Join the new world

Just a few musings on the general situation to start off the new year....



I never take seriously the notion that we have outgrown Marxism and are on the verge of a new political era. Ideas, theories, ideologies -- are tools, instruments. Ideas and concepts are part of a tool box, tools which can be changed, borrowed, stolen, or used for alternative purposes.

The phrase "the end of Marxism" means nothing at all. Only that certain uses of Marxist tools are ineffective and others are in need of review, while others continue to work perfectly well. It stupid to simply throw out all of your tools.

A re-evaluation of Einstein requires a re-examination of Newton too. But one can never say that "Newtonianism is dead". Some branches collapse; new sprouts grow. We might say that Marx"ism" has never existed. We borrow or adapt some Marxist concepts that can be put to good use.

Moreover, reading Marx is a hoot. He's a great author.


Politics and politicking are different things. Politics can't be inscribed on the surface at all. It is concerned with the relationships of large social groups to what surrounds them, including their economic set-up, but also concerning attitudes in an individual's life, their family life, the life of the unconscious, the assemblage of enunciations around them, of artistic creation, and so on...

Some people talk about the implosion of the social aspect of the game. What is that? Is it anything? Or is it that the social no longer expresses itself in the configuration of forces we had become accustomed to?

The e-workers movement has become much too complex to conceive of in simple terms. There are masses of players who have nothing to do with any definition of the working class from classic literature. Not that they are no more in relationships of force, both in-game and out-of-game, simply that the powers of the states, of capitalism and of state-bureaucracy can no longer handle the situation.

We are in a phase of considerable turmoil, perhaps even a pre-revolutionary phase, where virtually no one can control anything anymore.


In the real world, at this point, the storming of the prisons would be just the tip of the iceberg.

Society is well along the road to total collapse. Ways of conceiving the law, religion, the body, filiation, the family, time, literature -- all that is moving, changing, bursting at the seams. The bourgeoisie is struggling to pull themselves together and redefine their new grounds. It will take even more time for the workers and oppressed to find a lightning rod around which to gather and establish themselves in a new relation of force.

I feel a similar "calm before the storm" here in the New World.



We must stop claiming there is no more "social", that nobody gives a damn. We should recenter the focus where politics has migrated, where the situation is critical, most difficult to get a grasp on, and attach meaning there.

We should call into question all of the so-called political instruments at our disposal, including the e-world capitalist model, and all the forces of contestation still striving to establish some kind of "dominance".



In the real world, the frozen dance between dogmatic Marxists and ossified social democrats and guilt-ridden social liberals on the one hand, and the stark fatalism of the Friedman-Rand folks and their neo-fascist fans who proclaim that things can never be otherwise than what they are and that in any case capitalism is a better world, while the actual world burns and the poor masses get poorer and more massive, is leading to catastrophe.

A reexamination of all the questions once thought resolved, to wit the way the entire game works, in spite of all the trash, is increasingly evidenced to likely be less catastrophic than either old-style central planfications or the proclaimed "freedom" of a freed-to-do-what-it-likes-oligarchy.

Countries of all types have collapsed or are collapsing.

Like Marxism, capital itself may not have reached the end of its potential. It may have tools for how to divert, how to orient ourselves in another way. Deterritorializing. Like how the indigenous autonomists and social ecoologists of Chiapas and Rojava are modeling an anti-capitalism inside of capitalism.

Connecting together anything that will initiate a new sequence of events seems the likeliest road to rescue at this point.


And so the collective subjectivity is tripping. It has flashes of insight. It sees things. Then it stops. This doesn't mean a total incoherence, only that an effort is being made to perceive something that has not yet fully registered.



When?

When players begin to realize that they have allies everywhere, including in countries that don't even exist in our Little New World, everywhere, and that a new alliance is possible because they have common enemies that go way beyond the Admin.

It's that, I think, that could shape itself into a real new type of political intelligence.






Happy new year.