A Note to Radicals
In the wan years following the revenge of internecine political antagonisms that characterized many post-Occupy US scenes, Obama-era "politics-as-usual" amplified a sense that nothing we could do would shake the culture from its suicidal satisfaction with Peak TV.
We were right. It wasn't us.
From our perspective now, futility is quaint -- so much has changed, unpredicted, unpredictable. Perhaps, then, all the more: many of the lessons remain. Read and weep (and sing), gentle comrades.
After decades of tragedy, perhaps it's wise to lose confidence. Do we the people have the power to diagnose the (post)modern condition, gather ourselves into a revolutionary subject with its hands on the levers of power, and change the political economy -- seize it, supercede it, or self-organize the new society in the shell of the old?
Our protests, our meetings, defensive campaigns drowning amid the onslaught, punctuated by brief surges of glory (that stutter and stumble in the mire of what we actually have to work with) -- is this the best we can do?
Is it even remotely enough?
No.
What is to be done?
A suggestion: perhaps the greatest crisis of the moment is not without us, but within us: we don't know what to do, and we know it.
Oh, we've tried things.
For many of us, the great hope lay in scientific socialism, dialectical materialism, and the vanguard party -- the hope that the vanguard can lead us in a clear direction based on objective analysis and reason, bringing the people to power.
"The point is to change it." The idea was that intellectuals would analyze the balance of forces to discover the correct diagnosis of events, identify the key linchpins of change, predict how interventions hasten telos, frame a platform that inspires the revolutionary subject to emerge for-itself, and smash capitalism. But it hasn't worked out so well.
On another hand, at least since '68 there's been a strong tradition seeking alternatives to transcendent party-tales of counterpower, finding them within an immanent body of molecular micropolitics. Yet has this encouraged our rebellious forebears to settle for a politics of balkanized identities, unable to join forces, patrolling the hybridized boundaries building discursive (superstructural) communities, remaining peripheral to the material forces that actually make a difference?
Capitalism purrs along;
it co-opts "transgression" as a commodity niche,
fodder for the market of authenticity.
Hammer and Sickle vodka.
Blag Flag pre-torn T-shirts.
#BlackLivesMatter Starbucks.
An atmosphere of futility. Maybe Dads and coworkers were right all along?
"That's a nice idea, but it'll never work."
"You're ignoring human nature."
"Don't be naive."
Throughout the world of activists and revolutionaries, already before "climate change" but now amplified in slow-motion apocalypse, we feel an abandonment of hope.
We're not going to win.
But perhaps this is just the flipside of an overly dualistic, a non-dialectical revolutionary imagination.
After all, the world is always changing. Capitalism is always changing. The workerists encourage us to see the source of this change not in capital's "progressive" power, but rather as capital's perpetual reaction to people's permanent urge to free ourselves from the alienating discipline of bosses and systems. Such discipline, in the era of mass factories, regimented bodies into human cogs, from 9 to 5 or longer -- but at least the mind, the heart were free to roam. We as workers fought to liberate ourselves from those bosses, from those factories -- and started to win! More time, more leisure, more control. In this sense capital was on the back foot.
But from this back foot, hasn't capital responded with the just-in-time knowledge economy, in which we're always precarious, and therefore have no bosses -- but the boss inside? The boss inside -- activated by individualized ringtone-stimulus -- that makes us package our friends into networks, our passions into personal brands, our capacity for care and inspiration into the raw material of eyeball-counts and viral campaigns.
Not everyone inhabits the hypermania of the everything-is-services market. Not everyone pays Peter to look after my children so I can change the senior diapers of Peter's great-uncle Paul. Not everyone is part-time in search of piecework. Not everyone is downsized for robot muscles and artificial intelligences, seeking job security in something only humans can sell.
Not yet.
Note: it's not crucial that you agree with our rather inconsistent set of arguments, the details and the whys and wherefores of the doomed-right-now.
But, ask yourself: Can you can see what we're getting at? Do you, just maybe, feel something along these lines as well?
The youth-workers' sixties and seventies
were an upsurge of insurrectionary feeling.
Capital responded -- so now, at least tendentially,
it's not just our bodies that have been colonized,
but our abilities to feel and relate.
As Bifo says, our soul.
Amidst post-Fordism, the service economy that supersedes making things,
what we sell is more and more our ability
to make other people feel things.
Entertainment is bigger than steel;
retail is about mood more than efficiency,
and your contacts are your assets.
This mode of production turns us always-on, into hyperalert mania. From there, where can our worker-creativity guide us but to depression and withdrawal, disconnection from the matrix? Is this not refusal to work, refusal to perpetuate the machine, refusal and withdrawal and the absence of movement -- stillness -- isolation -- as the flicker of revolutionary disobedience?
From this perspective, the withdrawal and scenesterism of much political work these days is of the zeitgeist, too: a rebellious urge, a trace of the creeping human creativity that will somehow force capital onto the back foot, again.
In this way we radicals may not be so different from the contemporary profusion of gamers' societies and self-help groups, all the hip niches of geekery. Perhaps these, along with the more familiar multicultural identities of resistance, may embody a reclaiming of the commodity-products of our labor in the "new economy". Taking back meaning, feeling, connection with others -- the very stories of our lives -- from the spectacle-mongers and their big-data overlords.
For all our talk of mass movements and global change, isn't this after all the worlds most of us radicals live in? And maybe finding a crew of others to commiserate and scheme with is why most of us became "radical" to begin with.
Our disconnection from the Empire is half-assed at best! Anti-oppression workshops that reproduce white supremacy and phallogocentric, classist fixations on words. Accountability invoking a pall of failure, exhaustion, fear, insecurity, cynicism, trauma. Revolutionaries in long meetings surreptitiously tapping under tables on iPhones Facebooking feverishly about dates and scandals and annoyances -- anything but being here, now. Despite everything.
And yet, crafting these pockets of relatively inaccessible partial political purity -- makes sense. We can see so many ways we have been, are being co-opted -- and yet our experiences point to a half-imagined possibility of a world freed of Empire.
From a workerist perspective, perhaps it's just this kind of creativity that will force capital into another desperate adjustment.
(Another cycle of the dialectic. Another chance to ... what?)
Isn't this just hopelessness doubled-down? How can this kaleidoscope of patchwork cyborg micro-collectivities ever hope to take on the vast mechanisms of power, brute and subtle, that maintain the momentum of endless cancerous growth -- fast enough to make a difference?
Once, when we drew diagrams of imperial power, the fat cats ruled the roost, pulling strings to guide the ship of state in their larcenous interest.
These days, that seems quaint. Is any human guiding this vast system? The idea of a dark smoky room, a secret cabal, is almost comforting -- humans, even evil ones, surely wouldn't consciously and intentionally doom us all?
But we are too world-weary now for such nostalgia. Everyone's just driven by the carrots and sticks of their competitive advantage, watching the quarterly bottom-line, thinking about the icebergs (if at all) only on their downtime.
No one's at the helm.
(No one?)
Inter (qua) lude
There's some pretty words in this screed, glowing turns of phrase, deft rhetorical splash. But it's glossing the garish Real.
Let's try this again.
Things look bad. We're at a serious juncture.
It may be true that if we globally reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050 that the worst of climate disruption will be avoided. But what possible set of factors could orchestrate human society to make such a change? We can make up all kinds of possible technical or political fixes. but which of them propose a likely material process by which such fixes would actually be implemented by the system we inhabit, with its many self-reinforcing feedback loops, self-reinforcing hopeless growth?
Take a breath, here.
Look out the window -- or better, a walk in the wind. Study your soul. Can you feel it? The grim taste of despair?
And yet, despite it all, coordinated moments of action do happen. Arab Spring. Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. What triggers sudden proto-insurrections, seemingly out of nowhere? Of course there's long years of organizing behind them -- but why do some explode, when other campaigns and movements at least as "analytically correct" fizzle and pop?
Complexity incarnate
Perhaps feeling futility is a first step towards understanding social systems as too complicated, too complex for us to reliably predict the large-scale impacts of our actions, especially in the context of deep change.
The language,
even ontology,
of "complex systems" has been mobilized
to understand this disconnect.
Sometimes it is a quietist exercise.
But it has also been used,
beautifully and persuasively,
to suggest creative, collaborative modes of action.
To over-simplify complexity: systems with enough interacting parts, can develop large-scale, persistent patterns, in which change can only be perceived and predicted when considered as a whole.
Yet if lower-level actions cannot predictably translate to higher-level changes, if strongly emergent patterns are properly autonomous from everything that happens lower down -- where we live, die, and act -- isn't it properly hopeless to try to do anything with the goal of making social change?
The inverse is a certain defiance. Fie upon the pluralistic unknowable! We will ourselves as participant in a universal telos, so that in the Event that it comes we will have been its progenitors! We cannot know what actions will cause liberation, so we choose to believe instead.
There is something important about this way of being wrong. Though our distaste for post-Pauline universalizing Eurocentrism is stark, it embodies a truth about the moment: it is not crucial that we "correctly" analyze the world, in order to win.
To put it another way:
at the emergent level of whole social systems,
what matters about humans
are the ways they function materially --
that is, the ways our daily interactions
resonate with large-scale patterns (social relations) --
and evolve.
Ideologies matter because
they are one of the ways those social relations are structured.
An "incorrect" ideology,
in the sense that its ideas about what's going on
do not map isomorphically with stable patterns of the system,
may nonetheless be profoundly effective
at destabilizing the status quo --
or reinforcing it.
This seems incoherent. But what is (already) incoherent, is our familiar idea of truth. Some of us have tended to think something is "true" if it maps the world, and true ideas help us act more effectively. But in an unmappably complex world, this idea falls apart -- it becomes "false". A more meaningful truth measures the success or vitality of ideas that articulate parts of the world through us in ways that persist over time.
That evolve successfully.
Is this Stalinism? It's what makes sense of Zizek's revival.
But the true-as-mighty is not the true-as-good.
This is empire: a vast social technology articulating parts of the world through us, through our theoretics and technics and not least our bodies, the blood & sweat & tears of disciplined ardor. It has evolved successfully. This is empire's truth: the growth of more and more (politically, economically, materially) effective assemblages of such interconnected artifice. Theory is mechanism.
Political organization to smash this empire, to transform it, has typically taken the form of mass organizing. The idea is to unify, to link whatever it is that makes us the same, and push in a single powerful direction. Sometimes organizers have been successful at mobilizing "masses" -- huge numbers of people subordinating their differences to a common cause -- especially when the engines of capital make a single group or body too obviously the agent of the many modes of oppression that keep the pistons purring.
True: more often, we organizers sound like grating polyannas or cynical crypto-fascists selling tired slogans and pointless political theater. Micro-factions duke it out, scenesters ice out newbies, and burn-out rules.
But even in the best case scenarios, do our mass movements play out as we hoped? Civil rights, and racism persists more subtly and powerfully than ever. Union victories suborned by war and labor aristocracy. Nixon passed the Clean Air Act, the ESA, and NEPA, for heavens' sake!
Not to mention the re-emergence of bureaucratized class structures in the "state capitalism" of the revolutionary communist regimes.
When the tight power of whatever-it-is that binds a mass movement together relaxes, the complex web of interactions recapitulates the living problematic in new and unpredictable ways.
Thus: "One no!" -- the people have had enough with what is!
But also: "Many yeses!" -- the moment the fever-pitch of resistance is released, our differences resurface, we become a cacophony, a thousand flowers.
How can this be a recipe for real-politikal revolution?
It can't,
as we've conceived it.
Mass organizing simplifies the problem,
to find one structural contradiction
and one lever of power
to change everything.
This can work to make reforms -- but the underlying complex system remains.
Be it resolved: to change such systems profoundly -- kill them, supersede them -- no longer may we simply seek the key among the component parts; we must engage the whole. We must engage the whole of patriarchal capitalist white supremacist empire; we must engage at the same level of wholes, or our interventions will be washed out in the self-regulation of homeostasis.
How can we, mere humans, ever hope this?
Believe!
Complex systems in crisis cannot be understood, predicted, manipulated from below. What is the best analogy? How can liver cells in your body know (or influence) your actions?
But you are not inexplicable, impossible, insane. Another human can negotiate with you, sympathize, inspire. Your liver cells can't make you hear them -- but your best friend can.
If the empire is some kind of vast leviathan, how can we negotiate with it -- or make it die?
Imagine the familiar word "belief" this way:
"To believe is to participate in a larger, complex system."
Belief, seen one way, is a word for what it feels like, when we commit to practices that weave us into larger systems.
Belief, seen another way, is a word for the material reality of the social relations thus made.
Thus we believe in science, weaving us with technology into cyborgs. We believe in capitalism, weaving us with money into engines of growth. With luck, courage, and grace, we believe in revolution, weaving us with movement into liberation.
Thus we (can) become modulated and correlated by the maintenance of that higher-order system through which emerges unforeseeable possibility.
This is the wisdom to hear beyond Zizek and Badiou.
Belief is not a binary switch, rather a process of increasing alignment, higher fidelity participation with the believed-in larger being. Belief can involve ideas, can involve myths and stories and assertions, but these are instrumental at best. They are tools, technologies, whose meaning is measured by how they cultivate new powers of direct action. Belief isn't defined by the ideas you accept or deny. You believe in the (living) god, the whole. Believing, you become newly related. True belief means material relation.
And there is not just one god.
We are calling the empire a god. Is this strange? The gods and spirits of yore, are they not ways of talking about -- talking to -- the complexity of systems?
We are calling the empire a god -- maybe a demigod, demonic, half-conscious and bloated and blind, conducting a mammonic chorus of fallen angels -- and saying that it is not the only social god, the only complex coherence inhabiting the patterns of human peoples.
Even here, even now, other gods might be going to have been born from the fecund failures of industrial enlightenment.
Other gods: other ways of organizing social life. Other gods are always already all around us: the great social lives of ecosystems, of webbed patchwork mycelial microbial biomats of metabolic spirit. Humans have always already been made of these, also. This is what it has meant to honor the old gods. And always, new gods have arisen. Life is creative; despite our superstitions, we are alive. New gods, new ways of liaising psyche and sociality.
New worlds in birth.
Revolutions are god-struggle.
This has nothing to do with what we think about them. Whether they involve "religion" or (pretend) they don't.
It's just the most sensible perspective. The best way to mobilize our neurology to sense what's happening. And, perhaps, to act.
An example.
Social systems,
and the entire more-than-human world in whose fate we perforce participate,
these are complex,
and thus emergent dynamics
unknowable by our measly human brains:
yes.
But not completely!
Of course there are predictable aspects of the system,
as well as unpredictable ones
(whether unpredictable in practice or absolutely hardly matters).
What is the balance?
How do they interact?
Is our only hope to somehow smash the edifice of empire so that smaller local entanglements more amenable to individual human engagement can once more thrive? Smaller gods, the better to propitiate them -- and make them humble in the face of the elder gods of all-Earth?
Or can the overarching whole be transmuted from deviltry to divinity by unknowable grace? The networked mind of human nous singing blessed material praise to the goddess-our-mother-in-whom-we-become?
The god of small things and the goddess of the Great Turning are distinct. Are they at war?
Who should be your god?
How do you do decide, discern?
We think we are rational, in this; at our best, we are not.
Here's what this means.
As it is, it is clear.
The vast bulk of us,
in the overwhelming mass of our lives,
are faithful devotees
of the animating pantheon of capitalism.
Perhaps all the more effectively
for our rational incapacity
to believe our belief,
we ritually work in the service of profit,
consume in the service of admen,
breed in the service of the image of sex.
This is well-covered ground.
Not everyone. Not all the time.
For many of us, our minds seek something other than servitude. We (think we) believe in freedom, perhaps, or justice: communism, anarchism, deep ecology. And maybe we begin to enact these ideas. Best of all, perhaps the ideas arise as ways to communicate practices and experiences that have already begun to organize our souls; in this way our belief sparks to life!
But for most of us, most of our lives, the 40 hours fighting off boss-think, the psychoactive strobe of media saturation, the perpetual struggle just to be alive: most of our lives are in active or reactive thrall to the animation of Capital.
So: to assess our political efficacy we cannot simply examine our intentions, nor the deterministic mechanisms of the ancien regime, nor any analytical categories at all.
Rather, reviewing our history with these new (3-D?) glasses we may discover music (sometimes) more important than messaging in motivating collective action, passion and sacrifice better predictors than correctness, and outcomes (good and ill) often far afield from goals. We may see the ghostly outlines of spiritual (higher-order) patterns at play that structure us in ways unlooked for.
This god-war is thus a confused and confusing mess: when are we actually contributing to the soul of revolutionary change? What's the relation between the things we think, the things we do, and the unpredictable impacts they have? And which larger patterns or changes in the social systems are actually growing through the meager offering of soul that is the most we can give?
We need help.
"Science" is the story that trained us most of all to think in terms of levers, mechanisms, and materialist determinisms.
Now science may be opening to mystery at its core. As quantum behaviors are demonstrated in larger and closer contexts; as living systems are observed to amplify quantum entanglement in warm, wet regimes "known" ten years ago to be impossible; as spooky action at a distance becomes commonplace -- the domain of properly materialist politics zooms out.
If it's not just the classical complexities that delink political economies from human-scale actions, but system-wide quantum coherences, then perhaps the human body may be subtly attuned to signals that allow us to assess the spiritual battles raging among and beyond us, and seek our allies, accomplices.
Maybe there are ways to hear the voices of gods -- and to choose our entanglements.
This is not an argument. It is an opening. It is a way, a tactic (cf. elsewhere) to perhaps shake loose the superstitions that make us mostly blind to the unpredictable, the nonlinear, the alive.
(Intellectual) revolutionaries have gotten used to imagining that analysts and theoreticians were our most reliable guides. But in many places and times -- maybe more than we realize -- it's other ways of relating possibility that have better motivated and cultivated the revolutionary spirit.
Poets more than pundits. Prophets, most of all.
These are exceptional people that cultivate the ability to intuit the patterns of the whole, to invoke the small changes that unpredictably arise into movements, insurrections, Events.
Most of us are unexceptional. As humans we have been conditioned to be agents of empire, cogs in capitalism. Trained to be insensitive to magic. Systematically disenchanted by a sadistic regimen of poisoned fairy tales ("Santa is real!" snigger) and poisonous fairies ("Santa is real!" cha-ching!).
This is a failed program - some of us still have ears to hear. But even half-success leaves us with but vestigial aptitude for spiritual discernment.
The skills of listening, of opening to the movement of omens, the signals of our bodies, the deep journeys that bring home information from our allies, the ones we discover on our side.
This is a sobering, daunting business with the highest of stakes.
Does this mean that thinking is dead? No need for rationality, for theory, for struggling over truth?
No. But perhaps it helps us recognize that thinking great complex structures of thoughts has always already been a bit post facto. A making sense of what has arisen in us, for other reasons, by other means. This does not make it pointless, but places it within the tools that help us link together, share with our descendants: relate.
Thinking is a way some of us love.
Prophets, then. But actually existing prophets have been dangerous -- relying on any single individual amplifies human frailties ... But we've covered that already. Let's assume this much is clear: we wish no titanic great men, this time.
So if we are not just to follow the next guru, what are the ways to cultivate amidst each of us a properly political sensitivity to the subtle wholes, the fey currents that tear society asunder?
We may need to ask for help from those with more experience.
Let us ask for help.
This is one way how.
A world in which many worlds fit
What is our strategy? Looking around, we see us offer ourselves to a double move:
We participate in stoking the "heat" of a system oscillating far from equilibrium, encouraging the kinds of micropolitical agitation that seem likely to amplify the disruption of homeostatic self-regulation, to tip it over the edge into uncertainty. This is the value of running from action to action, of seeking confrontation to make the iron fist more visible, of flooding the streets and the jails in an endless boat-rocking amplification.
But where does this go?
We cultivate the growth of new gods, new spirits of social being, that parasitically invade the existing relations among workers crafting their spaces of affective reclaiming and therapeutic community. This is the power of growing communities, cross-pollinating the vast worlds of resistance and disconnection, seeing within these identities possibilities-to-become.
If and as the overheated empire melts down and comes apart, it is new gods that can reanimate the pieces, become new paradigms of power.
So: who can help us?
Who has more experience in long-term group-forms that tend the spiritual sensitivity to wisely choose our allegiances in the wars of the gods?
Many of us turn to indigenous allies.
In the last two decades -- since the Zapatistas, the Oaxacan commune, and other more locally-known struggles -- fully-colonized (and/or settler) radicals have become more and more comfortable engaging native people(s) as elder allies offering wisdom about how to navigate the confusion of the global moment.
The invitation within this Note is: let's take this much more seriously than we've heretofore known how. Let's not just support "their" struggles or learn abstracted elements of political practice, but discover again through relationships and experiences our collective ability to participate responsibly in spirit.
What can this really mean?
What can this really mean, if we are not to vulgarly appropriate others' cultures?
For example, we are not going to be adopted into some other people's tribe -- most of us are not. But if we remain just weekend warriors, then whatever bits of our lives we give to our chosen spirits are counteracted by the great tide of our participation in day-to-day empire. Faith is a transformative process. It takes all of us, and we are only all of ourselves in groups.
Let us participate, not in religion-tacked-on-the-side, not in politics-at-protests, not just any one bit here or there, but in an integrated psycho-social system that reproduces us as people in ways that craft us into the body of the goddesses we hear calling us in the voices of our descendants.
Let us become a people. (Well, peoples.)
Nationalisms have been concocting identities in reaction to the dissolution of empire, and in the service of political violence, for 200 years. They are too much mirrors of the dissolving, reconstituting empire to be god-stuff enough.
We need wise, experienced help, human and more-than-human, to discern the wholly-other invocations that may support social soulcraft that is holistic and politically economic without becoming insular and distracted by who we're not.
Becoming peoples against, beyond, and without nationalism is a world in which many worlds fit.
A world where many worlds fit requires double consciousness --
a participation, a belief in a growing spirit-whole that makes a people-that-makes-us-people at human scale; and
a diplomacy, a relationality between groupings that affirms that our common allegiance is to prevent the emergence of fascism in or between us.
A world of many worlds: as things change more quickly, the system of our revolutionary ecology becomes more agile.
Rather than casting about for a better approach at random; rather than always creating new patterns of social relations from scratch; we can do like wildness does -- alternatives that struggled in obscurity amid the old conditions, can thrive and grow shining and attractive in the new.
In this way, we see our own groups' interest served through the well-being of others, even marginal others, even if they "disagree" with us, even if they seem poorly adapted to the moment.
How might we cultivate our relationships to become the ancestors of this kind of world?
You want action items?
We need help, and some of those that have the most experience with the diversity of ways of honing human holisms are anthropologists.
(Yes. A dirty word in many circles, for good reason. We are speaking, of course, of the anthropologist underground, the feral few that go native, fight the power, race traitor.)
Let us talk to, listen to, connect with such ethnographers, as mediums translating enspirited worlds as yet beyond our ken.
Perhaps, wisely seduced, we can grow our relations from fragments into a corps diplomatique.
Action items?
Christians --
not just the easy progressive ones,
but the red state
born again with the good news
of your relationship with Jesus ones --
are on to something.
Gods change --
and who now possesses the mystical body of Christ,
that once-human prophet mortifying the moneychangers and magnifying Magdalene?
Is it not a spiritual warfare we are called to -- and are not some of our deepest (potential) allies struggling within parishes and poorhouses to respond to that ancient angelic call:
"Come out of empire, my people."
And if indeed the gamers and the fankids are (tendentially) reclaiming the stuff of our souls, if the preponderance of misfits and drop-outs in the ballyhooed halls of faddish crowd may be rehabilitated as the raw materials of a new labor regime, a spiritual productivity pushing capital (perhaps) this time to bursting -- if this, indeed, then perhaps even our political scenes can be redeemed as well.
Perhaps we can find the ways to honor our fractionalizations and friend-networks as appropriate scales to begin to become ancestors of diverging peoples-of-many-worlds. Perhaps we can recognize that the spirits that weave us separately can also be invoked together, accompliced if not united. Perhaps, in fact, we can learn to get along, at war.
Is this even remotely enough?
We listen to the spirits in the wind, on the mountain, the roar of the sea and bright the hawk's gyre across the darkling sky.
We hear the Great Spell.
We open to the allies of the wild: may they enter through the bodies mystic and material of our ceremonially-emerging political economies: may they enter into, and transform our world.
So mote it be.