Methods Devour Themselves

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Hence, even those who recognize the way in which capitalism delimits thought have a difficult time thinking beyond these limits. In Capitalist Realism, for example, Fisher in fact uses the term Stalinism to describe the ways in which contemporary capitalism manages market exchange.7 But Stalinism is a pseudo-concept produced by capitalist ideology so as to reinforce what Fisher calls “capitalist realism” and thus linking the former to the latter should be treated as strange but, because of the strength of capitalist realism, is not judged as such. We should all be familiar with the liberal cliché that communism is “good in theory and bad in practice”, a mindless truism that enforces the capitalist imaginary. A core doxa of this truism, though, is that any attempt to transcend capitalism will end up resembling this vague Stalinism where “some pigs are more equal than others”, a centralized market will reduce everything to a repressive and drab collectivity, and terrible iron-fisted catastrophe will become the norm.

  The capitalist imaginary replaces the truth of the “socialism or barbarism” antinomy with this groundless maxim: “capitalism or Stalinism”. Although Fisher’s entire work on capitalist realism was dedicated, and masterfully so, to demanding a return to the recognition of the former antinomy, he unintentionally valorizes the latter. By conflating contemporary capitalism with Stalinism he places socialism beyond the horizon of our atrophied thought. If all real world attempts to make socialism are branded with the charge of Stalinism––and contemporary capitalism is even worse, according to Fisher, because of its “market Stalinism”––then what else exists that can launch our atrophied thought beyond the boundaries of the capitalist imaginary? Only Trotskyism or some form of anarchism, one would assume, but this is entirely convenient since these are traditions without a significant revolutionary legacy. Such a discourse forbids us from engaging meaningfully with anti-capitalist history.

  Moreover, in using the signifier of Stalinism in such a manner, Fisher appears to be implying that capitalism is worse than it would be otherwise because of this qualification: contemporary capitalism is worse than classical capitalism because of a characteristic derived from communist history. Capitalist realism thus seems, if we are to focus only on this interpretation (which we should not), to be derived from a cold war hatred of socialist realism.

  We are so thoroughly haunted by the poltergeist of capitalism that it becomes difficult to comprehend this haunting except by its own terms. Reaction to Trump’s election in the US is a perfect example of how decades of anti-communist ideology has produced a common sense inability to reject capitalism’s most senile manifestations. Faced with a crisis in the liberal order––an order that had erroneously conceived itself as the opposite of fascism––US mainstream resistance to Trump’s election could only conceive of the latter in terms of what the former had been conditioned by capitalist realism into thinking was the greatest evil: communism. Thus Trump, despite being an extreme but logical symptom of capitalism, could not be seen as such since capitalism was understood as the end of history. The great evil of communist “Stalinism” has been mobilized to critique Trump’s regime because, after decades of cold war propaganda and a pitiless hatred of socialism, what could be worse than communism? Newspaper cartoons with hammers and sickles have become common; conspiracy theories about Russian tampering with elections, despite the fact that Russia has been capitalist because of the end of history, and diatribes about Trump’s “Stalinism” are everywhere.

  Since fascists are quite aware that communists are their natural enemies, and have done their damnedest to confuse the masses (i.e. the Nazi terminology of “National Socialism” was mainly coined to pull would-be socialist workers into a national capitalist project), Bannon gleefully encouraged this misunderstanding by ironically referring to himself as a “Leninist”. Liberal ideologues, who love to take fascists at their word, broadcasted this disinformation. Capitalist realism reigns supreme: it is indeed easier to imagine the world according to capitalist categories, even when these categories have become non-sensical, than dare to think their transcendence.

  Behind the barriers in thought

  The barrier in thought we encounter when apprehending the past isn’t limited to the more distant events of previous world historical revolutions; it also has to do with movements closer in time. Take, for example, the New Communist Movement which represented a period of massive organizational agitation against capitalism throughout the world. Motivated by the Cultural Revolution in China, anti-revisionist communist organizations proliferated on every continent; in the global metropoles these kinds of organizations diverged from the so-called New Left of early 1960s radicalism. Despite the fact that the New Communist Movement greatly eclipsed the New Left in terms of numbers and organizational discipline there is very little assessment of this period.8 Since it met its limits at the end of the 1980s following the victory of the “capitalist roaders” in China and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc its significance was undermined by the consummation of the capitalist imaginary at the altar of the end of history.

  Due to its attempt to declare fidelity to a critical and anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism, the New Communist Movement was drowned by the tide of victorious capitalist ideology and thus relegated to a limbo that resisted investigation. It was as if, despite all the literature and accounts that claimed otherwise, this period of struggle had never existed. In the imperialist metropoles, where the capitalist imaginary is the strongest, we are fed a particular narrative about 1960s radicalism: hippy peaceniks, an incoherent New Left, a milquetoast interpretation of the Black Panthers, and then a “growing up” that is best represented by Reagan and Thatcher.

  What we must not recall, though, is that the moment when capitalism declared its end of history is also the moment when revolutionaries declared a new stage of revolutionary science: the People’s War in Peru. Such a declaration and the sequences it unleashed with the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, revolutions in Nepal and then India, must also not be thought. After all, such recollection defies what is acceptable for an imagination conditioned by capitalism to think beyond its limits in the very moment it declares itself eternal. All histories outside of the singular history of capitalist victory are forbidden: when they are not condemned to amnesia they are interpreted as naive or totalitarian mistakes.

  My contention, which should not be controversial, is that we should engage with these kinds of histories and refuse to forget the sacrifices or dismiss them as museum relics; the time in which they operated is not entirely alien to our own. We need to refuse the total denial of our past and learn the lessons forbidden by an imagination disciplined by capitalism.

  Capitalism abides

  So what, then, is the solution? Due to the problematic I have described––the capitalist imaginary, capitalist realism, the end of history discourse, etc.––it becomes quite difficult, by definition, to answer such a question. Radical theory has in fact provided justification for this difficulty. According to Althusser the creative subject is nothing more than the interpellated product of ideological state apparatuses, a completely socialized fabrication; Foucault and other post-structuralists went further by suggesting a complete decentring of a subject that could think outside of oppression, a subject that could only reinscribe the totalization of reality in even its revolutionary attempts. The protagonist in Sriduangkaew’s story is symptomatic of this difficulty: despite being a detective hired to solve the problem of a curse, she is also a child who was stolen by Himmapan in the early days of convergence, discovered her subjecthood in a tragic romance that produced her sense of self, and thus cannot think outside of its reality; the entire mystery is compromised by the fact that she is part of the very problem she seeks to solve.9 In such a context, then, to even conceive of a solution to the capitalist imaginary is itself met with a barrier in thought that results in three apparent problems.

  First of all, if thought is thoroughly atrophied then we cannot answer this question or even properly conc
eptualize it; such a total understanding undermines critique itself, rendering everything I’ve said contradictory. Secondly, and as I’m suggesting, if the way to answer this question is to recapture the lessons from the past, resist historical amnesia, and concretely connect with revolutionary sequences in a manner that rejects capitalist realism, then we encounter some serious difficulties, much like the difficulties encountered by the protagonist of Sriduangkaew’s short story (a detective attempting to force meaning, based on her understanding of an eclipsed and obscured past, upon the mystery of her dystopia), because we have been forbidden from thinking this past. Thirdly, due to the problems I have described, the mention of even the slightest opening to a solution culled from a sequence of past revolutionary time is also classified as forbidden, exiled by an imagination disciplined by capitalist ideology.

  These three problems can be unified in an unflinching apprehension of the imagination produced by capitalist realism. Such an imagination insists that it persists beyond the limits of physics itself; it would claim purchase upon a reality that is even torn asunder by an event like Himmapan’s infection of Krungthep in Sriduangkaew’s story. The phenomena of sheer fantasy can walk the streets, the rules of space-time are threatened, and yet the capitalist imaginary is convinced that it will persist.

  Capitalism abides in thought, even when we argue for its destruction, colonizing all of our attempts to conceive its destruction. It is the “debris and dead skin” of thought that chokes our imagination as its economic and political processes smother existence itself. It will permit its own hungry giants waiting in ruined airports just so long as these forces of violence can be “move[d]… in turn by [its] levers and hand-wheels.” That is, by the laws of the market which, always conceived like Smith’s invisible hand, are just as mythic as ogres and magical forests. Capitalism has always loved the mythic order just so long as this order can be subordinated to its logic: the story of Odysseus, as Adorno and Horkheimer discussed, becomes a tale of bourgeois cunning; Jesus justifies private property; a “work ethic” is located in the New Testament; a variety of new mythologies, like the self-made man and the cult of the individual, proliferate. In many ways capitalism is the mythic order of Himmapan that has collided with human existence, subordinating reality to its brutal imaginary.

  The reality of this imaginary, however, is one of immanent catastrophe. As I have argued elsewhere, following Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary tradition, if the limits of this reality are not transgressed and the logic of capitalism is allowed to persist then the world will be thoroughly devastated, our material grounds for existence annihilated, and this vicious system will devour us along with itself. “Maybe that is the future,” Sriduangkaew writes: “An epidemic of disassembly and all of us lying exposed, apart, awaiting the end.” In a very real sense, and according to the systemic logic obscured by the capitalist imaginary, this is indeed the future.

  The only way out is to rupture from this imaginary and its purchase on reality. Hence, the philosophical project to which I am devoted, and which I have written three books about so far, concerns the (re)discovery of a coherent revolutionary past beneath the closures enacted by the capitalist imaginary, this history’s unfolding according to historical necessity, and the ways in which such a past can be logically conceived so as to breathe life into the present.

  Chapter Three

  Krungthep is an Onomatopoeia

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  On the shipworld’s skin they find her half-dead, pierced by the shrapnel of her chassis and seared by the spill of her fuel. They have to saw through cables and melt through blueshift alloy, unravel the latticework of couplings and wirings that connect flesh to processor, and even in her catatonia she cries out in pain at each separation.

  They do not dare to part her from the pilot’s cradle, so fused is she to the seat and the frame: her nerves to sensors, her muscles to controls, her tendons to bulkhead. Instead they carry her entire into the shipworld, part human and part machine and barely alive, the wreck of her beautiful even in this moment close to the end. The lustre of satin-glass that grows out of her scalp in place of hair, the geometric perfection of her silhouette, the jagged prisms of her dream that transmits even now into the whorls of the shipworld’s cortex. She is the sum and total of human accomplishment.

  While they lay her down on her deathbed, the cortex sorts through her dreams, which have pushed forth in reflex like blood gushing from a wound.

  First: the pilot is clasped in her cradle, one with bulkhead and trajectory, a star through the dark. She is not alone. There are three of them together, knitted by complex decisions and compromises and something the cortex understands as affection.

  Second: the pilot is on her knees and one of her companions is a mass of rot and gangrene, his body failing him, the augmentations of his limbs and liver in rapid decay. He reeks of mortality. There are two of them left.

  Third: the pilot is cradling a gun and she is firing it, a single shot––this close, she cannot miss––into her last companion. The bullet cuts a clean, painless path through skin and skull and the death is immediate. This dream replays, over and over. Grip on gun. Trigger pulling. The bullet clearing the chamber, and then the pilot is alone.

  When queried, the cortex says, “Her dreams do not contain the answer you seek. Her dreams do not contain her duty and service, the directive to which the shipworld’s destiny may be yoked. Her dreams do not say whether humanity can go home.”

  They query the cortex as to how this crucial answer may be obtained.

  To which it says, “As for that, only the pilot can tell you.”

  The shipworld is called Krungthep after the city in which it was built. It has been made to last: the central matrix-column takes the shape of a banyan tree, its vermillion canopy housing the cortex that calculates, regulates, and sustains the three hundred thousand that inhabit Krungthep’s decks.

  Suranut has seen the original Krungthep in records and knows that the shipworld is nothing like it: no canals run between the decks and partitions, fluorescent with lantern-eels. There are no ferries that glide close to form market islets and bridges, no ropes of golden prayers billowing in the sky at visakha bucha. There is no sky.

  A sky suggests possibility, opens up infinity, cannot be measured. A sky is vaster than the shipworld which is enormous but has precise limits: Suranut knows its dimensions by heart, like any child born to the decks. These thoughts have consumed her since an age she could comprehend what sky meant, what its presence in the old media of Earth entails, what its absence in the shipworld declares. Its absence, the shape of no and cannot.

  When the cortex summons her, it is the sky that she is dreaming of.

  She is authenticated into an elevator she’s never seen before, the carriage opaque with combinatorial poetry. When she steps in and touches the inner wall, the verses leap and rearrange around her fingerprints, coiling around her knuckles and thumbs. One of them bites––a pinprick, surgically precise––and then the cortex’s voice blossoms in her ear.

  “Esteemed citizen,” it says, between alto and tenor, in the formal register. “You have been selected on strength of your likely affinity toward the subject. Along with two other candidates, you will be assigned a trial period to interact with the subject, to test her responsiveness to you and vice versa.”

  In her thirty-eight years this is the first time Suranut has heard the shipworld’s voice.

  “What is this about?” she asks, expecting no answer and is given none. No doubt the intention is for her to enter the situation unbiased. The cortex didn’t even send an official to soften the summons.

  Under the glow of serpentine verses, she looks at her fingertip where the cortex injected her with receptors. Bloodless; she can barely discern the puncture-point. Suranut wonders whether this is a permanent change, whether she would always be able to hear the shipworld.

  She meets the other candidates in a chamber lit by the cortex-cloud. On
e is an older supply-accountant in his sixties, the other a teenage girl no older than seventeen. As Suranut opens her mouth to greet and introduce herself, the cortex murmurs in her ear, “Esteemed citizen, it is requested that the candidates do not converse either during or after the trial period. This is to ensure the purity of result.”

  Biting down on her lip, she finds a corner and sits, her hands clasped on her stomach. One by one they are called, disappearing into different doors. They must exit elsewhere, for by the time Suranut’s turn comes she still hasn’t seen either the girl or the accountant. Or perhaps the cortex has deemed them lacking and directed them to the recycling plants––but this isn’t a thought she entertains for more than a moment. The shipworld terminates residents humanely at the expected end of their lifespan.

  Her door is a trapezoid. The passage behind it stretches long and subterranean before her. Distant noises she recognizes as owl hoots; she’s seen the birds in the zoo, those beaked somnambulists. A second ambience runs in counterpoint, more strident. Reference index lets her know they are audio files of cicadas, randomized into organic play. Where her feet fall she feels not the hard tiles of shipworld ground but something that bends and rustles.