“Next thing you know you’re fucked.”
Joe Rogan
Most of you will have noticed a shift in public discourse in recent months. Whether it’s around Covid or Climate or War, state authorities and institutions whose functionaries are unelected like that of the WHO, the Global Climate Fund, or the military lobbying industry no longer so much focus the protection of their narrative on “disinformation” – although the business model of “disinformation” and “conspiracy theory” to denounce critics is a gift that keeps on giving and will most probably not be given up so quickly - but have opted for a more transparent approach to their own agenda: authoritarianism is good actually, and you have to be an idiot to not want to be told how to live. As Twitter mutual Silenced on Site has succinctly remarked:
This is quite remarkable, and could have been noticed in the spring of 2020, when the Authoritarian Personality, as I noted in an essay written in these months, had its heyday. The Left’s disdain for such the old-fashioned liberal virtues of individuality, freedom, and autonomy and its replacement for what now goes as “socialism” – state control – became a mainstream idea very quickly, with a hitherto unseen shift of power from citizens to corporations and state institutions. “So we support the police state now?” I asked unbelievingly, only to wake up to Twitter posts from members of my previous Marxist academic peer group who, with eyes wide open, endorsed police violence against normal citizens in the name of “health”, turning everything that could ever be learned from Marx’s theory of reification and fetishization onto its head form one day to the next. The ghoulish treatment of Marx’s legacy within today’s “Marxism” is one thing, though. The other was the talk of conspiracy theory and Schwurblertum (an orace-style murmur, the go-to smear against dissidents in the German speaking world). This went so far that just before nation-wide lockdowns were implemented, the German government announced on their Twitter page on Saturday that “talk of lockdowns” were “fake news” and should not be trusted, only to lock down the country on Monday, without ever bothering to remove that Tweet. Incredibly, it is still on the government’s official Twitter page.[1] The same went for “vaccine mandates”, deemed another conspiracy theory, which of course were implemented with 2G-rules a few months after Schwurbler warned of its possibility.
The script, however, has become a little too predictable. Now that mainstream media like the New York Times have admitted that “The Mask Mandate did Nothing” (which is not quite true: they enforced compliance), and the FBI and the US ministry of energy told everyone who wanted to know what they already knew about Covid-19 created in a Wuhan bioweapon lab with US tax money funding gain-of-function research, and the realisation that even UK officials never believed the narrative they told their citizens, after close to 100 000 WhatsApp messages between then health secretary Matt Hancock, George Osborne, and other officials at the height of the pandemic were revealed, the beer has become a bit stale. Bill Gates who, after Pfizer’s own head of research and development, recently admitted that the mRNA-vaccines do not stop transmission is just short of calling the Covid crisis a “plandemic”. The laugh is on them, because whatever they admit, they will not be held accountable.
A different scenario evolves if we consider a power narrative that no longer hides behind benevolent motives, but open proclamations of grand authority and little care about people. A case in point is a series of articles ran in The Guardian, the official organ of the ruling class, on “15-minute cities”, as the winner of the “rebranding of climate lockdown social engineering competition” is now called. One article by original Village of the Damned-child lookalike Oliver Wainwright titled “In praise of 15-minute cities – the mundane planning theory terrifying conspiracists” is particularly interesting. Though Wainwright mainly resorts to the “conspiracy” dogma – “no no no, saying this will mean you cannot leave your home for further away than a 15-minute radius by foot or bike is just a conspiracy theory” – he also tells everyone that not wanting 15-cities is as much right-wing as it is stupid.
Oliver Wainwright, blue eyed Guardian design commentator
To catch the gist of Damned Child Oliver’s “take” and his entitled mockery of stupid people who do not support to climate lockdown social engineering is worth quoting in full length:
“There’s an international socialist conspiracy afoot, and it wants to make it easier to walk to the shops. Fringe forces of the far left are plotting to take away our freedom to be stuck in traffic jams, to crawl along clogged ring roads and trawl the streets in search of a parking spot. The liberty of the rush-hour commute, the sanctity of the out-of-town shopping centre and the righteousness of the suburban food desert is under threat as never before. The name of this chilling global movement? The “15-minute city”.
Ha ha ha, thinks the Guardian reader, it is just a little jab, just a tiny little jab! Oh wait, that was the vaccine. It is just a little mundane city planning theory, for God’s sake!
“Never before has a mundane theory of urbanism been such a lightning rod for outrage. It’s like suggesting that public parks are part of a sinister plant-worshipping plot to demolish our homes and replace them with grass. Or that public transport is the work of a satanic bus cult. Some online forums have claimed that the 15-minute city represents the first step towards an inevitable Hunger Games society, in which residents will not be allowed to leave their prescribed areas. They see it not as a route to a low-traffic, low-carbon future, but as the beginning of a slippery slope to living in an open-air prison.”
Low traffic and low emissions for the neighbourhood indeed because ambulances that can’t access the site of emergencies will need to resort to the motorway, where the racist working class live. What a mundane solution! But of course disagreement with this new “policy of virtuous obstruction”[2] that presents yet another strategy for the disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens – and neither a merely a symbolic or minor one at that, but an actual and concrete breach of the freedom of movement as written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – can only come by someone who “shrieks” or “screams”: “As one irate TikToker shrieked, while jumping around his room in disbelief: “You’re going to have to apply for a fucking permit to leave your zone!”, Oliver laconically comments. Of course, the young man in the TikTok video does not shriek, but by this point in the text, the Guardian reader feels like wincing at the stupidity of those who do not like the idea of 15-minute cities. What’s not to like about getting a permit for saving the climate? Make Hunger Games yummy again!
Oh yes, the climate. I heard that people still talk about it as though this was an actual thing, something that has a correspondence in reality, without being able to give a definition that is neither tautological nor purely quantitative (“climate is weather over a certain period of time” - this is like differentiating a wedding cake from a simple cake by saying “a wedding cake is different layers of cake in space”, i.e., it has no quality of its own). But sacrifice our humanity to this thoughtless thought we must. Do not question the significance of “climate”, the precondition for its “change” or “crisis” or “emergency”, for, in another Guardian piece that innocuously asks “Is the tiny little neighbourhood the city of the future?”, most big organisations and unelected networks of leaders totally endorse it: “In September, C40 Cities, the network of leaders from the world’s largest cities, partnered with UN-Habitat to deliver proof of concept through five pilot projects. The journalist Fareed Zakaria endorsed the idea as a principle for the post-pandemic world. Deloitte identified it as a key trend in its 2021 study of the urban future.” Proof of concept through five pilot projects? Principle for the post-pandemic world? Key trend – when Deloitte, the consulting firm, said so? Oh my golly, sounds like we’re really saving the climate here! Let ten, twenty, ten thousand trains loaded with toxins explode in the US rust belt, but 15-minute cities will literally save everyone’s life. Except, like with Covid, we cannot talk about the reasonableness, appropriateness, or suitability of locking people inside a mile square radius, because authorities have said so.
Except the new lockdown cities won’t save anyone or anything, and our unelected authorities know it. Again, this is about power like the next best thing. However, the sheer speed with which the narrative has changed from “it’s just a little jab” to “you must be stupid not to like 15-minute cities” is disturbing. On the up side, the patronising “the thing the government does may be hard on you, but together we can see this crisis through” was way more irritating to the blatant “you gotta like it or we will make you!”, at least to the more gullible among us. Looking at the demographic of the Oxford protests and elsewhere in the UK – some the crowd of non-compliant citizens may even be more outspoken than with Covid lockdowns, and partly also angrier. “Love” signs hardly abounded. There is a good argument to be made that even emergency leftists – dare I say it – will not be “down” with the 15-minute city. The youngish constituency of left-wing voters likes the travel, to party, and to shop, with the cool shops, flea markets and clubs a popular weekend travelling destination in the bigger cities. It seems unreal in hindsight that Covid lockdowns took all of that away to allegedly save 100 million lives, which is something no longer discussed for the fear of total humiliation and ridicule of the original propaganda. But will the people – even people on the Left – go along with it yet again? While authorities are getting more aggressive in their communication strategy with climate lockdowns, young, left-leaning TikTok influencers may not be as easily gaslighted by people like Oliver Wainwright this time around.
It may be that with their entitlement to power and their open hostility and ridicule towards dissenters, governmental elites have just overstretched it. Naturally, they won’t let it go so easily. But after three years of the bio-political surveillance state, the human original desire for normality and a basic share of freedom can no longer be denied.
Cover: Sparks, “Tryout for the Human Race”, video still (1979)
Well this "revolution eats its children" scenario seems too me - i have too little faith in the TikTok people - too optimistic. Give them some candy and some privileges, smear a little honey on the top of the turd and they will eat it with relish - and film it for Tiktok while they eat it, to tell everyone how great the honey shit tastes.
Have you ever considered that this is a flaw inherent to Marxism itself? Your attempts to resuscitate Marx as a paragon of 'liberal virtue' strikes me as coming from someone in the grips of pretty severe cognitive dissonance. Even if we grant that Marx didn't intend for the failure of the transition from socialism to communism to result in failure, it always has. That is a fact that cannot be denied.
We can tie ourselves in knots over the meaning of 'abolish private property', as Evangelical Christians deliberate over multiple interpretations of the Gospel, but to average prole who hasn't spent years devouring Marxist literature, it seems like an imperative and a fundamental tenet of Marxism.
I also don't understand how one could l envision moving towards a classless and stateless society without the kinds of authoritarianism you rightly criticise. The 'levelling' *requires* not only authoritarianism, but totalitarianism: everyone needs to be on the same page or it just won't work. Again, Marx may not have *intended* for that to be the case, but it is nonetheless a requirement. If Covid has taught us anything, people don't spontaneously rise up and overthrow totalitarian regimes, the regime always dissolves internally before they eventually do revolt.
By that juncture, people would be so jaded and cynical that they would be right not to, and probably wouldn't, tolerate the imposition of another ideological and material imposition on the lives they're trying to rebuild – which is what communism, rightly or wrongly, requires.
If you can figure out a way to transition to communism without any top down restructuring of society and of people's psyche, please let me know – I'm interested.