1. Examples of the current agonised condition of the West, and the world, are almost too plentiful to require citing. But a few would be: the takeover of the US government by a militantly authoritarian and irrationalist government; the collapsed legitimacy of the UK Labour government and its retreat to kitsch nationalism; the rise of a vicious-led white identitarianism in Australia; the relentless maintenance of US over-extension and the consequent breakdown in international relations; the relentless rise of an ultra-tech transhumanist movement, presenting as salvation, actually nemesis; and above all, and most visceral, the genocidal destruction of Gaza, while the powers of the world stand by.
2. The simplest way to summarise that agon is to say that the political frame that has operated since the end of World War Two has been brought to collapse by a series of deep socio-material and cultural changes occurring ‘underneath’ it. Prior to considering that collapse, it is worth considering what that post-war constellation and continuity were.
3. World War Two was the defeat of an explicitly race-based politics of domination and anti-modernism, by an alliance of the bourgeois order, the working-class movement and the anti-imperialist movement. To achieve this, states drew intellectual practices—technoscience and humanistic social reasoning—into the centre of social reproduction. Hiroshima is the most visible expression of this, but the intellectually-engineered techniques of propaganda, surveillance, and social governmentality created to turn states into total war machines are its complements.
4. In the post-war period in the West, the grand social coalition of the war effort became a peace effort. Though this pertained to the West only, the bourgeois right and working-class Left accepted a grand truce in the class war. The right accepted that modernised liberalism rather than racialised conservatism would run capitalism, and that equality and positive freedom from want would become universal social goals. The working-class movement renounced ‘Bolshevist’ evolutionary socialism for mainstreamed socialist and social democratic politics. By common agreement, techno- and social science would be the means by which these common goals were realised. Massive investment in technoscience to transform production was matched by funding and propagation of social science to actively transform inherited practices and ideas of family life, association, crime and punishment, race and tolerance, and every other aspect of life. Remnant attempts to continue explicit colonialism by France and others failed precisely because this new global order had acquired legitimacy.
5. The sciences, as they advanced into everyday life, were first seen as pure progress, from increased production, labour-saving in the home, medicine, vaccines, humanistically expansive curricula, the socio-psychological management of crime, and the like. Those doing the sciences as intellectual labour were a small group to the side of what remained a politics dominated by class processes. Science was an ally in the pursuit of the good life, conceived of as a steadily modified, yet structurally unchanged lifeworld of family, kin, neighbourhood and nation, within inherited structures.
6. These transformations produced their own opposition. Technological dominance and systematic socio-cultural ‘engineering’ became visible as an alienating force, producing a new form of domination that gave rise to the movement known as the ‘New Left’. The centralised role of liberalism was extended from old political conceptions to broader social ones, producing liberation movements—black, women’s, gay and lesbian—which turned critical action towards those social structures that had been ‘taken for granted’, and were outside the class politics framework.
7. Within the framework of capitalism, technoscience and automation were steadily undermining the accumulation form of high and mature capitalism, centred on alienated, routinised labour of the worker within Fordist-Taylorist processes. Technological change reduced the share of labour required for social physical reproduction, while swelling the ranks of the ‘intellectually trained’ to a still modest degree.
8. Beneath an appearance of good health, working-class social power was being weakened by this process. In the 1970s, working-class capacity to wage class assertion—even within the post-war compromise—was undermined by the deep structural changes of socio-economic life. Thatcher, Reagan, Hawke and the rise of neoliberalism were the political product of this socio-cultural transformation.
9. Neoliberalism presented itself, and was seen by many of its advocates to be a continuation of the broad goals of the post-war consensus, responding to social democracy’s difficulties as a failure of means. Technological change continued apace. University expansion turned the ‘side group’ of the ‘intellectually trained’ into a primary social group in its own right. The collective class culture sustained by industrial capitalism was atomised by the transformations of mass culture, creating new, more individualised subjectivity/selfhood as the dominant social-psychological form.
10. Post-war, social modernisation had been, for the vast majority, bound within common inherited life traditions. An aesthetic/ethic of radical life transformation had been the preserve of a bohemia within the ‘intellectually trained’.
11. Steady application of intellectual practices and technoscience to the social whole trends the value of routinised labour power towards zero. Those enacting such a transformation must be seen as a different ‘class’—in an expanded sense—to those having their lives transformed by it, even if both are, as waged/salaried workers, of common class within the old framework.
12. This is at the root of the social conflict of our time. Science is perceived to have ceased to be an ally to social advancement, hitherto standing to one side of class process, and has become the visible means by which a whole class will be extinguished, as a class—the class of routine labour power. The relentless shift of wealth to capital, and away from routinised labour, has been occurring for decades, a product of the steady development of technoscience within a capitalist framework. The trajectory, never complete, is the abolition of labour, leaving only capital and intellect—just as the trajectory of capitalism was the abolition of non-commodified work, leaving only capital and labour.
13. The great shift of the large sections of the working class to the right has been driven by this. The working-class uprising sought by left leaders has happened. But it has happened against them, and against the technoscientific knowledge form altogether. Technoscience has rendered vast areas of life a non-comprehensible ‘black box’ for those outside of the ‘knowledge class’.
14. The rise and general spread of conspiracy theory has been a collective social response to this. For groups now at the mercy of the technoscientific knowledge class, science itself is founded on the application of systematically, ever more abstract processes of thinking (atomised chemistry to transform the material world, particle physics to ‘meta-transform’ it, etc). Science, and intellect in general, has become the master’s discourse.
15. Conspiracy theory explains the world through linked ‘concretenesses’, reducing abstract processes to conscious power applications by specific individuals. Conspiracy theory serves as a socio-cultural defence against class annihilation, creating a bulwark against the dissolution of class being into total dominance by the other.
16. That ‘other’ is not merely technoscience and the social group advancing it. It is also the process of radical cultural transformation enacted by the socio-cultural sciences, half of the knowledge class. This group’s necessary cultural assumption is that of radical equality, equivalence, borderlessness, the ‘transgression’ of boundaries, etc. People of this group cannot help but believe that borderlessness is ethical, nationalism is not; traditional family mores must be overturned by a fluid gender equivalence, etc. Their cultural power has allowed them to unreflectively push their group beliefs—radically universal in form, but specific to their ‘class’ being—as a mode of discipline and governmentality on those still within the cultural frame of traditional class life.
17. For the ‘knowledge class’, radical universality, transgression, and fluidity present themselves as an affirming cultural habitus, a place to live. For those to whom it is being applied from the outside, it appears as a nihilism that seeks to undermine any cultural form or institution—chiefly the nation and the ‘fixed’ role of the family—that might anchor rich meaning and value in life. In fact, it is equally destructive for the group living within it, and enforcing it, producing the widespread existential conditions—anxiety, depression, spurious ADHD, light autism—that both plague them, and that they understand their life through the mirror of. Like any rising ruling class, this group will sacrifice happiness as the price of gaining power, medicating themselves into existential nullity, in order to power on.
18. While all this has occurred to Western societies internally, the same processes on a global scale have created the pressures bringing the West to social crisis. China, Vietnam, East Asia, and parts of India have emerged from a system of underdevelopment to become both new producers of intellect-transformed societies and global consumers in a demand-driven competition with the West. It has also radically divided the fortunes of the ‘global South’. China, especially, has created early forms of post-capitalist socio-economic steering—or directed economic activity combined with social-credit-based surveillance and discipline—in a way that has enabled it not only to accelerate techno-development past the West, but to accelerate the process of acceleration.
19. Had the post-war political frame survived, this new condition would have been dealt with by a degree of dialogic and negotiated global steering—even if the US and Europe were keen on maintaining a legacy dominance.
20. But because it has coincided with this new upheaval in the West, chiefly the Trump return, external and global politics are being subordinated to the demands of internal politics—that aged parties of right and left must perform for the demands of social groups using public process to rebel against the cultural rule of the new masters.
21. Mass migration is the material point by which these exterior and interior politics have met. The high-tech globalised framework makes it possible for large numbers of those in the part of the Global South that has not made the ‘China leap’ and is devastated by wars arising from these processes, to conceive of and enact getting elsewhere, i.e., the West. This is occurring in an unprecedented volume at a time when people in the West feel their lives are being ungrounded by the high-tech transformations advanced by the newly dominant intellect-oriented social groups. These processes converge into a perception of a ‘great reset’, a unified process dominated by elites.
22. What progressives/the knowledge class now see as things getting worse in every area, and on all fronts, is this process building upon itself as it advances.
23. Politics is this now, a cultural-existential divide. The Left is now the knowledge class plus the ‘recent migrant’ section of the working class, the latter due to their different type of ‘ungrounded’ status. The right is everyone else. This is around a 30%/70% split, unlikely to change, and leaving the Left in a minority, indefinitely, now that the former alliance of progressives and the working class are political enemies.
24. Marxists and other leftists from within the knowledge ‘class’ will continue to hope for a return of class politics, respecting no other boundaries or affiliations. But this is to repeat Marx’s error, projecting communism—a utopia derived from the values inherent in intellectuals’ exchange practices—as the inherent realisation of working class liberation. Much of the working-class movement was a fight to ‘reconcretise’ life—i.e., to regain the society of reciprocal face-to-face life—against the abstracting fury of the commodity. Marx’s synthesising formula became the working-class movement’s banner only for a certain period of modernity. In the present, leftists who invoke the working class have the air of Victorian mill owners who believed themselves to be Methodists. In the two decades since the 2008 crash, militant universalistic socialism has made almost no progress at all among the main body of the native-born working class. Marxism as a frame of system analysis remains powerful. Politically, as labour evaporates, its promises have become a consoling myth for a cogno-precariat, a sigh in the heart of a heartless world.
25. Thus, those on the left within the knowledge class express in the world the ethic of universal demand. So do others from all walks of life. But the ‘class preponderance’ of such demands, i.e. who they’re coming from, is relatively clear, as the global movement on Gaza exemplifies. For those in that group, it is impossible to accept what most now see as a genocide in Gaza as something elsewhere, and not bound up with us. Only certain social groups, as whole social groups, feel that way.
26. But that left will have to accept that this is not a class ethic of all groups, that is simply, among others, buried deep under the rubble of false consciousness. They will have to cease gaining their political identity by claiming to represent social groups with which they now have a degree of antagonistic relations of interests. They must abandon the notion of mystical political unity that is now decisively in the past.
27. Nor does there seem any real hope of an imminent renewed coalition of these two big groups, based on a reciprocity in which the Left could understand and recognise the legitimate ethical basis of investment in more parochial, traditional and collective life forms, as expressed by family, nation and other entities.
28. The task is to prepare for that eventual possibility, the first stage of which is left intellectuals’ necessary reflection on the dual character of their own universalist values: that they are both a general ethical demand on the world, the precondition for a transformation, but also a particular expression affirming group belief for the pleasures of identity and the will-to-social power.
29. Can such a reflection arise from within humanistic intellectual practice? Will defeat after defeat eventually force this deeper reflection, as a necessary entry into deeper reflection on continuing political failure? There is no possibility of a renewal of critical social transformation without it.
30. But nothing guarantees its possibility. If even humanistic intellectuality is a feedback loop of self-affirmation, then the deep drives expressed in our era as evangelical technoscience will drive humanity to its omega point. Our current agonised condition, with geopolitical wars now imminent, is merely a precursor.
Comments
The empowerment of hardcore liberalism is what occidental radicalism means—to propagate in loops the prospects of some reimagined, never realised Left, a continuous replica of the political agents of the past. It conveniently plants across the wide spectrum wherever the need. The ‘old framework’ lives in its whole truth, the false consciousness is real, and the seeming confusion around it never is. Marx’s error and all the rest.