Necromancy of the Spectacle: Fragments of a Revolutionary Philosophy of the Future

Note: Ok so I was an idiot and rushed releasing the essay and missed lots of flaws, so I deleted the first two posts and spent about a week(?) adding to it and revising it. This is the end result. Also, easybib isn't working for some reason and i really dont want to type out the citations so i will fix it later.

Note #2: in this essay I cite Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and in particular his analysis of black and mixed race people in white dominated society. Because the author of this essay white, and does not have the experience of being black in a white dominated society, Fanon's examples are used and discussed only as metaphors, and when the author speaks of them, he is not speaking his own opinion on the matter, but rather, his interpretation of what Fanon has written, which is used as a template to discuss other issues which the author is more intimately familiar with.

1

We are, as agreed upon by everyone, living in very tumultuous times. The outrage sparked by the public murder of George Floyd has led to massive protests against police brutality all across the nation, and many people on both ends of the political spectrum have made surface level comparisons to another great and bloody conflict in the history of our nation, that conflict being the American Civil War. Many people, upon hearing such a claim, dismiss it as being overly alarmist and fear mongering, and I (as well as others) suspect that this is to a certain extent true of the comparisons made by right wingers, many of whom not only compare, but also advocate (though usually very subtly) for such a conflict to occur again. 

It is important, however, to make the distinction between the reasons those on the left conjure up images of the civil war, and the reasons those on the right do so. The left uses the civil war as a way of comparing the struggle against police brutality and state violence to the struggle to abolish African American chattel slavery. That is, they use it as a way of revealing their intentions in a way that is palatable to the average person, who has been bombarded by propaganda and imagery telling them that what we want is unamerican, violent, and oppressive. It is in this way that, through a clever maneuvering, we are able to get our message across clearly and precisely without invoking the images of soviet gulags and bread lines that our struggle would ostensibly lead to. 

The right, however, invokes not the political struggle of the civil war (for in order to invoke that they would have to say what they actually want, which would immediately discredit them in the eyes of the average American), but rather, the aesthetic of a noble, traditional, god fearing people, who are once and for all breaking their silence and rising up to defend the tradition of their forefathers against an over encroaching mob of cultural bolshevik queers and anarchistic criminals.

This inability to set out clear cut and definitive goals is due to the fact that fascism (as pointed out by others smarter than myself) is first and foremost not a philosophy of genuine political depth, but a philosophy of political, social, and historical aesthetics. Fascism (including all of its splinter philosophies such as Evolian radical traditionalism and neo-reaction) is possible only as a philosophy of aesthetics, because aesthetics are not set in stone, and allow for the central authority of any given society to manipulate the society itself, first and foremost through the manipulation and obfuscation of history into a sort of pseudo mythological narrative which is the backbone of all fascist politics. Take, for example, the statue of Augustus Caesar, the first roman emperor, in the city of Rome, Italy. The statue was put in the city of Rome not as a glorification of the Roman Empire, but rather, merely because it was a piece of history. However, because the meaning of art is completely subjective, it could easily be turned into a monument to fascism, if the people (or rather, the state) so desired. Or, for another example, Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus... stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol.”

Evidence of this can be seen in how, throughout all of the protesting and fighting and violence, the one thing the reactionaries focus on more than anything else is the removal of statues. It’s what they whine and scream about the most, like infant children wailing because their toys were taken from them for misbehaving.

The objections of the reactionaries to taking down statues are as follows; “they can’t be taken down! This is our history! You’re trying to revise history! This is totalitarianism!” Now, any reasonable person can see and understand that history isn’t going to be erased because a few statues were taken down. So why do the reactionaries fall back on this argument the most? It is because, to the reactionary, history is nothing more than an aesthetic, like a work of art or a statue. To the reactionary, history isn’t something that explains why the world is the way it is today - it is something that justifies it. The struggle and war and death which all led up to this point is what matters, not the nuanced material explanations of actual historians. To the fascist, history is not a science that explains; it is an art which gives meaning. But unlike most art, which is constantly changing and developing, the art of history must remain a stagnant and static justification of the inherently illogical and unscientific beliefs that are held by fascists. If Marxism is a philosophy which introduces the rigor of material, scientific analysis into politics, then fascism is the philosophy which introduces to it the static and unchanging dogmatism of artistic mytho-history.

2

The murder of George Floyd, the events that led up to it, and the events that occurred due to it, are among many of the events that prove Marx was correct when, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he said that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honored disguise and this borrowed language.” (The Marx Engels Reader, 595).

This is seen in many places; in the comparisons made to the Civil War themselves,  in the invocation of John Brown made by police abolitionists (as well as the term “police abolitionist” itself), in the idea that police abolition (and with it prison abolition) is the true abolition of racial prejudice, in the tearing down of confederate statues (which, in clarification, I fully support), and even in the memes and videos created and posted by young people in which northern civil war era imagery, art and music are used, which itself implies that the creators of this content in some way view the current Abolitionist Uprisings as being the modern day Civil War.

Are any of the things listed above bad or untrue? No, not at all. Of course police and prison abolition are the logical conclusion you would come to if you believed that slavery was wrong. Of course it’s good that people are producing content that compares the current struggle to the struggle to abolish slavery, which was a most noble and just struggle in a world saturated with injustice and exploitation. However, there are concerns to be raised over how, rather than viewing the current movement as something new, it is viewed as merely a modern day repetition of events that occurred in the past. 

This reappropriation of events of the past is, as Marx shows, how world conflict has always worked. In the same essay, he continues; “thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 184 draped itself alternatively as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing other than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795.” (595).

Though the spirit held by the masses of people out in the streets fighting for their comrades is strong, and though they themselves are the people who push the wheel of history forward, they will remain shackled by the ideological chains of the past if they do not break out of this backwards gazing fever and dare to step forward and imagine a new world. For, unlike the bourgeois revolutions of the past, “the revolution of the nineteenth century [in our case the 21st century] cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” (597).

There has arisen, however, a great, inhuman force, a force dedicated to the never ending, constant and ruthless reproduction and revival of images, symbols, and movements that died long ago, and should have stayed dead. The American Revolution, The Civil War, The Bolsheviks, The Free Territory of Ukraine, the Spanish Civil War; all of these are movements and events that have long ago died, yet their ghosts remain in the background of every movement with revolutionary potential, haunting them with the false promises of the old ways, whispering the sophistries of the past into their ears. This force is the Spectacle, the ultimate sorcerer, the necromancer who grips the world with an iron fist, twisting the bones of the dead, waking them from their eternal slumber and forcing them back into the world of the living.

The spectacle, by invoking images of pseudo-historical figures and events, is capable of preventing, or at least slowing, the dialectical progress of actual history. By infiltrating revolutionary movements and instilling in them the reactionary tendency to look for the future in the past (a defining characteristic of fascism, one may add), what is real in these movements is severed from the whole and set upon a pike which is paraded above the masses, who jump and scramble to reach it first, believing that what they are fighting for is a revolutionary future, when it is in all actuality nothing more than a rebranded version of the past. It is by this methodology that the spectacle renders harmless contemporary revolutionary movements, and it is this Debord missed in his analysis of spectacular society; he understood how the spectacle recuperated past revolutionary movements, but he failed to describe how it then takes those resurrected images and uses them to infiltrate contemporary movements.

3

Not only does the spectacle revive the specters of dead movements, but it mythologizes them, turns them into half truths. This is done by gathering up everything that was truly revolutionary about them for their time and magnifying it, while leaving out everything negative about them. In this way, it makes impossible all criticism of said movements, and thus makes it impossible for them to be overcome. This is contrasted with older means of suppression, such as suppression by means of force, which are inherently unstable due to the fact that the state must exist as a positive, encroaching force that restricts the people’s freedom. However, under the spectacle, no one is directly prevented from doing anything. They don’t have to be. It’s impossible for the downsides of any particular thing to be revealed and critiqued if they aren’t even shown in the first place.

It is in this sense that historical events become commodities, for spectacular society is defined by a “loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates…” which “merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the commodity form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 38).

It is at the highest stage of capitalism that history itself becomes commodified in the abstract, stripped of all nuance, truth, and objectivity, and sold to the people to satiate their thirst for meaning in a meaningless society.

4

Fascism, being a philosophy of pure aesthetics, can only exist in a society dominated by the spectacle; that is, it can only exist in a society where the relation between people has been replaced by a relation between the consumer and the image, the worker and the representation

This is because fascism, basing itself solely on the dead images and symbols of the past, requires that said symbols are constantly taken and reproduced, raised from the dead and repurposed, which is something that can only be done by the spectacle

5

In societies where the acceptable modes of discourse, activism, and advocacy are constrained by an ever narrowing set of norms laid out by corporate entities, based upon the trends of mass consumption, all of mainstream politics presents itself as a massive battle of aesthetics. From liberal activism to reactionary organizing, all conflict that occurs within the Overton Window is nothing more than a conflict of performativity and appearances. 

This can be seen in both corporate “activism” and spontaneous activism, government backed and anti government movements. Protests and riots erupt across the nation. The people demand justice; so the government renames a street. The White House is surrounded by angry protestors - so the president has a photo taken of him standing outside a damaged church holding up a Bible as a way of saying that he will fight for “traditional values” and “the american way.” 

In the same vein, democratic politicians take time to kneel and observe a moment of silence for racial injustice, while doing nothing to actually fix the problem. Why? Because fixing the problem doesn’t actually matter to them. It isn’t a part of their agenda. It won’t help them. What matters to them is that the appearance of justice is maintained, that the appearance of sympathy is observed. Structural change can go to hell.

This is how political conflict has played out for about 100 years or so. But now, things are changing; with the advent of the internet and the dawn of the information age, it has now become possible to disseminate millions of images, videos, news articles, and thought blurbs in a semi-decentralized manner faster than ever before. We now know more about the lives of society's elite than we ever have. And with this knowledge comes the realization that their acts of political performativity are just that; acts. The more performances that are made by our leaders, the more we doubt the authenticity of their words and acts. The more they do, the louder they have to shout “we really do care about you!”

But it’s obvious that this is a lie, for if they truly cared they would actually do something to improve our lives. But they don’t. The more our leaders employ tactics of performativity, the less they actually work, the less useful they become.

“In the inverted reality of the spectacle,” writes Debord, “use value (which was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification.” (48).

By what method are discourse, activism and advocacy controlled? By means of historical recuperation. Walter Benjamin, speaking on the subject of artistic reproduction, says that “an analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships [between the original and the reproduction], for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

This is what is happening to history. The historical event, long dead and buried, is conjured up again by the spectacle, put in different clothes, and displayed to the public; “here! This is the movement that will liberate you! Look to your forefathers!” What, then, was the original revolution from which all others drew inspiration? The question is nonsensical, for it has been resurrected and put to rest so many times that it is impossible to know. Socrates, Jesus, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior. The Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the British, the Americans. The Taborites, the American Revolution, the French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution; what is the original from which these copies were made? Again, the question is nonsensical, even if the answer does exist. The Spectacle has done to history what mechanical reproduction did to art.

“The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular time dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them,” writes Debord. “...they are lost in the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of the spectacular machinery.” (157).

6

History did not originate as a science. History was an art. It was only later that history became evidence based. History, like art, originated as a cult based activity. Stories of noble kings and warriors were told to inspire awe in the people. Stories of great struggles were told to justify the way things were. Historical events were, in a sense, autonomous; their context did not matter. All that mattered was that they were retold beautifully. Eventually, however, that changed; historians ceased to be artists, and became more like scientists, constructing historical narratives (for the most part) using the evidence that was available to them.

Historians would of course still construct narratives from the perspective of whoever they were working for (usually some government or military); that is an undeniable fact. History has always been political. Historical narratives have always been made and pushed to serve particular narratives. The way Walter Benjamin describes the production of a film here serves as a good metaphor; “The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests.”

We do not view history directly as if it were a play - we view it indirectly, through the lens of ideology. This hasn’t changed. However, what has changed is this; not everyone receives their information from the same handful of sources who share the same ideology with only slight variations. Now, the wells of information from which it is possible to draw are so numerous and varied, that nearly every individual operates from a uniquely politicized socio-historical narrative. It must be noted that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; quite the opposite, this trend of individualization helps to further liberate the individual from the cultural hegemony which they live under… if it’s done right. However, if it’s done wrong, it will merely lead people to become alienated from the groups with whom they share direct and immediate political interests. It is something of a balance that must be maintained, and we are failing to do so.

However, it must also be acknowledged that our experience with information in the modern day, so long as we live under capitalism, is not all positive. Because information has become so decentralized, it is inevitable that many of the outlets that disseminate said information will be bought up by larger ones in a sort of media arms race. This, in the end, results in the majority of information outlets being owned by a small handful of organizations. However, when ownership of the smaller outlets changes, it isn’t always the case that their titles change, so millions of people who relied on smaller information outlets are now relying on the same handful of corporations, and they don’t even know it.

Then, it is through these organizations that people are riled up and told to fight for causes that don’t directly threaten the current order of things, but merely shift around who sits where in the hierarchy. Neoliberal feminism, race reductionism, corporate sponsored pride events; these all exist, and are propped up by the establishment, to promote the false idea that it is possible for disenfranchised groups to be liberated under the current order of things, and not just assimilated into the capitalist death machine. 

I believe this is demonstrated best (though not intentionally) by an anecdote recounted by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks; 

“One day, Saint Peter sees three men arrive at the gates of paradise; a white man, a mulatto, and a black man.

‘What do you want most in this world?’ he asks the white man.

‘Money.’

‘And you?’ he asked the mulatto.

‘Glory.’

And as he turned toward the black man, the latter declares with a wide grin:

“I’m just carrying these gentlemens bags.” (34).

For our intents and purposes, this story can be viewed as a metaphor for the historical and social development of capitalism as it further assimilates groups that it once oppressed and strangled with an iron fist. The white man who desires money can be viewed just as he is in the story; a “respectable, peaceful” (for, as discussed by Fanon, that is what white society sees as the qualities of whiteness) man who desires to exist and compete within the capitalist system. Then we have the mixed man, who for our purposes will represent the individual who is partly accepted by society, but due to a certain part of him being not like everyone else(in this case the fact that he is half black), he is excluded from enjoying the same privileges as the man who is fully accepted by society. Because of this fact, he is incapable of existing and competing within the capitalist system as an equal to the white man, and must first earn glory, i.e., recognition that he too is a human being. But, because humanity is measured in terms of whiteness, in order to become human in the eyes of white society, the mixed man must become less and less black, and more and more white. 

And finally, we have the black man enthusiastically carrying the white man and the mixed man’s bags. He is allowed into heaven, but only as an underling, a servant to the whiteman, a doorman. He is accepted not as a unique black man with thoughts, emotions, and experiences, but rather, as the stereotype of the black man as submissive and eager to serve. It is in this backwards way that the black man attempts to gain the recognition of the white man; by kneeling before him and submitting to his every order, he wishes to be recognized as an equal. As put by Fanon, “it is because the black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance into the white world.” (41).

It is here that I will fall back on another anecdote recounted by Fanon; “A few years back, we knew a black medical student. He had the infernal impression of not being appreciated for his true worth, not at the university level, he would say, but from a human point of view. He had the infernal impression he would never be accepted as a colleague by the white physicians or as a doctor by his European patients… one day he enlisted in the army as a medical auxiliary, and, he added, not for anything in the world would I agree to being sent to the colonies or being posted to a colonial unit. He wanted to have whites under his orders. He was a boss, and as such he must be feared and respected. What he wanted - in fact, what he was aiming for - was to make the whites adopt a black attitude towards him.” (42-43).

The mixed man, the representation of those who just fall outside of the acceptable in white society, attempts to gain recognition by metaphorically bleaching himself white, i.e., by participating in activities that are “civilized and domesticated.” The more he becomes integrated into white society, the more he loses sight of who he truly is as an individual, and the more he becomes lost in his obsession with negating his blackness and appearing more white. His whiteness becomes a use-value which he employs solely when around other white people. The non mixed black man, on the other hand, attempts to find recognition among white society by falling deeper and deeper into his perceived racial qualities, and in doing so loses sight of himself as well. The same can be said of queer people, neurodivergent people, disabled people, religious minorities, etc. They are, within society, not viewed as human individuals, but rather, as the stereotype of the group that they are a part of, and depending on their status in said group, must either unwillingly shed their identity, or fall so deeply into a bastardized version of it that they forget themselves if they wish to be accepted. “You’re gay? You don’t look gay. You’re big and muscular and masculine. You couldn’t possibly be gay.” “You’re black? Do you like rap music? Smoke weed? Own guns?” Or, on the other side of the spectrum, “I know that you’re gay and all, but could you tone it down a bit? The painted nails, makeup and rainbows can in all honesty get quite annoying. Like, we get it. You’re gay. It seems that you’re just trying to shove it down our throat. I’m not saying don’t be yourself, but…” 

I’m sure you are familiar with and have heard similar questions and complaints, directed either at yourself or others. 

Under capitalism, members of disenfranchised identity groups are not valued in and of themselves, but rather, they are valued as perceived copies of a stereotype without an original, whose sole purpose is to be put on display and paraded before the middle class citizens. “Look at how progressive we are, we hired this many queer people and this many people of color!” As said by Walter Benjamin, in the modern world, “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Now, it may seem that this way of running a society and maintaining power is inherently contradictory and unstable. That’s because it is. For it is these very identities which are turned into categories that serve as pseudo-justifications for the way things currently are. 

The corporations, seeing, for example, that there is a large queer movement that is growing and entering into mainstream politics, decide to profit off of it. They contact the organizers and leaders of the larger, more relevant portions of the movement and begin to, through sponsorships, encourage them and push them towards a specific set of traits that are stereotypically thought of as queer, such as femininity, flamboyance, and sexual openness (which, mind you, I am not saying are bad; it is just how it happened to play out, due to the fact that gay men are stereotypically thought of as effeminate, and that it would thus make more sense to exploit that particular section of queer culture). This side of queer culture is promoted through the marketing of various Pride style products that are traditionally thought of as feminine, such as fake nails, makeup palettes, hair extensions, etc.  While this is being done and that specific aesthetic of queerness is being promoted, the other, more rough, rustic, side of queer culture (one thinks of the bear subculture, for example) are ignored almost completely by straight society. Now, if how a community evolved is artificially controlled through corporate sponsorship and the funnelling of cheap, mass produced items that share a specific theme or trait, it is only natural that overtime the community will begin to lean in that direction, seeing that the people who join and integrate themselves into it will likely be introduced to it through said corporate products.

Now, once this has been happening for a long enough time, eventually the image of the hyper feminine and overly flamboyant queer person will become ingrained in the minds of the general public, so when a queer person who doesn’t fit the created archetype inevitibaly comes along, the conservatives can say, “now this man here, he’s one of the good ones. He isn’t flamboyant and up in your face like those other faggots. He’s quiet, he’s respectable, he doesn’t dye his hair unnatural colors, he keeps his hair at a reasonable length. He looks just like a good ole fashion hard working american man, and that’s what I love to see.” The conservative will likely draw the conclusion that the man in question is only different from “the rest of the gays” because he was raised in a religious household, or because his parents weren’t exactly comfortable with gay people, so he didn’t come out until much later in life and was thus further removed from the corrupting influence of the “bad gays.” Or, perhaps the conservative in question is not particularly religious, and rather than credit the church, he will credit other, more secular phenomenon, such as toxic masculinity or majoritarian groupthink that views queerness as a weakness or perversion that is less preferable to straightness. Whatever be the case, it will reinforce, in his mind, the belief that the only way for gay people to “assimilate” (be forced to pass as straight) into the status quo is if the institutions he loves so much - the church, patriarchal family relations and toxic masculinity - are given more power over people culturally, economically and legally. 

The same, of course, can be seen with Black Americans. The perceived hyper masculine gang culture that is imbued in the minds of whites by corporations and the media is used as a justification for over policing, harsher sentencing, and irrational fear. One needs look no further than how Black men are portrayed by pornography to see this. Young black men, usually poor, often grow up surrounded by this culture, and feel the need to emulate it. This view of the world is further justified in his mind by the fact that society, and especially the police, view him as the enemy. If you are viewed as the enemy by the dominant power, and the dominant power has no conscience, all you can do is adopt an aggressive, war like stance. When you may die at any moment, you must yourself become a war machine. Again, we find man to be lost in an identity constructed for him, not by him, but by the other. Repeating the words of Benjamin; “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

It could also be theorized that this specific culture that develops is, as Fanon would say, an outlet, for “in every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released.” (Fanon 124).

7

In the digital age, the reproduction of artistic images is negated by the fact that there is no original version of a work produced digitally.

8

The liberal, insofar as he remains a liberal, is incapable of understanding the true nature of domestic political conflict. To him, politics is nothing more than ballots, campaigning, debates, and policy. He is completely blind to the true nature of it all; violence. The liberal ignores the essence of politics in favor of its appearance. He ignores the violence of politics, and focuses solely on maintaining an aesthetic of civility.

9

The liberal views democracy not as a means to an end, that end being a better world, but rather, he views it is an end in itself; in other words, the liberal views the function of democracy as being nothing more than the preservation of democracy. The details don’t matter. 

Whenever bourgeois democracy produces results that are antithetical to the values which created it (which happens very often), the liberal does not look for how to better preserve the values which prop it up, but rather, he looks to better preserve the system. He gets it backwards. He does not view democracy as a system meant to safeguard enlightenment principles such as legal equality, economic mobility, free speech, etc, but rather, he views enlightenment values as a means to preserving democracy. 

10

But what happens when democracy passes the point of no return? What happens when things become so bad that even the moderate is marching in the streets and fighting the police? It is at this point (a point which, at time of writing, we in America have a) that the people will demand change, will demand that the conflict be played out to its conclusion, and that justice finally be done. Obviously, the bourgeoisie would never actually let this happen, for it would cause the foundation on which their power sits to crumble. So, it is at this point that faux conflicts must be constructed. It is necessary that the thing being fought over not actually be of much significance, but it must be made to appear as if it was a matter of life and death. 

A recent example of this is the net neutrality debate. The internet was on fire with debate and discussion about how network neutrality might be repealed, which would allow broadband providers to take advantage of their customers in various ways. People were raging about how if the law was repealed the internet would be ruined… and it was repealed… and nothing really changed.

The way people were arguing about the topic, and the way it was portrayed in the media, made it seem as if it was a matter of biblical proportions. But it wasn’t. Portraying net neutrality as more important than it actually was just a method of distracting people from things that actually mattered. The same is going on now. The decision made by the Minneapolis city council to “abolish” the police isn’t actually revolutionary, it is merely made to appear as if it were so. If the police were really abolished without capitalism also being abolished, they would just be replaced by equally racist community patrols and equally brutal private police forces.

However, the difference between the net neutrality conflict and the conflict over police brutality is that people weren’t getting beaten in the streets over net neutrality. But it is precisely this conflict (when well maintained and kept within the grasp of the bourgeoisie), that will help maintain the status quo. As long as people are caught up in fighting over how to best reform the system, they won’t be fighting to abolish it entirely, which is what must be done if justice is to be delivered. 

11

“I embrace the world! I am the world!... The essence of the world was my property. Between the world and me there was a relation of coexistence. I had rediscovered the primordial One.” (Fanon 107).

We too must discover the primordial One. The original One. The One from which all existence flows. But we first must liberate ourselves, and our minds. First, we must liberate reason.