Big thanks to leadstarlesbian, Yara, Thyme and Feeliiks for participating in the endless schizoid theory discussions that made this article. This was by all means, a joint effort.
Deterritorialization as a Social Need
But the truth is that everyone here desires to insulate themselves from capitalism in one way or another. Whether it’s to insulate oneself from poverty, alienation, burnout, oppression, or the instability of the market. But alas, everyone’s idea of escape, whether a new business to get rich with, a new invention to profit from, a new expression to criticize the world’s shallowness, a new artistic endeavor to articulate what the modern world couldn’t, or a new worldview to soothe the existential dread, all become commodities that are sold to the rest and trap them further.
But that’s how it stays dynamic. Deterritorialization seems to be the understated social need that everyone living in these urban-industrial cities demand without even knowing it. The endless process of deterritorialization, the aesthetics of constant evolution and the absence of supposed social stasis seems to be the one thing that convinces all of us that even if we aren’t fully free (whether due to money, class, race or gender), at least our society seems to be so.
A society that depends on your escape to create new culture for itself, a non-Newtonian fluid whose viscosity becomes stronger with every attempt to burst through it. A new normal, a normal that outgoes every old normal from yesteryears only to abandon them as well for a newer normal. Another carving on the mosaic of delirium. Another boiling pot overflowing with lines of flight.
— Some other cringy essay I wrote that you should not read
Deterritorialization is a need, one instrumental for the preservation of urbanized and labor-specialized societies, strengthening the regimes that accept its terms and conditions. It is how we measure time and why most people in the world have had their political imagination unconsciously associate freedom with capitalism more than they do with socialism. For the engine of deterritorialization is harnessed better by market economies than planned ones, by crafting a subject convinced of the freedom of themselves and their environment despite all the actual ways they may be unfree. And any political project concerned about creating a political-economic system that would liberate this unfree subject towards a far truer ideal of freedom must contend with the reality that people no longer involved with deterritorialization (thanks to having been liberated from the horror of existing in market capitalism) will merely seek deterritorialization somewhere else that isn’t their own country.
It is in this sense that regimes who wield deterritorialization have long been more powerful against those who have insulated themselves from it. Not in the sense of the economy or military, not in the power to coerce, but in the power to convince and co-opt, to embody and channel desire, to infect subjects and electorates across continents to foster alternative loyalties, not towards countries hostile to the insulated regime, but towards accumulations of small desires that end up serving as the drives to generate hostility towards the insulating culture, the insulating society and the insulating ideology. Wielding deterritorialization is wielding soft power.
Deterritorialization ranges from post-communist citizens seeing bikini babes on soda advertisements for the first time, liberating the bikini from being exclusively mentally associated with beaches, to the samurai way of life disappearing alongside the power of the landlords they protected in the face of the Meiji era. But this great liberation of social units and the lines of flight it produces shall eventually end with reterritorialization, as the bikini babes become a permanent staple of advertisement (with the bikini babes themselves now under permanent suspicion of being used to sell something else) and the zaibatsus reappropriate bushido culture into corporate loyalty-signifying buzzwords. But there is no tragedy felt at the loss of this old flight, for there are always new territories waiting in line to be deterritorialized.
The circular and simultaneous liberation and repression of social units come in the shape of Baudrillardian fatal strategies like rock and roll to challenge bubblegum pop, then punk rock challenging dinosaur rock, and shallow punk rock challenged by the post-punk new wave, and disingenuous new wave being challenged by grunge and alternative just as well. Each strategy to escape commoditization becomes a new commodity borne of creative destruction, each rejection of standards becomes the mythology of that new commodity, and each disavowal of preceding commodifications and mythologies become the reason this new commodity ought to exist.
“The world that exists up to the present day is the history of what capitalism has done to us so far, and the desires and obsessions we indulge in today are the desires to negate what that present day is doing to us.”
We “consume capitalism” out of anger and frustration towards capitalism, we consume it to reclaim the thing it took away from us. The venues it can exist in may quite literally be all-encompassing: the articulation of anti-state rebellion or anti-corporate resistance, the rarity of aesthetic authenticity or foreign spirituality, the innovation away from cultural stagnation or everyday mundanity. Its manifestations in media, architecture, music, subcultures, news, art, in-jokes, conversations and social phenomena can rise up in any and all societies, but taking these minor fragrances of deconstruction and materializing it into a mass and a whole requires a system of reception and appropriation, a desire-channeling infrastructure. So, in a way, whether as insulation from it, resistance against it, flourishment within it despite social and racial expectations that you won’t be able to, the hatred towards whatever status quo capitalism has constructed so far is what drives the passage of time within market societies. For anti-capitalism is the engine that produces culture for capitalism. Its only engine, perhaps.
Authoritarianisms genuinely committed to an ideology hostile to capitalism (an anti-capitalist ideocracy per se) always fail at catching up with destructive culture production that injects itself into the zeitgeist, because capitalism keeps shattering, collapsing and reforming into further and further unrecognizability in an arms race with its own criticism, while ideocrats remain insecure in their ability to have their self, their government or their ideology criticized, causing them to end up pooling greater and greater of people’s cultural fixation into finally getting to criticize the state openly, manifesting a line of flight encompassing everyone under the rime but never can never truly be fulfilled without the regime’s very disintegration.
An exemplar being orthodox Marxism-Leninism that brings blunt shotgun approaches to desire-decoding in its early decades through industrialization, korenization, electrification, urbanization, and the explosion of rights and equalities splashing onto the populace as new intensities to fixate towards. But the intensities end as these vanguardist states reach a comfortable equilibrium of everything it needed, and time stops socially. The questions of advancement now being only considered through further industrialization, korenization, electrification and urbanization, lines of flight now long fulfilled and defunct.
Capitalism can never monopolize deterritorialization, but Marxism-Leninism in the traditional sense of the word (as in before the Deng Xiaoping era of “Marxism”) has always inadvertently done so, unintentionally as a matter of fact, and the passage of time in it gets to be measured not by the package of memories and aesthetics organized along the lines of decades, but by General Secretaries. The USSR had no comparably solid sense of a 60s or a 70s like the ones that can be found across the capitalist world, it merely had the Stalin era, the Khrushchev era, the Brezhnev era, and soon the Gorbachev era.
Fascism, and other forms of ideologically flexible and negotiable capitalist dictatorships are by all means of a middle ground, with the effete difference of its corporate statist economies playing catch-up with liberalism better, at the expense of lacking in the early deterritorialization victories that Marxism-Leninism achieves. One cannot ignore the irony of fascists and their explicit mission of stopping social time in an ideal equilibrium was what the communists accidentally did, yet fascists have always failed to achieve that mission, for their regimes had already conceded to bourgeois and market interests in order to take power, proactively cementing the pointlessness of their objectives.
Anarchism on the other hand, remains untested. The wielding of deterritorialization is ultimately wielding of international soft power; not merely by inheriting it from the regimes it replaced, but by generating new ones to inflict upon the world. While no anarchist polity has so far been successfully able to serve as engines of such dynamism, we have whole centuries of future history to observe if that streak will end. But its trends towards agrarian and industrial conservationism, and its vague and unstandardized relation with creative destruction in both social and economic senses do not spell great.
There are many an amateur Soviet historian that wished Leonid Brezhnev would spend more on the ephemeral concept of “consumer goods” over the military, or at least be more open to granting freedom in the avenues of self-expression. There are even more who wished Nikolai Bukharin would have succeeded Lenin and preserved the USSR’s state capitalist economy, a policy decision that not only would have been less and less reversible with time but would have inevitably degenerated the regime into something a lot less left-leaning down the line (more on that later). And there are others who see automation as a way to accomplish and fulfill everyone’s basic needs, but for some inexplicable reason have chosen to cede other sectors such as luxury and entertainment up to market forces. It is after this long history of soul-searching has the Left been stuck with the eternal question of how to create a post-capitalist society that accounts for autonomous forms of self-perpetuating deterritorialization. Yet, most leftists do not seem to recognize that deterritorialization was the overarching issue after all, merely chipping away at the symptoms of its absence as separate issues to solve independently from each other.
Most of the Left seem in agreement that the USSR had partly lost the Cold War due to being outcompeted on certain vague and fuzzy “things” that the United States had within its sociocultural sphere, but the Soviet Union didn’t. Despite replete internal propaganda from both sides to ensure the loyalty of their electorates, there continued to be something that made the Soviets want to live the United States but didn’t make Americans want to live in the Soviet Union. And many make it an imperative for a hypothetical oncoming socialist power to ensure it has that vague sociocultural “thing” to prevent it from being the reason a far-left great power collapses again. And yes, deterritorialization is that “thing”. That “thing” you’re thinking of, but never able to fully articulate.
The Twin Towers of Desire-Decoding
The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are both gigantic deterritorialization machines. But it is a lot easier to describe the sociocultural, political and economic milieux that helps them deterritorialize than the processes themselves. American deterritorialization is done the way most people expect deterritorialization to usually work, through its cultures, decodings and discourses flaring up from its megalopolises and echoing across both rurality and suburbia. Soundwaves spreading from coastal cities and collide with the Bible Belt and Middle America, its affects splashing onto the rest of the world as lines of flight borne of shock discourse, transgression and commercialism. It has enclaves of every civilization, every country, every nation and every ethnicity within its borders. And all of them sacrifice lambs of culture and authenticity to increasingly incomprehensible lines of flight. But America ended up with this dynamic only because it was founded as the closest thing to a cultural blank slate.
Despite the pretensions of America’s Founding Fathers establishing a supposedly enlightened and secular society, the on-the-ground reality of the Thirteen Colonies was that many of its first settlers belonged to niche Christian sects like the Puritans and the Quakers, people who only came to America because Europe rejected them for being too religiously fundamentalist and radical. And it was these first settlers that ended up defining the initial base of American national culture that later immigrants had to integrate into. In an alternate universe where the Muslim world was the one to usher in the Enlightenment and industrial capitalism, people like the Puritans, Quakers and the Amish could have ended up being seen as closer in equivalence to how we see Wahhabis and Qutbists today, as religious zealots and radical fundamentalists in eternal rebellion against the secularity and progressivism of the modern world.
On-the-ground America in its infancy contained a lot more pockets of theocratic fiefdom than its history is willing to admit, and it was their strongly regimented and ultraconservative ideals defined by both religious insularity and radical monism that would serve to create an American national culture that severed many White settlers from the cultures of the Old World, with the White American slowly being divorced from and denied their heritage as either English, German, Scottish, Dutch, Scandinavian or French people to such a point where the blanket term “White” came to be the go-to label for these people now culturally unlanded. “American” was meant to be a new national identity expected to supplant Old World ones, but the on-the-ground reality of this identity found itself merely a blank canvas given to a people now so starved of cultural indentations that capitalist deterritorialization had a far easier time inscribing upon it compared to anywhere else, a process that continued on for so long that the perception of American culture across the world came to be more associated with both the offerings of its sub-groups throughout history, but more importantly the excesses of capitalism itself, over any sociocultural artefacts of its first settlers.
Sometimes you can see the less apologetic of Black Americans claim that “white people have no culture”, especially during periods when White American consumerism is actively attempting to commodify Black American culture. The sentiment behind this statement is meant to echo the reality that the baseline culture of White America, one primarily defined by puritanical austerity, had denied its people for so long the many cultural enrichments that other countries take for granted, where White Americans feel so bereft of cultural identities to the point of latching onto “non-White” (code word for non-puritan) cultures, in varying degrees, on a scale unprecedented compared to other nationalities, often to the level of frequent secondhand embarrassment.
This process of cultural commodification and appropriation is, for a lack of a better phrase, an economic sector with such latent value-adding potential that the industries that rose up to tap into it, and the exportation of these commodifications onto the rest of the world, has historically been the biggest source of American deterritorialization, and a fundamental pillar of American global power. Not only do such obsessions become normalized for the rest of world to indulge in, but it is often the case that most world cultures coming into contact with the United States will end up finding their ultimate commodity forms thanks to the United States.
While American deterritorialization can be seen as dealing in quantities, Chinese deterritorialization deals in speed. Ever since Deng Xiaoping slowly dismantled socialism, the Communist Party of China found itself in an unprecedented pickle, it was now a Marxist-led neoliberal economy. The many ad hoc adjustments to the party constitution it made to justify its continued vanguardism, and the political rise of many reformers that such a weakness in ideological cohesion had enabled (with the most consequential being the party’s grey eminence Wang Huning, the Chinese Mikhail Suslov) would enable Neoauthoritarianism to become the party’s prevailing political current, transforming it into a depoliticized cameralist regime more akin to that of Chiang Kai-shek and Lee Kuan Yew than that of Mao Zedong. With the Chinese government rewriting its social contract (or at least it seems to believe so), with the Chinese people to promote itself as basically an organization that the people merely outsource governance to, and now equipped with a flexible non-ideology that it can mold freely to fit any hole it needs it to, the party-state found a brand new mandate where it gets to keep proudly justifying its own dictatorship by delivering economic growth in a way that the people can be perceived by the people in tangible ways, as compensation for the nation having to stay a dictatorship.
But scratch the surface a bit, and it becomes clear that the Communist Party of China is not that ideologically impartial. Scratch beyond the facetious far-left imagery, beyond the pretension of technocratic neutrality, beyond the theater of an enlightened political culture that plans in decades, and what you will find is an apparatus now almost exclusively defined by appealing to the shallowest of populisms, no longer striving towards anything beyond the basest perception of its cultural self-understanding, a decay seen in many of the former states of the Eastern Bloc. Like Orban in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, Aliyev in Azerbaijan and most definitely Putin in Russia, what you see in China is the same kleptocratic apparatus that eventually learned to rely on the most efficient way to rile up its people towards fervor and distract them away from nuance, while turning on and off the hose of ideology whenever it sees fit: A right-wing populist dictatorship. And even though China did not go through the same degeneration of liberalism endured by Eastern Europe to reach this state, the end result has more or less been the same.
Now a national conservative government more or less, with unprecedented access to technology, resources and funding, China has expanded what was considered back then to be a side-project not wholly worth pursuing: the total standardization of its people, to craft a monoculture, of one language, one history, one society and one ideology. While there has been a plethora of erasure that happened in the history of communist, and even pre-communist China before the governance of what I would now refer to as “late-stage CPC”, the practice has most definitely accelerated under their watch. Not just with the suppression of Tibetan, Mongol and Uyghur languages, but through the slow and simmering assimilation of identities like those of the Shanghainese, the Hoklo, the Cantonese and the Yunnanese. Even if the latter people have very little history (if none at all) of regarding themselves as separate from China proper, but the Chinese government still finds it utterly imperative that everyone is able to fluently speak Mandarin, and that everyone sees themselves as an extension of Han civilization rather than something outside it. And very ironically, it was this development that set the stage for China becoming an engine of global deterritorialization.
For this drive towards the standardization of a billion people merely exacerbated a latent potential China always possessed, the largest possible audience for every single thought had by a human, an audience that can spread it as fast and as large as possible, a society where no idea is slowed down by either language or cultural barriers. What China created for itself is a gigantic petri dish primed for subcultural takeover, where all subcultures have the possibility to end up having their largest number of members exist inside it, and at the fastest speed of expansion. The continued optimization of the Chinese citizen’s day-to-day life becomes more convenient and accessible through super-apps, automation, GDP growth, high-speed rail, infrastructuralization and cybernetics, all the while its urban society continues its constant motion outwards, ever-shortening the expected speed of the world. The accelerating speed of ideas simply jump on the accelerating speed of communication, commerce and transit, and now China is a forum where billions of discourses occur every single second.
Messages that ripple across a land where a billion people can understand each other perfectly not only presents the possibility of cultural enclaves counted in the infinites being created at ease, but each enclave will always look enormous compared to any other in the world. If a measly 0.01% of China dabbled in Shamate, that is still a whopping 140k people. Make it 0.1% and now the numbers are big enough to look like an insurrection, even if the percentage doesn’t. The government realizes this and is fated to forever play catch-up with this enemy it created for itself. It is forced to care because it simply doesn’t have the privilege to evaluate movements on mere population percentage but must also evaluate them on the quantity of members just as well. 0.01% of Estonia or France can do very little to affect the world, but 0.01% of China can terrifyingly, accomplish a lot, not just in affecting the world, but in perpetuating its own numbers. It was a lesson harshly learned with its struggle against the Falun Gong, and a lesson that will never be unlearned sans the collapse of the Party.
You could say the same about all other authoritarian nation-states with a universalized lingua franca the same way you could say American deterritorialization is something that can equally be wielded by other settler-states such as Canada and Australia, but like how America gets to be dominant in this form of deterritorialization through the sheer size of its populace, China is so far the only entity in the modern world that has a population of over a billion people where this one billion can communicate and share ideas with such speed and efficiency. You cannot say that for India, the other billion-strong country for instance, where no lingua franca on the scale of Mandarin exists, where even if Hindi and English are considered the languages most people speak, linguistic penetration to this day has not been enough for these languages to truly serve as universal tools of communication, and that is without considering India’s current average level of urban-industrial development. While the continent-level linguistic plurality and the lower middle income-level of physical and digital infrastructuralization within India slows down the speed of ideas, the authoritarian attempts of China to eliminate its on-the-ground diversity has only created a supersonic highway of ideology that it struggles to control far harder than it ever did with rebelling minorities in the pre-Deng Xiaoping era.
The rhizomatic processes of ideation, proliferation, fragmentation, radicalization and deconstruction can all occur at its fastest inside China, but it hasn’t been allowed to do so freely since the first half of the Cultural Revolution (when seeing the Cultural Revolution as an experiment to avoid Soviet mistakes, not just in the establishment of a particratic class system, but the stopping of social time, by stimulating deterritorialization beyond the typical ways done through capitalist desire-channeling, the whole ordeal starts making a lot more sense). The People’s Republic of today already knows that the greatest threats to the People’s Republic lives not outside its borders, but inside it. If that seems too hard to believe, it becomes easier to realize when you compare the amount of money China spends on its military compared to how much it spends on “internal security” and “public safety”.
All the Good (And Bad) Ideas to Let the Future Arrive
While it is impossible to let people concede their gains in consumer choices and living standards due to the pre-existing neoliberal supply chain management serving as well as it does despite its problems, it is easy to imagine why the left has been more and more partial to AI, automation and computerization in a planned economy as an alternative handling method for increasing production complexity. But AI and computerized planning is already used today and it’s becoming clearer that these aren’t systems of deterritorialization on their own, but simply force multipliers of a pre-existing one.
When you remove the shotgun label of “automation” that many leftists use as a crutch, the currents of articulated post-capitalism turn out to be profoundly lacking in imagination. Center-left social democrats continue to fail at bringing forth the future as its policy tendencies become more economic reactions to capitalist developments than pro-active generations of new dynamic infrastructures, toeing the neoliberal line and letting itself be backed into a corner as ignorable, visionless and fated to lose power due to its ideological surrender towards the embrace of either an “ethical capitalism” or a “revived Keynesianism”, pushing edgeless aesthetic reforms without significant economic ones, and taking on the Sisyphean task of putting band-aids on a dysfunctional machine.
And there are the considerably more radical socialists who actually dare to implement an economic vision beyond merely just “better capitalism”. By that, I mean that these democratic socialists actually dare to nationalize things. But what has been the endgame of these nationalizations? Democratic socialists in Spain, Greece, Venezuela, Portugal, Bolivia and many other countries have rose up in response to the untenability of neoliberalism, and what have they offered so far? In what way have their policies of reining in capitalism created a self-reinforcing socius protected by an unimpeachable consensus? How unimaginable is the replacement of their economic status quo? Or does it look like a case where the great democratic socialism they have built can easily be undone by the next change of government? Have they actually created a democratic socialism that could outlast their cabinets?
Ultimately, the economic order that many democratic socialists have aspired towards could have been seen as an admirable goal, if only there weren’t already massive political experiments done throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s that have taught market hegemons precisely how to slowly dismantle a rigid socialist/Keynesian consensus. Some of these hopeful radicals fall onto authoritarianism as the last hope to preserve their system, while others slowly accept the inevitability of neoliberalism and recede into the right, along with their now-fellow social democrats. The Sandinistas and the Chavists are the former, while SYRIZA and PSOE are very much the latter.
What about the anarchist-leaning? Rojava, the Zapatistas, Revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovshchina. I have no need to dogpile on them, for I have sympathy for them the most. I wish them great and eternal luck in their endeavors, for they will need it more than anyone else.
From these corpses of a stagnant authoritarian socialism and a co-opted democratic socialism came a set of even more embarrassing people called left accelerationists. In one way or another, left-leaning accelerationism has always existed as a political position. You can see accelerationist tendencies in Marx’s support for free trade as a way to further intensify and export the bourgeois-proletarian tension. The Bolsheviks’ “The worse, the better” policy to encourage more instability in Russian society as a way to further destroy the political standing of whatever non-Bolshevik government Russia had at the time very much mirrors modern accelerationist praxis. And the early Impossibilist/Opportunist tendencies within the early Internationals might as well be the first time left-wing accelerationism was given a term and put to paper as policy.
But the modern ilk of left accelerationists that now call themselves L/acc share neither convictions nor strategies with the Impossibilists. Granted, the goal of a Marxist-Leninist state is one no longer held by the majority of these new generation accelerationists, and rightfully so. Much of L/acc praxis, while possessing quite articulate strategies on accelerating automation as the primary method to bring about post-capitalism, seems to have their political imagination perpetually stuck in the aesthetics of post-work. L/acc chief Nick Srnicek has stressed the need to identify and utilize the engines of deterritorialization so it can continue beyond capitalism but has offered no solutions to do so. And without a proper strategy of evoking deterritorialization, left accelerationism circles itself back into traditional leftist proposals with no new actual model for a transition that moves beyond the same mistakes of both reformists and revolutionaries. Maybe that can be fixed. Maybe something else completely unconsidered could be accelerated.
A Government of Khrushchevs
This is why Khrushchev’s speech in 1965, in which he ‘admitted’ the failings of the Soviet state, was so momentous. It is not as if anyone in the party was unaware of the atrocities and corruption carried out in its name, but Khrushchev’s announcement made it impossible to believe any more that the big Other was ignorant of them.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
As both Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek had pointed out, Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was an act of murder, that of the Big Other of Stalinist Omnipotence. It is not that the Soviet bureaucracy remained unaware of the inefficiencies and repression brought upon by Stalinism. But that the people within this bureaucracy had outsourced the undying of belief in socialism and the ignorance of inefficiency onto each other, without really even telling each other. Everyone lived under a Big Other who believed in the virtues of communism instead of them, and everyone had a Big Other who remained unaware of its atrocities at their behest. 90% of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could have complete and total understanding of all aspects of Stalinist failures, yet nothing will happen. Because that 90% continues to have the paranoia that everyone else except them may still be genuine Stalinists. This is how the Big Other worked in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
While on the other side of the planetary aisle, Donald Trump, the American Khrushchev, had took the Tea Party’s lead and let out a genie from a bottle that no other American president succeeding his tenure may not ever be able to fully put back in. Donald Trump killed America’s Big Other. He showed that the only reason 21st century Americans kept trying to preserve a spectacle of civility and mutual respect in its political sphere was not because 90% of Americans believed in civility, but that 90% of Americans believed everyone else believed in civility. The American Big Other of Civil Order, the hypothetical silent mass that believes in the politics of respectability at our behest was, like all Big Others that haunt humanity, non-existent all along. There never was a wholly “civil” America, just an overwhelming majority of American individuals afraid of their own opinions because everyone else except them might be secretly “civil” the whole time.
All statistics seem to show that Donald Trump is bound to lose the 2024 presidential elections at the time of writing this paragraph (August 18, 2024), and there is many a liberal salivated by the idea of Donald Trump’s increasing untenability as an election winner leading to a split between the Republican Party; between the nationalist conservatives for whom right-wing authoritarianism has been made both a desire and an achievability thanks to Trump’s tenure, and the traditional fiscal conservatives who simply fell in line with the party’s direction out of a sense of self-preservation for their own careers. And even if this potential split ever happens, it will never result in two different yet relevant political parties (for the American political system is set up in a way where all third parties are destined to die), and this split will not remain the only one. For such an open split in the Republican Party has a chance of encouraging the very same in the Democratic Party just as well.
Joe Biden’s and now Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign promises have been rooted in this narrative of a soft rejection of the Third Way neoliberal managerialism supported by Clinton and Obama. The new Democratic Party paints itself as economically far more interventionist than it has been since FDR, ready to promise strategic trade tariffs, consumer protection, union support, progressive taxation, state-led industrialization, welfare and subsidization at levels never before seen since the Keynesian era. And the fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party is not a united front when it comes to Keynesian Embedded Liberalism roaring back into relevance. Those such as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are oft perceived as opportunists in the American legislature who took the slim majority of the Democratic Party hostage in exchange for political favors. Unlike openly left-leaning lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Ilham Omar, Sinema and Manchin aren’t “real Democrats”. Are they?
The truth of the matter is that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are far more emblematic of what the Democratic Party has been in these last 40 years compared to members of the Progressive Caucus. The Democratic Party has long served as a center-right institution, and people like AOC or Sanders have long been its outliers, not its leaders. And as the Democratic Party shifts further to the left in the wake of a potential Harris presidency, what we will see in its aftermath is more and Sinemas and Manchins showing up as spoilers and saboteurs, enough to negate a potential Democratic majority in Congress and stall all the progressive promises the people were anticipating.
In the event of this split coinciding with a potential Republican Party factional split, the conservative Blue Dog Democrats and centrist Tuesday Group Republicans will suddenly “find out” they agree a lot more with each other policy than they do with their counterparts within their respective parties and start using bipartisan channels such as the Problem Solvers Caucus to advocate for legislations that they can advertise as “both parties are in support of”, while potentially being able to circumvent the hard-right among the Republicans and the hard-left among the Democrats.
With the immense public relations boost of “bipartisanship finally working again”, this legislative coalition between the centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans may be able to pull a public relations coup strong enough to take the wind out of any true march towards progressive change, as many voters would be happy to move on from this tumultuous period of polarization and radicalism behind for the sake of “making politics boring again”. The MAGA crowd and the DSA crowd finally sidelined, America can go back to normal now. But they fixed nothing. And America will go through 2016 all over again thirty years from now. A Big Other finally reconstructed, only to be dismantled by your children’s children.
Never Let Politics Be Boring Again
But maybe that is just fantasy on my part. Maybe there is no split. Maybe both parties stay intact. Maybe the Democrats will fail in their ventures to reconstruct the American Big Other, like how Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov failed with the Soviet one. If nations of 50–60 million people can generate at least two Trump figures, in the form of Le Pen and Zemmour for France and in the form of Salvini and Meloni for Italy for example, a nation of 300 million like the United States surely can spawn more than one Trump. And maybe for the foreseeable time being, the United States will continue to live with the constantly looming threat of far-right takeover, one that moves past Trump and solidifies into a well-organized political force that no Rockefeller Republican trying to put the fascist dog on leash would be able to stop. Personally, this seems far more likely to me. Appropriating the Irish Republican Army’s quote about Margaret Thatcher: the Republicans only need to be lucky once, the Democrats need to be lucky every time.
The prospect of liberals aspiring to make politics as boring as it once was before the times of the postmodern right-wing outliers very much mirrors socialists who made the mistake of participating in electoralism, hoping their policies survive future cabinets of business ontologists, for they need to be lucky every time too. Even then, leftism continues to clamor for respectability in this world where the Big Other who desires civility politics has long been abolished. For Trumpism is no outlier within the reaches of global politics, in the sense of a total Internetification and spectacularization of politics that we can now clearly see across Argentina, Germany, the Philippines, Britain, Brazil, Italy, South Korea and a plethora of other countries. The postmodern right-wing as I would term them, exemplified by the figures of Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Milei and Farage are entirely and wholly driven by a form of schizopolitics.
The rhetorics and promises of their movements transcend the usual trappings of civility politics, the platforms in which their rhetoric echoes the loudest are within the digital sphere in which deterritorialization happens at its fastest, and the speed and quantity of controversy that they generate serves to wholly destabilize the expected speed of news and discourse. Merely observing from the outside, you can see that the postmodern right-wing populist movement is no opponent of deterritorialization the way pre-Internet traditionalist conservatives were but are in fact machines of deterritorialization that can absorb anything onto itself and regurgitate it back as something it’s aligned with.
One of the primary strengths of the postmodern right-wing is its ability to divorce art from its meaning and context. The irony of using anti-fascist, anti-capitalist or anti-conservative art for its own movements is an irony that the postmodern right is too busy to worry about. These arts are merely used for their factors of aesthetic and coolness, and right-wingers are indifferent to whether the deeper meaning is contrary to their movements or not. That’s for the liberals to worry about. The liberals can gleefully exchange observations of irony with each other about whether a right-wing campaign using Fortunate Son or Little Dark Age is a self-own, but these temporary assurances of comfort they give to each other about how stupid the right is because of the oddity of their music choices will convince no right-winger to turncloak. It convinces nothing and no one, for politics has never been a competition over who knows art the best.
“If a tree falls, but no being was there to hear it, did it make a sound?” Same as that, “If Trump plays Fortunate Son at his campaign rally and no one cares about the irony of it being played at a Trump rally, does the song’s actual message matter?” The weakness of staking ownership over the meaning and allegiance of art by relying on what the art actually means is a futile and wasteful effort. Publicly reclaim the art in your own politics or shut up. There is no future in being the reactor, only in being the proactor.
But the postmodern right-wing is not the only threat really. As a matter of fact, it does not exist in isolation. For, there is a mixing of colors going on. It is perhaps more appropriate to see all pre-existing ideologies as the enemy of post-capitalism, and that the bastard child of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev and Carl Schmitt has finally come home to roost. You will have to bear with me here as I talk about these two men, not necessarily because of the content of their political ideas, but the form of it.
Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
Back in the 1920s when European communists were organizing and strategizing en masse to start revolutions across the West to bring about an international socialist society, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was a maverick Tatar Bolshevik who argued that a communist revolution first taking over the West wouldn’t necessarily change anything for the overexploited peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America; with him presupposing that the new Western vanguard regimes would then be interested in preserving the same living standards that colonialism had previously afforded its people, and thus engaging in the continuation of pre-existing colonialism through either discreet or wildly indiscreet means.
Being one of the earliest proponents of what is now known as dependency theory, his new proposed strategy of action was based on starting revolutions across the colonies first and insulating these newly independent polities from global capitalism, essentially cutting off the natural resources and cheap labor that Western countries had relied on to accumulate their wealth and raise their living standards. Only when the overwhelming majority of these former colonies had joined in on this great embargo of the West would the instruments of global capitalism that depended on colonial exploitation to stay powerful finally be starved out, eventually collapsing unto itself and making way for international egalitarian communism. Or at least, so was the saying.
But what made Sultan-Galiev so different wasn’t just his preference for a revolution in Asia and Africa over a revolution in Europe, but his belief that these proposed revolutions do not necessarily have to be communist in character for them to damage the influence of the West. It did not matter if the revolutions were communist, fascist, anarchist, liberal, or even theocratic, as long as those revolutionary regimes embargoed the colonialist West, it was still a blow to capitalism.
The plurality of these communist, fundamentalist, fascist, democratic and other regimes were to come under the umbrella of a Colonial International that would supersede the Communist International in importance by not only serving as a basis of collaboration, commerce and aid between these newly-liberated countries while excluding the West, but also to serve as a stage for an international coalitionary “dictatorship of the colonies over the metropole”, to return the capitalist plunder of the world from the West back to the rest in a historical correction of wealth redistribution as an act of indulgent mass vengeance, and by nature, a mass exportation of the developed West’s specific historical conditions of metropolitan industrial labor alienation onto the rest of the world, now with their brand new native capitalists and brand new native proletariat, now all truly ripe for an orthodox Marxist revolution bereft of need for Bolshevik-style socialist industrialization.
Seeing what he perceived as an ignored potential in the Muslim world for explosive revolutionary energy, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev had proposed an ideology that came to be known as Islamic National Communism, an attempt at reconciling Marxism-Leninism with anti-colonialist nationalism and Islamic integralism in order to cast as wide a net as possible in terms of appeal for Europe’s Muslim-majority colonies. A coalition against not only colonialist capitalism, but a coalition against Christianity and for Islam, a coalition against Westernization and for nativism.
The thing is that Sultan-Galiev wasn’t really a religious sectarian, he wasn’t a social conservative, he actually saw the decline of Islam as a good thing. But Sultan-Galiev seemed to believe that if his hypothesis of the dependency theory is indeed true, then the most pragmatic course of action for the international communists would be to break bread with the forces of petty nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the colonial peripheries of the world for until the time comes when communism no longer requires their alliance to continue sieging and subjugating the capitalist West.
For it was either this, or having to bear the insurmountable task of trying to export ideologically pure Marxist thought onto to the destitute reaches of the world and unironically replicating the same power dynamics of European missionaries exporting Christianity onto the native peoples of their New World colonies, something Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev already saw happening within the early days of the Soviet Union as he predicted that its government’s internal dynamic would slowly corrode the initial pluronationalist character of the Bolshevik regime by continuing to obfuscate the line between Marxism-Leninism and Russian assimilationism until both became inseparable from each other in terms of the USSR’s domestic policy practices.
Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was the first person ever to be arrested by Stalin’s secret police and would be executed in the USSR for the crimes of treason in 1940. The method of his treason being a conspiracy to organize a “Pan-Turkic bourgeois-democratic secessionist state within the USSR”.
Carl Schmitt
As Sultan-Galiev’s works faded into a footnote in Russian history, somewhere else in Europe, a disgraced legal scholar named Carl Schmitt would have trouble finding employment in West Germany due to his adamant refusal to disavow fascism. Schmitt had not only previously been a member of the Nazi Party but was actually the person who provided the philosophical and legal justification for Adolf Hitler seizing ultimate power with the Enabling Act of 1933.
While Carl Schmitt would continue to write many books and articles before, during and after the Nazi regime regarding topics such as parliamentary democracy and constitutional law, it was his criticism of the liberal international order that came to be a cornerstone in the formation of a newer understanding in realist geopolitical thinking. Schmitt favored the international order of pre-WWI Europe for the reason that its nations had clearly delimitated “rights to war” and “laws of war”. The national right to declare war in Schmitt’s eyes, had changed the default understanding of war by making both parties of the war considered mutual belligerents, and the European order had no room for the concept of morally just wars.
By removing all moral narratives from war, not only would observing states possess the right to back either side or remain neutral without moral considerations to restrict their options, but the warring sides also themselves would be removed from having to appoint blame, allowing for a greater enforcement of the “laws of war”. If both sides are to equally hold each other and themselves responsible for the war, it becomes far easier to establish conventions between each other on how to conduct war, such as distinguishing between combatants and civilians, or abstaining from using methods of warfare that endangers civilian lives and property. For one side breaking the law of war would mean inviting in an international narrative that this may have been a morally unequal war all along and leading to a self-inflicted diplomatic isolation.
Once legitimate and illegitimate belligerency is separated, it becomes impossible to argue that observing states have the right to back either side. Schmitt rejected the project of creating a post-war international order that would subject war to a criterion of moral and legal legitimacy, for he argued that it would not only not prevent wars but will make the laws of war unenforceable due to unjust belligerents now always being incentivized to fight total wars, and just defenders also having to resort to total wars in retaliation.
Schmitt’s solution for this was a realist global world order that delimitates spheres of influence between hegemonic nations, and advocates for complete non-intervention between them. Despite his Nazi beliefs, Schmitt himself was indifferent to the ideology these hegemons would possess as long as the ideology served to consolidate the sphere. Schmitt believed that only when every sphere of influence, whether its a German fascist hegemon in Western Europe, a Chinese communist hegemon in East Asia, an Indian democratic hegemon in South Asia, or a Russian monarchist hegemon in Eurasia is made into its own sovereign social order akin to pre-WWI Europe is when the enforcement of the laws of war and the abolition of total war could theoretically be possible.
But a universalist ideology let loose would not only see the entire world as a potential territory to expand in, but will be in direct opposition to this realist order due to its perception of seeing these regionalized ideological-cultural diversities as aberrations. Which is why Schmitt disliked the United States for its rejection of possessing a natural sphere of influence, its desire to continually expand its market share and financial hold over other states, and its tendency to export its ideology worldwide, all being seen as an obstacle to achieving his global order.
Schmitt’s suggested strategy for realist hegemons to handle other hegemons with universalist ideological aspirations was to always diplomatically force them into positions of ideological hypocrisy and dilemma until that universalist hegemon is to either compromise that the global application of their belief is impossible, or to collapse unto internal conflict due to committing to its own ideological purity.
Which was why Schmitt was so gleeful at the rise of Mao Zedong, for he knew more than most by instantly recognizing the territorialist, telluric and ultranationalist character of Mao’s regime despite its far-left claims long before anyone else did, and predicted that Communist China’s regional hegemonic aspirations would inevitably tear apart the Cold War narrative of competition between two universalist orders by reinserting great power politics into it once again. Schmitt hoped that the rise of political communities like Mao’s would eventually disintegrate the grandstanding global community into a realist world order that he had wanted all along.
What is Synarchism?
You may ask why I just made you read 1,580 words on a Bolshevik and a Nazi (each having 790 words). But the answer is that Sultan-Galiev and Schmitt had inadvertently founded the theoretical basis for both the far-left and far-right to pragmatically collaborate with each other without engaging in ideological hypocrisy.
The Bolshevik Sultan-Galiev had found a theoretically-sound use for assisting the far-right to counter capitalism, and the Nazi Carl Schmitt saw a potential for boosting the far-left to counter liberalism. These two men have never met, and their ideologies have never actually been synthesized into practice. All I wanted to show was that a tendency of reaching across the aisle to fight against the greater enemy of liberal capitalism was not only something that started and ended with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but had far greater philosophical and strategic considerations.
Because as we continue on the 21st century, a philosophical and political engagement across the aisle not just between fascists and communists, but between libertarians and authoritarians, republicans and monarchists, and socialists and capitalists are happening. A cross-pollination of all their conceptions onto a singular blob of idealistic contradiction and incompatibility that has surprisingly managed to actually become the most resilient form of dictatorial politics that the world has ever seen. And it is very likely the newest and strongest ideological enemy to liberal capitalism yet. The new right-wing.
This tendency in authoritarian ideocracy is something that has moved well beyond being named by terms and labels that already have baggage associated with them. Socialist republics, fascist autocracies, technocratic minarchies, integralist theocracies, communist dictatorships, absolute monarchies. Such labels are no longer viable to describe this highly schizophrenitized authoritarian tendency. And as such, I would prefer to term this phenomenon of post-ideological dictatorship with a new word that has little baggage: Synarchism.
Synarchism generally means “joint rule” or “harmonious rule”. Beyond this general definition, both synarchism and synarchy have been used to denote rule by a secret elite in Vichy France, Italy, China, and Hong Kong. — Wikipedia
I think it works? A joint rule between those who hate capitalism and those who hate democracy. A harmonious rule between those who advocate for progress and those who advocate for reaction. And also, a combined rule of none of these people. Ideologies divorced from policies. Policies divorced from ideologies.
Is synarchism nationalist or globalist? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism fascist or communist? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism socialist or capitalist? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism syndicalist or corporatist? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism reactionary or revolutionary? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism progressive or conservative? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism centrist or extremist? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism monarchist or republican? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism religious or secular? Both, and neither.
Is synarchism accelerationist or decelerationist? Both, and neither.
Metamodern post-ironic authoritarianism. It is all of them, and none of them. It has the capacity to engage with all of the ideas above and even implement them, with all of its contradictions, all of its incompatibilities, all of its differences, all of it in their ridiculous glory. Or it will implement none at all. As the synarchist regime engages in all narratives, you cannot tell apart which ideas are it engaging in seriously, which are it engaging with facetiously, which are it engaging with ironically, and which are it engaging with for populist appeal. The fact that none, all and some are all possible answers is the greatest strength of synarchist dictatorship.
There were ideologically variable dictatorships before. Those that also simultaneously named themselves these things as well for the sake of populist appeal, but the main difference between the 21st century synarchism and those previous dictatorships is that synarchism has proven itself to actually be able to actually engage with all of its contradictory beliefs on a theoretical basis, no matter how ridiculous.
The Conception of Corporate Communism
Communism once was a conduit of punk energy, and its promises prophesized faster generation of new cultures, greater proliferation of new arts, and an unforeseen potential to unlock newer venues of free-thinking. Even the Bolsheviks made the openly gay Georgy Chicherin their very first Foreign Minister. While many communist movements from Marx’s death to the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War exhibited genuinely progressive, anti-authoritarian and revolutionary tendencies that were barely seen during the Soviet era, so much of that energy would eventually be either suffocated by Bolshevization or reterritorialized onto edgy social democracy.
A problem with early communist dictatorships was that by completely concentrating all annals of power and all privileges of control onto itself, the vanguard party ended up becoming the only remaining outlet for the pathologically power-hungry, the pathologically prestige-hungry, and the pathologically wealth-hungry.
As the first generation of revolutionary firebrand communists died of old age, the next generation of supposed “communists” who were to succeed them that coalesced under their authoritarian system would be the very people that would otherwise have been ruthless capitalists or demagogue politicians in a market democracy. With each new generation, the revolutionary fervor gets diluted further and further. The old guard passes away one-by-one slowly until the socialist state and its leadership finds itself no longer occupied by fervent anti-capitalist theorists, but fervent anti-change careerists, cementing an unwritten and unspoken ideological shift from revolutionary anti-capitalism towards simply a comfortable civilizational statism.
Lev Gumilev would have been arrested for his ideas about the Eastern Bloc constituting a singular civilization of passionarity if he ever published those ideas in the early days of the USSR, but since it was the late-stage Soviet Union where not only his audience, but the nomenklatura that regulated them were now both full of those more open to ideas regarding conservative preservation than communist revolution, he ended up with an undeserved honor of a maverick intellectual of the Marxist strand. Gumilev’s ideas were nothing more than the pre-existing social order seeking to justify its own existence in hindsight through conservative sophism the same way capitalist austerity retrospectively justified its own existence through Thomas Malthus and Ayn Rand.
It is extremely telling that no truly radical and revolutionary anti-capitalist force was ever able to take hold in a pocket of Eastern Europe during the 1990s when such a movement was arguably the most in-demand. Oligarchization, austerity, mafiazation, recession, poverty, destitution all came together like capitalism speedrunning onto its endgame. Yet there were barely any movements of organized labor, barely any left-wing firebrand revolutionaries, barely any communities of mutual aid, all that once used to be the signatures of 1910s European communists assisting the proletariat in fighting through capitalist destruction was barely existent. In a moment of deep disillusionment, many of these post-socialist democracies would even end up re-electing their former communists for a reprieve from capitalist onslaught, only for these supposed communists to gleefully re-impose neoliberalism.
What were you even expecting from the anti-change careerists? The very organizations that were designed to harbor and monopolize left-wing political expression had inadvertently ended up training them instead of revolutionaries, and they were all intellectually unequipped to handle the sins of actual capitalism, and most would actually participate in it.
When the Iron Curtain fell, the supposed communist parties that still remained in its cadaver had scattered into many different avenues. Some remarketed as social democrats that followed the capitalist line (Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania etc.), while other transformed into ultranationalist authoritarians that founded regimes not unlike those of the Axis powers (Turkmenistan, Belarus, Uzbekistan etc.). But the most interesting to observe were from those who still decided to stick with the label of a leftist party and still arguably had leftist ideals, but were indubitably transformed by not only a sudden exposure to Western culture, but also to social progressivism.
Yes, I am talking about Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation. And not just them, but also Yefrem Sokolov’s Communist Party of Belarus, Zinaida Greceanîi’s Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Petro Symonenko’s Communist Party of Ukraine and the variety of other supposedly communist/socialist parties that not only had a goal of fighting capitalism and reinstituting socialism, but also fighting against Western progressivism and reinstituting reactionary conservatism, all the while shilling for right-wing dictators like Putin, Lukashenko and Nazarbayev.
Communists used to be the first people in Europe that advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, they used to be the ones that talked about the rights and protections of national minorities, Lenin himself even wrote about microaggressions within tsarist society that alienated its Polish and Tatar citizenry. But somewhere along the way, these leftists came to identify the tenets of social progressivism with capitalist corrosion as well, with the fight against capitalist domination now being translated into also a fight against tolerant societies.
Perhaps this evolution was foretold, for Kim il-Sung’s North Korea, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, and Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia were all already intensely flirting with some truly right-wing notions on what nation, culture and society ought to be despite their socialist credentials.
On top of this was the recent reappreciation of the Chinese economic success by these reactionary leftists, especially by Gennady Zyuganov himself. As China continues on with its corporatist economic model that would have been the envy of Italian rightists instead of Russian leftists a century ago, the promise to make their respective countries more akin to the Chinese style of “socialism” has also become a marketable buzzword for this reactionary left to advertise themselves with.
As the Eastern European reactionary left fall into the Chinese communist logic of “keeping surplus value in the nation as a temporary substitute to keeping surplus value in labor” as an alternative for the neoliberal model of development, they engage in an indulgent fantasy where the Soviet Union continued to exist, now running under the Dengist hyper-capitalist economic model reappropriated as Neo-Bukharinism, still a superpower and still a Leninist state. Envious at the current glory of China as something that should have been reserved for their fantasy Soviet Union, this reactionary communist tendency has had their ideology transformed into something not quite what Marx or Lenin wanted at all.
If you call yourself a communist while waxing nostalgic over the loss of some glorious superpower, while identifying social progress as Western degeneracy and advocating for economic corporate dirigisme, wouldn’t that make you ideologically aligned with fascism instead of communism? Yes. Yes, it does. They would never admit to it (except the few intellectually honest ones that took on the moniker National Bolshevism), but this cross-pollination has been a fundamental building block for what we see today as the synarchist trend. As a phenomenon, it is no longer merely limited to the post-Eastern Bloc space, as movements such as the MAGA Communists in the United States and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany are taking to the Western mainstream these forms of politics that were mostly observed within the peripheries of the Global South, now driven by people who look back upon the USSR and the social order it imposed upon the Eurasia as not a Marxist dystopia, but a conservative aspiration. And the largest of the globe’s pulpits will get to endure a new set of firebrand promises to consider for the mid-21st century: communist means towards conservative ends.
The Conception of Anarchist Fascism
What about fascism? Did fascism have to conduct this ideological outreach onto far-left ideas? As an ideology that appreciated the absolute application of absolute power, fascists had long been envious of communist regimes for being able to effectively apply the power they desired. And no, fascism as an ideology wasn’t defeated after World War II unlike popular notions. It continued to proliferate after the war, with the catch being that these regimes couldn’t get to or didn’t bother to call themselves fascist.
East Asia had Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto and Ne Win. West Asia had Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and Mullah Muhammad Omar. Africa had Hendrik Verwoerd, Mobutu Sese Seko, Francisco Macías Nguema and Isaias Afwerki. Latin America had Rafael Trujillo, Augusto Pinochet, Jorge Rafael Videla and Emílio Garrastazu Médici.
The advantage with fascism is that it has no economic ideology. Fascists have little care for whether something is socialist or capitalist, as long as it is deemed suitable. As a matter of fact, fascism has no care for the meanings of the word “socialism” or “capitalism” at all. “Socialism” shall mean whatever the fascist needs it to mean, and the same goes for capitalism as well. They can get to define what is “socialism” because as a fascist dictatorship, they have not only monopolized the meaning of the word, but they have also monopolized the means to define words as well.
With the most famous case of this being the Nazis (short for National Socialism) implementing a mass privatization of Weimar Germany’s state-owned assets to such a degree that the word “privatization” was literally invented to explain the phenomenon, the Nazis had only managed to hold on to terming their policies socialist by implementing race-specific welfare programs to ethnic German people that excluded all other races, and implementing a dirigiste four-year economic-planning system to coordinate all of the megacorporations they just empowered. Welfare and economic planning are “socialist-ish”, so the government can get away with naming it that way, while literally anything else they did would not fall under any sane definition of socialism.
The same can be seen for many other fascist regimes as well. The Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athists establishing a corporate economy ran entirely by an insular family of Assads and Husseins in a structure not unlike aristocratic absolutism but getting to call that system “socialist” because even with this patrimonial structure they had established, the economy was planned in nature. Even Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain flirted with the “syndicalist” label, trying to implement their own band-aids of labor justice onto a system that profoundly advantaged owners over workers.
But fascism’s role in synarchist tendency was not the appropriation of leftist ideas. You can already see that such a thing has already happened. What has been new is fascism’s reappropriation of libertarian capitalist ideas in favor of socialist ones. Libertarian capitalism has always had a complicated relationship with democracy, expressed in writing by right-libertarians such as Insula Qui, Frank Van Dun and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Even chief neoliberal Friedrich Hayek would express doubt that liberal democracy could be the best system in fully harnessing the self-correcting power of the market.
Democracy as a government prone to populist public will that continues to demand greater regulations, nationalizations, protections and expenditures that would only serve to derationalize and obfuscate the efficiency of market mechanisms down the line was frequently discussed by all of them. Many would argue for an absolute monarchy as an authoritarian defender of the free market, more would advocate for a propertarian oligarchy as a democracy of businesses to institutionally insulate political decision-making from populist market disruptions.
While libertarian capitalist thinkers had long possessed doubts over the compatibility between democracy and capitalism, it would be the work of one English jungle raver and philosophy professor Nick Land that would transform the libertarian capitalist cynicism towards democracy into a full-blown ideological embrace of fascism. Considered the father of accelerationist philosophy, Nick Land would originally start off as a left-wing philosopher who advocated for the acceleration of modern capitalism’s desire-producing, deterritorializing, self-cannibalizing, and crisis-perpetuating internal hyperstitional processes as self-reinforcing mechanisms that would inevitably manifest the physicality of capitalism’s complexity production onto tangible intelligence production through technological singularity. The concept of capitalism as an artificial intelligence operating through human communities as its microprocessors, and one that will always win at game theory was a novel one. And many of his initial ideological colleagues (and sometimes even Land himself) saw this entire process as a potential to have capitalism negate itself, towards either revolutionary progress or a progressive revolution.
Warwick University’s Accelerationist philosophy had initially been a profoundly left-wing thought, with its adherents being either socialists who wanted to help capitalism destroy itself along the Marxist Impossibilist line, or xenofeminists that sought to deterritorialize gender through capitalist decoding and completely abolish its binaries. But Nick Land himself would eventually be radicalized onto the far-right due to circumstances regarding his mental stability, drug use, and his relocation to Shanghai to escape his previous life. No longer convinced that the acceleration of capitalism can ever be harnessed for left-wing purposes, Land saw in China the basis for a new strand of accelerationist thought.
Dubbing China a “fundamentally accelerationist society”, he saw the Chinese state’s systematic intervention in the economy as actually accelerating capitalism far faster than liberal democracies ever could and began to form a brand-new idea of accelerationism. Land would eventually come into contact with the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin (pen name Mencius Moldbug) to form the Dark Enlightenment: a movement synthesizing reactionarism, ultramunicipalism and anarcho-capitalism into a singular ideological strand of fascistic cyberpunk acceleration.
Coming into a similar conclusion with previous libertarian thinkers on how the concept of freedom within the context of a democratic nation-state government was a mechanism that would perpetually add more and more regulations, inhibitions and limitations upon the free flow of capital for the sake of “progress” and “equality”. International consensus politics as symbolized by those of the United Nations and the European Union came to be seen like the plague, as over-reaches of a global governance mechanism that actively delays intelligence production. Nick Land soon came to support all forms of conservative, fascist and reactionary politics, ranging from queerphobia and antisemitism to Nazi eugenics and Christian theocracy. His reasoning being that the right-wing, in his perception, was something that does not inhibit limitations upon Capital, but merely preserves and advances its reach, whether out of pro-market beliefs, ideological tunnel-vision or appropriation by capitalist interests themselves.
Land soon came to advocate for the concept of “cold anarchism”, a slow disintegration of the present world-order onto ever multiplying and ever Balkanizing fiefdoms and statelets, an order of a million city-states that only ever looks outwards, for its internal political dynamics are already settled by matter of plutocracy and dictatorship. A world order so beyond global consensus and regulation that no United Nations, no European Union, no BRICS or no ASEAN can ever survive within it. A million nations to choose from for the billion peoples of the world, nations that you vote for with the simple instinctual procedure of your own immigration rather than voting within a single anemic nation-state through the corrupted and bureaucratic mandate of ballots. Not the freedom to choose per se, but the freedom to exit.
But the theoretical conceptions of accelerationist philosophy are not important. What is important is that Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin had successfully bridged the ideological gap between fascism and anarcho-capitalism, paving the way towards a flurry of ideologues taking that synthesis into the political mainstream, as both the strategies of its praxis and the visions it carry are now considered the forerunner to and the theoretical basis of the modern alt-right movement.
The fascists, having long settled with advocating for corporate statism, national syndicalism and half-socialism as economic platforms to bleed supporters off the disillusioned left, would now have access to a profoundly liberal-minded political audience who found the increasing viability of businesses untenable with global crises coming year on year, slowly falling into far-right radicalization and extremist praxis.
So there you have it. As a communist, you have audiences if you synthesize with reactionarism, you have audiences if you synthesize with capitalism. As a fascist, you have audiences if you synthesize with socialism, you have audiences if you synthesize with libertarianism. Bereft of anarcho-communism, the stage has been set for autocrats to exploit all other political extremes in order to establish a coalitionary monster. So why wouldn’t pre-existing regimes jump on this to consolidate their power?
So What?
Is this some horseshoe theory take that when you go far-left enough you end up on the far-right? Or is it some Orwellian take that far-left and far-right regimes are functionally identical due to their totalitarian tendencies? No, and no. There is a functional capacity for nations to preserve a purely far-left or a far-right regime without such ideological combinatorics. What I am trying to say is that at this point in history where extremists have done a profound period of rediscovery due to having no currently existing ideological pole nation to idolize, this cross-pollination of extremes has now not only become possible but incentivized for autocrats to compete with democracies. A dictatorship where you could be radicalized in either direction and still support the dictator.
If you combine the labels that modern anti-liberal regimes get named as, the labels they intellectually engage with, the labels they parade around as national aesthetics, and the labels that would describe their actual internal policies, it would look something like this:
The Russian Federation, a Tsarist patrimonial, Soviet patriotic, antiliberal accelerationist, neo-feudal corporatist, Slavic supremacist, Eurasianist tellurocratic, antifascist fascist, gangster autocracy.
The People’s Republic of China, a Confucian conservative, technocratic accelerationist, Marxist-Leninist, neoliberal corporatist, Han supremacist, revolutionary internationalist, neocolonialist particracy.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, an ethnonational fascist, revolutionary communist, pagan conservative, single-party casteist stratocracy led by an apotheosized absolute monarchy.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, a reactionary Islamist, revolutionary anti-monarchist, multicultural Pan-Shia, theodemocratic counterintelligence state with a centrally-planned socialist economy.
Whether these labels are worn facetiously or seriously, the trick is to always engage with their ideas no matter what. But the true potential of synarchism has not quite been seen. It could embellish in creating its own natural history of supposed ideological diversity as China does. Yesterday was communism day, and tomorrow is fascism day, but today is liberalism day. It could perhaps even embellish it through panarchist diversification. Russia may be a fascist state, but Chechnya is an Islamist one. China may be authoritarian, but Macau is indubitably libertarian. Myanmar may be a right-wing military junta, but the Wa State is very much Marxist-Leninist. As long as the centralized power is stable, the ideology may not matter.
Communism bereft socialism. Fascism bereft nationalism. Libertarianism bereft liberalism. All reterritorialized along a singular authoritarian line. Progressives may already be on the path of assimilation as Occidental politics flirt with pinkwashing and femonationalism to justify identitarianism. Perhaps even the anarchists are to be reterritorialized as well, we can only wait.
Which is the reason why the evolution of the Syrian Civil War has been so interesting, for Bashar al-Assad’s government and its de facto cooperation pact with the Kurdish libertarian socialist forces in Rojava have paved a possibility previously completely unconsidered: The prospect of anarchist localities existing within a dictatorship. It remains to be seen whether Rojava forces survive this conflict, but in the case that Bashar al-Assad and Îlham Ehmed manage to reach a power-sharing agreement, that would mark it as the first step of even left-wing anarchism being reterritorialized onto synarchism.
Only now are dictators truly realizing the true extent in which their states can remarket itself like a corporation. It can change labels and switch ideologies like a company going through marketing redesign: corporate statism can be remarketed as socialist planning, social reactionarism can be remarketed as cultural decolonialization, enterprise nationalization can be remarketed as wealth redistribution, mass privatization can be remarketed as pre-socialist market forces consolidation, authoritarianism can be remarketed as sovereign democracy. But the fundamental basis is the same. Whether it is the state that dominates or the oligarchs that dominate, the synarchist government still remains a corporate parasocial entity. And all it has to do is to conquer the alienated gaze.
Because synarchism is just as much a social phenomenon of projection than it is an actual ideology. There is a deep desire within many to wish for alternatives to neoliberalism. As fascists appreciate the Eastern Bloc states for keeping immigration away, as communists appreciate the Islamists for successfully throwing off Western neocolonialism, as Islamists share Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate videos on TikTok, as libertarians begin preferring the exit from democracy over their voice in democracy.
Alienations of all kinds, whether it drives far-left desires or far-right ones, all coalesce together into this singularity of authoritarian escapism. Dependency theory and realist theory gone amok. All dictatorships are fair game as long as they can insulate itself from neoliberalism. All of us anti-neoliberal states can come together to bring the West under siege and bring an end to entrenched globalization once and for all, whether that globalization is a capitalistic one, an Occidental one, or a Semitic one depends entirely on which label fits the day.
As the Russian Federation invades Ukraine, it is both Europe’s communists and fascists that continue to come to Putin’s defense. As the far-right idolizes the reactionary dictatorial governance model of Putin as an inspiration and seek to steer their own countries into the very same rabbit hole of post-truth oligarchic fascism, the far-left seems to still have holdover nostalgic allegiance to the USSR that they mull over with a justification that Putin’s regime is a potential counter-pole to all-encompassing American neoliberalism. Same goes with the Chinese system, for quite a majority of the communists seem to see China as a success of Bukharinist planned economics on the verge of achieving developed socialism, while the fascists see the Chinese governance of nationalist technocracy as a tried-and-true alternative to the degeneracies of liberal democracy.
Every loss of the West feels like a vindication of their beliefs, whether they are communist, fascist, theocratic or libertarian. Even a patchwork neoreactionary finds solace in China outcompeting the United States. Even a communist hardliner feels schadenfreude with every nuisance Russia inflicts upon the European Union. And don’t forget all the general anti-Westerners and anti-hegemonists in between that subscribe to some utopian conception of multipolarity that they imagine to be an improvement over American dominance in one way or another.
They will have talking points from the far-left, the far-right, the anarchists, the libertarians. They will quote Hegel, Kant, Hobbes and Rousseau. They will quote Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. They will quote Mussolini, Gentile, Evola and Benoist. They will quote Hume, Spinoza, Locke and Descartes. They will quote Luxemburg, Bordiga, Gramsci and Trotsky. They will quote D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Land and Moldbug. They will quote Friedman, Hayek, Keynes and Smith. They will quote Chomsky, Parenti, Althusser and Žižek. They will quote Leontiev, Ilyin, Gumilev and Dugin. They will quote Bataille, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari. They will quote Hoxha, Ceausescu, Sankara and Tito. They will quote Hitler, Goebbels, Codreanu and Horthy. They will quote Rand, Hoppe, Thatcher and Reagan.
They will quote Lee Kuan Yew. They will quote Ruhollah Khomeini. They will quote Nelson Mandela. They will quote Mohandas Gandhi. They will quote Subhas Chandra Bose. They will quote Michel Aflaq. They will quote Theodore Kaczynski. They will quote Napoleon Bonaparte.
These thinkers and these leaders. Their beliefs do not matter. All that matters is a single quote from them that is marginally agreeable in the synarchist’s eyes that they can share as a belittling vindication of their beliefs in the midst of the gurgling feed of propaganda.
Whether it’s saving the cohesion of the nation by showing the middle-finger to global government, whether it’s taking a stand against exploitative finance by the reintroduction of sound money, whether it’s the severance from global trade through complete protectionism and import substitution industrialization, whether it’s the mass nationalization of Western assets to have the people’s control over the economy, whether its the advocation of the native civilization-state over the values of thalassocracies. They will oppose American hegemony, they will advocate multipolarity, they will talk about how the Western model is not universal, or they will say cultures have their own presupposed existence incompatible with Western democracy, or they will say that modern liberal prosperity is only tenable with the Global North’s neo-imperialism.
But the truth is that those who oppose universal humanist values in the modern world are very efficiently and freely engaging with each other’s anti-universalist values, learning from each other and assisting each other at this very moment. What is this if not universalism? Multipolarity as a universal value. Cultural reaction as a universal value. Economic nationalism as a universal value. Rejection of universalism as a universal value. A metamodern post-ironic coalescing of all of authoritarian history come forth into a single universalist model of amorphous anti-humanism.
Synarchism. The dictatorship so flexible that anyone who finds capitalist democracy abhorrent in one way or another can project their own utopian beliefs on it. A Schrödinger’s dictatorship. And perhaps, the ultimate one. And as the world continues its march, this will be the greatest barrier to letting post-capitalism come into existence.
The Uncompartmentalizable Left
In the wake of total synarchization of all politics, the reformist left strives towards gaining the respect of the electoral mass while playing catchup with right-wing deterritorialization, while revolutionary leftists who never had faith in electoralism seek to find respect within their own insulated ecosystems for they see the entire thing as a spectacle not worth participating in. Reformist leftists are afraid of getting caught dead in public saying “Maybe Marx had a point.”, while revolutionary leftists are deathly afraid of saying in a symposium “Maybe Marx didn’t have a point.” And both absolutely dread getting caught saying anything about a person like Juan Posadas except a passing curiosity. Maybe this fear of ours is a Big Other as well? One we need to abolish to be able to finally embrace an unexplored potentiality?
Transhumanist hypotheses of the biopunk and cyberpunk kind, coupled with cosmic ponderings of posthumanism and postplanetarism seem ready-made for enabling leftist schizopolitics to cross boundaries and escape public compartmentalization without embarrassing itself through infringement on pre-established scientific expertise the same way reactionary schizopolitics do. But such pathways remain not only unused, but the people most in need of making use of it remain unaware, unimaginative and craven. Those who dare to be insane and navigate leftism through schizopolitics (like Juan Posadas), are derided and mocked as distracting and unserious.
I do not agree with Juan Posadas’s views. I am not pro-nuclear war. That’s fucking stupid. I am also doubtful of the potential of dolphins becoming a civilization co-existent with humanity. And I am not so confident as to claim that capitalism is so logistically impossible to enforce for a multiplanetary civilization that all transgalactic alien civilizations are either communist or non-existent. But I still like Posadas, I like the form of his ideas more than its content. His career is a fascinating, if not accidental, social experiment in attempting to reterritorialize a subculture towards leftist radicalization. It showcases something that perhaps Posadas himself was not realizing that he had been accidentally doing. An exercise in taking over a fringe idea and exerting so much dominance over its membership and direction that not only does the entire idea itself become automatically associated with freak leftism in the mind of the masses (thus organically filtering out rightists from the subculture who voluntarily eject themselves out of desire to not have their identity pigeonholed into leftism by proxy), and serving as a pipeline of radicalization for new entrants of the subculture.
Any leftist writer who takes one’s imagination of praxis away from the usual trifecta of picket signs, wildcat strikes and the people’s war onto asking aliens for their assistance in overthrowing capitalism is not necessarily a political win, but perhaps a cultural one. It doesn’t necessarily matter if we take Posadas’s ideas seriously, but we should perhaps complete the Posadist takeover of ufology. For it, and multitudes of other pockets of interest strewn across online spaces will always be seeking new hosts and new believers, naturally conquering microcultural territorialities and reversing the slow siege and takeover of the Internet currently being done by rhizomatic postmodern conservatism (the conspiratorial Facebook/4chan right-wing), reclaiming the zeitgeist arena of political discourse that the offline world now inevitably drip-feeds from. Not just to counteract its tactics, but also to establish the first infrastructures of a hypothetical post-capitalist model.
The Kaiserreich Modder and the Kaiserreich Streamer Are Both Filthy Commies
There is fault in trying to imagine post-capitalism by reappropriating pre-capitalism, pre-feudalism, pre-neoliberalism or pre-perestroika through the lens of automation. The Left needs their own natural and state-independent system of creative destruction, culturally, technologically, politically and economically. Or else, their societies will forever play catch-up with deterritorialization. Capitalism and feudalism did not have a cold war where feudalism lost, it grew out of feudalism and swallowed it whole. While the observations and analyses brought forth by Marxist philosophers have no doubt been valuable, the attempts of Marxist regimes to build socialism seem just as much towards insulating oneself from capitalism than outcompeting it. Not only is it automatically a weaker position to start from, but one that is doubtful to ever be as adaptable and dynamic as the thing they are trying to insulate against.
Acceleration of technology under feudalism made way for infrastructure that allowed a superior economic system to outcompete feudalism and replace it from the inside, because the technologies available made apparent the inefficiencies. It made it clearer to see precisely what to deregulate that would allow capitalism to be ushered in, and precisely what to deregulate was deregulating who owns the means of production. Aristocratic ownership was so much more inefficient compared to private ownership, so you may say we are reaching the point where people are beginning to see that private ownership is reaching the same inefficiency as aristocratic inefficiency once did. But compared to what? State ownership? Social ownership? Capitalism is unable to be imagined into existence without the printing press, without inter-ocean navigation, without the steam engine, without the smelters that mint currency. So, what technologies can post-capitalism not survive without?
One must not forget that even modern and historic manifestations of capitalism had those seeking to exit it that inadvertently deterritorialized social bonds independent of the market but could only be reassimilated through statism imposed as a foreign agent due to capital alone being insufficient, showing that non-capitalist deterritorialization continues to exist throughout history, but merely lacking in either public cognizance or simply the capital needed to proliferate it. These attempts of desire rationalization are when we see capitalist ownership at its weakest, most willing to compromise, and most likely to entrepreneur its way into its own negation.
Platform capitalism is an interesting manifestation of this adage, because here is a question worth pondering: Do Youtubers, TikTokers and Twitch streamers own their means of production? If the commodity they produce is video content, surely the means of creating such content; the filming equipment, the editing software, the upload profile, are all owned by the majority of these content creators in the form of a small private business, an informal cooperative of friends, or an individual person. Perhaps the only thing outside of the creator’s ownership is the platform where their content is published, as those remain resolutely in the hands of corporations. Despite its glaring imperfections and extreme sensitivity to market logic, this content production form can be imprinted on by both sides of the spectrum as something worth desiring. While the left-leaning sees it as self-ownership of their own labor product, the right-leaning romanticizes it as a hustle to escape common drudgery.
As these platforms begin to take up greater and greater share of global media consumption, media created through traditionally capitalist means of production become increasingly marginalized among social attention. Authenticity artisans and parasociality producers, people who, to a degree, own their means of production, inevitably creating a contradiction for its viewers and consumers. When all of consumed media seems produced by people with one foot outside of traditional capitalist relations, even those not fully cognizant of it would feel their alienation fueled further every time they have to conciliate the neoliberal lives they lead with the proto-socialist media they consume. In a way, we are all medieval peasants watching Fight Club to pass the time. Not because the highs of the world presented in Fight Club is aspirational, but its lows are. A medieval peasant watching Fight Club has less concern for the atomization of society caused by late 90s capitalism compared to the mind-blowing fact that no one in the film needs to toil in the fields.
This contradiction even encompasses conservative and hyper-capitalist grifters as well. With each success of the grifter persona depending on authentic personal charisma, and each charismatic persona serving as a role model for those who want to escape ordinary life just the same, but for right-wing reasons. It is absolutely no accident that statistics show more and more American children wanting to become Youtubers as their primary occupation. While the reality of becoming a Youtuber is no doubt difficult and tenuous, this desire is partly driven by the subconscious recognition of Youtube exhibiting self-ownership of the means of production to a degree not seen anywhere else, and it looks the closest in approximation to being the full master of your own destiny in comparison to any other corporate career path out there.
The entirety of social media content creation fuels something akin to Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal simply by nature of its production method, for every day we drip-feed from a future form of commodity production yet continue to be denied that very future, like East Germans having American jeans being dangled in front of them, like English Quakers having American liberty being dangled in front of them. We have been cohabiting with the ever-strengthening radiation poisoning of escapeways from capitalism for quite a while now, afflicting all of us with the inability and refusal to desire anything for themselves within the conception of classical production and the paths of life it enables. As time marches on, our bodies will continue to choose this proto-Great Refusal without the consent of our minds. But this in itself is not something that will collapse capitalism, for without any new articulation of a world to supplant the overwhelming sense of capitalist realism, this wave of alienation has no choice but to be reappropriated by pre-capitalism, pre-feudalism, pre-neoliberalism or pre-perestroika once again, leading to solutions to we have already tried, solutions that did not last. Or even worse, it may be appropriated by the crowd nostalgic for pre-democracy, pre-rights, pre-equality and pre-secularity.
On a completely unrelated note, we have artels. Artels were semiformal cooperative associations for craft, artisan, and light industry seen in both Tsarist and Communist Russia that served a very important role in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union as pockets of decentralized production that filled in for deficiencies of the Soviet planned economy wherever it can. But the artel sector was something that slowly began coming under government management throughout the latter half of Nikita Khrushchev’s reign, and by the time Mikhail Gorbachev got into power, this entire sector of decentralized cooperatives that served as a state-sanctioned cushion for goods shortages had been utterly erased from Soviet economic existence.
But just because the artels themselves came to be nationalized and rationalized under a central planning system did not mean the inherent need they fulfilled had gone away. The deficiencies still existed. But with the artels gone, these needs came to be fulfilled by the far less monitorable black market that served to fill in for the shortage economy not with legal domestic production, but the blat system, industrial corruption and foreign importation. It is no coincidence that the eye-opening study of Vladimir Treml and Mikhail Alexeev upon the Soviet shadow economy showed that disparity between legal income and legal spending gradually grew starting in the mid-1960s and diverged completely by the 1980s, indicating the increasing proliferating of everyone’s participation in the Soviet black market, right around the time when the independent nature of artels were beginning to be abolished.
But artels were not just worker cooperatives in the classical sense, for the informality of this institution was perhaps its most important component. Its proceeds were divided in equal shares without regard to skill or assumed merit, associations would split into minor artels with head supervisor “Elders” that looked after fiscal responsibilities, its various branches possessing freedom of action despite sharing expenditures and profits. Artels were infamous for their simplicity due to having no written agreements to regulate their operational specifications, and slacking being dealt with by group admonishing and chronic cases by expulsion, with only the capacity and desire to work in good faith being regarded as the primary metric for operations. In a great break from traditional lifestyles, artel workers preferred communal living. While seemingly disjointed at first glance, artels were intensely coordinated and obedient with their self-organization and its members highly respected their supervisors, even if every member of the artel was a free agent except for the duties he owed. Wage differences only manifested in cases of wealthier members receiving recompense for supplying equipment or capital. In a way, artels were small enclaves of a high-trust society which had its operations dependent more on the proliferation of shared communitarian values than methods of hard coercion and rule enforcement.
This mode of production and ownership may seem familiar to a good few, for it is extremely similar to communities of modding, speedrunning, open-source coding and all other forms of commons-based peer production. Members joining user-run forums and servers to freely participate and contribute to these projects with no written agreements to regulate them and no meritocratic reward differences to prioritize competition over cooperation. Moderators and admins serving as elders and supervisors of these online artels, group dynamics and self-monitoring (and banhammers) serving as the basis of good faith behavior generation, and everyone being free to exit with little to no legal or social implications. Its monetization is only done with its platforms, with the actual products being unable to be properly replicated as market goods in any way. And as traditional artels pursued the production of seasonal agriculture and light consumer goods, online artels generated game mods, speedrunning entertainment, open software and other formulated desires unheard of and unable to be assimilated.
Perhaps this, not the orthodox replication of these dynamics, but the ephemerality of its self-organization could be a component worth considering. Like the old artels of Russia, open-source communities are pockets of something quite resembling the operations of a high-trust society up to a fault. But this online high-trust community has manifested independently from the way this word is usually deployed, for the word “high-trust society” is usually used to describe hypothetical sociocultural homogeneities, nation-states with faiths and values where the lion’s share of good behavior generation within society is not dependent on law enforcement, but the people themselves feeling comfortable interacting with society in good faith.
There are of course many new different radical proposals that came into serious discussion during these last few decades: universal income, remote work, workers on boards, carbon tax, 4-day workweek, liquid democracy, paternity leave, fossil fuel phase-out, flexible workhours, stakeholder capitalism, consumer rights, stock as payment, etc. All seem fine as proposals on their own, but all share the same lack of systemic self-perpetuation. Policies, not ideologies. Band-aids, not replacements. But nonetheless are valuable ideals to strive towards, not as painkillers for capitalism, but as the accelerators of the thing that succeeds it.
For the New Earth shows up in short bursts, like flares of electricity and imperfection jumping out of the river streams of frutiger aero, showing up in parts and segments, but never as the whole thing. So here is a freeform theory-fiction based on all the parts and segments of the New Earth we already have, assembled together as a left accelerationist exercise of being able to visualize the future once again. A quick shot at trying to imagine the end of capitalism before the end of the world.
Hikikomori Europe
Cultures under capitalism are always on the path towards deconstruction. The mourning of cultures erased by imperialism is just as much a mourning of being denied the products of its deconstruction just as much as mourning that undeserved erasure. And sovereignty is ultimately the opportunity to deconstruct your own magic circle of play that constitutes the community in which you belong to. It means you are the one shoveling the manure of tradition, authenticity and heritage into the globe-trotting steam engine of commodity fetishism and value-added industry. Shovel it more. Soft power is only borne through the death of a culture’s true spirit. Soft power is what saved the Notre Dame from the fires, but not that Ethiopian church or mosque that even I have forgotten the name of. The true and authentic Japan is dead. There is only the idea of a traditional Japan that earns money for real-life Japan. “Authentic” Europe is dead as well, as dead as “authentic” India and “authentic” China.
And when seen in terms of the metrics of their global political power, that is surprisingly a good thing. Culture is the fuel thrown into the furnaces of capitalism to move the engines of soft power. America is the strongest because it cannibalizes on culture the most. America is unchallenged because it feasts on its own beauty. That is soft power, power beyond the gun and the wallet. The power not to coerce, but to co-opt. Kill culture. Debase culture. And within its corpse, you will find global power.
— Another awful essay, and this one, I won’t post anywhere
The Great Refusal comes biodeterministically, as people exit production and procreation one by one in the shape of NEETS, hikikomoris, incels, antiworkers, burnouts, MGTOWs, 4B feminists, tang pingers, sex strikers and birth strikers, all clamoring not for band-aids to modernity, but the glory of the universe’s energy spent irrationally. Radical inaction, radical rejection, radical crisis; the corporate bushido and competitive involution (in the Chinese sense) that kept everything running become flimsier with each coming generation; as more people escape towards the ephemeral platform-based independent employment, production ownership and self-affirmation of the cyberspace. The illusion of escape through hustle culture and classical entrepreneurship becoming increasingly see-through with automation, stable diffusion, audio sampling, additive manufacturing, piracy and the great open-source all making private ownership seem pointless and unenforceable. Cohabiting with the ever-strengthening radiation poisoning of escapeways from capitalism, afflicting all with the inability and refusal to desire anything for themselves within the conception of classical production. Our bodies choosing the Great Refusal without the consent of our minds.
While America and China have now both surrendered into the closest possible mutations of their regimes’ foundational bases; a corporation state and gangster state respectively without threatening their territorial integrity too much, the institutionally incomplete European Union finds itself still needing to act and behave as if its ideals still matter in order to preserve itself. As an organization of inevitable inequality yet attempted equity, Europe has to intervene on behalf of its peripheral and minority polities to prevent sovereignty assimilations borne of business or bureaucracy interests that otherwise would have continued without protest or would have even been taken for granted in homogeneities or melting pots. A single overreach of the Eurobusiness or the Eurostate made without compromise becomes infinite ammo for institutional skepticism, thus making available to Europe only indirect solutions to solve its domestic labor aristocracy inequity. This modus operandi in the face of an accelerated creative destruction in all sectors of the economy will only lead to more desperate and more experimental politics of survival.
So, Europe blinks. Europe blinks in its staredown with Sino-American technocapitalist deterritorialization, with the continuing delirious onslaught on whatever community or society it told itself it ought to preserve. It blinks in its staredown with the biodeterminist Great Refusal and ends up legislating universal demogrants to ensure middle-class survival in a frenzy of technoskeptic paranoia. Basic income for the European Union was the final band-aid, the final act of bureaucratic charity before it deems its own existence futile; but what it actually and accidentally created was libidocapital. Not just any libidocapital, but the largest to have existed in history, large enough to assemble itself towards perpetual self-replication.
At first, Europe’s private polities face competition with anti-work tranquility and irrational risk-taking now brought forth by basic income, but soon it faces down the consumer nonproductive quinary sector and death-drive socialism. Libidocapital is the opposite of technocapital, it is anti-intelligent, anti-rational, anti-market and anti-channeling. It rejects greater narratives other than creation and explosion sans universal utility and value, a nigh-kekistic production of destruction finally fed the resources it clamored for so long. It is the accursed share in its purest form, divorced from bourgeois codependence.
It all starts with either pornography or gaming. Miniscule start-up cooperatives experimenting with selling shares and privileges to maintain not profit, but the continuity that enables their irrational desires to remain afloat the longest. The slow boiling of underground cooperativism, once merely appendages of Silicon Valley through Patreon and Etsy find itself ballooning further as funding and fans within the environment of a Europe whose money velocity and expendable income both continue to increase. Enterprises exist, because they are desired into existence. No more reasons, no more rationalities, no more justifications, only the enabling of desire onto material reality. By all means, it is the worker cooperative and consumer cooperative coalescing into one.
In lies the dynamic eventually borne that disintegrates and replaces the culture war. For impartial discourse necessitates transparency as these coops transform into parliament servers with a house of UBI investors and of workers. The Lower House of the Laborers, the creators of the neo-artel who are in negotiation and consideration amongst themselves on what to do. and the Upper House of the Desirers who have committed their stagnant demogrants and incomes to see the existence of this enterprise and its particularities come to life, breathing life onto itself as a congress of group chats deciding on counsel.
“Bicameralism” it is termed, complete with a lower house of coop workers who take upon the death-drive role of creation for the sake of creation, and an upper house of those spending their UBI just to see this weird thing coming into existence. The more savvy of them begin to expand into cyberspace and generate parasociality with new consumers and viewers through online personalities and authenticities native or outsourced, attracting more share purchases, with ephemeral cyberspace self-employment and worker cooperativism merging in a flurry of sponsorships, shout-outs and premium deals. Societas cooperativa Europaea soon finds itself under pressure to reduce maximum opt-in capital for those spending their UBI to support coops.
You only need one thousand Europeans investing 100€ of their UBI each to raise 100,000€. And in the wave of cybermedia where views are measured in the millions, such is easier than ever. Subscription models for monthly and continued stock purchases arise like Patreon memberships, automated direct stock purchase plans where “investors” commit their stagnant and unused monthly UBI into tangible coop shares with little investment knowledge, all driven solely by desire to see something continue to exist. Democracy infrastructures trial their way across artels into a standardization of equilibration between minimal behavioral engagement and optimal operations enabling. All relevant communication and cooperation manifesting through dialogues of online rhizomatic structures as individuals slot themselves randomly into servers and forums, generate new ideas through shared in-languages, and detach without issue to the greater collective structure.
Victors of the authenticity economy era shift into cyber-oligopoly as existing brands, signifiers and personalities have their autarkic nature amplified with AGI-adjacent mimicry and automation to be consumed as the basest layer of culture consumption, leaving for those remaining to aspire for a heightened place in the self-expression industry the option to settle for aforementioned cooperative mutual aid. Some may get to exit this and enter the cyber-oligopoly, but most remain in the network of minor attention fiefdoms and stock-sale-hungry coops. In the face of everything becoming duplicable and automated, biological labor itself and the knowledge of it being biological, whether creative or destructive, becomes the directly consumed commodity borne of pure parasociality replacing market value; a sovereign luxury signifier tokenized in glass displays.
The artels aren’t just trade workers in blue-collar syndicalism or B2B outsourcing-recipients filling labor specialization niches, they range from additive manufacturing production complexity freaks to wheelchair-bound Frostmourne forgers, from vaporwave anti-cafés to mail-order Satanic rituals. More and more sectors invented and bicameralized to perpetuate libidocapital, more of society in need of liberation to maximize parasocial marketization and the money velocity it accelerates, ranging from sex and drugs to athleticism and craftsmanship.
As coops become self-sustaining, it comes under threat from economic dictatorship. Millionaire angel investors and overweight hedge funds begin seeing dynamism in a scene long-neglected and seeks to buy a dominant share of the Upper House. The bourgeois demand to be involved develops concern for internal democratic structures. But it is libidocapital, not plutocapital. It is desire freed from marketized channeling, produced and funded by those who simply want it to exist. Shareholder value creation has little place in such organization, and the only ones deserving of undue propertarian power are those who made sacrifices or supported for the coop at its lowest moments. So, the coops smart enough to see where the tides are turning decide to cap the amount of spendable money, with monthly stock purchases being capped by the national monthly UBI amount and the share split between the Upper and Lower Houses being defined at a clean 49% and 51% of shares, now cemented in perpetuity as the template of the Bicameral Enterprise.
Cooperatives with financial insolvency or functional insufficiency are seized by a coalition of the upper house and an exploited worker minority as an organic regulation against schemes and frauds. The Marcora Law sees demand as workers cash in their unrealized unemployment benefits to capitalize a buyout of their failing businesses and shift into bicameral ownership. Stock exchanges (whether private, state or cooperative) exclusively aiming towards artel shares start sprouting up. Same goes for UBI-based hedge funds that find artels in sectors neglected by cyberspace attention to detect unrealized explosive market potential, gauging their growth and purchasing them en masse through committed and accumulated UBI, with their committers taking de jure ownership of the purchased shares.
Accumulations of total stock purchase plans by UBI investors, their promised commitments measured in months and years, and organized as permanent or changeable, become signifiers of stock stability, brand loyalty and financial solvency that enables further fiscal investment from even institutions of traditional banking. Ideological slacktivist participation in consenting to ethical consumerism manifests into real affect. Online servers of interest groups auction off their desires of building better worlds and making incremental changes, with maverick artels taking up their offers in exchange for stock sales. Welcome to Artelism, where growth engines self-assemble from capitalist aberrations.
Money velocity is at 5, and 200 billion Euros is worth a trillion in GDP. It moves from bank accounts to coop stocks to inventory purchases to salary accounts to private spending, each demogrant spreading out the market like blood through a beating heart pumping across rhizomatic arteries; fusing with, splitting across, expanding onto and retracting from each other as the pattern of blood vessels change every heartbeat. When Europe’s heart beats, the whole world hears. Money serves as not the accumulation of wealth, but billions of pinballs dashing across receptors, each collision generating value on the GDP scoreboard. Basic income becomes a phenomenon as natural and as irremovable as taxes, with its rates shifting with each collected revenue and money velocity. The Pandora’s box of domestic production is opened as lightspeed money starts taking larger and larger shares of GDP until non-artelist competitor states start coping towards Keqiang indexes. The true third position is now open for consideration, and it is neither privatization nor nationalization.
As history has shown that coops possess lesser failure rates than private firms during market instability due to their ability to reduce their own wages through internal democratic negotiation, more and more people begin favoring the guaranteed stable employment of coops with each new boom-and-bust cycle. Same goes for the quaternary cyberspace sector as each recession proliferates greater disillusionment in traditional employment and the romanticization of alternative incomes further enabled by monetized online platforms, both having their viabilities boosted by demograncy. The slow exit from capitalism begins, all until the Finlandization of the capitalist economy and the irrevocable shift of self-image in the voter demographic. The rest comes easy; flexible workhours, remote work, union rights and 4-day workweeks aren’t top-down mandates of the state, but internal artel initiatives to poach talent from rival private businesses. If you are competing with slaves, then you are a slave yourself. So, fund a slave revolt to even the grounds.
Economic Caesarism
Democratic discourse becomes difficult within the largest of cooperatives as a thousand voices demand an audience, grievances eventually concentrating upon a few personalities; shareleaders among coops speaking on behalf of a certain half without the thousand themselves speaking in unison. Workers and owners transfer their ballot authority onto these personalities with each shareleader serving as their very own political party within the coop, as operational optimization translates into populist interest competitions where the currency of power is attention and appeal. All done from the ease of your smartphone where you can pick and change your shareleader anytime, Caesarism saved from the consequences of political dictatorship.
Megacoops start arising like hyper-Mondragon monopolies brain-draining all proximate corporations, possessing political influence through its pull as a left-wing megacooperative and pushing policies at the expense of capitalism. The megacoop parliaments democratically favor strongarming the state into shifting the financial burden of healthcare, education and housing away from the wages of coops to the taxation of old money now mattering little, now armed with parties.
The strategy of the artelist political party to gain power is precisely the same strategy to accelerate the exit from capitalism: corruption. It takes little policy coordination to bring it forth. The Marcora Law, UBI and coop stock markets need to be put in place; with everything else being completely negotiable at the start. Artelist parties across and outside Europe form one by one, all advocating for both wealth distribution and economic liberalization simultaneously, promising everyone the world. Abandon all notions of political virtue such as honesty, rationality and transparency in favor of populism and syndicalist Caesarism never before seen.
Business deals made with heads of private competitive sectors for deregulation, tenders and tax breaks in exchange for political donations and platforming. The artelist party is the most corrupt party precisely because it wants the economy to crash. The more capitalism crashes and burns, the more people will seek the exit. More people seeking self-employment and freelancing, and more failing businesses transitioning into Marcora artels. Each boom-and-bust cycle dropping off more and more people, each new election dominated by the pro-business artelist party, each economic sector having a death rattle in the form of its final corporate monopolies competing with Mondragons resurrected from the cadavers of their defeated business rivals. The dirtiest and most naked of capitalist malpractices all used by the artelists to asphyxiate capitalism itself; until the majority of the populace finds themselves, their employment, and their community directly dependent on the high velocity rhizomatic ouroboros of the bicameral sector.
Artelism isn’t a revolution to supplant capitalism through a great planetary civil or cold war, nor is it the great social democratic reform to finally fix capitalism once and for all. It is mass exit from capitalism self-replicating itself across the planet disguised as both whenever needed. It is the legitimization of a dual power, an alternative network of neo-medievalist sovereignties in the forms of coops, freelancers, servers, donors, artists, forums, unions, bloggers, consumers, content creators and peer producers that capitalism cannot rationalize in its tunnel-vision, ceding ground to in failure at replicating the dynamics of its intended functionality under a market context, now an ever-rising opposition to intelligence production that deprioritizes technocapital logic into negligibility.
In order to secure greater access to libidocapital, the artelist society requires more and more people to participate in its processes. More and more influx of humans who receive UBI, yet don’t actually need it. The strategy is to make basic incomes more likely to be spent on artels, and the spendsters more likely to join the network of anti-intelligent intelligence production, an indicative and participative economic planning using mass human perception as its semiconductors receiving desires capitalism could never decode.
Logic first takes them onto solving poverty so the former poor can serve as a source of libidocapital without being stuck spending on basic needs. As the private economy gets truly sidelined, the economic participation of the wealthy becomes just as limited as that of the impoverished, with the state cannibalizing on all of their now-uninvestable money to further fund its machine. Billionaires become a sign of economic inefficiency, all that money not going through the pinball machine.
The unmentioned truth is that the monetary value of human life now equals the life expectancy multiplied by the annual UBI amount, and the extension of life expectancy becomes imperative for increasing libidocapital. Artels rising up to directly appeal to the elderly and retired now newly reinvigorated with their new economic roles, or the young and idealistic more likely to commit longer permanent stock purchase plans.
The status of data had long shifted from being the new oil to becoming the human-produced consumable egg, with tech companies continuing to gather and process these digital human eggs to sell it off to advertisers. Market logic accidentally circling back to intrinsic human value as the public becomes aware that minor activities such as scrolling and browsing had already been generating value without their knowledge. Recompenses are demanded worldwide, no matter how small. New laws regarding intrinsic monetary values are demanded as governments with artelist economic majorities are pressured towards new organizations of data management in the face of artel-centric personalized advertisement. Not just for data, but for any other minor activity that may accidentally become profitable in the future.
Tech companies following the natural monopoly business model of software as business enabling platforms, untrustworthy and exploitative in either private or government hands due to its affinition for either surveillance capitalism or surveillance statism, start facing the hypothetical possibility of socialization due to their present roles as public utilities on an international scale. Avant-garde ownership models rise up as suggestions. Pluronationalization, national representatives of all user-countries owning controlling shares to intentionally replicate the dynamics of the UN General Assembly or the European Parliament, managing to pass the most common-sense and commonly-agreed resolutions regarding platform operations while leaving the more controversial ones in perpetual electoral limbo. Plurocameralization, worker-users taking bicameral ownership across transnational lines, the lower house a democracy of billions with shareleaders of millions that is fairer in theory but messier in practice.
Lines of flight unlocked by lingua francas and comparative advantages bind the artelist networks together closer and closer, cross-attracting economies unto each other like magnets coming together into singular libidocapitalism. Artelist expansionism manifests through Europe’s demands for more land, more labor and more people to enlarge its libidocapital. Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Serbia, Kosovo, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Albania and Bosnia all get inevitably swallowed up by the European Union and inevitably reach the apex of zeroth world existentialism, the Second World swallowed to feed Europe’s labor aristocracy to excrete freed desire. As soon as Second World middle powers are finished importing the material conditions and privileged existentialism of social democratic tripartism, it may finally feast on Turkey and Russia to sate itself. More nations to feed on, more hunger to absorb. Europe will mean whatever Europe desires it to mean. Its borders arbitrarily set to accept any polity that wants to be voluntarily consumed.
The personalist parliamentarian structure becomes more and more commonplace with the advent of bicameral cooperativism as local and regional elections start conforming to more and more of its appeal standards, eventually trial-and-erroring itself into reforming as a competition between not parties, but personalities all the way to Brussels. Members of Parliament abolished in favor of legislative vote shares ran by shareleaders under an imperative mandate of a democracy both council and liquid, always at risk of losing majority vote shares in an instant from any deemed impropriety. You pick and fire your CEOs and your Prime Ministers just the same, from your phone with your vote share.
The engines of escape that drive anti-capitalism are finally freed, only to end up in the jaws of artels. All arts of escape are assimilated onto it, sanding down rhetoric of opposition into a free sample commodity of in-jokes, emotes, irony and cringe. Old nostalgists long for the days of propertarianism and statism, while their writhing expressions get reterritorialized onto the desiring-production machines as new culture for artelist self-perpetuation thanks to their implicit consent to using artelism to spread anti-artelism. But the exit is always possible, a built-in opt-out function for those who are content with pretending the private economy never left. Silently take your demogrant and exist outside of it all; enter neither node nor collective. The pinball bumper that is your own spending will empower it just the same. Artelism becomes inescapable, its oppositions create subcultures that empower it, its rejections feed tendencies that diversify it, its disillusionments are assimilated onto a schizophrenitized hyperreality of the greatest order. You cannot escape this socialism, this socialism is stronger the more you resist it, this socialism appropriates and infects every resistance to it, this socialism is a cancer that will make a fool out of you for daring to believe there is something beyond it. Evil socialism, dystopian socialism, disillusioning socialism, evil democracy, dystopian democracy, disillusioning democracy. Except for all the others.
Tie Down a Carthaginian Farmer and Make Him Watch Fight Club Until He Finally Gets It
What does rebellious art look like in an anarchist world? What would it be rebelling against that is different from the things anti-capitalists have rebelled against? How does fantasy fulfillment fare out under mutualism? What fantasy would remain unfulfilled that the people seek reprieve for? What kind of escapism would syndicalism warrant? What would drive us to imagine different lands or different adventures than the one syndicalism brings us? How does tragedy look like under the final stages of communism? The way capitalism makes fools of our lives, how would communism do so?
Art continues to get informed by the socioeconomic realities surrounding it; for if it’s escapism, what it’s escaping from matters. If it’s fulfillment, what informs that fulfillment matters. If it’s cathartic, how that catharsis relates matters. If it’s rebellious, what it’s rebelling against matters. And certain art may not be as appreciated by those existing in differing economic realities. Even Shakespeare commented on how haute theater may be fundamentally unable to be enjoyed in its full breadth by the masses due to its struggles, tragedies and comedies only revolving around the struggle of the rich, wealthy and elite, with the scale of such art’s understanding gatekept by the privileged idle class where such follies relate to them unironically. Haute culture theater cannot be truly appreciated by the proletariat, for they do not exist in the socioeconomic reality that gives its understanding context.
But escapism, fulfillment, catharsis and rebellion all become fundamentally changed by the narratives of artelism that renders capitalist realism outdated and obsolete. The struggles of Caesarist shareleaders in coops, the insufficiency or oversufficiency of demograncy, and all other follies of artelist culture assimilating capitalism, anti-capitalism and pre-capitalism onto itself, all becoming the new narratives of art and expression, spreading among non-artelist societies like neoliberal art spreading among medieval farmers.
Zeroth world art unleashed on an unsuspecting populace. The art is alien for it fails to be an allegory of life under capitalism, even if its other features are recognized for the universalities it possesses. The people find the problems posing within its narratives preferable to the problems of the First, Second and Third Worlds. No propagandizing needed, even if it is an art about suffering, it is about Zeroth World suffering. And artelism spreads further through this art like the capitalist sufferings in the Grapes of Wrath ignored for the indelibility of automobiles having been made affordable in its setting.
The result of all this had made it as easy as possible to die striving for all the irrational causes and projects that obsessed us and utilized that energy as the driving force of production. Happinesses not of conceptions of fulfillment, but of willingly choosing desolation and suffering for that one incomprehensible and irrational project. A world singing the love of danger and hazard, the habit of energy and rashness, and the embrace of speed and revolt; living passionately and chaotically and dying with the same conviction. Perhaps that could be the closest one can get to a societal permanence of revolutionary delirium. Every revolution becoming a new tradition, and every new tradition being replaced with a new revolution. A beauty of struggle and an assault on the senses. A permanent version of the possibility and euphoria where you have no choice but to let go of all reactionary notions on how to navigate societies. Perhaps not every day a revolution, but everyone dying for different small revolutions. Those are the automobiles. That is the quinary death-drive service sector.
Your project is by all means in all likelihood, for your own eyes only. Because no one else may have the context to take it at face value and not ridicule how stupid it actually is. And it’s beautiful. Be fine with dying once you have spent time finishing chiseling all its details. Your death-drive project, something you do despite every rational bone in your body informing you that it is a waste of time. Even if it will never help you, even if it isn’t some great art venture, even if you wouldn’t dare to show it to people, even if you may die as the only person with the knowledge of its contents, still do it. Because you feel like it. Desire freed from channeling or rationalization, desire you invented for yourself.
Because whatever sort of energy that made you do it is the onus of the driving force for the thing that you have worked on for the longest time in your whole life, the untapped human nature to expend its own energy in the most irrational ways possible. Follow it for the fulfillment you couldn’t get from anything else, for it is something capitalism can never assimilate, commodify and reterritorialize without breaking its own logic entirely. It is a productive force, the kind of desire that can never function in a market, the hidden tier of need that can be unlocked only by the Zeroth World, and the very engine that enables it.
Transhuman/Posthuman/Metahuman/Hyperhuman/Cyberhuman/Demihuman/Overhuman/Ultrahuman/Neohuman/Superhuman/Nanohuman/Gigahuman
While Africa waits for the light of low-cost manufacturing to shine on them once the industry’s love affair with Asia ends due to rising wages and living standards, accelerated automation calls that old reliable back to the high-tech East and West with the new promise of post-automation “no-cost manufacturing”, as the window of time to implement the traditional capitalist development stages of the three-sectors close further with each new decade.
As automation enables humans to coordinate entire production lines on their own as a sudden influx of hyper-competitive business actors, the risk-to-reward ratio of massive sprawling enterprises lean more towards the risk side and fiscal prudence becomes more in favor of these neoartisan-operated local production lines. The imagined gap of know-how disappears through neural network information proliferation, and all contents and processes of a single business concentrates onto the neoartisan self. The distance between labor and product come up close again.
Viking capitalism strengthens as socialist/corporatist synarchic Global South dictablandas cannibalize on each other’s foreign reserves through national champions and developmental dirigisme, fighting over the assumed new vacancies in the top throne of labor aristocracy, whether those vacancies are real or not remains to be seen. But one by one, nations and inter-nations begin falling into either synarchism or artelism, but many choosing synarchism to accelerate into artelism.
Despite protests of newly established bioconservative ideologues, populations embrace mind-uploading, sentience-duplicating, artificial intelligence, cyberization, collective consciousness and transcendence of the flesh to accommodate for the explosion of information and maximizing of the death-drive proliferation. Everyone starts eluding statistics that population censuses like. Sentiences start defying definitions such as an individual, a human, or even a lifeform. Things that experience the Self escape all forms of standardization, whether size, matter or physicality. Transhumans, posthumans, metahumans, hyperhumans, cyberhumans, demihumans, overhumans, ultrahumans, neohumans, superhumans, nanohumans and gigahumans. Spheres of existences and realms of realities; physical, virtual, cultural, quantum, spiritual, digital or analog. Cross-pollinating into sociality as incompatibilities contradicting into a co-habitation under a great sentience-intelligence biodiversity.
Even when only some are considered by governments as actual sentiences deserving of libidocapital, the economic productivity of the rest still produces surpluses that the state feels through increased tax revenue or new bubbles of wealth disparity waiting to be taxed. The greater revenue procured has no use but to be libidocapital once again, exclusively redistributed among members of multihumanity deemed human enough among the sentience-intelligence biodiversity to deserve redistribution, but now also transferred from the census-count multihumanity to the non-census multihumanity through their networks of cross-realm socialization, each distributing to whoever it deems sentient enough to deserve libidocapital, and each of those distributing to whoever else just as well.
Another rhizome of destruction-production networks, heartbeats on top of heartbeats. New discourse, new desires and new philosophies arising from each infrastructural slog of the blood from the first heartbeat reaching the fourth and the fifth and the sixth, from each chalkboard scraping that is statist social standardization crashing into perceived reality, and even worse, actual reality. Anti-intelligent intelligence production driving into permanent self-replicating overdrive now hopelessly beyond human comprehension as the 31st century begins. Third World problems are dead, and so are those of the First World. Long live Zeroth World problems.
Further reading
- Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
- Education and Self-Government in Russia by Manya Gordon
- The Second Economy and the Destabilization Effect of Its Growth on the State Economy in the Soviet Union: 1965–1989 by Vladimir Treml and Michael Alexeev
- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
- Post-Punk Then and Now by Mark Fisher
- The Social Revolution and the East by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
- Considerations on the Basis of the Socio-Political, Economic and Cultural Development of the Turkic Peoples of Asia and Europe by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
- The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev by Matthieu Renault
- Theory of the Partisan. Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt
- The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum by Carl Schmitt
- Biography of Carl Schmitt by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Grossraum Order of International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Powers: A Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law by Carl Schmitt
- Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth by Lev Gumilev
- The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation” by Vladimir Lenin
- Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek
- Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture by Sadie Plant
- Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by Karl Marx
- Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 by Nick Land
- Cold Anarchy by Nick Land
- Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin
- Rethinking Politics and Democracy in the Middle East by Joost Jongerden
- ANALYSIS: ‘This is a new Syria, not a new Kurdistan’ by Wladimir van Wilgenburg
- Acid Communism by Mark Fisher
- Fanged Noumena by Nick Land
- The Thirst for Annihilation by Nick Land
- Libidinal Economy by Jean-François Lyotard
- One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse
- Back To The Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy by Stephen J. Kobrin
- Italy’s Marcora Law (law 49/85)
- Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
- Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
- #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
- Liquid Democracy: True Democracy for the 21st Century by Dominik Schiener
- Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy by Max More
