#15

#15

A medium that is reproductive can take reality and reduplicate it meticulously, the way that virtual reality is pushing us deeper into hyperreality¹, a reality that collapses in on itself and brings the spectacle to an end. The tendency of reality to reproduce from one medium to another is the reproduction of the medium into the message. This tendency towards hyperreality was inaugrated by realism. “Realism seeks essential or scientific correspondence with physical reality.”² Reality and its representation is fundamentally linked to the imitation of the ideal. Appropriation, reproduction, simulacra, and simulation all comprise the 'new realism'.

Paul Harvey writes to us from 1976, to quote the then-Republican Party politician George Romney who described the American “economic system as neither capitalism nor socialism – but 'consumerism.'”³ Citizen Harvey goes on to say that the industrialist and former Interior Secretary Wally Hickel redefined the American political preference as “neither liberalism nor conservatism – but 'realism.'”⁴

Citizen Harvey cites Hickel as saying that down through the twentieth century the American political system has been swinging like a pendulum, from left to right and back again. Citizen Harvey demystifies any reality of there being a post-McCarthy era hidden Communist lurking underneath every American bed or that the U.S. Economy is somehow isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, for Citizen Harvey, the realism is in the enlightened selfishness of capitalism. And in this light, Citizen Harvey quotes Hickel as saying that “the wave of the future is realism.”⁵

Citizen Harvey stresses that this does not mean that the government should take care of everybody whilst nobody is left to take care of the government. “In trying to do everything for everyone,” writes Citizen Harvey, we almost destroy the system of capitalism.⁶ And nobody'll do that any day will they? Even so, as a caution Citizen Harvey warns that a minority can litigate and legislate away the citizen's own freedom, a freedom that is inherent within capitalism. So, it would appear that some amount of realism is needed to bridge the gap between capitalism and socialism and keep in check a rampant consumerism. Citizen Harvey's article also raises the question as to whether we should prioritize unemployment ahead of concerns about the environment.

From the epoch of Citizen Harvey, there might be something to be said about the myth of scarcity. “{An oil} driller dares not plan a $10 million investment when he doesn't know whether the price is going to be 52 cents or $2.”⁷ Prices have to have a high fixivity according to the myth of scarcity for any real capitalist to make any serious money. Meanwhile Citizen Harvey reports that economists protest the economy for its increasing complexity. Yet, “{i}n reality, economics is as simple as this,” Citizen Harvey tells us, that, “{t}here is no wealth without production. The way to stop inflation is to increase production.”⁸ The rubric of consumerism: once again exploiting the proletarian. It bears repeating: the proletarian must be abolished. Surplus-value can be proportionate to an increase in wages. Citizen Harvey tells us: “{t}he cost of electricity will go down when there is more than enough electricity. The prices of houses will go down when there are more houses than buyers. That is realism.”⁹

1See Chapter 2 for the definition of 'hyperreality'. Basically, it means the simulation of reality.

2Jones, B. (1989) “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities.” Leonardo. Supplemental Issue, Vol. 2; p.32.

3Harvey, P. (1976) “It's Time For Realism.” Ocala Star-Banner, Sep. 26.

4Ibid.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

7Ibid.

8Ibid.

9Ibid.

©Elijah Nathaniel James

#6

#6

Kapitalismo-sozjietie's omnipresent falsifications serve as the basis for unrealistic authoritarian planning, its industrial production proves superior to its bureaucracy, but its “bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture...”¹ The beginning of labour is marked by the end of a contentless freedom, the end of idlety, when agriculture becomes sedentary, confined within a locality by the industry of Kapitalismo-sozjietie, confined to “the repetition of {the sequence of activity}.”² Cyclical time, based on the rhythm of the seasons, governs the agrarians and their productions. “Eternity is within this time, it is the return of the same here on earth.”³ Without cyclical time, we are subjected to the movement of capital rather than the migration of people. The latter economy is more sustainable.

Bryan Silcock writes to us from 1975 to describe agrarian revolution, a “so-called green revolution ... that {can} produce enormous yields in response to massive applications of nitrogenous fertilizers.”⁴ Citizen Silcock goes on to explain that the fertilizers are “beyond the means of many peasant farmers in developing countries.”⁵ Citizen Silcock is looking for a “transformation in agriculture comparable in importance to {a} 'green revolution'{.}” Agrarian, proletarian, revolution. What Kapitalismo-sozjietie provides is a possibility.

°How does Kapitalismo-sozjietie feed me?° wonders Citizen Smith.

Citizen Silcock provides the answer: through the acquisition of the scientific knowledge that grass bacteria are able to alter their atmospheric conditions for growth rather than relying entirely on the soil. So, the lesson is simple – maybe the message prophetic – that when the system has appeared to have exhausted all its natural resources, it begins to adapt by colonizing outer space and create the conditions there to thrive. “There would be no such obstacle,” writes Citizen Silcock, “to the introduction of cereals able to 'fix atmospheric nitrogen.'” So, we see that Kapitalismo-sozjietie also has the ability to modify its own atmosphere to produce better growth conditions.

Citizen Silcock explains that “{l}egumes fix nitrogen with the help of bacteria of the Rhizobum genus, which form conspicuous nodules on the roots.”⁶ Alongside this thinking “Deleuze and Guattari offer a decentered and multiplicitous thinking which they call rhizomatic. The rhizome,” according to Postmodern Anarchist commentator Lewis Call, “is a nonhierarchical, centerless mode of organization.”⁷ Nothing in this pandimensional multiverse is unrelated to the centre, or hierarchy for that matter. The 'radicle' - part of a plant embryo that develops into the primary root – is related to the 'folicle' in that the structure of the flora and the fauna can replicate the rhizomatic foundations found below it, surviving in different conditions. Both the rhizomatic foundations and the flora and fauna configurations stem from the single radicle's extensions. The rhizomatic foundations rely on the radicle's attraction to light. The flora and fauna depend on the rhizomatic networks' capture of soil nutrients. This is our allegory for the relationship between the proletarian class and the bourgeoisie, that they are organically linked by the radicle, the root, of the tree schema, as once proposed by the eighteenth century statesman, Edmund Burke, whom Karl Marx vilified as playing the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution.

1Debord, G. (2002) Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press; #108.

2Ibid.

3Ibid., #127.

4Silcock, B. (1975) “Another green revolution?” The Montreal Gazette, Sep. 29.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

7Call, L. (2002) Postmodern Anarchism. Maryland: Lexington Books; p.123.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.

#1

#1

Representation recedes directly; the intermediary draws away from actuality. The spectacle of mediation accumulates an immensity of production under the condition of domination.

Socialism coexists with the production of the commodity; {C}. Kapital {K}, abstractly, is the commodity.

Kapitalismo-sozjietie is a “social formation in which the presence of commodity production reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.”¹

Victor Riesel writes from 1970 concerning wage labour, portraying the immiseration of the Kansas City labourers union of unskilled workers. Citizen Riesel uses the term proletarian explicitly, a term not anachronistic to 1970. Citizen Riesel writes from a time when strikes in The United States of America spanned across 22 states. Rather than the mobilization of the sickle and the hammer, Citizen Riesel's comrades lay down their arms. America's “endemic rebels,” according to Citizen Riesel, redistribute the capital of their expropriation by means of the strike.

George Shultz and then-president Richard Nixon author the apology of capital's representation. The proletarian, the immiseration, the expropriation. Citizen Riesel assigns power to the radicalism of rebellion with a juxtaposed view of an establishment that considers the strike to be “militant.”²

In a 1970's America, those who built the structures owned the houses whilst those who did the talk wore the trousers, the labourers were the lower classes remaining expropriated and immiserated in their masses.

A rise in wages means a rise in commodity exchange value which has lead to a rise in the number of bureaucrats serving the bureaucracy that upholds capitalist domination. If each and every one who considered themselves a bureaucrat, thereby recognizing themselves as the proletariat – Citizen Smith addresses ye, o people of the telephone call centre, the mill worker, the night-shift shelf filler – and walked out «en masse» on bank holiday Monday in the month of May then each and every one of us would get their own way, put it to a vote, let each and every one have their say.

That is what Kapitalismo-sozjietie does.

The collectivity, extending to all members of the commonality, share a belief-system brought about by cohesion. Between individuals consensus is established. “At the same time, their voluntary consensus links up with a coercion imposed upon them 'from within' – that is, by the collectivity greater than their sum.”³ Conscience collective describes the process of coercion by consensus. “Or, to reformulate, conscience collective is the norms, constraints, moral or religious sentiments, and all manner of symbolic representation that express a society and legitimate both its institutions and the actual behaviour of the people in it.”

°There must be something wrong with society if I'm behaving badly° thinks Citizen Smith.

The freedom to make choices falls under the illusion of external forces that nullify any determination of individual behaviour. Depressions mark the oscillations of liberal culture, the very thing that determines our behaviour, liberal culture. Material circumstances delimit the determinations that give us real choices.⁴

“Consciousness of the material origins of culture and its relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivileged. This favours an appeal to 'man's history' in which the unified subject 'man' has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this progress is said to be challenged.”⁵

1Gillette, C./Raiklin, E. (1988) “The Nature of Contemporary Soviet Commodity Production.” International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 15, No. 516; p. 65.

2Riesel, V. (1970) "Nation Disdains Much Authority." Rome News-Tribune, Jun. 23.

3Shevtsova, M. (1989) “The Sociology of the Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 18; p.182.

4Wallis, M. (1994) “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties'.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 38; p.140.

5Ibid., 141.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.