Civilization and Co-dependence - GZ

While the deck-chair candidates of Titanic America “debate” each other endlessly for the amusement of the passengers in steerage, the corporate Plutocracy pretends to party in the gilded ballroom, keeping watch on the lifeboats. Last night I watched Jeremy Scahill on Moyers. He detailed Eric Prince’s media offensive promoting Blackwater in the wake of Congressional hearings. The most chilling portion was Scahill’s vision of a future in which wealthy Americans hole up in fortress enclaves defended by mercenaries while the poor clamor at the gates for food, water, the basics. Far-fetched? With Oil ratcheting up to 90 dollars a barrel the apocalyptic scenarios concerning Peak Oil start to seem frighteningly immanent. Today there was news in the Times that Iran is moving to a more hawkish stance regarding the conflict with America, with Russia on its side. Oil, again, at the root of it.

We’ve often postulated that Cheney has been driven mad by knowledge of the actual situation regarding fossil fuels. Dwindling fast and already not enough to go around, is the basic scoop. We all imagine there are easy replacements, but there truly aren’t and the juggernaut of Western industry is a big thirsty beast. The straightjacket of the Conservative mind is not made to handle transitions like the one we confront in Peak Oil. Inflexible and given to panic-driven acts of aggression, Mad Dog Dick has made America’s situation infinitely worse with his batten-the-hatches approach to the energy crunch. Among his other acts of idiocy and weakness, he has subverted the rule of law, corrupting the culture he claims to protect. Cheney is a weak man in the wrong place at the wrong time is a useful way to view the situation.

American democracy is clearly approaching a crisis point. It seems clear that, should Giuliani trail badly in the polls, the right will be sorely tempted to instigate a Reichstag fire incident sometime before the ‘08 election, suspending the election in the name of public safety. In addition to their hunger for complete power, there’s the issue of self-preservation. In the wake of multiple law breaking and crimes against humanity, what do they have to lose? In such an overt coup, Blackwater and other corporate militias will be used to surpress any backlash and our 200-plus experiment in representative democracy will be over. A new corporate feudalism will be established. Social tensions will slowly ratcheting up as the middle class consumer paradise of America gives way to endless poverty and servitude. The unctuous pandering of the Right wing elite to the masses (NASCAR!) will then give way to increasingly chilly disdain amid ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege. The Republican embrace of the NRA, for example, will slowly shift 180 degrees toward mass disarmament. Slowly, revolutionary pressures will build, fought tooth and nail each step of the way. It’s an ugly scenario made worse by the fact that things needn’t have unfolded in this way.

With regard to the nature of spectacle, Guy Debord certainly saw things clearly and in your last post, John, you lay out the operation of spectacle with great eloquence. I had to chuckle reading your description of the stroll through the Galleria because I actually find it difficult not to think about carnage while walking through those utterly artificial environments. There is something inherently fascistic about architecture (or any cultural artifact) that so completely excludes awareness of actual life with its weight, its burdens and unanswerable dilemmas. In the embrace of mindless satisfaction you can see what drives the anti-western Muslims toward the insanity of self-immolation. Bin-Laden and Bush are the two faces of the demonic Janus driving us toward the brink.
However…I disagree with Debord about root causes in the same way that I disagree with Marx about root causes. I do not agree that alienation is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in Capitalism. Rather, via Lacan, I would say that alienation is a consequence of how subjectivity is created by language itself, which splits us off from the ground of our experience and thus from any real connection to the Other. For me, Capitalism, fascism, the master-slave dynamic in all its forms, is an expression of root features of human psychology and the delusions of dualism. This conviction perhaps creates problems in terms of mobilizing resistance, but the left can’t afford to get lost in spectacles of its own, as it often has. The Cultural Revolution, to choose just the most lurid example, was pure spectacle, pure street theater. And while Bush intentionally spurs the terrorism he then rides to further domination, the NeoCons lifted the underlying concept of “creative chaos” from Trotsky.

While tactically inconvenient in the way it undercuts sloganeering, locating the root malady in the operations of the psyche has the advantage of being true. Among other things, this anti-materialistic view stresses the fact that, in a system based on domination and violence, nobody wins. Ask any rich brigand on his deathbed - nobody gets what they want from this system. Capitalism doesn’t really serve anyone, and if that fact is seen with real clarity the spectacle collapses like a hologram when it’s plug is pulled. The material facts are not the place where change will originate. In this Marx had a 19th century bias that we should drop, speaking of beliefs and superstitions because while, left alone, Capitalism will never give plutocrats what they want, the hatred of the oppressed begins to give them what they want, which is relief from lack, groundlessness, a sense of solid existence. This is why it’s such a co-dependent syndrome, civilization, masters and slaves locked in a dismal discourse that locks in misery for everyone.

Guy Zimmerman