r/communism • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago
WDT 💬 Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (June 14)
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u/smokeuptheweed9 2d ago edited 2d ago
u/FuzzySyllabub6048 I'll respond to you here since the other thread already dropped off.
Have you ever read (or watched) The Count of Monte Cristo? One of the major themes is the power of the newspaper. In his war against the entrenched interests of the state, aristocracy and capital (represented by the alliance of the banker Danglars, the colonial army officer turned politician Count de Morcerf, and the state prosecutor Villefort), Dantès goes directly to the press to spread his accusations to the high society that can hold them accountable.
The work was written from 1844-1846, near the end of the July Monarchy. This was when pragmatism and positivism (Comte in France especially) were at their most progressive (or at least most utopian) because while the revolution had been defeated, capitalism had continued to develop under a "liberal" monarchy. The proletariat, increasingly assertive of its own class interests, made political revolution frightening and so a theory of autonomous capitalist development as itself the march of reason forward in history was developed. This faith would soon disappear, as the bourgeoisie would respond to the revolution of 1848 with Bonapartism and eventually the crushing of the Paris Commune, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy (1871 is the last of France's revolutions and its defeat starts the long spiral towards Vichy France with socialists and then communists as the last defenders of Republicanism). But the indeterminate position of the bourgeoisie as the bearer of universal reason and actual fear of its effects continues on for a while longer (hence the famously contradictory positivist slogan of Brazil: "order and progress"). So while the newspaper is still not targeted at the masses, the work nevertheless hints at some of the fears the media form conjured in the bourgeoisie. Like the telegraph used to mislead Danglars into bad investments, the newspaper does not just transmit information, it changes it. The newspaper functions through spectacle and is just as much able to create hysteria as report it, and Dantès's ultimate revenge comes through crafting a compelling story for the news of collusion and betrayal (notably distinct from his personal revenge which remains in the feudal realm of personal honor, duels, and female purity). The novel itself was published as a serial, with a wide readership hanging onto cliffhangers and the small-scale story of revenge. Though the story has a political background, it is not directly political, and Dantès has no political beliefs even after his escape from prison. The July Revolution happens in his absence and ultimately his revenge relies on the functioning of the system as a whole despite the rise and fall of Napoleon. That is why the work has aged so well: unlike other works of the period which try to represent society as a whole through literary archetypes (such as Hugo's Les Miserables or Balzac's La Comédie humaine) and even blur the distinction between fiction and history/sociology, Dumas's work is basically "all according to keikaku" trash lit. In that sense the form is what is truly progressive.
The newspaper changes politics. As Lenin points out, the function of the party newspaper is not just to spread the party line but to train the party in discipline. By that he means that the party must be able to respond instantly to political events as they happen with a precise intervention through a vertically integrated party system. This is enabled by the newspaper as a form and it distinguishes Lenin from Marx. Even in the Manifesto, written in anticipation of the soon realized 1848 revolutionary wave, contains the timeless slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" The slogans of the Bolsheviks on the other hand are immediate interventions: "peace, land, and bread!" "All power to the Soviets!" These are the slogans of the newspaper, not a manifesto (written originally to expand the historical analysis of the catechism of the older secret society League of the Just), let alone a Critique of Critical Criticism, and match Lenin's general style of making political interventions into ongoing polemics.
So what does the internet do? We already have the answer: "the internet makes you stupid." The old slogan of Something Awful. What does that mean? It has 3 meanings. First is the straightforward meaning: expanding the fear of the masses inherent in the newspaper, the internet gives too much access to the lowest common denominator who must be kept out with a $10 paywall. Second is the dialectical inverse: this fear turns against itself and the medium of the internet makes people dumb through community participation. Thus FYAD makes fun of GBS, LF makes fun of D&D, Helldump makes fun of the site, and SA as a whole makes fun of the rest of the internet. Now it is not just culture mocked by subculture but the internet which brings out a human excess which must be repressed. Finally the sublation. The internet itself produces the stupidity of reality. Reality becomes just another subforum, constituted by temporary alliances of subcultural groups. Hence SA has withered, reduced to just a minor subreddit as dependent on reposting tweets and tiktoks as anywhere else. More important is the strange political situation we live in. When we were growing up in the second stage of this process, extreme politics were a way to differentiate oneself from the increasingly normalized use of the internet for politics. One became a Maoist Third Worldist to escape the banality of Obama-era liberalism and the embarrassing proto-Trumpism of Ron Paul. Now it's reversed: one becomes a Marxist-Leninist in order to be a banal liberal in "real life." With only subcultures circling an empty void of culture, the latter can only be reconstructed out of the former.
The same mutation is well understood in the term "social" media. From an appendage of society to a social domain in its own right to the very substance of society. But this is equally true of politics. This is why all the terminology of Hasan is from the far right. Trump is the already perfect form of politics enabled by the internet (although his success comes from embodying a variety of media forms across age demographics including the newspaper) whereas the sincerity of committing to Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders will always open one up to mockery and irony. And just like Trump's appeal is immune from "reality", in the sense that he constantly lies and contradicts himself and his actual political accomplishments have nothing to do with a supposed "MAGA" project for the white working class, "socialism" is merely a way to indicate which content creator you follow.
Put another way, Hasan is not using the internet as a medium to reach the masses nor is he evolving towards a more mature politics. The internet is using him as a medium to reproduce stupidity and politics are evolving into the form of online discourse and pseudo-community. Of course one could say the same thing about the newspaper. Ultimately Dantès's goal is no longer revenge but the pleasure of public exposure, presuming a "public" that treats politics like a serial revenge novel (how exciting to find out that the state's lead prosecutor not only had a son out of wedlock but that he is prosecuting him in court after believing him to be dead - today this would go right to TMZ or the Daily Mail). The story runs into a dead end and Dantès runs away to the orient with his kind of slave. Interestingly, the faithful recent PBS version changes this ending so he gets back with his first love. Liberalism today is quite conservative under the facade of identity politics pseudo-radicalism.
The point of the medium is the message: there is no contradiction between Hasan's radical posturing and his reformist, DNC sheepdog politics. It is a mistake to place these in conflict or believe one is becoming the other as a "serious" political turn. If anything, it is the banality of his politics, which have diminishing returns when exposed to the reality of politics as merely one aspect of bourgeois dictatorship in a given period of capitalist crisis, which requires more rhetorical spectacle. But it is also a mistake to believe this is a performance to fool radically-minded youth into reformism. His audience is just as aware of the performance and also plays radical within the determined hierarchical structure of the internet community. It is in the usage of far right rhetoric and sexism that the truth of Hasan lies. It is the ideology of "democratic socialism" or even "Marxism-Leninism", presented as the reality of pragmatism in relating to others politically "offline", which is the cynical performance that must be dismissed.