The Spectacular Non-Marxist 'Left' and The 180 Year 'Present Age'

A beautiful tenet of Marx and his circle - a  truth they not only propounded, but lived and lived FOR - was that class could in large part determine, but would not in the future define us. Hence to be on the right side of class struggle was to fight in effect for the end of class structures themselves. Each could in due course be everything.

Thus we would 'win' when we no longer are tokens of pre-given types, but become types of our own - when we collapse the type-token distinction itself. Each 'in a class by herself,' her own type and token, her own 'sign' and 'signified,' her own form and content. No more substance and accident, only substance as essence.

A lamentable feature of the platform-based spectacle we now inhabit - the 'present age' SK saw coming - is its inhabitants' seemingly having forgotten this. Or of course never having known it.

Class in large measure now not only determines, but entirely DEFINES us in the now Marx-ignorant pseudo-left's eyes, such that there ARE now no tokens, even in potential, not typified entirely by pre-given type. Such that there IS no thing signified that isn't mere sign.

All is form, without content, in the new ersatz-left's visionscape world. We are both jointly and severally no more than a substance-free play of flat imagery in each other's 'imaginaries.' Faces of categories.

Worse than a 'lightness of being,' a non-being called 'Light,' or 'Enlightenment': putative 'knowledge' expressible only in word-forms that cannot be words. Squiggles and sounds that, no longer meant really to refer, cannot be 'meant.'

Hence the shot-in-the-back death of a health insurance executive is in a certain sense literally bloodless, just as the death-bringer is in a certain sense gutless. (No 'cajones' required to 'kill' symbols.) Both are mere class-representatives. Memes, senses without referents, connotations without denotations.

Both become 'merch' and, yet worse, are PRODUCED to be merch. PERPETUAL merch. Production for circulation and circulation alone.

'Free Luigi' is merely a laughable and a purchasable, Luigi himself nothing more than the unpaid supplier of the image that's 'featured,' the prototype of the type. (The type that's the teeshirt, the mug, or the meme.)

Brian Thompson is for his part the mere posit required, the deposit that's taken, as 'capital' investment en route to the image production and circulation. (Ask: do you recall what he looks like as you know what his killer looks like? No, because he is the input, not the output, in this 'symbolic economy.')

And it isn't just individuals now used in this manner - as means of production for ultimate circulation - of course. Opportunistically picked peoples now discharge this function as well. You see it each time that you gaze on the staged 'Pallywood' video, the repurposed black & white (Iraqi, not 'Palestinian') sand-scarf, or the fake foreign (Jordanian-derived)

'flag' that commodify mayhem as image and fashion merch both now.

What a fking nightmare this is. To see even one's comrades or a loved one drawn in and then almost willingly drowning in the dystopian meme-maw turned on-screen morality play. Like a parent's or lover's eyes clouding and fogging and then disappearing as she absently 'pours another drink' or 'puts a spike in / to her / vein' ... 'Bye darling, I love you darling, bye ... '

Right down 'the widening gyre.'

It is easy to see why some sensitive observers now find Gorgon's head JOKES in it all - just as did SK 180 years back. The new self-styled pseudo-left, far from class warriors or class abolitionists like Karl or Rosa, are class reifiers or hypostatizers a la Gyorgy. And instead of proletarians demanding to BE realized SUBSTANCE, have become now mere FORM-capitalists chasing value-realization through image-dissemination.

And in this case the surplus labor's extracted from us, the attenders, and more importantly all who must suffer or die in producing the images made for the circulation.

The new pseudo-left meme-capitalists: 'influencers,' 'streamers,' 'digital creators,' ... cosplayers, morality-players, 'online justice warriors,' ... identity-performers, 'virtue-signalers,' moral-peacockers ...

Latterday useless self-flattering Verkhovenskys straight outta Dosty's 'Devils,' as I mentioned here earlier in taxonomizing the class of those Useful Idiots who now surround us.

Debord once said 'soon there will be nothing but "artists" and it will take no end of effort to find a single [hu]man.'

That is no longer soon, it is now. And if it was even Kierkegaard's present, one wonders now how we shall make it our past.

More on that soon ...