the unplanned organism

[circadianwolf-old]

realism in fiction

(in response to characterizing and dismissing a criticism of Fallout 3 as a silly concern about “scientific accuracy”)

I don't really want to talk about Fallout (I've done enough of that in the past), but on the topic in general with the various Fallout games as examples. I think the "inaccuracies" of Fallout 3's setting are incredibly relevant to the rhetorical/ideological work that the game is doing (knowingly or not). Presenting a world that seems to have existed in stasis since the bombs fell, which still lives in the junk and detritus of the Old World, is (obviously) a deliberate choice, commonly assigned to the "aesthetic" of post-apocalypse. But beyond this it serves the function of justifying a dioramic world of isolated scenes and disconnected characters, not a society but rather individual survivors and communities which form no larger network, produce nothing, and  whose labor, where it exists, is purely extractive (scavenging), mercantile, or violent. The notion of a post-apocalyptic world as a ruthless every-man-for-himself (gender deliberate) anti-society is common and dangerous; it is a fantasy of unrestrained masculine violence, in the same way zombie stories are by and large fantasies of racist genocide of thoughtless hordes by the imperiled white minorities. Fallout 3's world of tattered three-hundred-year-old clothing and squatting in three-hundred-year-old ruins and eating three-hundred-year-old canned food is one of total scarcity, in which the only gain possible is by taking from someone else.

That this is "inaccurate" is important for the reasons all stories are important: stories serve as life experiences by proxy. Our brain compiles our experiences over time into recurring patterns which become templates for our default reactions to future situations that register as similar - these are our "instincts", which are not programmed in our genetics but largely socially conditioned. Stories are a technology of information sharing, a way for humans to collectivize experiences so that we can react to experiences we have never faced ourselves with the knowledge of others' experiences. Stories are -always- didactic. But this technology opens up the opportunity for false experiences which can teach false reactions. All stories are, of course, "unreal" - even those based in reality are abstractions, even fiction set in the "real world" creates characters and situations, etc. So yes, to criticize "inaccuracies" is on a base level silly; but they are very relevant when these inaccuracies reinforce false patterns. Normally, false patterns are not promoted precisely because they teach false responses; but when culture is controlled by a minority, they can override the normal dynamics to promote stories that falsely justify power, exploitation, and oppression.

This is not just a theoretical or abstract process (as you might look at with Fallout), it is something governments and corporations actively and knowingly engage in. In the 1950s a major priority of the CIA was to promote "anti-communist" media. Perhaps the predominant example of this was the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a literary graduate program which became the model for many similar programs across the US. Its early funding included a grant from the CIA and its founder openly proclaimed his goal of creating "anti-communist" fiction, which meant the elision of "politics", relations of production, and similar structural forces and a rejection of "didacticism" in favor of a focus on individuals, psychological interiority divorced from material circumstances, and atomic social relationships. The epitome of this "anti-communist" fiction was the motto "show, don't tell". What this reflected in a larger sense was the conflict in philosophy between what is termed "idealism" and "materialism", the latter of which is fundamental to communist theory (Marx's theory is specifically termed "dialectical materialism" or "historical materialism").

Now in American culture, the interiority of "high" literature was matched by a false opposition of plot-heavy "low" culture, increasingly dominated across mediums by corporate-controlled franchises that become ever-more enmeshed within their own "canon" (a metaphor from the debates over which Christian scriptures are "true"). Alongside this was encouraged a cultural fixation of quantification, metrics, and consistency - but only of specific things. The early fan cultures which treated corporate fiction as any other mythology, as something to be interrogated, extended, transformed, and played with as people found it useful (and not coincidentally composed significantly of women) became the extensive but derided backwater of "fan fiction" while corporate media instead promoted a fan culture of obsessive cataloguing and collecting "approved" products. The only form of extra-canonical culture encouraged was/is the sort of "could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise" questions and "fanon" creating extensive and ridiculous justifications for existing canon - in other words, fan culture that was wholly secondary and subservient to corporate culture.

It is in response to this latter trend that we got to the modern rejection of "scientific accuracy", both in terms of complaints about a lack of accuracy and in false claims of accuracy as justification for pernicious fiction (e.g. "it's medieval Europe so of course everyone is white" which is both a false statement in itself and of course completely nonsensical when applied to fiction not even set in history). But both sides of this are largely unconcerned with "accuracy" in the sense of storytelling that does not promote harmful responses; both position themselves as "apolitical" and in so doing reify the capitalist logic underlying this entire spectrum of criticism. Complaints of "how are people feeding themselves? who is doing the work?" and similar are neither promoted by those invested in "accuracy" nor indirectly promoted by citing them when refuting the desire for such. Materialism remains by the wayside in favor of supremely individualist critiques isolated from any larger context or relevance. (As an aside: even I was surprised when I did a survey of what are today termed "simulationist" tabletop role-playing games and found that while they would spend dozens of pages on rules simulating the physics of gunshot injuries, rules for production relations and political structures were all but nonexistent in every single game. Surveying strategy video games with a global/regional setting for mechanics covering these topics is less fruitless but still incredibly rare.)

In recent years the derision of "accuracy", "realism", "plot holes", and similar has intensified as mainstream culture has become more and more, to borrow a metaphor from other criticism, pornographic. By this is not meant a proliferation of nudity and sex, but rather a structuring of fiction around crude emotional climaxes, with plot, characters, setting, tone, and other concerns set aside in order to achieve the desired climax, no matter how nonsensical. This is spectacle in the basest sense; absent the contextual girding of plot and characters, these climaxes can only move viewers (or players or w/e) to emotion by way of basic visual and audio cues: lurid violence, triumphant music, explosions. Previously this might have been derided even in mainstream criticism (look to the reception of Michael Bay's films), although there has always been exceptions; but, for example, the most recent season of Game of Thrones - which while always a white supremacist fairy tale dominated by a materially unsustainable by fascistically indulgent level of violence, at least at one point paid heed to concepts like "character motivation" and "distances of 1000 miles are significant obstacles" - seemed to deliberately give up on any pretense of its storytelling serving any function other than the delivery of "awesome moments" to be "shared" and discussed on social media the following day. Critics, beholden to the domination of the capitalist behemoth, at most offered tepid laments of the show moving too fast while continuing to celebrate it as an apex of television storytelling.

All of this is not to say that, for example, Game of Thrones would be better with context simply because context is good in itself. Rather, it is that context demands a logic and material basis; when a story undergirds itself with material logistics of how its characters eat, clothe themselves, travel, etc., even if those details are not centered or elaborated (but not if they are ignored for "dramatic purposes"), it forces the storyteller to engage with the processes and conflicts that actually drive human society, and that are therefore of import to us. One critic calculated that based on the stated land area of Game of Thrones' setting combined with the stated casualties in the various battles across the series and assumptions of medieval European population density and farm outputs, the entire continent would be suffering depopulation and famine (as a result of lack of farm laborers and devastated fields). Certainly, the assumptions based on medieval Europe are not "accurate" for the story, but they serve to demand an explanation of how -does- the continent still produce food? Why -do- the armies keep fighting rather than deserting, as many pre-modern armies did when wars stretched long and without result? Among many other unanswered questions.

The point is not that there can't be answers to these questions - c.f. "fanon" above - but that the canonical fiction bypasses them in order to tell the story it wants to tell - a story about endless violence, faceless armies, and nihilistic elites, without any interest in how such a society functions at all. That the values of a story should trump material logistics of the setting and plot is an absolute truism in American fiction and criticism, but this is not a neutral position; this is the CIA's project for anti-communist fiction having triumphed utterly, the idealist ideology of capitalism, of decontextualized individuals driven by abstract values and engaging with material reality only through the lens of violence, having been rendered so dominant that opposition is unthinkable. Similarly elevated is "show, don't tell" and its dismissal of didacticism, its explicit valorization of the elision of ideology. Lost in all this is, again, that if stories matter - and they do - then their ideology matters, and all stories teach ideology, and the rejection of materialism - the wholesale dismissal of "realism" and its ilk in favor of abstract ideals - is a pernicious ideology that works to justify capitalism and undermine anti-capitalist - which is to say, communist - education. We -need- stories about logistics and labor in order to teach ourselves how to survive and escape capitalism, to provide us with experiences we cannot yet have in reality.

[circadianwolf-old]

On change under capitalism

(transcribed from twitter)

An important element often lost due to American economic miseducation is that capital is worse than a zero sum game. Mainstream economics teaches that as exchanges only happen when they produce value for at least one party, they are positive sums. Of course, anyone with even a cursory understanding of capitalistic social relations knows that the threat of violence plays a vital role. (Look at libertarians, in whose own words the sole value of the state lies in its violent enforcement of capitalist contracts.) When one side of a trade is "do this or I will kill you", it's a joke to call that "producing value" for the threatened party. 

This is especially important in today's discourse as people talk about what can be accomplished under capitalism (reformism). Capitalism is a pyramid scheme in which a smaller and smaller number benefit while a larger and larger number must suffer to sustain it. It is not merely that rich people are corrupt, or power-hungry, or viciously uncaring toward the poor, though they are. But rather, it is important to recognize that these are not merely attributes of individuals, but structural features.

That is to say, it is sometimes acknowledged today that capital cannot survive without constant growth. But less acknowledged that that growth must take the form of ever greater material loss as a whole, transformed into gains for a few. In order for profits, for "economic growth" to continually increase, the violence, and number of poor, and degree of poverty, must also. To reduce the overall degree of poverty or number of poor in the world would threaten capital's very existence by slowing its growth.

Every benefit of the "social democratic welfare states" comes from a greater deprivation of the world outside the West. States which merely try to provide for their own people without taking part in imperial violence become imperial targets - e.g. Libya. 

This is also very relevant when it comes to considering, for example, Sanders' proposals. Sanders candidly speaks only of bettering the American working class, and against the global working class. Even if he did not, can anyone really imagine Sanders accepting a global economic crash in order to better the working class? So what Sanders is actually proposing is to cause further harm to the third-world working class in order to better American workers. Setting aside the vileness of that, does anyone think that even possible? What part of the third-world working class can be pushed farther? 

Sanders' supporters laugh at the notion of "how will he pay for it?" because of all the corporate excess they (accurately) see to tax. But they fail to grasp that to genuinely take that largesse away & give it to workers would literally destroy the world economy. Compare to Trump, for example, who promises benefit to the white working class by taking away from the marginalized within the US. Though circumstances are dire for the marginalized within the US already, there is clearly room to make things worse for them.

The morbid joke of all of this, of course, is that though Sanders will surrender to desperately avoid such a crash as surely as Syriza did, it's only delaying the inevitable. Growth is obviously not sustainable; no amount of "disruption" or "innovation" will persist forever. And in fact despite capital's mythologizing of the fall of empires preceding "dark ages" of violence & poverty, it is hard to imagine that, when scarcity is almost entirely artificial, that the collapse of capital would make things worse for workers.

This is not to say, "wait it out". Rather, I'd promote merely that economic education is important, and to note that its absence on the permissible left is no accident. It was (and is) rooted out, for the very reason that it is vital to our survival & success.

[circadianwolf-old]

Kill Them All

I recently found myself re-watching “Kill Them All”, the first season finale of Spartacus, Starz’ gory, stylized historical drama of the most famous Roman slave rebellion. I wouldn’t defend the show as a whole - I’ve actually never finished watching the fourth and final season - but the first season, and its finale in particular, remain lodged in my brain as a singular depiction of the conditions leading up to, and the initial outbreak of, revolt.

The first season, which covers Spartacus’ time as a slave gladiator, is structured as a sort of Upstairs, Downstairs-style drama, with the two halves swapped for a sports show and a Roman House of Cards: while Spartacus and company train and fight in the arena, the gladiators’ owner Batiatus, wealthy but lacking social status, schemes with his wife Lucretia to elevate themselves politically. Batiatus is positioned as the deuteragonist, carrying the most scenes separate from Spartacus, and while deceitful, power-hungry, and amoral, he’s nonetheless allowed a charisma and investment comparable to the anti-heroes common to so many television series today.

Every slave character, Spartacus included, is willing to accept their position and the limits placed upon them. Being tied to an occupation and a residence is hardly different from their experience would be as free people, after all, and Batiatus and Lucretia are both charming, and both pledge support to their slaves - after all, they rely on the slaves as much as the slaves are tied to them.

So initially, rebellion is not on the mind; the episodes focus on Spartacus learning to fight like a gladiator instead of a soldier (having been enslaved as a prisoner of war in a Roman conquest), on petty rivalries and disputes among the gladiators, on relationships that emerge between the domestic house slaves and the fighters, and on Batiatus’ schemes against political rivals.

But the abstract logic of slavery inexorably finds itself taking shape in specific, individualized acts of violence. Spartacus agrees to settle and fight in the arena without struggle only after Batiatus promises to try to find Spartacus’ wife, also sold into slavery, and initially Batiatus plans to make good on his offer. But as Spartacus becomes his most valuable gladiator, fear creeps into Batiatus: what if returning Spartacus’ wife softens him - what if it damages his greatest source of profit? And so (in an unfortunately direct fridging), Batiatus instead, when he locates Spartacus’ wife, has her murdered. It is only upon finding out this truth that Spartacus permanently sets himself to revolt, and even then it is only him so set.

Each of the other slave characters (bar the traitorous Ashur, who willingly betrays the other slaves to gain favor with Batiatus), find themselves one by one in similar situations, in which Batiatus or Lucretia are faced with the choice of humanity or profit, and which in each case they choose the latter - they’re only slaves, after all. It’s a simple logic, but the way the plots are threaded, with Batiatus and Lucretia so often successfully convincing the slaves that they are all in this together, that their opposition is elsewhere, that it nonetheless is frequently surprising.

I should speak, too, of the way the gladiator fights are portrayed: a pseudo-300 style of slow-motion; sweaty, nearly naked masculine bodies; and a level of gore, with comically fake blood frequently showering the screen, that is equal parts disturbing and absurd. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of them - it’s one of those situations where we’re being both genuinely invited to enjoy what we’re seeing and simultaneously hedging itself as a critique. But regardless of intent, the highly stylized fights, framed both from the desperation of the slaves and the bloodlust of the audience, in combination with the frequent political maneuvering occurring between gladiator owners and their esteemed guests in the Roman equivalent of a skybox while the fights go on, skewers the intersection of entertainment, politics, war, and labor that is still at the heart of most major televised sporting events today, where Americans salute to their national anthem and men permanently damage their bodies in hopes of winning enough favor in their short careers to last them the decades after.

And this violence, pornographically poured over by the camera, lies in stark contrast to that of “Kill Them All”. Batiatus invites the local nobility to his estate to celebrate his political success (achieved by blackmailing a prominent Roman politician); a throng of wealthy elites gather for an indulgent Roman party, with the centerpiece an in-house death match between his two star gladiators, Spartacus and Crixus. But after everything that’s happened, the majority of the gladiators have agreed with Spartacus that enough is enough, and after a few minutes of careful sparring, Crixus helps launch Spartacus up to the balcony from which Batiatus and his guests spectate. Spartacus unflinchingly stabs one of the visiting nobles through the head and shouts the titular proclamation to the gladiators below. What follows can only be described as a massacre.

There’s little celebration to the camera’s portrayal of the mass killing of unarmed men and women by the gladiators and the other slaves, but neither is there remorse. Gone is the elevated camerawork that seeks to make the violence into something greater; this is no longer a performance. And there’s no question as to whether these people deserve their fate. Even though few of the guests have appeared before, and fewer still are directly responsible for the specific incidents that have driven each of the slaves to rebellion, the distinctions have collapsed back into the abstract: united as a class, the slaves recognize their enemies not as individuals, but as the entire system of slavery and all those who uphold it and benefit from it. Even if some of these nobles never directly raised their hands to a slave; even if some were kind or generous to their slaves; all of them have, at some point, made a choice to privilege profit over life - the choice to own slaves. That is indictment enough. Kill them all.

Obviously Spartacus is freed by being a historical drama set far departed from our modern world, and by having a predominantly white cast (which is inaccurate in itself of course) - it’s impossible to imagine a similar series about, say, the Haitian revolution, or any American slave revolt. (It’s especially illustrative to compare to any mainstream depiction of American slavery, for example 12 Years a Slave. Almost universally, the heroes of those narratives are ultimately white men in the service of the American state, and black-on-white violence is minimal and delegitimized.) Even so, I’m still surprised the finale is as uncompromising as it is.

It’s especially notable in the final confrontation between Batiatus and Spartacus: Batiatus has spent the entire season scheming, manipulating, plotting his way to power, rarely giving thought to the potential threat under his own roof, and achieved victory over his rivals only to be cut down by his own pawn. Spartacus gives Batiatus a weapon to fight back with, but it’s a pathetic defense, absent any tension. After all that’s come before for Batiatus, it’s in many ways an anticlimax - all his conflict with the nobility, the dominating secondary plot of the entire season, is rendered meaningless, conclusionless, when his own slave kills him in his own home for reasons he can barely grasp.

I think about “Kill Them All” a lot, especially whenever discussions of violence in resistance, of what is appropriate and what is not, come up. American television is all but universally in the service of empire and capital (and the specific oppressions which it takes advantage of and exacerbates), and I don’t mean to suggest that Spartacus is some revolutionary, radical series. But I still find its depiction of the abstract logic of power manifesting in specific, individual incidents of violence to be useful; and its uncompromising sentencing of the entire class of owners as worthy of death, heartening.

While liberals dither with their proclamations of free speech and rules-abiding agitation, there’s a temptation sometimes to argue the semantics of their accusations: that protesting a political movement is an exercise of speech, not a restriction of it; that property destruction isn’t violence; that acting outside the law is necessary when the law is demonstrably in violation of higher laws. But all of these cede to liberals the notion that their valuing of abstract principles over human lives is valid, just misplaced in these specific circumstances. All of these cling to the notion of respectability before a system which has as its basis our permanent exploitation and deprivation, and that the specific violences that motivate each of us can be opposed individually, on their own terms, rather than as part of a united front attacking the entire system at its base. In such moments I find it helps to recall this simple, unambiguous declaration of intent: kill them all.

[circadianwolf-old]

(Feb 23)

95% of liberalism is just a modern version of theodicy - trying to answer the problem of evil, "why does god allow evil to happen?" to ask that very question is to ask for justification and rationalization rather than justice. it's asking for a way to claim that a system that benefits you benefits everyone in spite of the obvious injustice and violence all around you. I never understood how anyone could ask that question and not immediately turn to "how can we change it? how do we dethrone god?"

every form of "electability" or "realism" (and sanders is very much included in that) is a plea for workers to concede to the ruling & killing classes. we don't need a goddamned election to feed, house, and provide medical care to people. as I said years ago, any movement genuinely capable of electing someone to achieve those goals would be more than capable of achieving those goals without electing anyone. capital doesn't vote and it doesn't care who wins, because it bends whoever wins to its will. because it has real power. if in a democracy the elected represent the will of the people, why does it matter who's elected? the people should be able to impose their will regardless; the elected are a vessel, not an agent. there is no power in a ballot.

people are so desperate to believe that changing things is just a matter of finding the right clever loophole or even just believing *hard* enough. because the truth, which we all know, is terrifying. the truth that any change for the better requires a direct confrontation with capital and its enforcers. the truth that the enemy is not the .01% but the many armed men and the many managers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, and bureaucrats of all kinds behind those armed men that organize and implement mass murder on a global scale everyday. that these people aren't figures on a computer screen to be hated from a distance and who themselves are only so uncaring by way of never interacting with the common people but rather people we interact with every day. that the majority of beneficiaries of capitalism were never the figureheads of power but the petty tyrants who willingly harm the welfare of those they directly interact with on a daily basis (and often take pleasure in it). and that they won't give up their power without violence.

that's scary as hell, I am the first to admit. and a lot of people have much more direct experience of what I'm talking about than I do. but denying that this evil is real, that it's systemic, in fact foundational, to our society & legitimizing those systems by pretending things can be changed through them? denying all that blood in the streets so you can wish for deliverance from the very people filling the streets with blood?

[circadianwolf-old]

(Feb 10)

since I'm doing definitions

what socialism is: a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which capital is abolished and the working class manages labor and distribution through the apparatus of the state in pursuit of advancing the means of production to the point where the abolition of labor (and thus class) becomes possible while maintaining the welfare of the working class until that point

what socialism is not: government spending also not: valuing American workers over non-Americans and nationalism in general also not: a global empire in the service of capital and the specific support of the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel

words you may be looking for instead: fascism (see my earlier post)

[circadianwolf-old]

(Feb 2)

when the left gave up on reducing hours of labor in favor of higher wages is when they gave into a nightmare of endless capitalism.

reducing hours of labor--which laborers fought for at Haymarket and elsewhere, which drove the movement before the New Deal and the cooptation of unions by capital--is a fundamentally revolutionary demand: it recognizes that the amount of necessary labor is a function of productive efficiency and that as that efficiency increases, the amount of necessary labor time decreases.

imagine if this had been followed not just to the 40 hour work week (which we don't even have now, for the majority of people) but beyond, with the literally tenfold increases in productive efficiency we've experienced since then. imagine a 10 hour work week, or a 4 hour work week. imagine a 0 hour work week.

there's a word for that, for when automation achieves the abolition of labor, for when we are left with free time and nothing else: communism. that's what that word actually means. reducing hours of labor is the foremost possible threat to capital because it is a direct reduction in the amount of control capital possesses over us; it is literally increasing our freedom. what do all your rights--trampled anyway--matter when you spend the majority of your time having signed them over to another party in exchange for material survival?

profit under capitalism is a function of labor time. to decrease labor hours is to decrease profits; this is absolutely true under the present, final stage of capitalism, following the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value, in which no market competition is possible and all profits derive from state fiat. increased profits can only ever come from increased labor time--as most of us are directly familiar with, increasingly overworked despite ever-increasing plenitude around us. this is insanity to a human being; it is sensible only from the perspective of a set of logical axioms in which humanity is a means and not an end.

but here's the kicker: capitalism is still failing. despite the valiant efforts to sustain it, it is dying--a wretched, howling, violent death which will take many with it, but dying all the same. in the 1930s we were given an ultimatum: "socialism or barbarism". then we had a choice: organize a humane transition to communism, or let capitalism run wild. the choice, of course, was made for the latter; but this choice was only ever for the means of transition, not the end point, which remains the same. free time and nothing else.

[circadianwolf-old]

(Feb 1)

~all mainstream american politics & politicians are fascist~ and if you know anything about actual fascism and not just movie nazis it's really obvious like obv fascism is often a vague term purely used to signify "evil that is evil" much akin to terrorism but like terrorism I think the term has a useful, material definition based on actions and not factional identities in the case of terrorism it's "violence or threats thereof against civilians for persuasive purposes", i.e. intimidation (which of course implicates most of what today's us military does as terrorism) in the case of fascism that definition in its strictest form is "state management of capital", the stage of capitalism which necessarily follows the collapse of commodity production on the basis of exchange value should socialism not succeed now that is a bunch of marxist stuff I won't go into but it basically means that since the great depression capitalism has required ever greater state intervention in order to survive, and the support of this intervention   (as opposed to killing capitalism once and for all) is fascism-- this is the essence of the perverted use of socialism in "national socialism" (nazi) for example, and incidentally the same kind of "socialism" sanders promises this intervention takes the form of technocratic management in which capital is privileged above people and was pioneered in the us under the new deal according to the economic theories of john maynard keynes, the liberal saint and whose writing is quite explicit in its goal of forcing workers to do useless work using state funds in order to devalue wages as a whole and preserve capitalism the broader definition, as I mentioned the other day, also includes a strong appeal to nationalism, to the identity of people as citizens of a specific, exceptional group identified through their relationship to this technocratic state (the imagined community called the "nation") in those terms - material rather than vague evil - there is no debate that everyone including sanders meets these criteria all of them support saving capitalism and all of them appeal specifically to a fantasy of american exceptionalism that openly privileges the wellbeing of americans above the rest of the world (sanders is quite disdainful toward non-americans and oc everyone else is even moreso) and the capital definition is relevant because the privileging of capital over people compels all the structural violence that people try to fight in other ways but anyone dedicated to defending capitalism, however much they hem and haw and act sad and upset and angry about this violence, will in the end support it, because the alternative is the death of capitalism (anti-capitalism may not be sufficient to end those violences, but it is a necessary prerequisite)

[circadianwolf-old]

Mockingjay and Hollywood Revolutions

In an early scene of Mockingjay Part I, the third film in the Hunger Games series, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character, the inadvisedly named Plutarch Heavensbee, advises the leader of the rebellious District 13 as to how they will win their fight against the tyrannical Capitol: propaganda. The oppressed masses are fighting now because of a symbolic act of resistance from Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen, but that will soon stop if Katniss doesn't agree to be the "Mockingjay", the symbol of District 13's organized campaign of revolution, according to Heavensbee. Without a figurehead to inspire them, the revolution will die.

This argument drives much of Mockingjay, in which an internal rebellion of the working class against the opulent elites of the Capitol and their Peacekeepers is narrowed to dueling propaganda between the Capitol and District 13, each airing heavily manipulated and manufactured videos of a captive Hunger Games victor with the intent of swaying the masses to their respective side. It's typical of the Hollywood, and ultimately the liberal and Western and capitalist, view of how revolutions happen: a Great Man (or Woman, in this case - how progressive) inspires the faceless masses to revolt against the existing elites. In the aftermath, the Great Men (and Women) deliberate and determine the structure of the new society.

This goes for revolutions constructed both positively and negatively: the American Revolution has its Founding Fathers; the French, with its demonized Reign of Terror, has Robespierre. It's storytelling, of course: reducing history, or a fiction about history, to the drama of a few individuals is just cutting the cruft, or so the writers would say. Portraying complex social structures, economic systems, and historical processes is hard. It's not meant as a handbook for revolution. But Mockingjay has been taken up by real rebels already: photos circulated last week of graffiti in Ferguson reading "if we burn, you burn with us", one of the defiant proclamations Katniss makes for her District 13 propaganda videos. And so I think it's worth thinking about what this view of revolution means, where it comes from and who it serves, and I think Mockingjay is particularly illustrative of that.

The Hunger Games series portrays the dystopian society of Panem, in which the extravagant ruling class of the Capitol rule over 12 Districts, each specialized in a particular area of production. The people of the Districts are for the most part impoverished, though some are richer than others. The Peacekeepers enforce the Capitol's rule. There is not much more I can tell you than this, with regards to how the society functions: how the government's leaders are appointed, how commerce or distribution occurs, what the criminal justice system looks like. Is Panem nominally capitalist, socialist, something else? Did the Capitol's sneeringly villainous President Snow come to his position through an election or some other means? I have no idea. Does it matter that we don't know? In the first film it felt like these details were perhaps ancillary, but as the mechanisms of revolution take center stage, it seems more and more pertinent.

In Mockingjay Katniss and her allies are taken in by District 13, the former center of Panem's military, which apparently rebelled at some point in the past and was thought entirely destroyed. Instead they survived in a labyrinthine complex of underground bunkers, a military without a civil society to defend or targets to attack, spending their entire lives preparing for another war. As it turns out, 13 has enormous reserves of weapons, including tanks, bombers, and ballistic missiles possibly carrying nuclear warheads. When asked by Katniss why 13 never acted with this arsenal to defend the other 12 Districts, she is told that the Capitol's similarly sized arsenal would have meant neither 13 nor the Capitol would have survived.

Thus we learn that Heavensbee's insistence that the revolution would fail without Katniss inspiring the masses is untrue even within the logic of the film, which presents no evidence against his opinion that these people could or would organize in rebellion of their own volition. 13 could have ended the rule of the Capitol at any point: they haven't because they value seizing power in the aftermath more than the liberation of the District's peoples - and they are more than willing to use the lives of people in the other Districts to advance their cause.

(It's particularly interesting that, despite 13's stocks of weapons, one of the pivotal scenes of the rebellion involves masses of unarmed people storming armed Peacekeepers, getting shot down in droves before being able to overcome them. It's an affecting scene, but seems predicated on the audience looking on unarmed resistors being shot as more legitimate than armed resistors shooting the Peacekeepers from afar and thus saving lives, a reflection of the martyrdom fetishization common to liberal mythologizing of revolution.)

What Mockingjay's revolution, then, starts to resemble most is the so-called "color revolutions", the series of revolutions largely funded and managed by the United States and its allies (national, corporate, and nonprofit) in order to overturn governments unfriendly to American hegemony and replace them with leadership willing to cooperate (and usually embedded within existing hierarchies of Western capital and violence). Color revolutions are usually portrayed in American media as grassroots revolutions against despotic powers, but in practice they frequently amount to an American coup on the backs of native citizens who often don't know where the money and resources of their revolution are coming from and what the actual end goal is - an alternative path than the US' other tested avenues of arming reactionaries, fundamentalists, and fascists or direct military intervention, but nonetheless achieving the same end.

In Mockingjay, District 13 plays the role of the United States - using extensive propaganda to convince the populace they have its best interests in mind, confirming the population's support by supplying them weapons (but not all that they could), occasionally intervening directly, but largely waiting for the masses to succeed so that they can step in and take over.

While I've not read the novels the films are based on, I've heard enough rumblings about the events of the concluding novel to know that District 13 is not intended to be taken entirely positively. But my interest is not so much in how the film judges the actions of 13 and its leaders, but in how the film, positively or negatively, constructs a world in which the oppressed cannot and will not organize themselves without outside intervention.

This is where I think the absence of the structure of Panem's society really matters: the filmmakers cannot imagine a route to revolution outside of the inspiration of a symbolic leader and the management of military technocrats precisely because they have not imagined a society, but merely a series of scenes of imbalanced violence. There is no history to Panem, no sense of why it exists or how it came to be; it is a static diorama of Peacekeepers oppressing citizens and wealthy opulence in the Capitol, but without any ongoing processes, and thus any point of intervention or change from within the system. Because they have not imagined a world beyond the emotional scenes of oppression and the catharsis of reprisal, they cannot imagine change that does not come from without, from above.

I think this is important because it is indicative of liberal views as a whole. Liberals focus on individual moments of violence, specific eruptions that draw attention. They believe at their best that through these specific, localized eruptions they can craft a media narrative, a spectacle, which will inspire the masses, almost always faceless to them, to act - with the guidance of liberal leaders, of course. Setting aside the ultimate motives of liberalism - technocratic management, pathologizing the impoverished as tragic but unsalvageable, maintaining their own privilege - this liberalism refuses and dismisses analysis that contextualizes these eruptions in the fabric of larger systems. They see an act of injustice and seek to correct it, but they rarely seek a larger understanding of the processes leading to these events.

Even when liberals acknowledge, briefly, tentatively, that perhaps, for example, racist police violence is not an instance of a few bad apples but symptomatic of an entire institution, they cling to the mythologizing of the police as being intended to "serve the people" - that if the police as a whole are racist, it is "corruption", a "broken" system that must be fixed, reformed - not something that was designed all along to be this way, something to be dismantled altogether. Liberalism is adamant that the role of government, police, the military, money, jobs never be questioned. And because they never question the stories we've been told about why these institutions exist, they cannot conceive of a revolution that is not merely the replacement of one ruling class with another; they cannot conceive of throwing out the system, only changing who runs it.

The entire project of liberalism, and this Hollywood understanding of revolution, is based on this: on using spectacle and propaganda to sway the masses, on individual personalities inspiring people to action. But what ultimately wins those liberal revolutions? Not the propaganda, but the American guns backing it.

So I guess my ultimate point is that we need to seriously consider the tactics of left resistance. Liberal tactics cannot achieve radical results. If we try to fight a propaganda battle, we will always lose. If we seek to inspire the masses, we can at best only join the ruling class ourselves. The oppressed don't need leadership or inspiration. Their problem is not a lack of motivation, but a lack of means. We don't need to convince anyone. We need to jam the workings of power so that those already convinced have space to act.

[circadianwolf-old]

(from a facebook comment from a while ago, posted here so I don't have to trudge through facebook to find it later)

the claim of nonviolence or pacifism privileges certain forms of action as violence and normalizes other actions as non-violent, even when they require and are utterly dependent on violence - namely, engagement with capitalism and the state. now, when, for example, people made the "criticism" of occupiers that "you use iphones, those are made in sweatshops, what hypocrites", that's an inane argument clearly meant only to dismiss the occupiers and construct a perverse moral superiority for those who engage with capitalism without doing anything to resist it, because we have no choice but to be a part of this evil system; there is literally no escape on the earth from it. however, to say we have no choice is not to say we have no complicity; we are each and all, especially in the West, especially as white cishetero able-bodied men (etc etc), party to and benefited by enormous architectures of violence. in our world, there is no such thing as nonviolence, there are only different violences, some considered "acceptable" and some considered "unacceptable" within different frameworks--to the Establishment, Americans bombing children with flying death robots is considered "acceptable" whereas non-Americans bombing military bases staffed by people intent on killing them is "unacceptable"; to nonviolence activists, enjoying the products of slave labor and mass poverty is "acceptable" while breaking windows is not; and so on and so forth.this is not to demean the value of human life in general or any human life in particular; rather, it is to assert the primacy of its value in a way that I believe philosophies of nonviolence ultimately do not and cannot. when we are faced with a system that has claimed and exercised the right to kill anyone in the world, at any time, with no justification at all--which is the reality of the system we face today--a philosophy of nonviolence is just that: a philosophy. it is a theory that privileges the abstract at the expense of material reality--at the expense of human lives. it is a comforting fairy tale for those privileged enough to be able to exercise it from a position where they can ignore the realities of violence all around them and within them--a position I am in, but can no longer indulge.if there is one thing that has changed about me since occupy and the past few years, it is this, the belief the abstract should never take precedence over the material. (the map does not precede the territory.) I believe, ultimately, that it is in fact this precedence that allows and drives the violence of these systems. the belief in a moral order that transcends human lives--that there is a Right Way For Things To Be, whether it be ordained by God or by the Law or by the Market (economics and legal theory are, wholly and entirely, moral orders, theologies rather than philosophies or sciences) or whatever other bullshit, and that when that Right Way conflicts with reality and human lives, it is acceptable and even necessary to sacrifice those lives for the sake of creating and enforcing the Right Way.the reason soldiers can do what they do and cops can do what they do and capitalists can do what they do and politicians can do what they do and all of us can do what we do is because we abdicate responsibility for our actions to others, we make ourselves into instruments of the Nation, of the State, of Capital, of our own greed (which is distinct from selfishness or self-interest in that greed as the capitalists demonstrate it is a pathology, a mental illness that in fact only hurts them, with no benefit to themselves or others), of our principles. to privilege these abstractions over human lives--which is what nonviolence does as much as the philosophy of Just War or any of that other bullshit--is one of two things: insanity--a genuine belief in something that does not exist--or cowardice.and I don't say the former as a joke--I do think it's a kind of insanity to believe in these things. the Nation and the State and Capital and God are ideas from within our brains, and they aren't real. they are incomplete and incoherent. just figments of our minds, shapes in the fog caused by apophenia, a desire for greater meaning. but there isn't a greater meaning, there isn't a higher order, and the moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice. there's just us, human beings, trying to survive. to claim to be serving something greater than that is, I honestly believe, evil--maybe a small evil, depending on the circumstances, but an evil nonetheless, and one I try--but obviously nonetheless sometimes fail--to avoid.

[circadianwolf-old]

Ticketing After the End of the World

Detroit lacks any kind of urban pedestrian traffic. The residential areas, which the ticketing officers often travel to, are full of abandoned homes. It seems like 1/10 houses are occupied on the streets that we get to see. Visually, it is confirmation of the narratives of flight from the Detroit area that we’ve been hearing for the past twenty years.

What is interesting about this whole thing is how the expectations of the ticketing officers and the people receiving the tickets are so far from one another. In some ways, it is the best lens into the authoritarian state that I’ve seen in a long time. The people who live in on the abandoned streets are materially connected to the reality of the situation: they live in a radically depopulated world where jobs are scarce and people are just barely getting by. When a ticketing agent issues something for a car being over the curb on a block that has maybe one or two occupied houses, the people who are being ticketed come out of their houses screaming. “The city is going to ticket me!” they scream “Why doesn’t the city mow these abandoned lawns?!”

This is postapocalyptic ticketing. The material reality that undergirds the relationship between normal people and the state structure–the idea that these people will be getting basic services in exchange for taxes or just generally following the rules (and paying the financial price when they don’t)–is laid bare. These people are getting nothing from Detroit and they know it, but the ticketing system has to disavow that information to keep on living.

This is one of the best descriptions I've seen of what collapse looks like.

[circadianwolf-old]

What was it that WikiLeaks did that aroused so much consternation and condemnation? It wasn't simply that WikiLeaks provided "secret" information that the State was determined to keep from public view. It wasn't even that WikiLeaks provided a huge amount of such information. It was that WikiLeaks provided masses of "raw data": the original documents themselves, whether they be battle reports, inter- or intra-agency communications, or documents of many other kinds, sometimes with redactions, often complete. And WikiLeaks offered them with no filters whatsoever: no one was going to hold our hand as we read the documents, telling us what was "important" and what wasn't, and what its significance was, or whether it was significant at all. If we wished to understand the documents and what they revealed, all of us had to do the work ourselves. What we discovered was that many people didn't want to do the work. More than that, they resented the fact that such responsibility was demanded of them. They wanted some "authority" figure to explain it all to them, they wanted "experts" to tell them what it meant.

Silber's critique of the methodology behind the Snowden leaks (without criticizing their content) is important reading.

[atomheart-brother-deactivated20]

Adult Swim making an unholy amount of sense.

[davechisholmmusicandcomics]

holy smokes!

[drew--cifer-deactivated20160124]

film piracy feeds babies

[circadianwolf-old]

"The dark side of historical strategy"

This is a great piece on how EU in particular and strategy games in general put players in the minds of imperialists. There's a joke about the much-vaunted German board game tradition that I love: "It started with laying out maps of Europe and pushing army figures around." (And what makes it even better? It's true! Pretty much the entirety of modern war gaming originates from German "kriegspiel", literally "wargame", which was used to train Prussian commanders. There's a fascinating history of it given in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World.) There's something about looking at a map that inspires the imperialist impulse, the reduction of the world into territory, zones that can be color-coded and labeled: German, French. Roman, Gallic. Stark, Lannister. In a strategy game, people are abstractions; the map is the territory, the real thing, and everything else is a representation. It's easy to understand, I think, playing EU, how those who spend their days looking at nothing but charts and maps, who are surrounded by numbers, optimize those numbers at the expense of reality. To a bureaucrat, the numbers are reality; the people are something they hear about second-hand at best. And a bureaucrat's performance, to the extent that it is judged at all, is judged on those numbers, not on more difficult to measure things like happiness or well-being. How much did you increase the economic output? How much territory did you conquer? These are the things we celebrate political leaders for, while dismissing those who have no such accomplishments to claim. Life is more than numbers, more than market transactions among self-interested rational utility maximizers. But measurement requires abstraction; comparison requires reduction. For bureaucrats it's just a game, an optimization problem: manipulate the variables to achieve the highest output. But there's something more, too: why do we make and play so many war games? Why are there not more city management games, like SimCity, which applies the same philosophy of abstraction and technocracy to a superficially peaceful context? The answer, I think, is not merely the valuation of violence over other forms of conflict resolution, as we might first assume. Instead, I would say, war games are, in fact, more honest. Not honest about the consequences, but honest about the means. That is to say, when the abstractions of the bureaucrats' games cause real-world harm, normal people would ignore them, given the choice; life is more important than abstractions. To prevent this, the abstractions of bureaucrats are enforced with violence. Violence requires no context, no understanding, no nuance: as Graeber says, violence is the one communicative act which requires no understanding of the target of communication by the communicator. To make a game of bureaucracy and technocracy--which is fundamentally what EU and other strategy games are--is to make a game about an artificial order that depends on violence to exist. It is appropriate, then, for such games to be literally about that: moving armies in order to change fictional borders. A game like SimCity, on the other hand, is fundamentally dishonest, eliding the massive violence required to enforce the city's technocratic government. (Even in the latest SimCity, for example, homelessness does not exist; likewise, poverty and unemployment exist only in economic equations of demand, not in impacts on the citizens of the city.) The violence is subsumed into unquestioning obedience. If the morality of EU, where genocide and colonization are just good tactics, is horrifying--and it is--what do we say about the morality of SimCity, a game purportedly about liberal good government where totalitarianism without resistance is an unstated foundational assumption?

[circadianwolf-old]

"Today's internship economy is widening the wealth gap in America"

But some of the most desirable intern gigs go to the highest bidder – and I mean that literally. Earlier this spring, the charitable fundraising site Bidding for Good auctioned off a one-month internship at Marc Jacobs in the Collections Accessories Sales Department for $4,000.

[...]

Here's proof that there's demand for these non-jobs: there are now internship brokers, no charitable veneer required.

There are outfits like Dream Careers, whose website boasts of "Guaranteed Intern Placement. Top Companies" in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco and says that spending $8,499 for a two-month internship (food and housing included) is a "practical and wise investment in your professional future." Another such company is the Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars.

And if you lack the money to pay? No need to worry. That's what bank-offered student loans are for. According to the website for Dream Careers, about 50% of those taking part in their program receive private student loans to help offset their expenses. [...] Just think about it: you can pay for that job that's not paying you, decades into the future.

Unpaid internships are a hideous method of class stratification, deeply immoral, requiring people to be able to survive years without pay (or even paying for the opportunity to labor, as here) in order to weed out the impoverished and precarious. And as Graeber points out, the distribution of what careers require internships tends toward those that offer the opportunity to actually help people or make a difference in the world while also paying a decent wage--politics, civil service, journalism, non-profits, etc. If you're poor you're not allowed into non-selfish jobs--other than the military.

This also means, of course, that those in a position to effect change are those who are most disinclined to pursue it, those who are born into privilege and rarely anxious to change the status quo.

[circadianwolf-old]

The constitutions and political settlements in the southern periphery, put in place in the aftermath of the fall of fascism, have a number of features which appear to be unsuited to further integration in the region. [....] Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labour rights; consensus building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. Countries around the periphery have only been partially successful in producing fiscal and economic reform agendas, with governments constrained by constitutions (Portugal), powerful regions (Spain), and the rise of populist parties (Italy and Greece).

The authoritarianism dominating Europe today is, in its way, even more horrifying than that going on here at home. The governments of several of the Eurozone periphery (notably Italy) were literally overthrown by western Europe (primarily Germany) and replaced by bankers and their (unelected, obviously) "technocrat" stooges, all without so much as a peep in the American press. I'd like to repeat that for emphasize: Germany oversaw the overthrow of multiple European national governments, replacing them with unelected bankers. What are the bounds of their brazenness?

[circadianwolf-old]

"Filthy Lucre"

Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top. 

Once, I met with a man who runs an idea festival. He was a great admirer of businessmen who became Buddhist monks. "I don't like protest," the man told me. "It's too much about ego. Ego is the problem with America."

I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big?

So much of the difference between the experiences of rich and poor comes down to kindness. Kindness is scarce. Kindness must be bought.

If you have money, you can pay to live in a bubble of politesse. Excellent wine choice, sir. Here's your gift bag, madam. Often, you don't have to pay for it. The mere promise that you might will keep you sipping prosecco and deserving of servile attentions. Soon, you think this treatment is earned.

Meanwhile, we treat the poor with casual cruelty. Single moms on welfare have their homes searched by police to make sure they're not hiding a man in the closet. But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. The poor get stop-and-frisk, drug tests, and constant distrust.

[circadianwolf-old]

"Rape and other sexual violence prevalent in juvenile justice system"

Hundreds of teen-agers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country's juvenile detention facilities, and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities, and fully 20 percent of those victimized by the men and women charged with protecting and counseling them said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions.

fuck the police and the entire justice system. smash the state.