In light of the recent United States attack on Venezuela, and the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, I have had to reflect again on the nature of my work, such as it is. What I’m actually trying to accomplish. Why am I writing instead of dying. It’s something that all “knowledge workers” and “culture workers” have to contend with in times like this, or at least something that many of them do contend with. Politically, I’d say I wasn’t really animated until after college, and I did not start trying to write about political processes in particular until later; I can’t place it exactly but I would say about the time of the 2014 Gaza conflict that the particular nature of the American regime.
Now, of course, there’s a very simple base answer to why I write instead of dying. But more practically, the question is what is important about this writing, what is useful about it. What is the purpose of doing this rather than doing something else?
I don’t believe that I will be able to materially contribute to the end of the American empire in my life. By “materially contribute” I’m not excluding writing, not at all. I mean that I don’t think even my writing will have much bearing on what happens in the next few decades. This isn’t what I would like to be the case, but this is usually how ideas work, especially for someone like myself who is writing out of no position. So as much as I would like to help stop war in Venezuela, I don’t think it is likely that I can do anything about this.
What I hope to be able to do is instead to lay out a framework which can be seized upon by others, when the time is right, in order to build a stable and effective movement, one which can both withstand outside pressures and which can cultivate its own strength.
The reason this has not happened is not that “the masses” are not prepared for this to happen, or at least, not in the obvious way. It isn’t the case that the masses are skeptical of socialism or communism etc. Well, in the case of the United States this may be different due to decades of propaganda, but in general, a group of people do not fear change for its own sake.
There are two reasons, in my view, that such an anti-government movement has not arisen in the United States.
The primary reason is that the means of revolution have consistently been denied to potential revolutionaries. There is a misconception that the will to revolution alone is enough to create a revolution. We have overcorrected from “great man” theory to the point where we believe that no one matters, only a feeling matters, and part of the result is that we have not cared for our leaders and they have been gunned down. It isn’t entirely or even largely our fault, I know I’m going on about this part a bit too long, but if there is any philosophical lesson for us to draw from our experiences, it is that certain personalities are in fact important and may be critical, and these personalities are not exchangeable. It is not possible to simply replace a good leader with someone else, and the practical benefits of good leadership are real.
Beyond leadership, though, every other kind of means of revolution has also been denied. Guns, spaces to organize, etc. Part of what I want to explain, therefore, is how this state of affairs came to be. How was it that revolutionaries of the past dealt with these issues, and how are we meant to deal with them now? This is part of why I have investigated economics. My contention is that regardless of anything else, having the means of revolution available would have resulted in a revolution many decades ago.
This is one reason why I think we spend too much time on doctrinal debates. I think the differences between different kinds of socialism, between ideologies like anarchism and communism and social democracy, are in fact very important in a general sense. But they aren’t important in the specific case of a revolution, in which the strongest party is likely to be the one that wins out. If, for instance, a powerful social democratic party arose in this country, do you think that avowed communists and anarchists wouldn’t ally themselves? Of course they would. Maybe not everybody, but they would carry the whole tendency because they gained the means of revolution.
So it’s not that we don’t have our different ideas, of course we do. It’s also not that we should “just compromise”. I’m just trying to point out that it isn’t necessary for any tendency to win the doctrinal debate first. What groups need to do is gain the means of revolution. This is not an easy thing to do, I’m not trying to suggest that it is, but the dominant ideology is going to be the one most ready to push forward its goals.
The secondary reason an anti-government movement hasn’t really arisen in the USA is that everyone is captured. Society is structured in such a way that people naturally give their allegiances to employers, to scornful political parties, to media organizations, etc. I disagree with analyses that state reality is being “covered over” in some way, such as from Baudrillard and Debord. The nature of reality is part of my investigation, but that’s not the key point.
The key point is that people are not “constituents” of their society in the sense that they “have a say”; they are subjects of the state. Exploring this is a major part of my investigations. One of the problems that liberal democracy introduces is that it allows an ostensible freedom of choice, which is to say, it offloads the responsibility for a person’s choice onto the person rather than onto the one that made the circumstances. If you are poor in a feudal community because you haven’t gotten any work, you can straightforwardly say “the lord is not giving me work”, “the lord is taking too much in taxes”, etc. In a liberal democracy, the illusion of choice means that if you are poor, people can say “why didn’t you make better choices?” and the circumstances are forgotten.
What I am trying to point out is that, unlike what most forms of political ideology, “the people” are actually not the basis of a state’s political power. This idea has been uniquely destructive to anti-state movements because it claims that the people have a level of autonomy and influence that they do not have. This is not to say that the common people affect nothing, but the mechanism of this effect has to be properly understood. We the people do not make choices which are then reflected in the government, as if we’re partners in the state. A good analogy for how the state views the people is how a stereotypical husband of the medieval to early modern period might view a “shrewish wife”. Does the husband sometimes do what the wife says? Sure. But the wife has to nag in order to get anything done, relying on the husband seeing it as the “lesser evil” to just comply. And the husband develops a hatred for the wife, and he treats the wife as his property, and the wife has no recourse. This is the relationship between the state and the subjects: it is a marriage but one in which the state has all the power.
My goal with laying this difference out is to lay out the goals for a potential revolution. As I said, the philosophical/theoretical battle isn’t of extreme importance to the success of a revolution; what’s needed their is to acquire the means of conducting the revolution. It takes on more importance as we consider running such a society, however. I believe that establishing the problems with how states are currently set up, we can devise a better solution in practical terms rather than simply replaying what has already been done but with new paint. Further, I hope that revealing even the system of liberal democracy actually has a very narrow constituency will help to convince people that other ways need to be tried, even if they do result in a vast difference in resource distribution between now and the possible future.
Supporting all of this are two fundamentals: a basic critique and a metaphysics. The metaphysics is not meant to be as singular in its conception as a system like that proposed by D&G, but it is important that chains of communication and understanding are properly understood. Another key to this project is the idea that people are not trapped into systems of thought, but instead that they are convinced of ideas and facts, and they access different systems for different purposes. In terms of propaganda and social cohesion, this is very important. There is no innate “power” or “force” of “charisma”. It is a matter of different relevant ascendancies, different needs, and different ways of seeing the world. It isn’t that a person is stuck in the Christian mode and then moves to the secular mode, and it isn’t that an idea like “liberalism” has a force that can be abstracted from people who believe in it. Every person calculates, every person thinks and decides; we might observe general trends, but we cannot simply conclude “the trend swept the nation” or whichever, we have to understand the process on a person-by-person level.
The basic critique is the critique of Nietzschean thought. This is Nietzsche’s world. People will attempt to deny this fact, to assert that Nietzsche meant things other than this, but it isn’t true. This is the world of power, the world of the ubermenschen, of people who have moved past shame and into creating a new morality. What else did people thin Nietzsche meant? No, people assumed that Nietzsche must have meant something clean and pure, that he must have had a greater aim than simply challenging pro-social ideas. But I don’t criticize Nietzsche for his own sake, or even because he is influential, because he isn’t influential on conservatives for the most part. As a Nietzsche fan will take great pains to remind you, Nietzsche’s work was chopped up when the nazis used it. My point isn’t to say “well they still used it”. That would be easy. Instead, my contention is that regardless of if they used it or not, his worldview is exactly the same as their worldview, and it is the same as the modern conservative worldview.
I don’t critique Nietzsche in order to dispute his conservative legacy but to critique the conservative worldview directly. Unlike committed conservative political actors, Nietzsche does not hide what he thinks. It’s impossible to read someone like Robert Nozick and get all of this. But the things which Nietzsche describes are exactly what is happening now. Ressentiment is the order of the day, and not in the way leftists will twist this. I don’t mean that the government is full of ressentiment; you aren’t clever for just saying that people you don’t like do the bad thing. No, ressentiment is the prevailing accusation made by the conservatives. Liberals are just overcompensating for their weakness. They’re part of a conspiracy, they don’t want to help people. It’s all a scam. Those are accusations that Nietzsche makes against those he says are consumed by ressentiment, and they are how the conservatives justify their opposition to the left.
If we can’t understand how disruptive these ideas are — primarily ressentiment and bad conscience, slave morality, the distinction between action and reaction, the will to power (as opposed to the will to life or other formulations) — then we will not be able to prevent our movement from including the rot which has destroyed any ideals of Western democracy. And as long as we continue to base our observations on Nietzsche’s professions, we are always going to be hampered in understanding our real obstacles.
This is an essentially self-centered blog, but I do not have any knowledge of Venezuela, nor would anything I could say about the situation help. I want to do more, but I must recognize right now that I do not have that ability. Instead it drove me to reflect on what I am doing. It is never enough, but it is what I can do, and I think it is a worthy project.
Venezuela must be free. Palestine must be free. Sudan must be free. Ukraine must be free. What else can I say?
I remember during the last summer, Seun Kuti was at Glastonbury, in the United Kingdom. He told the crowd that they want to free everywhere else, but first of all, they must free Europe.
So I say: America must be free. That’s why I’m writing.