from.

It is a capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose.

Genuine solutions: agroecology, decentralisation and localism

However, what really irks the corporate interests which fuel the current GMO/chemical-intensive industrialised model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives and solutions. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

This represents a challenge to all good neoliberal evangelists (and outright hypocrites) with a stake in corporate agriculture who rely on smears to attack those who advocate for such things.

To understand what agroecology involves, let us turn to Raj Patel:

“To understand what agro-ecology is, it helps first to understand why today’s agriculture is called “industrial.” Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… Agro-ecology uses nature’s far more complex systems to do the same thing more efficiently and without the chemistry set. Nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of inorganic fertilizer; flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests; weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture—that is, it produces many crops simultaneously, instead of just one.”

And it works. Look no further than what Cuba has achieved and the successes outlined in this article. Indeed, much has been written about agroecology and its potential for radical social change, its successes and the challenges it faces (see this, this and this). And now there a major new book from Food First and Groundswell International: Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up.

Executive Director of Food First Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system (also see this and this) of GM/chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.

He adds that the scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change. By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that has devastated the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.

When you fail to understand capitalism and the central importance of agriculture, you fail to grasp many of the issues currently affecting humanity. At the same time, when you are part of the problem and fuel and benefit from it, you will do your best to attack and denigrate anything or anyone that challenges your interests.

A Skeleton Key to the Alt Left

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: the HipCrime Vocab

Last time we looked at the differences between the “Left” as manifested in the mainstream political discourse and those of a number of authors, blogger and thinkers that I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) lumped under the umbrella of the Alt-Left. We listed a lot of their views, but what lies at the heart of the Alt-Left’s critique?

I think an answer to that question might be illuminated by this article: Kanth: A 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

The article describes the ideas of a thinker named Rajani Kanth. Like some on the Alt-Right, Kanth is highly critical of many of the ideas which came out of the European Enlightenment. Kanth’s critique, thought, centers around what he calls Eurocentric Modernism, which he feels had come to define the current world order, pushing out any alternatives:

We’re taught to think of the Enlightenment as the blessed end to the Dark Ages, a splendid blossoming of human reason. But what if instead of bringing us to a better world, some of this period’s key ideas ended up producing something even darker?

In [author Rajani Kanth’s] view, what’s throwing most of us off kilter…was…a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes of existence, many quite ancient and time-tested, and eventually rose to dominate the world in its Anglo-American form…Kanth argues that this framework, which he calls Eurocentric modernism, is collapsing….

Many of the authors previously mentioned are critical of Eurocentric Modernism, even if they are not familiar with that concept. What is Eurocentric Modernism?

The Eurocentric modernist program, according to Kanth, has four planks: a blind faith in science; a self-serving belief in progress; rampant materialism; and a penchant for using state violence to achieve its ends. In a nutshell, it’s a habit of placing individual self-interest above the welfare of community and society.

Eurocentric Modernism is also intrinsically tied up with the concept of the One Big Global Market put into place by European economic liberals using strong centralized states and top-down state violence. The Market itself is the greatest “social engineering” project ever conceived, and is currently showing signs of fraying around the edges (or even collapsing outright):

Eurocentric modernism…delivered a society which is essentially asocial — one in which everybody sees everybody else as a means to their own private ends…[and] consigned us to an endless and exhausting Hobbesian competition. For every expansion of the market, we found our social space shrunk and our natural environment spoiled. For every benefit we received, there came a new way to pit us against each other…[P]eople are not at all like Adam Smith’s homo economicus, a narrowly self-interested agent trucking and bartering through life. Smith…turned the human race — a species capable of wondrous caring, creativity, and conviviality — into a nasty horde of instinctive materialists: a society of hustlers.

In fact, economics has been called the “crown jewel” of the Eurocentric Modernist project. Rather than any sort of actual “science,” it is a code of ethics and philosophical justification for the world as it is under Eurocentric Modernism. It prevents any challenge to it, depicting the current order as “scientific,” “natural” and “inevitable.” (i.e. “There is no alternative”). According to its adherents, any criticism of it is contrary to “human nature.” Every day, millions of people in every corner of the globe are indoctrinated in its tenets, like a modern-day religion. You can’t understand the political regime of Eurocentric Modernism without its philosophical handmaiden—Economics.

Modern orthodox economists frequently theorize and propose their models wrapped in algebraic expressions and econometrics symbols that make their theories incomprehensible to anyone without a significant training in mathematics. These complicated mathematical models rely on sets of assumptions about human behavior, institutional frameworks, and the way society works as whole; i.e. theoretical underpinnings developed through history. Yet, more frequently than not, their assumptions go to such great lengths that the models turn out utterly detached from reality.

This approach was promoted during the 1870s, in an effort to emulate the success of the natural sciences in explaining the world around us, and so transform Political Economy into the “exact” science of Economics. The new discipline, born with a scientific aura, would provide a legitimate doctrine to rationalize the existing system and state of affairs as universal, natural, and harmonious.

It is understandable that economists wanted their field to be more like the natural sciences. At the time, great advances in physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy had unraveled many mysteries of the universe. Those discoveries had yielded rapid development around the world. The Second Industrial Revolution was well underway, causing a transition from rudimentary techniques of production to the extensive uses of machines. Physics and mathematics were validated to a great extent with the construction of large bridges, transcontinental railroads, and the telephone. There exists extensive evidence to establish that this success of the natural sciences and the scientific method had a big influence on the mathematization of what had been the field of Political Economy. Early neoclassical theorists misappropriated the mathematical formalism of physics, boldly copied their models, and mostly admitted so. Particularly guilty of this method were W.S. Jevons and Léon Walras; credited with having arrived at the principle of marginal utility independently…

The Borrowed Science of Neoclassical Economics (The Minskys)

Not only did it borrow the language of science, at around the same time it eliminated all class/institutional power relations from consideration, instead depicting us all as “equals” making mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges.

…Power was originally recognised as important by the Classical economists like Adam Smith. However this changed with the rise of socialism. Wealthy industrialists and rulers feared this threat and sought to find an economic theory that would debunk socialism and protect themselves. It was for this reason that economics began to downplay issues like inequality and poverty. It also de-emphasised production and therefore any resulting questions about social relations. Instead economics switched to discussing marginal utility of hypothetical individuals where none had power over the other. There was no boss or servant, but rather groups of individuals voluntarily interacting in mutually beneficial arrangements.

Crucially, economics became depersonalised and it was no longer possible to make value judgements. A dollar spent by a rich person on a loaf of bread was the same as a dollar spent by a poor person on the same loaf. It was no longer argued that one person may need the dollar more or that the starving may need the loaf more than the fat. Economics abandoned the idea that people have needs and assumed we only have desires. This change in focus did not happen by chance or due to superior argument but due to the politics of the time…

Economists and the Powerful (Whistling in the Wind)

Rather than the pseudoscience of Economics, Kanth suggests we take our social inspiration from a different source—human anthropology:

Utopian dreamers have often longed for a more hospitable way of living. But Kanth believes that when they look to politics, economics or philosophy for answers, they are missing the best inspiration: human anthropology…without which our forays into economics, psychology, sociology, and pretty much everything are hopelessly skewed…the Eurocentric modernist tradition, influenced by the Judeo-Christian idea that we are distinct from the world of nature, seeks to separate us from the animal world. We are supposed to be above it, immortal, transcending our bodies and the Earth…

As Kanth sees it, most of our utopian visions carry on the errors and limitations born of a misguided view of human nature. That’s why communism, as it was practiced in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, projected a materialist perspective on progress while ignoring the natural human instinct for autonomy— the ability to decide for ourselves where to go and what to say and create. On flip side, capitalism runs against our instinct to trust and take care of each other.

[D]idn’t Eurocentric modernism…give us our great democratic ideals of equality and liberty to elevate and protect us?…Kanth…notes that when we replace the vital ties of kinship and community with abstract contractual relations, or when we find that the only sanctioned paths in life are that of consumer or producer, we become alienated and depressed in spirit. Abstract rights like liberty and equality turn out to be rather cold comfort. These ideas, however lofty, may not get at the most basic human wants and needs.

The key is not to project ourselves into the future, but to learn from the practical, beneficial ways humans have lived in the past and still do, in some cases, in the present…

Now let’s introduce a related concept here called High Modernism. This concept was developed by James Scott in his book Seeing Like A State. It has some similarities and overlaps with Eurocentric Modernism, but is distinct from it.

Seeing Like a State (The Easiest Person to Fool)

Book Review: Seeing Like A State (Slate Star Codex)

High Modernism is associated with the project of state-building. To this end, it is intrinsically tied up with many elements of the mainstream Left/Right view–democracy, meritocracy, top-down technocratic management, rationalism, materialism, educational attainment, laissez-faire capitalist markets, centralized power, standardization, multiculturalism and globalism.

High Modernism is the attempt to standardize and regularize the world so as to make it legible for rational management and top-down planning by centralized bureaucracies. It places a premium on maximizing “efficiency.” The ultimate purpose is taxation–the funneling of resources from a periphery to a core. In Scott’s view, this process defines the creation of what we normally term “the State.” However, this process often has unforeseen consequences.

[James] Scott defines [High Modernism] as[:]

“A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids (maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”).

Clearly both the Mainstream Left and Right are adherents of High Modernism. But more importantly, even the major so-called “Leftist” or “collectivist” movements of the Twentieth Century, such as Soviet Communism, were just as wedded to ideas of “progress” and High Modernism as was Western “libertarian” capitalism. The distinction between Left and Right breaks down here.

Many adherents of Communism were moved by Marx’s descriptions of Capitalism’s flaws and shortcomings, but they attempted to construct a “new and improved” top-down hierarchical system in its place which was just as much based on a flawed conception of human nature (the Soviet “new man;” a “classless society”). To keep this utopian project going also required state violence and oppression. Yet we forget that our Capitalist Systems rely just as much on state violence and social control. Note that the “free” societies of the West have now become just as much carceral/surveillance states as the fallen regimes of Eastern Europe, if not more so. As John Gray commented, “The Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. “

Both ostensibly “Left” and “Right” movements were obsessed with an idea of “progress” that left millions of dead bodies in its wake. As I’ve written before, we are taught to believe that One Big Capitalist Market came about organically through the “scaling up” of primordial farmer’s markets due to our “natural” instincts to “truck barter and exchange.” Yet this is horribly wrong. It’s another part of economics indoctrination.

As Karl Polanyi demonstrated, the One Big Global Market was an artificially constructed by aggressive top-down state violence. The Enclosure Movement, the Highland Clearances, the Poor Laws, Speenhamland, Work Houses, Debtor’s Prisons, the Luddite Revolts, the Corn Laws, Game Laws, Colonialism, the Gold Standard, state-granted corporate charters (e.g. the East India Companies), national banks (the Bank of England), and many other historical changes brought it about.

Millions of people perished in the construction of the Market, from Native Americans, to English peasants, to Irish subsistence farmers, to Indian and African villagers (to the unemployed coal miners overdosing in rural Appalachia today). Many institutions we take for granted in the modern world are band-aids put into place as a result of popular demands for some sort of protection from the destructiveness of this project (e.g. popular democracy, the Welfare State, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, environmental protections, etc.). These people were victims of Modernism just as much as the victims of the Holdomor, yet they have been erased from history. The top-down creation of the Market by central governments is what allowed Capitalism to form in Northern Europe and to project itself around the world.

It may be hard to believe given how much we’ve become inured to it, but the social dysfunction we take for granted today, with its rampant homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, abused children and elderly, beggars on the street, and so forth, would have been unthinkable to traditional societies. What was once shocking has become normal.

Scott describes in detail the processes by which local knowledge is supplanted by regularized systems. Some examples he gives are: the replacement of small-plot peasant agriculture with large-scale, “efficient” mechanized farms of monocrops, assigning people permanent last names (and later ID numbers), bulldozing neighborhoods of crooked streets and replacing them with planned, rectangular grids of wide-open streets, replacing vernacular architecture with cookie-cutter high-rise housing projects, the supplanting of regional dialects with a single “national” language, universal childhood education, and the standardization of money, weights and measures. For example:

…Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants [in 18th century Prussia] were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones…

With the advent of globalism, the High Modernist concept now has the entire world in its grip, and is driving us off a cliff. From the countless environmental catastrophes, to the breakdown of entire nations like Syria and Afghanistan, to the ultimate High Modernist project of China, it seems like this project has run its course and is leaving us with a destabilized climate and social situation.

Unemployment, violent crime, war, violence, depression, obesity, environmental catastrophe, social chaos, extreme inequality, mass incarceration–all are getting worse, and our leaders have no answers besides enriching themselves! No wonder we’re desperately searching for alternatives.

I see a lot of the criticism of the Alt-left stemming from a critical view of both Eurocentric modernism and High Modernism. The similarities between them are that both are fundamentally a Procrustean bed for humans, as opposed to the anthropology-centered approach advocated by Kanth.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we, the human beings inhabiting this planet, try to solve problems of great significance and complexity with the…Procrustean method. Instead of making the bed fit the travelers, we stretch and cut off limbs to do the inverse.

One example Taleb points out are schoolchildren who we pump full of medication so that they adapt to the unbelievably flawed education system, instead of altering the curriculum to suit the children. It couldn’t be that the 10-year-old boy is not meant to sit in the same chair inside the dull classroom for hours on end every day, and when he starts to fidget he’s diagnosed with ADHD, considered hyperactive and has a learning disability, which of course needs to be corrected by tinkering with his brain chemistry.

Situations like this are everywhere around us and they often bear grave consequences…[The Bed of Procrustes] represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects:

Modifying humans to satisfy technology

Blaming reality for not fitting economic models

Inventing diseases to sell drugs

Defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom

Convincing people that employment is not slavery

Philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs:

The chief effect of the Industrial Revolution was to engender the working class. It did this not so much by forcing a shift from the country to towns as by enabling a massive growth in population. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new phase of the Industrial Revolution is under way that promises to make much of that population superfluous.

Today the Industrial Revolution that began in the towns of northern England has become worldwide. The result is the global expansion in population we are presently witnessing. At the same time, new technologies are steadily stripping away the functions of the labour force that the Industrial Revolution has created.

An economy whose core tasks are done by machines will value human labour only in so far as it cannot be replaced. [Hans] Moravec writes: ‘Many trends in industrialized societies lead to a future where humans are supported by machines, as our ancestors were by wildlife.’ That, according to Jeremy Rifkin, does not mean mass unemployment. Rather, we are approaching a time when, in Moravec’s words, ‘almost all humans work to amuse other humans’.

In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which – though it is busier than ever before secretly suspects that it is useless.

Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone. ..Bourgeois life was based on the institution of the career – a lifelong pathway through working life. Today professions and occupations are disappearing. Soon they will be as remote and archaic as the ranks and estates of medieval times.

Our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring. None but the incorrigibly feckless any longer believe in taking the long view. Saving is gambling, careers and pensions are high-level punts. The few who are seriously rich hedge their bets. The proles – the rest of us – live from day to day.

In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

What is Kanth’s alternative?

Kanth thinks what we’d much prefer is to live in what he calls a “social economy of affections,” or, put more simply, a moral economy. He points out that the simple societies Europeans were so moved by when they first began to study them, conjuring images of the “noble savage,” tended toward cooperation, not competition. They emphasized feeling and mutual affection. Karl Marx got his idea of communism from looking at the early anthropological studies of simple societies, where he was inspired by the way humans tended to relate to each other.

“Today we are taught to believe that society doesn’t owe us a living,” says Kanth. “Well, in simple societies they felt the exact opposite. Everybody owed everybody else. There were mutual ties. People didn’t rely on a social contract that you can break. Instead, they had a social compact. You can’t break it. You’re born with it, and you’re delighted to be part of it because it nurtures you. That’s very different from a Hobbesian notion that we’re all out to zap each other.”

Note that this is very different from the Alt-Right, who celebrate capitalist Markets as Social Darwinist winnowing mechanisms eliminating the “weak” and “unfit” and argue that one’s intrinsic value as human being is solely a function of one’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and money-earning power. They celebrate a society of constant, unremitting conflict, where all one is entitled to is what he or she can claw free from the impersonal market, nothing more and nothing less.

The Alt-Right is, as one commenter observed, obsessed with the idea of inequality–between people, nations, and various “races.” They believe that the strong are entitled to rule, and that the weak must yield. They believe in a society where the “best” climb to the top, and anything that retards this, like “democracy” or “collectivism” is bad and leads to dysgenics or some sort of ill-defined cultural rot. The Alt-Right wants an “every man for himself” predatory world of relentless individualism, where society owes you nothing and you owe nothing to society, and the strong are free to prey upon the weak at every turn (“There is no such thing as society…there are individuals, and there are families…”).

In my view, one of the major mistakes of the Alt-Right is their refusal to accept that modern globalized libertarian capitalism is a project of the High Modernism of the Enlightenment, rather than a permanent feature of the human condition stemming from our “natural instincts” to “exchange value.” Note that “exchanging value” is not the same thing as maximizing profits. Most ancient thinkers saw profiting at the expense of others as unnatural, since by definition it implies an unequal exchange of value (which it must be). Furthermore, they made no distinction between “the economy” and the rest of society. This was a creation of economic liberals of eighteenth century Britain.

While there’s always been an elite with a lust for power, the desire to hoard and accumulate possessions was not a major factor until fairly recently. Neither was acquiring large amounts of money. The Alt-Right accepts the economics creed as gospel—that markets are “natural”, that we are instinctively inclined to maximize our own self-interest, and that anything that restricts this behavior is an affront to “freedom.” However, most societies before the present day recognized that runaway greed and self-interest would tear society apart and lead to collapse, not to “higher” states of civilization. They put certain limits on self-seeking behavior. It was the centuries-long process of breaking down communitarian values and privatizing the commons that led to market-based capitalism (along with mechanization). Capitalism is simply impossible without strong centralized states (meaning that “anarcho-capitalism” is an oxymoron).

The Alt-Right looks to the Victorian Era (and perhaps the Roman Empire) as their ideal society. Men rule, and women’s sexual behavior is extremely regulated. Constraints on social behavior are strictly enforced by restrictive social norms. Political control is restricted to the “best” people (the wealthy and property-holders) rather than the “rabble.” Monarchy is still a valid system of government, and power is often hereditary. The gap between rich and poor is extreme, and there is no “welfare state” to support the useless eaters. In this Dickensian economy, people are forced to struggle just to survive, and this breeds “achievement culture.” The winners (usually white males) are rewarded with higher reproductive success, driving Darwinian evolution to “superior” lifeforms. Without being able to satisfy their carnal urges, people instead channel their efforts into work and duty to empire. Europe is not on its back foot, but ruling over much of the globe (including Africans and Muslims) with no apologies, as it should be. The Market dominates the globe without all the pesky rules and regulations imposed by nanny states to protect the weak and unfit. Large-scale heroic engineering projects are launched on a weekly basis, from bridges to canals to railroads. Anything that departs from this ideal society is “decline”–an obsession with the alt-right.

Personally, I don’t think that most people want to live this way.

We may be able to perform dazzling technical feats, like putting a colony on Mars, but we will pay for it by working even harder and longer hours so that a few may get the benefit. A whole lot of lost time and suffering, and for what? Kanth points out that the Bushmen do not have a Mars rocket, but they do have a two-and-a-half-day workweek — something that most modern humans can only dream of. What’s more significant to the lives of most of us?

“We have become unhinged from our own human nature as heat-seeking mammals,” says Kanth. “What we really crave is warmth, security, and care — the kinds of things we get at home and in close social units.” Our greatest human need, he says, is something far more humble than launching rockets: we want to huddle.

The Alt-Left, from what I can tell, is much more focused on creating a well-functioning society where the rapacity of the elites is held in check. They believe in communitarian values–things like common ownership and worker self-determination. To this end, they oppose authoritarianism, institutionalized hierarchy, slavery, gender inequality, racism, bigotry, and conflict. They advocate that the needs of business and the market be subordinated to the needs of a healthy society, rather than society arranging itself according to the requirements of the global marketplace. They advocate environmental stewardship and living in harmony with the natural world (e.g. Permaculture in place of the industrial food system).

If there’s once commonality I see in many of the Alt-Left’s arguments, it is the replacement of large-scale, depersonalized, centralized, high-tech, authoritarian systems with communal, locally-based, more informal ones based in face-to-face relationships and intrinsic social ties such as family, friendship and community. This does not advocate isolationism; only that one’s local community is intact and more important than abstract notions of globalism. It is a vision of a convivial society. There is often more than a hint of nostalgia in their writings.

Thus, for example, James Howard Kunstler argues that we need to downsize and downscale, abandon suburban sprawl, move back to small and medium-sized towns, grow our own food in local farms and gardens, get the old train system up and running again (NOT build new high-speed rail) and reactivate downtown main streets in place of Wal mart. He sees much ill in the alienating suburban infrastructure America has built around automobiles (“Happy Motoring”) and big-box consumerism.

His fictional World Made by Hand series of books depicts a future America where we live essentially like modern-day Amish–with pre-Civil war technology in small towns connected by horses, canals and railroads, growing food locally and living in line with the seasons. Computer scientists, business executives and telemarketers have been replaced by dirt farmers, carpenters and blacksmiths. But the key is, he depicts this way of life, harsh as it is–as far more meaningful and emotionally satisfying than life in modern-day America, which is increasingly resembling the hellish dystopias envisioned by cyberpunk authors in the 1980’s.

When I go around the country, there’s a great clamor for ‘solutions.’ Whenever I hear that world solutions, it’s always invariably in connection with the wish to keep all our stuff running. The amount of delusional thinking that’s being generated by this set of very vexing problems is staggering. There’s understandably a wish to keep all the stuff running that we’ve got up running. That’s the psychology of previous investment. The only conversation they want to have at the Aspen Environmental Institute is all the nifty new ways we’re going to run our cars.

The most impressive part of the situation at the moment is our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what’s happening to us, and what we’re going to do about it…I think the young people especially are going to have to discover that hope is not something that is given to them by a politician or a corporation or by anybody else. Hope is something that you generate inside yourself by demonstrating to yourself that you’re competent–that you understand the signals that are coming to you from the universe…Life is tragic, and history doesn’t care if we pound our civilization down a rathole…

John Michael Greer advises us to “collapse now and avoid the rush.” He argues that we will increasingly be unable to sustain our extravagant ways of life due to decreasing net energy available to industrial civilization. This means that more and more people will inevitably be thrown into what is considered poverty by modern American standards, and we had best learn to live with it. He looks to the past to find inspiration about different and less resource-intense ways to live. He is highly skeptical of new technology, seeing them as “solutions in search of problems.”

His recent fiction work imagines a world where modern cutting-edge high technology has been replaced with older, simpler, more resilient technologies (Retropia). The imaginary country has “fallen back” to earlier levels of development, but these are far more stable and politically functional that the world depicted “outside” where the status-quo is failing and a slavish devotion to technology and “innovation” is increasingly becoming a burden for most people rather than a blessing.

First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided…Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need…Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit…

Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception…Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet…

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush (Archdruid Report)

Dmitry Orlov advises us to disengage from the money economy and formal work arrangements, and instead develop informal, face-to-face relationships based on shared commonalities. He advises “investing” in practical skills and land rather than opaque financial instruments. He himself lives a peripatetic life based on sailing.

His book “Communities that Abide” looks at what are considered minority “out-group” cultures that nonetheless have managed to sustain themselves even as big, top-down hierarchical political systems have collapsed around them (like the Soviet Union, the original focus of his writings). These groups all have durable, time-tested ways of living that have largely resisted Scott’s “High Modernism” and retained earlier lifeways, for example, the Roma (Gypsies), The Old Order Mennonites (Amish), the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, and others. His latest book, “Shrinking the Technosphere” describes how our dependence on centralized high technology is increasingly antagonistic to genuine freedom and autonomy, and describes ways to minimize dependence on such technologies in our daily lives.

He cynically believes that large-scale institutions, including state, national, and local governments, are irreformable, and that any attempts to “fix” them are doomed to fail. Politics is nothing more than show business. Instead, he argues, we should actively disengage from them to the greatest extent possible, refuse to participate, and tend to our own business by forming ways to attend to our daily needs which do not rely on the existence of any large-scale institutions, whether public or private.

I would argue that all of the above authors are all “Small-C” conservatives, in the true sense of the word. They are highly suspicious of anarchic capitalist markets and banks and skeptical of all the new technology being foisted upon us. They see “innovation” as more often than not a dirty word. They all advocate less dependence on top-down hierarchical systems, an emphasis on local community, self-reliance for one’s daily needs, and a slower/simpler way of living.

According to Ran Prieur:

If I defined an alt-left, it would explicitly take no position on race, or on racially charged subjects like immigration. The core of my alt-left definition would be economics. Libertarians want a “level playing field” but I want a playing field slanted so hard that trying to turn a lot of money into more money would be like climbing a mountain, and being content with just enough money for basic dignity and comfort would be like coasting downhill on a bicycle.

http://ranprieur.com/archives/053.html

Rather than the Victorian Era, the Alt-Left looks back much farther—to the hunter-gatherer past—in search of answers. It was a world of equality, sexual openness, freedom, spontaneity, abundance, and leisure. They are likely to see our decline as starting with the transition to sedentary agriculture where elites gained control of the political system, women’s reproductive behavior began to be strictly regulated, war became endemic, slavery was established, yawning gaps between rich and poor emerged, we destroyed our natural habitats, population exploded, people got sicker had to work far longer and harder to support the ruling class.

Or, perhaps they might look for inspiration to the European High Middle Ages, with the dissolution of the centralized Roman State and the re-emphasis on small-scale local economies. While the mainstream Left sees this as a time of backwardness caused by adherence to religion, the Alt-Left sees much to admire in societies not based on acquisition and overproduction, but instead focused on humanism and spiritual values (even if the behavior of the Catholic Church was less then admirable):

The Alt-Left has many antecedents, what Morris Berman calls the “alternative tradition.” This ranges from the old-school communist/anarchist thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Owen, and others, to the American Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, to voices from the 1960’s–Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, Richard Theobald, Kenneth Boulding, Jane Jacobs, Barry Commoner, and others. These views have always been suppressed by the dominant culture, which is dedicated to the religion of progress.

However, the religion of progress seems to be breaking down. It’s telling that many of the above writers are put in the “collapse” camp. Perhaps when Eurocentric Modernism has run its course and consigned to the dustbin of history, we can rebuild something more healthy and durable. Assuming there are any of us left, that is.

Kanth…senses that a global financial crisis, or some other equivalent catastrophe, like war or natural disaster, may soon produce painful and seismic economic and political disruptions. Perhaps only then will human nature reassert itself as we come to rediscover the crucial nexus of reciprocities that is our real heritage. That’s what will enable us to survive.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but right now, we can learn to “step out and breathe again,” says Kanth. We can “reclaim our natural social heritage, which is our instincts for care, consideration, and conviviality.” Even in large cities, he observes, we naturally tend to function within small groups of reference even though we are forced into larger entities in the workplace and other arenas. There, we can build and enrich our social ties, and seek to act according to our moral instincts. We can also resist and defy the institutions that deny our real humanity. Rather than violence or revolution, we can engage in “evasion and disobedience and exile.”

We had better get to it, he warns. To put it bluntly, Eurocentric modernism is not compatible with human civilization. One of them has got to go.

Right to Burn

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Free-market economics gives the poor equal rights to substandard housing

By Siddhartha Deb

Source: The Baffler

At the very end of the film High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s 2015 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel from the seventies, we hear a familiar authoritarian voice extolling the virtues of capitalism. Against the backdrop of the high-rise building that is in many ways the protagonist of the film, the camera closes in on a young boy sitting on a jerry-rigged structure made up of discarded tires, a golf bag, a hockey stick, and a profusion of wires that have allowed him to tune in to the wisdom of Margaret Thatcher. “There is only one economic system in the world, and that is capitalism,” Thatcher says, and the only remaining argument is whether this is to be a form of state capitalism, “where there will never be political freedom,” or if capitalism is to be “in the hands of people outside State control.”

The fire last month that killed eighty people in Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story high-rise for low-income, mostly minority Londoners, is a stark example of what that Thatcherite vision looks like when carried out to its logical extreme. Built in the seventies in what can now be seen as the last great wave of public housing in Britain, a trend that started under the post-war Labour Government with the New Towns Act of 1946, Grenfell Tower steadily came under assault from the market forces unleashed by Thatcher. Located in London’s wealthiest borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the upkeep of the building was outsourced by the borough council to the ingeniously named Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation, a body that steadfastly ignored, and sometimes used lawyers to threaten, tenants protesting about safety concerns.

The cladding newly installed on the exterior, apparently more for the purpose of making the building appear attractive to private buyers of available units than for reasons of maintenance, was found to be highly flammable and responsible for spreading the fire throughout the building. Other “refurbishment” work left the building with just one staircase and exit, and that too partially blocked. In the aftermath of the fire, when the Conservative party prime minister Theresa May visited the site to talk to members of the emergency services, she avoided meeting residents of the building. The borough council, meanwhile, at first refused to admit residents and media into its “public” meeting. Then, when ordered by a court to allow the media to attend its proceedings, it cancelled a scheduled session.

When Ballard’s novel was published in 1975, Thatcher was merely a rising star in the Conservative Party, still four years away from occupying 10 Downing Street. From there, she would go on to use every lever of the state to promote her vision of state-less capitalism, a ferocious ideology of elite self-interest that would ravage Britain and, promoted across the Atlantic by her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, blight the United States. Given a massive boost by the end of the Cold War, this worldview received regular technocratic updates from the Anglo-American leaders who succeeded Thatcher and Reagan, the old piss always managing to find new bottles—Tony Blair’s New Labour, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, George Bush’s New American Century and so on, all the way to Barack Obama and David Cameron until we reach what now looks like the terminal point of that blight, the endgame of Theresa May and Donald Trump.

The rhetoric of neoliberalism was that, with a market society taking root in Britain and the United States, the model could be exported to the world at large. Grenfell Tower shows, instead, that it meant turning Britain, the so-called home of free markets and democracy, into a banana republic. The same could be said of the United States, where crises in infrastructure show a similar trajectory, including in the cost-cutting measures that led to the presence of lead and other toxins in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, in the very town that, as portrayed by Michael Moore in the documentary Roger and Me, was once home of the nation’s largest General Motors plant.

In London, this transformation was achieved, by successive Conservative governments as well as by Blairite New Labour types, through a relentless stripping away of public housing in favor of private residences for the extremely wealthy. Thatcher, in 1979, had introduced “Right to Buy,” allowing tenants in public housing to buy their units at discounts of up to 50 percent. Initially reluctant at the idea of providing a state subsidy to buyers, and nudged into the populist move by other Conservative politicians, Thatcher was nevertheless the one who endowed Right to Buy with an aspirational flavor that everyone could become middle class. The buyers, however, tended to be the most well-off among the tenants, and although the units were initially meant to be lived in, they were eventually often sold at market rates to private landlords, in effect a privatization carried out with the help of public money. It is a process similar to what has happened to Mitchell-Lama housing in New York as buildings have steadily been acquired by private investors, including a building in East Harlem where seven died in a fire in 1987 and that, once purchased by a company backed by a Morgan Stanley investment fund, saw long-time minority residents harassed to make way for new, wealthier tenants.

The resulting housing crisis in London has been accompanied by an evisceration of services, as in the cuts in fire services and policing pioneered by May as home secretary. And all this has been achieved swiftly, accompanied by a technocratic jargon that appears utterly self-referential. Among these are words like deregulation, outsourcing, and, especially, “austerity,” as if what has been going on is some kind of secular Ramadan, a communal fasting to be followed by an iftar party, rather than a refusal by elites to provide basic services to citizens of the sort depicted, recently, in Ken Loach’s film, I, Daniel Blake.

Ballard’s novel captures all this quite perfectly, including the arc from enlightened self-interest to enlightened dementia as his high-rise, which starts out as a self-contained utopia for the professional classes, descends steadily into a small-scale civil war. It ends, as emphasized by the opening passage of the novel where a character eats “the roast hindquarter of the Alsatian,” in a man-eats-dog free enterprise society. With its forty floors, thousand apartments, supermarket, swimming-pools, bank, and school, Ballard’s high-rise, one guesses, has been at least partially funded by taxpayers’ money. It is built, after all, in a reclaimed area of London’s “abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river.” Once completed, however, one of five such towers, it looks out with a glance every bit as predatory as the wealthy in Kensington and Chelsea eyeing the property values near Grenfell Tower, at the “rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation.”

But if Grenfell is a working-class, minority other to Ballard’s tower, ravaged from the outside by predatory capitalists rather than a gated community devoured from within, it also provokes something that is not to be found in Ballard’s prescient work. The tenants who voiced concerns about safety, including two minority women who went missing in the blaze, exemplify a social vision quite different from Ballard’s crazed professionals turning upon each other. In the continuing protests of survivors and their allies asking to be let into the closed meetings being conducted by the borough council and in the demands made by the Labour party leader that empty residences in the borough, owned by absentee rich landlords, be used to house survivors, we see the inverse of Ballard’s psychotic elites competing to the death. Corbyn’s proposal stirred a Tory writer to ventilate about his “true, disturbing nature,” as if he were beginning a class war. But in Corbyn’s bringing to life a moribund Labour party in the face of a relentless media campaign against him, in the votes his party received in the recent general elections, especially from the disenfranchised young, the working class, and minorities, there is a profound stirring of hope, the beginnings of a refusal of Thatcher’s diseased world of man eats dog in a gutted tower.

The Crisis of US Imperial Governance and the Struggle for a New World

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray.”

When I was here last year, I spoke a lot about ideology and how the struggle for social transformation in the mainland of imperialism partly depended upon the ideological development of oppressed people trapped within US borders. The 2016 elections were beginning to pick-up momentum, but it was unclear what direction they would go. Fast-forward to the present and, I don’t know about you all, but I am exhausted. The election of Donald Trump has presented both new and old challenges. It has created an almost circus-like political environment with dire consequences for the masses. What precipitated the circus-show is a crisis of governance that has been intentionally misunderstood by US imperialism’s corporately owned media and political elite.

To distort the crisis, a state of anti-Russian madness has been prescribed to medicate political consciousness in rapidly changing times. The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts. Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray. Donald Trump took advantage of the chaos. He spoke about jobs, he spoke about wars, and he spoke to the growing insecurities of white Americans of working and middle class status who no longer can rely on the wages of whiteness for guaranteed prosperity. The duopoly and its capitalist masters had no one to offer, indeed nothing to offer, so Trump rode in on his orange horse to become the head of state of imperialism.

“The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts.”

The ruling class does not want people in the United States to understand the context of the Trump Presidency. It has reapplied Cold War fears with Russia as the prime target. Russia’s geopolitical moves away from imperialism have been deemed just as criminal as China’s economic supremacy. The US does not depend as much on Russia in the economic sense, but it trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia. Yet, provoking Russia militarily will lead to World War. This is a risk the ruling class appears willing to take as the anti-Russia narrative in the US has only intensified since Hillary Clinton made the erroneous claim of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

According to the US ruling class and its “intelligence officials,” Russia promotes “fakes news” to assist Donald Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin lurks in our social media, and is hacking his way through algorithms to smear the US political system. Russia is infecting minds with its Russia Today “propaganda” arm. The Ruskies have no regard for the damage they have caused to so-called US democracy. Putin wants total control of the US and will wield his most talented social media users to get the job done. This is what the corporate media sounds like these days.

“The U.S. trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia.”

Of course, the US ruling class doesn’t want to talk about how US intelligence already collects the numbers, emails, and calls of every single person in the world who uses a cell phone or computer. They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years. They don’t want to discuss how Russia has absolutely nothing to do with the millions of incarcerated people in the US or the fact that it is the US monopoly capitalist economy, not the emerging capitalist economy of Russia, which has automated many of the jobs and siphoned much of the wealth that once belonged to a privileged sector of US workers. No, it would rather attention be placed on the Russian boogeyman.

Anti-Russian hysteria doesn’t just distract the broad masses of people from the legitimate causes of the conditions afflicting the working and unemployed. It feeds into an atmosphere of war that strikes the very roots of the US social order. Imperialism is the rule of monopoly and finance capital. This system has run its course. It cannot hold onto political legitimacy any more than it can spur economic development beyond the meager 1 to 2 percent growth calculated year after year. In a sense, war is all the system has left. And war is exactly what the ruling class will get, with or without Trump.

“They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years.”

War with Russia is today’s clarion call for “American unity.” In times of crisis, the US imperial state has relied on war to bring political and economic relief from domestic crisis. Every major US-led war has in part been waged for this purpose. What differs now is that war with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity. Scientists have confirmed that nuclear war could make the planet uninhabitable.

What is also different about this current war drive with Russia is how it marks the historical conclusion of the current stage in the world imperialist order. When the US threatened nuclear war with the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and the Cuban missile crisis almost two decades later, the world was in the midst of a transition from Western monopoly capitalism to proletarian socialism. Revolutions in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, to name a few, threatened to undo the very notion of private property. And while US and Western backlash nearly eliminated the socialist bloc by 1991, the imperialist order entered a transition stage of its own that some call “neo-liberalism.”

Neo-liberalism has greatly expanded the reach of capitalism’s tentacles and widened the impact of capitalist crisis since its inception in the late 1970s. Neo-liberalism has unleashed unfettered capitalist production by imposing economic stagnation on participating countries. Meanwhile, China’s socialist model has paved a different path, one marked by unprecedented growth and poverty reduction. China has understandably attracted underdeveloped nations so desperately seeking to escape from the clutches of neo-colonial impoverishment. Russia has grown close to China, providing both countries with much assistance in the way of constructing a multi-polar economic arrangement based on the principles of sovereignty and mutually beneficial cooperation. According to the logic of neo-liberal capital, only war with Russia and China can save the system from itself.

“War with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity.”

This conclusion stems from the fact that neo-liberal capital is not growing, it is contracting. Eighty-percent of workers are near-poor in the US while six mega billionaires hold ownership of over half of the planet’s wealth. Concentrated profit does not mean that all is well with the ruling class. Internal contradictions are eating the capitalist system alive. Neither finance capital nor its monopoly investors can arrest the resultant decline. The growth of technology to speed up production and profit has left millions stuck in permanent unemployment. A high-tech system of production is an expensive system of production, requiring lower wages and debt to absorb the falling rate of profit. Global overproduction has thus developed alongside mass misery.

Such conditions are at the root of mass incarceration, where millions of mostly Black and poor workers are warehoused in cages because there is nothing on the outside that the system can offer. They are also the root of mass surveillance, as the system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures. The War on Terror and Drugs have been prerequisites toward keeping the population scared and its attention away from the US capitalist overlords who fund and support drug trafficking and terrorism for political gain. And when all else fails, blame Russia.

“The system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures.”

The struggle against neo-liberal capital and anti-Russian hysteria is a struggle to transform and revolutionize society. This struggle requires both practical political organization and ideological development. There will be no revolution without revolutionary thought, and no revolution without revolutionary action. All too often the left is debating which one is the most important for the future success of a revolutionary movement. The answer is both, together.

For most, this explanation is understandably too broad to inform individual political energy. Liberal thought and action thus becomes attractive because it hides behind the cloak of the possible and pragmatic. It is easier to think in terms of electoral politics than in global struggle. It is far more simple to advocate for a cooperative economy or universal basic income without spelling out the broad context that prevents their formation. In order for any material victories to be won on a mass scale, the victors must understand the world in which they fight.

“A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born.”

Conscious struggle has brought about meaningful and deep changes in recent years. Mumia Abu-Jamal is now receiving Hep-C treatment after years of struggle with the State of Pennsylvania. The release of Chelsea Manning and Oscar Rivera Lopez also come to mind. Solidarity with Cuba freed the Cuban 5 and has given the socialist nation more opportunities to develop its economy. But these victories have come in the midst of great cost. A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born, as the presence of dozens of political prisoners and the ongoing US blockade against Cuba reminds us.

Not once did I mention the Democratic or Republican Party. Both parties have done their part to create the crisis before us. A rejection of the two-parties means an embrace of the struggle against imperialism worldwide. It means that the nations with US targets on their backs should be seen as potential allies. Yes, this includes Russia. And Syria. It includes the left movements in Latin America. In the spirit of Malcolm X, the Black liberation movement, and the historic anti-imperialist struggle around the world, the time has come to search for real bonds of solidarity around the world to aid in the struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, and empire in the US and the West. Let no one, not even those who call themselves “the left,” tell you otherwise.

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He canbereachedatwakeupriseup1990 @gmail.com

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care

By Laurie Penny

Source: The Baffler

Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

There is an obvious political dimension to the claim that wellbeing, with the right attitude, can be produced spontaneously. Months after being elected leader of the most right-wing government in recent British history, yogurt-featured erstwhile PR man David Cameron launched an ill-fated “happiness agenda.” The scheme may have been better received if the former prime minister were not simultaneously engaged in decimating health care, welfare, and higher education—the very social structures that make life manageable for ordinary British people. As part of Cameron’s changes to the welfare system, unemployment was rebranded as a psychological disorder. According to a study in the Medical Humanities journal, in the teeth of the longest and deepest recession in living memory, the jobless were encouraged to treat their “psychological resistance” to work by way of obligatory courses that encouraged them to adopt a jollier attitude toward their own immiseration. They were harangued with motivational text messages telling them to “smile at life” and that “success is the only option.”

This mode of coercion has been adopted by employers, too, as Cederström and Spicer note. Zero-hour-contract laborers in an Amazon warehouse, “although they are in a precarious situation . . . are required to hide these feelings and project a confident, upbeat, employable self.” All of which begs the question: Who exactly are we being well for?

The well-being ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.

Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:

The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.

This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of well-being and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

With the language of self-care and well-being almost entirely colonized by the political right, it is not surprising that progressives, liberals, and left-wing groups have begun to fetishize a species of abject hopelessness. Positive thinking has become deeply unfashionable. The American punk kids I know describe it, disparagingly, as “posi.” The British ones, of course, describe it as “American.” Whatever you call it, it feels a lot like giving in.

In a scintillating essay at Open Democracy, activist Chloe King writes that

changing your attitude is not going to change or help to dismantle structural injustice and a failed and unsustainable economic model which serves only the elite rich of this world, and exploits the rest of us, particularly the working class and those living in poverty. As far as I am concerned positive thinking will fucking ruin your life. “Just think positive” is a precursor to “it gets better,” and the hard reality is it is only going to get much, much worse for our most vulnerable.

There is truth here. What is also true, however, is that the young people I know who are, in general, the very worst at taking basic care of themselves as individuals—the people whose problem is not that they don’t drink enough asparagus water, but that they don’t drink enough of anything that isn’t day-old wine from a foil bag—are those who went through the student and Occupy uprisings of 2010–2012 and experienced, briefly, what it meant to live a different sort of life. What it meant to be part of a community with common goals of which mutual aid and support were not the least. What it meant to experience that sudden, brief respite from individual striving and build a prefigurative society together. The lonely work of taking basic care of yourself as you wait for the world to change is a poor substitute. When you’re washed up and burned out from putting your body on the line to fight the state, it’s especially galling to be told to share a smile and eat more whole grains.

When modernity teaches us to loathe ourselves and then sells us quick fixes for despair, we can be forgiven for balking at the cash register. Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better? The question is not rhetorical. On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.

Some of the left critique of self-care as a neoliberal conspiracy has to do with dismissing the work that women and queer people do to survive. “I have heard feminism be dismissed as a form of self-indulgence,” writes Professor Sara Ahmed of Goldsmiths, University of London. So have I. I’ve heard men on the left write off anti-sexist, anti-racist politics as hopelessly individualistic, whilst also refusing to do the basic work of self-care and mutual care that keeps hope alive and health possible, because that work is women’s work, undignified in comparison to watching your life fall apart while you wait for the revolution or for some girl to pick up the pieces, whichever comes first.

The left has a special talent for counterproductive, theory-enabled wallowing. “Neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neo-liberalism,” writes Ahmed. “When feminist, queer, and anti-racist work that involves sharing our feelings, our hurt and grief, recognizing that power gets right to the bone, is called neo-liberalism, we have to hear what is not being heard. . . . A world against you can be experienced as your body turning against you. You might be worn down, worn out, by what you are required to take in.”

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system. Overpriced charcoal health drinks aren’t good for liberating anything except your wallet and your colon in short succession, but walks in the park are free, so I occasionally go out in the sunshine and try to soak up a bit of Vitamin D without worrying about skin cancer, melting ice-caps, and millions of people drowning in Bangladesh. I no longer subsist entirely on chicken nuggets, cigarettes, and spite. I sometimes take a day off, because it became apparent that the revolution was not being driven any faster by my being sick and sad all the time. Late Capitalism is as good an excuse of any for not getting out of bed, but huddling under the covers worrying about Donald Trump is a very inefficient way of sticking it to the man.

The problem with self-love as we currently understand it is in our view of love itself, defined, too simply and too often, as an extraordinary feeling that we respond to with hearts and flowers and fantasy, ritual consumption and affectless passion. Modernity would have us mooning after ourselves like heartsick, slightly creepy teenagers, taking selfies and telling ourselves how special and perfect we are. This is not real self-love, no more than a catcaller loves the woman whose backside he’s loudly admiring in the street.

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

The broader left could learn a great deal from the queer community, which has long taken the attitude that caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle—in many ways, it is the struggle. Writer and trans icon Kate Bornstein’s rule number one is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.” It’s more than likely that one of the reasons that the trans and queer communities continue to make such gains in culture, despite a violent backlash, is the broad recognition that self-care, mutual aid, and gentle support can be tools of resistance, too. After the Orlando massacre, LGBTQ people across the world started posting selfies under the hashtag #queerselflove. In the midst of the horror, the public mourning, and the fear, queer people of all ages and backgrounds across the world engaged in some light-hearted celebration of ourselves, of one another.

The ideology of wellbeing may be exploitative, and the tendency of the left to fetishize despair is understandable, but it is not acceptable—and if we waste energy hating ourselves, nothing’s ever going to change. If hope is too hard to manage, the least we can do is take basic care of ourselves. On my greyest days, I remind myself of the words of the poet and activist Audre Lorde, who knew a thing or two about survival in an inhuman world, and wrote that self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Accelerating Capital: Completed Nihilism and The Indebted Man

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By S.C. Hickman

Source: Southern Nights

In his book Data Trash (1993), Arthur Kroker writes that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning, because meaning slows info circulation. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies the elimination of meaning.

—Franco Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End

The pursuit of profit is the engine of Capital, accumulation is its outcome. Profit is from the Latin profectus, meaning “advance, increase, success, progress,” out of which the need to benefit or provide income derived. This sense that progress and success drive the need for profit, that the goal of capitalism is this abstract movement toward increasing and advancing one’s success in the world has always been at the heart of the competitive spirit. To compete or strive against others for the foremost place, this sense of the competitive spirit that has been with us at least since the first Greek Olympics. The term itself “compete” is etymologically to enter or be put in rivalry with an other,” from Middle French compéter “be in rivalry with” (14c.), or directly from Late Latin competere “strive in common,” in classical Latin “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com “with, together” (com-) + petere “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack”. A sense of violent taking and war against all comers for the top prize, the best or foremost place in the Sun.

As Berardi reminds us in the old industrial economy described by Marx, the goal of production was already the valorization of capital, through the extraction of surplus- -value from labour. But, in order to produce value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange useful things, so he was obliged to produce cars and books and bread.

When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books and bread become superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly what is happening under the cover of the so-called financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all, but the transition to the self-referential financial capitalism. (A: 125-126)

Financial capitalism is no longer the pursuit of profit in the Greek or Latin sense I described. No longer is there a sense of the old value of the pursuit of excellence or an ill-defined sense of virtue. Rather there is no value at all in the outward sense, but rather value has itself lost its luster and only the sheer accumulation of abstract value in the form of debt remains. But what is debt? What exactly is this debt economy of financial capitalism. And, most of all, how does the spirit of capitalism in itself bring about the death of meaning (i.e., nihilism). If as many suspect we are in the moment when Capital is completing this process of nihilism, what does that entail for humanity?

As Berardi said in a recent essay,

The colonization of time has been a fundamental issue in the modern history of capitalist development: the anthropological mutation that capitalism produced in the human mind and in daily life has, above all, transformed the perception of time. But we are now leaping into the unknown—digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

This sense that there is a connection between time, language, and capitalism that is playing out the endgame of nihilism in our generation is foremost in this equation. At the forefront of this is the notion of debt, and that we are entering an era of a new Guilt Culture based on an infinite and unpayable debt. A future imploding into a black hole of guilt and shame that will leave us and our planet bankrupt and without sense or value.

I’ve written of debt in other essays: here and here in which I follow Deleuze and Guattari down the rabbit hole. Alberto Toscano in an excellent essay on Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man talks of the indebted this way:

Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death…2

Thanatropic capitalism feeding off the living dead, the zombies of a system that has become total predation on human life and the planet.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explain their sense of our current debt regimes:

Society is not exchangist, the socious is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth. We have seen that the regime of debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt, creates for man a memory of words (paroles). It is alliance that represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelest mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it – and the inscriptions themselves – into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 185)

For Deleuze and Guattari it is Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals that teaches us the truth of debt. In fact it was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche alone who provided the first hint of a theory that the “primitive socious” was inherently a “problem of inscription, of coding, of marking…” (p. 190). As they’ll state it:

Man must constitute himself through repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be created for man – a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that declines alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection and detachment, and that effects this way of coding the flow of desire as a condition of the socious? The answer is simple – debt – open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: the extraordinary composite of the spoken voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye.” (AO: 190)

This sense that in financial capitalism is enforcing a cruel mimetic experiment of instilling and inscribing the Word of Capital upon the body socious; and, that we have reverted to the primitive tattooing systems by inscribing of the social body through the cruelest measures, imposing the harshest words of power over the flesh and blood of millions of indebted humans to suck every last ounce of desire from their zombie lives. This is the outcome of our completed nihilism. Capital as a machine of death and consumption, feeding off the desires of the indebted. If capitalism is defined by social production that passes through axioms of abstract quantities, flows of money and labor that are the real relations of alliance and filiation, rather than codes. Codes have become private matters, searches for meaning. This split between production and reproduction constitutes a very particular affective relation as well, which Deleuze and Guattari summarize as, “the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. These two affects, cynicism and piety, correspond to the division of social production and reproduction. In the first, in the axioms of capital, we have a social order that reproduces itself without meaning or code. Axioms merely set up a relation between two quantities, a flow of labor and a flow of money. One does believe in, or justify, the rate at which labor is exchanged for money—it simply is. Cynicism is an affect attuned to the indifference of the axioms that produce and reproduce social life, the recognition that the flows of the market mean nothing, have no justification, than their brute effectivity. (AO)

As Nietzsche would say,

All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-credit relation, which both sides turns out to be a matter of memory – a memory straining toward the future. (On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 190)

This sense of debt binding us to a system of mnemonics and cruelty, an organized and ritualistic memory system based on marking and pain – inscription of the collective socious as a system of obligation and guilt, debt and the endless deferral of payment into the future. The ancestors require sacrifice and payment, blood and guts. Alliances against this filiation must be formed, struggles against the dead, defensive gestures: the infinite deferral of debt beyond the vampirism of the dead. This whole triangular process of voice – inscription – eye becomes in our time the “spectacle of punishment”: “as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything” (p. 191).

Even while we are punished and inscribed, ritually sacrificed to the modern Moloch and his retinue of High Priests and Financiers, the Oligarchs of the World we discover that Capital no longer needs to produce visible commodities, no longer needs to produce useful goods for its wage slaves, it can now bypass us, bypass our needs, our desires, our dreams for its own infinite and digital accelerated world of pure circulation and profit. As Berardi attests,

In the sphere of the financial economy, the acceleration of financial circulation and valorization imply the elimination of the concrete usefulness of products (no matter if material or immaterial, industrial or semiotic). The process of realization of capital, namely the exchange of goods with money, was obviously slowing the pace of monetary accumulation. The virtual technology has created the possibility of skipping this slow passage through concrete meaningful useful goods. (A: 126)

Invisible, immaterial, the new financial economy runs at the speed of light in an absolute timeworld, where profit is based on the virtual circulation of abstract value (not even money, but algorithms, electronic impulses) that has been accelerated and sped up to the point of totally escaping the possibility of human understanding and— obviously—of political control.(A: 126)

Value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from infinite self-replication of virtual exchanges of nothing with nothing, whose outcome is more money. Digital abstraction leads to the virtualization of the physical act of meeting, and the manipulation of things. These new levels of abstraction do not only concern the labour process, they tend to encompass every space of social life. Therefore, digitalization and financialization are transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations in it. (A: 127)

Berardi tells us to look at the reality of debt, look at the awful effects of submission, impoverishment and exploitation that debt is provoking in the body of society. Debt is a weapon against social autonomy, a transformation of money into a blackmail. Young people are obliged to borrow money from the bank in order to pay for their studies, as the public system of education has been destroyed by the Neoliberal fanatics, and private school is costing more and more. As soon as they come out from the university they have to start paying back their debt, and they are obliged to accept any kind of precarious job, and to suffer any kind of blackmail. (A: 128)

For such creatures the future can only be bleak and full of misery and endless years of untold grief as they strive to pay their debt. Many forgo such a Sisyphean project and commit suicide. Others mentally and spiritual die inside and live out the remainder of their lives as zombies under this terrible debt system. In our time whole nations have been blackmailed into this system of debt as we ponder the EU. This same process has already happened to much of the Third World nations for years under a predatory capitalism well documented by Naomi Kline in The Shock Doctrine among other works of like caliber.

Commenting on this dark scenario Berardi says “Money, which was supposed to be the measure of value, has been turned into a tool for psychic and social subjugation. The metaphysical debt is linking money, language and guilt. Debt is guilt, and as guilt it is entering the domain of unconscious, and shapes language according to structures of power and submission.” (A: 128)

The notion that our age old systems of power and coercion have migrated into the digital age and brought about a new guilt culture to subdue and channel the desires of nations into the profit bins of a minority of Oligarchs seems ludicrous at first glance as if this were some nefarious planned and intentional affair. But is it? Is anyone or anything behind such a sinister system of slavery and control? Is this a conspiracy of madness against the human species? Berardi will liken this process not to some power behind the scenes, but rather to the inherent power of language itself and how we for two hundred years have obliterated the hold language had on the referent:

This process of de-referentialization of language—emancipation of the linguistic sign from the referent—which has been the mark of poetic and artistic experimentation with language during the twentieth century, shows an interesting similarity with the transformation in the relation between economy and monetary exchange.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced dramatic changes in economic policy. Particularly he ended the Bretton Woods international monetary system. The Bretton Woods system, created at the end of World War II, involved fixed exchange rates with the US dollar as the key currency—but also a role for gold linked to the dollar at $35/ounce. The system began to falter in the ‘60s because of an excess of dollars flowing out of the US which foreign central banks had to absorb. All of this was ended unilaterally by Nixon’s decision. After a brief attempt to create a modified fixed exchange rate system, the world moved to flexible rates.

Breaking the Bretton Woods’s agreements, the American President declared that the dollar has no referent, and its value is decided by an act of language. This was the starting point of the long lasting process of financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality. The Neoliberal offensive started in that very moment of arbitrary assertion of the value of the dollar outside the conventional standard. The neoliberal school of the Chicago Boys said “money is creating reality” like the Symbolist poets had said: “words are creating reality”. (A: 128-130)

Words had lost touch with their referent, the natural world and environment within which we all live and have our habitus. The disappearance of the natural and the virtualization of language produced the effects we see in the world today. We are the product of a process that undermined the ancient metaphysical systems of the world that guided primitive, feudal and early modern societies. In our bid to overcome the religious and metaphysical systems that held us in their clutches we also lost the world, our world. We lost the natural in life and ourselves, lost touch with the signs that kept us anchored to the natural environment that our brain had been tied to for sex and survival from the beginnings of the human. We ourselves in our bid to transcend the animal and inhuman in ourselves became non-human. We have brought upon ourselves the semantic apocalypse we see all around us. This is the guilt we bare and the debt we will have to pay, not the tributary debt to those few dark controllers who seek to lord it over us.

It was Jean Baudrillard who wrote in the Symbolic Exchange and Death, where he announces that the economy has abandoned the old law of determination of value, and that the referent for linguistic and economic exchange was dissolved:

“The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life. The finalities have disappeared; we are now engendered by models… The entire strategy of the system lies in this hyperreality of floating values. It is the same for money and theory as for the unconscious. Value rules according to an ungraspable order: the generation of models, the indefinite chaining of simulation.” (Baudrillard 1976)

We have become mere simulacra of our former selves, simulated creatures in a simulated world. Bound and ensnared in a world of debt, controlled by an algorithmic system of digital hypersystems we live out our lives under the guilt of a system we ourselves helped create. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We know this. We deny this. We seek solace in escape and fantasy worlds of mediatainment that even further suck dry our desires and channel our hopes and dreams into a fantasia of tomorrows that will never come.

For Deleuze & Guattari this primitive system of memory and pain will enter the stage of religion as a debt to be paid ending in the death of Christ as the payer of all debts; and, yet, it will not end there, for debt can never be repaid, so it forms the kernel of the modern State: “the new machine, and the new apparatus of repression” (AO: 192). This system of endless debt: “that finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility. The Earth becomes a madhouse.” (AO: 192)

Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. And: Phenomenology of the End. Semiotext(e) (November 6, 2015) (A) (Page 126).
Toscano, Alberto. Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man. The New Reader #1, 2017

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

A Skeleton Key to the Alt Left

Free-market economics gives the poor equal rights to substandard housing

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He canbereachedatwakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He canbereachedatwakeupriseup1990 @gmail.com