Capitalism as the normative order of existence
Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s We Are All Wasteland On the Inside describes a world in which the reality of the mythic Himmapan forest has collided with our own. The former laws of space and time are degraded, subjected to a new totality sutured from the alterities of Himmapan and modern Krungthep (Bangkok). A state of horror becomes the state of affairs for the denizens of both formerly separate realities. Hungry giants with four faces––whose names are “the crunch of femur and the slide of tongue on new guts”––occupy airports; existence “has become debris and dead skin.”
Instead of treating this story as just another iteration of “Zone” literature (such as Roadside Picnic, Nova Swing, or The Southern Reach Trilogy), which in many ways it is, I find it more useful as a metaphor for the colonization of imagination affected by the capitalist end of history. For the detective story Sriduangkaew tells unfolds in a fictional landscape where the Himmapan event is so total that it assimilates imagination itself:
The writers and artists were wrong, and what once resided within their fantasias and imagination are now everyday––everywhere. Metaphor and allegory no longer serve, having turned literal overnight. Even the statues and stencils in Suvarnaphum have come alive, adopted as vessels for the creatures they once depicted as fictional. What is the point of words on pages, or nielloware etchings or delicate carved ivory, when the genuine articles are full of voice and viscera.
Once the fancies of the poets and myth-makers insinuate themselves in the everyday they necessarily subject our creative faculties to a regime harsher than any totalitarian institution of censorship; the realm of fantasy, which is also the realm of desire, is censored by reality itself. What kind of literature would exist in such a world? A kind of realism, based on a reality where the beings of fantasy have become banal, that will become more monotonous than the social realist moral tales we imagine were commonplace in past socialist regimes. The story’s protagonist in fact laments that the reality of a tree that grows living beings is “less glamorous” than the myth that proceeded convergence.
I would like to suggest that this story’s mythic dystopia is in fact the world in which we live; we are indeed living in a time where the fancies of the poets and myth-makers of yesteryear are commonplace. While there are no ogres or living trees, the technological development in the past two decades has resulted in a reality that would appear phantasmagoric to a time traveller from the 1950s. And yet this fabulous world of smartphones, tablets, 3D printers, self-driving cars, etc. remains limited by the boundaries of capitalism. In a telling passage Sriduangkaew writes:
Few ailments… have not been catalogued, compared, cross-referenced into mundanity. We forge the changed earth through empiricism and remorseless analysis. The poets and dreamers thought they would be ascendant, but after all it’s people like me and Jutamat who thrive. Pragmatists who know how to move… it in turn by levers and hand-wheels.
All transformations unimaginable a generation earlier remain dominated by capitalist techniques of positivism, the rule of the bourgeois technocrat. Despite even the most unanticipated and fantabulous transformations, reality is recaptured by capitalist one-dimensionality. If we could impose a moral to such a fantastic story it would be thus: no matter the transformation, and regardless of what some “accelerationists” might think, while it is possible to imagine and accept the strangest transformations of our fundamental existence, the barriers of imagining how to end capitalism, let alone how to think outside of capitalism, remain daunting. Our fantasies are not only totalized and rendered banal, they are subordinated to the normative order of existence.
Capitalist realism and its purchase on imagination
The late Mark Fisher used the term “capitalist realism” to describe our inability to think beyond the capitalist imaginary. Capitalist realism, according to Fisher, is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.”1 Before Fisher numerous left thinkers had already analysed the end of history discourse that had taken on a life beyond Fukuyama’s initial pronouncement. Despite the fact that the maxim “history is written by the winners” is an eye-roll inducing cliché it has not really been applied to the history of the cold war as written by the capitalist victors that declared themselves history’s consummation. Perhaps there is a compelling truth contained in this cliché. The fact that there is a general unwillingness to critically engage with the discursive historical claims of the victors of the cold war by the very same people who mindlessly repeat this saying about the writing of history demonstrates that it not only holds some truth but also defies the thought of those responsible for its promulgation. That someone can claim that “history is written by the winners” while simultaneously accepting the narrative of the cold war victors is telling: it demonstrates the strength of capitalist realism, the omnipotence of the capitalist imaginary, and the “end of history” discourse’s monopoly on reality.
We can also use Marcuse’s concept of “one-dimensionality” to describe the ways in which capitalism draws boundaries around thinking, socializing us into accepting that there can be nothing of value beyond the limits of the bourgeois order. Generally, and especially in the imperialist metropoles, we are meant to believe (and this belief is very compelling) that the way in which capitalist ideology describes reality––its imaginary––corresponds with reality itself.
Obviously the anti-capitalist left has rejected the ideology of capitalist realism for as long as the latter has existed; if it had not done so it would die a quick death. One cannot be an anti-capitalist, after all, while consciously agreeing that there is no point in struggling against capitalism. What I’m suggesting, however, is that despite our critical rejection of the diktat of the capitalist imaginary it has still influenced the way in which we engage with reality. The result is an atrophy of thought. Such a suggestion should not be controversial for those who believe that social being influences social consciousness: having grown up in a capitalist social formation we have been socialized according to its categories; resisting its hegemony is a lifelong struggle. Former leftists who “grow up” and become liberals, or worse conservatives, are just individuals who lost this struggle, for whatever reason, and were yanked back into a proscribed framework of reality. What might be controversial about my suggestion, however, is in how I see the affect of capitalist realism upon the left, particularly since I think this atrophy in thought persists even within critiques of this phenomenon.
Indeed, the strongest boundary the capitalist imaginary enforces is between the “end of history” present and our understanding of past communist catastrophe. The reason why this boundary is significant is because a discourse that describes communism as out-and-out failure reinforces the claim that a communist future is always doomed. The result is a left that is haunted by its past, and most of the left in North America might agree that this is the case. But usually the meaning placed on this haunting is precisely the meaning determined by the capitalist imaginary: we are haunted by the failures, by all the mistakes our forebears have made. I am not suggesting that our communist past was not filled with mistakes (if it was not then the entire history of the cold war would be different), but I hold that this wallowing in tragedy is the kind of thinking encouraged by capitalist ideology, particularly the ideology reinforced by cold war dogma. Jodi Dean refers to this wallowing as a melancholia where “the Left is bent around the force of loss, that is, the contorted shape it has found itself in as it has forfeited or betrayed the communist ideal.”2
The strength of the past to linger as a ghost lies in its ability to disarticulate any meaningful analysis that can inform our practical struggles. We see only the failures of revolution and are usually conditioned to ignore the successes. We often refuse to grasp the precise nature of world historical revolutionary successes––hard won by the sacrifices of the oppressed�
��–just as we refuse to grasp the whys and hows of the parallel revolutionary failures. The justification for this claim is that, since the declaration of “the end of history”, the anti-capitalist left at the centres of global capitalism has unilaterally failed to produce a coherent and combative movement. It has not seized victory from the proverbial jaws of defeat and part of this is because of its inability, as a whole, to produce a concrete assessment of the conjuncture. We are at a point where fascism is re-emerging, as we should have known it would, and we do not yet possess the kind of fighting organization or united front that is disciplined enough to respond to this challenge.
Thus, there is a strong and knee-jerk reaction even amongst Marxists to the suggestion that, in order to get beyond the movementist malaise, we need a “new return” to the conception of the fighting party that is derived from a critical assessment of the two great world historical communist revolutions of Russia and China.3 Despite the fact that when I have made this claim in the past I have also critically qualified it by stating that such a return must not be a revival of a “Marxism-Leninism of an old type”, my suggestion that there were great successes we need to learn from, and that we need to find ways to grasp the failures that are not determined by cold war ideology, immediately meets a limit in thought. The common response is: it was all a failure, we need to think of new methods of organization and strategy, to even consider value in past patterns is the sin of orthodoxy.
On the surface such a response, motivated by a supposed heterodox appeal to new methods, seems to be an endorsement of the kind of creative thinking forbidden by the capitalist imaginary. Its apparent strength is that its critique of programmatic party politics is intended to be a declaration of a practice that pushes beyond old patterns of thinking. The truth, however, is that this supposedly imaginative way of thinking beyond the limits of capitalist realism is, like the poets and artists in Sriduangkaew’s story, conditioned by the “debris and dead skin” of atrophied thought. What is in fact truly forbidden, and what is declared outside the logic of the capitalist order, is not the pursuit of vague and supposedly “new” ways of organizing. Rather, what is anathema to the capitalist imaginary is a style of thinking and work that excavates our revolutionary history, and the lessons learned from this history, that can teach us something about the weaknesses of this reality.
The limits of thought
The militant at the centres of world capitalism is in fact forbidden from imagining that the communist sequences of the past can teach us something about the limits of capitalist reality. In this context, the fetishism of novelty is widespread. This search for the new holy grail of anti-capitalist theory is akin to a poet in the fictional universe of Sriduangkaew’s story attempting to develop a new style of art in a world that has rendered the fine arts largely meaningless. Capitalist realism is not challenged by the supposedly new characteristics of social movementism because it has always been able to absorb these characteristics. What is far more bothersome for bourgeois hegemony, and that produces an imaginary that exists in defiance of the one demarcated by capitalism, are unified movements that seek to be comprehensive, fighting, and revolutionary parties.
We only need to look at the struggles outside of the imperialist metropoles to realize that it is not the novelty of social movementism––of inchoate social movements with no direction beyond the spirit of rebellion––that grips militants pursuing long-term anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist projects. The sequence of people’s wars since the early 1990s to the present tell us a different story. These were programmatic and disciplined movements that based their organization and strategy on lessons critically extracted from the past. Despite the fact that many of these movements failed––in Peru, Turkey, Nepal––they were still making revolution, and sometimes even coming quite close to victory, in a context where so-called radical intellectuals and respectable leftists, whose thought was claimed by the capitalist imaginary, were arguing that such movements could not even exist.
And yet the strength of capitalist realism is such that it encourages a very particular way of engaging with social movements in the global peripheries. Therefore, right at the height of the people’s war in Nepal––a movement that, before it was claimed by the old revisionist patterns of practice, was producing new conceptions of organization and strategy, and new articulations of theory––the first world left was more interested in the Egyptian movement of the squares. Despite the fact that this movement was incoherent, and was easily claimed by reactionary forces and then a military coup that reinstalled the old regime, because it looked like first world movementism it was accorded more interest than a far more radical people’s war. It is thus difficult for militants in the imperialist centres to look to the global peripheries for direction because their ability to even perceive these peripheries is immediately filtered through a capitalist imaginary: they can only see what they are already proscribed to see.
If we look at India and its current people’s war the struggle between atrophied left thought and a revolutionary movement that rejects this impoverishment is acutely apparent. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an official government institution that participates in the repression of Naxal insurgency; meanwhile the greatest security threat to India and the imperialist interests in India is this very insurgency, led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), who are classified as “terrorists” by the CPI(Marxist) because they won’t get with the programme of capitalist realism or, more accurately, comprador-capitalist realism. India thus demonstrates a clash between an “end of history” type of thinking and a radical imaginary that rejects capitalist realism within the left itself. This clash sharpens when CPI(Marxist) intellectual ideologues deliver talks at academic conferences about the need for “creative solutions” to the problem of making revolution only to walk off the stage when supporters of Naxal insurgents demand that they explain why their party is not opposed to the suppression of an active people’s war that is precisely the “creative solution” they seemed to be describing.4
Hence, while it is indeed the case that a rejection of capitalist realism is prevalent in the peripheries, it is also the case that leftists in the imperialist centres do not want, as a whole, to recognize this rejection because it does not accord to the patterns of behaviour they have inherited from end of history thinking. When ideologues of comprador “left” organizations endorse this way of thinking this atrophy in thought is justified. A people’s war that is still the number one security threat in a peripheralized nation can be ignored, despite the fact that the most powerful capitalist countries are spending billions in military aid to put it down, and first world leftists can instead focus their attention on inchoate uprisings that look precisely like the novel ways they have conceived of their own struggles. A warped pragmatism reigns supreme, just as it does in Sriduangkaew’s Himmapan event: if we accept that the capitalist imaginary is normative, and that all fantasies to the contrary are rendered banal, then it is simply a matter of damage control. The dreamers behind a people’s war, masses of revolutionaries who reject this logic, might as well not even exist.
Beyond “Stalinism”
Of course we do need to think new methods of organization and strategy. But if we are critical of the ways in which struggle has been conceived by this first world inspired capitalist imaginary, I think I’m quite justified in claiming that the organizational and strategic concepts that are often passed as “new” are in fact quite old even if they have been rebranded. Movementism is just a modern iteration of an age-old anarchism; left refoundationalism is what the anti-capitalist left has been trying to do for decades. And when it comes to the concept of strategy––when it is not being conflated with organizational structure––we’ve mainly been treated to different forms of the same insurrectionist substance that was considered normative since 1917. Indeed, the problematic of strategy is paradigmatic of an impoverished imagination.
At the end of the 1990s the now defunct Quebe
cois organization Action Socialiste declared despairingly: “The fact is that 150 years of Marxism––including all its vitality, its energy, its intelligence and resources––should have been oriented in an almost singular direction: solving the question of proletarian revolution.” They lamented that the left had not solved this question because it had instead accepted the theory of insurrection: protracted legal struggle, general strike, a beautiful moment where the proletariat arms itself, a rapid civil war that splits the forces of the state. Hence, despite all of the talk about new theoretical developments, despite all of the novel conceptions of organization, it is quite telling that the normative strategic conception––so normative that it is rarely examined in a critical manner––is one inherited from 1917.5 In the midst of demands for creativity there is a stark lack of creativity in the one area that should matter: making revolution. This lack should not be surprising since an imagination conditioned by capitalism will necessarily find it difficult to think the one thing this imagination holds as truly monstrous: the annihilation of capitalist reality.
Leaving aside the question of strategy, which is its own difficult problematic, lurking behind this knee-jerk rejection of my suggestion of a “new return” to past revolutionary sequences is a conception of reality conditioned by the capitalist imaginary. What is really going on is that any appeal to the past that wants to treat its successes as precedents––even if it is qualified that such precedents must also be developed out of an assessment of failure––is dismissed according to a vast machinery of anti-communist ideology established by the cold war and sanctified by the “end of history”. Liberals have a name for the communist threat: totalitarianism, one of the worst concepts produced by Western thought, a discourse primarily designed to associate communism with fascism. First world leftists have their own name, which pretty much means the same thing: Stalinism. While I am not arguing that we should return to Stalin’s conception of Marxism-Leninism, I do believe that one of the ways we are kept from critically engaging with our past is due to this concept-that-is-not-a-concept called Stalinism, unfortunately reinforced by the fact that adherents to Trotsky’s political line have been more active in Western intellectual circles for the past three or four decades. The reason I think Stalinism is useless as a concept, and why it forbids critical historical memory, is because it lacks historical and theoretical coherence: when the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and then Gorbachev and Yeltsin are all called “Stalinism” then there’s an obvious contradiction inherent in the concept.6
Methods Devour Themselves Page 4