#postmarxism

[impendingapotheosis]

I just started reading Capital Is Dead by McKenzie Wark and I've instantly become deranged and insufferable, muttering darkly about signifiers and the intellectual commons at unreasonable hours

[fragments-and-fractions-blog]

Es geht immer darum, eine Idee zu finden, die größer ist als die Situation.

Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn (rundschreiben 03/17 medico international)

[proletarian-witchcult-blog]

The State: What is it good for?

In recent years it has become trendy in some circles to question the notion of having a state at all. Some argue that the state is an inherently repressive institution inhibiting the free and full development of human capacities. Foucault argued in Discipline and Punishment that the state institutionalizes society, thus institutionalising the people within it. This instills neuroses and leads to depression and alienation, the clearest marker of which is America’s ongoing love affair with prescription drugs. Some have pointed out that the state is the friend of monopoly: politicians scratch big business on the back, because big business can scratch them back the best; whoever fails to take advantage of this won’t last in the arena of politics. These people blame the state for every kind of wrong, from enviromental destruction and global warming to institutionalized racism, sexism and class inequality. We have deep problems with this sort of argument. If states were so harmful, why is it that states cover the world with only a very few exceptions, and only experience marginal resistance to their hegemony? If having no state is such a desirable state of affairs, why don't these hipster anarchist fucks move to Somalia? Obviously, we need a state; the state is an absolute precondition for human progress, technological or social. If people are to improve at all, obviously there will be a state will involved, but what is this "State" and how can we use it to accomplish our goal of a free society?

The state is what happens when one group of people create a sociallly accapted monopoly on violence for the purpose of shaping society and creating "common space." like basic infrastructure and roads. Without this ever-present threat of violence or poverty, the common people would never get anything done. They would simply argue amongst themselves all day and bicker over power. It is much better to entrust power to one group to permit conflict but prevent it from overwhelming society, while at the same time still enjoying the security of an ever-prevent deadly force. This we call the state, and the state lets us channel human potential, taking us to the Moon, or helping us build the Pyramids.

What are some things we could do with a state? Why, the list is endless! There is much debate about what we should use the State for; but there are many "common sense" things that every aspirant state-entity clearly should do if they want to govern society effectively, such as:

Improve the Distribution of Resources

Today, approximately 9 million people die every year of hunger.[1] With this much death from hunger, food would have to be very scarce indeed! But this is not the case. Annually, up to one-half of the world's whole agricultural product is simply never used.[2] It rots on warehouse shelves for want of a customer. The bourgeoisie have told us we do not need a state to give us food because their alleged "market" can provide us with what we need. The ever-present hunger throughout much of the world forces us to question this claim. If the Workers had a State, we could feed the entire world tomorrow, because working people understand how important it is that everyone get enough to eat. The only cost to this project is that of distribution, and this modest sum could easily be paid for by the bourgeoisie through taxation. Some have argued that if we were to tax the bourgeoisie to any significant extent, that they would leave our great country and find a tax haven somewhere else, taking their wealth with them. This concern, while valid, has been blown far out of proportion to the actual magnitude of the solution. We will simply confiscate their passports. For a citizen to abscond with the wealth that the people created for the bourgeosie by working for their enterprses is an act of profound violence and treachery against the Nation. We cannot allow this, so naturally we should prevent them in the first place from ever crossing another border.

But we needn't stop at feeding the world. We could do all kinds of things with that kind of organized power and wealth. One thing we could do is ensure full employment by publicly funding the construction of gigantic monuments to great proletarian fighters, such as Lin Biao, Nyar-lat-hotep, and Kim Il-Sung. We could create monuments to reflect the glory of our State, such as the Eiffel Tower or the Twin Towers. We could initiate a renaissance of the built environment, by rethinking how we do everything: build giant facilities to grow food using renewable energies and clockwork distribution of rainwater. See? We could do almost anything with a state! It is to be hoped that the proletarians get one soon! If there can be a Jewish State, why can't there be a Workers' State?

Repress the Jehovian Cult.

The Cult of Jehovah has become a dominant force in our society threatening our democracy with a populist uprising towards fascistic theocracy. This cult began in Rome when a rhetorician named Paul took the martyrdom of a radical Pharisee and created from him a religion which was to be a completion of Jewish prophecy, and a religion of compromise that could spread across an empire. The instability and petty factionalism of this cult undermined Roman leadership and traditional civic process. Ultimately destroying the unifying social foundations of the ancient Roman Empire, these early Jehovah-worshipers confidently gathered their forces and led Europe into 800 years of darkness. It was not until the iconoclasts of the Scientific Revolution that a little light could begin to shine through their veil of state-institutionalized lies and madness. Without the influence of a democratic people's state fighting to defend our democracy from this anachronistic cult of death, we will be threatened with theocracy at best, but most probably barbarism.

Free Arms Training for All and Socialized Firearms.

When the Founding Fathers established this great country, they had in mind certain wise principles which they enshrined into law, one of our most hallowed of which is the right of the people to form and regulate their own militias and to more generally bear arms. The Second Amendment has long protected this hallowed right, but sadly, when some of us have tried to bear arms in our own self-defense, the State has responded most swiftly and assuredly to “keep the peace" by confiscating or otherwise regulating access to our firearms. In a society based on revolutionary democratic principles, firearms will be commonplace and considered essential to the defense of the collective freedom. We believe every person should receive extensive arms, tactical breaching, and explosive training from the State upon reaching the age of majority. After they complete their training, they will receive a wide variety of firearms for the purpose of arming themselves and others in case the need arises to defend the revolution against the reactionaries.

Widespread Pre-Emptive Rectification Campaigns.

We are deeply concerned about the anti-social and frankly sociopathic tendencies that capitalism breeds in property owners. Even after we set up our State, they will still be dangerous. We must tirelessly root out all those who commit crimes against the people, such as exploitation and hoarding. It will be necessary to tirelessly struggle against the capitalist excess which has brought us to this point. These capitalists are mentally unwell and need our help, not just our hatred. We must find them before they become dangerous to our democracy. The bourgeoisie become elite through their own self-imposed alienation from the social body, standing over others and not understanding the simple necessity of human co-operation. We will subject them to vigorous re-education campaigns for their own benefit. Think A Clockwork Orange, to bring them back into the social fold, and re-humanize them.

Placate the Proletarian Witchcult.

It must not be forgotten that at all times the Proletarian Witchcult has the power to usher in an era of animalistic chaos. The only way to placate them is to meet their ever-shifting demands without question or hesitation. Due to the nature of their demands, a functioning revolutionary democracy must be in place, or else we will not be able to concentrate enough wealth to satisfy their eldritch requirements. The most basic function of a State is to concentrate enough resources to prevent the Proletarian Witchcult from ever lashing out.

Inculcate the Spirit of Solidarity in the Bourgeoisie Through Mandatory Volunteer Service Programs.

The wealth acquired through their petty organization of our labor gives them access to resources that are clearly beyond their due. The state, then, to balance this, will mandate that they handle all environmental cleanups, and on an individual basis, these servants of the economy will clean the monuments of their great proletarian leaders with awkwardly small brushes. We will give them the benefit of proletarian experience so that they will better understand why we, the world-historic proletarian class, must destroy them. The work must instill a clear love of labor and symbolize their understanding of what we, the world-historic proletarian class, have generously provided for them.

Inculcate Great Feelings of Nationalism to Bring National Unity.

A great illness of capitalism is that the national community becomes less and less relevant over time. The lack of a sense of community, both local and national, leads to alienation and social deviance. We must attack the isolation and solipsism produced by capitalism and suffered by all classes. We can do this by inculcating great feelings of proletarian revolutionary nationalism. By the reform of education, campaigns of public rectification, occasional beheadings of reactionaries, and the State-funded talent drive to display the vigor and pride that is a part of the revolutionary nationalist experience, we will bring the people together to celebrate the greatness of ther national unity. The rise of the oppressed classes of the world will bring about a change in the meaning of the State and therefore the nation. Instead of being a tool for exploitation, through great proletarian democracy the State will be an instrument of liberation. It will exist to serve the people and not the other way around. Untold prosperity lays before us, all it requires is arms, discipline, and leadership.

Tenant Supremacy.

In the modern world, we suffer from a most serious social malady: homelessness. The homeless litter our streets, people whom society has failed to find a use for, who are therefore simply left out to die. The material excess of our society and constant demand for labor mock their struggle to remain alive. There really must just not be enough houses to let everyone have a place to live!

Well, Comrade, think again!

In the United States there are approximately 630,000 homeless people[3], and there are about 14 million empty houses[4]. If we were to distribute all of the empty houses in the country, every single homeless man, woman, and child would receive 22 houses to themselves. This level of inequity is completely irrational and the fix is oh-so-easy. Seize state power and nationalize all of the excess land and homes for the benefit of the public. By doing this we create a more healthy, just, and productive society for all.

Squatters and tenants will be given greater status in law than property-owners. Those who own property but do not directly use it themselves create the conditions of an inherently unequal society by preventing people from having access to the land which supports us all. When the land is returned to the people, the people living on that land will be able to provide for themselves. We will permit unoccupied and otherwise unused buildings to be used by the public, ending absentee ownership once and for all.

The state wlll be a useful implement to perfect and correct society's ills. We both want, and need the state.

[theinconceivablemiddlepage]

The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory), or of supluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development). Even the most complexan flexible theories of global development that have come out the Marxist tradition (Amin 1980; Mandel 1978; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982) are inadequately quirky and have failed to come to terms with what Scott Lash and John Urry have called disorganized capitalism (1987). The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. 1996, pp. 32-33