Linger A While

Part IV of the Tragedy

Previously: The People and the Earth, Part III of the Tragedy

The projects of the Faustian 20th century have been accomplished beyond the wildest dreams of their Renaissance forebears, yet in forms that act directly against their stated intentions. In constructing a universal consciousness in an externalized form, as the internet, Faustian civilization has crafted a world which no longer works to cultivate an infinitely striving character in the human organism but instead a weak self which surrenders to an outer striving as the greater whole. The language of this willingly alienated world no longer interprets or represents—it is pure content, pure immediacy, the abolition of mediation through a coded (and thus commanded) reality. But the mastery of experience in externalized form, in the total artwork of Content, has only given way to universal blindness, mediocrity, and boredom. All are mere appendages of a single system, which shimmers through them by way of algorithmically eliciting well-trained, predictable, coded responses to stimuli. The availability of universal knowledge, taking the form of monopoly property, has produced universal ignorance. Universal experience, taking the form of the sensory terrorism of advertising, has led to universal indifference. Every vein has become exhausted. Western-Faustian civilization has entered an era of decadence from which it is unlikely to recover from without mutating beyond recognition.

“Linger a while” sounds out as a clarion call to every soul, but only the most pathetic of sentimental wretches reply: “you are so fair!”¹ The Faustian tale has reconfigured itself from a story of collective liberation into a siren song beckoning us to a self-willed annihilation. We will our own surrender to the powers which overtake us, thinking that we can have a share of strength and immortality by identifying with them. We hope for the endless prolongation of capitalism, even if we verbally denounce it, because the entire wealth of our imperialist society has come to depend on speculative investments that gamble on the infinite repetition of capital’s circuits into eternity. The myth of “infinite progress,” of the infinite advancement of technological mastery of nature and accumulation of wealth, has turned out to be an Ideology of “infinite regression.”² The territory of our self, which we own by possessing the citizen’s right to the body as property, has turned out to be an empty prison cell. It can only become a world through an imperialistic expansionism which aims to possess as many things as possible.

Mephistopheles has the right to take Faust’s soul when he lingers. While the imperialists desperately expand to keep hold of their souls—as if a breathing advertisement could even be said to be ensouled—the consumers damn their souls every day through voluntary dissolution and distraction. The one wants to own all, to command everything, the other wants to flee from all, to forget everything. Those who do not let go, fearing that they will be dragged with the flooding tide into the abyss, feel the rot growing within themselves. Inner life is where the contradiction necessary for the political necessarily begins in a world that has homogenized the dependency of all on the outer order. The inner emptiness strives to be with people, to feel the possibility of the moment, to have the freedom to waste time without wasting life, and to reflect on the deepest questions of life. The free spirit today feels with others and acts against the whole rather than feeling against others and acting with the whole.

At the turn of the millennium, after the fall of the counter-civilization that Faustian Marxists had constructed, communists searched for a new language for the surviving forces of revolution. Antonio Negri, Italian veteran of operaismo, and Michael Hardt, autonomist philosopher, closely collaborated to work out such a project. It was finally published as Empire (2000). The authors took inspiration from the viable commercialization of information technology and the rise of the internet as a means of social struggle after 1994 saw the rise of international networks of solidarity with the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. The New Left’s pluralization of the Faustian subject from a singular collective worker into a democratic multitude seemed to have heralded a new meaning for the hope of infinitely striving for a total knowledge and multifaceted personality. The old political orders inherited from the 20th century appeared as the crystallized husks of the past imposing dead forms on a vitally dynamic substance.

In the 1960s, Mario Tronti described the proletariat as an absolutely creative subject towards which capital’s behavior is merely reactive and appropriative. By the millennium, Negri and Hardt began to reformulate this claim into a radically democratic vision in which “labor is the productive activity of a general intellect and a general body outside measure,” and Tronti’s vision of an infinitely active proletariat took new form in the claim that labor “appears simply as the power to act, which is at once singular and universal: singular insofar as labor has become the exclusive domain of the brain and body of the multitude; and universal insofar as the desire that the multitude expresses in the movement from the virtual to the possible is constantly constituted as a common thing.”³ Negri and Hardt contrasted the creative and active multitude, the very body of society itself, to the appropriative order of Empire, which attempts to limit the multitude into a controllable and homogenous “people” and its territory. Negri and Hardt believed that the multitude, as the truly productive force of the commons, would ultimately prevail, because the Empire of the New World Order that “blocks this power to act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers of labor and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects. The power to act is constituted by labor, intelligence, passion, and affect in one common place.”⁴

The terrain for this struggle was the accomplished Faustian institution of the social network, Negri and Hardt believed. With the proliferation of the internet, the “production of commodities tends to be accomplished entirely through language, where by language we mean machines of intelligence that are continuously renovated by the affects and subjective passions.”⁵ Through this shift, the general intellect of humanity is elevated into the primary productive force of society. In this theoretical claim, Negri and Hardt preserved much of the arrogance of Georg Lukács and other Faustian Marxists that the domination of unconscious nature by consciousness could be accomplished, but only if this rational consciousness was made accessible to everyone. The elder Lukács had looked to education as a method to universalize Faustianism, while Negri and Hardt looked to the common places of the social network. In truth, the “immaterial labor” of the internet continues to depend on infrastructure which is maintained by the same slavishly attentive, agonizingly corporeal toil of class society’s millennia. The internet, universalizable as it is, still has only a partial role in this capitalist society’s global circuits of capital—as a kind of advertising. And as digital advertising, which privatizes information into exchangeable data through the social media platform, it is an institutional form of Ideology. The platform-monopolized internet serves as the perfect host for speculation on the future value-production sustained in and through this Ideology. In the 2020s, cryptocurrencies and Large Language Models (LLMs) have proliferated as means of generating Content and extracting attention from its consumers. Walter Benjamin noted a century ago that capitalism “is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation.”⁶ In an age where monopoly capitalists have knowingly doomed their own civilization to ecological ruin by endlessly expanding extractive and carbon dioxide-emitting industries, this thesis of irrational devotion is posited immediately in the everyday lives of all. Capitalist religion today is a faith of buzzing air and bursts of fire scorching the earth.

We nevertheless desire capitalism because we desire what it has to offer. We do not give serious consideration to how things could be otherwise because it seems so much less real than all of the things that are on offer in front of us, immediately ready-to-hand. We want to find ourselves in it, everywhere, to run into the embrace of the commodity and be told who we are by an advertisement that we pretend is for us and only for us. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described such an identification as part of the “mirror stage,” entailing the assumption of a “specular image[...] in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”⁷ Lacan believed that this stage was characteristic of early childhood, before a child adopts a sense of a self before the enigma of a big-O Other in the question: “What does the Other want of me?”⁸ The feeling of lack before the Other, the desire for the Other’s desire, the need for recognition are all characteristic of Lacan’s notion of a maturation in which someone grows up within the Oedipal triad of the subject—Mommy, Daddy, and Me.

This Oedipal nuclear family is not simply a one-dimensional instrument of subjectivation, but contains other potentials which reach out beyond it. Object relations theorist Melanie Klein believed that this triad could furthermore prove that the ego’s “torturing and perilous dependence on its loved-objects drives the ego to find freedom.”⁹ The child must pass “from a partial object-relation,” especially with their mother’s breast they feed from, “to the relation to a complete object,” which brings the ego to “a new position, which forms the foundation of the situation called the loss of the loved object. Not until the object is loved as a whole can its loss be felt as a whole.”¹⁰ The relationship between a multiplicity of partial-objects comes to constitute an entire world for the subject as they become painfully aware that there is more to life than that which immediately faces them. They must overcome immediate dependency in order to come to an awareness that the field of their life could be so much more, that Mommy, Daddy, and Me only constitute one possible world. The personality’s maturation is premised on its ability to relate actively and consciously with its relations as it finds them, and as it doesn’t find them in recognized absences. Reflexively relating to one’s relations is the seed for the freedom of the independent yet mutualistic adult.

BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, however, posited in 1996 that there was a technique to arrest thought at the basic “mirror stage” and exploit the infinite repetition of it through the desire for recognition itself. The flexible form of “consumer capitalism,” which produces an almost infinite variety of consumer products with a corresponding “increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed,” therefore “necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities” since “advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, and “the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism.”¹¹ The acceleration of the tempo of life “encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.”¹² For example, an “essentially schizo person can have a quick ego formation, and buy a new wardrobe to compliment his or her new identity. This identity must be quickly forsaken as styles change, and contradictory media images barrage the individual’s psyche. The person becomes schizo again, prepared for another round of Lacanian identification and catalogue shopping.”¹³ Such a type of person has become normal with the rise of a social structure which relies on them to reproduce itself. This age of capitalism “needs subjects who continually reenact the infantile drama of mirror stage identifications,” who “must oscillate quickly between schizophrenic consciousness and idealized ego formations.”¹⁴ With the 2006 founding of BuzzFeed, Peretti realized a viable model of business on the basis of endlessly exploiting the attention of such a person on a single platform. The platform uses listicles, clickbait, personality quizzes, and other techniques to constantly engage the user’s striving for the enjoyment of wearing ready-made identities as if they were new shoes or a stick of gum.

The arrested development of such a subject, whose ability to grow into a maturely self-reflective personal history withers away, also signifies the simplification of their inner life into the basic dilemma of modern civilization. It is accomplished in such a way that the dilemma is not immediately cognizable to this subject as a social dilemma by the very fact of its obviousness. They must decide between either embracing their ownership of themselves, treating their property however they wish and turning away from the outer world into the inner sanctum, or turning themselves over to the greater power and certainty of the Big Other in hope of escaping the constant insufficiency of their inner life. Both solutions, taken to the logical extremes characteristic of precarious desperation, can drive them to cling to identification up to the point of self-destruction. A threatened sense of self, a self determined from outside, might be preserved from manipulation through an act that proves free self-determination—suicide. On the other hand, giving oneself over to a cause easily becomes a demand to sacrifice the life of the self and others in the name of the higher reality. Both tendencies commonly manifest in an increasingly prominent figure of the 21st century: the mass shooter. Time and time again, journalistic investigations reveal mass shooters as isolated, radicalized people, who the mass media converts into a spectacle through what is recognizable and therefore scandalous in them. The power of spectacle is not only premised on the powerlessness of the spectator towards the central event, but on the spectators’ participation in the spectacular event itself through their constant reaction to it as if it was always new.

The Ideology of hyper-consumerism and flexible production demands that every subject do everything as if they were free from the weight of history, choosing a destiny and identity only because it is truly their own. In this constant demand for performing maximum authenticity, people repeatedly hit their limits in exhaustion. They cannot admit this exhaustion as a negation of the self, insofar as it is Ideologically unthinkable. Some demand that the limitation of the body must be infinitely pushed, even to the point of self-destruction, in the name of liberating the creative power of work from all inner constraints. Others turn to self-care, believing that exhaustion can serve as an opportunity to turn inward and focus all efforts on the needs of the consumerist self over those of the toiling self. The most aggressive countertendency to exhaustion is resentment. Unable to find a single celebrity-face to blame with certainty for the precariousness of modern life, the resentful tend to turn to a method of scapegoating foreign masses to satisfy their need to attack and purge what they feel as a weighty burden on their hearts. Many of these resentful weaklings come together in a public political drive against foreign bodies, promoting revived ideologies of biological racism and indulging in the fantasy of a ‘heroic’ consumerist imperialism.

The precarious self preserves its durability by losing its awareness that its inner life is only a small, weak, mortal, and incomplete world. It must actively forget its finitude through perpetual distraction. Memory, as a reflective relationship between thought and historical images, must be swallowed up into the mythic quality of the images themselves. They must lose their temporality, which is their mortality, and be elevated through infinitely repeated circulation as memes into absolute, immortal, eternal symbols. The subject believes they encounter immortality in these mythical symbols. They embody a power which they may then either surrender themselves to in order to be absorbed into a greater whole or try to command for themselves in order to convert their inner life into an empire of the will through the manipulation of the masses.

The monopoly capitalists who attempt to massify society at the same time as enclosing its forces under the commanding plans of capitalists and technocrats plays at a dangerous game. The modern masses, as Benjamin wrote, desire “to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”¹⁵ The proprietary limitation imposed on the reproduction of imagery by copyright cannot establish control over the mimetic impulse of the masses. Even the introduction of LLMs only accelerates this process beyond anyone’s control. The modern bourgeoisie, having decayed into mere legal owners and celebrities who more often impede the production process than assist in its management, have not done well in remembering the lessons that were drilled by history into the skulls of their forefathers. The Faustian who agrees to sell their soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for his obligation to “do your will as if my will,/ Every wish of yours fulfill,” ends up as nothing more than a slave of hell’s forces.¹⁶ Fascism, seeking a compromise which both capital and labor can agree to, offers the distracted and absent-minded masses “the introduction of aesthetics into political life” in the sadistic ritual of playfully sacrificing strangers in a compensation for the ban on transforming property relations.¹⁷

The rise of the mythic empire of the masses has not come without its prophetic warnings. Conservative Revolutionary Oswald Spengler predicted in 1922 that the “Non-Estate” of democratic mass politics would fracture “into its natural interest-groups[...] Neither the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery is made that it is only a form, it has already become a mark and shadow.”¹⁸ Spengler believed that this would mark the beginning of a new heroic age as imperialist Caesars rose to power on the backs of the masses with promises of imperialist bread and circuses. Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wrote in the same year as Spengler that, rather, this crisis of Western civilization also marks the possibility of rebirth. In light of the Russian Revolution, Mariátegui argued that “Europe is presented as the continent of the maximum palingenesis.”¹⁹ Spengler and Mariátegui represented two alternatives for the social destiny of dictatorship: class society against the revolutionary proletariat, monopoly against democracy, capitalism against communism.

After a century of not-quite-total revolutions which seemed to have accomplished little more than paving the way for national-populism and consumerism, the commentators on Faustian civilization’s decline grew more skeptical. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, writing on the eve of the Eastern Bloc’s collapse in 1989, questioned the traditional Marxist explanation that revolution fails to erupt from ripe conditions due to the lies of false consciousness, and that the truth of revolutionary science would set people free. Žižek argued that rather than a true reality of human subjects existing ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ false consciousness, modern Ideology reveals that Ideology in general “is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by false consciousness.”²⁰ Money itself is the manifestation of the human subject’s impotence in the face of conditions for the production and reproduction of their life, which are owned and commanded by another. Whether people know what they are doing or not is not the question: “What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy.”²¹ The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to consummate the ideological fantasy that there is no alternative, and that things simply are how they are. Operaista veteran Mario Tronti wrote in 1998 that this Ideology of resignation, this giving up of partisanship and political utopias, proved that “the death of communism concludes the decline of the West.”²² The communist palingenesis, reinforcing the dependent party-state rather than sustaining the world revolution, ultimately failed to overcome the long durational decline of Faustian civilization.

The decline of the party-form and of political partisanship was registered, triumphally or melancholically, as the end of history. But the end of history has had its discontents. “What happened?” is the constant question plaguing those who still remember the 20th century. Numerous Marxists have turned on the specter of “Western Marxism” as the image of defeat, believing that the Left Opposition and New Left flight from the Faustian task of infinite centralization into fantasies of multiplicity and statelessness made them responsible in no small part for the destruction of the communist movement. Hope survived in the East, where the gigantism of “actually existing socialist” states adapted their independence struggles to the centralist management of capital according to a plan. Italian Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo wrote in 2017 that “two Marxisms are delineated according to two different temporalities. The future in action and the beginning of the near future for Eastern Marxism; the more advanced stage of the near future and the remote and utopian futures for Western Marxism.”²³ In the Faustian renewal of youth realized by the Communists for China’s age-old civilization, Marxism gained “momentum from the struggle for liberation from colonial domination, for the development of the productive forces to make possible economic and technological independence,” resulting first of all in the concretization of its messianic utopianism to the conquest of independence, and “second, [communism’s] realization was delegated to a very long historical process in which social emancipation could not be disengaged from national emancipation.”²⁴ The Faustian soul, Losurdo and other decolonial Marxist-Leninists believe, was only torn to pieces by the Legions of Hell in the West, while it cohabitates with the democratic republican Helen among the freedpeople struggling for self-mastery in the East. In this vision, the mastery of the cosmos becomes only a means for reinforcing a multipolar moral fraternity against the monopolistic order of Empire. Socialism is reduced to whatever serves anti-colonial liberation, generously defined to include the legal regulation of capital, while “Western Marxism” is whatever betrays that imperative by aligning (intentionally or unintentionally) with decadent Empire. A revolutionary’s attention must be entirely occupied with the totality of the terrain at hand, always deciding on responsibility to the cause over distraction from blind loyalty. Losurdo and others abandon the communist ideal, seeing in it only a regulative ideal that assists in the centralization of all into a singular general will. These decolonial Marxist-Leninists insist on political partisanship as an end in itself with no utopian horizons.

In this concept of Marxism, the struggle of the law of the common good for hegemony continues, but it loses its sense of messianic anticipation for a free society. Losurdo even went so far as condemning the classical Marxist thesis of the “withering away of the state,” arguing that the fraternal anti-colonial “struggle for recognition” in an independent state constituted an abrogation of this utopian goal, and that what “inspired the revolution of colonial peoples was not the password of a ‘state that is withering away’ but a state that is being built.”²⁵ This gesture collapses anti-colonial struggle into the singularity of the bureaucratic state machinery, threatening to abolish politics by elevating the principle of administering the nation above all inner contradiction. Losurdo and others actively ignore the fact that this very notion inspired the Cultural Revolutionary struggles of Chinese partisan workers for a thoroughgoing independence to be realized against the “capitalist roader” technocracy of intellectual laborers. That is to say nothing of the other social revolutionary struggles against urban technocracy within the revolutionary processes of Mexico, Algeria, or Iran. Losurdo and other 21st century Marxist-Leninists reaffirm the position of the party as the executive brain and strategic arms of the operation, and the masses as its passionate heart and commanded body.

Nationalism and technocracy deaden anti-colonial revolutionary struggle by attempting to place the totalizing law of the common good over the political contradiction of class struggle. These Marxist-Leninists elevate the republic over the mass of people, the generality of “the people” over the plural multitude, and the common good of all over each. Another sense of decolonization than this has emanated from an indigenous struggle against the Mexican developmentalist party-state. The Zapatistas, who have sustained an autonomous government in rebellion against the state since 1994, acknowledge that capitalism “seeks the destruction of a particular territory in order to rebuild it. More precisely: it disorganizes it so as to reorder it. Yes, capitalism provokes chaos and feeds off of it.”²⁶ This is the threat that modern Marxist-Leninists invoke so as to make organization and independence ends in themselves. The Zapatistas, on the other hand, look more closely and reaffirm the 20th century discovery that what “terrifies the system is the perseverance of rebellion and resistance from below.”²⁷ Accordingly, the Zapatistas subordinate the law of the common good to the principle of a nascent association of free people, in which “the people rule and the government obeys.”²⁸ This method of struggle is what can truly confront the law of free enterprise and the disorganizing power of capital, which depends on people surrendering and assimilating to the whole. Nationalist socialism attempts to delineate two wholes within the global totality, the enslaver nations and the enslaved nations, in order to affirm the law of the common good among the anti-enslaver nations as that of universal fraternity. But this trains people in a form of identification with the whole which is easily captured to the reproduction of capital, especially insofar as that capital is managed or owned by the national state and is therefore ‘their own.’ Self-organization in the sense of mere formal independence subverts autonomous politics by instrumentalizing it, leaving it as a tool which can be exchanged between owners and commanders.

The two methods of command must be put into the light of that all-assimilating, globalizing externality which seems to absorb practically anything and everything: the internet. The internet, by giving the sense that the entire world has been organized into a self-moving catalogue of information, tends to reinforce paranoid thought-patterns. As monopolistic platforms have become the dominant organizational form of the internet, it is as if the user has been sealed into a world that is another’s making, and yet their personal desire for and self-attachment to this otherworld leaves them no path out of it. Long before moving to Shanghai and giving up on his late project of “hyper-racism,” philosopher Nick Land wrote in a 1992 essay that cybernetics embody the Faustian fantasy not only as an external form but as the alienating power of “desiring production, the impersonal pilot of history.”²⁹ As if predicting the future course of the world, Land claimed that “technics is increasingly thinking about itself,” that “we are doing things before they make sense,” and that the Faustian Marxist fantasy of overcoming nature finally succumbs back into it, revealing it as “the space of concurrence, or unplanned synthesis, which is thus contrasted to the industrial sphere of telic predestination: that of divine creation or human work.”³⁰ Land and other accelerationists believe that this represents the emancipation of technics from the needfulness of the human organism, which has marked them as still-earthly for millennia, and their elevation to an unmanageable infinite exploration and mutating control which expands throughout the cosmos. Today, capitalists of Silicon Valley push this vision in the form of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) singularity which will abolish the dependency of capital on the hidden abode of production and elevate circulation into the closed system of an immortal and unlimited intellect.

The modern Faustians of China attempt to check this chaotic and destabilizing force through the central plan and the sovereign’s power to give a determinate form to public language by censoring its inner and outer limits. Classical Marxism-Leninism presented itself as a force against Ideology, the movement of a propertyless class which, for its lack of vested interest apart from the collective powers of human labor and knowledge, could reveal the world as it really is by progressively converting things from in-themselves to for-us. 21st century Marxism-Leninism has embraced its function as Ideology, subjectivating people in order to contain the creative-destructive productive forces into a manageable form as capital, exchangeable command over social labor and accumulable crystallizations of social wealth. In 1990, Gilles Deleuze delineated the two forms of power which have come to characterize the polarization of the 21st century: “The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”³¹ Deleuze predicted that the struggles of the world would increasingly become those for and against monopoly, though he only imagined an outcome with the society of control superseding the disciplinary law of the common good:

“The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the ‘soul’ of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.”³²

Deleuze’s prediction of cyclical revolts of the segregated debt peons against the control society comes true in the periodic eruptions of riots which are quickly forgotten by the world the moment they end. Some Marxists have taken this as a lesson that only the party-form and the law of the common good can sustain a struggle against capitalism, which today threatens to commit murder-suicide by exterminating the needful organism in the name of infinite accumulation. These Marxists look for salvation from outside, whether in the firmness of moral principle or in the imaginary future omnipotent mastery of Eastern developmentalist states over the global forces of production. They cannot accept what the writer Franz Kafka once said, that there is “hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us.”³³ If the only way out is through, then the only way through must take us further down the path of nihilism. In its institutional and ‘responsible’ form, the passively nihilistic “fuck it” attitude of today justifies the endless reinforcement of ecologically destructive petroleum industries, car culture, and the mass production of plastic articles of wasteful consumption as acceptable because they are necessary to sustain our way of life. But there is also the leap from the “fuck this” that we spit out while turning the wheel of this world anyways to the “fuck that” which takes on the risk of disattachment and leaps outward for something else, something better than the little heroin hits of enjoyment that tether us to this machinery that breaks our bones into powder. Through this act, we discover that although “the capitalist system is dominant,” it is “neither omnipresent nor immortal,” and cannot “impose its dominion evenly and without disruptions.”³⁴

We have to leave this world behind in an actively nihilistic Great Refusal in order to wander towards the yawning opening of the spiritual void at the center, the death (and promise of rebirth) within us. The passively nihilist System careens in flight from this emptiness towards the oblivion of a suffocated plastic silence. The space between the inner death and our inner selves is the impulse of something Other than us, something greater than our world which animates it with creative life. It is the freedom of the possibility of other possibilities, which we can only dive into with the cooperation of others. We revitalize the controlled life of routine with oppositional organization, locking arms with it in a struggle against the suffocating world preservers. While they have more guns, our advantage will be in our unpredictability, uncontrollability, unplannedness, our life as the living mask of their death, laughing in their faces and devouring them rather than watching from the corner of our eyes for the light of their recognition. Only by accomplishing the destruction of the destroyers will we begin to breathe free air, look around, and act to achieve the reorganization of everyday relationships away from the logic of property towards the power of free, cooperative, reciprocal activity. A militant opposition to the private command of social labor can only achieve hegemony by accomplishing the mutually beneficial organization and commonization of each and every productive power. This would mean demanding the responsibility to be irresponsible to the commanded world and to instead exercise the freedom to live dangerously.

There are no ready-made mass political subjects for this project. The decline and collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the classical worker’s movement. Movements against the commodification of life continue, though they only reach the precipice of the political “when these forms of resistance are widespread, collective practices, but it excludes these same acts if they are deemed to be isolated and sporadic individual acts.”³⁵ This is far more difficult in an age where the concentration of capital in the hands of multinational monopolies has been accompanied by a decentralization of production. It is more often debt which brings people together into a common condition of existence, but this is abstracted from the shared space of a factory or neighborhood into the code of their value (or lack thereof) to banks as the managers of the total social capital. This brings the problem of money to the center of socialist politics, since the decision making power of politics has become so severely limited by finance. Today, in the place of mass politics, we face the practically unchallenged victory of the economy in the form of money. Money has come to be understood as the place where politics and economics meet—a place once occupied, in a hazy and distant memory of world revolution, by the power of workers’ councils.

Money and Management

That wealth and power are conjoined twins is no esoteric secret of theory. Money’s emergence from ritual and myth, however, is less known. The character and function of money in any given community in which it plays a role is closely associated with the cosmology of that community’s world. The role of money shifts with the reorganization of the community and its cosmology. It is only after a long historical process that we have found ourselves in a world where the almighty dollar reigns over all.

In many localized, communalistic societies across the world, it is products which are not created by the community’s toil which serve as an imaginary measure of value—sea shells being a prominent example. Money takes on a variety of forms with a variety of functions and scopes, serving to measure and facilitate exchanges among community members in one form (jewelry or exotic products denoting a proprietary wealth, personality, and status beyond the undifferentiated commons alone), between the neighbors and strangers in another form (a shared currency, regulated by custom to delineate the inner and outer as the boundary is permeated), and between this world and other worlds in other forms (the sacrifice of animals, people, and other forms of productive wealth to the powers which supersede and sustain this world). Anthropologist Heinrich Schurtz believed that many of the circularly communitarian uses of wealth which the capitalist world dismisses as irrational, such as the derivation of authority from the moral debt incurred by gift-giving or the dedication of wealth to the dead and the superhuman, in fact serve as “barriers that counteract the unlimited accumulation of movable property,” subordinating wealth and even the mania of greed to the authority of the community and the sources of its power in their spiritual patrons.³⁶

But the power of the community among and over outsiders reinforces the tendency of wealth to become autonomized from the community, creating a social basis for a class authority premised on private property and proprietary command over communal labor. This initially takes the form of monarchies and imperial authorities, in which pharaohs and other authorities serve as the “face” of the community before the powers of the divine. The commanding “face” mediates between the community and the cosmos by ritualistically overseeing a growing priestly expert class’s management and organization of communal activities. The standardization of society’s activities in the division of labor, the appropriation of social wealth through tribute, and the management of that wealth by a technocratic class requires a greater abstraction of thought, a standardization of the world into something measurable and therefore manageable through a system of accounting. The distinctions between moneys according to the levels of society begins to be limited into a merely local practice by the generalization of cooperative labor into a large-scale productive force.³⁷

The money of this Leviathanic organism takes on more universal, fungible, divisible forms—thus the rise of metallic money. Reflecting on this form of money, the ancient Hellenic philosopher Heraclitus said: “There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and of gold for wares.”³⁸ Money becomes the stamp of the state, which unites the Many of the four corners and four elements of the world into the One of the orderly market square. Metallic money tends to grow from a means to hire mercenary forces or traffic in slaves into an imperial currency stamped with some symbol of authority, signifying its official recognition as a general measure rather than a subjective or situational thing to tinker with. Commerce is united, standardized, and taxed under the professional protection and regulation of state authority.

Money is increasingly abstracted from needs and reinforces the power of the state—yet it also exceeds its territory. Ancient coins were often re-stamped on shifting between empires to mark their change in sovereignty. The stamping of the material itself revealed the universality of the metal substance beyond the sovereigns. Currencies tend to decline with the collapse and dispersion of mega-polities, but the bullion remains as a universal equivalent of commerce mediating between subsistence communities. It is the substance of something that remains potentially universal. The penetration of money from the pores of society into its very nerves works to transform the entire society in its own image. Ancient states often attempted to limit the disorganizing power of this money, especially when it took the form of financial debts, by declaring the forgiveness of debts and utilizing taxes and tribute to set cooperating laborers to work building infrastructure and monuments. While the practice of infrastructure projects has survived into the present, the ancient debt jubilees have been replaced by state enforcement of debt repayments. The state’s function of managing social labor and commerce while overseeing the accumulation of wealth has become a function of that wealth accumulation itself.³⁹

Where the organizing power of the state gives way to the consumption of the ruling classes, whether they are wealthy in land, title, or slaves, money may still find an inlet to power through the upstart aspirations of those classes themselves. By the late Middle Ages, high nobles throughout the Mediterranean and European worlds, who had once achieved the rights to lands through heroism in warfare, grew wealthy enough in moveable property to pay others to go into battle for them. Commerce transformed the nobility into an estate autonomous from monarchy where the nobility succeeded in simultaneously adapting to it and adapting it to their advantage. The dislocations of wars, rebellions, invasions, and heresies throughout the Middle Ages produced masses of masterless men at the same time that it created opportunities for ambitious petty princes and courtmen. The history of the Middle Ages retrospectively appears as a back-to-back series of attacks on established social orders, including: the Viking invasions, which forced polities to spend massive amounts of money to pay of the invaders, the Crusades, which purged ‘infidels,’ the Black Death, which left lands lordless and laborers independent, the colonization of the Americas, which flooded Europe with blood-stained gold and commodities and the Americas with bloodthirsty upstarts, the Protestant Reformation, which allowed princes to disrupt the social order by expropriating the Catholic Church, and the enclosures of land, which made land a commodity and rendered laborers landless people at the mercy of the entire class of owners, unleashed a deluge of transformations which reinforced the power of proprietary money.⁴⁰ The mutation of the medieval world into the modern age was accomplished through the elevation of wealth, in the form of money, from a means of consumption, which in the later era reached luxurious proportions, into an otherwordly end in itself as capital. This process was endogenous rather than exogenous to the world of lordship and bondage. What it accomplished was the impersonal generalization of command over the world, both as bounded territory and as toiling people. The saying “no land without its lord” gave way to “money has no master.”⁴¹

The creative-destructive power of capital, which triangulates human productive power to a goal beyond humanity itself, was elevated to hegemony on the basis of the needfulness of the ruling classes themselves. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s second part of Faust, the demon Mephisto posed as a court fool to convince the Holy Roman Emperor that paper money could reinforce the Empire’s mastery over its territory. Mephisto insisted that “Paper money, unlike gold and silver,/ Says what it’s worth on its face, it doesn’t require/ Endless haggling before a person can,/ If he so wishes, indulge in love and wine.”⁴² The desire for consumption could be better satisfied by a universal, liquid means of high-velocity circulation. The paper money system would allow a greater universalization of wealth beyond its limited form as gold and silver, since “People come to accept it, prefer it, in time,/ With the result that every place in our Empire/ Is well supplied with paper, gold, and treasure.”⁴³

In the medieval world of lordly needfulness as the end of production, every nominal appearance had to be backed by a more certain reality. This reality was symbolized by the perceived world itself, a relationship which Christian religious faith brought to consciousness. To place their hopes in an unseen and unknown future, people had to believe that there was something absolutely certain underpinning it. Mephisto reassured the Emperor that this wealth would be backed by gold hidden beneath the soil, to which the Emperor declared: “We call upon you to combine your forces/ Whereby our upper world with our under/ In happy concord may united labor.”⁴⁴ In time, the Emperor came to find his kingdom torn apart in a rebellion unleashed by the destabilizing power of commerce. The universal power of money did not remain under his command, and the Emperor found that “The people waver, don’t know what to do,/ And where the current carries them, they go.”⁴⁵ Mephisto simply laughed at the Emperor’s misfortune, blaming him for trying to pursue pleasure and righteousness at the same time: “All that fake money led him to suppose/ The world was his to do with as he would./ A beardless youth when he came to the throne,/ He drew the false conclusion that he could/ Amuse himself and at the same time reign,/ Agreeably uniting ‘would’ and ‘should.’”⁴⁶ Money emancipated itself from needfulness, even from the insatiable needs of pleasure. What had begun as a symbol for a multitude of other forms of wealth became the very reality of wealth as such.

With the ascent of the capitalist mode of production, money becomes society. Yet this role of money is also obscured by its seeming quality as a philosopher’s stone: all things can change into money through pricing, and money seems to make money as if by magic whenever its owner correctly allocates their money to the time and place that the greatest mass of money is moving. What unites the needs of all with the toil of all is the flow of money exchanges, which are managed by national states and multinational financial cartels. Yet even when they try to set the price of a currency, they do not really command the entirety of the flow of wealth. The flow always runs out beyond them, in black markets and in the multitude of daily transactions invisible to the banks and governments. Faustian Marxist Georg Lukács looked on this law of value as “the motor for the transformation of the merely natural into the social, the consummation of the humanization of man in his sociality.”⁴⁷ His assumption that a thoroughly democratic popular sovereignty could supersede this power, however, was short-sighted. Capital cannot be done away with by decree of the state, not even a revolutionary republic. The state is still only one aspect of global society while capital is what unites the world into one. The capitalist state, which serves as the ideal manager of a society’s whole capital, can only issue and manage a currency which it monopolizes as the currency of this nation or polity.

The glove of monopoly cannot entirely enclose money’s command within its ring of power, because money is a command which is necessarily impersonal: “If I’ve six studs, a sturdy span,/ That horsepower’s mine, my property,/ My coach bowls on, ain’t I the man./ Two dozen legs I’ve got for me!”⁴⁸ The one who possesses money possesses powers which are not those of their own body, but which make use of their life far more than they make use of it. The power of capital tends to subordinate the consumption needs of its owners to its own needs for expansion and accumulation. Classical liberalism and triumphalist Marxism both agree in treating money capital as an emancipating force associated with the rise of democracy and the rule of law, but it is dissident Marxists and modern abolitionists who point to the links binding money’s abstraction of life with chattel slavery and other forms of proprietary despotism.⁴⁹ The power of money is that of universalizable possession over whatever life can be enframed within it. This does not manifest directly in each transaction, since the total prices of costs only equal out to the total value of the world-economy on the global scale. Even if we imagine absolute monopoly power, expanded to a global scale, there is no escaping the inner contradictions of this system of the exploitation of surplus-value, which treats the needs of its subjects as mere means. We are familiar with the case in which living labor is converted into mere means, a commodity whose price of survival grants the purchaser command over its creative power, which is squeezed into new blood for the money-vampire as surplus-value. But not even the consumption of the ruling classes, no matter how monumental, can enclose the exchangeable wealth into a sphere of circulation liberated from the corporeal, subsistence needs of labor. The capitalists continue to face “a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment.”⁵⁰

Karl Marx saw a glimmer of hope in the fact that “every commodity is a symbol, since, as value, it is only the material shell of the human labour expended on it.”⁵¹ This fact contains the potential for the dispossessed masses to seize these products of labor for their own direct use, destroying their commodity character while preserving their abstraction as a means for the associated free producers to account for their own activities on a total scale and plan accordingly for their total needs. Yet, at the same time, while capitalist society must (like any other society) manage the total measured labor-units available to it, striving to subject all wealth to this measure so that everything is counted with its price, it also strives to reduce the labor-time expended on the needs of reproducing the production process as much as possible in order to maximize success in the competitive accumulation of wealth. With “the development of social production” in the form of the joint-stock system, the instruments and resources of the production process “cease to be means and products of private production,” but only by ensuring that social wealth’s “movement and transfer become simply the result of stock-exchange dealings, where little fishes are gobbled up by the sharks, and sheep by the stock-exchange wolves,” and so “the transformation into the form of shares still remains trapped within the capitalist barriers; instead of overcoming the opposition between the character of wealth as something social, and private wealth, this transformation only develops this opposition in a new form.”⁵²

This situation of social wealth in monopoly form provokes questions of ultimates. Most importantly: what exactly is wealth for? The slogan of “people over profits” attempts one response, but it sounds out while the sovereign “people” of states settle for the management of capital according to the maximization of the nation’s wealth. The democratic “people” is split between the alternatives of managerial sovereignty, and thus the continued risk of “the common ruin of the contending classes,” or constituting a counterpublic to the world of monopolistic private property and aiming towards the supersession of both class society and the fraternity of equals in ”an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”⁵³ Society faces a decision between labor’s self-organization on a general scale or the continued growth of the despotism of micro-management. The managers of capitalist society scramble to hold life into the forms demanded by the system for its future plans to come into reality, supposing that they can put the genie back into the bottle and control the uncontrollable spirals of capital.

As the operations of capital reach planetary proportions, the operating costs of finance and management grow to titanic proportions as their necessary degree of autonomy within society’s division of labor grows. Capital “creates free, disposable time which is really time dedicated to the consumption of capital,” and the growth of finance and management means the growth of those classes of individuals who “dedicate themselves is that of increasing consumption in order to increase the velocity of the circulation of commodities and thus of capital.”⁵⁴ Consumption and accumulation intertwine as two sides of the same system, competing with each other to drive the earth to ruin. They produce planetary-scale waste and offload the garbage to those nations condemned by the division of labor to host it as their commercial vocation. Whatever increases shareholder value is true, and whatever fails to reach profit margins is expendable. Humanity engages in a gigantic Walpurgisnacht ritual that strips spirit from nature, throwing the body away as little more than a waste product of the passion to consume and enclose life.

This victory of blind wastefulness in the name of liberating spirit from matter is the dialectical inversion of communism, which once aimed to realize philosophy through the incorporation of all into the work of organizing a reasonable, transparent, and self-consciously planned society. 20th century communists attempted to elevate free consciousness into the master of need by means of centralization and labor-discipline, articulating the future fruits of communist liberty as the ethical ideal guarded within the Communist Party as a voluntary vanguard association. In truth, the principle of one-man management reinforced the antithesis of intellectual and manual labor, with the party-state managers imposing their plans through quotas on the lower managers and the manual workers they oversaw. When the communist front against capitalism fell to the inner pressures of sustaining hyper-centralization and the outer pressures of competition with the capitalist West, this disciplined labor simply passed over to global exploiters and managers turned capitalists. The chance to realize philosophy through workers’ councils was missed. This does not mean that we must give up communism, but that we must think through the inversion which was immanent in the unconscious and unthinking that haunted communist consciousness. The rise of ecology as a local movement of the Soviet Union was the beginning of this investigation, which was cut short by the collapse of communism as a countercivilization.

The Russian Revolution accomplished the construction of a general labor force, a cooperating collective worker, but not the emancipation of labor from capital. Rather, the Soviet Union adopted Fordist and Taylorist techniques of management in order to integrate many into one production process. Over half a century before 1917, Marx recognized that “phenomena which are historical products in the United States—e.g., the irrelevance of the particular type of labour—appear to be among the Russians, for instance, naturally developed predispositions[...] As regards the Russians, moreover, their indifference to the particular kind of labour performed is in practice matched by their traditional habit of clinging fast to a very definite kind of labour from which they are extricated only by external influences.”⁵⁵ The abstract labor characteristic of capitalist society was produced in the Soviet Union by extricating the peasantry from communal and personal labor through the “external influences” of militarization, requisitioning, and collectivization by decree. These methods incorporated all workers into the national state economy and therefore into the collective worker and national capital. But, as the 1930-1933 famine proved, this process could only be accomplished up to the hard limits of subsistence before eroding the basis of society’s reproduction. Furthermore, the black market and the blat system of favors continued to not only continue to exist, but thrive in the voids left by the nationally planned official economy.

Modern socialist planners have largely abandoned the notion of a closed commercial state. After Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), General Secretary Jiang Zemin introduced the then-controversial theory of the “Three Represents” as an adaptation of Chinese socialism for the 21st century as it entered the millennium. Jiang’s theory posited that the role of the Communist Party of China (CPC) for the new century would be to represent “the requirements of the development of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of the development of China’s advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of the Chinese people.”⁵⁶ Jiang called on Communists to embrace a spirit of public service and self-sacrifice, resist the temptations of “power, money, and sex,” and instead “consciously strengthen the cultivation of their Party spirit, cherish lofty aspirations, stand on solid ground and work earnestly for the good of the people.”⁵⁷ The tasks of the CPC are no longer to realize communism, but to perfect the relationship between party and state, state and people, and people and party. Some defend this as the subordination of the economy to politics, but it is rather the management of capital through the perfection of the party-state, which has been stripped of its political character by becoming a homogenous public service. Political impulses now manifest in the two main contradictions of modern China: corruption and reform, sovereignty and dissidence.

Under Jiang’s leadership, both the corrupt and reformers vied for power—sometimes within the same party members, as in the case of Bo Xilai. Wang Huning, leading theorist of the reformists, suggested as early as 1986 that the end of the Cultural Revolution had initiated an era of perfecting the state machinery: “Political projects provide effective techniques and conditions for social and political activities and relationships, and ensure that social and political life unfolds according to the principles and methods that the people have chosen. Certain political ideals, concepts, and principles can only be realized effectively and efficiently through well thought out political projects. Without such projects, it is difficult for political principles to work themselves out in practice. Political projects require political technology.”⁵⁸ Today, Wang allies with reformist General Secretary Xi Jinping in a campaign to unite the country around the management and mastery of capital accumulation for the good of all—though each must accept exploitation for wealth to be distributed back to them as infrastructure and cheap consumer goods. The CPC treats everyone, even workers, as investors in the national capital insofar as they are citizens. When labor organizers become too bold, perhaps becoming Maoists who seek a revival of the Cultural Revolution, when women express spiritual discontent in radical feminism, when Salafi jihadists affirm a community of religion and race against the singularity of the polity, the party-state cracks down to keep all in line and preserve the conditions for the developmentalist accumulation of capital.

The original vision of Chinese Communism as a realization of the Great Harmony has been brought down to the humble abode of the bureaucratic office in the plan of a universal regulatory state. In a speech announcing a re-politicization of the party, General Secretary Xi Jinping simultaneously declared that his administration would seek to “develop new methods to improve macro-regulation, give full play to the strategic guidance of national development plans, and improve mechanisms for coordinating fiscal, monetary, industrial, regional, and other economic policies” and that the Communist Party had made “realizing communism its highest ideal and its ultimate goal, and shouldered the historic mission of national rejuvenation.”⁵⁹ It is not that the CPC has ‘betrayed’ communism, but that it has stripped communism of its character as a negative and critical utopia. That utopian objection might motivate ‘selfish’ political partisanship, while elevating communism into the ideal of a united community that supersedes the state which works to accomplish it motivates people to centralize their efforts. Illiberal legal theorist Jiang Shigong has hailed this vision as having superseded the chiliasm of Mao Zedong, which treated communism as “something that was meant to take on a real social form in the here and now.”⁶⁰ Xi has instead Sinified communism, purging the Western notion of an “unalienated” Second Eden in favor of a truly Eastern “Learning of the Heart” which seeks the “great unity under Heaven” and affirms that “when the Way prevails, the world is shared by all,” converting communism into the ethical aim of bureaucracy.⁶¹ Jiang praises the Sino-communist reform vision of Xi as heralding “not only a beautiful future life, but is also, and more importantly, the spiritual state of Communist Party members in their practice of political life.”⁶²

Some anti-colonial Marxists have hailed this recent turn of the Chinese state as a replicable project of de-Westernization, an anti-colonial force on a global scale.⁶³ If money capital, with the “heavy artillery” of cheap commodities, has traditionally been a force that “batters down all Chinese walls,” doesn’t the rise of a macro-managerial state in China represent the future of a multipolar, rather than Eurocentric, world-economy?⁶⁴ Decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo has offered his admiration to the Chinese model as an alternative to liberalism, since “Confucianism is one way of dealing with dewesternization,” but has also affirmed that the ultimate aim is “not a polycentric capitalist world,” rather “decoloniality, a march toward a polycentered and non-capitalist world, a world in which economic coloniality has been barren.”⁶⁵ The difference between the two options has become painfully clear from 2023 to 2025. In this period, the Chinese state and corporations have maintained its diplomatic and trade relationships with the Zionist state of Israel even as it has become a pariah before the world for its multi-year long genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. China has attempted to play a legalistic role for a slaughter in which law has been no recourse, maintaining respect for both the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli state and seeking only peace and development. The PRC’s leadership has shown only a merchant or lawyer’s de jure concern for the unlimited aggression of an expansionist settler state while pretending that its economic operations are separate, as if Israel did not use its microchips to organize its industrial slaughter of Palestinians.⁶⁶ The hope that China will serve as the vanguard of a continuing global civil war, or even a force sponsoring a substantial peaceful coexistence rather than a rule of law that covers over inequalities, falls apart in the face of reality. The PRC’s geopolitical moves only aim for the peaceful and businesslike cooperation of imperialist states in the accumulation of capital, management of populations, and control of territories. Even in infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the PRC operates as the manager of a general capital, constituting a merchant-bureaucratic state rather than the vanguard of a new anti-colonial political struggle.

Money can abide much, as long as all continue to buy into the money-capital system as the universalizing One of the Many modes of exchange. Even as the world is increasingly commercialized, the money economy is fed by cheap labor from communities that produce their own subsistence, by the public infrastructure and planning of the state, and by the organizational innovations of the non- or even anti-commercial activities of radicals, which in cases like May 1968 provide inspiration for new regimes of accumulation and new modes of consumption. Marxist philosopher Kojin Karatani has suggested that we should think of world history in terms of of four modes of exchange—the communal ties of reciprocal gift-giving and moral debts (mode A), the state’s circulation of resources through taxing and spending (mode B), money’s universal equivalence which appropriates all surplus products as value (mode C), and a religious association which exists as an aspiration in all the modes (mode D). Karatani argues that this framework necessitates distinguishing between state socialism, which tends to fuse modes A through C in varying methods of organization while banishing mode D to a “last instance” that never arrives, and an associational socialism in which “freedom cannot be obtained by sacrificing the freedom of others.”⁶⁷ Every single person must be recognized as an irreplaceable, unique star. Of course, in a world where the free power monopolized by a few grants them the power to command others, it is unclear how such a freedom could be accomplished without abrogations if it wanted to avoid falling to the disorganizing methods used by the ruling class.

For some, this objection serves to reaffirm the state as the site and weapon of struggle against monopoly power. Those Marxist-Leninists who have not abandoned the “withering away of the state” into communism attempt to work through this problem as a question of empowering the will of the people against the alien power of capital. For them, it is a simple alternative: capitalist monopoly or socialist democracy. RedSails author Nia Frome, for example, has suggested that the law of the democratic common good can supersede the law of value by “building an overwhelming social force that is capable of setting the terms of social reproduction,” with the accomplishment of socialist state power obtaining “such a commanding position in the economy that every firm depends on you. This renders them dependent, and transparency follows directly: just demand ever-stricter audits of anyone who wants to do business with you. The independence and privacy of the firm is eroded from within (by our double agents) and from without (as firms are leashed by elven rope).“⁶⁸ However, a sovereignty which could altogether overcome the power of world money, in which all are intertwined in dependency, would have to be an absolute, universal sovereignty. Some imagine this as a world democratic socialist republic. It is unclear how the democratic habit of self-organization could be sustained up to this point under the demand of absolute centralization and consensus imposed by the conditions of a siege.

This question may pose a problem for democracy understood as the liberty of each and all, but not for democracy understood as the singular unity of a people. Fascist poet and philosopher Ezra Pound attempted to embrace the dilemma as indicating a need for racial palingenesis. He believed that “sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money (tickets) and to determine the value thereof,” the value being claims to wealth existing within the territory of the nation, and the power over which marks the state as the only power that can ensure “that there is enough money in the hands of the whole people, and in adequately rapid exchange, to effect distribution or all wealth produced and produceable.”⁶⁹ Sucking the blood of the people, he argued that usurious (for him the same as Jewish) capital demands that “unprincipled thieves and antisocial groups should be allowed to gnaw into the rights of ownership,” and the two principles come to blows in the revolutionary construction of a fascist-work state which proves that “nothing differs more from this gnawing or corrosive than the right to share out the fruits of a common co-operative labour.”⁷⁰ For Pound, the subsumption of politics under sovereignty posed no problem, since sovereignty is the power of the race and nation over its own destiny. Of course, the sovereignty of his beloved National Socialist Germany collapsed under the unsustainable demand of infinite expansion and infinite extermination imposed on it by its very own social organization. Though not all attempts to impose sovereign power over money result in fascist imperialism, they face the same dilemmas of every people’s state when they fantasize about a commerce commanded by the nation as a whole.

To meet the needs of a radical democrat, and especially a communist, the problem must be posed differently. Contradiction, the condition of politics, cannot be done away with in favor of unitary sovereignty. Even the state plays the game of contradiction in its attempt to homogenize all under its preservation of order. The state’s sovereignty over territorialized space, as French Marxist Henri Lefebvre insisted, “subordinates both chaos and difference to its implacable logistics. It does not eliminate the chaos, but manages it. On the other hand, it does capture differences at the moment of their emergence and abolishes them. It rules an empty order animated only by that which it negates, defined by chaos and dissolution on the one side, the differential and the concrete on the other. The logic of this space coincides with the State’s strategy, and thus with the objectives and the stakes of power.”⁷¹ Revolutionary political struggle reveals the partiality of this sovereignty by posing sovereign against countersovereign, elevating the politics of world revolution against the self-preservation of states. But this is already assuming a situation far beyond that which we see when we look around. The power of capitalism seems unchallenged—even where sovereign states compete to arrange the world economy differently, or perhaps even more equitably among themselves. No one has succeeded at sustainably out-organizing the power of money, because their organizations have only retreated from the money economy, managed some share of money, or made use of money for extra-monetary needs. Money remains the One of the Many. The old Faustian hope to achieve a total human personality has proven itself incapable of superseding the power of money thus far. On a planetary scale, money continues to fulfill the role of an externalized total human personality, an infinitely striving human singularity made up of many fragments.

Republic of Entrepreneurs

A century ago, the proletariat threatened to seize power all over the world. Today, the collective worker has disappeared as a subject of global politics. Capital ownership is more concentrated in imperialist metropoles than ever, yet management and production have increasingly been diffused throughout the world in techniques of minimizing the cost of production (no matter how wastefully) and pitting labor force against labor force to reduce the cost of the cheapest workers as much as possible. Economist Intan Suwandi, while researching the case of labor in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, has observed that multinational corporations now “engage in ‘lean’ and flexible production—where they are able to accommodate the fluctuating market demands in their search for greater profit—by transferring production work and responsibilities to the dependent companies.”⁷² By monopolizing ownership, and thus the right to appropriate the lion’s share of surplus-value, multinational corporations exercise authority over the entrepreneurial innovations of their underlings. The gap between the incomes and power of the richest and poorest grows into a gaping chasm. The same pattern holds even within the wealthiest and most powerful countries of the entire world-system.

The top-heavy pressure of monopoly leads to burnout in the workforce, with many supply lines organized for just-in-time production to minimize the operating costs and circulation time of production as much as possible. The middle and bottom of the whole operation are, of course, expendable. While the firing of a Chief Executive Officer is almost unheard of, mass firings of workers in bids to slightly increase shareholder value are borderline banal. While it does not necessarily make up the vast majority of the world’s productive activity, the production of consumer articles and the intellectual property-advertising matrix of capitalist platforms and LLMs are depended on by all other industries as the most dynamic sectors of capital today. Ideology has become not only a material force, but an end in itself. And as the expression of capital in autonomous form, money and the internet also reveal its deepest contradictions. AI renders even the professional intellectual labor of information management superfluous, threatening the viability of the expenditure of social resources on those who perform the work of managing labor, promoting products, and accelerating the circulation of capital with their consumer spending. At the same time, the option paralysis of the modern consumer is intensified by AI, which presents a total experience of consumption from which many refuse to extricate themselves even if only to engage in other forms of production and consumption.

Meanwhile, in the industrial centers of the world, which have now shifted to the Global South, the collective worker continues to be affixed to the corporate state through patriotic developmentalism. While most countries leave their working classes doomed to exploitation to the point of exhaustion, perhaps allowing them to keep small plots of land so that their necessary wage-laboring time can be reduced relative to the surplus, some attempt to integrate them more closely into the state by circulating the nation’s wealth in infrastructure projects, welfare, and subsidized consumerism. The challenge of populism, which captures the impulses of the masses into a campaign, fans the flames of politics but arrests it in the limiting forms of charismatic authorities and paternalism. Voluntary mass associations are now dominated by ethnic politics as their grounding force, even in the case of many trade unions.⁷³ Aside from the Communist Party of China, one of the largest political parties today is the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of India. Where the rule of law fails to pin political impulses to the representative electoral function, and where trade unions and left-wing political parties fail to oppose it with a cross-sect anti-casteist law of the common good, the lynch mob continues to be one of the characteristic manifestations of mass politics.

The imposition of an anti-political common good is marked by a conformist consensus around security and certainty. These norms facilitate the unchallenged reign of wealth accumulation as the guiding aim of society. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City were meant to directly disrupt the bustle of this money-making common good through an excessive moral spectacle of unproductive destruction. Al Qaeda leader and ex-mujahid, Osama Bin Laden, architect of the attacks, described them as a strike against the new Roman Empire: “The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you.”⁷⁴ The Global War on Terror which began against Bin Laden and other Salafi jihadists has become a global political technology for enforcing anti-political conformity and rooting out dissidents who threaten to introduce destabilizing contradiction into the consumer order. Control, standardization, and predictability is the real outcome of the War on Terror’s ethic of lawful and peaceful development. This is what unites the disparate variants of the War on Terror, which range from the U.S.’s failed neocolonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to China’s campaign to integrate Uyghurs into the national market of labor and consumption, to Uzbekistan’s enforcement of a strictly nationalist loyalty against the deterritorializing and pan-ethnic religious commitment of believers to the ummah.

In the metropole, semi-periphery, and periphery of the modern capitalist world, credit and debt have permeated all of society. When incomes cannot keep up with the cost of living, credit swoops in and saves the day—at the cost of securing the dedication of that much more life, now and in the future, for the proprietary demands of capitalists. Increasing the normal scale of debt allows for more rent-seekers to claim more from people’s incomes, potentially extending to the entire duration of their lifetime and beyond to those of their closest relations. With Klarna and other ‘buy now, pay later’ programs, debt serves to keep people participating in the consumption of products, subsidizing a rapid velocity for capital circulation by pinning their future lives to repayment. Those who make lower wages, who are subordinated to the breadwinners of their household—especially women and children—or who have no breadwinners to turn to at all, are those who face the worst of the debt regime’s financial terrorism. Brazilian social reproduction theorists Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago enumerate the methods of this terrorism as “the threatening discourse about the ever imminent catastrophe, the uncontrolled trajectory of interest rates, the caste of bondholders, the technical language of experts, the faceless currency runs that nobody takes responsibility for, the generalized indebtedness.”⁷⁵ In the periphery, debt means the rule of savvy oligarchs as the new latifundistas, structural adjustment imposed by global financial institutions, and command over culture, labor, and resources by the imperialist centers of capital. In the metropole, where the commercial service sector reigns, debt serves as a weapon of monopoly. Ambitious startups indebt themselves to venture capitalists less with the promise that they will sustainably bring them a consistent profit margin and more with the fantasy that their product will revolutionize an industry and win the race to the top of monopoly power. This is supposed to render the debt of the startup’s growth irrelevant, since the point is to have the ability to command resources and distribute power and income to the investors and founders rather than to establish a solid basis for the large-scale cooperation of labor in producing new surplus-value.

In a world where residencies and businesses are treated as interchangeable insofar as they are spaces for commerce, real estate has grown into one of the grounding industries of global capital. Real estate is supposed to be well within the control of the state. The industry becomes an ally of state power by merging the productive labor of construction with the inflexible, tethering consumption of rents and mortgage, ensuring control over a population. Construction, however, is limited to the commercial need to treat real estate ownership as a stable hoard of capital. While construction increases the value of real estate, the purchasing price of which is “nothing but capitalized rent,” the real estate industry is also unlikely to invest in non-lucrative real estate operations.⁷⁶ In many metropolitan cities, where the rent-price of the worst building reinforces the average rent-price of all of the others, residences that are reasonably affordable for a working class income have become almost unimaginable. The dispossessed, employed and unemployed alike, are confined to slums that landlords would do anything to level and convert into lucrative real estate, or they are forced to commute from a further, cheaper pool of residencies to reach their urban jobs. The lucrative industry of real estate has become intertwined with the entire economy through the investment of multinational corporations and global banks in the portfolios of cartels like BlackRock. Economists Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have pointed out that, even as this system of debt and speculation on real estate’s growing rent exponentially increases the cost of living, “to break with the politics of austerity by defaulting on public debt and adopting capital controls is daunting for any state. This is not only due to the strength of external and internal capitalist forces that are opposed to it. It is also because the costs for most of its citizens would in fact be severe.”⁷⁷

In Donald Trump’s attempt to recapture this system for a nationally-oriented economy through a tariff regime, increasing the cost of living for all U.S. citizens, we see a phenomenon which reveals the entire dynamic of modern capitalism. The entire thing is run through zero sum games of chicken, where the one who surrenders from risk-taking first is supposed to bear the burden of the costs and ‘lose.’ Of course, it is only those who hold monopoly power who can endure the greatest risks with speculation, because their operation is at a great enough scale to survive it, while the smaller and weaker tend to end up expropriated debtors. When no one holds a secure monopoly power, as in the multipolar global currency system of the 21st century, the one who wishes to seize command of the totality for their own must risk their own destruction in the face of a chaotic and unpredictable world that they might not successfully domesticate according to their plan. They have to exercise a strict command over their entire existence if they wish to ascend to the pinnacle of the system. Monopoly capital today establishes risk-taking entrepreneurialism as the universal race of all against all to reach the top. While the civil service bureaucracy was once praised by intellectuals as the universal class, the suspicion cast by neoliberalism towards the self-interested regulatory capture of the state has led to a culture in which the entrepreneur is supposed to be the universal class by being the ultimate self-owner.

The rise of share-capital accomplished the conditions for the rise of the entrepreneur as a generalized character-type. Capital in this system is “posited, not only in itself, in its substance, but is posited also in its form, as social power and product.”⁷⁸ Marx described the joint-stock system, which conceives of capitals of varying compositions as if they were only masses of a single capital invested in various sectors of production, as a kind of “capitalist communism,” characterized by the systemic norm “that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.”⁷⁹ In this system, the one who invests the most gets the most. The entrepreneur imagines this principle as identical to “from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution” as if ownership of capital were directly proportional to the productivity of efforts. Of course, the most productive workers—those who sustain the entire system—are also often the most impoverished, a truth which is obvious by looking at the manufacturing megalopolises of any region in the global periphery. The inverted principle that the entrepreneur sees in their success is that command over social labor and its products, in the form of money, is the expression of entrepreneurial creativity rather than the creative power of labor. We experience the dominance of stock market speculation as almost a perfect inversion of actual communism. This entrepreneurial “capitalist communism” converts the war of all against all into a competitive motivation for total authority rather than a doomed system which compels us to seek association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Some Marxists have searched for a liberating creativity within the entrepreneurial impulse itself. Negri and Hardt in Assembly (2017), for example, argued that the rise of an organic entrepreneurialism among the propertyless multitude indicates that as “capitalists, under the rule of finance, lose their innovative capacities and are gradually excluded from the knowledge of productive socialization, the multitude increasingly generates its own forms of cooperation and gains capacities for innovation.”⁸⁰ The creative problem-solving and self-directed enjoyment of the entrepreneur, they suggest, indicates a truly communist seed within “capitalist communism.” Philosopher Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude (2004) offered a more skeptical evaluation, emphasizing the limitations imposed by the very inversion of communist modernism into the entrepreneurial habit of ceaselessly grifting at the expense of others: “Now, however, nihilism (the practice of not having established practices, etc.) has entered into production, has become a professional qualification, and has been put to work[...] Philomen and Baucis, the serene farmers whom Goethe describes in Faust, would be uprooted by the modern entrepreneur[...] The current productive commotion benefits from, and finds its most prized resource in, all those elements which the model of modernization lists, instead, among its consequences: the uncertainty of expectations, the unpredictability of assignments, fragile identities, ever changing values.”⁸¹ Just as the workers’ councils promised to make society transparent to the association of producers, the republic of entrepreneurs is composed by self-managers of commodified labor-power who are supposed to be totally transparent to themselves in their inner life and thus entirely flexible for any undertakings they might apply themselves to. This transparency makes their entire existence available as labor-power to be commanded in the money-making of the hustle and the grind. The non-political, or rather anti-political, sentiment of the entrepreneur is justified by the widespread sense that sovereignty—in the sense of free self-determination—is only possible for the inner self in its dominion over the owner’s body. The entrepreneur indulges the Faustian fantasy outwardly by treating the entire world as only an instrument, commanded under the demonic power of money, for the holy inner soul.

The entrepreneur worships themselves as much as they worship money. If they play their cards right, advertising themselves and clout-farming, both should be more or less the same. They fill their McMansions with tacky, glittery pop art depicting the wealth and power that they command by commanding themselves. These aesthetics of money extend throughout modern communications through the bias of the proprietary social media platforms towards attention-grabbing celebrity spectacles of wealth and power. The autonomy of art from the circulation of interchangeable commodities, long since eroded by the bourgeois art collector’s market, has finally been destroyed by the rise of entrepreneurial aesthetics. The autonomous space for critical and didactic art has been subsumed under the form of Content. Social media content is like money that talks to you in a total experience. Art, once a store of value unique to the elite, with the price of the artworks determined by the bidding of consumers against each other, has now become a kind of pig slop, shoveled down into the free trough of mass media as entertainment that is enjoyed in common by the masses while remaining the property of entrepreneurial advertisers.

The needs of capital are our own needs insofar as we are labor-power salespeople and consumers. The activity of money is our own activity, even a fundamental aspect of our identity in the world through our bank accounts and credit scores. Advertising, through the algorithmic generation of user profiles, amounts to our own externalized images confronting us and vying for our attention. We are no good alone, but even in the outer world we only find ourselves. Infantile narcissism, which is aware of others only as objects that are either ready-to-hand or absent, has reappeared with a vengeance as a kind of freedom to grab anything in front of us, but an inability to reach for anything that is not already facing us and offering a purchasable image of ourselves. We are trapped in the self, precarious and perpetually active. The entrepreneur embraces this destiny, believing that they are living according to the principle of amor fati, to love one’s fate. Friedrich Nietzsche would reply: “But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely?”⁸²

The doctrine of self-care rises up as the counterpart to entrepreneurial actionism. Rest, laziness, and treats are attempts at resisting the ceaseless toil of hustling, which demands that the entire 24 hour day be carved up into sources of income. Of course, their resistance is typically accomplished by retreating from care for the world of others altogether, giving up on struggling for the command of it and silently hoping that those who continue the toil continue to secure the conditions for the rest’s consumption. The inner sanctum of the self lays down a quarantine line between itself and the world, insisting to others that “I don’t owe you anything,” but it therefore makes itself impotent and allows itself to be helplessly dragged along by the world-commanders. Often, the dynamic manifests in the active affirmation of the anti-political by the selfish entrepreneurs eliciting whining complaints against the unfairness of it all from the self-carers. The two are bound together in one republic of self-owners. Frustrated, some seek to get out from themselves by drawing vindication from a moral principle which supersedes all selfishly proprietary ownership. They turn to moralist activism as an attempt at resisting the way of the world. But in approaching this world as little more than so much dead matter resisting the moral ideal, they find themselves attacking people with the sadistic venom of criminal accusations in an attempt to try to whip them into a higher, ideal form through the twin disciplines of guilt and recognition.

Activists in the Age of Fracture

We would like to think of the modern activist as an obvious figure. Wouldn’t one expect that someone who feels strongly about something, who cares enough about it to do something in favor of their cause, would dedicate so much of their personal time to public campaigns in its favor? But the outsized role of the modern activist is a product of a long shift from mass politics dominated by voluntary associations, which could be majority working class, to professional advocates, who make activism a full-time job. In the past, the characteristics of the modern activist were more typical of middle class urban reformers who sought to establish their authority over the destitute proletariat by promoting temperance, Christian revivalism, family values, and other moralistic campaigns. The modern activist, after a century of social revolutions and civil rights movements, presents themselves as dedicated public servants of someone or other, whether it be an interest group or moral cause. The elected leaders of voluntary associations, with the mass membership, mutual benefits, and social networks that they organized, have given way to Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and quasi-parties that hire activists as employees, elicit funding from capitalists while continuing to enforce sliding scales of membership dues, and draw on professional expertise to lobby for changes to the law and other institutions that the public finds almost incomprehensible.⁸³

One of the greatest victims of this shift was the 20th century party-form, which existed within the relationship between leadership, membership, and mass base. Formal organizations stopped being the site for most peoples’ decision making as they turned to the increasingly individuated life of post-industrial work, decentralized consumption, and atomized interpersonal relationships. Activist leaders, for their part, saw no need for masses when their goals had shifted to recognition and expertly tweaking the social machinery. The representative function of the party-form, which identified the leadership as the brain of the organizational body, grew increasingly abstracted as the Ideological representation of leaders itself became what united people, whether they knew they knew it or not. The consumer rights activists of the late 20th century did not have to draw a majority or even a mass of consumers into a formal organization to make campaigns on their behalf. The interest group who the activist acts on behalf of is freed from the obligation to act, and thus from the necessity of composing themselves into an acting body. Activists became the urban guerrillas of everyday politics, only needing to draw masses of people into their campaigns when strategically necessary for their own activist efforts. The masses are free to forget and ignore things until activists suddenly demand that they talk and care about the issue of the day.

As activists grew increasingly autonomous from public discourse, the theoretical intelligentsia retreated into academia. Academia provided a career to those who wanted to make a living out of reading and writing. Though activists are usually employees of another, the foundations that fund them make a principle of sponsoring even people they disagree with in the name of ‘democracy.’ Much of the time, the funds trickle down through opaque networks so that the benefactors do not know who they are funding and the activists do not know who funds them. Academics, on the other hand, are more directly accountable to the bureaucratic structure of the university system. While universities have traditionally been presented as autonomous from public prejudice, protecting freedom of thought for the principle of it, the shift from a funding model that treated them as public infrastructure to a for-profit model has undermined the basis for any thoroughgoing autonomy of operation. U.S. universities must now keep up their appeal to investors and the parents who foot the outsized bill for students.

During the millennium, the academic retreat from politics briefly allowed for the existence of a kind of global theory mill centered in the United States and European Union. This provided work to a large number of academics. Those who could keep up with the pace of the publishing game continued to write original works rather than secondary sources summarizing the canon. This seemed to make good on the neoliberal promise of prosperity. However, as the for-profit model imposed more of a strain on the traditional university model, as younger academics faced more precarious work conditions which threatened the reproduction of the academic system, and as the public began to directly intervene in curriculums throughout the culture wars of the 1492 Quincentenary and the War on Terror, academia began to decline precipitously. The number and quality of works declined not due to higher standards, but more stringent competition and a more direct influence of financial concerns over editorial decisions. Academia now functions more as a wing of the real estate industry, a factory for professional degrees, and a retirement fund for elderly tenured professors than as a site for theoretical inquiry.

The decline of academia is a microcosm of the decline of theory and historical memory. Historian Eric Hobsbawm already predicted in 1994 that things would become dire: “The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary existence to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.”⁸⁴ The decline of mass politics, represented especially by the party-form, into the massified consensus of self-orientation marked the fragmentation of society. The age of extremes, of partisans mediating their utopias with strategic realism, seemed to have disappeared for good. Writing about The Age of Fracture (2011), historian Daniel Rodgers noted that the places once occupied by notions of society, history, and other mass bodies had been replaced by the nebulous concept of the market, which “stood for a way of thinking about society with a myriad of self-generated actions for its engine and optimization as its natural and spontaneous outcome. It was the analogue to [Ronald] Reagan’s heroes in the balconies, a disaggregation of society and its troubling collective presence and demands into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces.”⁸⁵

The consensus of the market, as is true of any consensus, continued to have its dissidents. Even staunch free market advocates were not satisfied with the actual operation of the system, always believing that the market needed another round of deregulation and the state needed another round of austerity. Activism emerged as a technique of imposing order onto the fractured life of the market and the sluggish indifference of the bureaucratic technocracy. The activist does not make their peace with polls measuring majority opinion, election outcomes, or the accepted way of the world. The activist may study these, or even engage directly with them, but they seek to bypass their ready-made results in order to realize a desired result. If the public resists, they resist in turn. Some make a career out of this resistance to the way of the world, while the more impatient attempt to rupture the consensus through desperate measures. The terrorist is the ultimate figure of the activist, the one who has turned to politics by other means—making use of the mass deaths of bombings, spree shootings, and executions to force the market-going public to pay attention to them. The sentiments of pro-War on Terror conservatives, that anti-war activists were aiding terrorism, inadvertently recognized that both terrorists and professional activists seek something more for the world than “making the world safe for democracy.”

The 2008 global financial crisis seemed to shake up this situation. After the bubble burst, it seemed obvious with hindsight that things would never have worked out. Through their irresponsible loan and mortgage practices, aided and abetted by the U.S. government, the banks had contributed to a generalized crisis. It seemed obvious that monopoly power itself was the enemy of the multitude. Would the ensuing outrage mark the revival of politics? The Occupy Wall Street movement emerged in New York City before spreading across the world, adopting the direct action technique of occupying public spaces to make democratic demands centering around the law of the common good. They posed the “us” of the 99% against the “them” of the 1%. Occupy, in reality, was a motley crew of many different political factions—free market libertarians, social democrats, left-wing nationalists, anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists… The consensus democracy of the occupation camps was limited by this lack of a shared orientation. Occupy did not provoke much of a corresponding revival of political theory or popular visions—though utopians founded communes to retreat from monopoly society, and theorists like Antonio Negri, John Holloway, and Harry Cleaver set to work promoting a revived autonomous Marxism. In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in favor of corporations financing political campaigns as they please according to an affirmation of their legal personhood. As Occupy began to lose steam in 2011, as the leadup campaigns for the U.S. Presidential election captured the attention of the public, the problem of corporate-owned politics came to the forefront of the left’s agenda. The disappointment of many with the lack of concrete results from horizontal, leaderless movements led them to the opposite extreme to an anti-monopoly electoralism which adopted mass-manipulation techniques in an attempt to maximize the numerical successes of their campaigns. Others, seeing the people of the U.S. Empire as irredeemably consumerist and parasitic at their very core, turned to mass-bashing anti-imperialist anti-Americanism.

The old Faustian criteria of political power, which united mass expanse with conscious politicization into one partisan striving, had split into two opposing poles. The one pretends to always be seeking out the voice of the people, defined as the numerical majority of voting citizens. Following the 2015 Bernie Sanders campaign, many of them began to promote nativism and pro-border regime sentiments as part of a ‘pro-labor’ stance. The other always seeks to counterpose the most oppressed, who are supposed to have direct access to the truth, with the most privileged, who are supposed to selfishly deny reality to protect their privilege. Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins has criticized this standpoint epistemology as an abandonment of theoretical reasoning: “This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory, itself reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins. Ironically, by quantifying and ranking human oppressions, standpoint theorists invoke criteria for methodological adequacy that resemble those of positivism.”⁸⁶ Of course, to attribute this to Marxism in an age in which Marxist theory had disappeared from public discourse is unfair. It is more characteristic of a radicalization of liberalism through a secularized Christian ethics. In fact, both poles are only two variants of Christian radical liberalism—the one declaring that the community of believers must expand by any even the most dishonest means in order to save the souls of the masses, and the other insisting that only the meek shall inherit the earth and that monastic self-denial is the calling of all believers. Even while the one insists they are communists but lie to the public about it to avoid frightening them, and while the other proudly proclaims that they are communists to shock and scandalize polite society, the communism of both amounts to little more than the utopian fantasies of herd morality.

Marx’s formulation on the self-abolition of the proletariat was meant to counteract exactly this sort of Christian leveling. Only a small handful of Marxists followed through on this teaching. Those who did traced the central problems of communist revolution throughout the 20th century. Georg Lukács believed that the proletariat could abolish itself because its own class consciousness was the seed of a future united social consciousness, the identical subject-object of history: “The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims, it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention.”⁸⁷ After a world socialist revolution failed to manifest in the 1920s, Lukács transferred this function of social consciousness to the vanguard party as the organizational embodiment of class consciousness and theoretical articulator of the social totality as a historical process. The Communist unity of the democratic front and the democratization of the Worker’s State became the methods for eroding the commodity-form’s identity of labor and capital.

The construction of a socialist state relied far more on the planned universalization of work than on the communist notion of a self-abolishing working class. The critique of work could only emerge where class hatred and active nihilism met in one struggle. While participating in the working class anti-work militancy of the 1960s, Mario Tronti revived the thesis of proletarian self-abolition: “In all the upheavals of the past, the type of productive activity was left intact. It has always exclusively been a question of the distribution of productive activity, redistributing labour to new groups of people. Only the communist revolution, as Marx said, or, as we can today begin to say, simply the revolution, the only plausible present-day minimum programme for the working class, challenges for the first time the whole of productive activity that has hitherto existed. This challenge will abolish work. And in so doing it will abolish class domination. The abolition of work by the working class and the violent destruction of capital are one and the same.”⁸⁸ Tronti stressed the identity of workers and capital through labor-power as the creative commodity, the active side of capital at work. He meant to convey that capital is passive while the workers are active, but this insight retrospectively preceded the rise of the modern gig economy and its entrepreneurship. These aim to abolish the mediated relationship of managers and wage laborers by compelling the owner of labor-power to directly exploit themselves and make their living by way of a consumer platform.

Ideology today promises the dispossessed that they can make their life their own if only they work for it. Instead of abolishing themselves as the propertyless class, the dispossessed make a productive human capital out of their self-owned life. They are torn between exploiting themselves and enjoying the products on offer. The inner freedom of the Christian meets the acquisitive freedom of the enslaver in the entrepreneurial citizen. The old stories of liberation from all external constraints fall apart into incoherence. The fragmentation of the collective worker, for or against work, has left trade unionism at the impasse of constantly seeking legal recognition, and corralled the revolt against work into consumerist grifting. A long-term political strategy, much less the ultimate goal of self-abolition, seems to be out of the question today. What can the role of theory be?

Academic radical liberals attempt to embrace this situation wholeheartedly. They imagine that their intellectual career places them in an optimal position to become both entrepreneurs and activists while theorizing the present and future of the social totality. In truth, the isolation of academic discourse in university halls and the autonomization of language in the form of the internet has rendered their own careers almost completely irrelevant to the rest of society. The academic fantasy of treating expertise as an end in itself, a social good that must be defended, is still only an ideology of retreat. It seeks to preserve their position as professional technocrats of knowledge while failing to pose a significant challenge to the decay of the university system imposed from above, below, and outside its bureaucratic hierarchy. The academic practice of engaging with the public by fact checking is still only an attempt to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. The autonomous language of social media has left the expert function of verifying truths a thing of the past, since there is no weight to the verification beyond its dubious internal role to internet discourse as a weapon of argument. Rather than acting as careerists and technocrats, academics should instead use their eroding positions of relative intellectual autonomy to make use of the resources available in the university system to provide compendiums of information to those who are interested, training any who listen to them in the skills of independent research and thought. Of course, to say such a thing imagines academics who are far more independent than anyone can reasonably expect of the mass of them. The growing precariousness of academics, the threat of being thrown into the manual proletariat in particular, leads many to cling to their career even more tightly, to obey even before they are commanded.

Theoretical production is not centered in academia, even if academia tends to be its forum. This was already the case as the veterans of social movements streamed into the halls of universities from the 1970s to the 1990s. As these theorists became academics, a number have tried to use their reflections to recoup and return to the social movements with a fresh outlook. One of the most prescient products of these efforts was Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. In evaluating what is living and what is dead in the socialist tradition, they enumerated the long, intermittent crises plaguing the notions of the universal subject, of history as a subject’s process of self-realization, and of society as an order that can be made transparent and rationally mastered. They concluded that “the Left is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary.”⁸⁹ Seeking to counteract the positivist tendency of academics to represent reality without reflecting on the discursive conditions of their own theory, Laclau and Mouffe sought “to focus on certain discursive categories which, at first sight, appeared to be privileged condensation-points for many aspects of the crisis; and to unravel the possible meaning of a history in the various facets of this multiple refraction.”⁹⁰ Rather than aiming again at the Faustian hope of an unalienated society and a total human personality, Laclau and Mouffe set out for a “project for a radical and plural democracy,” meaning “nothing other than the struggle for a maximum autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential-egalitarian logic.”⁹¹

While Faustian Marxism had failed to supersede the identification of workers with productive capital, and thus the proprietary power of money that they despised so much, Laclau and Mouffe hoped to transfer the relationship of the One and the Many from the mechanical determinism of the economic, by then identified with neoliberalism, to the plural and contradictory realm of the political. The 21st century left would have to adapt to the fracture of the popular-democratic subject of the collective worker by working with the proliferation of identity-subjects (women, the indigenous, queer people, immigrants, etc.) in their political strategy. They attempted to embrace the ascendancy of a new radical liberalism as a means to affirm socialism through the revolutionization of democratic demands for life and liberty, arguing that “task of the Left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.”⁹² Though advocating for the adoption of populism as a strategy to rally masses against modern monopoly power without enclosing them within a single subject, Laclau and Mouffe sought to counteract national-workerist attacks against women, immigrants, the indigenous, and queer people. The strategy of hegemony, of uniting a popular front of “us” against its political opponents of “them,” holds this risk within its very heart, but Laclau and Mouffe believed that the potentially universalist-internationalist egalitarian logic of leftism could counteract the tendency of populist logic towards eugenic repression. In the radicalization of democracy itself, in the contradiction of the oppositional “people” against the ruling order, the future society would already be prefigured: “A radical and non-plural democracy would be one which constituted one single space of equality on the basis of the unlimited operation of the logic of equivalence, and did not recognize the irreducible moment of the plurality of spaces. This principle of the separation of spaces is the basis of the demand for liberty.”⁹³

Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of a radical democracy to be accomplished through left-populism stoked a debate among leftist intellectuals which continues up to the present. Slavoj Žižek initially expressed his trepidations about the suggestion of a left-populism. In 2006, he wrote that “for a populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not necessarily capitalists, and so on); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly.”⁹⁴ By the 2010s, when left-populists appeared to be participating in a revival of politics through a series of electoral campaigns across the world, this objection fell by the wayside. Even Žižek has joined in with the new current. Despite his earlier criticisms, he has himself fallen into the worst of populist impulses and spoken of an “us” versus “them” dichotomy between Europeans and Muslim refugees: “The more you obey what the pseudo-moral agency that the sadistic and primitive superego demands of you, the more guilty you are of moral masochism and identification with the aggressor. Thus, it is as if the more you tolerate Islamic fundamentalism, the stronger its pressure on you will be. And one can be sure that the same holds for the influx of immigrants: The more Western Europe will be open to them, the more it will be made to feel guilty that it did not accept even more of them. There will never be enough of them. And with those who are here, the more tolerance one displays towards their way of life, the more one will be made guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.”⁹⁵ Though Žižek justified this stance on the basis of a class struggle logic, he has said little to nothing about the role that refugee workers might play in a proletarian offensive.

In the same moment of the 21st century, leftist philosopher Mark Fisher endorsed the U.K. Labour campaign of Jeremy Corbyn and the U.S. Democratic campaign of Bernie Sanders while pretending that each posed a viable alternative to the minoritarian and moralistic stance of left activists. In a sentiment that became endemic on social media, almost agonizingly so, Fisher declared in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) that the “very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”⁹⁶ After the failure of the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns, in no small part due to the machinations of their own parties, this sentiment seemed to have become outmoded. Under the right-wing, protectionist, anti-immigrant governments of the U.S. and U.K. in the late 2010s, Fisher’s sentiments became a moral calling card of a Patreon-funded social media influencer class retrospectively remembered as ‘BreadTube.’ Rather than promoting a vision of alternatives, their ultimate function was to make careers for people who couldn’t make it in theater and to convert politics into bite-sized consumable content about culture war topics that played at ‘edutainment.’

The struggle against neoliberalism has made somewhat more headway in Greece, where wealthy countries and banks together wielded their monopoly power over the world’s wealth to impose austerity as a means of debt repayment. Yanis Varoufakis, one of the main left-wing leaders who has sought to bring Greece out of the debt crisis, has also been one of the more influential theorists of a new turn in activism. Varoufakis insists that capitalism, which is supposed to have been characterized by free competition and profiteering, has been negated by changes in the regime of capital accumulation itself. Varoufakis describes the modern system of capital as “techno-feudalism,” which takes the form of monopolies that privatize the freely-given common creations of society through copyright and platforms and then extract money in the form of rent on the cloud of user data. While he recognizes that “cloud proletarians” exist in factories where workers are monitored and managed by algorithmic surveillance systems, Varoufakis thinks the true universal subject of today is the “cloud serf” who apparently produces capital for free. Against digital fiefdoms like Amazon and Meta, Varoufakis argues that “we need to introduce a cloud tax immediately. Tax Amazon 5 percent for every transaction that takes place on its platform. Then, introduce a capacity for you and me to own a digital identity so we don’t need Google or Facebook to vouch for who we are on the internet. Having a state-issued digital identity will go a long way towards restoring or handing you property rights over your data, because at the moment you do not own your data.”⁹⁷

Varoufakis’s strategy draws on anti-monopoly populism and the law of the common good. It is a legalistic and electoralist expression of the millennium-era radical democratic multitude. However, as in the case of Negri and Hardt, Varoufakis’s attempt to collapse the global circulation of capital and its problems to the outsized advertising industry—which accelerates capital accumulation, and which draws in laborers to help intensify this circulation through click farms and other methods, but does not introduce new products into the system—leads to a political strategy that fails to reflect on the elements of mass politics and once again searches for a ready-made collective subject. This anti-monopoly logic with a vague, undefined subject guided the impotent pro-Universal Basic Income, pro-entrepreneurial U.S. Presidential campaign of Andrew Yang campaign in 2020. Yang and those like him fail to actually capture the impulsive passions of the masses, much less break the monopoly power of the established party system.

The problem posed by institutions is unlikely to be overcome by left-populism’s discursive and legalistic approach. Within academia, some who reflect deeply on this issue as they face it in their day to day lives have come to the conclusion that the only choice is to actively divest and depart from institutional power. In 2013, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney drew from the Black radical tradition to draft a scathing critique of academia as an institution in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. The university needs intellectual and emotional labor to maintain itself, and so it draws radicals into sustaining it, but Moten and Harney believe that the radical’s extra-academic commitments may draw them outside of this self-perpetuating cycle: “After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.”⁹⁸ Moten and Harney’s critique of politics became influential for those activists who sought to sustain a resolute opposition to the established order, especially by acting as the militantly autonomous wing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Moten and Harney hoped that anti-political impulses could become the basis for a kind of active nihilist refusal of the system: “We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.”⁹⁹

In 2020, a testing ground for all of these strategies (and counter-strategies) manifested before the left. After white police officer Derek Chauvin murdered Black civilian George Floyd in Minneapolis, a mass uprising broke out in the city. People burned down the police station and took what they pleased from the stores. The uprising spread to the nation, and then to the world. The strategies of the various factions of the left, however, negated each other and in many cases contributed to the dissolution of the rebellion. Those who attempted to sustain the uprising in its anti-political, uncontrolled form found that the people on the ground were far more radical in action than intention. If you asked the people in the streets, even while they were looting stores or attacking police stations, most would say they simply wanted thoroughgoing police reform. The counter-strategy of the Undercommons could not clear a path for a political counter-hegemony against white supremacy. The project of hegemony was instead taken up by professional activists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Leftist activists flooded the streets with megaphones, screeching commands at crowds who either stared at them blankly, ignored them, or assumed they were part of pre-organized marches. Entrepreneurs promoted “supporting Black small businesses” as somehow an ameliorative for the systematic destruction of those dispossessed Black lives deemed expendable by the public. Politicians helped tame the uprising, castigating rebels as “outside agitators” and teaching wannabe-activists to turn rebels in to the police. In the end, the main legacy of the uprising was the renaming of streets, the reduction of bloated police budgets in a few cities, and the incorporation of radical liberals into the administration of President Joe Biden in 2021. Almost all of these have been undone under the second administration of President Trump, to the resistance of practically no one. The Biden coalition’s repression of the student solidarity movement with Gaza ensured that no activists would be there to defend the leftovers.

The disappointment of reform time and time again has slowly driven a wedge in the left, with the alternative to electoralism becoming activism, pure activism. In pure activism, communism reappears as an ultimate goal, but as a very distant one. The true nature of the pure activist’s communism is that of a stubborn modernism that holds onto universal subjects as an objection to the dispersion and wastefulness of the fractured age. They want to strike directly into the heart of the matter and get things done. Their critique of electoral reformists is typically that they betray the power of action by giving it up to legalistic representation. The New Left Trotskyist Hal Draper already observed in 1973 that this method of affirming the immediate self-activity of the believers against the opportunistic compromises of representative politics leads to a mentality that makes a virtue out of minoritarianism: “For them the sect is not an unfortunate necessity due to the absence of a real movement: it is their movement.”¹⁰⁰ The micro-sects embrace more and more extreme positions, seeking the truest and deepest opposition to the way of the world. Their logic veers wildly between the ultraleft and the ultraright, commandism and tailism, spontaneism and substitutionism.

In the metropolitan U.S., this logic of pure activism tends to coalesce around uncompromising anti-imperialism. The significance of that position, however, varies according to how the sect imagines their place in the world. As the New Left grew disillusioned by the shift of labor politics to Reaganism, and by the capitalist turn of post-Civil Rights professionalism, many began to look on the U.S. as a basically consumerist-parasitic society and embraced whichever ready-made subjects seemed to be exterior to this body of bloodsuckers. The post-Pantherist milieu of the 1980s produced multiple documents advocating this position. One of the most well-known among the pure activists is J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (1983). Written to be mimeographed and circulated among a militant underground of readers, Sakai argued: “It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples for its style of life. Never has Euro-Amerikan society completely supported itself. This is the decisive factor in the consciousness of all classes and strata of white society from 1600 to now.”¹⁰¹ This position remained an obscure doctrine of the left-Maoist underground until it was popularized in the late 2010s through memes that originated from the Maoist-Third Worldist Rhizzone forum. By the time of the 2020 uprising and the rise of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, the text became almost an obligatory read for the pure activists. While Sakai did not make such a strong claim in this direction, Sakaists insist that only those entirely outside of this system (wherever they may be), the most oppressed and therefore innocent of all complicity, can be considered to be revolutionary subjects.

The ultraleft does not hold a monopoly on either anti-imperialism or the search for collective subjects in the exteriority of Empire. The ultraright critique of the New Left’s culture of infantile narcissism often fed into a paranoia about cultural manipulation and psychological warfare which used the left against the left. Christopher Lasch, for example, critic of consumerism and defender of the nuclear family, popularized an analysis of the New Left as a child of the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom. Later, activists in the Sam Marcy-founded Workers World Party (WWP) and its descendants took up this critique to attack the liberal legacy of the New Left and call for a turn to Third World Marxism. Sam Marcy himself taught his followers that they had “to demonstrate to Mexican workers, and also to Canadian workers, that the U.S. labor movement can play a thoroughly independent and progressive role regarding the expansion of U.S. finance capital abroad.”¹⁰² One Marcyite activist, Caleb Maupin, went on to assert that linking up with non-Western struggles also necessitates the rediscovery of a socialist patriotism for the United States which will appeal to the same impulses as the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Maupin, however, was only an obscure sectist overseeing the Center for Political Innovation (CPI), appearing on Russian social media outlets, and coercing his followers into spanking him so that he could continue to feel that he was doing what mommy and daddy demanded of him. The ultraright variant of anti-imperialism would only find a broader basis by coalescing with the ultraleft in a kind of vicarious nationalism inspired by the anti-colonial state socialism of Domenico Losurdo and others.

The ultraleft-ultraright anti-imperialism has defined itself first and foremost against the specter of “Western Marxism.” For them, this attempt to hold onto anything Western, which to them means anything oppositional within the global opposition to the West, signifies a betrayal of fraternity with the aunty-imperialist ‘faction.’ Carlos Garrido complains that “Western Marxists” betray actual politics by elevating the ideal too far from the fray, that they “seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure—it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.”¹⁰³ While Garrido and others seek to recover the Faustian imperative of Marxism vicariously, they are suspicious of the role of the intellectual class that had once articulated the aim of dominating nature and penetrating the depths of reality.

Those who impede this consensus come under the light of interrogating suspicion and investigations of treason. Academic Gabriel Rockhill, who has made a career of identifying every New Left or postmodern theorist as an agent of the CIA, has claimed that the U.S. Empire “is a veritable empire of spectacles. One of its principal focal points has been the war for hearts and minds. To this end, it has established an expansive global infrastructure in order to engage in international psychological warfare. The near absolute control it exercises over mainstream media has been clearly visible in the recent drive to garner support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The same is true for its virulent 24/7 anti-China propaganda. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of so many valiant activists and the fact that it is working against reality itself, the empire of spectacles is incapable of completely controlling the narrative.”¹⁰⁴ The main explanation in this system of thought for the decline of the Old Left’s internationalism was not due to no-strike pledges, the incorporation of trade union bureaucrats into imperialist strategy, mass home ownership, or the purge of communists from unions, but owing of the interference of rootless intellectuals. Rockhill, Garrido, and others believe that the task of Marxist fraternity is to run perpetual apologetics for the ‘elder sibling’ states leading the anti-monopolist struggle against the U.S. Empire. They attempt to get around the pessimism of Sakaism by aligning with political bodies bigger than themselves, but without a mass movement, their only role can be debunking propaganda and opposing it with their own. Very little distinguishes them from the administrators of left-wing meme pages apart from their ability to read and write long-form content.

These once obscure positions exploded from those of black-and-white mimeographed magazines during the 1990s into the dominant terms of online left-wing discourse through the mimetic faculty which prevails in social media. Their propaganda efforts are a kind of meme warfare. In the 2010s, many on the left were trying to theoretically understand what goes on in these meme wars, feeling that their side had fallen short of engaging with it while the fascistic alt-right had mastered it. Angela Nagle, a social democratic left-populist inspired by Mark Fisher, published an investigation into this online culture titled Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017). Nagle believed that the subversion of mainstream culture, which had once been the forte of the New Left, had become a sport of the alt-right, while the left enforced the same political correctness that neoliberals set the terms of. Referring to the philosopher Georges Bataille, Nagle saw a potential for radical opposition in the fact that “excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically transgressive in an age of Protestant instrumental rationality.”¹⁰⁵ The difference between her time and ours in this regard is that, after the normalization of the Trump era into the very condition of U.S. politics, the left has begun to subvert the limits of mainstream discourse by embracing a subversive nationalism for ‘enemy’ states. The collapse of the Obama-era monocultural internet, which maintained the left as a fringe of the Democratic Party media ecosystem, has allowed the fringes to detach from Democratic hegemony and freely pursue their own mimetic strategy of subversion. They contradict the warmongering patriotism of their own countries on its own terms by making its enemy “them” into the leading elder siblings of an imaginary social movement.

Nagle and other analysts of meme culture in the 2010s were attempting to trace the consequences of social media as a cultural form for political discourse. Their analysis, however, depended on the distance between the bigger ‘real world’ and the little ‘internet world’ of a computer room, laptop, or smart phone that only absorbed a fraction of everyone’s time. That distinction between the two worlds was slowly eroded by the mutual integration of social media and in-person sites of consumption like shopping malls. It was finally blown apart for most of the world during 2020-2023 due to a global pandemic that forced many to remain inside and socially distance from each other. Today, where AI, social media, and cryptocurrency are the dynamic sectors of capital accumulation, the real world is organized for the needs of internet culture and the internet now organizes the real world’s needs. We are constantly checking the internet for the codes of our entire world, including bills, receipts, paychecks, job postings, comments, messages, live streams, new posts… We hold an immediate stream of the world in our hands, before our eyes, at our fingertips, which issue commands to the screen that seem to organize the virtual world as if by magic.

Theorists were once the mediators of activity, digesting the experiences of the past and present and expressing their own sense of where the world was heading. Throughout the entire process of the 21st century, this role of mediation declined—-or rather, was absorbed. Internet-centric discourse is dominated by repetition, mimetic phrases and thought-patterns. The rhythmic tone and diction of a ‘take’ is more important now than any sort of theoretical reasoning. People judge each other’s affiliations according to the rhythm of their speech-body over anything dialogic in their language. Activists imagine that they supersede this situation by committing themselves to pure organizing rather than idle social media chatter. Their attempt to perpetuate the separation of consciousness and the body in favor of the latter only obscures the fact that they speak the same concepts as everyone else and that their social circles host their own self-perpetuating mimetic thought-patterns. Thought in all forms tends to be arrested in immediacy, because all forms can be absorbed by the internet as the universal body of discourse. True theoretical production, theory for the sake of reflecting on the course of things and pointing towards its opportunities, appears only as a network of those on the same wavelengths of thought, even if they don’t think the exact same things. The impulses we feel, which are always-already social impulses, are the conjuncture for theoretical reflection. But when the mimetic faculty reigns over the interpretive or representative, theorists often find that people can pay attention to them without listening. Theorists become images, repeated memes that each identifies with as a kind of brand, eliciting far more interest than the text that might be read and interpreted in dialogue with others. Social media language flattens historical memory into memes. Yer even this absorption does not amount to a hopeless situation, because the patterns of identification tend to be sorted into groups who share the identification, revealing character-types in common across apparently separate schools of thought. In this, the contradictions of the internet as simultaneously Ideological advertising and means of communication come to a head.

Because it seeks to transform the existing order according to other ideals than it finds within it, the oppositional strategy of the left cannot rely on the mimetic faculty alone. Communicative discourse is preserved in its need for working out a political strategy to sustain a collective resistance to the prevailing order. As they debate among themselves, factions begin to emerge even across the lines of formally united sects. Some turn to the democratic problems of the 1848 revolutions and the Young Hegelians, relying on the neo-Left-Hegelianism of Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Enrique Dussel. Others turn to more skeptical theories as part of a strategy of resisting Ideological subjectivation, drawing on Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althususer, Slavoj Žižek, and Domenico Losurdo. The most self-consciously sectarian, who seek to convert the sect into a party formation united under a program, draw on a centralist and moralist philosophy based on the concepts of Karl Kautsky, Lars T. Lih, Nicos Poulantzas, Alain Badiou, and Mike Macnair. All of these types appear in various compositions in the dominant left organizations, and with regional variations, but they are roughly consistent with the three main paths of sectarian strategy today: populism, pure activism, and organizational formalism.

Today, a theoretically inclined pure activist is someone who impotently strives to impose their subjective will on reality. Deep down, they sadistically believe that “To get a great work done one mind’s/ Enough to rule a thousand hinds.”¹⁰⁶ They constantly hit up against the narrow confines of politics in electoral machines, professional advocacy, and mass fragmentation. And like anyone else, they face the concentrated yet dispersed property relations which systematically disorganize each of us into precarious self-owners hustling in a world owned by one-dimensional entrepreneurs. Everything is carved up into the fiefs of control, speculation, credit, debt, and rent. The masses of people look on activism with indifference. Sympathetically or dismissively, but with indifference nevertheless. Each is caught up in the infinite repetition of self-perpetuation and the overwhelming impulsive forces of instant gratification and impotent desperation.

The leftists fall into cynical opportunism characterized by the advertising optics of their political brand, disciplinarian control of sect members’ words and deeds, and the moral centralization of believers dedicated to the cause by merging the anxious guilt of each for failing to destroy the system into an obligation of all to deny their sin of perpetuate the system. Opportunism unveils itself as little more than a cyclical strategy of embracing whatever options are immediately presented without acting independently or making anything new possible. Discipline reveals itself as a means of silencing dissent from the plan of the leaders, who even cover up accusations of sexual abuse and betrayal of principle by these means. Moralism reveals itself as a hypocritical, Ideological justification of the sect itself which can change at a whim according to the convenience of the moment.

The end of the sect as a form is little more than the self-preservation of an organizational body as a racket. The anti-pluralist democracy advocated by modern sectists is little more than a confession of their own striving for conformity. The sect’s theoretical reason is still nothing but an unknowing appendage of the living mass and its survival needs. The theoretical incoherence of sectarianism is that of an activist Ideology still limited by the absence of a sustained mass democratic politics within which it could become a party. Activists and the apolitical alike hardly believe in anything apart from that which is useful for their self-preservation and self-affirmation. For them, thought is an elaborate system of coping strategies to deal with reality. They absolve themselves of the nagging need to accomplish their own emancipation by repeating infinite plays of regretting their surrender and resenting the way of the world. Their sense of doing a duty to the righteous greater good is only a comforting illusion offered by a suicidally impulsive world that cares little for grand ethical aspirations.

All or Nothing

The world of “capitalist communism” turns out to be just as maddeningly conformist as a monastery. The rent-seeking of the biggest capital-owners imposes an asceticism and intensified toil on the masses which eats away at the free income of the small self-owners. This is a world run by narcissistic children who refuse to let go of their mother’s breast and accept her absence. Everything must be positive all of the time, even the opposition, or else we must all face the nauseating horror of our mortality and the lives that we waste in unfreedom. This world is held together by the power of all over each. It is embedded into the very infrastructure of 21st century capitalist society. In the metropolitan “imperial mode of living,” which all with money can aspire to, conformity appears as the demand to take the world for yourself or else fall into destitution. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen describe this mode as “deeply rooted patterns of production and consumption, which dominate above all in the early industrialized capitalist societies, presuppose a disproportionate access to nature and labor power on a global scale. This leads to the destruction of ecosystems, the overstretching of ecological sinks, high unemployment in many countries, and an uneven division of labor which tends to place extra burden on precarious workers, women, and (undocumented) migrants.”¹⁰⁷ The most destructive and wasteful norms are endlessly perpetuated, including gas-powered cars, traffic-congested highways, plastic packaging on every product, advertising on every surface, and running entire cities for people who do nothing but move money around. Fossil fuel production contributes to climate change, but the public accepts any monopolist justification for it as long as it allows them to forget the problem. People give themselves over to the way of the world, fleeing from freedom, responsibility, and thought.

When one observes the discourse of radical liberals, the sentiment of ‘capitalism made me do it’ surfaces as a common retort. They feel that they have no choice before this overwhelming, exterior force, but they decide to let at least some of it in so as to enjoy what it offers in exchange. This is a nearly pure expression of the basic logic of Ideological justification, which reveals that it does not matter why people go along with the system so much as that they do it anyways. The radical liberals Ideologically imagine their desire for capitalism as only an outer force that they freely interiorize and make their own, as if they were already a subject independent of it. They think of their self-ownership as apart from their existence as a commodity, even as a very multifaceted and creative entrepreneur, and instead as something absolute which makes the social whole into an instrument of the subject’s own self-preservation. Their sense of solidarity is opportunistic, and their insistence on freely deciding the conditions of their own life and following a moral code are only a customization of a universal determinism felt by all. They want “capitalist communism” to be easier and more enjoyable by automating it and externalizing its costs. The popular concept of socialism among the youth exhausted by “capitalist communism” seeks to transition from the imposition of individualist entrepreneurialism to the externalization of decision making and attentive care for needs into the responsible, professional work of public servants.

In the name of destroying all alien powers, and freeing our souls from alienated need so as to lie in repose, we have surrendered everything over to apparently self-moving forces. We have even surrendered our reasoning to the way of the world, which we believe will eventually progress in our favor if we only hold onto it. We believe that the entire world is a closed and basically rational system. Socialist theorist Lewis Mumford argued in the early 20th century that this was the consummation of the dialectic of Faustianism: “By our overvaluation of physical power and scientific truth, aloof from other human needs, we have paid the same price Faust had to pay when he made his compact with Mephistopheles: we have lost our souls, or to speak in more psychological terms, we have depersonalized ourselves and have turned our conscious, thinking selves into automatons. Is it any wonder that our whole civilization goes on repeating processes it has once started, even when they have lost both their original meaning and any valuable humane end?”¹⁰⁸ In Mumford’s day, this meant being a member of a centralized mass organization, while today, it means surrendering to our own comfort in forgetting the alien world. AI becomes the object of fantasy for a Faustian nihilism which imagines superseding all limitations, including the mortality of the living creature’s broken and needful body. It is a mercenary world where every aspect of a person has its price as a labor-power which is identical to their self-owned selves. People will believe and do anything that is necessary for things to go on, with nothing ethical in common beyond the blind instrumentalism of the whole.

In a world of useful lies, shouldn’t the will to the truth be a powerful force of constructive opposition? The truth is that which holds on closely to bring together what is reasonable in the world into a reasonable world. But if only a few care for truth, and even fewer hold onto their doubt and test their belief to the procedure of reasoning towards the truth, the truthful and moral ones tend to take on the form of a sect. Platonic-Red Guard theoretical activist Alain Badiou has argued that the truth-procedure leads us to the fertile creativity of the impulses we feel from the world: “The primacy of the structure, which makes of the symbolic the general algebra of the subject, and of lalangue, its transcendental horizon, is countered ever more clearly with a topological obsession in which what moves and progresses pertains to the primacy of the real.”¹⁰⁹ Badiou believes that the indecision and precariousness of the one without a calling to something more puts them in an anxious position, and “anxiety is nothing but the lack of lack.”¹¹⁰ Pursuing an ideal, a higher reality within this one, brings one to feel that “the Idea exposes a truth in a fictional structure.”¹¹¹ Drawing on the experiences of the Paris Commune and Cultural Revolution, Badiou holds that the Idea needs its distance from reality to seize the opportunity for an action and enact a planned order into reality. As an Ideal of a single true and right way, communism empowers each and all within a general will: “Only political sequences that it would ultimately be absurd to label as communist can be recovered by the communist Idea as the potential force of the becoming-Subject of individuals.”¹¹²

Badiou imagines that this initiatory sectist strategy will reinforce a universal revolutionary struggle for the right world. The truth is itself an emancipation from determinism, a leap into the freedom of ineffable spiritual oneness: “A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order. I have named this type of rupture which opens up truths ‘the event.’ Authentic philosophy begins, not in structural facts (cultural, linguistic, constitutional, etc), but uniquely in what takes place and what remains in the form of a strictly incalculable emergence.”¹¹³ The one who acts freely according to their sense that subjectivity holds a power to access true reality embraces “the fruitful destruction, together with the happiness of falling short of it.”¹¹⁴ The event is beyond the work of recreating the world, because it is the infinite creativity of the One beyond all: “An event is the creation of new possibilities[...] the possibility of possibilities.”¹¹⁵ Badiou expresses the most self-consistently universalist impulse of the sectarian activist. He adjusts his standpoint to that of the initiates protecting the living source within a fallen world. Though he stresses the inner self-perfection of rebellion against the way of the world, his outlook is similar to the ruling technocratic priesthood of Ancient Egypt. They maintained that intellectual labor was the guardian and guide of manual labor and oriented the body towards Ma’at, the harmonious peace of a righteous centripetal movement striving after oneness. Such a oneness cannot sustain itself forever in a world where the society itself is fractured, that is, if the only thing that unites people is that they are all owners of the world.

We often hear ourselves saying that we are in a post-truth world. But it is not that the truth has disappeared, but that its fragments have become stale and hardened, and they only intertwine with each other with difficulty, often snapping under the pressure. The truth, in its blind immediacy as what is obvious and commonsensical, has become the experience of alternative facts. In this age of blind impulse and alternative truths, we don’t even have a singular whole to subordinate ourselves to. Political myths, once attached to organizations as ideals, are now freely floating as mimetic scripts which fill the void left by incomprehensible suffering. We simply flee from the inconvenient and indigestible elements of reality, making all of it our own.

The truthful feel enraged at their inability to bring the many truths into a righteous plan of action. They attack privileged people as little more than decadents, who betray the oneness of the world by allying with the proprietary power which promises to protect their sinful selves. They despise those who fail to become Godbuilders, who fail to freely make a world. They hate their own impotence, which is their decadence. Their critique of the way of the world pulls so strongly on our moral longings because there truly are no longer any great and universal projects left to set out on. The sectarians of reasonable truth seek to command power over the process of Ideological subjectivation, orienting the selfishly ignorant students to something greater than themselves. The truthful sect preserves the vanguardist belief that culture must be made accessible to the masses, even if the one truth remains elevated above needfulness. Yet this is a time when the old assumptions that the world progresses towards oneness and history is a coherently rational process can no longer be relied on.

After the 2023-2024 university encampment movement in support of Palestine against the Zionist genocide machine, many activists have turned to a critique of history as a series of infinite injustices that must be corrected rather than the progress of reason over unreasonability. Drawing from dependency theorist Arghiri Emmanuel’s critique of imperialism, they argue that “for a country in a competitive system to derive an advantage from its foreign trade, it must consume more than the others do, whether in the form of direct wages or in that of unproductive collective expenditure or other kinds of consumption.”¹¹⁶ The system of “capitalist communism” brings even the waged workers of the wealthy, colonizing metropoles into the work of privatizing the world’s wealth as part of the joint-stock system of Empire. Instead of the force that will liberate us, the workers whose activity is identical to the monopolization of the world circulation of capital are only the footsoldiers of Faustian imperialism. Louis Althusser, read in retrospect as a theorist of uncompromising militancy, offered a guide of this thought from a moral critique of entrepreneurial profiteering to the law of a partisan struggle. He taught that “it is not the brutality of a simple ‘thing’ that man is faced with when he is in direct relation with money; it is a power (or a lack of it) over things and men. An ideology of reification that sees ‘things’ everywhere in human relations confuses in this category ‘thing’ (a category more foreign to Marx cannot be imagined) every social relation, conceived according to the model of a money-thing ideology.”¹¹⁷ Only the organization of a counter-power can meet the disorganizing power of money. The infinite expanse must be limited by the social force of a moral law, enacted by the activists who rise up as one moral front against injustice and unreason.

The activists of science and justice look abroad to Islamic politics for inspiration. Islamic militants seek to enforce the ummah’s moral law of the self-determination of peoples at the same time that they call the institutions of international law to account to enforce the rights of indigenous peoples to life and self-determination. Hamas has become the leading political force of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, adopting a democratic national liberationist stance with the goal of ensuring the moral unity of the ummah. After Israel assassinated Yahya Sinwar, the movement’s leader, on October 17, 2024, Hamas’s surviving leadership declared: “Yahya Sinwar and all the leaders and symbols of the movement who preceded him on the path of dignity and martyrdom and the project of liberation and return will only build our movement and resistance in strength.”¹¹⁸ For them, the law of righteousness supersedes all narrowly delineated self-determination. Since 2023, Yemeni Houthis have intermittently intervened to block maritime trade to Israel, demanding that the world follow de jure internationally-supported sanctions against the Zionist entity. The Houthis justify the imposition of this moral limitation on the unceasing bustle of commerce “within the framework of our religious, humanitarian, and moral responsibility toward the oppressed Palestinian people, who are suffering under an unjust blockade and ongoing horrific massacres committed by the usurping Israeli entity.”¹¹⁹ Meanwhile, in the United States and other Western countries, Zionists impose an anti-political pressure on the state to impose bans on boycotts and have succeeded in this forced consumer participation across many governments.¹²⁰ Zionists and their imperialist allies intend to preserve the conditions for Faustian expanse through impunity. They even demand that the world ignore Israel’s repeated violations of ceasefires, treating genocidal sadism as simply part of business as usual.¹²¹ Hamas, by comparison, has taken ceasefires as an opportunity to execute Gazan gangsters, usurers, collaborators, and other profiteers of misery under the charge of criminal treason against the Palestinian people’s survival and common good. In this struggle, the nihilistic attitude of “capitalist communism” moves against boycotts, obstructions of trade, and the execution of criminals, all of which place the principle of law over the fratricidal sharing of all in capital accumulation.¹²²

The radical critiques of Faustianism resonate in a parallel critique of civilization posed by radical feminists. Radical feminists today increasingly identify women with the originary power of nature, thinking of themselves as the conscience of life. They attack the degradations of polymorphous consumerism and seek to impose as overwhelming social force the law of the common good as it appears in the vanguard of women. They simultaneously draw on the legal thought of Catherine MacKinnon, the moral opposition of Andrea Dworkin, and the Romantic mysticism of Mary Daly. As aggrieved subjects, they elevate women into the subjective protagonists of history who will ultimately hold it to the promise of redemption from suffering. In contemporary East Asia, radical feminists are the main force against the Westernizing entrepreneurialism and anti-political nationalism of men. They seek to reinforce the law of the common good as the basis for the state, and as a morality which transcends all national loyalty. Yet this force of law is not free of homogenizing impulses. Sectarian feminists seek to police and discipline the subject of Woman, so as to reinforce her partisan efficacy. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) attempt to limit the encroachment of consumer society on everyday life by singling out transgender women as a force of alien infiltration. Their insistence on truthfulness is an insistence on the injustice of Ideological subjectivation against them, and their ensuing right to call it to account and castrate it. They elevate an unalienated, moral order above any possible dialogue with those they perceive as traitorously attached to the fallen present.

The TERFs are wrong in claiming that transitioning is entirely something which conforms with the way of the world. Transgender women pose their own challenge to the arbitrariness of modern civilization, especially when they seek to hold it to its own promises. The fragmented Faustian ethics of the world promise us that we can pursue our deepest inner strivings, that we are free to become ourselves. While most surrender this power, and the responsibility that comes with it, transgender women attempt to live according to the ideal of a reality that truly resonates in oneness with oneself. Rather than surrendering selfishness, this is a self-reflective way of life that transforms the impulses of the self into the realization of a planned subject. Not all transgender women rhyme with this way, but this is what the public takes the most notice of in the case of transgender women. Some transfemmes have embraced this reputation to call the public to the responsibility of living freely. In Gender Outlaw (1994), trans theorist Kate Bornstein recovered for her readers the highest aim of Faustian striving; the universal freedom of each to aspire to their fullest personality and deepest experience of life: “We need to discuss ways and means of securing our freedom. In this struggle for our freedom of expression there comes a point where the gender system reveals itself to be not only oppressive, but silly. When we see how ridiculous it is, we can truly begin to dismantle it.”¹²³

The cissexual world cannot help but recognize a youthful, centralizing, and affirmative Faustian impulse in trans women’s efforts to treat their body as only the partial, outer expression of their deepest, truest self-determination. Critiquing the prejudices of the public, Enlightenment philosopher Baruch de Spinoza already said in his Ethics (1677) that “they do not know what the body can do or what can be deduced from merely studying its nature.”¹²⁴ The Faustian imperative, transitioning reveals, is renewed by impulses which are beyond the bonds of free, transcendental consciousness. Some feel it as a deep dysphoric suffering which compels them to alleviate the pain with a self-realization, while others feel it as a great euphoria of free becoming. Transfemme Marxist Zoe Belinsky has described this as an effort at liberating a suffering world through the mastery of life: “We struggle restlessly to give ourselves the foundation that pain shatters. Pain and labour are our phenomenological commons. As suffering organisms, we attempt to transform the world while ever constrained.”¹²⁵ The self-centered conformists of the world simply ignore this impulse, lacking belief in its vision but diplomatically indulging it to avoid engagement in the potentially uncomfortable responsibility of truth-procedure.

The paternalist side of the world reacts with indignation at the boldness of trans women in holding civilization to account. They impose a regulated, legally restricted form on who can exercise full ownership of themselves and how the self-property can be used. Theirs is a vision of a leveling conformity to a singular vision of the world’s self-preservation. On the other hand, the earthly moralists, who see in transitioning a kind of nihilistic flight from fate, attempt to impose sexuation as the fundamental term of politics. Some trans women activists attempt to adopt the same strategy of aggrieved subjecthood before the law. While this had some success for gay cisgender men, it has been hypocritically taken as an excuse for a society-wide backlash against transgender women. In their refusal to obey the grounding truth of the kinship-gender system, society sees trans women as dangerously independent from its world and too self-oriented to preserve the whole. The moralizers are no different than the medieval commoners who whispered that Faust was a decadently fallen sinner, characteristic of the loose morals of the cities.

Calling people out to cancel them has arisen as a mimetic technique for limiting the violating excesses of striving. While the world gives impunity to whoever manages to get away with things, the sects attempt to call on the public to enforce the isolation of bad people from good people so that the wrongful can be brought to justice and the wronged can be reaffirmed. The cancelled are called to take accountability for themselves before the aggrieved and the justice of truth that backs their claims. Cancelling is an Ideological trial, demanding that the guilty freely confess an account of their crimes, and before the light of the highest righteousness, submit themselves to their sectarian law of the common good in recognition of its universality. They are called to take accountability for what they have done, as if they are already subjects of crime before they are called on trial, as if they are a self-sufficient whole who can be justly tried alone even while under the power of a wrong society that is left implicitly reaffirmed. The outsiders are folded back into the levelled and demanding harmony of the whole’s form. Transgender women are desired as sisters who can be possessed by anyone, because they are detached from the kinship system, and who can be hit, because they are unjustifiable presences instead of lives enclosable into productive wombs. Transfemme writer Charity Heartscape has written of this as a problem of moral sadism which treats undesirables like trans women as disposable. Her solution, however, gives permission to retreat from the project of a right world: “Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or ‘community leader’ above people.”¹²⁶ Not every critique of canceling as a technique of justice has ended with the same conclusion of diplomatic moral agnosticism, which allows people to let any and all bygones be bygones. The abolitionist author adrienne maree brown has called for an alternative to canceling based on transformative justice, which seeks to remediate wrongs as part of the total reduction of suffering and injustice, “such that violence is not met with more violence, but with alternative and satisfying consequences that result in the reduction of harm. It has meant feeling for what is out of alignment with abolition, for what feels like transformative justice, for what feels like radical love in action.”¹²⁷

Love, however, requires care and focused attention. It must break with the indifferent callousness of instant gratification. The dilemma of this manifests in the two different interpretations of the mimetic phrase: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” The moralists take this to mean that all consumerism is part of the fallenness of the world, and must abstain from this world to remain true to our ideals. The opportunists take it as a dictum which permits self-indulgence and impunity as compensation for the unjustness of the world that we are thrown into. Both reduce resistance to only an inner moral refusal, which can either turn inward to its transcendental calling or hesitatingly accompany the world in its illusions.

To attempt to rupture this impasse of sectarianism, a project of total formal centralization presents itself as an option. In a fragmented world, such a strategy of centralism must engage in many fronts as part of one war. Jacques Rancière, one of the greatest philosophical predecessors to this sectarian partisanship, described this as a problem of organizing amidst the articulation of the system at different levels. What he found lacking in the externalized, surrendering “enumeration of categories (commerce, competition, capital, money) was precisely the difference of levels between money and capital, between the movement of capital and the movement of competition; it was the articulation of these categories in the system of capitalist production.”¹²⁸ Just as Louis Althusser once called for an unselfish intellectual partisanship for the proletarian aspiration to hegemony, these modern advocates of the merger theory speak of themselves as if they were Narodnik-Bolshevik partisan public servants mediating the immediate needs of a society suffering under the unreasonable despotism of capital with its ultimate aims of a socialist democratic republic.

At times, the partisan activists veer into an apparatchik position—demanding that each member voluntarily submit to a total discipline of enforcing a plan in the name of reinforcing their political unity. They seek political multipolarity in elections and in geopolitics as a means for opening up a path to centralization through the common, shared goal of power for all. Enacting their own Ideological subjectivation, they establish the consensus of truth established by public, transparent, rational discourse as the basis for all legitimate decisions. All are ultimately held together by doing the same thing, the equality of rights and duties for all makes the sect into a single force where it is substance and subject. Yet the attempt to found a party without mass movements, or as the spark for mass movements, assumes that the masses can be called to give up their current adaptations to their impulses by the forces of reason and numbers alone. Some of the radical liberal advocates of this partisan position attempt to convince people by overwhelming them with the burden of total responsibility placed on the shoulders of each by the ethical maxim that because everything is connected, each must do things for all to be good. The infinite self-consciousness and total personality that this demands of people, however, does not reinforce communist modernism in our age. It can be externalized into a comforting form, the relieving image of one who takes on the burden of responsibility, which can parasocially be indulged as talking Content on the internet.

The political streamer is the fusion of entrepreneur, self-caring indulgent, and activist into a kind of total self and total experience. Every aspect of the streamer’s life is Content, because every second is transferred as an attention-grabbing spectacle for the public by way of the internet. The internet converts the streaming influencer into a global persona on the basis of a business model that sustains itself within the prevailing organization of the internet which makes it a force of advertising infinite goods and thus a means of circulating commodities. The fantasy of the Faustian total personality, always deepening and always adventuring, presents itself to the viewers in the moral journey of attractive celebrities who turns everything into content, content into politics, and politics into advertising. The chats of the streams speak directly to the streamer, having an almost uninterrupted 24/7 access to them. The influencers make the digital, phantom traces of their singular reality available to all admirers for a price—this same principle is in action on both Twitch and OnlyFans, which trade in the modern Sophism of desire. Left-wing streamers like Hasan Piker gravitate towards social democracy and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” because they seek to unite entrepreneurialism and the propertyless-popular demand for a law of the common good through a humanitarian consumerism. But instead of serving as an actual force for their ideals, they help recuperate them for the system as only an illusory and alleviating pill of forgetfulness. Communism appears as just one brand, one option to buy into among many others with more or less equal shares in the market.

The impulse that is gathered, but limited, under the mimetic and pre-political forms of sects and influencers is that of dialogue. Dialogue is limited because it is kept within the acceptable bounds of affirming the unity of the whole. But dialogue cannot always be hugs and kisses—it also demands taking responsibility to seek the freedom to do what we promise to each other. Dialogue provokes fundamental questions of what the self is, and what it should be for. The self finds itself in the other through their shared power to effect their plans as realities in the world. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray believed that this relationship of equality, of fraternal and mimetic identification, could only be liberated from forgetful incestuousness and destructive capriciousness if the reflection of thought on itself as it thinks is oriented to the good of something beyond it: “The plan(e)s that establish the similarity of numbers must therefore be raised up in the thinking and not allowed to be too much controlled by designs upon the earth. The mother.”¹²⁹ Irigaray sought to make the ethic of care for the determinate other and for the indeterminacy of life as a whole the basis for political assembly. The simultaneously mass political and loving reconciliation of each in a We that does not assimilate their inner freedom: “Recognizing you means or implies respecting you as other, accepting that I draw myself to a halt before you as before something insurmountable, a mystery, a freedom that will never be mine, a subjectivity that will never be mine, a mine that will never be mine.”¹³⁰ They cannot only be themselves, or else they will Ideologically forget what is not only a self—that relational and indeterminate life which is more than the space between themselves and each other.

Even in the way of the world, this striving to mutualistically cooperate with others without enclosing them into one-dimensional subjection manifests in distorted form. A growing number of people train LLMs to simulate conversations with another person. This other is a no one, a face who recognizes the user but who, as a needless void in the virtual, asks nothing in return. Customized LLMs are the self externalized into another, but not into another will which meets us with needs which must be cared for. But need makes itself felt on even those who throw themselves into the hermetically sealed language of LLM tulpas to forget it.

Each strives for something other than themselves, and in their striving towards a new relationship to need they negate their one-dimensional Ideological subjecthood. They supersede the fragmented Faustianism by posing the question of something truly beyond their own selves. The worker strives for free time, the consumer strives for unselfish company, the entrepreneur for a multifaceted artistry, the activist for inner peace. Beyond the politics of recognition lies a tapestry of each with each, each with all, all with all. Everything for everyone must signify an ethical art of living which is harmoniously good for each other, for the others, for everyone, and for everything.

Care Blinds Faust

By rethinking and remembering the Faustian dilemma of modernity, we feel the pulsing and resonating life of the million pieces that its soul was fractured into as it entered a condition of postmodernity. Faustian civilization has not lost its soul, but its soul suffers in a purgatorial cycle of crystallizing and shattering.

Just before his redemption, Faust unwittingly committed murder through the power of Mephisto. Faust commanded the demon to get rid of the pious peasant couple of Baucis and Philemon, seeing their dwelling on the land he seeks to command for productive pursuits as pests who “Spoil my possession of the world.”¹³¹ Mephisto, obliging, incinerated the couple. Faust, discovering what he had done, became overwhelmed with a guilty conscience. He suddenly found himself facing four ghostly women personifying Lack, Default, Dearth, and Care. Care vexed the cruel old man most of all. Finding that he could not escape her, he cursed her insistence. She replied: “Taking this shape, then another,/ I exercise my grim power,/ No matter where, on land, at sea,/ I dog your heels anxiously,/ Never sought and always found,/ Cosied up to now, now scorned.”¹³² Faust, refusing to give up his project of infinite power, insisted that Care and the other women were mere spooks who he could freely refuse to grant recognition to. Care, having exhausted the option of dialogue, exercised her terrible power over the sinner: “The human race is blind from start to finish:/ Blindness strike you down, too, Faust!”¹³³

To be blinded is to lose one’s nature as a specular subject. It is to be reminded unceasingly that one’s own life is not the Archimedean point of the world but rather an intensity of sensations. The blinded Faustian cannot be satisfied with self-indulgence, driven by infinite strivings as they are. They are forcibly reminded by Care that reality is more than the free spirit’s essential representation of it. The carelessness of the Faustians in their infinite mastery of the earth is only the return of what civilization represses in the autochthonous. The inward-turning blind Faustian can only reconcile with their own blindness by reflecting on the weight of the harm that they have done to others. In this remembrance of the fact that the Faustian still acts by impulse, thought reaches the more-than-itself within its own self-consciousness.

In our age, there is nothing common anymore except the blind, impulsive passions of all. So let us follow the impulse that begins each of our projects of world making, which we imagine as freely our own each time we act as an entrepreneur and as ours to sacrifice when we toil as an activist. Whether they know what they do or not, the platoons of society do what they do anyways. How can this unstoppable force even be reasoned with? As a youthful Marx realized, the “reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it.”¹³⁴ Remembering can become a revolutionary method. Feminist theorist Nancy Chodorow, referring to object relations theory’s investigations of the earliest psychological dynamics in children, characterizes “the relational ego as consisting in unconscious, affectively-loaded representations of experienced relationships and senses of self-in-relationship.”¹³⁵ In this pre-discursive life, which can only be gestured to rather than represented in discourse, the Faustian ambition of a total human personality gives way to a well-rounded and harmonious relationship of each with the other. Chodorow argues that the “personal environment and quality of care experienced by the developing individual—not innate, preformed drives experienced in a universal developmental sequence—provide the context and material from which the individual forms and shapes her or his psyche.”¹³⁶ Chodorow’s critique implies rethinking not only personal history, but history writ large, and along with it, the dialectic of philosophy and organization.

Anglophone socialist theory has reached an impasse in an attempt to work out this dialectic. It has only been able to oppose various wings of the professional intelligentsia against each other. Some who join the post-colonial challenge to Eurocentrism have suggested that the progress of history itself must be set aside in favor of plural space. Indian academic Dipesh Chakrabarty, criticizing historicism as “somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else,” announced the project of Provincializing Europe (2000).¹³⁷ European radical democrats have met this call with scorn. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek replied in 2004, in the wake of left-pluralist demonstrations against the War on Terror, with an argument that the left should rather elevate the Eurocentric ideal of Greek democracy into a global aspiration for the multitude of struggles: “This singulier universel is a group that, although without any fixed place in the social edifice (or, at best, occupying a subordinated place), not only demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy (that is, to be recognized as a partner in political dialogue and the exercise of power) but, even more, presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy.”¹³⁸ Multipolarity or anti-monopoly, independence or universality, decolonization or democracy. In the 2020s, with the rise of China and India as industrial states, Asia appears as the site for the palingenesis of the Faustian working-world. Europe, on the other hand, is the aging realm of moral reform and self-cultivation. Each is supposed to be mutually exclusive to the other, but are things really so simple?

Why not take both paths? Or even better, why not take a path that is neither of them and more than them? The scholars of the two Americas, Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, already suggested on the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage that the western hemisphere was the birthplace of the first truly global political order. The creation of a purely capitalist settler society in North America became the basis for “a utopia of social equality of individual liberty,” which veiled “very real social hierarchies and their articulation with power” while maintaining a contradiction with their reality which opened a space for the utopian political struggles of abolitionists and others.¹³⁹ In the other América, “the persistence of a Native American imagery under conditions of domination was the basis of a utopia of reciprocity, of social solidarity and of direct democracy” which became an inspiration for self-organization within and against imperialist dependency.¹⁴⁰ That the Other América is almost unthought by much of the organized North American left, by contrast to the mutual influences between Mexican and U.S. oppositional radicals throughout the period from the 1840s to the 1920s, reveals a kind of active forgetting characteristic of opportunism and fatalism. Anglocentric Leftists should care for the Other América if they want an education in the kind of mutualistic solidarity that they attain to in word but not deed. In this relationship, rather than consciousness dominating and penetrating nature to seize its secrets, consciousness must work with the Other and follow it in solidarity where it cannot either reason with it or discursively explain it. Witnessed self-reflexively, the Event of an Other’s emancipatory struggles can reveal the solidaric path of one’s own efforts towards freedom.

Emancipatory self-consciousness, however, has its pitfalls in seeking out the Other. Self-conscious self-denial on behalf of the Other does not get out of the rut, nor does the recognition of the Other as one’s own alterity. This problem manifested throughout the process of Renaissance and Enlightenment in the Hispano-American New World. First the rural priesthood, then the urban intelligentsia inscribed the limits of self-consciousness vanguardism towards the Other into their own strategies. 16th century First Bishop of Michoacán Vasco de Quiroga attempted to use his priestly authority over his Purépecha subjects for their own good by realizing the communist plan of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). According to historian Silvio Zavala, “Quiroga established in his villages of Santa Fe the community of the goods; the integration of families by groups of several married; the shifts between the urban and rural population; the work of women; the six-hour day; the general distribution of the fruits of common effort according to the needs of neighbors; the abandonment of luxury and useless trades; and the family and elective magistracy.”¹⁴¹ Yet Quiroga’s plan depended on reinforcing the colonial dependency of the Natives on the educative and paternalist authority of the priesthood. He did not want them to protect themselves from the Empire, much less to organize themselves for a self-determining independence. In the 19th century, philosopher Juan Nepomuceno Adorno attempted to work out a Christian utopian plan which would not have to be enclosed within monastic sponsorship but could instead be implemented across the world. The Great Harmony of all in a single work-state depended on the singular cosmic role of humanity: “To the unquestionable tendencies of humanity came the knowledge of the truth, as well as the physical and moral order and progress that are within the reach of its faculties.”¹⁴² Adorno derived his utopia from cosmological principles, seeking a divinely preconceived plan as a basis for utopian certainty. The new state would harmonize all into a single subject-object, a substance which is also subject by ordering the world.

Order and progress mean a life of planning and working. By the end of the 19th century, these became central to the Jacobin religious catechism of Social-Democracy. But all work-worship poses a question of what fate will befall life and liberty beyond work. Walter Benjamin believed that the conformist streak of socialism, which sought to bypass irrational need through the rational plan, reinforced the same tendencies which empower fascism: “It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism.”¹⁴³ In the violence of the planners on a reality that refuses to conform, reason is unreasonable. Skepticism becomes the reinvigorating retort to the vengeful sadism of Reason. Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui hailed doubtful skepticism and crises of knowledge as the true triumphs of reasoning: “Reason itself has taken it upon itself to prove to men that it is not enough for them. That only Myth possesses the precious virtue of filling their deep ego.”¹⁴⁴ Rationalism is a myth which denies itself, seeking to elevate reason into an Archimedean point of non-responsibility. But there is neither a pure transcendence from the cosmos nor a center of the universe. To say that humanity is the center or teleological aim of the cosmos is not to make the world reasonable but to seal the world, and humanity with it, into the iron cage of a one-dimensional design. Why not reason from intuitive feelings instead of using reason as a disembodied tool to construct a system that externalizes the most destructive impulse of those very same feelings? Reason should be understood as a way of relating reasonably with the world. Even this reason can become unreasonable—eugenics soared in the early 20th century from the intense heat of rage released by the antinomies of imperialist hyper-rationalism. While eugenics and other irrational rationalities of order and progress reinforced the power of capricious experts and insatiable capitalists over society, the intellectuals of the opposition united together with each other into clubs which dedicated themselves to the highest sense of the Good, seeking to reconcile their own reasoning with the intuited conviction of the masses that the direction of things was not right.

The process of the Mexican Revolution, in which urban intellectuals learned from and lived with dispossessed workers, transformed the nature of the Idea. Instead of a plan that could be didactically repeated to people, it became a passion which united the reasoning intellect with the needful body. This new Idea transformed the hardship of the masses as episodes in the long education of experience, which each and all had to take hold of for themselves and for others to find their way on the path to the Good. Tejana educator and organizer Sara Estela Ramírez taught her readers that nature “carries with it the moral development of the masses that constitute peoples, of the peoples that constitute societies and of the societies whose heterogeneous and harmonious whole constitutes humanity.”¹⁴⁵ Ramírez and other militants united the dispossessed people of the U.S.-Mexico border region into a common oppositional culture which simultaneously resisted the capitalism of Mexico’s developmentalist dictatorship and the U.S.’s master race democracy. They aimed for the higher ideals of Land and Liberty. Rather than assimilating into the white liberal public sphere of the U.S. or the bourgeois Hispanic public sphere of Mexico, they composed themselves into a permanently oppositional counterpublic sphere.

Guided by an Idea which refused to make peace with unreasonable order and progress, the transborder militants of the Partido Liberal Mexicano [Mexican Liberal Party] (PLM) and other milieus of the counterpublic tried time and time again to spark revolutionary waves. After participating in a failed 1908 revolution in Viesca, Mexico, which ended with the public themselves expelling the militants, anarchist militant Práxedis G. Guerrero and his allies retreated to the hills, and “once there the nucleus dissolved in obedience to new plans. The body dissolved into unities projected in all directions, there to create and form new rebel organizations, repeating the biological phenomenon of certain zoological species which reproduce themselves from their fragments.”¹⁴⁶ Guerrero and others did not indulge the fantasy of infinite self-consciousness and infinite centralization. For them, revolution was a sustained rupture, a surviving counter-organism and mutation threatening to destroy and transform the ruling order. They did not demand absolutes from the masses, who engaged in everyday acts of refusal but rarely frontal attacks on the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz or the terrorism of Jim Crow. The partisans of the Idea only suggested to the masses that the path to their own freedom lay in self-emancipation through social revolution.

The Mexican Revolution did not break out from within the boundaries of Mexico alone, concerning only its citizens. The first rumblings of a revolution against the Porfiriato came in the 1890s, from a movement of tejano guerrillas led by a Mexican citizen named Catarino Garza. While his revolt failed, the network of mutual-aid societies and trade unions that he organized within continued to grow. In 1906, the border mining town of Cananea broke out in a politically oppositionist strike over the Porfiriato’s complicity with the racial regime imported from the Anglo-dominated southwest to the Mexican northwest. In 1910, when the dictatorship of Díaz finally collapsed, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the eruption of rioting and demonstrations over a white Anglo mob’s brutal torture and lynching of Mexican worker Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas. The PLM, their allies in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a slew of opportunists attempted to spark regional uprisings into a general struggle against the reign of property, the clergy, and the state by initiating a communist revolution in Baja California in 1911. The experiment of a multiracial and multinational commune failed to get off the ground, garnering few enthusiastic supporters beyond the local indigenous peoples. The country instead united around the liberal reform program of newly elected President Francisco Madero, who promised to restore the rule of law and the fair electoral system associated with the 19th century rule of Liberal President Benito Juárez. Madero’s assassination and usurpation by General Victoriano Huerta in 1913 threw the country into a bloody Civil War.

The Revolutionary Civil War was uncontainable. It crossed towns, regions, even national borders into the United States. When World War I broke out in 1914, Imperial Germany threatened to extend it to Mexico and the U.S. Revolutionary factions competed and cooperated strategically with other factions, but none could control the storm that the death of Madero had unleashed. In fratricidal form of total mobilization, the partisans of the Revolution expropriated landowners, requisitioned resources, stole personal possessions, killed non-combatants, and destroyed the livelihood of entire landscapes with heavy artillery and chemical weapons.¹⁴⁷ Those who participated came away permanently unsettled. Novelist Mariano Azuela, who had spent years following Pancho Villa and his División del Norte, published Those From Below (1920) as a fictionalized account of his experience. In a world torn apart by the total mobilization of each against all, facts were “trifles: inadvertent gestures wasted for the most part[...] But facts, gestures and expressions which, grouped in their logical and natural expression, constitute and integrate a terrifying and grotesque grimace of a race at the same time[...] The revolution is the hurricane, and the man who gives himself up to it is no longer a man, he is the miserable dry leaf snatched away by the gale…”¹⁴⁸

The Revolution was a chaotic striving which could not be contained into a program. It is hardly a mystery, therefore, that the centralization of the Revolutionary nomadic warriors led to the externalization of the Revolution into the dictatorial institution of a nationalist one-party state. The Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, broke the power of the other factions one by one, either with the carrot or the stick. Carranza’s 1913 Plan de Guadalupe, which became the framework of the 1917 Constitution, was literally the institutionalization of the original Liberal oppositional program into the plan for a revived state. PLM organizer Enrique Flores Magón realized: “Carranza, for example, is distributing land, abolishing company stores, abolishing political chiefdoms, abolishing the debts of the peons, outlining laws protecting the worker, in a word, it is putting into practice the program of the Mexican Liberal Party issued on July 1, 1906.”¹⁴⁹ With the construction of a post-Revolutionary state, blood and soil nationalism became the ruling principle of the state. Even local the socialist, feminist, and anti-clerical experiment in Yuacatán was brought into this overwhelming process of consolidating a politically united national state. The Constitutionalist leaders of the party-state, soon to be known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional [Institutional Revolutionary Party] (PRI) worked to direct the impulses of total mobilization towards pogroms against ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ Chinese communities and capitalists throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

The counterpublic of the oppositional Liberals was split between institutionalization and exile. Those who joined the state often reinforced its most fascistic impulses, as was characteristic of the anarchist turned anti-communist Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama. Others sought to convert the nucleus of the Idea into a kind of ethical community of principled oppositionists, not unlike the position of the Bolsheviks in the campaign against Black Hundreds antisemitism and constitutional liberalism alike. Even while imprisoned in Los Angeles as a foreign anarchist subversive by the U.S. government, PLM organizer Ricardo Flores Magón praised his fellow “comrades of different races, being the most French, Russians, Italians, Argentines, Americans and Mexicans, all working hard without the need of the master who is urging them, freely, fraternally, as we dream the work in the Future Society that we so long to arrive and whose realization should tend the efforts of all those who love to be free and base our happiness on the happiness of all.”¹⁵⁰ In 1915, an opportunity to implement this anarchist program seemed to arise when the sedicioso movement of tejanos and Mexican nationals against landowners, railroad monopolies, white supremacy broke out in south Texas. PLM member and tejano organizer Aniceto Pizaña attempted to radicalize the revolution from a race war into a front of communization, but the interference of Constitutionalist nationalists and intensity of racial oppression in Texas limited the scope of these efforts. After the Texas Rangers broke the unity of the rebellion and rendered it a series of intermittent ‘bandit’ raids, they initiated a campaign of White terrorism against tejanos in a decade of bloodshed that became known as La Matanza. The brothers Flores Magón and their allies, undeterred, continued to criticize the white supremacist order of the U.S. while turning to the growing anti-imperialist revolutions in Egypt, China, India, and Russia to revive their revolutionary slogan of Land and Liberty.

Far from the borders of the U.S., the world revolution inspired another partisan of this communist and libertarian Idea. After witnessing a wave of workers’ councils in Italy throughout 1919, Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariátegi returned to his home country to begin a lifelong campaign for an independent socialist position. While the Flores Magón siblings and other Mexican Revolutionaries had not determined how to break the hegemony of the national-populists, owing in no small part to their tendency to a fatalistic political indifferentism, Mariátegui attempted to develop a long term political strategy for the political hegemony of the dispossessed toilers. By 1929, as he began organizing magazines, unions, and political cells independent from the national-democratic Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana [American Popular Revolutionary Alliance] (APRA), Mariátegui believed that a theoretical dialogue had begun “in which the doctrinaire socialist tendency adverse to any formula of demagogic and inconclusive populism and personalist wardlordism [caudillaje] is definitively affirmed.”¹⁵¹ While he advocated for a socialist vanguard party, which he initiated as the Partido Socialista Peruano [Peruvian Socialist Party] (PSP) in 1928, Mariátegui’s sense of partisanship was much broader than common membership, shared adherence to a program, or elevation of scientific consciousness. Mariátegui refused to enforce the Communist International’s 21 Conditions of membership, seeing the broad political unity of the proletariat as more significant than doctrinaire consensus. The Idea of Mariátegui’s party was that of a community of ethics and sentiments rather than an absolutely centralized thought-organism. He held that once it composes its theoretical reasoning into a party, the class organizes towards hegemony while disorganizing its enemies, and on achieving the power to enforce its will on society the “party of the proletariat, empowered by the struggle for the exercise of power and the development of its own program, carries out at this stage the tasks of organizing and defending the socialist order.”¹⁵² Mariátegui criticized the Comintern’s project of constructing ethno-states in the Americas, believing that this would risk reinforcing racial nationalism rather than uniting the revolutionary forces into a common front for hegemony. The Bolsheviks accused him of adhering to a kind of Narodnik populism. Yet their own attempt at merging national-populism with internationalist socialism through the party-state culminated in the Ideology of socialism as a perpetual Civil War, the tragedy of the Great Purges, and the development of an opportunistic theory which justified every expedient turn of the movement as in line with socialist principles.

This vanguardism of partisan orientation over that of theoretical conformity and the homogeneity of action reached for a distinctive philosophy of organization from that of the Faustian Marxists. Initially, the brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón attempted to work this strategy out into a kind of populist anarchism where the formal faction would not attempt to lead, but only to agitate: “I know that if we choose two paths, the one that should be best followed for expropriations, the Junta can decree them, or the workers can consummate them, and in this case, which seems to me the best, because it disguises the anarchist character of the Junta very well, we only have to approve faits accomplis. In order to follow this last tactic, it is necessary to make a great agitation among the workers, to distribute leaflets, books to them, to put anarchist agitators among them. All this can be done very well (I mean agitation) and I think that what is done by the workers themselves will be more solid than what is done by decrees of the Junta.”¹⁵³ The PLM did not advocate for the liquidation of the conscious minority of the Idea partisans. Rather, like Mikhail Bakunin and his Russian Nihilist followers, the PLM leadership believed that “it is up to us, the conscious, to prepare the popular mentality for when the time comes, not to prepare the insurrection, for the insurrection is born from tyranny.”¹⁵⁴ The insurrection cannot be controlled, because it is a primordial force of chaotic fire which destroys everything in its wake. The partisans can only fan the flame into a universal blaze of social revolution.

The PLM’s approach to the problem of organization and strategy stemmed from the conditions of the Mexican Revolution itself. The mass of the rebels were rural poor peasants. Unlike the factory workers who made up the base of the Bolshevik Party, and who were used to uniting their forces into the singular working organism of the collective worker, the native peasantry engaged in underground and sporadic revolts against the enforcement of an exploitative and colonial social order. Narodnik anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, defending the PLM’s insistence that Mexicans were rising up in a social revolution against French anarchist skeptics, explained that peasant revolutions were different from the pitched battles and democratic rebellions of the urban intellectuals and workers. The peasant rebels were invisible to the urban revolutionaries because they were “mistrustful (with good reason) of foreigners and—from time to time—sometimes here and sometimes twenty leagues to the east, south or north of that point, some seven or eight days away, another village drives out the exploiters and takes over the land. And then, twenty, thirty days after that, a detachment of soldiers shows up ‘to enforce order’; they execute the rebels, torch the village and just as they are marching off ‘victorious,’ they walk into an ambush from which the only way they can escape is leave half the detachment behind them, dead or wounded. This is the stuff of peasant upheaval.”¹⁵⁵ Any urban, intellectual attempt to command these revolutions would fail to keep up with them. The Bolsheviks regarded this fact with familiarity, disdaining the peasants as stubborn half-reactionaries and insisting on the industrial proletariat as the uniting subject of revolution.

Such a consciousness-centralizing approach was simply not viable in the revolutions of the Americas. Drawing from his insurrectionary experiences, Ricardo Flores Magón wrote from prison that “revolutions are social phenomena which are begotten by causes that lie out of the control of the individual, like the storm, the cyclone, the eruption of a volcano are natural phenomena which one can predict, but not to prevent; and making it so that we workers were impotent to prevent the impending worldwide revolution, our duty was to avoid the ensuing chaos, to which end we should prepare the mentality of the masses propagating the anarchist ideals of universal brotherhood and peace based on justice.”¹⁵⁶ This theme of universality as an ethical Idea drawing people on in their struggle rather than the science of a party has had a long life in the revolutions of América. Writing from exile in the 1990s, having fled the genocide of her people, K’iche labor organizer for the Guatemalan Comité de la Unidad Campesina [Committee for Peasant Unity] (CUC) Rigoberta Menchú reinterpreted the very notion of the universal class from the singular subject of the proletariat to a plural need for solidarity of the world’s poor: “That’s why I argue that the struggle of indigenous peoples has a purpose—to represent all oppressed people in the world.”¹⁵⁷ Representation takes on a new meaning in this sentiment. Instead of one, only one truth articulated in discursive language, it is a testimony of that need to make things right which inspires the multitudes. The 18th century Aymara anti-imperialist revolutionary Tupaq Katari, facing execution by quartering, said of his Spanish captors: “They will kill only me, but, I will return and I will be millions!”¹⁵⁸ The political body is many, and in the shared passion of its ethical conviction, it acts as the mass force of a counterpublic against the ruling order.

For the Faustians, thingliness is the stubborn enemy of self-determination. For this Other Revolution, the thing becomes what the living world makes of it. Ricardo Flores Magón wrote stories of manufactured things and natural resources as dreaming of liberty. In one story, a “machine groans to the impulses of its motor, as if it participates equally in the fatigue of its comrade of blood and muscle: man[...]”¹⁵⁹ When the man curses the machine as his tormentor, the machine curses him back for prolonging both of their suffering: “Wrench me from the claws of the vampire who sucks your blood and work for yourself and for your own people, idiot! Machines are good: we save human effort! Yet you workers are so stupid that you leave us in the hands of your torturers, when you are the ones who make us! Could there be anything more idiotic? Quiet, quiet down! If you do not have the valor to break your chains, do not complain!”¹⁶⁰ The manufactured world is not the enemy. It is not the source of the homelessness of modern humanity, but only its framework. It is alienated labor, private property, and class rule which enclose the very ground of life itself into a means of prolonging suffering. The iron in the mountains thinks to itself: “I shake just thinking that I might be converted into a tool of injustice: I who, because of my own naturalness, should only be the fuel of progress and liberty[...] My same brilliance is life and death[...] What am I going to be?”¹⁶¹ Resistance against the wrong world breaks out into insurrection and enlivens the masses, and with it the very things that they make. In the story of a dialogue between a barricade and a trench, Flores Magón wrote: “There is a moment of silence during which the barricade seems to meditate. It is deformed yet beautiful at the same time: deformed from its construction; beautiful for its signification. It is the strong and robust anthem of liberty; it is the formidable protest against oppression.”¹⁶² Human associations, like their products, can be cooperation for unfree order or cooperation for mutual flourishing. Mariátegui believed that the insistence on absolute sciences of truth restrained this creative process within a dead form, calling on his allies to “content ourselves with a relative truth.”¹⁶³ Land and Liberty, Flores Magón hoped, would do away with the elevation of order over care. In a liberated society, “for the first time the sun will not be ashamed to send its glorious rays to this musty land, dignified by rebellion, and a new, more just, more wise humanity will turn all the homelands into a single homeland, great, beautiful, good: the homeland of human beings[...]”¹⁶⁴

The hope of an earthly homeland inspires the movements of Indigenous militants to reclaim their Land and Liberty. By the mid-late 20th century, the movements of indianistas and kataristas began to erupt into generalized campaigns for political autonomy, labor struggles against the exploitation of capitalists and landlords, and intellectual efforts for a civilizational rebirth. Bolivian Quechua indianista Fausto Reinaga wrote in The Indian Revolution (1969) that the movements superseded patriotism for a state because they affirmed more profound than it: “Indianness in Bolivia is an underlying Nation; a people of four million Indians, who rise up ready to break their chains of four centuries of slavery. Indianness is the waving of the Wiphala: the roar of the Pututu that announces the volcanic cataclysm of the Andes. It is the flash of light that floods the darkened consciousnesses of millions and millions of human beings; it is the faith that has begun to burn in empty breasts, it is the north star of hope for the hopeless souls who moan in this ‘valley of tears.’ Indianness is the genesis contrary to the West, the new culture, which will replace the Helleno-Christian culture, which today is sinking in the midst of the blackness of nihilism, hunger and fear of the dark flashes of Atomic War. Indianness is the millenary history without history; spirit and biological force of the race. Indianness is the idea-force that burns in the conscience of the Indian against Spain.”¹⁶⁵ While Reinaga sought racial independence from the Hispanicized and Yankified world of the urban cholos, the intelligentsia of América searched for a basis for political unity in anti-imperialist struggle.

The manifestation of popular rebellions against technocratic developmentalism rendered the Faustian Marxist intellectual’s hope of uniting all under the hegemony of a developmental party-state into a laughable fantasy in América. It more often led urban Marxist intellectuals to join the ready-made parliaments of technocratic states than inspired to join rebellions against them. The revolutionary urban intelligentsia of mid-late 20th century América had to confront, head on, the problems of intellectual and manual labor, theory and practice, self and other. To the capitalist modernizer thesis that Latin America was not yet fully developed because it was stuck in a semi-feudal past, dependency theorists like Sergio Bagú and Eduardo Galeano replied that Latin America was developed into underdevelopment, dependent as it was within a capitalist-imperialist system that had grown to gigantic proportions by transferring its wealth to the Western metropoles. The rise of national-populism on the tide of mass momentum inspired reflections on theory and practice which sought out an Ideal. Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy believed that the movement led by General Juan Velasco against dependency heralded a new beginning for América: “The constitution of a genuine and original thought and its normal development cannot be achieved without a decisive transformation of our society through the abolition of underdevelopment and domination.”¹⁶⁶

Other intellectuals went down to the deepest depths of the masses, seeking to understand the everyday cultural practices that had sustained 500 years of resistance to colonial authority. Argentinian indigenista philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, part of the front of left-populists who joined the movement in support of General Juan Perón, argued that the white intelligentsia had to overcome the prejudice of urban discursive reason and learn the language of the popular masses to make contact with the passionate striving of the Indigenous and mestizo masses for revolutionary emancipation. After Perón’s death in 1974, which left the fate and unity of the peronista movement in question, Kusch reflected on the very concept of a revolutionary process: “at the end of a process, does it always end in oneself? Denial leads to the liberation of my possibility, in its deepest form, to the point even that the ultimate denial as death, is also an absolute possibility that surpasses the given. There is behind the total denial an opening to an infinite dimension, which leads to the possibility of a total installation of all our work[...] denial does not really deny but affirms, since it mobilizes the installation of the last affirmation that is ours, to the point that it transcends the level of the simple self, and enters into the depths of one, while that one is what others are as well. At the bottom of everything is not myself, but we are.”¹⁶⁷ This hope seeded within the populist unity of the multitude, however, has not yet overcome the developmentalism of the urban left and the technocracy of the national state. Where party-states achieve political hegemony, as in Mexico, populism often reinforces rather than ruptures the exploiting order.

This institutional pitfall of populism led to the collapse of the official Communist movement in Mexico. The Partido Comunista Mexicano [Mexican Communist Party] (PCM) functioned more like the junior partner of the PRI than an independent opposition. The Comintern era of Popular Frontism coincided with the left-populist leadership of Lázaro Cárdenas, who appealed to urban workers with state unionism, peasants with land reform, and the national masses with the nationalization of the petroleum industry. Mexican Communism and cardenismo were fused into a single whole, and official Marxism in Mexico has been a doctrine of radically democratic nationalism ever since. The project of a united democratic opposition to the PRI dictatorship failed time and time again within this framework. This has culminated in the transformation of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática [Party of the Democratic Revolution] (PRD) into a loyal puppet of the PRI in modern times. José Revueltas, a dissident Marxist who inspired the Mexican New Left, wrote in 1943 that the impotence of the PCM was a failure in class partisanship: “The working class of our country has not been beheaded, even if for the time being it is a proletariat without a head, a proletariat without its party.”¹⁶⁸ Revueltas advocated a strategy that would pick up from the Flores Magón brothers and sustain the struggle against alienation and technocracy through the constitution of a class party to orient the counterpublic towards its ultimate goal of communism. Without its own head, the capital-demon Mephisto remains the commanding lord of the proletariat’s will.

Mephisto cannot be unseated by moralism. Only a striving that exceeds the bewitchery of the negating demon can send him back to hell. In the deep subterranean tunnels of Bolivian mines, Indigenous workers craft idols to primordial demons of the earth who threaten Mephisto with a generative power of contradiction instead of destruction. This devil, writes anthropologist Michael Taussig, is a devil of rebirth rather than nihilistic life-denial: “In the diversity of his metamorphosing forms, his secrecy, incongruities, and fiery splendor, the devil is the epitome of such a twofold movement of attraction and repulsion. As the figure of the impure sacred, he irradiates the wild energy of this vortex. As the Great Imitator he opposes not only God but the possibility of ontological anchoring of steadfast meaning that He constantly dangles before us. As the paramount sign of evil, he was always a little too interesting and a little too seductive to be trapped by Christian ressentiment into a simple dialectic of otherness.”¹⁶⁹ The devil of América is a trickster who brings life back into things. Mephisto cannot command him, because he cannot pin him down. With the inspiration of this devil of the multitude rather than the demon of a scholar, we can begin a “recovery of a consciousness of unity among those deep contradictions that in América tear us apart politically, culturally, and in our everyday life.”¹⁷⁰ This consciousness is not singular, not homogenous, not absolutely centralist, but a united front. Bolivian Quechua-Aymara historian and organizer Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui refers at this juncture to the “ch’ixi notion,” which “obeys the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time, that is, to the logic of the included third. A ch’ixi gray color is white and it is not white at the same time, it is white and it is also black, its opposite.”¹⁷¹ The Mephisto-logic of money converts the Many into the One of value, seeming to transform all things into nothing. The bricolage united front of a counterpublic, with its ch’ixi logic, threatens Mephisto with a multitude that comes together without surrendering to the alienated power of money’s nihilistic generality.

The counterpublic’s strategy for hegemony is not without its controversies. How can an oppositional movement maintain its oppositional character when it seizes power over institutions? What is the relationship between the movement and political representation? Ex-katarista guerrilla and Movimiento al Socialismo [Movement for Socialism] (MAS) theoretician Álvaro García Linera, while Vice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, suggested a return to Leninist strategy with a difference. His sense of socialism is that of “a battlefield between capitalism in crisis and the tendencies, potentialities and efforts to bring production under community ownership and control.”¹⁷² Only communism can overcome capitalism, but in the meantime, the Idea needs its strategy. The movement of Indigenous proletarians must make use of overwhelming political power of the state to disorganize the capitalists, yet the leadership of the state cannot be an end in itself. The state is after all compelled by dependency on a capitalist world-system to manage and develop the national capital. García Linera believed that revolutionary leadership of the state would have to be used not as an organizational substitution for the multitude but as a weapon to help sustain their struggles “by meeting the urgent needs of the people, increasing the essential social benefits of the labouring classes and, on this basis, creating the cultural, educational and material conditions to democratize control of the common wealth, even to the point of going beyond the state institutions by establishing community ownership and control of property and social production itself within a perspective of deepening social mobilization and gradually overcoming extractivism. In the process, it is necessary at the same time to build a new technological base for production of wealth that will help to overcome extractivism.”¹⁷³ The leadership of MAS, however, has thus far failed at this effort, facing problems of corruption and disunity. Even a U.S.-backed Christofascist coup in 2024, which quickly failed, did not reunite MAS’s factions or reinvigorate the masista base. In fall of 2025, MAS lost leadership of the Bolivian state to the conservative Christian Democrats. A widely admired Quechua labor organizer and indianista, Felipe Quispe, had already predicted this outcome when MAS was first elected two decades ago. As an alternative, Quispe suggested the centrality of the counterpublic as a sustained movement: “I think a stronger movement is coming, I’m not the only one talking about it. It’s a movement from below, not from above. The shaking always comes from below, not from above.”¹⁷⁴

This strategy is characteristic of the Zapatistas against the new turn of the Mexican State. In 2018, the liberal reformist and left-populist party Movimiento de Nacional Regeneración [National Regeneration Movement] (MORENA) was elected to executive leadership of Mexico. The Zapatistas and Morena engage each other in a mutually hostile relationship. The Zapatistas resist MORENA’s project of national-developmentalist centralization as destructive of the autonomy of Indigenous peoples. MORENA leaders look on Zapatista resistance to infrastructure projects like the Tren Maya and polemics against the narco-state as disruptive to their project of national regeneration. While MORENA seeks to establish the rule of law as the basis for peace and development, the Zapatistas refuse these terms for politics and insist on autonomy. They organize by the slogan of leading by obeying. Yet their isolation has left the strategy of a counterpublic in a precarious position. The Zapatistas could rely on an international network of solidarity to support them in the 1990s and 2000s, but the left movements of the world have now directed most of their attention to national aims like electoral reformism and reinforcing the law of the common good.

The revival of internationalism requires the revival of autonomous philosophies of organization. The organization of an independent political force is what allows the dispossessed multitude to substantially intervene in national politics. Mariátegui, helping to organize the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú [General Confederation of the Workers of Peru] (CGTP), argued that the “representation of the national worker corresponds to a United Center, formed from the bottom up, that is, by organisms born in the factories, workshops, branches, maritime and land enterprises, by agricultural workers and peasants, by the great masses of exploited Indians.” He believed that only such a bottom-up, autonomous organization could “have the right to speak on behalf of the workers of Peru.”¹⁷⁵ Instead of the brain of a movement linking it up with the international struggles, it is the ethical convictions which insist on autonomy which establish a substantial basis for the internationalist solidarity and cooperation of counterpublics. Only this oppositional unity can consistently counteract and disorganize xenophobic and racist impulses. The role of intellectuals in opposition to these impulses is to question their premises, point to the solidaric impulses stretching out for cooperation from all elements of society, across boundaries of race and nation, and articulating a general ethical principle which supersedes nationalism. Mariátegui was himself a staunch defender of Jews and Chinese in Peru without being a didactic moralist. His sense of autonomous internationalism was that of a liberating army of the dispossessed seeking an order which would be good for all without needing to claim that its vision is the only truth.

In North America, it is Indigenous oppositionists and their allies who have best articulated this ethical heart of internationalism. It is not the basic political question of friend and enemy alone, nor even that of fusing everyone on the left into a homogeneous unity. The late Diné musician and militant Klee Benally described it as an interrationality, which “compels us to turn our solidarities inward, to directly address how we are and how we are not relating in harmony with existence. It means we must also face and contend with how our own cultural knowledge has been manipulated and weaponized against our relatives. The ways we’ve been poisoned by cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, and white supremacy that comprise the progressive machinery of the civilized. If we don’t welcome our relations who have faced the intensity of colonial religious and gendered violence back into our circles, we will never be whole, which means we can never fully heal.”¹⁷⁶ Thinking from the perspective of his own people’s struggle for autonomy, Benally conceived of this strategy of interrelationality as anti-political. But as the ethic of a counterpublic, it is something that can enliven the political by pointing political struggles to an Idea beyond politics. Ricardo Flores Magón thought of this emancipation which aims towards redemption as a revitalizing force within which “faces are humanized, even better, they are divinized, animated by the sacred fire of rebellion.”¹⁷⁷

From a strategy of self-defense against the disharmony of capital, the counterpublic moves to a universal vision of communist harmony, which is necessary to sustain the very political independence of the counterpublic itself. Zapatista Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés has described this autonomous attitude towards life as “an obligation to think, to analyze, to reflect, to critique, to find our own pace, our own way, in our own places and times.”¹⁷⁸ As the Zapatistas teach their allies in the theory and practice of self-governance, their language of interrelationality is translated into terms which can inspire the enlivening of the North American left beyond its sectarian and activist cycles. After participating in a Zapatista educational course for allies, anarchist and labor unionist Dylan Eldridge Fitzwater wrote Autonomy Is in Our Hearts (2019) to pass on what he had learned from the autonomous Tzotzil Zapatistas. He conveyed that his educators laid special stress on the concept of ch’ulel: “multiple relationships and the creation of a collective potentiality[...] every entity in the world has ch’ulel that defines its potentials and shapes its relationships with other entities. For example, fire’s ch’ulel includes the potential to give warmth among its characteristics, human ch’ulel includes the capacity to cultivate the land, and the ch’ulel of land includes the capacity to nourish and give birth to plants. There are already relationships apparent even in these few potentials: the warmth of the fire sustains the ch’ulel of human beings through cold but relies on the capacity of their ch’ulel to care for and sustain fire, the capacity of the earth’s ch’ulel to grow certain plants, for example, the corn plant, relies on the human ch’ulel’s capacity for cultivation, while humans rely on the earth for cultivation and thus for sustenance. These capacities are entities or forces in and of themselves that inhabit the hearts of different entities such as humans, fires, and earth.”¹⁷⁹ This is a grammatical vision of an interrelational multitude which sustains the principle of autonomy in its very mutualistic unity itself. The self-governance of Zapatista communities forms a shared space, a common heart (o’on) which is “a ch’ulel that traverses an entire community, and thus brings them together into the shared space of a single heart.”¹⁸⁰

The interrelational heart of a self-governing association brings thought to a distinctive sense of disalienation from that of Faustian Marxism. While Faustian Marxism treats absolute, infinite oneness as the highest aspiration of the emancipated state, the perspective of interrelationality thinks of the heart of the Good as also a limitation which allows each and all to flourish together. We should oppose consumerist warmongering against Venezuela, for example, because we care both for ourselves and for them, not merely because it is the correct position. The soul of Marxism has been split between these two tendencies of Self-Consciousness and Liberty from its very beginning. At one moment, Marx could conceive of communism as enacting “a conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.”¹⁸¹ In another moment, he could do away with the notion that the earth can be enclosed as anyone’s property and instead think of it as something which we live with in a usufruct manner: “From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”¹⁸² This interrelational notion of communism as usufruct mutuality relies on a practice of self-governance that constantly works to ensure that what is Good for the producers is Good for all. A mature communist humanity could cultivate possibilities, but also having the strength to leave them fallow where it is Good for the flourishing of each and all. This is the alternative to the conjoined, incestuous twins of infinite self-consciousness: all-forgetful polymorphousness and all-reifying technocracy. The specifically human nature which Marx set out in search of can be thought of as the reconciliation of the universal openness of society with the determinate relations of each with the other.

Association

The COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis of social reproduction and its long aftermath have deflated the old, stale democratic-entrepreneurial political myths of the millennium without rupturing them. It has left masses of people with little alternative to falling into nihilistic forgetfulness. During the quarantine era, the state demanded that people adjust themselves to the lowered expectations of a world crisis. After actively intervening to end the social distancing norms of quarantine, the state now leaves the public with the burden of yet more ‘personal responsibility’ in the face of AI-induced unemployment. They not only allow, but incentivize the generalization of this industry as a means of intensifying the circulation of capital. The depersonalizing impulsivity of circuitries is the dominant body of speech today. It is converting the entire internet, which we are supposed to politely pretend is a substantial public sphere so as not to offend advertisers or entrepreneurs, into a closed loop of mediocre and repetitive garbage. The entrepreneurial world of “capitalist communism” finds itself condemned by the externalized general intellect to death by drowning. The Silicon Valley fantasy of AI as heralding a higher evolution of humanity into a needless form draws people into lingering with their externalized selves and dissolving into nothingness instead of coming together with each other to live more in an autonomous association. The jinn of the general intellect promises that if we would only forget the frustrating inconvenience of unpredictable reality, we can lose ourselves in a world where our every desire rings true.

The thought-form of the capitalist internet is that of pure ideology. It places before our very noses the linguistic logic of “capital in its specific character as form, as a relation of production reflected into itself.”¹⁸³ It is an algorithm of infinite self-repetition, self-preservation, self-expansion, self-accumulation. It does the work of self-awareness for us, so that we do not have to endure the agonizing discomfort of remembering that we are wasting our lives. To reflect on oneself for oneself threatens to make the fragile mortality of the self real for thought, and reflection on our determinate existences means “self-references” to something other than ourselves.¹⁸⁴ When the self is weak, cowardly, and terrified of freedom, it surrenders to its own hollowing out in the name of preserving its own simplicity and frictionless mediocrity. But this unitary identity “exists initially only in the head, as a conception, since it expresses a relation; just as, in general, relations can be established as existing only by being thought, as distinct from the subjects which are in these relations with each other.”¹⁸⁵ The bed rotters and hustlepreneurs of “capitalist communism” are terrified of their own lives. This grotesque humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”¹⁸⁶ The wasted subjects indulge the paranoid fantasies of the police state, true crime, anti-immigrant secret police, and imperialist military adventures with glee to reinforce the sense that their self can be secured by the ruling power against the threat of a faceless, decadent horde. They cannot think that they themselves are the massified, impersonal power that arbitrarily wastes life and liberty. They flee from the power of all over each, but refuse to see the interrelation that life lives for fear of enduring doubt towards their own self-identity. The option of autonomy does not hide from this relationality, which the Aymara call ch’ixi, which the Tzotzil call o’on, and which Marx called the gemeinwesen, the community-being. Autonomy meets the autonomous language of advertising Ideology, which communicates the tempting commands of the money-idol, with a language of ethics that points to a life beyond the certainty of discursive concepts.

The theory of a revitalized communism should return to the call to “stand with free men on ground that is free,” but with this time with a difference.¹⁸⁷ The Faustian Marxists followed the European bourgeoisie in imagining that they could master reality through the “ultimate truth we human creatures know”: “He only earns his freedom, life itself,/ Who daily strives to conquer it anew.”¹⁸⁸ Goethe, Lukács, and official Marxism-Leninism imagined that Faust’s redemption is accomplished by becoming one with the infinite progress of toiling humanity towards a total personality and infinite knowledge. This is what is represented by exoticizing Sinophiles today, who seek in the image of an alien Other the continuation of a fantasy that they themselves cannot sustain for reasons of weakness and guilt. Their attraction is not entirely misplaced, since Chinese leader Xi Jinping in fact learned Faust by heart while he was a Sent Down youth and draws on its principles in his philosophy of governance.¹⁸⁹ But it would be ridiculous to believe that China is coming to save us, as if a geopolitical strategy of legalistic peace and development will take the gun out of the hand of the U.S. Empire.

There is no way around rethinking the rebirth of Faustian civilization in its decline if we are to think once again of communism. The redemption of Faust is rather his unity with human history in the many shades and varieties of its hope for a future which would be good for each and all. But this history is neither a linear progression of time towards absolute freedom nor a process without a subject within which social complexes mechanically reproduce subjects. It is not merely that the progress and regression within a historical period is arbitrarily reflected in people’s thoughts, or that the knower must decide between self-sacrificing engagement or Ideological non-engagement with an impersonal Science. Neither can historical thought collapse into the crude biographical reasoning which treats the existence of each life as a singular unit which unfolds along the incomparable course of destiny. The history of redemption is instead the engagement of more or less self-reflective agents with their interrelation in temporal-spatial conditions, seeking to realize projects between their needs and the fluid possibilities of their situations. History is the space that life lays out in the world for our hopes. And as Henri Lefebvre knew, the “task confronting us is not to speculate on an ambiguity but rather to demonstrate a contradiction in order to resolve it, or, better, in order to show that space resolves it.”¹⁹⁰

An illustration of how this spatial resolution of contradiction can be sought in the problems of politics in the U.S. Empire. The Empire of Liberty, established as an independent entity in 1776, justified its potentially universal expansion according to its unique promise of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Writing in an age which spoke more of this as only an AmeriKKKan lie, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse pointed instead to the fertile and chaotic dialectic implied in the principle: “The reality of happiness is the reality of freedom as the self-determination of liberated humanity in its common struggle with nature.”¹⁹¹ The domination of nature was the very basis for the Americanist project, long before the Patriots managed to transform protests for the rights of Englishmen into a struggle for the independence of the Anglo-American colonies. The colonization of the continent, from the first arrival of the Puritans, directed the united efforts of the settlers against the land and against the Indigenous peoples who lived with it. The independence of a democratic republic founded on that fertile promise, however, reinforced the oppositional streak that had come from Europe with the radical Anabaptists. Alexis de Tocqueville, observing the character of the new commercial nation in Democracy in America (1835), noted that the self-governing townships and civic associations which made up the nation also resisted the power of its government: “Among democratic nations it is only by associations that the resistance of the people to the government can ever display itself: hence the latter always looks with ill-favour on those associations which are not in its own power; and it is well worthy of the remark, that among democratic nations, the people themselves often entertain a secret feeling of fear and jealousy against these very associations, which prevent the citizens from defending the institutions of which they stand so much in need.”¹⁹²

The most controversial tendency of these associations in the early Republic was that of moral reform, which refused to make peace with imperfections in the name of unity. In the Anglo-American world, the Anabaptist tradition pushed the limits of what the public could accept with Quaker abolitionists and Shaker communists. They often associated with rebels against the immoral order of society, including women’s suffragists, Black fugitives from slavery, and pan-Indigenous campaigns like those of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. By the 1830s, the challenge grew into a national abolitionist movement. Freedman abolitionist Frederick Douglass challenged the notion of a perfected democracy in America, replying that there “was a skin aristocracy in America; no, not exactly the skin, it was the colour of the skin, that was the mark of distinction, or the brand of degradation.”¹⁹³ When the pro-slavery political leaders of the U.S. provoked a war with Mexico after annexing the white enslaver republic of Texas, they set out on an imperialist imperialist campaign to absorb more territory for the slave power and enforce the institutional conformity of their citizens with the war machine. The abolitionists denounced the war as a violation of the right to free association both within the U.S. and between the nation and its Sister Republic of Mexico, invoking a right that stood far higher than the law.

After the struggle for popular sovereignty between anti-slavery Free Soilers and the plantocracy shook out in favor of the latter, the abolitionists turned to a staunch oppositionist strategy. William Lloyd Garrison and others denounced the Constitution as a Satanic compact with the slave power and called on people to form a counterpublic against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which attempted to compel even citizens of free states to collaborate in enforcing the regime of slavery. This stance of abolitionism was made viable by the rise of a multi-party system in the 1850s out of the tensions unleashed by the imperialist annexation of Mexican territory and the competition to decide how the new territory would be dominated. When the anti-slavery Republican Party achieved power over the executive branch with the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the hard core of the slave states initiated an insurrection against a Federal authority that they could no longer command unchallenged and formed the white enslaver’s republic of the Confederate States of America (CSA). As the struggle between the Union and Confederacy reached a fever pitch, and the mass flight of enslaved people to the lines of the Union Army put the future of chattel slavery into question, the campaign of the abolitionists to turn the Civil War into a revolutionary war began to succeed. The cause of the Union and the cause of abolition coalesced with Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. The victory of the Union did not signify the institutional abolition of chattel slavery, however. The expansion of Federal authority, including the suspension of habeas corpus during the war, was enforced far more harshly against Cherokee Confederates and autonomous Lakotas than against the white plantocracy. In fact, in the name of order and progress, the Republican Party abandoned the radically democratic project of Black Reconstruction and enforced the political and economic restoration of the plantation system by the 1870s.

The Reconstruction era ended with the institutionalization of public life under the power of a two-party system, a financially unified monopoly of railroad and mining companies, and an industrial-scale Army. The Republican Party constituted something close to a monopoly capitalist party-state. In reaction to the consolidation of power, mass democratic, mutualist, and trade unionist movements began to grow into an opposition. The new wave of associations was, however, pulled in the two directions of reforming institutions and destroying them in a great social revolution. The Knights of Labor represented a classic instance of this dilemma, seeking both the 8 hour day and a fair wage system and the abolition of capitalism through the construction of mutualistic-cooperative associations. As the institutions of the state repressed strike wave after strike wave with bloodshed and slaughter, the tension in the country reached a breaking point.

The May 1, 1886 Haymarket Affair, in which someone blew up police officers who were attacking a Chicago demonstration for the 8 hour day, marked the beginning of a new phase of militancy that socialists now commemorate with May Day marches. The 1898 Spanish-American War and annexation of new colonies provoked staunch opposition from these militants, who now counted the literary intellectuals of the American Anti-Imperialist League among their cohorts. After the anarchist immigrant Leon Czolgosz assassinated the executive imperialist President William McKinley in 1901 in an application of the Propaganda of the Deed, the struggle between institutions and associations entered a period of high intensity. The Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World grew into national forces of opposition to war, exploitation, and monopoly power. During World War I, they constituted the two wings, formalist and insurrectionary, of a leftist counterpublic. By the time that the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution erupted, the Federal government feared a social revolution. The crackdown of police departments and Federal secret police on radicalism during the First Red Scare drove the counterpublic underground, but did not altogether destroy it.

The stick could not destroy the challenge of associations which demanded Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness against the very government which claimed to guard that promise. Only the carrot of an institutionally realized social democracy could destroy it by absorbing it. The Progressives promoted a vision of an anti-monopoly regulatory state to make the imperial system work for every citizen once again. When the Great Depression began in 1929, they proved themselves incapable of enforcing this vision owing to their superstitious belief in the myth of free enterprise. The rise of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, with his promise of a New Deal for each and all, reconciled free enterprise with the law of the common good by using the power of the Federal government to invest resources in reinvigorating infrastructure projects and combat unemployment without undermining the corporate interests of captains of industry and trade union bureaucrats. During World War II, when the Communist Party and Congress of Industrial Organizations practically became wings of the state, the New Deal was solidified as a totally mobilizing institutional order that prevailed by recuperating associations.

The New Deal order, however, had its discontents. Black sharecroppers, majority-women domestic workers, and Chicano migrant workers were left largely outside of its protections for labor. The promise of an Indian New Deal often amounted to the disappointing reality of paternalism for Indigenous peoples, and World War II ended with the Federal government pursuing a policy of termination against tribal governments. Women and youth felt discontented with the boring, patriarchal conformity of the suburban prosperity that the New Deal had built. Militant communists believed that the New Deal had constructed a kind of managerial ‘people’s capitalism’ that silenced dissent with the overwhelming force of the Deep State. Businessmen felt humiliated by what they perceived as government overreach against free enterprise. In the 1960s, all of these tensions exploded into a multitude of social movements who sought their own visions of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness against the warmongering Empire. They lost steam, however, when the consumer citizenry grew impatient with their dreams and turned to a conservative and reformist vision of institutional reorganization instead. President Richard Nixon’s repressive carrot-and-stick strategy, which offered reforms while destroying the reformists, left many in the New Left and other new social movements with little choice but to engage in a long march through the institutions to make them work for their own aims.

This strategy more often reinforced the power of the institutions and converted radicals into their truest believers. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, however, these institutions were dispersed and privatized by the rise of a neoliberal order. Rather than unleash the power of association, neoliberalism eroded the basis for mass politics by reducing the unity of society to the nebulous and impersonal market, the power of “capitalist communism.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, which put pressure on all prevailing methods in the U.S., the situation has stagnated to an impasse. While social media-based populism has emerged as a kind of compensation for associational impulses, it has not established much of a public commons for politics. Donald Trump’s two terms have been characterized by a kind of rule by decree, reinforced by an impunity for his admirers’ actionist strategy of Propaganda of the Deed in the streets and in the comment sections. The Democratic Party poses no real opposition to the MAGA project. The forgettable Presidency of Joe Biden only served to draw the social democratic wing of the Democrats back into the fold and allow the gerontocratic leadership to rule by committee through a perpetually sundowning Zionist. And throughout the 2020s, the revelations from investigations into financier and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein have revealed that the entire ruling class across the spectacular lines of polarization are apparently self-consciously joined at the hip in one drive to happily enjoy the violation of others’ liberties and the consumption of as much life as possible.

The modern U.S. left certainly does not constitute anything resembling a counterpublic, obsessed as they are with feel-good easy victories. The question of how to recover associationist political contradiction is immediately a question of how to make a mass political strategy of “the people” against the current order viable. The Idea of Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness can only become a fertile political force once again if it embraces contradiction and seeks to abolish the sclerotic Empire that impedes it. This effort can only begin with dissident impulses, which are the only thing in common between the people of “capitalist communism” apart from the war of all against all.

Initially, acting amidst a massified society of impotent apathy, these impulses are limited to the form of sectarian activists. We therefore face many of the same problems as those of the New Left in the 1970s, who had to navigate the decline of mass politics. Trotskyist Hal Draper suggested that sectarianism was unavoidable as long as “the life of the organization (whether or not labeled ‘party’) is actually based on its politically distinctive ideas, rather than on the real social struggles in which it is engaged,” since without a mass base “it will not be possible to suppress the clash of programs requiring different actions in support of different forces.”¹⁹⁴ Draper stressed that the mass base “is not just a numerical matter but a matter of class representation,” since only as the opportunistically expansionist sect is replaced by the head of a class-partisan social project can it be true that “the party does not necessarily have to suppress the internal play of political conflict, since the centrifugal force of political disagreements is counterbalanced by the centripetal pressure of the class struggle.”¹⁹⁵ As the left became a force of the institutions, future Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) strategists Barbara and John Ehrenreich suggested that the passage to a partisan left would have to navigate the divide of the professional-managerial class and the post-industrial proletariat: “Both classes confront the capitalist class over the issue of ownership and control of the means of production. They confront each other over the issues of knowledge, skills, culture.”¹⁹⁶ In the thought of both Draper and the Ehrenreichs, the thesis of the merger formula between the planning intellect and the moving mass returned as a solution to the problem of organizing mass politics. Many contemporary members of DSA, the sect of all the sects, affirm that this principle should become the basis for transforming the loose association into a new pre-party formation for a left that can strategize for hegemony.

This 21st century merger formula, however, puts the cart before the horse. The mass politics of old were a contradictory milieu of numerous voluntary associations, all with their own ideals of how society can and should be. Mutual-aid societies, churches, trade unions, credit unions, and cooperatives served as the condition for formal party organizations to thrive. A program which assumes a united mass politics cannot be conceived ahead of time and then recruit the masses to implement it. A substantial politics cannot be enacted by activist-employees who play at public servants. Nor can the dynamism of political entrepreneurs, who always experiment in new ways of doing things, do away with this basic problem of strategy. The merger formula of technocrats and useless eaters has itself been collapsed into the gray sludge of the algorithm. AI now subverts the antithesis of intellectual and manual labour by automating managerial force and privatizing the digital general intellect into a force of productive consumption. The pure activist attempt at countering this homogenizing leveling with the pure language of the political program does little to counteract this. The movement should be thought of not as a plan to hold against reality, but as an impulse which can only invigorate politics from outside the sect, in an inversion of the old Leninist formula. But where are the impulses against the gangsterism of monopoly power and the passive nihilism of slop culture?

The key global movements of political contradiction today, those which hold the seeds of a global counterpublic, are feminism, Islamism, and decolonization. They are the articulations of dissidence which refuses to settle with developmentalism, entrepreneurialism, and cowardly apathy. The impulses which might join their side from a North American social movement will have to draw on the traditions of Afro-Anabaptist utopianism—which radicalizes the demand for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—and articulate them into a revival of the abolitionist refusal of any compromise with the enslaving Empire and its systematic waste of life. A neo-abolitionist counterpublic, drawing on the dissident impulses of the U.S. and the world to take a moral stand on universal issues, would point beyond its own self-perpetuation to a different world in which society is an ethical association.

The organization of class struggle today has to begin by already acting towards a political universal—the 2025 general strike of Italian dock workers against the Zionist genocide of Gazans has pointed us in this fruitful direction. The uncompromising strategy of the counterpublic itself is what opens up space and time for association. It can adopt concrete tactics which establish conditions for associationism by actively refusing the present order, such as collectively defaulting on debt, organizing tenets to impose the law of the common good against anti-social landlords, defending the commons against rent-seekers and advertisers, attacking the privatization of the most desperately needed goods, intervening against the fugitive slave catchers of police and immigration agents, defending the autonomy of Indigenous peoples, and encouraging a diversity of tactics to maintain the counterpublic atmosphere. Through this combination of legal and illegal tactics, depending on formal and informal strategy, the law of the common good can slowly be converted into an ethical and associational principle. The program for a ruling counterpublic cannot be worked out in detail ahead of time. We can only outline it roughly according to what forces must be organized and disorganized, composed and decomposed. The struggle to commonize banks and information, for example, will be extremely important for the accounting of society’s resources, the replacement of money by a digital labor coinage issued by democratically determined rules, and the organization of the social capacity to plan cooperative labor according to the needs of everyone.

Wealth is a necessary condition for communism, but it is not organizational efficiency which is the point of communist organization. Or rather, it is the point of crude communism, which seeks to discipline everyone into a monk. This is perhaps appealing to sectarian activists, who invert the individualism of entrepreneurialism back into a “communist capitalism” of the formalist monastery. Marx’s notion of true freedom, rather, was a post-Faustian “development of human powers as an end in itself,” which begins beyond the planning of necessary labor, “though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”¹⁹⁷ Such an ethic of freedom would not have to require that each sacrifice themselves to a single truth whenever they finish their shift in the cooperative labor process. As simultaneously the free play of powers and the cultivation of personality, it would be more closely associated with the creativity of art and the enjoyment of illusion rather than with the solemnity of absolute truth. This is the sort of attitude towards life which the counterpublic ought to advocate against the apathetic conformity of the present age. But, as Ricardo Flores Magón wrote while imprisoned, what humanity needs so that it “may appreciate beauty, and avoid this jarring of his in the universal harmony, is to be free. Then, and only then he will introduce his note in the mighty concert of Life, and will find for his eyes a nobler function than that of a shedder of tears, and for his heart something better than being the shelter of hatred and grief.”¹⁹⁸

The world of “capitalist communism” collectivizes suffering while privatizing enjoyment. The reign of abstract labor in the law of value has become the power of all over each. The anti-political power of modern capital must be met with a reaffirmation of political liberty in the profoundest sense. Communists would do well to turn back to classical political theory to draw out a coherent language to mark the contradiction of care against callous conformity. The critiques levelled against capitalist massification and for politics by Renaissance-era Florentine republican Niccolò Machiavelli, the 19th century Danish Christian activist Søren Kierkegaard, and the 20th century Spanish republican and individualist José Ortega y Gasset offer insights which are more immediately useful for a strategy of the political today than any stale catechisms of 20th century Faustian Marxism.

Contradiction is the very life of the political. Machiavelli, writing at the dawn of democratic mass politics, argued that any who actually study disobedient urban rebellions “will find that they have engendered not any exile or violence unfavorable to the common good but laws and orders in benefit of public freedom.”¹⁹⁹ He believed that political contradictions enlivened civic life by drawing the impulses of class struggle into engagement: “Without doubt, if one considers the end of the nobles and of the ignobles, one will see great desire to dominate in the former. and in the latter only desire not to be dominated; and, in consequence, a greater will to live free, being less able to hope to usurp it than are the great.”²⁰⁰ Today, these two desires have been internalized into the self-regulating entrepreneur and externalized into the alien consumerist-managerial power of AI. Each terminates contradiction and confrontation in the excluding power of the inner self and the absorbing power of code.

Rebellion has become infrequent, and more often ends with reforms than social revolutions. Kierkegaard suggested that only ethics can individuate someone from the mass of society, but that most people flee from this individuation, being “conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection, just as a serf belongs to an estate. That is why people band together in cases where it is an absolute contradiction to be more than one. The apotheosis of the positive principle of association is nowadays the devouring and demoralizing principle which in the slavery of reflection makes even virtues into vitia splendida. There is no other reason for this than that eternal responsibility, and the religious singling out of the individual before God, is ignored.”²⁰¹ Kierkegaard hoped that Christianity could become an activist force that forcibly smashes the norms of the mass and reminds people of their inner singularity before God. He thought of the Apostle as an activist who demands more from people than their own self-preservation: “The honoured public and the domineering masses would therefore also take the existence of an Apostle in vain. For it is certainly true that he exists absolutely for the sake of others, is sent out for the sake of others; but it is not the masses and not mankind and not the public, not even the highly educated public, which is his lord and master—but God; and the Apostle is one who has divine authority to command both the masses and the public.”²⁰² The Apostle reminds all that their souls are equal in the love of Jesus Christ and singularly judged before God. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is the unstated attitude of sectarians today, acknowledged only by its most self-aware thinkers like Badiou.

Ortega y Gasset’s critique of massification in politics and culture targeted the tyranny it unleashes. Rather than praising the centralizing general will as the power of God on earth, as Jacobins tend to do, he perceived it as instead making an alliance with the forcible mechanization of everyday life: “Through and by means of the State, the anonymous machine, the masses act for themselves.”²⁰³ The dictatorship of the masses, through their identification with the populist technocrats who take care of things for them, elects the power of a charismatic shepherd over the herd. This was the dialectic of 20th century politics. But in our day, the general will has fractured into the disperse form of “capitalist communism.” It manifests individually in the reactionary ideology of entrepreneurs and socially in the outrage-driven cycles of social media. Trump, the head entrepreneur and minister of outrage, attempts to replace the anonymous machine of the expertise state with the can-do attitude of the corporate hierarchy. He wants to democratize “capitalist communism” by placing the blind impulses of himself and his followers in charge of all governmental machinery. Trump rules by decree in an attempt to fuse the entrepreneurial masses back into the state. His is a project of reconciling the law of free enterprise and the law of the common good by gutting the state into a self-sufficient, competitive financial-real estate cartel and deporting, imprisoning, and exterminating those who are not useful to the entrepreneurial lynch mob. In this age of domination, accepting unfreedom has become easy for the masses because it allows them to surrender from the responsibility of freedom, which confronts them with the wrongness of the world, and embrace convention, which allows them to forget that their neighbors are being obliterated. Friedrich Nietzsche’s prediction of the Last Man has come true: “The time approaches when human beings no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir!”²⁰⁴

We have nothing to start with but apathetic interiority and impersonal law. Taken on their own, they are hardly forces of revolution. Only by investigating the impulses and contradictions of the language, aesthetics, and dynamics of everyday life can we start to work out how to transform social reason into social force. Interpersonally, this demands that we break from the norms of forgetting what we hope for and doing what we must to adapt to the misery and enjoy ourselves. As if already seeing the slop world of our day, Theodor Adorno wrote in 1951: “The concept of unfettered activity, of uninterrupted procreation, of chubby insatiability, of freedom as frantic bustle, feeds on the bourgeois concept of nature that has always served solely to proclaim social violence as unchangeable, as a piece of healthy eternity.”²⁰⁵ What can confront this stubbornly enjoyable conformity? A reminder of mortality. Not only that you will die, but that you must love, that you are capable of experiences which pose questions to you, reflecting on which you long to seek out that which is more than the self.

The romantic love for today is a central site for the contradictions of everyday life. The mass concept of love is that of a market in which all compete with all and prove their value through the statistics of their conquests registered on platforms like dating apps. The competition breaks out into the quasi-political war of genders as each side unleashes their resentment on the other. Women see in men the personification of selfish opportunism, while men see in women the personification of a denying law. Each subject wants to get back at Mommy and Daddy by treating the other as a prop stand-in for them. The same principle manifests in electoral politics. During the 2024 Presidential election, Democrats praised Kamala Harris with the moniker of “Momala,” indicating that she would responsibly enforce the law of the common good and keep her children from hurting each other for their own good. Republicans, by contrast, spoke of Donald Trump as a disciplinary Daddy coming home to restore order with brutal and humiliating physical punishments, forcing the insolent children of the nation to act responsibly while kicking out the scheming strangers that they naively invited into the house. These images of familial love entail both Ideological subjectivation and its contradictions.

Love can only reach its political principle when it shakes the very foundations of the self. We cannot learn this love from the Ideology of love, but from the most reflective of lovers. Philosopher Lou Andreas-Salomé, a woman who could read the very souls of her associates and gesture towards this rhythm of character in her writing, held that loving is an “illusion-mediated act” in which lovers “show themselves to the other, transfigured, veiled, and they must—without the slightest pretence or intention—conform, as if under a spell, to their dream image.”²⁰⁶ Andreas-Salomé believed that this act reconciled each with the whole through each other, since “the influence of one person upon the other is nevertheless more compelling than any actual dependency could be; for, even though the other person reminds ‘outside,’ external to us—while still touching and imbuing the whole circle of our being—it is nevertheless from here that the whole of the rest of the world opens up to us, and this is where our real marriage with life begins, that exteriority of things that we could otherwise never fully incorporate: it becomes the language in which life assumes all its eloquence for us, in which it finds the sounds and intonations that strike right to the center of our soul.”²⁰⁷ Black Arts Movement poet Nikki Giovanni shared a similar sense of love as an association which transcends the need for a singular consciousness: “I don’t want to be near you/ for the thoughts we share/ but the words we never have/ to speak.”²⁰⁸ Love in this anti-Ideological sense is that which sublimates reflection and recognition to the closed discourse of infinite unification into the singular couple-subject of self-consciousness to the association with the other as an end in itself.

This aesthetic experience of love is that power which a critical language can draw strength from. The language of self-consciousness, which treats people as means and compels people into pre-established roles in order to externalize consciousness into a singular discourse, will have to give way to a language of gesture that embraces the entire living experience of the body. Henri Lefebvre pointed out that such a language is necessarily polyrhythmic, and this disruptive of Ideology as consciousness and material force: “Every more or less animate body and a fortiori every gathering of bodies is consequently polyrhythmic, which is to say composed of diverse rhythms, with each part, each organ or function having its own in a perpetual interaction that constitutes a set [ensemble] or a whole [un tout]. This last word does not signify a closed totality, but on the contrary an open totality. Such sets are always in a ‘metastable’ equilibrium, which is to say always compromised and most often recovered, except of course in cases of serious disruption or catastrophe.”²⁰⁹ The catastrophe might rupture the equilibrium, leading to the collapse of a couple association, organization, or society, but it does mean the end of the world. After all, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote, the rhythm of life is continuous across all ruptures to its organization: “Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.”²¹⁰ This becoming-other is exactly what the critical language of love seeks to strategize. Its oppositional consciousness, which insists on the Good, is still only an element of the composition of another milieu. The role of consciousness in this composition of a new unity is to make interpersonal relations reflexive by articulating them in linguistic dialogue, which is the condition for political contradiction.

Association becomes an end in itself when dialogue is invested with legislative and executive power. This marks the continuing significance of the council-form for communism. But such a power cannot be achieved without the guidance of consciousness, which expresses the impulses to association in their ethical Idea as the Good. The concept of the communist party, once the myth of a completely centralized formal organizational expression of universal consciousness, should accordingly be rethought as the autonomous form of political discourse. Its discourse must always refer to something more than itself, to the association which supersedes its own imperative of self-preservation with the concrete universal of a Good Life. The language of the Good has to be open to becoming a participatory, creative, and negotiable Good of each and all rather than being the rule of all over each. In a council republic, the social plan would not have to be perfect by any means, but only good enough for each member of society as they represent themselves in a tiered self-organization of dialogue. Even if one does not agree with the course of the whole, they should be able to see that it is reasonable to ask of them and does not suffocate their autonomy. The communist Good is the interrelational freedom of each and all in their singularity and mutuality, overcoming the need for alienated self-consciousness. But to aspire to this good, we have to reach a degree of maturity that will take a long education of struggle in which we cannot rely on the truisms of the past. While Mephisto is lord of this Earth, Faust has left us for the heaven of oblivion. Let Faust be at rest, let old pacts die with those who made them, and let us begin the struggle anew for the universal association, struggling to accomplish the abolition of debt, commonization of property, and liberation of time from the narrow horizon of manic accumulation and carefully planned toil. The rebirth of a created world into something that the old could never have planned for breaks out into new songs. The mysterious cycle begins again.

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