In the Court of the Red Queen
::Better Red Than Dead pt.2::
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
— from “Through the Looking Glass”, by Lewis Caroll
It is true now as it no doubt seemed in Marx’s time that capitalism’s present and inevitable failures necessitate a radical antithesis. This antithesis necessarily falls under the umbrella of the term, communism, to any extent by which we might consider it as indeed antithetical, as is so correctly intuited among communism’s most ardent opponents¹; elsewise, outside of such dichotomy would the term bear no meaning whatsoever. Communism emerges practically by necessity upon the mere identification of the very paradigm of capitalism, which can hardly emerge in discussion under any but a critical context (the contrary position concerning itself almost exclusively with apologetics).
We should make no mistake, however: Communism’s possibility as we might hazard to envision sprouts only from the fertile soil into which all that was hitherto robust or sacred, modernity has trampled underfoot in its march of enlightened progress which finds its latest formation in that of capital.² It is not for a want of an appreciation of resources or socially productive organization that a conscious and capable proletariat emerges, and while want of an appreciation of that appreciation (an increasing of returns, or even merely some nominal retention of productive surplus) may serve to orient its revolutionary trajectory, any effective impetus for revolt should prove more fundamental.
Capitalism renders ever-more-elusive or forbidding all points of anchorage for the human spirit (troubling its waters, imperiling any attempt at occupying such points); in communism we take stock of this perpetually unmoored state and sound out a final weighing of anchors, swearing off such moorings and casting off to far-flung shores by stormy seas, upon which we might rightly reduce our ships to timber for the construction of a new world.³
But where is it that we find ourselves having never yet dared such? remaining as we have in this turbulent bay within which we exhaust all of our seafaring capacities merely to stay afloat? this veritable court of the Red Queen in which some ad hoc byzantine of machinery seems to sustain itself perpetually by the very course of its operation–a ceaseless churning, driven apparently by the tense anticipation of some fabled contentment of stasis, or the threat of its impossibility. Yet upon what might we plumb our own course other than just what substance of our lives this very churning extracts for its own sustenance? and for no greater purpose than to render fuel and lubricant for such operation. Now what might come of our siphoning such substance?
Footnotes:
- Referring here to the practice of red-baiting as being more correct than the promulgators of the practice even realize (though decidedly more-still than the accused would ever enact), perhaps just as the holdovers of American rightwing bandying about of liberal in their particular pejorative sense, however flagrant in its misattribution (gleaned most cringingly by those among truer strains of the Left), bears some grain of truth born forth in the Right’s revisiting such blurred notions of what is lib and what is red; as in, what is most liberal or at all concerned with the prospect of universal emancipation, would find itself most appropriately situated in a communist juxtaposition to capitalism.
- This is perhaps a combinatory sentiment of the context and implications of Nietzsche’s particular invocation of the the phrase, “God is dead,” as well as, with no small amount of deference, the thrust of Marx and Engels’ own observation that in the “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” which distinguishes “the bourgeois epoch … all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….”
- Very much in the Militant Modernist sense of “Vorwärts und nichts vergessen!” [Forward, never forgetting!], first brought to my attention by Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism.
