Month: March 2021

The Post-Vampire Castle Generation:
Notes on Neo-Anarchy in the UK

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I’ve been invited to write a text for translation, introducing some of Mark Fisher’s later essays to readers outside the Anglosphere. In particular, I have a desire to articulate the proper context surrounding “Exiting the Vampire Castle” and how Fisher pivoted from there to his “Acid Communism”.

This is always a stressful endeavour. I’ve defended “Exiting the Vampire Castle” plenty of times in recent years but it is still an essay that angers people greatly. In trying to explain the context from which it emerged, it is routinely the case that others remember things differently. And yet, in digging back into the archives of 2013 political commentary in the UK, the standard line on the left was really bleak.

There is little space for providing the full picture of this moment in the commissioned essay, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on one essay in particular that I unearthed during my dig, which I think epitomises the 2013 political imaginary.

I should also note that I have already written something similar to this recently, defending Fisher’s comments about his students in Capitalist Realism, and those comments remain relevant here again. Beginning the book’s fourth chapter, Fisher writes:

By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my previous post I argued that, whilst people continue to find Fisher’s comments about his student’s “reflexive impotence” offensive, this betrays an amnesia regarding just how bad things were back then. Yes, #NotAllStudents but, nationally, I think it’s safe to say that the political imagination of young people at the end of the 2000s was very limited. The point was to ask “why? What were the cultural conditions at that time that actively encouraged disenfranchisement amongst the young? Thankfully, things have changed a lot since then. But the general response to appraisals of that moment suggest we still don’t understand how or why things were as they were, or how or why they changed.

That was the previous pitch regarding a reappraisal of 2009. What has been interesting to me, in preparing to introduce a slightly later context to a non-British audience, is that I’m pretty certain most British people have forgotten how bad things were in 2013 also.

The main problem people had with Fisher’s “Vampire Castle” essay in 2013 was, undoubtedly, his defence of Owen Jones and Russell Brand. In his attempts to defend an active (rather than passive) British leftism, he backed the wrong horses. Brand, in particular, was deemed to be male chauvinist prone to the use of sexist epithets — a criticism that has followed him down the years. There was certainly a reckoning to be had about his use of such language, and I think many people were open to such a reckoning. Owen Jones had occasioned one himself regarding the ubiquity of the word “chav” in the national lexicon, but even he was too idealist and baby-faced to be taken seriously.

But the personalities weren’t the point. If anything, they were a distraction. Jones and Brand were put through the ringer as if they represented future leaders of some celebrity vanguard party, but it was this treatment in itself that was most telling. It revealed the lens through which the left saw its own political agency, calcified by the Blair years, as if Brand’s eloquence meant they were going to be forced to elect him to office in the present era of personality politics. The Blairite wing of the party were predictabaly asinine. (See Luke Akehurst’s recollection of a centrist Eureka! moment aged just 14.) But those far to the left of centre were no better. Less intolerant of Jones, they instead took turns attacking Brand. He wasn’t the right leader! But Brand never wanted to be a leader in the first place. Nevertheless, he became a stick for the left to beat itself with.

I think I found the perfect example of this sentiment whilst trawling back through the think-pieces of 2013: Natasha Lennard’s “I Don’t Stand with Russell Brand, and Neither Should You”, written for Salon late that year.

At first, Lennard explains how she is totally on board with (the least interesting strands of) Brand’s politics:

Like Brand, I don’t vote (I’m British, but even if I were American, I wouldn’t). Like Brand, I will not give my mandate to this festering quagmire of a corporate political system (any more than living in it already demands, that is)… And, like Brand, I refuse to say what I propose instead when badgered by staunch defenders of capitalism. Brand patiently explained to his pompous interviewer that, no, we can’t offer you a pragmatic alternative program — we’re too entrenched in the ideology of the current one. We have to live, act, think differently, dissentfully, for new politics to emerge. I’m simplifying, of course. But the point is, I’ve learned to leave conversations when the “what do you propose instead?” question is posed to me qua anti-capitalist. If you had a blood-sucking monster on your face, I wouldn’t ask you what I should put there instead. I’d vanquish the blood-sucking monster. And it seems Brand is committed to do the same.

So far, so very agreeable. (Although the tendency to abstain from proposals rather exercise the imagination is something thankfully left on the scrap heap of apolitical praxis.) But the issue, as it turns out, isn’t with Brand’s politics but rather with his success. If we’re going to think differently, it seems we must start with the cult of celebrity that gives people like Brand a platform in the first place. Lennard argues:

… if we want to challenge an inherently hierarchical political framework, we probably don’t want to start by jumping on the (likely purple velvet) coattails of a mega-celeb with fountains of charisma and something all too messianic in his swagger. “No gods, No masters,” after all. Brand is navigating the well-worn conflict facing those with a public platform in the current epoch (myself among them): We have to be willing to obliterate our own elevated platforms, our own spaces of celebrity; this grotesque politico-socio-economic situation that vagariously elevates a few voices and silences many millions is what Brand is posturing against. Would he be willing to destroy himself — as celebrity, as leader, as “Russell Brand”? I think he’d struggle, but I don’t really know the guy.

We are suddenly in very different territory. Brand’s calls for a popular radicalism are denounced outright and used to prop up a vanguardist strawman about capitalist complicity:

If we’re so damn excited to hear these ideas in (in their slightly haphazard form) from a boisterous celebrity, then clearly we have some idolatry and “Great Man” hangups to address (lest we reinstate a monarchy with Brand as sovereign, Kanye as chief advisor).

There’s considerable irony here, which primarily comes from the fact that “Messiah Complex” — Brand’s stand-up show, which his media appearances were in aid of at that time — was a show that played up to this hypocrisy for laughs. In the show, which is still on Netflix, Brand consistently and self-deprecatingly jokes about the vacuity of a popular culture that precisely allows someone like him to rise to the top. But he also recognises that the potential benefits of his speaking out outweigh the potential hangups. What Brand advocates for is, in essence, what Fisher had long been advocating for — a popular modernism.

The second issue for Lennard is Brand’s sexism. Such critiques are valid, as already mentionede, although this does not soften the blow of hindsight when chief TERF Sarah Ditum is cited as a leading critic of Brand in this regard. (I can think of a few people, since outed as TERFs, who first slammed the Vampire Castle essay, come to think of it.) But such is hindsight. It is all too easy to pick apart an eight-year-old essay for its blind spots. Nevertheless, I think it’s central argument is something that we should remain aware of. In part because, whilst Fisher’s legacy is continually denounced, thanks to the nuclear fallout of “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, it is notable that the left later changed its tune to fall in line with his argument.

Contrary to this position, Lennard writes:

As has often been pointed out, there is a constant conflict at play when radical or militant ideas or images enter the popular imaginary under capitalism… At the same time radical ideas might spread and resonate across mainstream and pop media platforms (and thus provide the potential for rupture), these ideas and images are recuperated immediately into capital. Brand calls for revolution, and online media traffic bounces, magazines sell, bloggers like me respond, advertisers smile, Brand’s popularity/notoriety surges, the rich, as ever, get richer.

But Fisher was steadfast in his argument that this catch-22 was not going to be solved by such “reflexive impotence”. There is no space “outside” capitalism that we can appeal to. But to respond to that by righteously sitting out, or rather using your own popular platform to attack someone else with a bigger one, achieves nothing. The only way out is through. For that, we need to work with what we’ve got. We need leaders and we need parties and we need politics. The purity of “neo-anarchism” will not help us. (Fisher’s pun on the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” is fitting — their cries of “no future” were an affirmation of working-class fury against Thatcher’s invention of the middle class. “No future” is a lot less powerful rallying cry when the cry from the other side of the political divide is that all too harmonic “no alternative”.) As Fisher wrote in “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, “Purism shades into fatalism”. For the average leftist in 2013, it was “better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.”

If we’ve course-corrected in this regard — although Twitter remains home to various shades of impotent and reactionary leftists — it is down to the likes of Fisher. In this sense, “Exiting the Vampire Castle” wasn’t an ur-text for the present culture war; it wasn’t a prefiguration of our sorry “cancel culture”. It was a central text within a leftist battle that we have conveniently forgotten — a battle between Blairite centrists, who saw anything left of centre as a pipedream, and post-Occupy “neo-anarchists”, who had witnessed the emergence of a newly emboldened undercommons around the financial crash of 2008, but who nonetheless rejected the corrupting potential of any sort of political or cultural influence whatsoever. The Corbyn era proved that the left’s shying away from mainstream politics was a mistake. We’ve learnt our lesson since, but it was Fisher, amongst others, who taught it to us. He deserves to be remembered for that.

A Brief History of the New:
Guest Lecture with Ctrl Network

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I’m very excited to be returning to Ctrl Network in April to give another guest lecture on “the new”. Last time I spoke at Ctrl Network, I presented new research, which later turned into the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire. This lecture might end up being something similar. A prologue of sorts to a book on accelerationism I started last year.

Read the abstract below, and book a place on Eventbrite to come listen live and join the Q&A on 21st April 2021, 13.00-15.00 GMT.

A Brief History of the New

How do we free ourselves from the tyranny of the “post-“? Jumping off from Fisher’s unfinished lecture series, which ends with post-structuralism’s moment of absolute negation, this lecture will return to the philosophy’s beginnings, tracing a wandering line of abstraction from Heraclitus to the Ccru, considering how “the new” has been thought and we might begin to think “the new” anew again.

Concluding the Ctrl Network reading group series exploring the lecture transcripts of Matt Colquhoun’s Postcapitalist Desire: Mark Fisher the Final Lectures, we are very excited to host a special guest lecture from Matt on Wednesday 21st April 2021, 1-3pm, with a chance for attendees to ask questions.

This event will take place online via Zoom. A link will be supplied nearer the time. There are limited places at this event so register early to avoid disappointment!

Please note, Matt’s lecture will be recorded and made available at a future date on our website.

In the meantime, our reading group will be exploring the final lecture transcripts as well as Matt’s introduction to the book in our monthly online sessions. All are welcome to join. To find out more, see our website.

What is an Institution?:
On the Thoughts of Police

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What is an institution? It’s more than just a building or a name or a person. An institution is a “body”.

We talk about government bodies or educational bodies. We talk about institutional “bodies” because institutions are sets of relations that both think and act. They are not just one thing. An institution is, in this sense, an established practice or way of doing things more than it is anything as physical and inert as bricks and mortar.

When we talk about the Metropolitan Police Service as being “institutionally racist”, this is what we mean. The Met thinks and acts in racist ways. It is also often sexist and classist. Why? Isn’t its very purpose to be just, to maintain law and order? Yes, but for whom? We can look in almost any corner of the law and see how it disproportionately affects or mistreats one demographic of people over another — poor over rich, women over men, black over white.

We already know this. Of course we do. We see how the police act and how they think, and it disgusts many of us. There have been mass protests over these issues, and with increasing frequency, for years now. We already understand the police as an institution — how it thinks.

Cressida Dick, however, thinks we do not.

When discussing the jobs that her officers undertake, in light of considerable recent criticism, Dick explained: “They have to make these really difficult calls and I don’t think anybody should be sitting back in an armchair and saying, ‘Well, that was done badly’ or ‘I would’ve done it differently’ without actually understanding what was going through their minds.”

But the very point of recent protests — whether for Black Lives Matter or, as was the case this past weekend, for those women mourning the murder of Sarah Everend — is that we do understand what is going through their minds. That is precisely the problem at hand. When we say the Met or the government or the media is institutionally racist or sexist or classist or transphobic, it is because we know exactly how they think.

My friend Natasha Eves was at the protest in Parliament Square last night. She sent over these pictures of the police choosing to better protect a statue of Winston Churchill — which no one present remotely gave a shit about — than the women of Clapham Common from the night before. This morning, we have seen that the thought process behind such a decision is being newly emboldened in law.

We see in very precise ways how the police think, where their priorities lie, and what influences them. We see how tactics and enforcement strategies brutalised and dehumanise, to the point that property is more worthy of respect than human life. We see how police officers are taught to think, if not by their handbooks then by the very culture they are immersed in. We watch very carefully and see what goes through their minds. It is what goes through their minds that is precisely the problem.

Then again, maybe Dick has a point. But is that any better? There is nothing more terrifying than an unpredictable copper. When a population doesn’t understand the way its police force thinks, then we have another problem. How is any institution supposed to be held to account, or maintain good relations with the public it serves, if that public does not understand how it operates? The actions of the police are frequently met with disbelief in this regard, but only because their thought processes are counter to any humane way of working. Either way, something has got to change. But what? And how?

When we talk about reforming the police, we are essentially suggesting that we should change how the police think. But how do you do that? How do you change learned behaviour at an institutional level? Do we give the police force mass CBT? Do we sit them down and have a chat? Make our case and appeal to their better nature? I’m not sure it works like that.

What do the police do when they want to reform the actions of the people they serve? Are we supposed to follow their example? Do we fine them and send them on a Police Awareness Course? Do we instead punish the police the ways they punish us? Punished police officers are treated as failed police officers. Individuals are denounced. The institution as a whole remains a problem.

This is because the police force is not an institution that understands reform. The law in this country is punitative at every level. How are we expected to reform an institution that generally doesn’t believe in reform for the rest of society? Little is done to address reoffending rates in the population. Why should we expect more from the institution that enforces punishment on those same people? We can expect adequate police reform when they provide adequate criminal reform. Which comes first?

In lieu of a stalemate, abolish the police. We know how they think. How they think is the problem. We need something new that thinks differently.

The Spectre of Acid Communism

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There’s a nice interview out with Adam Curtis for Jacobin in which he briefly talks about ghosts, Mark Fisher, and his latest series I Can’t Get You Out of My Head:

I’d like to ask you about ghosts. There’s a story by M. R. James called “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” which you’re influenced by.

The inscription on the whistle that the protagonist of that story finds on the beach — “What is this that is coming?” — was actually going to be the title of this series. But it’s not a silly thing. M. R. James was writing those stories in the 1890s, which I would argue is a similar time to now. The British Empire was collapsing, and there was this feeling of fear and guilt, that something was coming back to haunt you. I would argue that America has had that same feeling since the end of the Vietnam War.

That’s a bit like what Mark Fisher wrote about — the ghosts of the past returning to blot out the future.

I knew Mark. We used to meet regularly in a café by Liverpool Street station and have long conversations about all this. We appeared on stage together in Berlin, I think. But going back to this idea about ghosts, I use characters like Jiang Qing because they had this idea that you could force the ghosts out of people’s heads to produce a new kind of society. But the vital thing they forgot is the ghosts inside their own heads.

It’s the same with the Brexit people, who are haunted by a fictitious, idealized vision of Britain’s past. Dominic Cummings [Boris Johnson’s former adviser, who is credited as the Brexit campaign mastermind] accessed it through nationalism, which is something liberals are very scared of.

Already tweeted, this is a point that bears repeating on the blog: “this idea that you could force the ghosts out of people’s heads to produce a new kind of society” is, I think, the most succinct encapsulation of what Mark was aiming for in Acid Communism. It’s perfect, not least because it demonstrates the continuity with his previous writings that is so often erased, but also affirms that psychedelic gesture of manifesting what is in the mind.

I’m not sure Curtis’s new series makes good on that, as explored previously, but you can guarantee I’ll end up referring back to this indirect definition in the future.

“The critical legacy of theorist Mark Fisher is
a creative springboard for a new wave of musicians and thinkers”:
For k-punk reviewed in The Wire

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There’s a storming review of January’s For k-punk event in this month’s Wire magazine. Commenting on both our event and the fourth annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, which was given by Test Dept this year, Ryan Meehan writes:

The originality of these two events, and the variation between them, speak to the durability of Fisher’s ideas as cultural source code, and the potential they have — with growing institutional support — to engender crosscurrents and modes of production as yet unforeseen.

He notes that Test Dept represented, for Fisher, a form of “‘popular modernism’, that point of contact between mass audiences and the avant garde”, adding:

If popular modernism was an aesthetic for the advancement of the proletariat, then hauntology is the aesthetic that keeps this new precariat hanging on. For K-Punk: Postcapitalist Desires at the ICA offers variants on this uncanny mode and mood, in which the irrepressible spirit of utopian optimism is held in a melancholy tension with a future of surveillance, exploitation, and climate catastrophe.

The overview of the sets is really positive, but Iceboy Violet was the highlight for Meehan:

The programme’s crescendo belongs … to a live set by Iceboy Violet. An adept sonic contortionist with a bracing, confessional speak-song, they address the knot of all too contemporary anxieties that their rhythm strains to untangle.

He concludes:

For Mark Fisher, the future was something to be excavated. What those that come after him will bring to the surface remains to be seen. But their numbers are growing.

It’s an excellent write-up that I think clarifies the generative but nonetheless Baudrillardian tension within Mark’s legacy brilliantly. Go check out the full review in issue #446. It’s been fantastic to see the event being so well-received. We’ve already got ideas for next year…

Badiou’s Platonic Exit:
Egress Turns One

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After first watching this film at the start of lockdown — and finding little of value in it, if I’m being honest — I returned to it a few weeks ago, having actually read a fair bit of Badiou now, and found the whole thing much more resonant.

It’s a tricky sort of documentary. As an introduction to the man himself — at least for the uninitiated, as I was on my first watch — it probably appears to be ninety minutes of some coughing Frenchman talking about nothing much of any particular depth or interest. But I can appreciate it a bit more now for the seeds it plants along the way.

Each sequence feels like an introduction to one of Badiou’s primary concerns, introduced in the most basic terms possible — sometimes to their own detriment. (Asking “What is a woman?” remains a questionable look, even if — or maybe especially if — it’s part of your Lacanian routine.) However, discovering how those concerns unravel and complexify over the course of his work is quite a thrilling undertaking — at least for me, still in the depths of things.

Documentary reappraisals aside, I wanted to share, briefly, a quotation taken from early on in the film, where Badiou talks about Plato’s allegory of the cave. I liked this a lot.

The cave of Plato. You know the famous cave of Plato? Take the cave as the metaphor of the world in its normal, oppressive, obscure situation. So, the world as it is. The world where there exists oppression, division, rich and poor, and so on. What Plato explains is that you can find an exit.

The exit is something that you find by chance, practically always. Revolt, new invention, love encounter. Unpredictable, unpredictable. And what Plato says is that, progressively, the idea is the discovery of a new meaning of the world. You see something of the truth of the world, which was invisible when we were in the cave. And from outside the cave you understand that you were in the cave. When you are in the cave, you don’t know that you are in the cave. And Plato describes magnificently, you see the trees, you see the sky, and finally you see the sun. And the sun is the metaphor of the idea. That is, it’s the idea of what is the true nature of the cave, what is the true nature of the world.

And Plato, at this moment, said, what you must do with all that, with the idea. We must return to the cave. You must return to the cave. To do what? To organise the exit. At first, you have had the chance to find the exit, and your duty is to return to the cave to organise the exit of all people of the cave. Not for some aristocratic minority of the cave but for the great masses of the cave.

And this movement is politics.

As I continue to battle with my book Egress, which turns one today — as I continue to think about what it was for, what it meant to me then, what it means to me now, what it contains and what it lacks — Badiou’s comments on that eureka moment and that moment of political action and commitment — that exit from the cave and the necessary return to it — feels like a nice sentiment to internalise and newly affirm.

Egress was, of course, meant to be an egress. I had hopes, this time last year, that it would become a capstone to a few years’ worth of work; a way to commemorate what was, for me, an extraordinary amount of movement sideways. It was a chance to duck out, on a personal level, and pass the story on. I thought I was done, and due a moment to settle into whatever came next. Mark’s death had completely redirected the course of my life at that point, and given a traumatic foundation to a whole new set of commitments that I have so far spent over four years very consciously trying to weather and stay true to. I thought what I had to look forward to was a chance to stop working; a chance to take a break. It turned out it was far too late for that. The egress wasn’t to come; it had already occurred.

Suffice it to say, I wasn’t the same person after Mark died. When I try and list all the ways in which that is true, the list never ends. As melodramatic as it sounds, I feel there is no better way to put it: Mark’s death was apocalyptic. It was a great unveiling. A world ended and another one emerged in its place. Such was the tension at the heart of Egress — the desire to go back and somehow stop it from happening; the knowledge that so much good had come out of that moment all the same.

So many people, over the years, have cynically tied Mark’s depression to his political commitments, as if he was no longer here because he stopped believing another world was possible. Like Rothko, from that moment on people looked at his work and saw nothing but a suicide, conveniently ignoring all the colour and humour that had been there from the start. This was especially true for the rest of us at Goldsmiths. Once the dust had settled, after we’d stopped kicking it up in our grief-stricken abandon, at ill-advised raves and in moments of collective catharsis, we realised Mark’s death didn’t foreclose a world but made another one possible. It showed us, in all the grief and horror, that the facts of our lives are so malleable, and we could treat each other with the same care and compassion we did every day after Mark died, if we let ourselves.

Egress was an attempt to share that initial experience and the thoughts it provoked. It felt important to do so, especially because my experience was not singular. We all felt like the course of our lives had been redirected, and in a very literal sense. With my photographer’s instinct still intact, I wanted to document every minute of it, for better or for worse.

But when I was out of the cave — out of the university, out of the social environment that had initially defined that experience — I almost fell all the way out, irreparably, flying towards the sun, towards the idea, getting burnt up in the arrogance and stupidity of an absolute exit. I wanted out, and I thought I could write my way there. But a return was always necessary. In private, I made attempts to patch-up strained friendships. I built back relationships that had been worn down by the years of erratic mental health. I went back to that community of like-minded people that the book eventually became a tribute to — gently and over time, as I set about finishing a text I had started anxiously but found hard to abandon — watching as the book and the For k-punk nights and all the rest of it grew far beyond in its initial configuration…

Looking back on it now — all the fraught conversations and bad decisions — it makes me think an inevitable return to the cave ain’t such a bad fate after all.

I started putting together Postcapitalist Desire just a few weeks after Egress came out. At that time it was clear that some of the reviewers of Egress just didn’t seem to get it. Perhaps because it felt like a capstone to a story that hadn’t been properly told yet. Postcapitalist Desire wasn’t intended as an addendum to Egress. Even if it was, it doesn’t work as one. But what I didn’t expect was that it would become something of a prelude. People who were nowhere near Goldsmiths have since gained a sense of what Mark was building towards and the despair some of us felt when we understood it would never be realised. Egress is the story of what came next, at least for those of us present. That is, at least, what people tell me. For me, the journey is reversed. Postcapitalist Desire was a return, not a prelude. It was the political act to Egress‘s exit. Putting that book together completed the journey that Egress began, when the first words were written for it, back in 2017. It hasn’t undermined Egress for me. It has only made me treasure that exit all the more. There would have been no return to make without it.

There are still many more ways out, with Mark’s work or without it. I still feel the weight of Mark’s work, although the work and its proliferation makes it lighter. I don’t want to live under the shadow of Mark’s life, death and work forever, but having committed to picking up a project that was not my own in its origin, it is difficult to know how best to set it down again. I keep trying, but it keeps leading to new avenues and new encounters. And so it should. Mark’s gone and he is still so sorely missed, but I think we’ve resisted the impulse to mummify his legacy. I look forward to seeing what comes of it next.

Until then…

Happy birthday, Egress.

Extinction, Apocalypse and Desire:
XG with Thomas Moynihan on the MIT Press Podcast

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I really enjoyed talking to Tom about his work a few weeks back, hosted by Sam Kelly at the MIT Press Podcast. Tom and I have been friends for a few years now, since Cave Twitter coalesced into the Vast Abrupt. The last time we saw each other, he and Laurie Kent came round for dinner at XG HQ after the Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture and we broke bread with the Gruppo Ni Nun. I’m very much looking forward to pints when we return to the before-times.

Having known each other for a while, it was quite strange to come together like this and talk business, but it was also a good excuse to just gush over Tom’s work for an hour, which I hugely admire. Listening back, my questions for Tom were big — perhaps a little too big — but that is why his work is so interesting. To think about things at the biggest possible scale is something I struggle with — a lot of my own work struggles with this quite openly, actually. But Tom’s work makes it look very easy, and it is thrilling for that.

Check the podcast out below or search “MIT Press Podcast” wherever you get your podcasts.

Notes on Lenin and Accelerationist Meta-Terrorism

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, terrorism was an increasingly popular political tool deployed against Russian absolutism. It had proved effective in the past. Russian nihilists — revolutionaries who preached the absolute negation of absolutism — assassinated Alexander II in 1881. A year later, another band of revolutionaries would make an attempt on the life of his son, Alexander III.

Amongst those hanged for the conspiracy against the new tsar was Aleksandr Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin. Though Lenin himself was not an advocate of terrorism — once describing terrorists as “liberals with bombs”, exchanging the word for the deed in their propaganda machine — his brother’s execution was a major factor in his own radicalisation.

Lenin’s brother, who was a firm believer in his cause, did not want to die for it. At his trial, prior to sentencing, he had made a rousing speech regarding the necessity of their actions when faced with the towering inequality present in Russia at that time. “Terror is that form of struggle which has been created by the nineteenth century,” he declared, “the only form of self-defence in which a minority, strong only through its spiritual force and the awareness of its righteousness, can resort against the majority’s awareness of physical force.” As his mother wept, he continued:

Of course terror is not the intelligentsia’s weapon in organised struggle. It is only a road that some individuals take spontaneously when their discontent reaches extremity. Thus viewed, terrorism is an expression of the popular struggle and will last as long as the nation’s needs are not satisfied.

Though perhaps convincing to discontented young men at that time, it was not a practice that resonated with Aleksandr’s younger brother. As Tariq Ali notes in The Dilemmas of Lenin, for the future leader of the USSR:

Terrorism as a political act could not be resuscitated. It simply did not work. It was an inefficient substitute for mass action. It concentrated on individuals while leaving the system in tact, which is why it had long ceased to interest or attract the bulk of the intelligentsia.

Lenin was, on the contrary, something of an accelerationist. Whilst accelerationism and terrorism have become synonymous in the twenty-first century, in Lenin’s time they were explicitly counterpoised to one another. The lessons the early Marxists took from their more terroristic anarchist forebears was that absolute negation of the existing order was only possible collectively. Nothing is ever destroyed by the limited actions of a few, no matter how explosive and deadly they may be.

Of course, “accelerationism” is clearly a term of no use to Tariq Ali, but we might note how familiar Lenin’s view of revolutionary praxis will be to many an accelerationist when he writes that, for Lenin, “the coming revolution would be based on the growing strength of the proletariat, aided by the quickening pace of capitalist development and therefore bourgeois democratic in character.” The further capitalism spreads, the more proletariat there are. Capitalism, in its expedience, recruits more enemies than it does adherents. And so, for Lenin, “untrammelled capitalist development … would increase the size and weight of the proletariat, thus bringing it face to face with its enemy.”

Is this the kind of action Alex Williams is referring to when he advocates for a kind of “meta-terrorism” in response to the squalid stasis of late-capitalism? In the twenty-first century, terrorism is an act that has been vetoed by any moral-political orthodoxy. In postmodernity, this is perhaps because there is no singular entity to fight against. Islamic terrorists wage war against the amorphous targets of a shape-shifting Western hemisphere in the hope of carving out a space for their Islamist absolutism. Capitalism, on the contrary, spreads best through dissolidarity, and yet becomes absolutist in its global multiplicity. Then how might we accelerate capitalism’s development further still? So that it might start to dissolve itself in its own acidic consistency? Williams writes:

Instead of flying the planes into symbols of western capitalism, we plunge the financial-capitalistic contents of the towers into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering…

The question of what form the praxis necessary to destabilise the current state-capital bond [might take] has already been answered in part — a kind of meta-terrorism, operating on the plane of capital itself (ideally, in the conception which has obsessed me for some time, in the form of a capitalist surrealism, the exploitation of credit-based financial systems for their primary destructive potential. This destruction is not merely to be thought on the ability to trigger vast crashes, which is readily apparent, but further their capacity to destabilise the consistency of value itself). That this consists in taking more seriously the claims of finance capital than even its own agents is the very point itself, and is in a sense an actualisation of Lyotard’s gestures towards a ‘nihilist theory of credit’. Further we might conceptualise the collective forms necessary to actualise this praxis as being very much in the mode of the kind of Maoist party delineated by Badiou in Théorie du Sujet, an institutional actor capable of allowing the ephemeral vanishing term of history (now surrealist avant-capital, rather than the proletariat of course) to cohere, for as long as required to enable it to achieve the absolute dissolution of all structuration, including itself.

Further excavation is needed to locate Lyotard’s “nihilist theory of credit” and Badiou’s Maoist agitations, but we might note how the establishment has already mastered the meta-terrorist gesture in the last two decades? The definition of the term “meta-terrorism” already in circulation refers to the exacerbation of panic and consternation when a terrorist attack occurs. We see this deployed by the right all the time. Islamists attack the West, the West ensures that all fear and outrage is directed towards othered minorities who are otherwise “representative” of the “enemy” — no doubt fueling further terrorism. Just as terrorism itself is ineffective in its targeting of individuals by individuals, so is meta-terrorism ineffective in its targeting of minorities already rebelling under the cosh of globalist capitalism.

Is the argument, then, that the only meta-terrorism worth pursuing is system against system? When capitalism experiences one of its many market paroxysms, even one that is ultimately inconsequential in nature, it should be utilised to inflame dissent against the capitalist class. Treat capitalism how capitalism treats the Islamic faith; use their attempts to terrorise the proletariat against themselves, fueling hatred of their hypocrisies and injustices. Many are already doing this, of course, although not under the “accelerationist” mantle. But connecting the dots between revolutionary movements can’t hurt.