Wednesday, February 4, 2015

The False 'Neutrality' of Neoliberal Market Fascism

The 'neutrality' of the state and the market is malevolent, violent, and indifferent to human needs. A state or market that is neutral in both its content and political form, i.e. the particular interests the state exists for, eliminates the conditions for the necessity of its existence. No state or free market ideology can ever be neutral without violence. It is just a vacuous tautology to say a neutral state is one that does not intervene in the realm of private consumption and want. To give meaning to such a statement means the state's transformation of the material elements of civil society's private human activity into a new objective basis for the state, where real neutrality - the absence of a state - is possible.

The 'neutral' objectivity common to the middle class's dull, one-dimensional imagination is its prejudices disguised in an ostentatious display of pomp and hypocrisy.

The fixed gaze of the judge is elevated to the power of the market to deny, exploit, and appropriate in its greed and selfish interests. All legal formalities are reduced to empty guarantees to provide that which only the ruling class can produce, and only will if it profits from doing so. The pointless study of the fluctuations of the market is what a truly schizophrenic system of private ownership believes to be the domain of a real human science. Marx observed that the relation of supply and demand, if ever they achieved a perfect equilibrium, would cease to measure anything at all. They only express the rise and fall in the price paid for the value of another's power to labor, to which one class has a right of ownership, and the laboring class has no choice but to labor under. Labor that is free would never prefer to sell itself as a commodity instead of its own social product.

Does a blacksmith become a blacksmith to sell its steel instruments and tools, or to sell its power as a blacksmith to one that owns what the blacksmith needs to put itself to work? All that the owners of labor possess is capital, the objectified form of the accumulated dead labor of the past. The neutrality of the neoliberal system of global production is neutral only in its capacity to equate a certain quantity of necessities of life for a given quantity of abstract labor, and in its apparatus of regulation of life itself by awakening the dead labor of the past, and assassinating the living labor of the present according to 'objective' laws of value. The triumph of capitalist globalization is reached when the social machine and the social individual replace each other in their respective productive roles.

The advanced technological stage of capitalism inscribes the body of the living human laborer with the political, social and cultural operations of a specialized system of micro-machines. The psychic ego is torn into a disjecta membra, and once and for all its function of unifying the identity of the individual is destroyed by the will of the social machine, as it proceeds to grow on the life-process it parasitically drains in its efforts to perfect its methods of repression, to live off its internal contradictions.

The 'people' as a political subject have vanished from the social stage. There is no more 'people' after all have been subsumed into this social machine. Neoliberalism finally achieves what fascism strove to realize: the systematic genocide of a class and an identity, which is the expense of the continued perpetuation of a war economy, driven by constant crisis and conflict, and justifying its existence by its capacity to 'neutralize' these convulsions at the same time they feed the machine's power, putting off its eventual mechanical breakdown through self-perpetuated states of emergency.

Only the new, stratified, diffuse subject of revolutionary activity - the multitude - through its multiplicity of differentiated identities, can converge upon its common condition of exploitation and unite against capital in an unmediated struggle for survival by the historically determinate stage of capitalism under a real, unhampered globalization of a world market only hitherto existing as a formal system of capital relations between the 'international protectionism' of the external division of nations and their internal, intensive process of private 'national' competition.

The genocide of the people that precipitated its disappearance inaugurates its sudden reappearance under a new class composition in which it reprises its role as the advanced class that must deliver society from its reactionary devolution. This new laborer has none of the uniform, homogeneous, or centralized organization of the modern system of industrial factory production. Where the modern factory constituted a self-enclosed space for appropriating and deploying its army of labor-power, the global market regime is a social factory without any territory external to its perpetual management. It separates, splits apart, and fragments the collective labor into a differentiated series of layers, fissured along the fault lines of global labor's absorption into the capitalist war machine. This machinic factory's de-centered subject of labor is both the product and producer of the social factory's most historically complex social division of labor into intensive micro-processes for realizing a growing mass of capital surplus value. The machine's final aim is the reproduction of the social relations by which it springs into existence, or what is another way of saying it creates surplus wealth by feeding off of the accumulated value the machine is devoted to reproducing under more intensive conditions of the self-valorizing, self-expanding motion of capital. This substance of capital - labor - remains what Marx anticipated as the reason for the necessity of the destruction of capitalism: the immanent substance of value in the market, itself valueless, but used as the standard for measuring all other values. As the source of fresh value, the machine drains itself of the living substance its existence consumes for the purpose of its self-preservation. What creates new life is more intensively consumed productively, or produced consumptively. The postmodern paradigm of hyperimperialism cannot last without executing two functions. The first is its modern, traditional purpose: satisfying the desires of the collective labor it must live off of. The second function was also present under traditional forms of modern capital, but only as a secondary end and an accidental effect of the first, primary function. Today this function becomes an ever-increasing necessity of social reproduction. It manifests itself intensively, in the production of desire itself, of subjectivity, affects, ideas, images, and all somatic and psychic forms of immaterial labor.

Revolutionary praxis today has a more developed cogno-affective substrate: the revolutionary overthrow of international capitalism needs to effect a revolutionary overthrow of the accrued residue of all past subjectivities, of all past, socially determined stages in the development of human desires within those limits shaped by the law of capitalist value's need to realize its productive value in the sphere of consumption. The market circulates this social product according to the law of value under its new, subjective permutation. Desire, too, circulates through the market, becomes distributed, exchanged, and apportioned to individuals according to a socially fixed arrangement, and acquires the value hitherto assigned only to the means of satisfaction. The production of new needs satisfies the need of the violent capitalist machine: to live forever on the amputated, disfigured bodies of social labor, which the despotic machine takes satisfaction in punishing, wounding, chopping up, and scarring. The violence of the social machine is characterized by the efficiency with which it delivers punishment, and the more sophisticated methods it employs to create the desire for violence and carnal massacre that keeps it running. Hyperimperialism is the drive for expansion beyond capital's frontiers, driven to the point where those crises of violent barbarism which the system is periodically thrown into serve to preserve those internal contradictions formerly expected to make the destruction of global capital necessary and inevitable.

The revolutionary struggle against hyper-imperialism embraces this indeterminacy. Every attack by labor against capital in the postmodern era is a sudden intervention into the contingency of an irrational system of production, rationally reproduced by its violent, collective psychosis. Radical transformation of the subjective character of international capitalism situates itself in the positive, 'conservative' side of the dialectic. Crises do not negate this fascist order. After all, war needs a crisis to exist. Therefore resistance to the fascist war machine of global capitalism must use those weapons created for the machine's smooth, continued operation against itself: technological surveillance, rapid response telecommunications systems, digital imaging, data storage, virtual entertainment, and virtual realities - all of these new circuits of capital present the horizontal network of capitalism in its hyper-imperialist stage. This stage expresses what always was the hidden, inherent tendency of capitalism revealed in the openly frenetic state of the global war economy's chaotic madness. The competitive drive of capitalism's formal tendency - 'production for the sake of production' - turns against itself finally, and its hidden tendency toward destruction, rape, murder, and death openly appears as a system based on the market's secret logic: devastation for the sake of devastation.

Marx identified 'primitive accumulation' as that shameful period of original sin private competition must endure along the transition to a developed, 'civilized' capitalist mode of production. This preliminary stage in the acquisition of bourgeois private property returns, in the last stage of capitalism, as the irrational logic which is 'civilized' bourgeois society's sine qua non: the cannibalization of the human body, the torture and abuse of the mind, the scarring and mutilation of war as a form of entertainment,, for the private satisfaction of the despotic market regime. Primitive accumulation appears as the increasingly periodic, violent convulsions of crisis that recurs incessantly, not because of the inevitable death of the bourgeoisie, but because of the opposite: the bourgeoisie cannot produce without destroying more than what it creates, because it lives off the war against its own source of life, against life itself.

The revolutionary today must pose an authentic and spontaneous love for life, a desire for life to live and endure, against the neoliberal fascist order's sadistic and open hostility to life, to joy, to any display of tenderness toward one another. The revolutionary is driven by the deepest sentiments of love, because its enemy is that which ravages all objects of human affection. Our struggle is psychological: the revolutionary struggle against bourgeois fascism is a struggle to not give up on love despite the refinement of every part of the global machine to act as an appendage for stealing surplus value in the form of surplus joy. The revolutionary fights for the preservation of life's continued activity as a process of endeavoring to reclaim the compassion that is fundamental to its survival, to reappropriate the surplus wealth of vitality, optimism, courage and hope which the braindead, zombified bourgeoisie infects with its contempt for all things that stand in the way of its mission to destroy life wherever it finds and drains it of all substance, all aesthetic pleasure, any and all experience of emotional sincerity, all hope of achieving universal human self-determination. Capitalism cannot profit from hope without first violently wresting it from the grasp of its subjects, and transforming it into a cynical acceptance of war as a permanent ontological condition. The militant leftist cannot triumph without an uncompromising refusal of this logic and a radical refusal to ever work for it. The choice between socialism and barbarism is a choice between life and permanent extinction, between corporeal emancipation and corporeal punishment, between love for the world and a hatred for human dignity's resistance to its economic conversion into more private, superfluous, unproductive wealth of the dehumanized automaton of bourgeois fascism.

This obfuscating automaton lays waste to all belief, raising the specter of nihilism on the one hand,and superstition on the other. Militant anti-capitalism struggles against these tendencies by asserting its love and open, inclusive desire as a model upon which to construct a historical universe of real possibility: those rational truths which its victory against capitalism and the state uncovers, overdetermines, and proves to itself to be a historically necessary belief in the objective possibility of its subjective projection of its volatile passions, corporal suffering, and psychic desires into a real,radically alternative vision of the future.The global forces of production unleashed by the logic of capitalist techno-informatic production require a subjective Event for the multitude of global workers to converge upon. The recognition produced by this spontaneous convergence, of the common condition of its exploitation, awakens itself to its power to unite its biological, psycho-social, libidinal, reflexive, instinctual and cognitive-affective faculties on a radically integrated, self-immanent plane of Becoming. This constituent social subject has for the multiplicity of its possible constituent orders as many alternative models as there are a multiplicity of concrete forms of social labor carried out under each of the independent sectors of the global economy, and between and within every branch of the most historically complex social division of labor with which the hyper-capitalist paradigm of postmodern production is associated. The reappropriation of the global wealth of the universal forces of production by the multitude creates a system of democratic self-management more historically and technically advanced than all past revolutionary struggles of labor against capital. The immense mass of global wealth generated by the productive forces encodes in its self-immanent plane the conditions for establishing a constituted order based on: mutual association and exchange; collective economic management; democratic cooperation and compassion; and the self-conscious regulation of this constituted social organism's desires, life, and development on the basis of free, creative self-determination. For the first time, the scientific, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of human social development unify in an organic synthesis upon which the objective truth of rational social laws becomes identical with the creative construction of and mutual interdependence on the totality of its egalitarian relations of production. The new ego of the free individual can renounce the repressive deflection of its libidinal power into the exercise of the reality principle at the expense of pleasure. Hegel's assertion that what is real is rational and what is rational is real finds vindication in a manner Hegel did not anticipate: what is rational are those relations in which humans find their pleasure, and what pleases the human mind and body is rational. The new criterion for truth - following the triumph over the global regime of market fascism and its war economy - will become the conscious desire of the liberated will of society to commit its belief in its existence as an ideal to strive for.

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