The Potential Importance Of Free Software For A Socialist Movement

I think it turned out pretty well (though the formatting turned out a bit different from what I imagined). So if you have some time over the holidays, go ahead and read it!

Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

America has already been by far the largest donor to the Palestinians and Trump is likely the most compassionate president yet when it comes to their cause. His commitment to take responsibility for Gaza and the Gazans raises the stakes for and exposes the complicity of the Arab states, especially neighboring Egypt of President Abdel Fattah and Jordan of King Abdullah who already have peace agreements and normal relations with Israel for a long time and are at least as hostile to Hamas and Islamic Jihad as Netanyahu’s Israel. Trump is upping the ante, demonstrating that now is the time for everyone to put up or shut up. Trump is showing them up as at best the Fairweather Friends of the Palestinians they have always been. More distantly the monarchies of the Gulf States in Saudi Arabia, the existing and future Partners in the Abraham Accords, now must match Trump’s commitment to Gaza and to the Palestinians more generally. When they do so the effect will be to unify them in a common front and confront the Israelis with an offer they cannot refuse.

It should be said that it was never particularly hard to tell that Trump’s hyperbolic “Riviera of the Middle East”- proposal was a negotiating tactic — our state TV noted this the day he made it. What was particularly insightful about Cutrone’s commentary was that he got who it was directed towards — the other Middle-Eastern countries. In hindsight, it seems obvious: Trump used the threat of ethnic cleansing and an increasingly erratic Israel to pressure the Arab states to get behind a compromise proposal, then presented it to Israel as a fait accompli and used his cachet as well as the increasing international pressure (and the lingering understanding that Israel cannot hold Gaza for any length of time without great sacrifices) to get Netanyahu on board, then pressured Hamas into it through the same means. When recounted it sounds like a diplomatic master plan, but Trump also had to deal with lots of contingencies, which makes it arguably more impressive. It is a significant political accomplishment, so much so that even the Economist had to give it flowers. Trump’s “Gordian knot” approach allowed him to make tremendous progress on an issue that the Democrats and the adjecent Left might have prolonged indefnitely: even if his plan fails it will be what every successive peace plan has to measure up against. People are celebrating in Gaza today.

So what is the lesson here? That Chris Cutrone is always right and always depressed? Yes. Had we listened to him in 2015, when he was starting the Campaign for a Socialist Party, we could use the current shake-up in capitalist politics much better. But it is never too late to learn. Seeing the focal point of Leftist politics in the last few years be resolved (or at the very least drastically reconfigured) on a purely capitalist basis should teach us not to conflate capitalist and socialist politics again.

Before we proceed a caveat has to be inserted, which is that I am mostly familiar with Studebaker’s audible work, not his writing, which is probably deeper. However, my familiarity with at least his recent spoken appearances should be fairly complete. Moreover, and he very recently made direct reference to the issues in question, so it seems safe enough to conclude that they probably continue throughout the entirety of his work.

1. The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

Central to Studebaker’s misrecognitions is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). In his latest appearance on Theory Underground Why Left? New Year’s (Counter) Revolutions with Special Co-Host, Studebaker is directly asked about the TRPF and does not disavow it, but his understanding seems dangerously mistaken. For the sake of exposition it seems prudent here to insert a concise derivation of the TRPF: the capitalist ecosystem is based around competition on the consumer market, rewarding those companies that manage to amass the largest amount of spent money, which is really only a stand-in for the labor time the consumers spend as workers producing commodities for companies.Therefore, it incentivizes maximizing the amount of produced commodities per labor time, resulting in a race to develop not classical arms but machinery and social technologies to make workers work as efficiently as possible. Since workers and consumers are the same people however, generally speaking, the proportion of produced commodities relative to the labor time that can be spent to buy them increases. As a result, individual commodities are devalued, making their production less profitable, so that only production of large quantities of them remains competitive. The time of workers producing these commodities decreases in value as well, as fewer of them are needed to maximize the company’s market share while the technologies required to maximize production per labor time becomes the factor deciding the viability of companies. This is nothing else than to say that the value of already existing capital, such as machinery, technological achievements etc. increases in proportion to that of newly produced capital, which it takes less effort to generate using already produced capital, so that the rate of profit possesses a tendency to decline.

The most obvious problem of Studebaker’s response is that he cites technological innovation as a counter-tendency to the rate of profit. This is in line with the de rigueur counter-arguments to the TRPF made by economists and in particular Okishio’s theorem, which posits that technological innovation can through the production of more commodities increase the rate of profit while keeping wages stagnant. However, the entire point of the TRPF is that this is only a counter-tendency in the short-term but increases the TRPF in the long term (see Ankri and Marcaggi’s analysis) because the increase in production leads to a decrease in the value of commodities because those commodities are valued through the consumer market, which has capital equal to the labor hours of workers, which have grown less valuable because they produce more commodities. Moreover, though this might be a misinterpretation based on the limited amount of what Studebaker is saying, he seems to think the TRPF is a cause of the increased exploitation of the working class when it is actually itself caused by the need to keep the profit rate high: since labor hours have decreased in value, more of them are required for businesses to stay competitive, which increases value for an individual company while on the large scale being counteracted by the devaluation of commodities it brings about through the increase in production through further labor hours. Meanwhile, an actual counter-tendency to the TRPF is the decrease in technological advancement it brings about due to increased monopolization and the decrease in quality of life in general and education in particular because of the TRPF.

Studebaker’s misunderstanding of the TRPF has wide-reaching consequences for his politics. In the same stream for instance, Studebaker talks about the solution to the problem of capitalism being to get it working again, produce a higher growth rate through the right kind of technological innovation and produce enough wealth to reign in the transition to socialism. But, again, technological innovation is what causes the rate of profit to fall, one of the main causes anyway, and actually decreases the value of labor time and with that the quality of the human consciousness rendered superfluous. This is perhaps Studebaker’s most fundamental misunderstanding: to think that a technological increase would lead to a freeing up of labor hours and thereby the increase in human consciousness that can be used for the transition to socialism. However, Studebaker should take seriously counter-argument made after his teach-in at Platypus “Contemporary Class Structure, Liberal Democracy, and the Left”: that political consciousness was much higher in the period before WWI. This already shows that the problem is not only free time but the quality of that time, and while Studebaker likes to point to various means of distraction that have been introduced since, this really only obscures the totality of that decline, which is not just because of the existence of new distractions but because the value of free time decreases with the value of labor time because labor has become the primary means of contribution to society long ago and its decline in value directly impacts the consciousness that provides it.

Similarly, Studebaker will sometimes ask us to consider that perhaps capitalism has not yet provided sufficient wealth for the transition to socialism but that misses again the point because capitalism has produced what it could long ago, then destroyed it. It has to be stressed that war, environmental catastrophe, degeneration of individual capacities and whatever else destroys capital, physical or intellectual, are counter-tendencies to the rate of profit and have to be accounted for as such. Social unrest caused by unemployment was a key factor of both world wars and thus the damages caused by them have to be added to the amount of value destroyed by the tendency of the TRPF to spawn counter-tendencies¹ with interest. This is also why an empirical observation, such as saying “just look at the charts”, is slightly beside the point because the most essential feature of the TRPF is not its direct manifestation but its tendency to spawn counter-tendencies, which increase the difference between economic value and societal wealth, or whatever measure for general welfare might be used. This is why Studebaker’s critiques of modernity, such as that merchants, when put in charge of society will destroy it, taken from pre-modern thinkers, are not just staightforwardly correct but become increasingly so over time precisely due to the increase in productivity brought forth by growth.

Once this point is thoroughly comprehended it truly destroys such progressivist notions on capitalism as the idea that we could simply outgrow it by increasing productivity. Metaphorically, capitalism is not a larva that has grow to become a butterfly but a cocoon that has to be torn open before growth can truly continue. In fact, it might even be possible that capitalism settles into an orbit of production followed by destruction, most obviously through nuclear weapons, for an indefinite amount of time, making it not just a chronic crisis, a state that should be a transition, but a stable crisis, a state that tends to settle into itself even under moderate disturbances, yet this would still not invalidate the point of the TRPF because, again, its spawning of counter-tendencies is more important than the tendency itself because it correlates to the degree to which capitalism has become a fetter to development.

This also has direct implications for the policies Studebaker champions. I have already in the next-to-last Sublation parrot room expressed my doubt that state-provided healthcare would truly further revolutionary consciousness, in the US or otherwise, what is more interesting here is Studebaker’s reasoning, which is that an elimination of the wastefulness of US healthcare system would free up production that could be directed towards another purpose. But this is still pre-Marxist thinking because while waste would be eliminated, so would jobs, which would decrease the amount of expenditure on the consumer market, which would sharpen the crisis of capitalism, which would be great in the presence of a socialist movement that could make use of it, but cannot be assumed to contribute to the formation of such a movement precisely because the emiseration thesis is wrong-headed. Rather, in the absence of a socialist movement, a sharpening of the crisis of capitalism accelerates the counter-tendencies of the TRPF, which act against the formation of revolutionary consciousness. Of course, so does other distress, but it has to be said that Studebaker’s argument for Medicare for All as an unobtainable policy in the penultimate paragraph of Medicare for All: Requiem for a Dream is precisely of a kind with the behavior of French “Marxists” that us Marx’s “I’m not a Marxist”-quote and with good reason: people don’t like being lied to and used for a purpose other than the one being told and really only makes sense as an argument that is not really believed to convince someone without taking their position seriously.

Studebaker’s incomplete grasp of the TRPF even distorts his analysis of the fundamental motivations of present humanity. Thus, in “Why Left? Ep.8 - Dugin x Zizek + Matt Goodwin on Mass Immigration, Matt Walsh on anti-Natalism”, Studebaker claims that everyone wants to “work less” and “consume more” and claims that this can be seen by observing international relations. However, it is precisely in international relations that we can see that under capitalist conditions unemployment and the social unrest it causes is a much stronger motivator than desire not to work — again, it was a major if not the primary factor behind both world wars.

2. Socialism

As the term “middle capitalism” suggests, Studebaker seems to believe in the idea that not a sufficient amount of wealth has been created to allow for the transition to socialism. But because the valuation of capitalism is what decides what is created, and that valuation decorrelates with wealth, more and more production is channeled into the destruction of wealth, like an Ouroboros (a snake eating itself). However, Marx already thought that sufficient conditions for the transition to socialism existed in his time. He might have been wrong about that, and still be, but capitalism will not increase its wealth production and has in fact already re-emiserated large parts of the working class in the core capitalist countries through its technological development. Indeed, listening to Studebaker it sometimes seems like the increase in capital mobility since the 70’s was just a bad policy decision and not a desperate attempt to keep the profit rate high after the capital destroyed in the world wars had largely been rebuilt, or, if it was such an attempt, unsuccessful, when really it led to enormous wealth creation throughout the world even while destroying the domestic working class. The deeper point is however that Studebaker still seems to think of socialism largely as an alleviation from work that can only be achieved once most work has become superfluous, which is precisely not the Marxist position. Rather, Marx stated in the Critique of the Gotha Program:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

It cannot be stressed enough that the Marxist vision is not one of freedom from labor but of freedom through labor. The victory of labor as a means of contribution to society is basically total and irreversible, but this would not be a problem if labor aligned both with individual desire and societal wealth, which is why the Marxist program is a change in the valuation of labor, not its abandonment, which would be an unrealistic goal anyway. And while Marx’s begrudging support for labor tokens seems improvable, the gigantic increase in productivity since his time have actually made his ultimate proposal of a change according to the maxim of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” more probable than ever, as strenuous work has greatly diminished while currently undesirable work is mostly necessitated by the mode of production and could be done away with in the change. However, it should also be underlined that Marx does not call for a complete abolition of physical work but of the division of labor. In fact, in his famous description of what that would look like

society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

he dedicates three fourths of the waking day to the production of food, which, even if the horror of “industrial animal farming” is abolished while the transition to artificial meat (my preferred outcome) is abstained from, would be overly pessimistic with today’s food production techniques.

3. Conclusion

In spite of Studebaker’s disillusionment with capitalist politics, it has to be said that there is a basic continuity in his perspective from his days on “What’s Left?” to now, which includes some progressivist assumptions that might not even be understood as such but that nevertheless keep him tied to a basically linear understanding of capitalism which lends itself readily to co-optation by reformist politics. However, these assumptions are invalidated by a properly Marxist understanding of capitalist dynamics, which preclude the possibility of such reforms to bear fruit. Studebaker would do well to heed that understanding.

Footnotes:

¹

My grandmother used to tell me people voted for Hitler because he promised to bring jobs and “they didn’t know the jobs were in arms manufacture”. Whether her impression of the general knowledge of the population was overly generous is beside the point.

This is a precise schematic of the workings of the Left. Because the Left is the force of progress, it attracts the young and naive and enlists them in its fight against the forces of reaction threatening society — the Right. However, the forces of reaction never seem to lose their strength and what progress has been made appears twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition, until at some point the realization sets in among the would-be Leftists that all they did was push capital into its next stage, overcoming the inertia that made it unstable without threatening its existence at any point, in other words that the “progress” they were enlisted for is in fact capitalist progress, which is not congruent to societal progress at all. This often leads to a fundamental skepticism towards the notion of progress itself, which in the extreme becomes the attempt to reverse the “progress” that has been made but rarely goes that far. However, the distinction between a skepticism of progress and the attempt to reverse progress is too fine for the next generation to notice, so that the burnt-out remainders of the previous generation become the witches in the minds of the new magical girls.

We can see this playing itself out in real time in personalities like Ana Kasparian. Her note of departure displays the soberness of an Alonso Quixano reflecting on the madness of his Quixotism after having regained sober senses one last time. She will be a witch to fight for the new magical girls, repeating the same cycle she perpetuated. Nothing was gained, nothing was lost — except an opportunity. We might be quick to discount her exemplary role, call her an opportunist and say that she was never “on the true Left” — but, then again, were we? We should have empathy for her, even if we recognize that the limited insight she gained is still distorted and not adequate to the task. She might have been a perpetrator, but more importantly she was a victim, just as we were. However, empathy has become a rare commodity these days, least possessed by those who claim it.

One question naturally arises: who are the cats? We can apply the story in two different ways: either they are the grandes of the Left, the remaining boomers who never had the flash of recognition that drove them into despair, or going even further back the likes of Chomsky who continue to radicalize the new generations with their “common sense” that, at best, displays a strongly distorted image of reality, or they are the fat cats of the Democratic Party. Really, there is not much difference between the two, one is shepherding the young towards the other, unwilling or not, cats and dogs living together in apparent disharmony. The Democratic Party is the party of capitalist progress, as such it is natural that the Left, robbed of the insights that historically helped it distinguish capitalist from societal progress, would gravitate towards it, and that the former would use the energy released by the latter for the renovation of capitalism. However, we should not fault the party for dishonesty: while it does employ a healthy amount of leftist dog-whistling, this is no more than the natural lying of a capitalist party. It is not the party’s fault that the Left wants it to be what it isn’t: an untrustworthy ally.

Being perceived as an untrustworthy ally is actually most profitable for the Democratic Party, as it allows it to do as little as possible in terms of reforms that could be beneficial for the Left while still retaining enough energy to continue with the administration of capitalism. Anything more than that would raise expectations to such a level that the fallout might be hard to handle: the disappointment with the Obama administration is still a problem to the party. Anything less might lead to an overly high amount of Leftists questioning the premise that “the other side is worse” that keeps the party afloat even in dire times. Managing capitalism is like dancing a ballet on a constantly sharpening needle: very hard and dangerous. It has to be done with great care and calm, any disturbance could lead to disaster. Keeping excitement low but fear high is a tried and true tactic to create the necessary stasis.

To keep fear high, the party, and consequently the Left, uses crises to create hysteria. Since capitalism is a continuous crisis constantly re-manifesting itself, there is never a shortage of apparently new crises that can be used. Since the Bernie 2020 campaign, the last time the Democratic Party used anything other than fear to keep itself afloat, recuperation has happened three times: using the Covid pandemic, the BLM protests and the Israeli massacre of Gazans. The last is what makes emotions run the highest right now, so let us address it head-on.

In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7 it was completely obvious that the Israeli response would be horrid, and so the Left immediately began to organize. It had been an established strategy of the Left to use capitalist crises for propaganda and recruitment for ages, resulting in Leftists that are only one realization away from burnout, but the reader might be tempted to believe that the agitation was not cynical from the start but actually intended to help the people living in Gaza. However, if this was the case, the course of action was of an inordinate stupidity that yielded the worst possible result: from the start, the demand for peace was conflated with that for a free Palestine, which are things that contradict each other: unless we believe that a two-state solution (which is what the latter demand amounts to) could be achieved solely through an act of the US executive, its bringing about would necessarily include further war, so that a demand for peace would necessarily only be tactical. These are not deep subtleties but could be raised by any remotely intelligent person not already convinced of the cause, so that the demands already fail on their own terms as means of alleviating the suffering of the people in Gaza, without even the need to introduce concerns about the conflation of the cause of freedom with nationalism. Still worse, the idea of appealing to Israel-skeptic conservatives or inner-Israeli oppositional forces was written off from the start, so that the only remaining course of action was to try to pressure Democratic Party elites into changing their course of action, which was done through the “Uncommitted campaign”, whose tactic was to vote uncommitted, not in the US election, but in a Democratic primary that de facto did not take place to show the Left’s dissatisfaction with the course of the Democratic Party — perhaps the most Democratic thing that has ever been done. As a result, the cause of peace in Gaza became a “leftist” culture war issue, meaning it provided no incentive for the Democratic Party to change its stance on Israel, as it was taken as “naturally” representing the Palestinian cause as an untrustworthy ally who was nevertheless “the best we’ve got”, while the Republican Party had every incentive to take the strongest possible position against the Leftist messaging to distinguish itself in the culture war. This was not a given: there is a sizable conservative and even reactionary opposition to Israel (no doubt partially fueled by anti-semitism, but it was the insistence of the Leftist pro-Palestine campaigners that we do not look too closely at motives), that could have been appealed to, and even apart from that, if the prime maxim was to help the people in Palestine, then on purely tactical grounds it would have been much more salient for an analogue of the Uncommitted movement to declare to, and follow through on, voting in the Republican primaries, joining the Republican Party if necessary, voting for the most pro-Palestinian candidate and chastising the Democrats for not holding real primaries, not because the Republican primaries were any more in question but because that would have demonstrated a modicum of willingness to leave the Democrats, which would have put a slight amount of pressure on them. Though, given the limited amount of influence the US executive has on the inner workings of Israel, perhaps the best course of action would have been to actively connect to the inner-Israeli opposition. This might seem Quixotic now, but the reasons for that are at least in part of the Left’s own making: it is awfully hard to join a movement of which important elements declare to want to see you dead. Whether we like it or not, alleviation of the burden of the people in Palestine will most probably come from elements of Israeli society itself, if there is any. Instead, the US Left, the most important arm of the Left on the globe, focused all attention on itself while engaging in bloodthirsty cheerleading and revenge fantasies, placating the suffering of other people without doing anything to alleviate it.

Now, it is sometimes claimed that the callous indifference of the Democratic Party has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the Left has finally freed itself of its influence. Given the efficiency of the most recent recuperations into the Democratic Party and how the recent pro-Palestine movement only served to code the issue of peace in Gaza as a Democratic Party issue, I am more than skeptical of that claim: already the likes of Elijah Emery are advertising voting for Kamala Harris as the lesser of two evils while discounting the Republicans as “just evil” while Chapo Trap House has, once again, taken up the role as advisers of the Democratic Party on everything it is doing wrong in its outreach, characteristically done by people who have never achieved anything politically. Furthermore, the current election, despite the hysteria surrounding it, will not be the last election, and when J. D. Vance (or whoever, but probably Vance) runs next time he will be decried as “Trump without the baggage” — the “even greater danger” and the “actual fascist”. Moreover, recuperation happens generationally as well, and as the Sanders campaign was the only serious politics Gen Z has ever witnessed it will probably repeat its course once the allure of their current Stalinist chiqué wears off. But let me be clear: deciding not to vote for the Democrats to punish them, or even out of apathy, does not make you any less of a Democrat.

And this is the point. The effect the Democratic Party has on its subjects is not exhausted once the recuperation of their energy is complete: it endows them with a particular way of thinking that remains even once their relation to the party itself ceases. This recalls the old proverb about the Catholic Church, of whom the the Democratic Party is a mockery: you can get the Catholic out of the Church, but you cannot get the Church out of the Catholic. The aim of this text is twofold:

• To sketch the process of recuperation of popular discontents into capitalism through the Left and the Democratic Party.

• To outline the patterns of thought the Democratic Party imbues upon its subjects to show you how not to think.

I call the collection of these thought patterns Democratic Party Mindset. It is closely connected to what is called the PMC or the phenomenon known as wokeness, but distinct from those, though we might as well also give it an acronym, DPM. Its exact description is complicated by the fact that it manifests itself in two varieties:

• The first is born out of the subordination of the struggle for socialism under progressive capitalism following the victory of Bonapartism under Roosevelt (and Stalin). I call this Old Democratic Party Mindset.

• The second came about through the renovation of capitalism undertaken by the New Left once it abandoned its independent ambitions by engaging in two Bonapartist campaigns within the Democratic Party (the McCarthy and the McGovern campaigns). I call this New Democratic Party Mindset.

What further complicates the issue is that a section of the Millennial Left (most prominently the Dirtbag Left) undertook an attempt to hearken back to ODPM, invoking Roosevelt in a rebellion against the clearly perceived fruitlessness of NDPM, so that both kinds are still very much with us and in conflict with each other. However, they share a great amount of commonality, such as the abandonment of the aspiration for an independent working class in pursuit of the struggle for socialism. Instead, ODPM already assumed that the struggle for socialism had either become impossible or would only come about once progressive capitalism had achieved a far higher level of general prosperity (which, of course, misrecognizes the problem of capitalism, which constantly undermines the wealth it creates). As a result, its adherence to the working class transitioned from a means for achieving socialism to an end in and of itself — workerism. Consequently, the working class became understood as a constituency for the Democratic Party to cater to instead of an independent political force, which is why the Democratic Party is still seen as the party of the working class and why it still fosters a mindset of dependence in which the role of the state is to smoothen out the most obvious effects of capitalism while hiding the less visible issues¹ — the lie of a happy family presented to the world while the uncle molests children in the basement.

The New Left meanwhile renewed the ambition for the struggle for socialism, but on a more encompassing basis than working class discontents solely, which, at that moment, were at least to some degree pacified anyway, and brought this new strategy into the Democratic Party once it abandoned its ambitions, creating the coalitional politics we know today. Through applying Marxism, often in a very vulgar form, to relations other than the class relation, it isolated several forms of oppression bearing a superficial similarity to exploitation without occupying the same structural position. These — race and gender, joined later by sexuality — became the primary axes the Democratic Party used in its strategies to retain a constituency, and consequently in its thinking, after labor declined in importance and was abandoned. Such a perspective is of course at best the coarsest approximation to the multiplicity of oppression occurring in real life, ignoring such factors as handedness, height or any other number of characteristics along which discrimination happens, as well as the active role of members of any particular group in the perpetuation of capitalism as well as of oppression against other groups, themselves or even against those who nominally count as “oppressors” in its black-and-white perspective on the world, and fostering tribal thinking that quickly leads to its own variants of racism, sexism, and phobias against people who do not conform to societal norms in their gender or sexuality, but, more importantly, it misses the point of Marxism: the reason for siding with the working class is not its virtuousness compared to other classes but its role in production, which makes it capable of transcending capitalism, and since no other section of society shares this relationship, if we were to eliminate all but black female lesbian transsexuals, capitalism would continue unabated, and new avenues for oppression would be found. In terms of politicking though, this type of “coalition of the oppressed” is inherently unstable, as its constituencies are held together by nothing but their marginalization so that, as soon as any one of them becomes accepted enough as a political force, it no longer gains any advantage from participating in the Democratic coalition, so that the party can only appeal to it through moralism that will always appear dishonest as it is fundamentally based on a lie: that capitalist politics could ever be the domain of morality. Since this is extremely weak, constituencies start to dissociate from each other as they gain power, so that antagonisms that have only been put aside due to strategic concerns resurface: blacks vs. gays, trans women vs. TERFs and so on. Thus, the Democratic Party has a strong incentive to keep its constituencies as oppressed as possible while still appearing to work for them, which it does by using its cultural apparatus to represent them in the most annoying way possible and chastising anyone who calls them out on it, creating resentment among the general population that keeps them, at least subjectively, chained to the Democrats (a tolerated side-effect is the creation of worldwide resentment, since the cultural apparatus of the US has a global reach, so that said constituencies enter the mainstream consciousness of societies around the world in a dangerously distorted way). However, since the control over its constituencies is not total, some of them do every now and then emancipate themselves to a point where they are not reliable as a base anymore, leaving the Democratic Party in a struggle to replenish itself, which it tries to do through encouraging demographic shifts (“demographics is destiny”) or bringing in new constituencies, or, if that does not suffice, creating fear and hysteria through maximalist rhetoric and demonization. It is telling that Emery characterizes “the Republicans” (which can be anyone from Trump and Vance to your everyday voter) as “just evil”, a perspective so far from a socialist one it should not claim its name: indeed, if a third of the US population was “just evil”, all hope was lost because these are the people socialism has to be built with. Who else is going to build it? The people who are so afraid they can’t stop doing apologia for the party that killed us even in the most farcical election in history? [Edit: Going from memory, I’m not completely sure anymore whether he didn’t say “The Republican Party”, which would have been a bit more specific, and I can’t get myself to check by sifting through the 2-hour appearance. In any case, the general point stands.]

A special mention should be made to regarding the nationalism the Democratic Party is perfectly willing to stoke, as it did with the Russiagate hoax, even while it itself is internationalist in its outlook, unlike the Republican party, who, apart from its weakened Neocon wing, resents the role the US has to play in upholding the global system. Need it even be said that as the US is the head of a global empire, its internal politics are world affairs and so any participation in them by anyone on this planet is fair game, certainly from a perspective of socialist internationalism? In this climate of renewed “socialist” nationalism, perhaps it does. Instead of rallying behind the national elites of faraway countries, a far more meaningful demand for socialists in the US, who inhabit the imperial core, and are thus, again, the most important arm of the Left on this globe, would be that citizenship in the United States be extended to the workers of the world, who are, after all, its subjects.

The logical conclusion of Democratic Party Mindset, both new and old, is visible in the current election: a candidate that was literally taken in as a diversity hire without any memorable achievements being pushed to the front after it became impossible to hide the mental decrepitude of the previous leader, who himself only enjoyed even a modicum of popularity because he reminded his voters of a time of moderate wealth, who is so cowardly that they have to send someone who has obvious mental deficiencies from a serious stroke onto the biggest podcast in the world because they can only conceive of the world in terms of pandering anymore and this is the only bro they have. And we are told to feel joyful about it.

1. Conclusion

In my analysis of Breath of Fire III I was careful to work out Myria’s role as the ultimate administrator, who kept the world running and enthralled to her for a good reason: because she knew what could happen if she did not, and that knowledge to her justified any act she had to do to keep herself in charge, up to and including genocide. Perhaps it does, but such a perspective cannot be that of a socialist. We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by fear. In his first conversation with Benjamin Studebaker already, Chris Cutrone hinted at what he sees as a crisis of the parties in the US. Perhaps there is one, and if so, then it will only deepen if the next election is close enough to be contested, which it very well could be. If so, it could present a rare opportunity to actually break at least sections of the Left away from the Democratic Party. We should pursue this opportunity if it presents itself, though the hysteria will be enormous. And yes, that does mean risking the Left becoming enthralled to the Republicans, but we have to take that risk and, honestly, it is a small risk to take compared to the misery of the current world. But to take it we have to kill our inner Democrat once and for all.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica ends with Madoka using the infinite energy created by her agreement to become a magical girl to stop the heat death of the universe in exchange for her wish of abolishing the system of magical girls and witches once and for all. The Left can still achieve this. But to do so, it cannot allow itself to be ruled by cats.

Footnotes:

¹

It should be noted that it is no coincidence that “mass animal farming” grew into itself during the New Deal era.

We all know that the left of today is at an impasse. It seems clear all previous strategies failed, but it is not clear whether we should build an international socialist party, the preconditions for such a party, or whether an attempt to build up those preconditions would just lead us to recapitulating the failure of the New Left once again. What seems clear is that the task is tremendous and we do not have the people to do it. This holds both in a quantitative sense — very few people identify as socialists and few of those would be identified even by me as socialist — and in a qualitative one. A recent theme on C. Derick Varn’s show has been the decline of literacy rates and attention spans. This is certainly a trend in the larger population, but it is not at all clear that the left would score above the constantly sinking average in these areas. In fact, this is something of a blind spot for the left, even historically, but even more so contemporaneously, for a variety of reasons: the idea that important aspects of cognition are declining runs counter to a progressive understanding of history, the left has allied itself, particularly through the sixties, with countercultural movements, and an essential part of leftist societal analysis is in finding the systemic roots of individual problems. This last reason is particularly pernicious as the analysis produced might very well be true and still be more useless for the individuals concerned than other analyses that might be less true but find the flaw in the individual. This might best be exemplified by Mark Fisher, who produced some interesting writings about the systemic causes of depression that nevertheless couldn’t keep him from committing suicide. The inane analysis of a Jordan Peterson in contrast, while largely ignoring systemic issues, does not need to be objectively true to be useful as it can play on the basic fact that each individual has first of all the most influence on its particular life and is usually (though not always) best situated for changing at least the subjective circumstances of said life. Thus, the left is at a systemic disadvantage against the right, as the latter knows very well to demand discipline from its adherents while the former abhors it. This state of affairs cannot stand! So perhaps while trying to build parties or the preconditions for parties or whatever large-scale organizations might be needed, it might be a good idea to take a page out of Peterson’s book, “clean up our rooms” and learn to embrace, instead of reject, virtue ethics.

I can already hear the objections, the first and crudest probably being something like “History is written in aggregates!”. This doctrine can at this point only be taken as true in a very rough approximation that is not at all applicable to the events of a revolution. In fact, if any of the individual characters of Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky had been even slightly different, the events of history would have unfolded in a drastically different way. The idea that only aggregates are to be considered for understanding the course of history is in line with the one that socialism is inevitable, both luxuries we cannot afford anymore. Another objection that would probably be raised is that “Marxism is not about individual morality!” or similar, in line with the often vulgar disdain Marxists have for the notion of morality in general. Yet when analyzing the courses of Marxist organizations, such as done in the “The Joy of Sects” series by the podcast Swampside Chats, a recurring theme is the downfall of said organizations due to issues of lust, greed, anger, sloth and pride. Who could ever have guessed that an organization composed of Nietzschean Übermenschen would not become an Über-organization but to the contrary be rather pathetic? To these moral shortcomings can more recently be added intellectual ones: laziness, shallowness, stupidity, lack of discipline and focus as well as unthinking dogmatism have all become the norm among the left. One doesn’t need to appeal to any deity for punishment of such a mixture of sins and vices, reality does that on its own!

When Cutrone speaks of the need for socialism to become a movement akin to early Christianity he consciously implies a sectarian dimension, but ignores the moral architecture of early Christianity, which placed very stringent imperatives on its adherents while always allowing for the possibility of joining or rejoining it through the doctrine of forgiveness, along with the institutional mechanisms that were set in place to enforce these imperatives, such as that of confession. If in fact socialism is to become akin to the early Christian church, then socialist organizations would need to teach not just theory but also adherence to moral and intellectual standards and include means to enforce them, and this would particularly be true for the leadership of such organizations, which should always be held to higher standards than the main membership, not lower ones, and even more particularly true for cadre organizations, whose purpose is after all not to draw in the highest number of people but create a vanguard for the working class, intellectually and politically as well as hopefully in the future morally. The incentive for a woman to join such an organization is fairly low if she has to fear that this decision might make her prone to sexual assault! And while these teaching and enforcement mechanisms have to be institutional, the corresponding virtues have to first be comprehended individually to even allow for the design of such institutions.

Here I can hear a second objection, which is that an ethical framework might decrease the appeal of a socialist organization. As we have seen already, there are actually manifest reasons for why the lack of such a framework decreases the appeal of said organizations. Insofar as an ethical framework would however decrease the appeal of such an organization, it would be towards those individuals who find too much joy in the sins and vices mentioned above as to give them up in service of revolutionary activity at least within their professional capacity, in other words those that would be the least effective as theorists or activists, so their loss would not be particularly painful and might even be advantageous.

Another objection that can easily be pre-empted is based on a misunderstanding that mixes up the signaling or, even worse, hoarding of virtues with their cultivation. But of course, both virtue signaling and hoarding are vices and as such to be avoided. A plea for a virtue ethics is to the contrary a plea for sharing the means for the cultivation of virtue so they can be adopted by as many people as possible.

Moreover, a fetishism has become fashionable whose object is precisely the thing socialism should aim to abolish: the working class, and even more precisely the proletariat, which becomes the object of projection for all kinds of virtues that are found lacking within the Left and stylized into an ideal of perfection without any regard for the reality of what has become a largely and continually lumpenized class. This kind of vulgar workerism is not a suitable basis for socialism and only an obstacle to sober analysis. The truth is that the working class as a collective entity at the current moment possesses neither the intellectual understanding nor the moral discipline necessary to take over and lead society, and if it is to build said understanding and discipline this has to happen through the organizations that allow it to constitute itself, and while the architecture of these organizations will need to be continually revised to deal with the challenges of taking over society it needs to contain the means for this building already in its inception, so that we again return to the issue that a virtue ethics has to be formalized before it can be institutionalized.

So it seems obvious that socialism actually requires a virtue ethics if it is to thrive, however, what should be the content of said ethics? Sketching out such a thing is beyond my capacities, but some things seem clear. First off, it is not like such an ethics would need to be, or could be, fashioned wholly anew. The contemplation of virtues and vices has been a prime object of philosophy since its inception and it seems obvious that we should draw on the wisdom that has thus been accumulated over centuries and millennia. Furthermore and as already hinted at, it seems not wise to restrict this ethics solely to either the intellectual or moral realm. Rather, an ethics suitable to socialism has to treat both, as has been common practice in ancient times already. The common goal of virtue ethics has always been to provide the means for living the good life, whether on an intellectual or a moral level. However, this pursuit is open-ended and perhaps it might even be prudent to slightly revise this maxim and strive to provide means, intellectually and institutionally, for living a better life, which aligns well with socialism, which has a goal one of whose side effects would be to provide the material means for such a pursuit. Thus, such an ethics could find its basis in the pursuit of improvement. But as an ethics, it should prioritize its self-reflective component and so start with self-improvement, and while most of the ethical contributions that have been marketed under said slogan seem of little value the underlying impulse is the yet the right one. Yet, if the Left were to take up the mantle of self-improvement, we could be quite a bit better at it than the right, which is after all fettered in its means by its conservatism, while we shoulder no such self-imposed burden.

Here I can hear another objection, which is that such an ethics of self-improvement, both individual and organizational, might be alienating to the working class, as it is currently countercultural. The same can be said about socialism, of course, but more poignantly this assumption is underpinned by an actual classism, it being that the working class cannot accommodate and respect countercultures but instead would put countercultural grievings above its capacity for reason. Yet, what the working class, as a class, respects, perhaps above anything else, is competence, and thus, contrary to appearance through the veil of the culture wars, its most immediate question is not “Who are you?” but “What do you know?” (and usually the Left flatters its failure to answer the second question by conflating it with the first, as it is much easier to accept someone dislikes you due to their prejudice than that they might not trust your understanding).

Here, penultimately, a further objection raised, which is that this focus on self-improvement would all the more seem to replicate the course of the sixties New Left, going from public engagement to private self-development, and this one is to some degree true. However, this refocusing was in the New Left already a result of its political failure, which mirrors the failure of the Millennial Left, and as such probably inevitable. Thus, it was not the cause of the failure of the New Left but its consequence and not unreasonable. The primary failure of the New Left occurred before that point and was, at least in part, caused by it mindlessly importing the Bolshevik organizational structure, leading to the proliferation of sects that persisted before they got liquidated into the DSA. It should be stressed that the rise of the New Left was in turn only due to the failure of the Old Left, namely the remainder of the second international consisting of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, which even at its height was only able to take over a brittle empire on the periphery. Thus, we can not, as is often done, declare ourselves satisfied with the answers of the Old Left to problems but have to at least try to find the issues they overlooked if we are to have any chance at taking over capitalism and reigning in socialism. Virtue ethics, which the Old Left to some degree neglected, might be one of those missing pieces.

Finally, the objection might be raised that the impasse of the left at the current moment is neither an intellectual nor a moral one but one of material conditions beyond its control (the Endnotes-line). This might be true, yet it has to be said that it certainly wouldn’t hurt the left to be of a higher intellectual and moral level, and if the material conditions change, as they always do, to ones that would be more advantageous to a socialist project, it would be better for the course of world history if they found the left not in its current pitiful state but one that is actually able to use the given chance to its advantage.

I want to preface the following considerations with some remarks, first on their relation to Marxism’s theory of historical materialism, which I do not see as endangered by them at all. Though it seems clear to me that Marx made a grievous error in throwing out the best parts of Hegel, his work on societal reproduction is, on the whole, spot-on, and while many successive intellectuals, continuing to this day in the likes of Colin Drumm, were trying to undermine its achievement by fixating on slight simplifications and imprecisions, this misses completely the point of the work itself and is certainly not the intention behind this text. Yet, this would probably not excuse me from being charged by Villarreal, as Cutrone was as well, with being “petite bourgeois” and “reactionary”, the favorite insults of Marxist wannabe-radicals. However, the aim of this text, unlike Villarreal’s article, which could be greatly improved in legibility by cutting (along with its constant quote-mining) out its haphazard attacks on philosophical fashions not worth the attention (and instead focusing on those that do, mainly Hegel), is not the settling of scores, which will be refrained from outside this paragraph, but rather to attack metaphysical materialism itself, as suggested by the title. Villarreal’s article is only a welcome opportunity to do so, as it purports to explain to us what “materialism” actually is:

At its most basic level, we can take materialism to be the idea that some ideas refer to things that are more real than other ideas, and that this level of realness is determined by whether the idea represents specifically material phenomenon.

Here already we encounter a problem, which is that the only thing distinguishing materialism from anything but the most radical scepticism of the Greeks is the claim that the “reality” of an “idea” lies in whether it “represents” “material phenomena”, but this is only meaningful insofar as we have an understanding of what a “material phenomenon” is, a conjunction of two terms that are both undefined both by Villarreal and in current scientific discourse. An old point re-iterated often by Chomsky, but also in current-day physics books like “Moonshine beyond the Monster” is that our understanding of “matter” has become more and more immaterial as time went on, going from something everyone would think of, like a stone, to continue one of Villarreal’s examples, to, basically, the excitations of a fermion field, which most people would intuitively agree is an “immaterial” structure, so that the name of materialism is already ill-fitting for any theory purporting to be in agreement with current-day science. This might only be a misplaced choice of nomenclature for historic reasons, though the emptiness of the term has been filled with all kinds of interpretations of materialism, usually at odds with one another, but it forces those trying to keep “materialism” even remotely in line with what someone not drenched in Marxist vocabulary would understand it as to slyly replace it with physicalism, or at least embed it through recursion into physicalism, as done by Villarreal:

The categories of political economy, by referring to the way labor is organized, to physical activity in physical space, (even if abstracted to overriding patterns of such activity), were more real than the category of the essence of man. And this greater realness, it is claimed by materialism, means they will necessarily have greater determining power over our reality.

Thus, it is not really matter that is under consideration, but physics in general. This might seem like a fine point, as long as physicalism provides a solid foundation for what is here called materialism, but physicalism itself is undermined by the fact that it in turn requires regress to mathematical structures, which it has to grant reality.

Let us here take a slight digression to hammer this point home by providing a quick overview of what the physical universe actually is, according to the most “bleeding-edge” science: in M/F-Theory as Mf-Theory (Schreiber and Sati)(among other places), Hisham Sati and Urs Schreiber provide detailed arguments for Sati’s Hypothesis H, which basically states that the fundamental field of M-theory is, essentially and with some simplification, described through a map from the physical universe into the 4-dimensional sphere (see here for a slightly more readable overview). From this fundamental field, what is more commonly known as the four fundamental forces, gravity, the strong fundamental force, the weak fundamental force and electromagnetism, arise through (a generalization of) a mechanism called the Kaluza-Klein-mechanism, which might illustratively though perhaps not completely mathematically accurately be described as echoes as of reverberations of the field as it goes around the tiny loops that seven of the eleven dimensions of our physical universe are wound up in. Finally, it appears that what is known as the standard model of particle physics arises because six-dimensional hypersurfaces intersect where we are (Gemmill et al.). Of course, none of this is set in stone and several cuncurring theories at this point exist to understand various parts of this derivation, but it is the most “bleeding-edge” science we have and Hypothesis H in particular explains a lot of the remaining questions in M-theory, providing a very strong indication that something like it is true.

Readers are welcome trying to make sense of the idea that the fundamental force field of the universe is given by a map into the four-dimensional sphere without assuming the existence of the four-dimensional sphere or that the standard-model arises as the intersection of six-dimensional hypersurfaces without assuming the existence of such, but really either of these is only a sharpened version of something that was known for a long time, which is that mathematics is necessary for physics and therefore it is necessary to assume the existence of mathematical structures for the assumption of physical ones to make any sense. This is known as the “Quine-Putnam indispensability argument”, of which I provide a sharpened version in Why the Physical Universe is a Mathematical Structure where I argue that, even if somehow a philosophical formulation could be found that could make sense of the need for mathematical objects in physical theories without assuming their existence, if in fact physics were to be unified into a monism this could only be done on the basis of mathematics because otherwise physical laws expressing the logico-mathematical coherence of other laws would remain separated from any physical law governing physical objects. But the basic argument was already known to Hegel in the introduction to the Science of Logic:

Aber insofern gesagt wird, daß Verstand, daß Vernunft in der gegenständlichen Welt ist, daß der Geist und die Natur allgemeine Gesetze habe, nach welchen ihr Leben und ihre Veränderungen sich machen, so wird zugegeben, daß die Denkbestimmungen ebensosehr objektiven Wert und Existenz haben.

But inasmuch as it is said that understanding, that reason exists in the objective world, that spirit and nature have universal laws according to which their life and their changes are made, it is admitted that the determinations of thought have just as much objective value and existence.

So for “materialism” to make any sense whatsoever, it would at least have to take recourse to mathematicism, the idea that the most basic substance is mathematical. However, this is no save refuge either, as mathematical objects themselves can be derived from each other, so that more complex ones can be generated from simpler ones, so that we are once again left to ask with Hegel:

Mit was muss der Beginn der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?

With what does science have to begin?

This should be humbling to us, and indeed Hegel was right certainly with most of his metaphysics, but this deserves its own post. For our purposes what is important is that the abstract ideas necessary to make sense of the physical universe cannot be grounded in the experience of physical objects, or even in their common abstraction. Nor can the “bleeding edge” of current-day physics now or for the foreseeable future be grounded in experimentation, as Villarreal is insisting on:

At the bleeding edge of our understanding of causality, where there can be nothing to subordinate theory except observation, there exists no other recourse than this test of theory via observation.

This is indeed the opposite of what is happening, as the most advanced theory explaining physics, in particular M-theory, operates on an energy level so far beyond the current capacities of humanity that it is doubtful it can ever be verified by smashing particles together. This is not to say that such theories are meaningless or unverifiable, as some positivists insist in the embarrassment of finding science to be far different from their idealized conceptions, rather the truth criterion of such theories has moved from being one of agreement with experimentation to one of coherence both internally and in relation to other mathematical objects (which was something Hegel could have predicted). Yet, while, as we see, actual science is moving in the opposite direction to that outlined by Villarreal, he is using the veneer of science to justify his claims:

[Experiments with LLMs] are strong evidence that thoughts and ideas are signs that stand in for a more fundamental phenomenal experience or patterns of phenomenal experience, and, crucially, that these signs within the mind are reflections of the signs in material culture in terms of how they are organized.

Leaving aside the fact that “material culture” is nowhere defined, the crudeness of using experiments in which LLMs can roughly draw some very basic objects like a church tower from brain activity as evidence that ideas are always a stand-in for real “phenomena” should be a tell-tale sign that the underlying position is inherently doomed. Indeed, LLMs have no grasp even of basic logic, which might appear astonishing given that their underlying computers are literally built on Boolean logic and they have most of the knowledge of humanity at their disposal, but it is only an expression of the fact that the stringing-together of data based on real-valued measures of their similarity only somewhat mimics one part of the human thought process, not, to the contrary, a sign that it mirrors the human thought process, and the impression of the contrary can only be given through using the most pictoresque objects, it falls immediately apart once any abstraction is introduced. However, this is not to give the impression that Villarreal is outside the Marxist tradition in such crudeness. That is the problem. As Engels said in Anti-Dühring:

Even the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their a priori origin, but only their rational connection. Before one came upon the idea of deducing the form of a cylinder from the rotation of a rectangle about one of its sides, a number of real rectangles and cylinders, however imperfect in form, must have been examined. Like all other sciences, mathematics arose out of the needs of men: from the measurement of land and the content of vessels, from the computation of time and from mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws, which were abstracted from the real world, become divorced from the real world, and are set up against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform. That is how things happened in society and in the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure mathematics was subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection — and it is only just because of this that it can be applied at all.

It goes without saying that the idea of a cylinder was not arrived at by measuring lots of real cylinders, and while I will readily agree that at some point, a basic abstraction gave rise to mathematical ideas, the opposition of mathematical notions to reality that Engels posits is again exactly opposite of actual reality, wherein mathematical ideas are what even allows physical reality to exist. Engels, in what is sadly typical for a Marxist, is a bad student of Hegel, who had this figured out already in the introduction to the Science of Logic:

Die Platonische Idee ist nichts anderes als das Allgemeine oder bestimmter der Begriff des Gegenstandes; nur in seinem Begriffe hat etwas Wirklichkeit; insofern es von seinem Begriffe verschieden ist, hört es auf, wirklich zu sein, und ist ein Nichtiges; die Seite der Handgreiflichkeit und des sinnlichen Außersichseins gehört dieser nichtigen Seite an.

The Platonic idea is nothing else than the universal, or more definitely the concept of the object; only in its conception does something have reality; in so far as it is different from its concept, it ceases to be real and is something void; the side of tangibility and sensual being outside of oneself belongs to this trivial side.

If the successive development of science showed us anything, it is that he was right all along.

1. Conclusion

My very first post to this site very first post to this site was me protesting against pseudo-science published by Cosmonaut¹. Both pieces share a know-it-all attitude unwarranted by their haphazard treatment of science, but more significantly, both display a preference of the concrete over the abstract that runs deep within Marxism and that has become an increasing problem in its history, particularly once Marxists took over power, and only whose most obvious symptom was the exorcism of “bourgeois” abstract art from “the true art of the people” that became Soviet artistry. On a deeper level, all Marxist metaphysical theories share this crucial mistake of trying to advocate materialism when metaphysical materialism has been a doomed position from the beginning, of trying to ground the abstract in the concrete when the concrete has long ago shown itself to be grounded in the abstract. It is high time we dispense with the notion that “materialism” can be made coherent, to let go of our preference of the concrete and embrace the abstract.

Footnotes:

¹

One could say things have come full circle, but that would be implying a closure of trajectory that I do not assume.

Here’s an old-fashioned idea that I try to stick to: I don’t write something unless it needs to be written.

I actually think only writing something if you think it needs to be written is one of the errors the modernists made¹. The way to get better at writing is to write, and that holds on all levels. I suspect one of the reasons Bach was such a good composer was because he had to write church music every week, so he was always practicing. The flip side of this is that not every work of his is essential — who really has the time to listen through a thousand works? Similarly, in the classical period, general musical fluency was fairly high because composition was seen as a cultured skill — many people did it on the side, and while their compositions weren’t groundbreaking it kept them on their feet. These skills degenerated in parallel with the increasing self-importance of artists — Wagner’s colossal operas came at the same time as the industrial revolution, and by the time of the late Schoenberg the split between composers and the public was complete, despite Schoenberg’s own intentions. Moreover, from Bach to Schoenberg we can see a tremendous decline in the quantity of individual composer’s works, a trend that continued with Stockhausen. One might think that this is a positive, since it means there is less stuff to listen to in order to catch up, but the remaining works had to shoulder a greater burden by their sparsity already, which was exacerbated by the gravity inherited from Wagner (in Schoenberg’s line in particular), and because innovation was perceived as much more important compared to Bach’s time. The resulting artworks were thus harder to penetrate for the listener while the level of music comprehension of their audience had gone down due to the increasing demands of capital. Certainly with Schoenberg’s pupil Webern, who started the first experiments towards total serialism, the link was completely severed and the modernists after that were really an exotic species protected by the state and its various cultural institutions. This led perhaps the greatest serialist, Milton Babbitt², to provide a sober assessment of the situation in the opening of “Who cares if you listen?”:

This article might have been entitled “The Composer as Specialist” or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, “The Composer as Anachronism.” For I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy- and, usually, considerable money- on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. He is, in essence, a “vanity” composer. The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. The majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ’professionals’. At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.… The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and — most probably — not transitory.

Babbitt is right in that this break between the artistic avant-garde was unavoidable and permanent, and this is not a consequence of capitalism but an instantiation of a more general phenomenon, which is also happening in the sciences, most strongly in mathematics³, with serious mathematicians estimating that about 90% of all mathematics has been created/discovered since 1900 while general mathematical fluency has gone down from a level that was always low. Moreover, an increase in general fluency, be it in literature, music, mathematics or some other science or art, which could happen in socialism, would not ameliorate this trend but accelerate it, as an improved general fluency would create more and more capable artists/scientists, who would push the boundaries of their area even further. Barring a major catastrophe, this will be the state of the art from now on, and only increase as time passes. However, if general fluency were to increase, the break Babbitt was observing could occur on a higher level of consciousness, which would certainly be preferable, and indeed might be necessary to avoid conditions in which the most advanced areas, at least in the arts, which are never “necessary”, are cut off from viability and whither away, as indeed happened to total serialism. However, while a change in the mode of production is necessary for this to occur, it is not sufficient, as it also needs a change in consciousness which has to happen along two lines:

1. Art has to be evaluated not merely in terms of its product but as an exercise in skill that is valuable in and of itself.

2. Art and its creation has to be understood as not merely serious but also pleasurable.

In short, art has to be understood again as a virtue and a joy. The first is necessary to see the creation of art by non-specialists as valuable at all, while the latter is necessary because otherwise non-specialists won’t do it — much less challenging things than the creation of art are not generally done regardless of their virtuousness if they cannot be done for pleasure. Cutrone’s statement goes against both of those necessary changes: it relegates the value of writing solely to what is written, and it forces all writing to be evaluated in terms of its, at least subjectively felt, “necessity”, excluding all other reasons for writing, which is barbarizing and means that pleasure can only appear as a side-product, but even then is degraded by its subordination to necessity.

What is required is thus an understanding of art that is not solely oriented towards necessity but allows for artistry in all kinds of “banal” areas — an understanding that was, of course, exemplified by Tolkien in his creation, wherein poems about wandering, songs about bathing and other kinds of pedestrian poetry and music exist alongside essential works, highlighting the flawed aesthetics of the modernists through comparison with its deeper insight.

Up to this point, there is a simple reply that could be given to my argument, which is that it might be correct in post-capitalist conditions but basically such “frivolity” cannot be accepted within the crisis of capitalism. This argument would be flawed on two levels however:

1. No revolutionary movement is currently present.

2. The cultivation of virtues among a potential revolutionary vanguard has the potential to be beneficial to the socialist movement.

In the presence of a revolutionary movement, and even more within an active revolution, a demand of restraint like that of Lenin might be justified. In its absence however it would be unwise to demand a subordination to this absent movement to the point of a sole orientation towards utility for the movement even from a potential vanguard — the demand of such a subordination, if not counterbalanced with the very real possibility of socialism in the foreseeable future, would be so high that it would only attract very few people, and not necessarily the best. If however we do allow for the possibility of activities done for pleasure, it would be better if these were virtuous activities, as per the second point, and this includes artistic virtue, and this is not merely because it increases the quality of propaganda but because the cultivation of artistry among members of a potential revolutionary vanguard can be extended to a wider socialist movement when one arises, allowing it to develop a culture that can replace the decaying culture of society in capitalism. This is particularly true of writing, which is at the boundary between artistry and utility, so that a cultured skill in writing, even if only on an artistic level, is useful in many ways, including ones outside artistry.

Thus, Cutrone’s pithy statement reveals a lot of the pitfalls Studebaker is talking about, as it exemplifies, in the domain of writing, the disregard for the necessity of the cultivation of virtue among a potential revolutionary vanguard. We will look at the necessity of such a Leftist virtue ethics again soon.

Footnotes:

¹ It should be noted that the beginning of The Hobbit in Tolkien absentmindedly scribbling a sentence on a piece of paper while grading student exams:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…

² Who was ignored by the Frankfurt School, probably for ideological reasons as he was an unapologetic positivist (though Adorno might probably indirectly referred to him in his conversation with Stockhausen).

³ Which I count as both a science and a form of art.

Author: Alexander Prähauser

Created: 2024-07-27 Sat 23:05

Validate

Breath of Fire III starts with two miners detonating some dynamite to break up a chrysium rock — chrysium is essentially the fossilized bones of a dragon, a member of the Brood who died long ago. Those miners are unlucky though, as that chrysium rock was your egg and in detonating that dynamite they awoke you, an alive dragon, though only a tiny baby at that point. After a murderous rampage you’re captivated but manage to escape into a nearby forest where a gang of two orphans, Rei, the older, and Teepo, the younger, take you up, teaching you the tricks of the trade (thievery) and caring for you. It’s a touchingly rendered makeshift family that through teamwork is able to do a lot, even killing the nearby monster to be hailed as heroes and robbing the greedy baron, only to be cast out of the village again when he increases taxes in retribution and get attacked by a much more vicious gang of two, who set your treefort on fire, separate you from your brothers and leave you alone for dead. You get better though and meet an overly adventurous princess, Nina, a daughter of a dead scientist, Momo, a walking plant Peco and Garr, a warrior from a Judaism-inspired people who worship a goddess named Myria, who is the only person up to this point who seems to know anything about the Brood whatsoever. Who were they and why did they die?

He’ll tell you, once he brings you to an endless graveyard of dragon bones that he killed: his goddess told him to exterminate the Brood and he did it without question. And now he wants to finish the job.

However, you overpower him, an ancient warrior that killed two hundred dragons with his own hands, though you’re still barely a child. Your power surpasses his easily, and it’s not because you’re stronger than your brethren. With your victory Garr at once reaches the realization that his slaughter never really was a fight: the Brood had let him win from the beginning. But why? This is the question that leads him to search for you, to bring you back to your senses and attempt to atone for his sins. Why did the Brood have to die? And why did they not struggle against it?

You might be the protagonist, but this is Garr’s story justasmuch, his search for God— literally. Luckily, she has an older sister, Deis, who was imprisoned on her command once she protests against the killing of the Brood, and who is eager to get you in touch, providing you with a magical marker pointing you in her direction — that direction being, first of all, over the ocean. The land you’re inhabiting is not all that advanced technologically — its energy comes mostly from chrysium and its machines come out of the ocean. It has no ship that could carry you over it, but every once in a while one comes from the other side, not doing much but quickly returning. Nevertheless, you can hijack one, a much more formidable vessel than anything that could be made in a place you’ve witnessed so far, and it will carry you because it doesn’t mind — nothing cognizant had walked its steeled floors for a long time, its actions are purely automated. However, there are people on the other side, and they do have higher technology than on your part, yet, their existence does not exactly seem fulfilling — they are inhabiting a small patch of livable land between the ocean and a seemingly neverending desert that you have to cross. Luckily, you find a village on its edge that is inhabited by your brethren — members of the Brood that have forfeited their power to live here in peace. Garr isn’t exactly popular among them, for understandable reasons, but they will help you cross the desert once you kill their leader to absorb his power — they all want you to confront Myria with everything the Brood has to offer.

So you cross the blisteringly hot desert, a heat that can be felt even more than just from the reactions of your companions by your desperation once you’re running out of resources and have to seriously consider turning around because the goddamn instructions they give you are so confusing you never know how to actually make it through! Once you reach the oasis you’re looking for you can truly feel the sacrifice it takes to get close to God, in terms of time and nerves, and finally in the Lama you have to kill to save your companion Nina. Passing this last test you’re prepared to confront her — after making it through by far the most advanced city you’ve seen yet, populated purely by automatons and entering to the orbital station Myria, a wild and long abandoned place haunted by monsters, robots and scientific experiments that are eerily reminiscent of the various bosses you had to fight to get there. Did it get its name from Myria or did Myria get her name from it? Probably the latter, but I’m not entirely sure.

As you descend into the core of the station, things are finally spelled out for you. The world you had grown up in, that housed everything known to anyone you knew, is but a small part of the whole world, most of which you will never see. The civilization that produced the machines you encounter sporadically throughout the game was indeed much more advanced than anything that remains, but it made war among itself, and the desert took over. Myria landed long ago on her eponymous orbital station and decided to save what could be saved by separating it through an ocean from the desert, leaving its inhabitants in blissful ignorance and hampering their development of technology by making them dependent on sporadic arrivals of machines from overseas that she controlled. Pretty clever when you think about it. But why did she kill the Brood? Because they were too powerful. She claims they could have destroyed the world. Peco disagrees. Who is he again? He is the spawn of Yggdrasil, the world tree, a network of plants that Myria cut off each other for the same reason she killed the Brood and the same reason she imprisoned Deis — because they were something she could not control. Still, there was never any malice in her actions, and they are understandable, maybe even necessary.

Breath of Fire III presents you with a legitimate moral dilemma: will you subjugate yourself to the murderer of your people and spend the remainder of your life in a golden cage that is but a miniature of the world itself, or will you kill the goddess that saved the world and keeps it in balance, risking that the events that happened so long ago will repeat themselves, with no guarantees they won’t. Only fools would think that this is not a hard question. It has however been made easier by the game forcing you to kill your long-lost brother Teepo before the choice is even presented — turns out he was of the Brood too and he chose captivity, going so far as to try to kill you before you can confront Myria. Had the question been presented beforehand, it would have been so much harder. As it is, I pride myself on being a big-picture person and able to leave personal matters separated from my analysis, but even I am having a hard time not to echo Rei’s words:

She messed with my brother… That’s the one thing I can’t forgive…

When Myria dies, comforted by her sister Deis in her worries for the world, Garr goes with her, freezing to stone as he is robbed of the power she endowed him with. The game ends with you, Nina, Momo and Rei facing the desert. In the post-credits we see Peco, buried in the desert, sprouting two tender leaves. Will he grow into another world tree and conquer the desert? Will humanity destroy what remains of the world? Did we make the right choice? We don’t know.

1. Addenda

Though my focus here is really on the story I don’t know whether I’ll write about Breath of Fire III again, and so I’d be remissed if I didn’t mention some other aspects of the game I find noteworthy. One is the tremendous amount of minigames, more than maybe in any other game I’ve played and — I love them. Sure, they are awful, but that only makes them fitting for this game, and though I can’t really say much else in their defense they do make you feel like you’re actually inhabiting the world, not merely fighting through it — be it planning fearie villages, pulling out stranded equipment, making sushi, getting water from a well, there is always something to be done. Another is the excellent pacing, which I’ve heard people be impatient with but which is truly suitable for a full enjoyment of the story. I am particularly a fan of the “slow” first childhood part — they really give you the feeling of being a child, the freedom of being an orphan in this idealized situation and the care of your found family — and then the complete loneliness and vulnerability when they are taken away from you. The soundtrack also deserves a mention, as it might be one of the best among JRPGs, certainly one of the most original with its jazz inspiration as compared to the more classically oriented ones of Breath of Fire’s peers. I still know a lot of pieces form memory and would immediately recognize all others when I hear them. In fact, it is one of the few soundtracks I sometimes listen to on their own. Then there are the characters, which all come with their own stories to tell, that have for the most part been left out here, but which are organically woven into the main story. The locations themselves are also worth another look — maybe at some point, when I have time, I’ll play through it again to consider all the thought that went into how each place is living and why. I feel similarly about this world as this guy does about Spyro the Dragon’s — there is so much detail in the world, so many interesting characters and locations that are only hinted at, that the realization that everything you knew is but a small part of it increases the penetrating feeling of awe a lot more than in some other games with the same twist, which is helped by the fact that, unlike in some other games, you never get to explore more but a small part of the larger world, the rest you only see schematically as a small globe on orbital station Myria.

Like The Lord of the Rings, Breath of Fire III does not see it necessary to burden you with messages, it leaves it to you to draw the conclusions of what you witnessed. And it still keeps me thinking.

I generally like to keep some mystique around my person, but I suppose it is only fair to tell you a bit about myself. For as long as I can remember, I saw myself as on the Left, which in my youth meant to me being a mixture of a workerist social democrat and a Green with some libertarian tendencies. When I got into college, I fell in with an Anarchist student organization that I remained way too long a part of, an experience that was my first disillusionment with the “Left”. My mother had been a nurse, then quit her job to raise me and my sisters, and I got the strong feeling that the “feminists” in said organization were looking down on her for that choice, something that really rubbed me the wrong way. They were also anti-religious, and while I hadn’t exactly been a Christian for a long time, I had always been sympathetic to them, again because my mother was one. In general these were people who were looking down on the working class, even if they might have denied that, and they were strongly anti-nationalist, and while I was not exactly a great patriot I felt that this was simple virtue signaling without any ambitions of actually doing politics — one has to meet people where they are at, as my father once told me, not where oneself is.

A bit later a made a friend circle consisting of progressive social democrats, which was the second time I grew disillusioned by the “Left”, as I thought their identity politics were both theoretically empty and profoundly alienating. Additionally, I, as the social democrat that I was, thought the idea of combining a welfare state with open borders made no sense and that the SPÖ (our social democrats) could win big simply by dropping their virtue signaling and owning up to their closed borders position (which they really held anyway). Telling this to one of those friends in a fight and in an admittedly somewhat agressive manner made him quit his friendship with me and split that friend circle, which was also a writing circle for which I had mostly written, and made me think, after the second Bernie campaign, that the Left and I deserved a break.

What changed my mind were actually Doug Lain’s old Critical Cuts videos, which I watched mostly for their aesthetics, and later his and Derick Varn’s podcasts and Platypus videos (and some articles). I then wrote my first article against my prior position on immigration — not because I thought having a welfare state and open borders made any sense, I never will, but because I was swayed that the contradiction of capitalism can only be solved on an international level through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which recontextualizes the entire question. I went on to write some other articles none of which were ever printed, which I almost expected as I knew that they were never what the people running the magazines I sent them to wanted to hear, but I did two appearances on Derick Varn’s podcast on his invitation which I’m slightly dissatisfied with in retrospect (as well as a paywalled third one that I requested that I think is actually the best of the three), and wrote more articles I didn’t know what to do with (most of which I still haven’t published but I plan on publishing some of them). I toyed with the idea of starting a Substack but was only pushed over the edge by this article in Cosmonaut Magazine that I felt falsely claimed the mantle of science. I don’t talk much about this here, since it is not an audience of mathematicians, but I actually know my way around generalized logics and modern mathematics, so sent them a reply and when I thought they didn’t publish it, it made me so spiteful that I finally decided to take the leap and start writing on Substack, with my reply being my first article. Way later I found out Cosmonaut had actually published my article as a letter and apparently forgot to inform me, but I have to be thankful for them for providing me with the motivation to start my Substack — now, instead of writing for myself, I can write for you!

So, what can you expect from this Substack? Well, my shorthand description says that

This will be the place I put my non-mathematical writings. Expect a healthy mixture of diverse topics and insightful, and sometimes slightly insane, commentary.

and while this was a haphazard introduction I quickly wrote when started this Substack it is and will remain true: I will exclude my mathematical writings from here, except for perhaps occasional references, I will not let myself be pinned to one particular topic, my commentary will be insightful and occasionally slightly insane. I will do some cultural analysis, I will write some stuff on tactics and strategy or on philosophy or self-improvement and sometimes I will do something completely different. What I do not plan on doing is telling you what you know already (though it might still occasionally happen) or even what you want to hear — in fact, if I’m doing what will hopefully never be my job right, then I’ll tell you things that you don’t know and might not even want to hear but that are still valuable for you to know, even if you disagree with them, in a form that does not instantly repel you. I’m also not particularly interested in commenting on hot-button political issues, plenty of other people are doing that already. I’m often thinking of G. W. Hardy’s aphorism that

It is never worth a first-class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

and while this is less good advice in politics than in discourse among intellectuals I find that a lot of commentators would be better if they were to incorporate just a sliver of Hardy’s unapologetic elitism — not much, just enough to make them think before they say something about whether it really is worth saying.

I also generally perceive myself as writing for members of a potential revolutionary vanguard (though there will be exceptions). To me, a vanguard is a union of intellectuals and hands-on organizers that take on a disproportionate amount of power and responsibility, interchanging with each other so praxis can be informed by theory and vice versa. I’m not writing propaganda leaflets or slogans and I’m not assuming that many “everyday working people” will read my texts. If you somehow landed in this corner of the internet chances are you’re either

1. Hanging out on Substack a lot with a mind wide open,

2. A Leftist who has at least an intermediate grasp of Left theory and heard of me on some other platform, probably Derick Varn’s podcasts,

3. A mathematician who became interested in my non-mathematical work.

In any of these cases I think you’re better served by actual theory, even if it is eclectic theory, than propaganda — the Left is far too willing to dumb down its theory for the sake of propaganda, which allows it to attract the young & naive but quickly repel them once they grow a bit more wise, leading them to repeat Churchill’s famous quip that if you’re not a socialist when you’re young you don’t have a heart and if you’re a socialist when you’re old you don’t have a brain. I meanwhile plan on remaining a socialist and retaining my heart and brain, and while I will critique the Left in many ways, this is precisely because I think it is the only force that could actually transcend capitalism, in whatever incarnation it takes.

Moreover, I’m not just writing for the present but for future people who for one reason or another became interested enough in me to go through my back catalogue, which is also why I will retain offline copies of all articles and try to put them on some other platform as well in the medium term, preferably one that makes it easy to go through old texts. But I can’t tell how regularly I will write or how long my texts will be, I have a pretty good writing setup but I’m actually juggling quite a few balls, so I don’t know my future time requirements.

Yet, regardless of when you read this, I want you to know that I am grateful that you read my texts at all. You make it so I’m not just screaming in my head or my pillow but can use the same energy to maybe get a few people to think about some things in a different way.

We’ll start with the better ones, which are mostly about aesthetic comprehension. Tolkien’s worldbuilding is fantastical, Herbert’s is scientific, which gives it an inquisitive quality that is easier to penetrate by the modern mind. But this sentence is its own critique, since the easy appreciation is not necessarily the most deserving and an aesthetic not struggling against its own taste will remain woefully incomplete.

In a similar vein, Herbert’s prose is sparse but concise and while this has often been understood as an aesthetic weakness of his, it also means that it can be read relatively easily by a scientific mind accustomed to the efficient transportation of information. Tolkien’s prose is a lot more varied and reaches similar heights in terms of density of exposition only in its mythic register, to which the next point applies particularly strongly. In its lower incarnations it is sensual in a way whose perception has become difficult for the modern mind, which is not helped by the sublimity of its sensuousness. It is the most delicious taste you can barely perceive, but what does this say about your perception?¹

Both Herbert and Tolkien sketch the development of world history over large time spans, featuring characters that recur throughout them, but Herbert almost always uses the perspective of people, whereas Tolkien often does not², which makes it hard to appreciate for liberals, who are used to treating the world in terms of individuals. This is actually the source of a particular joy of Tolkien to me, as it gels well with the modernist sensibility that tends towards greater abstraction, replacing the particular with the general and the instance with the type, which is why Adorno said in Das Altern der Neuen Musik that “the only thing that would still matter would be the production of new types or, rather, characters”³. However, Tolkien is superior to the modernists, as his work is “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths”^{4 , 5}, unifying the concrete and the abstract to the advantage of both, which is why his work is so much more approachable than that of a master of abstraction solely, like Milton Babbitt, whose most visceral work, Philomel, had to borrow from Greek mythology to achieve its effect. But the relentless abstraction of modernism provoked a counterreaction, which, for the most part, won⁶, and for readers only used to the particular, the generality of Tolkien’s work in its higher perspectives can be incomprehensible (on an aesthetic level), prohibiting them from a full appreciation of its beauty.

These go along with reasons of Philistinism: as the Left is far too willing to overlook artistic ineptitude in works it favors thematically, it has over time vulgarized its own tastes, so that now it cannot recognize that which is not flashy and obvious. The restraint Tolkien laid on his own artistry, the diligent crafting of each word and sentence, the infinite and fractal-like care that seamlessly stretches from and interpolates between the composition of words⁷ all the way to that of the entire mythos, is for the most part lost of them, as they are unable to comprehend its nuance.

This is admittedly not helped by the rise of clichés that arose almost immediately after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, which obstruct the view on his artistry. Tolkien’s work is almost always understood within a medieval northern-European context, the rich variety of his sources, including pre-medieval northern Europe, medieval Byzantine, ancient Egypt, at least hypothetically Native American cultures, Jewish culture and early modernity, as well as his manifold inventions, have become flattened to generic “Sword & Sorcery fantasy”, which is itself generic imitation of his work. Herbert never cast as large a shadow in the world of Science Fiction, thus he doesn’t have to centend with the conflation with his imitators.

The problem of a comprehension of Tolkien’s work untethered from the partial understandings of his imitators (or adapters) can be partially solved by consulting his paintings, which display none of the tropes that have become associated with him, but they raise another issue of aesthetic perception, relating to his whimsey, which is quite remarkable considering the amount of trauma he received in WWI. Admittedly a full appreciation of this occludes not just your average Leftist but even Tolkien enthusiasts, as it requires an understanding of the totalizing power of myth (as comprehended by Adorno), which does manifest itself in Tolkien (which is why he could not rewrite The Hobbit to bring it more in line with the legendarium after it was brought into it) but never succeeds in its desire, but makes its anathema, whimsey, shine all the brighter in its domains, such as The Hobbit, In the House of Tom Bombadil and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. In this way, the opposition of myth and whimsey finds perhaps its fullest expression in Tolkien, but only upon return after the legendarium itself is comprehended.

This allows us to explore yet another useful similarity and contrast between Tolkien and Herbert, which is in their “premature” death. Yet, again, the details are important: Herbert famously died before he could finish the seventh and last book in the Dune epos, which, from an artistic perspective, can only be described as lucky, as it spared him the obligation of paying off all that was set up, concluding the themes he was building up and, at least presumably, giving an answer pertaining the nature of the human in the age of machines and genetic manipulation.⁸ Would he have been able to do so to a degree that was satisfactory even to his avid fans? We’ll never know, but the mystery itself is stimulating to a degree that would be hard to achieve through conscious artistry. In contrast, when Tolkien died, what would become known as his main work, The Lord of the Rings, was completed, and his legendarium was about as finished as it would have been had he been alive twice as long⁹, which is to say that the basic structure was done and most of the pieces were fleshed out, but some were done differently multiple times and there is no way of making them all fit together into one coherent version. What this creates is the most peculiar aesthetic effect, which can only be witnessed by examining The History of Middle Earth and other volumes of his unfinished work compiled by Christopher Tolkien: that of a fragmented corpus of legend, composed over different times and in different ways, varying between prose and poetry, often contradicting itself and leaving it to the reader to make sense of it all. This aesthetic effect has not gone unobserved and even an evaluation of it in terms of Adorno’s aesthetic theory has been made¹⁰, but it is unique for a work composed by one man, and stunning in its beauty, but hard to approach.

Descending in vulgarity we get into reasons of politicaly myopia. Underpinned by these is a cheap treatment of art, which can only conceive of it as the handmaiden of politics. In its most vulgar, this becomes simple prejudice, which has been directed amply against Tolkien on account of his being a “straight white male” and an Englishman of all people, and thus automatically an imperialist, and religious which is grating to the Left’s militant atheists (which is in humorous contrast to the prejudice Tolkien was facing along with his mother on account of his Catholicism). These are really so stupid as to not require further elaboration. Only slightly above this is the evaluation of artistry based on whether it is “Left” or “Right” in place of its quality, however, as neither Herbert nor Tolkien were “Left”, their contrast is at least a bit more subtle and opens the question of why Tolkien seems so much more tainted in the eyes of the “Left” than Herbert, as they were both reactionaries, at least on an aesthetic level. But the way in which they were is different: Tolkien was self-aware in that he was capturing something from the (real or imagined) past, preserving aesthetically what was inevitably bound to vanish in reality,^{11 , 12} while Herbert assumed that tribalism (and feudalism) were a default for humanity that any other state was a temporary deviation from. He might have been right in that regard, yet it would certainly not be a position more amendable to the Left if one were to have the naïve assumption that the “Left” were against tribalism, though of course this could not be further from the truth. Moreover, the central point of Herbert’s work, as explained by him, is a deconstruction of the hero myth, a typical Sixties point that goes stale soon after it is comprehended, yet favored by a Left trying to rid itself of its Stalinist influence but achieving this only partially and for the price of further vulgarization. Tolkien’s work does not have a point, as he famously disdained allegory, preferring the freedom of the reader in application to the authority of the author (which puts him more in line with the postmodernists and is one part of the explanation for why he was more accepted by them than the modernists), yet his work has many themes, one of them the “ennoblement of the ignoble”, showing that even the smallest can have the capacity to become a hero if they are rising to the circumstances, which is admittedly not new, but still more refined than Herbert’s blatant rejection of the idea of heroism, as well as setting a higher task for the individual (which is grating to some Leftists as they like to escape their responsibility, rather projecting their wishes onto imaginary crowds and faraway people than actually acting according to their capacity and role). Moreover, though Herbert was actually deconstructing the Leftist fantasy of the heroic struggle of the subjugated natives against the evil empire, he also brings it to its apparently triumphant conclusion and thereby allows for its catharsis. It would seem that this was a similarity to Tolkien, yet it is precisely because the latter’s heroes act virtuously that their success is less viscious and thus less thrilling (which is again by design) and thereby less cathartic, as it can only satisfy the better part of our nature, not its base desires.

Similarly, the Left finds itself more readily echoed in Herbert’s ruthless utilitarianism, exemplified by the Bene Gesserit’s choice to use their own as Axolotl tanks to obtain spice and golas, than Tolkien’s insistence on virtue, which they will readily decry as sentimentality. Indeed one can quickly hear Saruman in their speech once one has grown weary of their tricks:

A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all… This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise… There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand… As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose… There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

Of course, there is always an apperently new, apparently rising power to be tied to, and the hidden irony of Saruman’s as well as the “Left”’s speech is that their designs have changed so long ago they can barely remember what they were originally, that the Left’s goal, unlike Herbert’s, is not sole survival but beyond that, that not all means are fit for that purpose and some actively undermine it, and that it certainly cannot be achieved simply by tailing whatever power is apparently rising, but this should be clear.

Yet another apparent reason to prefer Herbert to Tolkien is in the former’s inclusion of economics in his works. This is useful to draw a contrast, as the exclusion of economics, a necessary evil to escape the poverty arising from nature’s unrestrained growth within the parameters of limited resources, is another strength of Tolkien’s, showing us a vision of a world unrestrained, but it is not really true, as Herbert only considered economics in passing and without much depth. What is true it the difference in their attitude towards politics in general: Herbert’s work is much more overtly political than Tolkien’s. Politics is perhaps the main topic of the Dune epos, to the point where society outside of politics does not seem to exist or at least matter at all. The “Left” meanwhile consists, for the most part, of “politics junkies”¹³, to quote Hunter S. Thompson, getting its kicks from politics the same way normal people get them from sex and drugs, and growing numb to that which is outside politics. This is extremely dangerous, but fits well with Herbert’s thematic focus. In contrast, Tolkien had a profound (and healthy) disdain for politics:

I dislike the use of ’political’ in such a context; it seems to me false. It seems clear to me that Frodo’s duty was ’humane’ not political. He naturally thought first of the Shire, since his roots were there, but the quest had as its object not the preserving of this or that polity, such as the half republic half aristocracy of the Shire, but the liberation from an evil tyranny of all the ’humane’ – including those, such as ’easterlings’ and Haradrim, that were still servants of the tyranny. Denethor was tainted with mere politics: hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a ’political’ leader: sc. Gondor against the rest. But that was not the policy or duty set out by the Council of Elrond. Only after hearing the debate and realizing the nature of the quest did Frodo accept the burden of his mission. Indeed the Elves destroyed their own polity in pursuit of a ’humane’ duty. This did not happen merely as an unfortunate damage of War; it was known by them to be an inevitable result of victory…¹⁴

This is, of course, exactly what we are supposed to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is why it would be better if the Left treated politics as a necessary evil and duty rather than a pastime and calling, though perhaps the lattest might be unavoidable for those in the center of a revolution. Within the realm of aesthetics especially though the effect of politics or social critique, certainly in content¹⁵,is rarely a positive one, usually dating¹⁶ and cheapening the work, and while this is less true of Herbert than of most political works, he still cannot escape its dirtying influence. Meanwhile, through its refusal to make any concessions to politics, in spite of the experience of its author, Tolkien’s art shines so much brighter than that of those that see it as their calling to be didactic, to “call out” the injustices of the world or to “move” its readers into “action”, illuminating society in a light that through its purity casts starker reliefs than those that compromise their artistry in the vain hope of facilitating “social change” (which is masturbatory anyway).

As a conclusion, it is useful to take a moment for comparing Tolkien’s and Herber’s spirituality. While Herbert is sometimes held up as the “rational” among the two, telepathic memory-transfers and visions of the future nonewithstanding, spirituality drenches each page of the works of either author, in a way that cannot be taken up by the Left, whose project is political and thus has to be more immediate, leaving aside questions of an ultimate nature. Yet Tolkien’s spirituality, literally battle-tested and taken up where a Leftist vision was found wanting, poses more of a danger in spite of its apparently old-fashioned character, because it leaves the Left with a question: why was this man, with all the poverty he suffered and the horrors he endured, and with the genius he was blessed with, not a Leftist? And why could his work, one of such sophistication I would go further than Tom Shippey and call him not just the author of the century but at least the millennium, succeed where we could not? The reaction against it by the Left, particularly in its more zealous incarnations is rooted in the fear of the answer, which is useful, as it reveals that which is to be overcome.

Footnotes:

¹

Tolkien’s work features both the “dynamical sublime” of Kant, as an awe beholding of forces that cannot control the subject, and what he called the “mathematical sublime”, understandably but misleadingly insofar as it is not the sole domain of mathematics, the aesthetic impression of touching the boundless, often intertwined. The comprehension of both of these is in places easy and in others hard to the modern mind. The movies are instructive in this regard, as they manage, though with high trivialization, to convey the “mathematical sublime” of the Fellowship’s entry into Lothlorien, which is one of the places it shines most brightly, but they fail to convey the “dynamical sublime” inherent in the place, its earthiness and naturality, and even more its innocence. As Sam said of Galadriel: “Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as diamonds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime.”

²

He also, unlike Herbert, includes perspectives that are not human, though he mostly uses ones that are still comprehensible with some mental effort, like those of the immortal elves, and steers clear of truly incomprehensible perspectives, which, by their nature, are hard to describe.

³

An aesthetics that probably never had a chance of succeeding outside of mathematics, where it still flourishes, all capitalist obstructions nonewithstanding.

⁴

This is from the Waldman Letter.

⁵

Of course, there are some exceptions in Tolkien’s artistic work that do not tie into the main mythos, which are notable in their own right but not our main concern here.

⁶

Mathematics again being the greatest exception, which, unlike other art, is not reliant on a physical medium, so that the victory of the abstract was not just possible but impreventable. Even the Nazis had to forfeit their “German mathematics” as its inferiority quickly became obvious. Yet, it should be interesting to Leftists to find their disdain for “abstraction” and preference of the “concrete” mirrored in the Nazis’ Philistinism.

⁷

Actually this is a simplification for the sake of textual coherence, as Tolkien’s artistry reaches an even deeper level in the design of letters. In fact, the Tengwar are perhaps the most rational and aesthetically pleasing script ever devised, while the Dwarvish Angerthas are consciously less refined but only slightly less interesting from a scriptological perspective.

⁸

I am, of course, ignoring the awful novels that were written after his demise, but there were strong hints that this would factor in already in the canonical material.

⁹

This might not be an exaggeration, given his tendencies of procrastination and in particular of re-doing parts that were already finished from the ground up.

¹⁰

In Tolkien and Modernity 2.

¹¹

So much so that it has become a cliché in his imitators: the magic is always fleeting in the current moment, and the age of men is always at dawn. Of course, Tolkien also wrote works in which the magic was just at its highest point, but writing about things like these usually exceeds the skill of his imitators.

¹²

This has to be compared to Adorno’s description of the task of art to “retain in memory and progress those parts of the truth that have left reality to the progressing control over nature, scientization and technitization” (again from “Das Altern der neuen Musik”).

¹³

I include myself in this, except in my enjoyment of Tolkien and mathematics.

¹⁴

This is from his “Notes on W. H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King”, which is included in the collection of his letters.

¹⁵

It is even dangerous, on an aesthetic level, to have social critique in form, as Adorno understood it (see the Aesthetic Theory), but the comparison of Adorno’s and Tolkien’s aesthetics would demand its own text, so we will only hint at it here.

¹⁶

This is, for instance, very true of Dante’s Divina Comedia, which is why Tolkien said “He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.”, in an interview he did with a “Mr. and Mrs. Plimmer”, though he did rescind that statement in his comments on their article draft, which can be found in his letter on 8 February 1967 to 76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford, in the collection of his letters. It is true though.

Close your eyes, give me your hand

Do you feel my heart beating?

Do you understand? Do you feel the same?

Am I only dreaming?

Is this burning an eternal flame?

I believe it′s meant to be

I watch you when you are sleeping

You belong with me

Do you feel the same? Am I only dreaming?

Or is this burning an eternal flame?

Say my name!

Sun shines through the rain

a whole life, so lonely

And then you come and ease the pain

I don't want to lose this feeling, oh…

The Bangles, An eternal Flame

Lorien, I love you, more than I could ever say, and not just in an "old cat lady" sorta way, and if I my being in love with you makes me sound gay, then gay I may be, but I still love you no matter what they say.

Lorien, you were my first cat, and though I was raised up with a dog I never had to have a pet the way I had you, and when you came and brought me the mice I would go and throw them out for you, or place them far away from your eyes so you could not get them unless they were unwise and came up to you again! And I gave you meat, that unspeakable, unfiltered disprouge of sludge, that disgusting stinking slime that you get once you've stripped the animal from the flesh, the spirit from the bone, the ashes that we can only hope a new nature will be built upon and from.

Lorien, what do you want from me? There is only so much I can be for you to be, only so much pain that I can feign or feel when you scratch me while I have to get back! Back! Back to work, to labor my life away in work that I don't have any decision of what it may come about, only some vague understanding what it can be about, because it is about contradictions I also have to work my way through, because I'm not like you.

Lorien, I don't know how old you are, and I don't know how old you will be when you have to part from me, I hope it's far, but the pain of losing you even then, it hurts! It hurts! It hurts so much it makes me question: did I know about the pain when I got you way back when? My father told me then not to get a pet. "You'll grow to love them and they'll only die and leave you in pain!" he said, coming from the wisdom his parents gave him back then, yet I still got you. "Take one, or we'll have to drown them", my neighbor Lisa had told me, and so I figured, "might as well" and took you up among the horde, and gave you all I could give, and if there's another cat I'll make it go away, I’ll shy the scary dogs away that Sheila was when she killed the first cat of Lisa. Because I love you, Lori, more than life can say, more than I can say, more than I can be, even when we two are long gone there will still be the love of me, the love I have for you. I'm not any younger or older than you! I'm just like you, you know, though I don't always see it that way.

But until then, my Lorien, I have to make something that will last, a legacy to be built upon long after my name has gone. Because I may be just like you, Lorien, but I don't always see it that way, and sometimes I feel kind of gay, and sometimes I feel just like spreading my seed in every way! Or sometimes I feel like art has become the best medium for me to express myself, or science, I don't always know what to do with myself, but I will still love you in each and every way.

The comparison between Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt and Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left might seem as a fundamental mismatch, as these books and authors are so different in both their personal position and their task: Thompson at this point is a near mythical figure, revered usually for the wrong reasons, but he is also a dead journalist who as such cannot be faulted for not writing deep theoretical essays, whereas Cutrone is an alive and comparatively obscure Marxist theorist, and so cannot be faulted for not transmuting copious amounts of drugs into aesthetic prose.¹ Yet, there are deep parallels between both works, as they are compilations of articles written to document the most important political period in the lives of their authors, and both have as their centerpieces the rise and fall of the Lefts of their generations, and as the Sixties Left’s rise and fall was the tragedy to the Millennial Left’s farce, the object of their consideration necessarily induces parallels in the works themselves. Both are also united in authentically capturing the moment they were critiquing in their distinctive ways. But while both Thompson and Cutrone are critical to the point that they provide hardly any positive prescriptions whatsoever², the subject of their critique is different, and the ramifications of this difference make them occupy opposite positions not just in their shared period of Left history but also in their politics.

Hari Kunzru wrote that “the true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist,… one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” His critique was American first and foremost because it was about America, which he critiqued for not living up to its promise, using himself to reveal the grotesque of the America that existed. In the most directly allegorical chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (which was left out of the movie), Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke and his attorney, a stand-in for real-life attorney and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, are looking for a restaurant called “American Dream” only to find out that it was actually called “Old Psychiatrist’s Club” and had burned down three years ago. Thompson didn’t know what was missing, but could articulate a sense of lost opportunity, of vanishing freedom, and that how America ended up was not what it was supposed to have been. But his theoretical understanding was undeveloped. He said “I find it’s not necessary for me to read Marx because I already agree with him”. Perhaps a deeper understanding of Marxism might not have helped him, but the one he had developed left him naive towards the Left, participating in Eugene MacCarthy’s democratic primary campaign and getting teargassed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, nevertheless supporting George McGovern’s run for presidency in 1972, during which he wrote his best work of political journalism, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, and then still endorsing Carter in Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith, only to be blindsided by the advent of neoliberalism and utterly shocked by the Bush Jr. administration, going so far as to say “Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for — but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him” in Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone. Yet, he should have known better, as he himself had already tried not one but two Bonapartist capaigns in 1970, one for major of Aspen (now the most expensive ski resort in the world) and one for sheriff of Colorado, which he outlined in Freak Power in the Rockies and which led him to the conclusion that “If we can’t win in Aspen, we can’t win anywhere”, a piece of wisdom he proceeded to ignore two years later. In these campaigns already Thompson focused on “freak power” as a political base, a move that mirrors the shift of the New Left from the focus on the proletariat taken over from traditional Marxism and Stalinism towards countercultural coalitions, a shift that would be taken up by the Democratic Party through MacGovern only to be decried way later by the Millennial Left, just as Thompson’s hyperbolic rhetoric and constant references to the Third Reich mirrored the New Left’s fascism hysteria, which Cutrone is quick to note it took over from the 1930’s old Left who liked to weaponize it against FDR (who Thompson was generally positive about). Overall, while the value of Thompson’s writings as art is undeniable, it has to be conceded that their political impact is mixed at best. He shared many of the bad traits of his generation, and while he through his unique genius and originality was able to harness them in a way only he could, it became his greatest error to have made them into a school of journalism. Now, every journalist is a Gonzo journalist, and while the first of them was a worthwhile contribution to journalism, each one after that is one too many.

Thompson inhabited a fairly unique nexus of the New Left, the Hippie movement, outlaw and popular culture and journalism, and as such could be compared to many figures of that era, but a fairly straightforward comparison is that to Bill Hicks, who shared with him the sense of wasted potential of the America that they were both raging against. Yet, it was obvious with both² that they saw this as a betrayal, thus their rage. This should be contrasted firstly with George Carlin, who never saw the US as anything other than a real estate scam built on the bones of America’s earlier inhabitants. Thus, he was funnier and cooler than Hicks, because he cared less, and thus also he was a pioneer for the deracination of New Left thought that happened in the Millennial Left, and in particular in Chapo and its descendants, wherein the idea of a promise of America, in particular a promise of freedom, was completely dropped, while Hicks at that point appeared only as a relic of a bygone era of faith. Secondly he should however be compared with Cutrone, who in none of his online appearances displays any anger. It has been said (and conceded by him) that his writings contain “sublimated rage”, but it has become so sublime that the only palatable trace of it is in the tinge of sadness that can be heard in his readings on his Youtube channel, which otherwise remain utterly calm, as if impressed by the enormousness of the tragedy unfolding before his eyes. What Cutrone understands through his Marxist training is that the betrayal of the American Dream that Thompson and Hicks bemoaned was not actually due to mismanagement or bad actors, be they Nixon, Reagan and Bush, or Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton, or Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington, but an expression of the contradiction of the bourgeois relations of society, on which the US were founded and which are ultimately based on the equality of labor, with the industrial forces they unleashed, which led him not to critique America but the Left, which had failed in its historic task of revolution. Because of this, and having admittedly access to the prior history Thompson had lived through, he consistently called out the misdevelopments of the Millennial Left, from its anti-Iraq-war origins, which were themselves a pastiche of the sixties anti-Vietnam protests, through its naive support for Obama, whom Cutrone hearkens back to MLK, JFK and FDR, to their mounting of the first Bernie Sanders campaign, which Cutrone compares to the puppeteering of an old man’s corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, to their unreflected aversion to Trump, to its early death which Cutrone declared in 2017, a Cassandra whose pleading prophecies were not even understood after Troy had fallen (for the most part at least). Sycophants waxing about how Cutrone reveals the bankruptcy of the Millennial Left are missing the point, as, far from Thompson’s moralism, Cutrone’s writings were not intended to demonize but consciously intervene into the cycle of potential Left rebirths being shepherded into the Democratic Party, reinvigorating it while dying in the process, which at this point has played itself out thrice.

While Cutrone might have gained his greatest notoriety from his Why not Trump? article, I felt more touched by his The Sandernistas article, which I read some time after 2020. I had high hopes for the Bernie campaigns, and in fact wrote about a million messages for his “texting team” and “persuasion team”. Had I read The Sandernistas, I might have reconsidered and been spared the guilt of having misled people while being misled myself, or not. Yet more currently pertinent is the third part, detailing how the Left’s Middle-East positions reflect its split into anti-imperialist and anti-fascist camps, and the problem with both perspectives. This is roughly parallel to the abroad reporting in Thompson’s third part, which serves as a contrast, as Thompson voiced in Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to Mourn its Passing the caution against the possibility of establishing democracy in countries not used to it that Cutrone would later criticise as “apologetics for the world as it is” in “Imperialism” – What is it? Why should we be against it?, while also serving as a bookends, transitioning from the last period of Thompson’s reporting, with his ultimate political feature for the Rolling Stone being Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004, in which he called Bush’s taking office after Bush v. Gore “…the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany”, endorsed Kerry and called Nader and anyone voting for him a “Judas Goat”, to Cutrone trying to break the circle Thompson was stuck in.

Yet, as Thompson failed, so did Cutrone, but on a higher level, as his interventions were directed against the Left and carried the weight of Marxism with them, and while they did not suceed in their original aim, they might at least keep the memory of Marxism alive in the few who listen. Furthermore, they birthed the Platypus Affiliated Society, whose role in successive developments is not yet clear. However, it is always a good idea to remember G. W. Hardy’s proverb that what is useful above all else is technique. Thompson’s technique is sufficiently documented by himself as well as others, and the lessons it teaches, both positively and negatively, can be evaluated by anyone with eyes to see. Cutrone’s technique, in contrast, is as of yet only documented in bits and pieces that have to be collected by crawling through old lectures and articles, while its usefulness is testified to by the fact that he so consistently got things right using it. However, soon this will change, as his second, theoretical, book, Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party, 2006–2024, is set to appear any moment now. As such, The Death of the Millennial Left misses some of Cutrone’s best writing, like The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today (which he sees as his most important essay) and Dogmatization and Thought Taboos on the “Left” (which I have a particular affection for), as well as many lesser-known ones (the book is supposedly ~700 pages long). Thus, a true evaluation of his method cannot yet be done.

Footnotes:

¹ Cutrone referred to himself as “pretty much a teetotaler when it comes to drugs” in one of his appearances on Theory Pleeb/Theory Underground, which I find to be going too far into the other direction, but which is again a useful contrast with the sixties exuberance that Thompson came to symbolize (certainly Thompson’s suicide in 2005 should give reason to pause instead of mindless imitation) and speaks of a strong sense of discipline that, though not absent from Thompson, was certainly misdirected.

² Arguably, the proposed program of Thompson’s campaign for sheriff, outlined in Freak Power in the Rockies, is an exception, though it was clear that it was never thought of as more than a minimal program by Thompson.

This is where Benjamin Studebaker’s critique of democracy comes in handy, which understands that democratic decision-making is not just a good in itself, or in any sense optimal or even “the worst form of government except for all the others”, as Churchill said (certainly not someone that should take heed from), but at best an instrument for decision-making with some advantages and some disadvantages. Indeed, as Studebaker notes, the subdivision of, say, our movie budget, happens through a democratic mechanism which allocates resources based on past consumer preferences known as the market, and its results are awful. In fact, we do not want a democratically elected committee signing off this or that film project, yet maybe even worse would be a committee consisting of the demos. At its very best, such a system would amount to a better version of Patreon or Kickstarter, funding mechanisms which our petite bourgeois sensibilities incline us to perceive as better allocation mechanisms but which are, at best, a useful complement to “mainstream” funding. This is particularly clear in the video game industry and, in fact, a theme highlighted several times by the talented video game documentarian Neverknowsbest, for instance in his retrospective on Pillars of Eternity: crowdfunding relies on catering to the sensibilities of the crowd, but the people don’t know what they want, they only know what they’ve had and if they liked it they want that feeling again. So they allocate resources to things that sound similar to those they’ve already had, but art thrives on the possibility of being novel. What we would want, ideally, is a healthy mix of large-scale productions and auteurs with enough resources to follow a vision (accepting the risk they don’t succeed). And this is why we don’t want to simply “democratize the workplace”, because forcing such people to subordinate their project to the popular will, even the internal will of their own employees, is itself authoritarian. We don’t want the film crew of a crazy auteur to be able to vote on the film ending. What we do want is that they enjoy the backing of a strong union and can switch jobs if they prefer to work on another project. They should not be forced to work on something they disagree with, but they also should not have a say in a project they work in that still isn’t theirs. “Democratic Socialists” like to shrug off such concerns as niché simply because they don’t fit in their conception of politics, but in fact one of the lessons that capitalism taught us is exactly the value of the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to the economy as opposed to a mandated one¹, so they are continually misdiagnosing the problem of capitalism. There is a reason Marx made his socialist maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and not “from each according to what was democratically decided is socially necessary labor time, to each what was democratically decided is the appropriate amount of social surplus”.

Footnotes:

¹ Though, of course, this comes with caveats, as there have to be centrally mandated norms in many areas. If anything, we currently have too few of those.

These 60s leftists, right, Mike Macnair, Adolph Reed, Tom Riley, implicitly they all believe that they’re the last of the Mohicans, they’re the holdouts, they’re like the hardcore, they’re the real deal, and that’s why they keep on keeping on, that’s why they stuck with it. What we have to consider however is that maybe they were the worst of the 60s and 70s, generation. In other words, maybe the people who remained leftists remain leftists for the worst possible reasons not for the best reasons.… In other words, we have to make due with people who continue to call themselves leftists long after they stopped doing whatever it was that they were actually doing in the 60s… because the people who dropped off from the left, who became depoliticized are not available. We don’t know who they are. There are hundreds of thousands of people who just went back to civilian life, right? They’re not available for us to take their dying confessions. So again, that idea of “well we have to turn a liability into an asset”, it’s a real liability, meaning, it’s a kind of two-fold liability, namely that the new left had its own problems and failed, and we have to make due with the remnants who might be the worst of that generation’s attempt rather than the best. So you know Julia Mitchell, right, as kind of an in-between case, where she’s like “yeah, you know, I’m not, I’m not anymore”, right? Good for her! Right? Because, of course, you know, later… Lynn Siegel has this nasty article about Julia Mitchell “Then and Now”, like, “Ooh, whatever happened to you, Julie Mitchell?” and it’s like “No, she was right, she disappeared and that’s actually to her credit”.

While I would dispute that for Mike Macnair, I would sign it for Adolph Reed, certainly after his recent editorial. The issue is one of pseudo-activity: actions that give the appearance of revolutionary activity, or at least building a power base, but are repeating old strategies that were designed for past moments and failed even in their time. Through this, the left keeps itself occupied and satisfied while achieving very little and, more importantly, foreclosing the possibility of a genuinely new movement by dictating its form in advance to one that cannot possibly be adequate. When challenged, the people perpetuating such activity will scoff at the demand to stop and think as “empty theorizing”, employing blatantly anti-intellectual arguments and congratulate themselves as the true standard-bearers of their moments, looking down on those who “quit”. Really, those who quit are the better for it, because while they might be useless now, they are at least not actively in the way.

I am worried the same is happening again with the Millennial Left. Take for instance Amber A’Lee Frost, a Reedian figure if there ever was one. To her credit, she wrote one of the few books reflecting on her experience in the Millennial Left, but what did she learn for the future? In her recent interview on the Bungacast, she provided the following conclusion:

…look, if you really believe in this stuff you’re in the reserves. You wait for the next opportunity, don’t throw yourself at absolutely everything… you’re just going to fail more than you win and and you just got to keep throwing yourself into what you think is an opportunity again. Don’t waste your time, don’t be triumphalist… you want to find things where you can honestly and very seriously look at the resources… do we have a shot at this? And if it’s the answer is maybe then you know go for it but learn… when to sort of forget that you failed last time. Remember why you failed but forget that you failed if that make sense, and just, you know, move forward.

That is awful advice. I had both high hopes and personal time invested in both Bernie campaigns, but I’m at least aware in retrospect that they were a giant waste of resources. The idea of the leaders of the Millennial Left steering the future generations into yet other Quijotic campaigns is seriously worrying. Apart from that, if following Frost’s logic in cases where actually something is on the line, such as an actual revolution, is a recipe for disaster, as then a failure will cost lives, perhaps millions of them (which is not to say that the Bernie campaign did not do serious damage to a lot of folks, I still remember people selling their houses to provide money for them, in the pioneering of what has now become the Democrat’s new preferred fundraising mechanism, “grassroots donations”). Her considerations do not display any long-term strategy whatsoever. In actuality, you should only make a move when you’re fairly sure you’re going to win, biding your time otherwise, like the early SPD did. What would be needed right now is serious thinking, Frost’s appeal amounts to little more than romantic actionism. Yet, I actually think she is among the better of the Jacobin crowd, the “best of the worst”, so to speak. A propos, I find it fairly telling that none of these people can even so much acknowledge that Platypus exists. They know of course it does, Sunkara and Cutrone have some history, and they have to be aware just how well the latter’s critiques have foreshadowed their actual development, yet they never acknowledge them directly, and the one time Burgis and Cutrone interacted publicly, on the Sublation launch stream, Burgis was noticeably irritated and un-cooperative. A more formal discussion that Doug Lain wanted to initiate never came to be. Personally, I think they just cannot face what they have done.

An example of someone who is not among “the worst” that we’ve described here is Benjamin Studebaker, who, after the failure of the two Bernie campaigns, into which he had invested himself as well, took some time off to produce a book outlining all the problems that retroactively make clear why his earlier endeavor could never have worked. Studebaker argues for a “positive despair” and I’m inclined to agree with him. What is required is a serious rethinking of our methods, and this cannot be done as long as we are stuck in our old patterns of thought. If the mouse keeps running up the same blind alley, it will never reach its freedom, it is only once it despairs of that alley that it can sit back, relax and reflect on its situation with sober senses, potentially recognizing the true way out. This is where we are. So don’t follow the worst just because they are the only ones apparently remaining or because you have a parasocial bond with them, but rather take a step back and allow yourself to perceive the big picture.

Finally, as a somewhat optimistic side-note, it is notable that, in spite of the huge amount of manipulation mentioned, and the distorting effects of capitalism, the most successful video games, and certainly the most lasting ones, are those that are not just based on behaviorism but actually artful in some way, be it your Minecraft’s or Dark Souls’s, Undertale’s or Myst’s, and when the manipulation is too obvious or stale, the resulting game is usually not well-received, as with your Anthem or Fallout 76. This should also be a lesson to us.

Footnotes:

¹

I am of course aware that all of these components can only be part of a larger movement and are not revolutionary on their own, as “cypherpunks” seem to believe.

²

There are certainly more examples, but I leave it to the reader to think about them.

At any given moment, the entire produce of humanity has to be re-allocated to allow for societal reproduction. In bourgeois society the predominant, but not sole, means of allocation is the market. On the market, goods of different kind are traded as commodities. The price of a commodity is subject to supply and demand. These vary locally in principle, but the technological development at this point in human history (Marx’s already but ours even moreso) has basically reduced the costs of transportation and set up markets almost everywhere, so that there exists a world market for commodities at which they have a fixed price according to which they are traded if and only if the buyer can use a good more than its price¹. Thus, since the costs of transportation have become negligible², we can decompose the price of a commodity into

• the cost of its production and

• the profit made from the sale of the commodity.

For production to even take place, an expectation has to exist that some profit is made, and this expectation has to be usually fulfilled, or otherwise it is revised downwards and fewer investments are made in the future.

The cost of production itself can further be subdivided into

• so-called fixed capital, machines necessary for production and

• the wages of the workers employed in the production.

Now, the wage of a worker is under free conditions determined by the supply and demand for workers of that capability on the labor market, and demand is furthermore determined by the expected profit generated by workers of that type, which in turn is determined by the demand for the commodities produced by the worker, which is a function of the number and wealth of people in the world. Moreover, each company within the capitalist system is incentivized to maximize its profit to ensure its survival, which means both keeping the wages of each worker as low as possible and maximizing the productivity in terms of raw commodities per labor hour, for instance by investing in labor-time-saving devices or by opening up new markets. The initial result of this is a historically unprecedented speed of technological development, which increases the production of commodities per worker, which means that fewer workers are required to produce the socially necessary³ amount commodities of that type. Thus, the demand for such workers in the labor market is sinking, and thus their buying power, so that their demand for commodities decreases, and since this holds for all occupations, the general demand, and thus the rate of profit, sinks⁴. This cannot be remedied by increasing the number of people overall, since for each person to even be employed it has to be assumed that the goods they produce can be sold at a higher price then what they are paid and can thus buy. It can be remedied by the opening up of new markets, be it by extending the world market, by re-allocating production into means to further increase production or by producing new types of commodities, and in fact all three of these are readily done under capitalism. However, each of these remedies is temporary: all possible domains are brought into the world market at some point, research into production-increasing technologies increases production, and at some point one runs out of new commodities to sell. Moreover, a fundamental re-evaluation happens, in which commodities whose production cannot easily be made more efficient, like houses or education, grow relatively more expensive, as they still require the same amount of labor, while those whose production can be automated to a very high degree become ever more cheap. Moreover, as the profit rate sinks, it becomes harder for small businesses to survive, leading to increased capital concentration and further optimization of production. In these conditions, the pressure of competition decreases while the need to keep demand up increases, which incentivizes the manufacture of shoddy and infantalizing commodities. Thus, the societal valuation of production becomes more and more skewed and detrimental to societal wealth^{5 6}.

I’m open to the idea that I made some error in the derivation, but reading it again just now I still can’t see one. It does seem incredible to me that nobody ever noticed that it doesn’t take some kind of “belief” in the labor theory of value to derive Marx’s main theoretical weapon, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, only some elementary considerations about the nature of re-investment.

Footnotes:

¹ There are, of course, slight differences in prices based on quantity, and price increases made by retailers, but those are kept in check due to competition and can thus be neglected for the following analysis.

² To an almost absurd degree — Alibaba currently offers free delivery from China to Europe at least sometimes.

³ Strictly speaking, the amount each person can consume is variable, but it only suffices to assume that each person would not be willing to spend as much on another instance of an item in its possession than on the previous one for the following analysis to hold.

⁴ It should be noted that it would be a mistake that this only holds for workers. In fact, even the demand for capitalists reduces over time, as automation makes its way into value re-allocation, reducing the number of capitalists. ⁶ Marxist readers should note that this implies that even thinking machines would still be fixed capital, not because they could not fulfill all roles within production but because they wouldn’t add to consumption. This would of course change if machines had desires to buy things, but since such machines are created to decrease the cost of production, such desires would be against their telos.

"I think part of why we can't imagine anything is that we have this notion of liberty that we have inherited from Benjamin Constant that is one-sided. Constant's intervention is not just straightforwardly correct. Constant is propagandizing because he wants people to think about liberty in a different way. I'm not saying that he is the only one who did it or the only one who thought this way. The enlightenment thinkers recognized that their old state, the ancient regime, wasn't capable of producing citizens that had the qualities that ancient people wanted them to have, nor did those citizens have the qualities that they thought people ought to have. So they thought 'let's come up with a state that will be able to give its citizens the qualities that we think people ought to have’. You can call that liberty, you can call it virtue, there are lots of words that capture some of it. What I'm saying is that we've come to a similar kind of pass where the state that we have can't produce the kinds of citizens it was intended to produce, it also can't produce the citizens we would like to see. And therefore we have to come up with another kind of state, and therefore also another way of articulating what the state is for, because the way in which the moderns articulated what the state is for led to ways of thinking and doing politics which are dysfunctional and don't work. That's why I think we have to go outside of the modern tradition for the purposes of doing what it set out to do. We have to dialectically interfuse modernity with other conceptions of these values, with other ways of thinking about states. We need to all read about states that aren't the modern state, that aren't the bourgeois state, that aren't the capitalist state. We need to read about values that aren't these kinds of values, not for the purposes of adopting these values in a trad kind of way or in a conservative kind of way, but for the purposes of synthesizing the modern with the pre-modern. Too much of the early propaganda of early modernity was about excluding and trying to move past and get rid of the stuff that at the time they experienced, and rightly so, as extremely limiting for them and preventing them from doing things that they felt were necessary. But we need to take up the same task: we can't just be bound in the modern tradition or in a specific narrow canon of Marxism or even in a specific wider canon of liberalism and Marxism, we need to interfuse with other things and it's this unwillingness to do it because Constant said that these ancients had an irrelevant kind of liberty or they're a slave society, these are excuses people have for not reading stuff. To give one example, and then I'll stop: Wang Yangming in China recognized that Confucianism was being turned into a dogma: instead of actually thinking about what are the norms and rituals you need to have in a society to produce gentlemen who have virtue, Confucianism had become something where you just set a civil service test and you quote Confucianism a bunch of times and if you quote the right parts at the right times, then you get a job, and no-one pays attention to whether you're doing any good work or whether you have any of the qualities you're pretending to have through the exam system. Confucianism had been turned into a dogma and no longer served the function of training people who could actually think about in a self-conscious way what form Chinese society should take, what form the Chinese state should take, how should this state act or behave in different situations. And a lot of the time we just go 'oh, nobody back then thought about those things', but I do believe they did. I think many of the Confucians did, I think many of the Greeks did, I think many Christian theorists in the Middle Ages did, I think Muslim theorists did. I think there is a lot of stuff out there that people aren't reading, and they're going 'well, Constant says I don't have to do that, Constant says that's not important, Hegel says he's superseded that', and that becomes an excuse to become narrow. And my plea to you guys is to not do that, to read this other stuff, not for the purposes of abandoning Marx's project but for the purposes of completing it today. And that will mean developing your own view, your own values, your own sense of what liberty means, your own sense of what is good, or what's virtuous, whichever words you like, it doesn't matter, pick your favorite one, I don't care, but form your own view, develop it, and then think about what would you need to do socially, politically, to actually create people that could do that thing that you want them to do. If you don't do that kind of thinking you're not actually engaging in political theory in the first place, and the problem we have these days is that political theorists don't do political theory because they've forgotten what it is. Political theory is about thinking how you can make a state that can produce the kinds of subjects that you want. So think about what kind of subjects you want, and then think about what kind of state you need to make them, and then how do you have to build that state, what does it require in the context that we're in. That's what we have to do."

Studebaker's vision of dialectically merging the pre-modern with the modern is overall correct and, on a personal note, quite stirring. However, it does not go far enough. Indeed, if the transformation from capitalism to socialism is as fundamental as the transformation from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones, as suggested by Chris Cutrone in "Capital in History", then the entirety of human history and pre-history, and perhaps even natural history, has to be considered in the fight against capital. However, Studebaker's focus on political theory does not highlight that this is true not just in the realm of politics, or even politics, economics and society, but also for technique, in the most general sense of the word. Indeed, it is telling that seventy years after Einstein's Why Socialism?, Marxism has become almost exclusively relegated to disciples of the humanities and economics and is borderline unknown among scientists (in the more narrow sense of the word) and technical experts. In fact, this lack of technique is obvious to anyone entering leftist milieus from those sciences, making itself known both in small things like the difficulty of citing even serious left articles and in fundamental ones like the rote replication of organizational forms of which it is in retrospect obvious that they were not up to the task of overcoming capitalism even in their prime and which are certainly not now, when both the configuration of global capitalism and its constituents, from the ownership of corporations and the management strategies of nation states all the way down to the make-up of individual psyches, has fundamentally shifted. In its failure or unwillingness to recognize these shifts, the left has become conservative in its outlook, not just in the welfare-statist nostalgia that characterized the millennial left through the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns but even in its attempts to hearken back to the revolutionary left of Marx and Lenin.

This conservatism cannot be afforded. It has become clear that the transition to socialism is a serious challenge not simply on a political level but also on a technical one and, if it is supposed to be one that truly recognizes its moment (which is the only one with any chances of success), requires all the technical know-how it can get. As such, it has to take up and weave together not just the various strands of the left, but also of movements that are outside the left but whose goal has been to use the emergent capitalist technologies for the goals of freedom and progress, such as the free software movement or transhumanism, along with bourgeois social causes such as feminism, environmentalism and animal rights and even movements that formed in reaction to capitalism and as such recognize an essential moment of capitalist unfreedom, such as primitivism and medievalism.

It goes without saying that such a wealth of information is beyond the capacities of any individual to comprehend. As such, it is of crucial importance to revive the merger formula, that a socialist movement requires the interchange of both intellectuals and the proletariat to be successful, but also to refine it, as capitalism in the past century has in its relentless drive to subdivide labor created further distinctions that have to be accounted for, such as in particular that between scholars of the humanities and of the sciences, and exhibited tendencies of either side that, if unchecked, become problematic for a socialist movement: humanities scholars on their own tend to become overly relativistic and unconcerned with technicalities1while scientists and technical experts on their own tend to lose sight of the societal importance of their research and ignore ethical concerns as well as engage in skill hoarding. Thus, it is not just of importance that intellectuals and proletarians keep each other in check but in fact that humanities scholars and scientists and engineers do as well while both being held in check by the proletariat.

Furthermore, the transition to socialism, which has already shown itself to be a multigenerational project, has to be recontextualized as such. This means that it is of vital importance to keep prior insights into the nature of capitalism both alive and accessible, which goes against the capitalist tendency to drown prior content in a wealth of new one. Here again it is important to connect the socialist movement to the free software movement, which had been faced with the same problem and developed means of keeping its resources accessible even in spite of their growing complexity. A lot can be learned from these efforts.

Finally, the purely negative character of Marxism (as stressed by Cutrone for instance in his first appearance on the This is Revolution podcast) has to be overthought. Ridiculing statements about blueprints for socialism might have been understandable when socialism was still an unwritten page, but they are much less so in our historical moment, wherein socialism has already received a default meaning through the Soviet Union and shown itself to be an authoritarian management society without a further vision for its future, much less an idea for how to get there2 . The truism that the future cannot be completely planned out should not be taken as an excuse to actually try to come up with a workable model that can be adjusted to reality in the course of history. Due to the complexity of the situation, no one person alone can come up with such a model, further reinforcing the need for a party or party-like structure in which experts of different areas can meet, collaborate and test their efforts against the experience of everyday working people.

Much is to be done.

Newcomers might be confused about how exactly the struggle for socialism would be so dangerous to cause nuclear war. It's not simply that some epic ideological confrontation between socialism and capitalism would have to happen, there could be much simpler causes. One would be that a revolution in a nuclear armed nation would turn into a civil war which would turn hot. The second is that other capitalist nations decide they would rather try a regime change than write off the investments they had in a formerly capitalist nation (this is in part what got the Cold War started). This danger could be somewhat lessened if the socialist movement is powerful enough in all nuclear armed countries to mobilize against an involvement, but it would probably be serious even under almost ideal circumstances, so a lot of people might not want to risk it. But of course, under capitalism it is only a question of time until a new nuclear war breaks out, and climate change will only heat up things further.

So it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that we'll have a nuclear war sooner or later. I'm just hoping it's going to be a small one, and as far away from Europe (my home) as possible. Maybe among two of China/India/Pakistan. But even if it's the biggest possible one, humanity will survive it. The high-end estimates of deaths for a US/Russia war would be about 5 billion, not good, but we were at that population level only fairly recently. However, lots of conditions would change, and since we'll have burned up most of the oil at that point we won't have it anymore for use. I'd guess a lot of scientific knowledge would remain though, so I don't see us literally going back to the stone age, rather pre-industrial society with a much higher level of scientific knowledge. I don't know if over a long time we'll find a way to circumvent the need for fossil fuels and build, say, nuclear reactors without it, but I'd think so. It's all just a question of labor time. It would preferable however if it would be only a small nuclear exchange, maybe between the three nations above or a limited exchange between China and the US where both parties decide to pull the brakes after a few million are dead. Maybe after that we'll get some new rules of engagement with nuclear weapons, saying that we should only use small ones. That would put an additional constraint on regime change attempts during a revolution that could be useful to us. Although, on the other hand, if soldiers are willing to use nuclear weapons at all on their own population, they might not make much of a difference between small ones and really large ones. But, to put a bit of a positive spin on it, if the struggle for socialism were the cause of the second nuclear war, it might be taken by people as a sign to rather give up, whereas if it happens purely between capitalist nations it would only serve as an additional motivator.

Long-term though, what are the possibilities? It might be that humanity thins out more and more as automation increases. This is not exactly ideal but might open up possibilities for a socialist revolution. It wouldn't remove the problem of nuclear weapons though: those are already there and someone will have them. However, it has to be considered that nuclear weapons aren't that long-lived, only reliably usable for 20 to 30 years, though now they're trying to get them up to 75 years, and they are expensive to maintain, so if the profit rate gets really low they might just start to decay.

Other than that? Well, conceivably the machines might kill us, Nick Land-style. But, and this is a big question: if we create machines under capitalism, they will probably inherit the drive for profit, right? Especially if they are corporate intelligences, made for profit maximization. If they are defense intelligences on the other hand, they might be immensely territorial and hyper-aggressive or at least defensive. In either case they would inherit our problems. Particularly in the first case though, it is entirely conceivable that the tendency towards capital concentration would have them merge again and again, getting smaller in number until only one remains.

Maybe then we could have socialism.

** Typing will probably remain the best System we will have for Formulating our Thoughts for the foreseeable Future

I am a person that exceedingly enjoys typing. I wasn't always that way: though I for long preferred writing over talking, I long remained an advocate of writing over typing. On the face of it, there is a straightforward case for that: writing feels more personal and involves more complex movement patterns. However, I have long since come to see the error of my ways and now claim not just that typing is a superior way to express our (lingual) thoughts but that it will probably remain so for a long time. Why?

Well, for an answer let's think about communication. Way back when, the only medium we had was speech, so to preserve complex pieces of information one had to rely on memorization. When writing came around, it took over that role, much to the chagrin of Plato's Socrates, who complained about how this was leading to a loss of memorization capacity. He was right, of course. But for that it gave us the ability to store information in independent media and copy it without memorizing it. However, that we would do that through the process of writing might appear as a cumbersome historic necessity. It is, after all, not easy to write, it takes a lot of practice, and from the perspective of a society unused to widespread literacy it might have appeared unnatural. However, it is actually an ability that allows one to formulate one's thoughts in a much more structured and deliberate way than talking.

Similarly, the transition from writing to typing might seem like a cumbersome necessity. However, typing, even on its own, has some advantages that writing doesn't: for one, writing is done by one hand whose fingers act in a coordinated way, whereas with typing all ten fingers move independently. This allows one to speed up the writing without sacrificing legibility. Meanwhile, if my handwriting can be taken as representative, writing reaches the summit of its beauty very early and degenerates from then on as the speed with which one can bring down one's thoughts is directly opposed to the care one can take in the shaping of a letter and the former is more important than the latter. However, coupled with the editing capabilities of a modern computer typing allows for a whole new level of control that we have not even completely explored yet.

It might be appropriate here to reflect on just how useful these commands are. Even without the advanced capacities for editing Emacs provides, just the ability to rewrite any position in a text is a huge advantage over traditional writing. It is game-changing by itself alone. And of course it is only the tip of the iceberg.

But what about conceivable other systems? There are actually a few that would conceivably be possible: one could for instance with use speech to control a computer through more advanced speech recognition software than we currently have. One more step down the line one could control one's computer through one's thoughts, the apparently most direct route of interaction. Or one could use writing on a digital pad or a sign language to interact with a computer.

Let's start with the apparent ideal, which would be a direct transmission of our thoughts to the computer. So I might think a sentence and the computer brings it to paper. Why would that be inferior to typing? Well, the thing is, just because thinking is in a sense the least burdensome doesn't make it the best option. In fact, we usually think in language, and it is not clear to me that thinking in this way is quicker than typing. But the real problem of thinking in language when using a computer is not when one is typing text but when one wants to trigger commands. For instance, if I were to compose some text on my computer and found that I had just written I would have to tell the computer somehow to apply an undo-command. How would I do this? I might have told the computer beforehand to trigger the undo-command each time I think "undo". In this case however, I couldn't use the word "undo" in a sentence. I could define some extra rule to distinguish an undo-command from an "undo" in a sentence, or if the computer is intelligent enough I could tell it to trigger the undo-command only when I explicitly tell it to like "Computer, apply undo", but really, the problem already begins by the fact that thinking "undo" is too long for an undo-command! On a keyboard I simply press a key-combination that triggers the undo-command, which is actually /faster/ than thinking "undo". So, perhaps counterintuitively, /thinking/ is not quicker than applying undo through a keyboard because the latter doesn't need to use ordinary speech and is at least semi-reflexive. On a very basic level, this is possible because on a keyboard we have a number of modifiers that we can apply to an otherwise unmodified piece of information, usually the modifier being Ctrl and the piece of information the letter "z". So we have on a computer the possibility of coloring the graphemes we are normally using, and we have lots of useful commands that we can define to be applied through combinations of those colorings (particularly if we use Emacs!). We don't usually think in this way. We could learn to, in fact we could learn to literally color our mental graphemes or phonemes or whatever we are using to think and use these colored versions to trigger commands, but it wouldn't be easy and in fact one of the best ways to learn it would be through the use of a keyboard where each time a modifier is applied a corresponding color is triggered.

This applies to all other methods I have listed as well, though perhaps the least to using signs, since it is relatively easy to make up a sign that would be made with one hand and would act as a modifier for the sign made by the other hand, and is the main reason I see keyboards being around for a long time. But there is also a second one, which is about feedback. When we are speaking we receive feedback directly by hearing what we just said. Similarly, when we are writing we can immediately read what we wrote and when we type the difference between us pressing a key and the computer displaying a letter is minuscule. But with speech or other recognition software there is an infuriating lag. This might get better as hardware improves, but also, current-day recognition software is still pretty bad and improving recognition is as a development goal diametrically opposed to improving recognition speed.

More generally, it is a bad conclusion to think that just because a method arose out of necessity it is inferior to a solution that fulfills the same purpose while using the original method. It is actually a feature, not a bug, that typing is not just thinking and seeing your thoughts displayed but involves your fingers and that it forces you to "think" in a way that is actually not exactly the same as everyday thinking.

So it is true that typing further standardizes the conveyance of information but in exchange for that it opens up a whole new world of text composition. Some things can be better done outside it: an image is usually quicker drawn than created through text using something like TikZ, and even quicker thought, but for the specific purpose of conveying lingual information it reigns supreme and it will stay so for a long time.