First as Farce, Then as Tragedy

-- ShayBanerjee - 10 Feb 2017

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

-Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

The religion of fascism, which worships the State, is implemented through consolidation of the bureaucratic mechanisms. Administrative structures are streamlined, agencies are gagged, and internal dissent is quashed. Rulemaking is politicized, and specialization is replaced by stratification. Corporate, political, media, and governmental processes are combined, as the whole of industrial, military, and technocratic society is brought under a unified structure. At this stage,the regime's operational goal is apparent: concentrate power to the inner circle.

The awoken comprehend what is happening, but some time ago we lost the language to explain it. Once again the Right has mobilized the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat---the crazed masses whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation. The battlefield is therefore familiar, but its terrain is novel---organized by bitstreams, data packets, and network protocols.

The fundamental power dialectic, however, is unchanged: our adversaries control the money-capital, and we control the labor. Still, to win hearts and minds, we must adapt our lexicon to a digitized world. The truth is that while Marx put the pieces together, he confused the chronology. The Farce---the sort that produced Trump---is actually our current age, and the Tragedy---the sort that can produce an authentic socialist revolution---will come next.

Capitalism is the Disease

The underlying contradiction of capitalism is as so: capitalists steal from the plates of workers, but workers require food to live as such.

The individual capitalist---immersed in competition---constantly fights to keep wages down, prices high, and taxes low. Relentlessly he seeks out loopholes, discovers regulatory havens, and leverages enormous market power over the worker. Consequently, wealth concentrates to the propertied elite.

Yet because the worker must participate in production, the system as a whole requires a baseline of aggregate demand. When the total cost of subsistence exceeds the summation of wages and state-backed social services, the system collapses. The crashes of 1929 and 2008 were caused by demand shortages, the first as a decline in discretionary spending and the second by debt that could not be validated by future income. Without conscious planning, such busts are inevitable.

To escape busts, capital must outsource, i.e. find workers to perform the same labor for lower wages. This task requires renovating the systems of information---the communication, transmission, and logistical processes that make globalization and the distribution of money-capital possible. The Fordist escape from the 1929 crash thus oversaw the mechanization of work and the automation of telecommunications---necessary steps for capital’s penetration into East Asian labor markets. Similarly the current recovery prioritizes software development and network expansion to enable outsourcing of the service sector.

The supersystem of capitalist accumulation is therefore trapped in a dangerous cycle. Booms are followed by busts, busts by renovation in information systems, renovation by outsourcing, and outsourcing by booms. In the process, insecurity and hardship become structural features of human life, and the reactionaries are given a space to operate.

Fascism is the Symptom

As investors redirect capital from busted assets to new industry, they summon into being two new insurrectionary classes: the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. The former emerges as investors divest themselves from antiquated industries, depriving entire portions of the bourgeoisie of access to credit. Unable to achieve sustainable growth, the petit-bourgeoisie lays off segments of the proletariat, creating the lumpenproletariat: a class trained in the labor of dying production systems but unprepared for the technology of the future. The 2008 Crash in particular resulted in severe, state-backed financial restructuring, accelerating the growth of dispossessed factions.

Unaware that capitalism is the true enemy, the dispossessed attempt to preserve the remnants of old society by turning against fellow workers. Capitalist systems of information reinforce this false consciousness: just as the right-wing propaganda of the 20th century divided workers of different colors and creeds, so too does neoliberalism imply a certain way of exploiting identity-based categories within the underclass. The deployment of personalized digital platforms, governed by powerful consumer analytics and backed by high-powered investors, actuates a politics of fear, division, and hatred---because such a politics happens to generate a profit.

Socialism is the Cure

Ending the destructive cycle that begets reactionary tendencies requires permanently replacing the capitalist order with a regime of rationalized industry. A socialist society would prioritize the combination of learning and industry, and thereby expedite the integration of dispossessed classes with the proletariat through continuing education. It would construct a robust social safety net to care for the dispossessed between employment, while easing our transition to a fully automated society by gradually reducing working hours. And it would socialize finance, introducing the periodic liquidation of inept assets as an institutional feature of the economy. The Farce inherent in the emergent reactionary regime is precisely in that it will not install these solutions, but instead accelerate the material enrichment of the monied elite.

Thus while the terrain may have changed, the basic lesson has not: fascism is the creation of capitalism, and socialism is the solution to both. What distinguishes the present moment instead is that we exist at a unique stage in the development of the systems of information. The rise of the Internet has reduced the marginal cost of transporting money-capital to zero, and therefore gave the Right an upper hand. After all, when a resource can reach every corner of an economic system for free, it is logical that those who control said resource will exert enormous influence. The Internet thus reoriented the political landscape to empower the owners of capital.

The next important development is near, however. Soon, autonomous vehicles will disrupt society, and the marginal cost of transporting labor and goods will also approach zero. On will come the Tragedy: mass unemployment, social upheaval, lost faith in government. As the crisis reaches its apex, the critical gap between learning and industry---now hidden---will be exposed, the student debt bubble will burst, and the future will be up for grabs: a veritable scramble for control of the means of production.

Now is the time to organize. The critical moment is coming, and the Left best be ready when it arrives.