Thirty-One Theses

Part 1 of 2

Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight by Joseph Wright of Derby

During our CLiuAnon event in LA in December, I read what I’m calling my Thirty-One Theses. Below are the first 16. I’ll publish the rest in a follow up post!

Don’t forget to register for the inaugural launch conference for the Palm Springs School for Social Research (PSSSR).

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1. It is only through the individual that the collective can be reached. The individual is no longer a given in a fully reified society: all relationships except the most primal, preverbal attachments are codified, commodified and open to exploitation, whether through surveillance capitalism, identity liberalism, or carnivalesque conservatism.

2. The saturation of our world with liberal and anti-liberal ideology makes the market, not the marketplace of ideas look like an escape valve.

3. Understanding markets, understanding capital and our relationship to them is necessary to Leftists, because the saddest form of bourgeois escapism is through the broken portal of ‘idealism’ – of any sort, be it religious or political.

4. The rise of Christian nationalism is a function of media consolidation and individual atomization. Their agonistic world view resonates because it does reflect, mythologically on a primal battle, except the actual one, fought on spreadsheets with algorithms and CBAs. The primal war they cannot address is being waged on behalf of capital against workers.

5. Promoting, cultivating and defending absolutely non-instrumental relations between people and people, and people and art should be the goal of Left politics.

6. Remember that you cannot express yourself “authentically” or “professionally” at all times and in all places. The dumb countercultural idea of “speaking truth to power” is a complete cliché: perfectly routinized at faculty meetings and professional conferences illuminated by fluorescent lights.

7. Restraint and understanding of the terrain of our battles is a good and necessary thing.

8. Remember that retreating can be a strategic sign of strength: retreat is not surrender. When a dogmatic liberal or conservative is making outrageous statements in person or on line, a strong “disagree” is often all you have to say or post in response.

9. History is being erased by liberal institutions as much as it is being trashed by conservatives. As the history of class struggle was erased, liberals rewrote the past according to a “fill in the gaps” project of reparation and inclusion.

10. The violence of capitalism in destroying functional market economies, or small holders in the form of farmers or mom and pop shops is inexorable. The abundance bros get this to a certain degree in their attacks on the regulatory state, which impedes local growth, but their prescriptions are designed in the end to promote the interests of capital over small holders.

11. Don’t give into the latest version of dirt baggery on the Left, where we can indulge in making fun of normies again. If our horizon is a massive political mobilization, we need to be able to appeal to everyone, not just college educated people with specialized forms of etiquette.

12. Freud says that the voice of reason may be quiet, but it is not easily silenced. I believe in the ability of all people to find their way to this reason. And that it is reasonable to rebel, in the words of another 20^th century giant, Mao.

13. Liberalism was historically valuable as a set of first principles, but its institutions and ideologies are designed to keep out dissenters, ironically especially those who object on the basis of dialectics to its idea of inclusion.

14. We should learn from the gangster and the clown as outsiders to the system of decaying liberalism. Remember that liberalism is encrypted in a tomb of its making, but its hunger for fresh blood is unabated. Do not give it your blood.

15. The social media ecology of Botoxed influencers and extremely gelled right wing talking heads prospers because there are no good jobs for young people in the content production professions and there are many rewards for being a living ancillary appendage to the app. Always understand context of production, before leaping to political judgment.

16. Most people are not political and to live in an agitated state of political mobilization has been characterized by libs as fascism. Without an organized politics of collective endeavor that leaves people alone not to be political, popular anger inflamed by Red and Blue MAGA produce a lumpen proletariat of opportunists, provocateurs and larpers, especially attracted to demagogues and celebrities.

Stay tuned for the rest!