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amor —

ālīs illīs

heu nē mē fugiās

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Violence and the Revolution

"The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party."

-Marx, The Class Struggle in France (1850)

The question of whether the Revolution (here meant as any meaningful overthrowing of the present state of things, whatever its form) will be violent or peaceful, through the medium of liberal democracy or outside it, used to be interesting to me, but since reading this quote it no longer is. It doesn't matter whether the actual toppling of the world order comes violently or peacefully, it is what happens afterwards. Will the bourgeois let capital be exorcised from its host, or will they fight back. In the video game Disco Elysium by ZA/UM, with dialogue predominantly written by science-fiction author Robert Kurvitz, an old man, a veteran of a failed revolution, talks about capitalism's "mask of humanity". In times of peace, capitalism parades as liberal democracy, hamburgers and endless TV-channels, but when faced with a crisis, this mask begins to slip. In the global north, we very rarely see this slip, because we need to think that everything is alright and that we live in a democracy, but of course our society is built as much on violence as any authoritarian state, we just outsource out violence to the global south. When a political candidate challenges Capital here, Capital does not need to use violence, at least not here --- consider Jeremy Corbyn being subjected to a smear campaign as bombs drop on Palestine. Capitalism cannot simply do away with him, because that might actually shock people out of despondency --- liberal democracy, the human mask of Capital, stays on. Optics in Chilean politics do not matter to Capital, only the flow of resources. If copper stops flowing, they might try some non-violent sabotaging of the economy to turn public opinion against the socialist president, but when that fails (the people who elected him were largely poor to start with, so they might not have perceived the change as much as hoped for), the mask will slip off. But this wasn't just about copper, the important thing was always to enforce capitalist realism (a concept created by Mark Fisher to describe that feeling of anything but capitalism being possible). If Chile had shown the world that, not only was socialism possible, but it was possible through peaceful means, through conventional liberal democracy, other countries would follow suit. If the proletariat of Chile could do it, so could others. So, the CIA backed a coup by the general Augusto Pinochet to "reinstate democracy". Many conservatives in Chile truly believed that this would happen, that the communists would be thrown out and that order would prevail. They were surprised when the junta refused to relinquish power and reinstate democracy. And the global north did nothing to about this. Instead, they sent Milton Friedman's goons to run their experiments on the country. They sent Margaret Thatcher to have tea with Pinochet (a recent example of a similar thing is how Venezuela and Cuba were refused entry to an OAS event, while Biden had a joint press conference with permanently constipated and corona-infected fascist moron Jair Bolsonaro). And of course, this is because liberal "democracy" is simply the human mask, the PR-trick of Capital and capitalism.

So where am I getting with this? To return to the quote that opened this post, I want to leave you with this: however the revolution happens, the counter-revolution will be swift and brutal, and we must be ready for that. They will first try to nip it in the bud, as they did with Corbyn and Sanders. Then they will try to choke the country, to show that the system does not work, like they are doing to Cuba. Failing that, they will do what they did to Allende, what they did to Patrice Lumumba --- they will swiftly and brutally put an end to the revolution. The choice is not ours whether violence will happen before we can come out on the other side --- it is inevitable --- and we must always be ready for it.

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Before I post any actual texts here you might want to know that they will basically consist of me thinking out loud. If I realise halfway through a though that I don't agree with what I'm saying, I'm nor going to delete it. Rather, I'll finish the thought to show you my workings, then tell you why I don't believe it.

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On non-physical, yet very material, entities

"[C]apital has only one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour."

-Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 10.

There is this tendency in Marx to describe capital in a way that makes it seem almost sentient, like a living creature. The parallels to Molok have of course been drawn before, and probably very little of whatever follows can really be called original, but I still wanted to get it out there.

Before I start, perhaps I should give a short run-down on what I mean by certain terms. When I talk about gods, demons, deities, and so on, I don't literally mean that there is a dude in charge of a certain aspect of nature --- instead I see these deities as metaphorical representations of certain... and there we run into the issue that makes this so difficult to talk about. What things can we say that these deities are metaphors of? Zeus isn't a metaphor for thunder, he is the underlying cause of thunder, as well as everything any particular greek associated with thunder. Michael S. Judge, the podcaster (although I don't really think that that moniker does him much justice) talks about Athena appearing being a metaphor for that sudden realization that sometimes hits you when faced with a problem --- the light-bulb moment. Perhaps Kantian language might present us with a solution --- since we only have access to the phenomena, the way things appear to us, we construct the noumena, the things-in-themselves as implied by the phenomena? No, that is not satisfactory either, because that would mean that the gods are not real. The gods still exist in the phenomenal world, implied by the noumena (let's leave Kant before I embarrass myself further). The issue is that I have an idea of what I mean but lack the language to describe it. Hopefully I can run circles around the topic until it's possible to derive meaning from my ramblings. What I want to get to is that, even though I probably am some kind of materialist (although I'm also an idealist, for reasons that I'll explain later. No they're not mutually exclusive), matter has a kind of "shine", there is something to how everything in the universe fits into each other to make a whole that is cohesive --- not at any one time, because time itself is part of the universe, and all of time is needed for this whole to be created --- that warrants our awe. Nothing by itself has any meaning, it is only once it reacts with everything around and becomes part of the chaosmic (thanks Joyce) whole that we can say that anything has any meaning. And is there room for gods in this chaosmos? Well, to disagree with a previous statement in this post, they aren't the cause of these movements around us --- they are the movements. But there is also capital God, and that I think Spinoza has already solved for us. If he, by God, meant simply the traditional sense of a deity, he would have talked simply of God. If he, by Nature, meant simply the traditional sense of nature, he would simply have talked of nature. But Spinoza talks about God-or-Nature which means he want us to merge these two concepts, taking connotations and implications and meanings from both.

So, then, Capital becomes a deity, a god in the pantheon of modern life. It has been spread out, maimed, yet its constituent parts are still powerful, and it yearns to be whole. Almost a bit like the myth of Osiris, but, unlike Osiris, Capitalism was born maimed, and rather than wise Isis being the one to but it together, its constituent parts crawl towards each other, the greater swallowing the lesser. This is capital's greatest impulse, its driving force, to accumulate into one place. The capitalists are only its priests, capitalism merely the religion, the bourgeoisie the elect, and the proletariat the preterite. It is important here to consider the fact that, while the interests of the proletariat consists in directly improving their situation, the class interests of the bourgeoisie simply serve Capital. Sure, they may profit off it as well, but in the end they will die, they will lose what they gained, but what they gained will still remain. It becomes a kind of deal with the Devil, not Faustian, but something different. If you serve Capital, you will be greatly rewarded (or you may not be, Capital is a fickle master), but the service must be active. Capital constantly requires sacrifices, both of its clergy and its laity, and there is no end. Capital will never stop and say "I am sated now", rather the opposite is true --- the more Capital grows, the more it hungers. A way this manifests in reality is the tendency of monopolization (to avoid confusion --- I am not talking about the creation of monopolies, but the tendency towards them). The bigger companies buy the smaller, capital accumulates, and so it goes. The problem here is that the basis for Capital, of course, is material, it relies on goods being produced and sold, and while Capital's hunger is endless, the resources from which it derives its value, are not. Much like I will turn to that weird can in my pantry that I got from a friend holidaying in Japan once every other edible thing in my kitchen has been eaten, Capital will find new things to devour in order to grow. But at some point, it will run out of things to devour. Capital, if allowed to continue this way, will devour the earth. If you want to know what that looks like just look at the melting ice caps, raging wildfires, opioid epidemics, endless wars, and so on. And it won't stop, unless someone makes it. Naïvely, some people think that the rational, invisible hand of the market will guide us away from this cataclysm, that enlightened capitalists will use their power for good. If there is something stories about deals with the devil have taught us, it is that no such deal can be struck that does not end with the devil getting his due. In order to become powerful enough to reverse the ills of capitalism, one will have to sacrifice so much that any attempt to make things better will be meaningless.

There is more I want to say on this topic, but I think that this is a good place to stop for now. This is part my elucidation of a system of thought I have dubbed magical communism, which takes as a setting off point Mark Fisher's idea of acid communism, but since he never finished that concept, and I want to have free reins to develop something of my own, I decided to give my interpretation a different name.

But all this is getting depressing, and I want to leave you with a bit of hope. Since Capitalism's power is dependent on us letting it vampirically suck the value out of labour and resources, and since that connection is all in our heads, we can stop it. We stop it by changing the way we think about this. One of the central tenets of Fisher's acid communism is the fact that we need to dare believe in a future. The present state of things is not the only way things can be. There is another way (and keep pissing on Thatcher's grave).

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A friend of mine once told me the story of Kripkenstein, the idea that the ideas presented in Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language neither belong to Kripke nor Wittgenstein, but simply appeared in Kripke's head while he read Philosophical Investigations. Not quite sure whether he agreed with these thoughts, he still found them worthy of publication, and so compiled them in the aforementioned volume. Since it would be wrong to say that these are views held by kripke, Kripkenstein was introduced as the hypothetical person who would hold them. I was reminded of this story while reading Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels where she presents a similar view of the creation of these gospels, and how the gnostics might approach a meditation on Christ.

"In the process of such internal questioning, answers may occur spontaneously to the mind; changing patterns of images may appear. The person who understands this process not in terms of modern psychology, as the activity of the imagination or unconscious, but in religious terms, could experience these as forms of spiritual communication with Christ." (18)

And who are we to question that? Perhaps that voice, not quite our own, floating around in our head, really is that of God. I am not really a Christian person — I can't say that I really profess to any religion —so I'll stay away from the drama that comes with a word like God (at least for the moment) and borrow a term from a thinker who predates the gnostics by a couple of centuries — Socrates (or Plato, but that's beside the point) — the term δαίμων. Δαίμων, while being the etymology of the word "demon" should not be laden with the negative connotations of that word. To the Greeks, the δαίμων was simply a lesser divine being, a few rungs below the gods (Homer uses the term, not interchangeably with, but similarly to θεός). To Socrates, his δαίμων was a voice warning him against doing certain things. To me, Kripkenstein was Kripke's δαίμων giving him ideas that his conscious self (if that even exists) could not agree with. I think we all have, at some point or another, come into contact with that sort of δαίμων. Where this is all going is the following: do not expect to find a coherent system of thought from this blog, some thoughts thinking presented here I take full responsibility for, others I'll blame on my δαίμων.

Before I go, I'd like to talk shortly about the name of the blog. It is simply a latinization of the French term for the tarot card known in English as the Magician, "le bateleur". As the first arcanum of the major arcana, it represents beginnings, the first step of a journey, potential made actual. Since I am a Fool, I have decided to step outside academia with my thinking, and this blog is thew first step on that journey of making it in the World. Will I make it, or will I get broken on the Wheel? Time shall tell, and maybe you, gentle reader, will be with me when it does.