hex_m_hell

I keep finding useful ways of thinking about things as I continue to read Dawn of Everything by Graeber ( et al.)

The book outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” it argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead the combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together. While this is a useful way to think about the past, I think it's especially relevant right now to explore Neoliberalism as an ideology, Trumpism relative to other fascist movements, and what we can do about this whole mess.

Using this framework, I would argue that Neoliberalism positions sovereignty within the entity of the state (as the abstraction of “the people,” expressed through, occasionally militarized but often not explicitly military, law enforcement). In practice, a sovereign, as Graeber eludes to, combines elements of an authoritarian parent and a helpless child: the sovereign must be obeyed without question, but also requires constant care (to be dressed, fed, driven or carried around, etc). The sovereign is, by definition, above the law.

The aspect of violence beyond the law aligns quite well with modern law enforcement and the legal apparatus, able to kidnap, restrain, and kill without repercussion. While we will revisit this later, there is another group under Neoliberal capitalism that demands both obedience and constant care: the 1%. (In the US, the elite are so jealous of parents paying attention to literally their own children that they have rejected the concept of parental leave almost entirely.)

In 2014 Princeton University published a study basically proving the US is an oligarchy not a democracy (do you remember? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers). We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of sovereign authority, but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us plebs are actually of that “We.” (Yet, there remains a cultural expectation that one performs belief in that illusion.) The US was designed, from the beginning, to produce this exact result. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

How much more accurately could we describe “the job creators,” demanding us to perform submission? What are demands like “return to office” and “use AI” but the forced performance of submission against all logic and reason? As private equity drove up the price of housing, the threat to tech workers became “if you want to own a house, to build equity, submit. Otherwise, risk being houseless.”

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal personhood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Historically the liberal “left” has pushed for a balance between bureaucracy integrated into the state and externalized bureaucracy managed by “markets” (markets which the state is then also responsible for managing). The liberal “right” generally pushes to externalize all bureaucracy to those markets and also not manage them at all. The global plague of Neoliberalism that lead us to fascism is essentially a complete acquiescence to the later.

Private security and, even more so, private military companies add yet another layer to the sovereign control of violence and right to act outside the law. But whether in the state or corporations, both sovereignty under Neoliberalism is solidly in the hands of the elite while bureaucracy may be offloaded to the state (so long as it does not inconvenience the sovereignty of the elite).

The defining facet of liberalism and Neoliberalism alike, though, is that of charismatic competition (labeled as “politics”). Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberalism as an ideology. The fact that the two parties are not bound by any laws or restrictions to operate democratically, that they are simply clubs that can operate by any rules they see fit, that they are transparently controlled by elites to artificially restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, is irrelevant to the ideology. Freedom to choose who represents one's masters is the ultimate freedom.

This, not the arbitrary use of violence, not the blatant distortion of reality, not being rooted in white supremacy and Christian nationalism, this is the most important difference between Trumpism and the oder he's trying to replace.

Authoritarianism eliminates the competitive element of politics while maintaining or expanding sovereignty. State Communism unifies sovereignty and bureaucracy. Nazism and Italian Fascism moved sovereignty out of the state and on to the leader, but maintained bureaucracy (both for the execution of sovereign violence, but also for some elements of social reproduction). Trumpism follows Neoliberalism in the complete externalization of all bureaucracy not explicitly supporting the execution of sovereign violence.

In this way, Trumpism becomes a power sharing system between the dictator and the oligarchy. It stabilizes, some elites may believe, the relationship between corporations and the sovereign. It can even allow elites to express their own sovereign violence, so long as they don't threaten the core sovereignty of the dictator.

This is almost a fun house mirror reflection of the pre-existing order. Where once the federal government delegated sovereignty to the states, and states to counties, and counties to cities, all having maximum sovereignty within their own domain so long as it doesn't conflict with the sovereignty of the container, Trumpism places the dictator as the ultimate authority, delegating to oligarchs, and they to their corporate underlings, each earning their position through fealty to those above. Fealty being a key word here, as others have pointed out that this is just another take on Feudalism.

While analysis is all good fun, it's not alone actionable and what we need, in the face of this horror, is action. What does this tell us to do about Trumpism?

Let's turn for a moment to the section of Dawn of Everything from which the earlier mentioned footnote comes.

Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a rule's actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don't want to do). If 'the state' means anything, it reference precisely to the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

Society is a ritual. There is a limit to the ability of any sovereign to force our participation in that ritual. The sovereign requires agents, who must, by simple resource limitations, always be a very small minority, to carry out their will. The agents must believe in what they're doing, they must get something out of it, it must be valuable to them to continue to do it. When it ceases to be valuable, they will stop. When the agents of the sovereign stop enforcing the sovereign will, the ritual collapses.

Then we have two strategies, in parallel:

1. Do not comply.
2. Make active compliance as unpleasant as possible.

Neither of these necessarily require violence. A system can collapse through non-compliance long before defensive violence is necessary. But the ability to absorb violence is critical as violence is the only tool of the sovereign who lacks bureaucracy and charisma. And violence may become necessary as sovereign terror, thus the capacity for defensive violence is always an essential element of non-compliance. But non-compliance is not always visible, and invisible non-compliance can be enough to bring a system to collapse.

Now, it would be absurd to claim that violence is not the fastest path to making active compliance maximally unpleasant. However, I don't believe that violence has a well balanced effort to result ratio. Violence has a tenancy to alienate less radical elements thereby decreasing resistance capacity. It also tends to reduce capacity by getting people arrested (some of whom may be the ones who carried out an attack, and many of whom are not). Arrests bring legal fees and defense organizing, all of which takes away from energy that could be invested in resistance methods with a better effort to result ratio.

It should, however, be noted that diversity of tactics is important. Reporting people to the police if they use a tactic that doesn't align with your own effort to result calculations is, in fact, a form of compliance. Cooperating with law enforcement in any way is a form of compliance that helps the regime. I feel as though this should be so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but some people apparently are ideologically incapable of recognizing it.

This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also take on the aspect of the dictator. That is, through the dictator they become the projection of the character of the dictator. If the dictator projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the dictator projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. Openly mocking those those specific elements separates the micro dictator from the macro one. That is, it refutes their “right” to ritually embody the illusion. In doing so, it is a direct attack on their reason for participating in the ritual. Portland is nailing this one.

Acting outside of the law means acting without accountability. Trumpism (and to a lesser degree liberalism itself) asserts that only the state as the right to hold people accountable. Only in this way can sovereignty and the law be ultimately united. This is bullshit, as we've proved innumerable times in the past. There should be, and often is, a social cost to anti-social behavior (outside of the legal one). We have always had this power, and always will, regardless of Trumpist attempts to crush or belittle it. This is, of course, why they wear masks.

They wear masks because are afraid.

Then we turn to that most critical part of that so well known Ursula K. Le Guin quote:

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

The ritual can only continue so long as enough people participate in the ritual. The ritual is a collective illusion, a story we build together. Children pretend themselves into all kinds of world. Adults don't stop pretending, we simply forget that we've been pretending the whole time. Though a regime could even take your life, and force you to behave as though you were a believer, nothing on Earth is powerful enough to make you actually believe. That power, the power to believe the illusion, is in you alone.

The game we are choosing to play is one that has been given to us, not one we have chosen, not one we have crafted. Nothing stops us from creating a new game. Nothing stops us from playing something else. Nothing except the limits of our own creativity, and the fear that imposes those limits.