Two Lines Against It All
Political Interventions: Part I
Effective Altruism. “Send the child of the deceased a lollipop, won’t you?”
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You say “nothing human is alien to me”, perfectly aware of the British Home Secretary. (Always apt.)
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Concerned about conspiracy theorists? It is those who believe nothing but benevolence emanates from the intersections of power, law and wealth, — coincidence theorists — who keep me up.
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What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it includes silence about so many atrocities
Brecht
I fear such thinking would make us silent about crimes that implicate not only those digging graves, but everyone — not least the germinal.
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Après moi. Attempts to create a populism of the Left have ended in failure. Although the reasons are numerous, a fundamental problem lies in the language of populism: it favours reaction. Those on the Right do not recognise structural failings (intentionally overlooking the more interesting reactionaries), preferring instead to haul some unfortunate before the mob and exclaim, “if only this migrant/globalist/radical-leftist/George Soros/etc. were smited all would be right with the world!” (Francisco Goya’s series about the Spanish Inquisition exposes this twisted mentality with an expert hand.)
Although there will always be political pathologies in need of suppressing, a serious radical project would emphasise the ways in which the system compels everyone to behave poorly. Noam Chomsky (perhaps generously) has even suggested there are conceivably CEOs who hold to lofty principles. But were they ever to act in line with their beliefs, they would quickly find themselves escorted off-site. For the behemoths they operate in have a singular concern: Profit, preferably with a quick return.*
The issue is not that others in the organisation would disapprove, the markets would. Capital would. Similarly and more concretely, we might consider the UN’s Climate Change Conference. Every outing, esteemed panellists from across the globe and political spectrum meet and preach. Inveighing with great passion, they pronounce the need to change, to mitigate, to make good. And the result of this public flagellation, each and every time? Fuck all. 2021 in particular was like witnessing men on the brink, pleading with the stalls to do what they cannot.
Is it all that different from the serial killer begging Chicago’s police department to stop him before he struck again? We might update his infamous scrawl, from a victim’s lipstick to oil graffito: For heavens Sake catch me Before I drill more I cannot control myself.
*Which itself speaks to another tragic dynamic at play. The sovereign individual was once seen as the very locus of capitalism, only for the lot they once traded to become the be-all. Owners are mere placeholders, as with kings.
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Unity! and Purity! The rallying cries of the traitor. Foul within the maw of reactionaries, among a cadre they elevate.
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The point of Rwanda [deportation] policy is to upset people like me.
Ian Dunt on Twitter
Can’t help myself. The almost accurately named Ian Dunt thinks a “dangerous idea” has taken hold of society: prioritising the group over the individual. He draws a line from the philosoph up until today, the crayon implicating Marx and (no… Dunty, surely not?) Fascism. This might pass muster among the brain-holed clogging W1, but as an intellectual exercise it fails on every level.
Marx himself had little time for such fables. They were a hopelessly atomistic way of divvying up the world, simplifying their advocates worst of all. Following Hegel, his baseline was not The Sovereign Individual versus The Collective, but “I that is We, We that is I.” Accordingly, individuals are understood as a product of society, as much as a society is dependent on particular individuals. There is no one without the other. (It is, and excuse me here, a dialectic.)
It also happens to be a sentiment echoed in the works of a favoured Spaniard: I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, it cannot save me.
Another damnable collectivist?! Ortega y Gasset, a lib. One worth reading.*
*Interestingly, there is almost something Rousseian about Dunt’s flavour of individualism. Fully autonomous men — pervasive suspicion — collective action foreclosed? Dunt basks in an afterglow, beside his bucket and spade.
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Notoriously, centrists struggle to tell apart leftists and fascists. “One calls my talk hollow, the other asks who provides our feeding tubes. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. — Right?!”
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The Jargon of Rights. If you insist rights exist without the ability to enforce them — that they somehow, theologically or by nature’s sanction, pre-date the punch and kick — consider state expenditure over the last century. When workers were a threat, government spending was occasionally favourable to their interests. By the time of their political defeat at the behest of the other n-word (neoliberalism), to join the war economy was quantitative easing, the neverending subsidisation of the casino market. An indebted poor was the result.
But regardless, to speak the language of rights is to admit defeat. Here we are, a dusting of monads;
Certainly Your powers are unprecedented. You are freely able to colonise my mind, body and home, but have you considered this scrap of paper?
This are not an assertion, a defiant stand against the Void, so much as flagging two square feet State-Capital-Nature has yet to fully consume.
