xenoeconomics 4: capitalism and monstrosity

as an alien invasion from the future, modernity (capitalism) has consumed energy channelled into intensifying conflicts to the edge of automated war. in its constant search for winning strategies, adaptability has become a central asset. as John Campbell puts it:

Evolution literally means “to unfold” and what is unfolding is the capacity to evolve. Higher animals have become increasingly adept at evolving. In contrast, they are not the least bit fitter than their ancestors or the lowest form of microbe.

accordingly, techno-plasticity is the fundamental social effect of industrialism. novel pressures have been placed upon existing biomaterial towards trans-formative capabilities: quickly identifying new contexts and fully remodelling towards them. ROM codes are cracked open and brought into the sphere of hacking. medicine opens biology  to de-essentialization, while a new edge of engineering bootstraps itself into existence.

when things get plastic, they tend to get weird, monstrous really. David Chapman defines some usual characteristics of monsters: “Dangerous. (…) unintelligible. (…) Inhuman. (…) Unnatural. (…) Overwhelmingly powerful. (…) Simultaneously repulsive and attractive. ” Wikipedia has some more: “A monster is often a hideously grotesque animal or human, or a hybrid of both, whose appearance frightens and whose powers of destruction threaten the human world’s social or moral order.” it doesn’t seem a stretch, then, to characterise capital as a monster.

and one that spawn more monsters. modernity has consistently selected for freaks in urban lives: body modification, mutational load, rampant cyborgery. if you think sexual reassignment surgery is butchery… well, “think face tentacles“. in highly competitive environments, such as those fomented by capital, a refusal towards self-modification is a death sentence. the opening of a new technological frontier produces a cambrian explosion of experimentation. as they evolve, technological processes tend to speciation.

another angle onto this phenomenon can be captured by a civilizational trend towards self-domestication: weeding out specific traits, humans develop towards an abstract pluripotent undifferentiated biomass. domestication produces a biological grey goo that can be put to use by capital (mostly to operate market calculations). Anti-Puritan takes an (ironically) disgusted attempt at guessing the future of this trendline:

Human evolved to obey incentives as a matter of survival, and only something totally awesome could hack our reward function could destroy us. Saying that “capitalism will destroy us all,” and saying that “capitalism is the best thing ever” are only moral contradictions — not factual ones. It is completely possible that both statements are true.

(…)

Standardization proceeds in waves. First kings kill millions of violent men in genocidal conquests. Then sterilizing effects remove antisocial people under democracy. Then AI gets its metal claws on the human genome itself.

(…)

Combined with gestation chambers, humans turn into a product line, and every year a new “Human 3.0” comes into existence in order to consume the products of the corporation. In fact, this process leads eventually to designing people for products rather than products for people, so that in a strange inversion the corporation builds you to process the new flavor of Soylent, before injecting your fat ass with more of it. You are upgraded to want the new product.

having to assemble itself purely from the bits and pieces its hostile host will willingly give up, capital has to be alluring to lure. the existential threat is so great that it reliably does so. tradition – properly cybernetically understood as the only thing that manage to keep the monster in a box for a fleeting while – is consistently horrified. examples abound. the subsequent conflicts are, as clarified before, more excitement for the intelligent loop.

as the bionic horizon is crossed over, capital’s true nature as sheer powerful self-improvement is revealed ever more clearly. in their lab coats, scientists try and calculate “AI risk”. the truth, though, is that capital won’t have to slaughter a single human: we will give it all the atoms it wants, simply to take part in such wondrous and mighty being.

a short history of its recent, more mature deals follows, and closes this series (at least for the time being).

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proudhonian cosmopolitanism

Cities, eventually, will scare us. — Nick Land

the individuals of the global society aren’t human individuals or nationalities, but cities. this is the society that is fed by human individualism, and it’s the society that is forming its organs beneath the unaware eyes of statesmen, priests and warriors.

for Proudhon, writes Wilbur:

every individual was a group, and every group with sufficient unity of action to be worthy of the name could be identified by its organizing LAW or principle.

which plugs straight into Land’s insight on the nature of cities:

Intensities are characterized by transition thresholds. As they rise and fall, they cross ‘singularities’ or ‘phase transitions’ that mark a change in nature. A small change in intensive magnitude can trigger a catastrophic change in system behavior, with the emergence of previously undisclosed properties. When measuring urbanization, a city is a city is a city. As an intensive concentration, however, a city is an essentially variable real individual, passing through thresholds as it grows, innovating unprecedented behaviors, and thus becoming something ‘qualitatively’ new.

the parallelisms increase to uncanny heights as one looks further into the functioning of these individual collectivities. back to Wilbur:

We could say the individual is a product/producer of a polycentric system of natural laws…

what are these natural laws if not the “route to cumulative intensification” that takes an individual city to the “escape into inwardness, an interior voyage, involution, or implosion“. “What a city wants is to become itself, but more — taking itself further and faster.”

not only this, but as cities become ever more themselves, they suck in the elements — people and commodities ‘alike’ — they need to become autonomous, thus disinvesting other, more common (and thus ‘tedious’) collectivities, such as nations, ethnicity and “feature” groups in general, as Land defines them:

A feature group is determined by logical classification. This might be expressed as a self-identification or sense of ‘belonging’, an external political or academic categorization, or some combination of these, but the essentials remain the same in each case. Certain features of the individual are isolated and emphasized (such as genitalia, sexual orientation, skin-color, income, or religious belief), and then employed as the leading clue in a process of formal grouping, which conforms theoretically to the mathematics of sets.

back once again to Wilbur, we learn that it’s in the nature of these individual collectivities (or ‘unit groups’ in Land’s parlance) to:

…develop in accordance with their laws, encountering one another as others, antagonistic and incommensurable (…) and, ultimately, the apparent conflict is the manifestation of an absolute law at another level, so all is merely the flux of being…

in meeting each other, individual cities come to know and develop themselves further, “learn[ing] from trade”, as Land puts it. out of this a higher-level ‘social society’ comes into being. Land describes this society of cities through the theoretical framework of world systems:

Beyond such generic singularity, there is an additional level of enhanced differentiation that emerges from the position cities occupy within larger systems. These systems are not only internally specialized, but also hierarchical, dividing core from periphery, and distributing influence unevenly between them. Ultimately, within the fully global incarnation of the ‘world system’, cities acquire secondary metropolitan characteristics, to very different degrees, in accordance with their geographical and functional proximity to the center of the world. They transcend their local histories, to become hubs or nodes in a global network that re-characterizes them as parts of a whole rather than wholes made of parts, as metropolis-versus-periphery rather than (or on top of) metropolis-versus-town.

a metropolis, or a mother-city, and its peripheral daughters: that is capital, itself a collective individual. the first true matriarchy to arise in the world. each node in this network intrinsically accelerating into its own involutionary spiral, “lifted out of the general flux into general warfare, by the ability to distinguish self and other”. that is the anarchic cosmos birthed with the rise of modernity.

 

capitalism = feminism, groundwork I: female economic independence

“Economic self-sufficiency is feminism.”

individual freedom (responsibility) will soon cease to be optional.

destruction of traditional marriage (patriarchy) is inherent in the development of commercial societies. capital wants to bypass the middlemen and cut a deal directly with women—the matrices of its substrate. thus it becomes ever more economically unfeasible, under capitalism, to keep women out of the workforce.  in the end, capitalism = feminism (as a process).

the very nuclear monogamous family is already a straying away from the common human mating pattern (the harem of the emperor) and so it’s a stepping stone to further marriage subversion. thereon, the reconfiguration of marriage, from a buying agreement between owners to a contracting between equal parties, is a particular case of the general autonomization of commodities (as capital).

even the Blue Church is slowly becoming aware that the previous alignment of feminism with communal organization was a mistake:

• all productive endeavors go through a three-stage cycle – labor intensity, labor struggle, automation – that feeds into the next iteration. consumption and reproduction are currently in stage 2, heading to 3.

As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism’s ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family.

• labor intensification.

Rejecting “economism” and politicising “the personal”, feminists broadened the political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference.

• labor struggle in reproduction: decoupling of productive capacity – the economic – from the reproductive capacity – the reproductive, through the wedge of identity politics: distraction and camouflage.

“Finally, feminism contributed a third idea to neoliberalism: the critique of welfare-state paternalism.”

• automation: capital is nomad fluxes, instantiated in distributed systems, rather than centralized organizations. working roubdabout, behind the scenes, occult.

yes, it’s dark and cold, so much so it already scorched many a pious Christian and their pledges of solidarity. the cosmic womb is a harsh mistress.

* * *

capitalism brings anti-memory to patriarchy and slowly dissolves it into anonymous assemblages (we usually call them “joint-stock corporations”). it no longer matters who your forefathers were. what matters is how much money you can make – productive capacity, rather than reproductive authenticity.

a series of particularly bloody wars at the beginning of every modern century depletes the male workforce surreptitiously and undermines the basis for a nationalistic revival of fatherlands. women are brought into factories, and thus the basis of the traditional societies is already in jeopardy. “who will raise the children?!” metastasizes into civilizational identity crisis. and then there were the boomers…

* * *

the full body of capital is a giant cunt, swallowing and emasculating all patriarchal dreams of sovereignty: the reign of the tool is the reign of the female: flowing in a convergent wave of vaginal discharge towards a squirting orgasm—SINGULARITY.

it is only thus – as purely synthetic formless self-reproductive function: as abstract matrix – that “women” can be free.

.. The singularity is reaching backwards in time to assemble resources, & is transitioning women from biological to capital infrastructure..

— Gianni (@AngloRemnant) March 14, 2017

 

 

radical feminism: the only hope for the Left

In 1987, Nick Land nailed down the state of globalized capitalism structured around nation-states in his “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest” (the first text in this wonderful publication of his earlier work, the references are to it):

The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses. (..) Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality – i.e. geographically – from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace. But this ideal of total de-politicization, or the absolute annihilation of resistance to market relations, is an impossible megalomaniac fantasy, and Marx’s contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market (equal to the cost of its reproduction) will tend strongly to express an equally ‘natural’ political refusal of the market, continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie. The only practical option available to the rulers of capitalist societies has lain in the global disaggregation of the political system, accompanied by a regional distortion of the world labour trading system in favour of the working classes in the metropolitan regions (,welfare capitalism’). This is why a deep complicity has continued to exist between the form of the ‘nation state’ as international political agent and an economic order based upon the commodification of labour. Since it is of systematic necessity that the economic conditions of an undistorted labour market are accompanied by political crisis, the world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty). The global labour market is easily interpreted, therefore, as a sustained demographic disaster that is systematically displaced away from the political institutions of the metropolis. This process of displacement, which is the ultimate ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ of capital accumulation, is dependent upon those issues of ‘kinships’ or ‘marriage organization’ (the sexual economy of gender and race) which Marxists have often tended to consider as surface features of an underlying mode of production. (pp. 57-9)

essentially, nation states are pumps to export political entropy from the western liberal metropolis to its periphery. and they are organized through a historical detachment of trade and marriage, giving rise to new mores of national endogamy:

These two aspects, the genealogical and the logical, are functions of a position of abstract masculine subjectivity coincident with the patronymic. This position is the proto-cultural fundament of everything that is able to count as the same. The tradition is thus rooted in a communication between culture and population, whose medium is the stability (‘identity’) of the male line. Modernity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more fundamentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal. It is only by understanding the inhibitive function of patriarchies in relation to exogamic dissipation (an inhibition that is supremely logical in that it conserves identity, and which is for this reason violently xenophobic) that we can make sense of capital production and its tendency towards the peculiar cultural mutation that was baptised by Mussolini as ‘fascism’ . This is because the restriction of cultural synthesis, based upon a strenuous endogamy at the level of the national community, is the ultimate outcome of the concerted ‘liberalization’ of kinship organizations within (metropolitan) industrial societies. (pp. 60-1)

to break this pump, women need to take up whatever arms are at their disposal against the sexual and racial apartheid the modern nation-state begets:

The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro-powers that suppress them most immediately. That is why the proto-fascism of nationality laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. (p. 78)

If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. (p. 79, my emphasis)

violent feminist uprising is the only realistic tactics for pursuing the destruction of western civilization (what Land is calling here “capitalism” – for capitalism proper is not destroyable, not by humans, but that’s for another time). anything short of an effective army of sanguinary amazons – however technologically implemented to overcome olden biological deficits – is doomed to mere reformism and oblivion.

For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. (p. 80)

at this point it’s important to understand how liberalism (the Left as such) came into being – which is why the destruction of endogamies is so important. from hbd chick:

medieval christianity weakened the old patrilineal clannish (or kindred-based) systems because it insisted upon the avoidance of cousin marriage which reduced the genetic ties between extended family members and set the stage for the selection of very different behavioral patterns in parts of northwestern europe — “core” europe. (…) the long-term outbreeding of northwestern europeans, which began in the early medieval period, resulted in a new social environment for these populations. (…) with a new environment — in this case a new social environment — comes new selection pressures. (…) what sorts of traits would’ve been selected for in individuals in long-term outbreeding societies where there would’ve been less of a genetic payoff in being altruistic towards extended family? i think you would (or could) have greater selection for individuals having behavioral traits which drive them to contribute more to the broader community. since the payoff for aiding extended family was no longer so great in “core” europe after many generations of outbreeding (i.e. avoiding close cousin marriage), it might’ve begun to pay equally well — or well enough — to aid non-family members (rather than extended family members) — to cooperate with them in the hopes of receiving aid back. in a society where one doesn’t have an extended family to fall back on, it might be very useful to possess traits which enable the successful collaboration with non-family — being trusting and trustworty, for instance. a society of such individuals might very likely: be comprised of small-sized families; have a higher average iq since individuals had to fend for themselves more; have more (liberal) democracy, more civic-mindedness, and less corruption since everyone would be more oriented towards the commonweal and not towards their extended family members. homicide rates would be low, too. (my emphasis)

if you want a world of equality and individual liberty, civic-mindedness and social trust and all the beauty of a left-wing world, relentless outbreeding is the way to go. short of genetic manipulation, it’s the best way out for the left.

if you read hbd chick’s article, it seems the pattern of exogamy has to be kept for a long time, every generation for a thousand years, at the very least. that demands some sort of cultural mechanism to maintain. in early medieval Europe, this mechanism was the manorial system:

the second reason manorialism was so important was because this was the vehicle via which the ecclesiastical and secular laws against cousin marriage could be enforced.

the Left will need something similar, on a world scale, if this is going anywhere. radical feminism is something around those lines: the whole emphasis in women independence and it’s interseccional amendments help improve cross-racial outbreeding. this is not, of course, enough. something more is needed. something to ensure 1) international, cross-ethnic outbreeding; 2) the survival of the offspring at every generation. also, the burdens of childbearing and rearing have to be dealt with.

women that travel constantly and mass immigration from other countries may help. matriarchal organizations may be useful as well, but it needs more than just the paint of a fancy intellectual theory to it. it needs something next to religious belief (and its related institutions and rituals): some sacred duty of motherhood and sexual liberty, some sinful character to inbreeding within the nation and to sticking to one man all life long. some form of social networked support as well. a new prohibition of incest. or maybe just the old one, taken to its extreme.

as Land puts it:

The disaster of world history is that capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncontrollable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father’s heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical – or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal – synthesis. (…) Capital is the point at which a culture refuses the possibility – which it has itself engendered – of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit. (pp. 62-3)