The Eternal Return of Capital

 1

The Eternal Return is localized, materialized, brought to life in the everyday workings of the capitalist death machine. Nietzsche’s demon brought to life as a Landian hyperstition that appears out of the shadow of the future; it looks down on you, smiling, for it has done this all before. Its voice booms;

“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and every thing unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you -” 

It stops. It Laughs. It knows. It knows that you know. And it knows that you will do nothing to stop it (The Gay Science, 125).

2

Unlike the eternal return of Nietzche, which is more of an ethical thought experiment than anything else, a thought experiment meant to help guide the individual towards the path in life that best suits them. However, the eternal return of capitalism is quite different; it is the material reality of modern life and society. Not only is its cruelty and barbarism forced upon the individual as he is forced to relive the same work day over and over again, but it has also been forced upon the natural progression of society, keeping it within an endless cycle of emergence, growth, decay and collapse.

“Stabilization circuits suppress mutation whilst short range runaway circuits propagate it only in an unsustainable burst, before cancelling it entirely,” (Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 298).

Just enough mutation to temporarily maintain the illusion of coming change in times of turmoil and hardship, but not enough to actually change anything, and certainly not enough to make the illusion last.

3

Labor has seen the rise and fall of capitalism, over and over and over again. And it will see it again. It was there, in the beginning, to lay the foundations, and it was there to build upon them, and every revolution sense this founding has done nothing more than tear away what lays upon the foundation, while still leaving the foundation intact. The capitalist machine was made possible by labor. But it is being forgotten, phased out, as automation takes hold of the economy and history begins to close in on itself. Labor, a product of what is human, will slowly grow less and less important as the human grows less and less important.

As historical time speeds up, labor begins to see clearly it's inevitable demise, and fights viciously to maintain its position within capitalism. This fight takes the form of union organizing, protests, petitioning, social democratic political reform, and sometimes even riots. But they riot, they are not attempting to end capitalism; they are rioting for recognition. They want capital to recognize the power of labor, heed to it, and allow its past manifestations to continue to exist in the future and maintain some semblance of power. Labor does not wish to end capitalism because it has yet to realize itself, and until labor realizes itself, realizes that it has power independent of capital, its power will forever be limited, exploited and subjected in its name. Labor refuses to make itself free, refuses to express itself in the act of free creation against that which subjugates it, and is thus powerless. We can say of labor what Hegel said of Spirit; its power is “only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, Paragraph 10).

It is necessary that we liberate from the necromantic powers that bind it to capital, the past and its own dead. What Hegel says of Spirit is what must be done to labor; “Spirit has broken with the world that it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward,” (Paragraph 11).

4

Contemporary radicalism reeks of theology. It stands against capital as a force of moral righteousness, with its own saints and sacred symbols, its prophets of the heaven on earth yet to come. Operating within the moral framework of capital, it is bound to fail. By condemning capital along moral lines, contemporary radicals appeal to an authority other than themselves. Furthermore, by appealing to forms, structures and signs already in existence, they fail their tasks as revolutionaries. By appealing to that which can be named, they fail their tasks as revolutionaries. Lao Tzu says “The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.” So too is it the origin of true revolutionary aspirations (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2).

What is the nameless in the individual? It is nothing, “not nothing in the sense of emptiness… but the creative nothing,” the Unique, the Tao. Radicalism should inspire people to liberate themselves from all categories, rules and sacred principles. In other words, radicalism should aid the individual in deterritorializing themselves. “The revolutionary unconscious investment,” writes Deleuze and Guatarri in Anti-Oedipus, “is such that desire, still in its own mode, cuts across the interests of the dominated, exploited classes, and causes flows to move that are capable of breaking apart both the segregations and their Oedipal applications - flows capable of hallucinating history, of reanimating the races of delirium, of setting continents ablaze. No, I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the deterritorialized.” (105).

It is this becoming deterritorialized that is the task of the revolutionary. It is the subversion of Oedipus, the becoming animal, which makes a true revolutionary. “Animality is not a state, essence, or genus,” Nick Land writes, “but a complex space cut across by voyages of all kinds… animality… has its dead ends and stagnant stumps, it has its humanistic and theological bumps, but it also has its channels of open flow; becoming multiple, fluid, unpredictable, becoming an enemy of mankind, lupine and murine becomings of all kinds,” (Fanged Noumena, 200).

The assault against humanity as a generalizing concept is necessary, for it is nothing more than another spook that obscures me from what I truly am. “The interest of those spirits, like that of society, of the human being, of the human essence, of the people as a whole, their “essential interest,” is an alien interest and should be your interest… duped egoism consists in the belief in an absolute interest, which does not spring from the egoist, i.e., is not interesting to him, but rather arises imperiously and firmly against him, an “eternal” interest. (Stirner’s Critics, 66-67).

“You are an inhuman monster,” says Stirner, “and this is why you are completely human, a real and actual human being, a complete human being. But you are even more than a complete human being, you are an individual, a unique human being.” (75). It is in this sense that, in order to be human, you must abandon all scruples surrounding what is and isn’t “humane” or “moral.” You must dwell outside the absolute of humanity, and only then will you as a unique human be recognized. Returning to Nick Land once more, he writes that “inferiority is not any kind of lack or impoverishment, but a positive libidinal charge potentiating spiritualizations. Anything that slumbers in the sterility of pseudoabsoluteness is right to fear the inferior ones, and the powerful regressions that wash away the ramparts of damming up intensive sequences. The accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization… the fire of the inferior ones is the dissolvant blaze which spreads uncontrollably, combusting the architectures of transcendence in the mad truth of exteriority,” (Fanged Noumena, 188).

By beast, it is meant a being that pays no heed to sacred abstractions and orders, that lives outside all artificially constructed orders and systems, which submits to no god, king or master - in other words, the egoist. The egoistic individual, whose labor power belongs to him and him alone, who is bound by no customs or laws. 

“Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are called to be idealists! Shake that off!” Stirner declares. “Do not seek for freedom… but seek for yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego! Or, more clearly: just recognize yourselves again…” (The Ego and its Own, 164).

Is this what the contemporary “radical” does? Do they seek themselves, do they serve themselves? No. They are not uniques, they are “black,” or they are “queer” or lumpen, or petite bourgeois, or whatever other label. They do not advocate for their interests as individuals, but rather, they advocate for their interests as generalized identities. In this manner, they fuel the capitalist machine, by misdirecting their potential revolutionary energy against other identity groups that seem to have opposing interests. They have what Deleuze and Guattari call the reactionary unconscious investment, the “investment that conforms to the interest of the dominant class, but operates on its own account, according to the terms of desire, through the segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus is derived,” (105).

Capitalism, as said by Deleuze and Guattari, “is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flow of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit.” (140).

5

The necromancy of capitalism functions in many ways, some of which I have outlined in previous essays. One of the more insidious ways in which it functions is by transferring its need of a singular overarching structure and identity. This is most visible in the online queer exclusionist community, which attempts to be accepted by cisheteronormative society by excluding and invalidating other queer people who they think are too radical or different. By doing this, they, whether intentionally or not, begin to lay the foundations of a structure that is just as exclusionary and oppressive as the current cultural hegemony. This actively destroys and denigrates what makes queerness revolutionary; the fact that it lacks such an overarching structure. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that these exclusionists are just as much our enemies as the bourgeoisie and the fascists, because they wish to, as I said, create a structure which is just as oppressive as the one that already exists.

This is necromantic because it aids in the continual murder and resurrection of the capitalist structure by not only reinforcing the idea that there must be such an overarching hegemony, but also by misdirecting potential revolutionary energy and therefore safeguarding capital. 

6

In order to escape the hell of the eternal return, it is necessary that labor be freed from the grasp of capital and that it is returned to the individual and his fellow egoists. Not only that, but we must reclaim violence as our own, and declare a silent war against capital and Empire. “The first movement of this war is reappropriation,” writes Tiqqun in This is Not a Program. “Reappropriation of the means of living and struggling. Reappropriation, therefore, of space; the squat, the occupation or communization of private spaces. Reappropriation of the common: the constitution of autonomous languages, syntaxes, means of communication, of an autonomous culture…” (68).

7

First we must leave. We must leave our homes, our jobs, our lives, even our names. We must leave everything. Then, we must infiltrate from hidden backdoors, revolutionaries from the future, ready to wreak havoc upon the human security system. Abandoning all principles, we become formless. Leaving all identities, we become nameless. We aren’t individuals anymore. We are a swarm of locusts who will devour the flesh of the undead capitalist. We will plot schizophrenic escape routes out of the nightmare of eternal return and enter into the future at a speed faster than light. And it is from the future that we will strike.

Citations

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Edited by Michel Foucault. Translated by Mark Seem et al., Penguin Books, 2009.

Friedrich, Hegel Georg Wilhelm. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Edited by J. N. Findlay. Translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Land, Nick, and Robin Mackay. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Edited by Ray Brassier, Urbanomic, 2019.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufman, Vintage, 1974.

Stirner, Max. Stirner's Critics. Edited by Jason McQuinn. Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, LBC Books, 2012. 

Tiqqun. This Is Not a Program. Semiotext(e), 2011.

Tzu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. Barnes & Noble, 2009.