Light Cue 23

Revolution, as understood in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, meant a seizing of the means of production and state power. This no longer makes sense. To seize power is to fall into the very trap of the capitalist and anti-capitalist revolutions. The true rupture points in a society are not those places wherein an accumulation of power is exerted over a populous. The true rupture points lay in the shadows. They are in front of us yet hidden from view. They are invisible.

It is held as common knowledge by many that the failure of the 20th century “communist” revolutions proves that not only is any derivative of Marxist theory wrong, but that the only viable option is liberal democratic market capitalism. The true failure of the “communist” revolutions was precisely their inability to rework the social or economic order. Zizek, in In Defense of Lost Causes, argues that liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. Liberal democracy is a system which, to its very core, reinforces the values of the Bourgeois class. If this is true, most 20th century dictatorships are merely a twisted inversion of that logic. Instead of smooth market flow, we have forced top down control. Either way the focus is on pockets of wealth and power and the exercise of control from as high up the pyramid as possible.

Taking this newly cleaned Marxist lens and looking at serfdom as the dictatorship of the Aristocracy and liberal-democratic market capitalism as the dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, what then would a dictatorship of the Proletariat look like?

Obviously when we say ‘Dictatorship’ we are not talking here of totalitarian political regimes. That kind of centralized power and socio-economic control is tied in with Democracy’s Bourgeois dictatorship. Capital(ism) is about centralizing power through economic processes. This is a vast improvement over centralizing power through brute force, but none the less causes great misery in its wake. In order to keep the engines that fuel it alive the working class must be convinced they need not only more than they have but more than they can afford. Once the worker buys into this idea the use of debt markets allows the workers to “own” the things they were told they wanted by the corporations.

Aesop Rock puts it a bit more succinctly when he states “We the American working population/Hate the fact that eight hours a day/Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us.”

In short the “communist” revolutions of the 20th century were mere perversions of the democratic revolution. The revolutionary forces took market agents and forced them under centralized government control in a style much more akin to the pre-democratic governments than anything since. While the rhetoric was different the shape was familiar. Instead of corporation we had government departments. The names were different. That is all.

We have yet to see the form a true dictatorship of the Proletariat would take. We have no sense of what life in such a system would be. How would our lives change if we worked directly with one another for the exchange of goods and services. If the exchange value of our goods, time, and services was not mediated by the wealth extracting capitalists and corporations would we treat each other differently?

What might a new shape look like? Aristocratic dictatorship places everything under a single control. All power radiates from a single source. Bourgeois dictatorship opens that space up a bit. Rather than one autonomous agent there are several. These multiple agents overlap. They are owned by more than a single actor and thus have aspects of autonomy yet maintain permeable edges.

Perhaps this next phase has no edges. Perhaps it is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Perhaps the very nature of power is in need of revisioning. A return to the direct human experience is an opening of a potentially new understanding of power. A third possibility, to pry us free of the dichotomy of (free vs. controlled) capital, is desperately needed. Power, as an expression of authentic human relating, by its very nature destabilizes the classical power structures of capitalism (and its negative).

Capitalist modes of control are failing before our eyes. The dust has not even settled on the latest economic bubble burst and already the wealthy who control this planet are working to gain more wealth at the expense of everyone else. Already the new free commons are under attack by the capitalist forces. Were it up to them we would pay hefty sums for services that should be free.

Of course the devious nature of debt markets has made everyone so concerned with keeping a roof over their heads that we hardly have time to look up and see a world of free information, free exchange of goods and services, true freedom taken away from before our very eyes. Or to put it in the words of Dead Prez, “How can you represent if you can’t pay rent?”

Tags: capitalism, communism, revolution, social networking

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 05:05 and is filed under theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.