A Non-Grand Thesis of Luxury Politics

Right now, I am starting to put together a work of philosophy, a thesis. My goal with this work is to explore this question: How does a smaller group of people manage to rule over a larger one? Why is “there are more of us” not enough to create change? My answer to that question is “the subjugation effect” and this work is my attempt to explain what that is.

To properly explain this phenomenon, I need to proceed in six stages. The first stage, political systems, will set the basic context of the argument. The second stage, money as a medium, will explore the binding force of money as an example of such forces. Third, the way we think, will develop the second stage and show how this “binding” can be generalized to other agents. Fourth, the mystery of cogency, will discuss the construction of social power and indirect action. Fifth, the subjugation effect itself, where specific manifestations of political-cultural subjugation will be examined in light of the first four stages. In the last stage I’ll explore the reason which motivates the continuing of the subjugation effect: the desire for luxury.

I wish to start with politics because we can’t understand the subjugation effect without understanding what subjugation is: the two are not the same. Subjugation itself, in terms of this work, is when one group of people is brought under the authority of another so that the first group – the subjugate or subjugated – do not have functional independence. This involves a new conception of fundamental class. Rather than being based on control of the economic means of production as the Marxite bourgeoisie-proletarian distinction, this conception is based on political control, with the constituent class contrasted with the subjugate class. The nature of the independence of the constituent class members as well as their cooperation has to be explored. This will also include a basic discussion of how orders, laws, and norms are created and pushed out into society.

By the end of the first stage, we’ll come to a definition of the subjugation effect. The subjugation effect how the subjugate class is motivated to participate in its own subjugation. As the rest of the work will explore, it is only possible to fully explore this effect when thinking about society in a particular way: not as masses nor as individuals, but as aggregates or groups-of-individuals. This is not a rejection of either mass or individual perspectives, as should become clear, or even a synthesis of the two. Rather, individual-aggregate-mass should be seen as phases of analysis which one can switch between when necessary.

The difference between a mass and an aggregate is that a mass is presumed to be a single entity while an aggregate refuses to make an assumption other than the terms of what is given. For an example of the difference, let’s imagine a military unit ordered to move from point A to point B. A mass approach would say that the unit moved (or didn’t) because of how the unit as a whole reacted to the order: the unit obeyed, the unit refused, the unit fell into confusion, etc. An individualist approach would look at each person to see why they in particular reacted in the way they did. Looking at the aggregate is trying to understand the general trends and forces which would lead the individuals making up the unit to act in the way they did, without the benefit of individual interview.

What the aggregate approach lacks is certainty, but I would argue that the certainty of other approaches is illusory. For the mass approach, the entire conception relies upon abstraction, not only in deciding what is this mass and what isn’t but also in deciding what constitutes a particular action, both in itself and opposed to other actions. For the individual approach, while psychological qualities can be identified and measured to some extent, even putting aside the relative arbitrariness of such measures, there’s the fickleness of the responses; I say “fickleness” not to signal resistance but because we might be talking about resistance or imperfect memory or miscommunication about the measures or a dozen other things. The point is that responses are not just unreliable but unreliable in an unpredictable way.

I’m not claiming that I’m the first to try and look at groups-of-individuals. I’ve named “the aggregate” because I couldn’t find anyone I was reading give a formal definition to this type of perception. The main reason for highlighting it is that it provides further context for the interpretations through the rest of the book, and it will become a focus again in the third stage of the work.

The second stage will be first, of course, and this will revolve around money. It can’t be denied that money, both possession of it and the desire for it, is a key part of the subjugation of the lower class. Why is this, exactly? The perspective here will not be primarily economic but persuasive-coercive (that is, cogentic). This means that I will not be focusing on the level of wages and amount of exploitation in the way that Marx did. Instead, I want to show how money is used to get things out of other people. There will be an exploration of economic interests (e.g. companies) vs. society as well as the construction of profit. The work of David Graeber was important in establishing the role of money in a manner that was not purely quantitative.

The aim of the third stage will be to explain on a philosophical-psychological level why money has a hold on us and how this can be related with the hold that more abstract ideas have on us. This requires an exploration of thought and communication on a mechanistic level, which is to say how one element affects another element which affects another and so on. Money will be shown to be a “prime agent”, as contrasted with the “universal agent” which it is a participant in. The importance of symbols, the means of their manipulation, and the way that symbols and understanding are linked will be important points in this section.

The fourth stage will explore the concept of “cogency”, which can briefly be described as “coercive persuasion” or “un-violent coercion”. Like coercion, cogency implies obedience and completion. Coercion can be resisted but resisted coercion is not coercion, which is to say that coercion is never “attempted” in a linguistic-symbolic sense. If I attempt to persuade you, then I was practicing persuasion, I was either persuasive or not persuasive. If I attempt to coerce you, we are more likely to say that I was practicing intimidation or exercising authority: coercion as an explanation comes after, or falls back upon, the initial actions which make it up. While this distinction is somewhat fictive, it is instructive for what cogency is and how it differs from persuasion.

Closely related to cogency is the construction of power. Power is constructed through the subsuming of intermediate processes such that the independent operation of those processes becomes hidden. The perception of power and the effective employment of power reinforce one another, so that power can be improved through the use of power. Power manifests as cogency, which is a necessary component of social cohesion. It must be understood as fire or as rushing water, however, not as a gun: it has to be managed and shepherded, it has its own laws, and it will consume you if it is not treated with care.

In the fifth stage, I will tackle the subjugation effect directly. Rather than being a single process, the subjugation effect is the result of a variety of different elements which together produce subjugation. What these elements share is that they reduce the possibility of the subjugate class to create revolution against the constituent class. There are several processes which are used to create the subjugation effect, but their primary mode of action is the creation and weaponization of divisions within the subjugate class, mainly those of faction (social-economic-vocational class) and domain (employees, client groups, and beneficiaries of a constituent). We’ll return to the four main factions of the first stage: enforcers, financiers, media, and jurists. Each of these groups employs and/or interacts with cogency in different ways, and each receives different privileges and incentives from the constituent class. This is what gives rise to illusions like “the middle class” and “the lumpenproletariat”: rivalries created within the subjugate class through the separate actions of these different groups.

The subjugation effect must also be opposed to “dependency”, which can be called “technical subjugation” and applies to those like young children, the very old, and the very disabled; those who cannot care for themselves. While such people are technically subjugated, this is not due to the subjugation effect, and the ideal is that this situation is temporary: children are expected to grow and become competent, and there is always the hope, however faint, that the very disabled and very old will gain or regain competence. This concept can be seen as “opening the door” to authoritarian abuse, but it would be wrong to remove consideration of these groups by pretending as though they are not part of society through omission. Instead, we have to be aware that we can distinguish appropriate subjugation (that is to say, dependency) from inappropriate subjugation (the subject of the majority of this work).

The last stage will address the reason that the subjugation effect takes place: the desire for luxury. I define luxury as the ability to pretend to immediate and unmediated satisfaction of one’s wishes. “Immediate” should suffice but colloquially it refers mainly to time, and an important feature about luxury is that it is both immediate in the sense of time and immediate as in unmediated, which is to say that there is nothing between one’s will and the end result. Luxury is an inverse of power; the construction of power is also the construction of luxury. Luxury differs from power itself in that luxury is absolute, or insignificantly distinct from being absolute; it is having power not only in one aspect but in all aspects at once, or at least all aspects that one is interested in. This is, I believe, the key insight that unifies the differing political systems throughout history.

The most coveted position in statecraft has often been presumed to be that of sovereign, but this is not exactly correct. The most coveted position is that of constituent. The sovereign is a constituent but they are not the chief benefactor of their system. In fact, their position and added rewards are a compensation for the fact that they are the primary operators of the system. The non-sovereign constituents do not have this duty. All constituents do have the ability to achieve luxury, however, if they can establish power over enough people to reduce them to effective irrelevance. They do this by creating the subjugation effect. This can only produce luxury, however, as long as they have a subjugate class of an appreciable size; you cannot create luxury if your only subjugates are dependents.

Many political remedies for the authoritarian nature of almost every political regime in history have been proposed. Many of these are workable. What the ideas which would be truly liberatory all share is that they seek a radical expansion of the constituent class, up to the limits of dependency and, if possible, beyond. They say this in different ways: stateless society, classless society, etc. They do have differences. But this expansion is the primary demand. And it is also the reason why the conservative authoritarians will always resist it. This rapid expansion would, by its very nature, destroy the possibility of luxury.

Marx said that the world is dividing into two separate camps: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I would say instead, that these two camps are the pro-luxury party and anti-luxury party. The driving force of the pro-luxury party are the constituents, of course, but also members are those highly-placed in factions and domains who benefit from the current system as well as those who aspire to become constituents themselves. The pro-luxury party understands that only a few people can have luxury and that this comes at the expense of the vast majority of people, and they are fine with this. The anti-luxury party also understands this but, for that reason, they oppose luxury politics. They do not want to become part of a system that brings them gain at the expense of exploiting others. Perhaps they do not want to be exploited, perhaps they do not want to exploit.

And what is it that the anti-luxury party has to offer? It offers joy. Luxury is a pretense, it is a Nietzschean forgetting, it is ignoring the world as it is in order to experience the world as one chooses. If one has the luxury of having maids who clean the house or of extremely cheap goods, that doesn’t erase the lives of each individual maid who does the work, or of the people along the goods’ supply chain who are being cheated in order to help drive your prices down. Luxury is about simply forgetting that those things are taking place. Joy is not about forgetting. Joy is about knowing. It’s about being satisfied that you have done your part and that the time you have to relax or to play has not come at the expense of anyone else. It is not having to hide and be guilty about one’s pleasures because they were not stolen. True joy is incompatible with luxury. It is not incompatible with serving or being served, doing or not doing, these can all be aspects of joy. But joy is greeting everyone you see and having goodwill for them, or at least not resenting and ignoring their existence.

If you look around at the world today, you will see that when we describe happiness, what most of us are describing is luxury. This is also part of the subjugation effect. It’s taught to us so that we don’t find away out of this system. To find joy again is an important part of breaking the hold that the subjugation effect has upon you.

Check back to this site every so often as I upload the parts to this thesis. It will take some time, likely several months at least, so you can follow me on bluesky while you wait.

My preliminary writing:

Works that have inspired me:

Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze
The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner
Liber Null by Peter Carroll
Psychonaut by Peter Carroll
The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Essays in Sociology by Max Weber
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Levi
Six Ways by Aidan Wachter
Capital by Karl Marx
Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes