Oligarchy 8

Reality-focus and class power

Oligarchy benefits from factual confusion and popular mistakes.

Today, ordinary Americans can have little or no independent influence on any political result, and absolutely no impact on the structural configuration of oligarchical power in the country; their corrupt rulers, using state-created privilege and legal and political subterfuge, redirect massive flows of wealth upward to a tiny and shrinking elite, both from stolen time and stolen land and resources. If there is one general political fact that Americans most misunderstand, then it is not one that has anything to do with a normative political theory. It is rather a collection of factual mistakes and misunderstandings around the role of the state in social and economic life. It is the idea that the modern state exists to serve the common good, the idea that capital exists and competes in a free market economic system.

These are the factual inaccuracies that serve the oligarchy, and that therefore need to be at the center of any new political discourse. Americans generally despise this form of political consciousness and action because it forces a confrontation with the actually-powerful, whom we are taught to adulate and admire, and because it seems to be less emotionally satisfying. Most of all, it is because, as we have been considering, successful ideological interpellation has made the politically and economically important features of the system almost totally invisible and irrelevant to the prevailing political culture and its debates. To those who have been observing from outside of the partisan clownery, and who understand the structural relations of power, this situation is somewhat terrifying in its lack of any real limiting principle: that is, because we have missed the real factual questions for a series of entertainment-based, corporate-created fake social divisions, we now have an oligarchy so powerful and insulated from democratic accountability that we and our neighbors are at risk.

Once more, this is not new, and we have for decades received consistent warnings about the unchecked power of the executive branch, about the lawless greed of our ruling class in government and corporate America, about the parlousness of the military-industrial complex’s position in our society, about a culture of political censorship and mass surveillance, and about the glaring fact that a domestic and global economic system fundamentally inseparable from a machine of war and empire was always putting American at risk. I’ve written often over the years about how questions of war and foreign policy are consistently and purposely left out of the political conversation and off the table. What we need to start appreciating as a people and a culture is that what we are watching here in our country right now is a completely predictable outcome, and is not unrelated to what we do to other countries. Many have thought about this in terms of the boomerang effect or imperial boomerang.

The ruling class knows us, but we don’t know them.

The counterfeit politics tells you that you have more in common with a rich politician or official within your own party than you do with your neighbor or colleague. This is amusing as a joke or an insult, but as a political approach or strategy it is completely needless and counterproductive. Laptop liberals use this politics because their corporate overlords have told them to, just as they’ve told them that it actually doesn’t matter whether we localize and decentralize the political-economic system in America. In short, the most senseless and short-sighted politics you can imagine if you’re interested in political realism or class theory. But it is a good example to have insofar as it shows both how good ideas like liberalism can be hollowed out and degenerated by docile tools, particularly within a system like ours, and how we are never considering just one register or layer of analysis (that is, we can think that liberalism is good, while the political theory and program of actual liberals is ridiculous and contrary to its own stated goals). I’ll give you an example. One of the talking heads, discussing whether some very famous former House Speaker will retire, said that this individual is among the most effective and consequential politicians of our time, and that they had delivered a masterclass on “how to wield power.” All true no doubt, but this is just the misrecognition we’ve been talking about showing itself in reality. It would be difficult to better sum up our politics and its unsolvable, incurable moral confusion and deterioration. To be clear, I do think this way of thinking about and performing politics is fundamentally incurable and ought to be abandoned forever. A human-based, solidarity-based free society already exists everywhere in the margins of the oligarchy’s enshittified corporate empire.

The other way of life already exists.

We have seen and participated in this free world, so we know it is real. This is unlike the authoritarian systems politics is asking us to watch and support, which have never existed and never could, at least not as promised. We don’t have to do anything politically but withdraw from those false systems and provide for one another, building out and expanding that free world we already see in each other. Our current knockoff politics sells us so short in its praise for brazenly criminal politicians. It sells us way short by impeding ground-level, solidaristic activity in the direction of providing our communities with their basic needs. Our current mode of political bullshittery and let’s-pretend sells us short also by trying to hermetically seal each political concept, discourse, or identity, etc.

Our way of discussing politics cannot acknowledge the obvious truth that in the real world, people solve their problems and organize their affairs in an endless variety of ways, totally without a thought to whether their plan is conservative, liberal, Klingon, libertarian, Marxist-Leninist, municipalist, primitivist, or a part of the Cult of Cthulhu, etc. And the boundaries between any of these things are contested and frequently arbitrary. One can find the full gamut in many of the world’s cities already, whether officially or otherwise. The political world is not described by our politicians and those with power; their job is to produce illusory nonsense so that we remain unable to describe it for ourselves.

We have a political culture of sheer nonsense and degenerated ideas.

As we’ve discussed, the real and material political-economic divide is between the 99+ percent of people who are always behaving themselves as anarchists anyway, and an open criminal ruling class in the state-capital system. What our politics demonstrates, perhaps, is the lengths folks across the so-called political spectrum will go to to avoid a confrontation with the ruling class and the real political questions. We will indulge an almost unfathomable level of sheer nonsense from the political and corporate ruling class rather than even consider being in solidarity with our neighbors. That is the truth about the U.S. in 2025. We all hate our neighbors equally, on the advice of openly venal politicians and executives who care about nothing but the almighty dollar. We cannot expect them to give up their religion, especially if we share it. What all of this shows, to my mind, is that we fundamentally misunderstand and misrecognize the ruling class, even as they know us increasingly well. This gets us into what James C. Scott discussed in terms of legibility. To begin with, from a strictly strategic or realist standpoint, the past several decades have seen Americans put ourselves quickly into a kind of trap, in terms of being both completely locked in and increasingly legible to our captors.

We find ourselves in an observation room where they can see us, but we can’t see them. Many modern people believe there is no them, because we live in a democracy so we must be doing this to ourselves. But that is not true – in fact, there is a very small group in the rarified world of government and capital who behave like a mafia out in the open, no conspiracy required. After all, what are we going to do about it? That’s the conversation we want to be having, not this low-rent Netflix drama of a fictionalized politics that we are embarrassing ourselves with now. Because, political tomfoolery notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that both Republicans and Democrats have been using the state as an organized crime ring. The state’s job is to be a mafia, or more accurately a mafia’s job is to behave like a state. The state is the exemplar of organized crime in theory and practice, but its power depends on our willingness to accept its misrepresentations.

The truth is that we can withdraw consent and build something better right now, quite without violence or its cynical covers in the fake political debate. The oligarchy cajoled their lackeys in the professional-managerial class to abandon the world of political ideas in favor of an imaginary sphere of meaningless symbols in a vacuum. Reenter the political sphere now, but without accepting the self-serving storylines of a ruling class that has already told you what’s up: politics is fake entertainment like professional sports or wrestling; the obscenely rich getting ever richer while people starve and end up homeless is fine because GDP; it doesn’t matter if politics is local; it doesn’t matter whether our institutions and technologies serve human beings; it doesn’t matter if we live in a 360-degree total surveillance state where masked federal agents rove the streets; it doesn’t matter if five global companies own everything including any idea in your own head you could dream up.

They are going to tell us to vote and believe in our institutions, because they know our type. They know we’ve left politics aside for the intentionally meaningless world of memes and mayhem. It can be entertaining, but it is in no way a coherent or workable political strategy for Americans. There is the saying (although I associate it with the film The Usual Suspects, I cannot speak to its origins), the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. I think this pretty well describes the situation in the U.S.: we don’t like thinking about or talking about class, because we worry that makes us commies. So we carry on with this insane pretense that what we’re looking at today is somehow permissible and consistent with a notion of liberal democracy that is pure fiction anyway. I’m of the mind that all of that utter nonsense is holding us back unnecessarily, and I have seen with my own eyes that these categories (free markets, communes, collectivism, syndicalism, whatever) can exist both alongside each other and even within each other.

We should multiply the number of different ideas we have for social problems.