From owner-marxism-international
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 16:50:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Brian M Ganter <bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT 5: CYBERFASCISM
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Revolutionary Marxist Collective U/Buffalo
PANIC LEFT 5: CYBERFASCISM
As to “fascism”: the net-left (Malecki and the rest of
the Mafia) are stuck in the past — they think of fascism
only in relation to monopoly capital, the “fascism”
that Adorno & Horkhiemer fought on the one hand
and the Spanish civil war and the Red Army fought on the
other. One of our points on the net has been that the net-left is
a memory-left: a left that has lost its ability to understand and
RESPOND in rigorous theoretical-praxical ways to the more
sophisticated and more nuanced and subtle forms of fascism today,
the “fascism," for instance which is articulated by
cybercapitalism. But instead of engaging the very idea of
cybercapitalism, all Louis Proyect and the other mafia gang
members can say is:
what the fuck is cybercapitalism!
It is true that the class roots of the fascism that is articulated
in cybercapitalism are also the petty-bourgeoisie caught between
the working class and the capitalist class. But the specific
shapes of the contradictions of this class fraction have
changed. The fascism of cybercapitalism works to
“solve” these contradictions not by guns... but by
“family values”... by the
“aesthetic”... it is this “fascism” which
uses “Stalinism” as a cover. It is this
“fascism” which often takes on linguistic forms as
well: Dumain's rallying calls to the authorities to crackdown on
Red Critique ("stay out of my space"). Dumain's fascist cries
are articulated and legitimated linguistically — through the
subtleties of the anti-immigrant metaphor. He scorns those who
have recently “invaded” the Marxism lists adding that
“somebody who migrates to a list when he doesn't belong
should be thrown out”. Just for good measure he writes that
those who want to discuss Engels should be put in a “cage."
Cyberfascism is one of the surest allies of capital. But what of
“cyberfascism” as a mode of “aesthetics"? In one
of his most recent posts Doug Henwood — the supreme
ideologue of cyberfascism — writes that he would not want to
live in a society designed by people “who write as badly as
you do”. This “revolutionary” person's notion of
a “good society” is not a society beyond class
contradictions but a society of beautiful sentences. This is
exemplary of a “cultural” solution to class
contradiction. This (not guns, etc.) is the core of cyberfascism:
the attack on intellectuals, on the academy, the celebration of
the aesthetics, etc. are all aimed at providing a pedagogy of
narcosis — a mode of understanding the world that displaces
the conceptual with the aesthetic and numbs the consciousness. The
goal of cyberfascism is to put forward well-written sentences as
the condition of a “good society”, to divert attention
from THINKING to FEELING... to get rid of “false
consciousness” as a concept. This is why Doug Henwood's
brand of fascism on the one hand fights pomo and at the same time
naturalizes what pomo has always done — the aestheticization
of the everyday. Henwood's brand of fascism turns the disturbance
of business-as-usual brought about through class conflicts (at the
level of theory and on the net) into an aesthetic experience:
FLAME WARS. FLAME WARS is the master trope of cyberfascism, one
that (as in Proyect's deployment in his recent post) both
aestheticizes the conceptually difficult and simultaneously hints
at the need for increased “authority” from above, in
this case, more “moderation” as a result of FLAME WARS
that have gotten out of hand. This is cyberfascism: throwing
people off of the list (the Dumain/Proyect/Henwood clique) all
under the guise of an attack on Stalinism and the exclusion of
persons who have a different set of understandings... these are
the
weapons of the cyberfascist..
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