>>913Again, the character limit lied to me. It is apparently 8072, not 8192. Anyway.
You claim you identify as post-left because you do not consider yourself a leftist but nonetheless base your ideas on "old leftism". So did Nazis, who originated from anti-Marxist national socialist tendencies which were eventually recuperated by capital; as did Italian fascists, who originated from anti-Marxist national syndicalists, futurists, and collectivists; as did Spanish Republicans and Francoists, who themselves
were national syndicalists. In each instance, they considered themselves to be transcending materialist Marxist conceptions of socialism and synthesising a new nationalist anticapitalism that was both rooted in old leftist traditions whilst dissociated from leftism as a whole – thus went their "third way". So, again, what makes you unlike them? Post-left theory can be many things, but one thing it consistently is not is fascist.
Briefly, by working
through Land I mean taking Land and his theories seriously, immanently and transcendentally critiquing them, synthesising a modified framework therefrom, operating
within that framework to interpret the past/present/future material conditions, establishing perspective
through that lens, and transforming those conditions in liberatory ways
through the sublation of Land's theories as (perhaps perverse) contributions to the
real movement. Contra Land's critics, I am not interested in merely refuting him, but in
overcoming him and being all the better for it. Nietzsche prophesied the arrival of the overman; Zapffe foretold the last messiah. The only way Out of such catalysms, and
beyond such catalysts, is
through them. In that sense, there is no Exit but Escape,
through those both blocking and showing the way Out – and that requires transformation, not (merely) opposition.
This difference is more fundamentally a difference between
anti- and
post-: whereas many of Land's opponents are anti-Landian, I strive to be
post-Landian, in much the same way I believe Marx strove (and in some respects failed) to become post-Stirnerian in response to Stirner's critiques despite the polemics against him. So long as leftists continue to hide and cower from Land's critiques (just as so many do against postmodernism), there will be no effective response to it, and so neoreaction will continue to grow whilst the "revolutionaries" will continue to wither.
If communism is the antithesis to capitalism, then what is its synthesis? A "national communism"? Žižek's "liberal communism"? Your notion of dialectics does not seem to be the one used by Heraclitus or Hegel or Marx or Engels or Mao or other such theoreticians, since it identifies contradiction as merely an opposition between two things and not as – also, and primarily – an opposition between a thing
and itself. Dialectics, as a transformational process, is likewise not (merely) the "unification" of opposites, but (also)
their interpenetration. By juxtaposing capital/ism as thesis and communism as antithesis, you malform the process and result in a conclusion that synthesises the two, the same frankly aberrant dialectic that [i]social fascists[/i] social democrats use to justify their anticommunism (especially in "post-communist" society), that fascists use to guide others along their "third way", that even liberals and capitalists use to rationalise the "mixed economies" at the "end of history". By identifying antithesis necessarily with an opposing thesis in some contradictory-yet-complementary binary, you erase the possibility for antithesis altogether – antithesis
as such.The resultant process is no longer position, negation, and negation of the negation; not Being, Nothing, and Becoming; but position, opposition, and combination. Where is the negation? The "no"?
Capital/ism may indeed be the thesis, but its contradiction is
internal and not (just) external and so it fundamentally
opposes itself and not (just) others. Communism may also oppose capital/ism, but communism is the negation of capital/ism's own internal contradiction, the negation of its own negation, and thus forms the resultant synthetic position that sublates the former forms and resolves its contradictions. The relation between the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is thus one of position, immanent contradiction, and transcendence.
The position/opposition/combination is, at best, a vulgarised and simplicated contraction of this cascading, recursing, transformational primary process (thesis is thesis, yet is antithesis, yet contradicts itself, yet contradicts antithesis and synthesis, yet sublates into synthesis; yet antithesis is antithesis, yet contradicts itself, yet contradicts thesis and synthesis, yet sublates into synthesis; yet synthesis is synthesis, yet contradicts itself
as thesis, yet contradicts antithesis
as antithesis, yet contradicts thesis and antithesis, yet is their sublation), but nonetheless obfuscates the role of the negative–the
anti- in antithesis–in the process of becoming. In a sense, it is not a dialectical dialectics, a radically metamorphosing metastasis in which the unity of opposites is opposed by both its own opposites, its own unity, and its own opposition to unity. Harkening back to Heraclitus, the only constant in this complex nonlinear
kosmos is precisely its absence, the reliability of its unreliability, the coherence of its decoherence, the antisystematic autosystematisation of the system, the flux of the fiery Logos in all its transient flows –
and yet it has identity, and therefore does not violate such law, because this process is identified by its own transformality, its identification
as transformation, and thus its unification of all opposites within a singular logic of transformational identity itself subject to its own identical transformation.
Returning to your "return to humanist ideals", antithetical to communism even as antithesis, it posits the very same bourgeois modernist logic I described before, the same logic that limited communism's potential into being merely a transformational variant of capital, the logic that confines communism to a humanism even Marx later abandoned
against the latter in favour of the former. In so many words, it is an anachronistic rehearsal of history's final act, seeking to restore man's place as the historical subject (much as Camatte sought with his reactionary turn toward primitivism) rather than
abolishing historical subjectivity altogether. You cling to these metanarratives of modernity and respond in romantic reaction to their dissolution, much like Evola did in lamentation against the degeneration of tradition in the face of futurity. Your "solution" is fundamentally the same, only worded differently and historically translated to a myth of early modernity and all its imagined ideals.
This is not dialectic, but its discontinuation, the dislocation of the synthesis and its reconnection earlier in the chain. The result is a haunted cul-de-sac at the dead end of history, a Mobius strip of modernity stripped of continuity that hijacks its futurity, choked with the exhaust fumes of modernism and suffocating under its own weight. This eternal recursion of modernity – in which the fads and fashions and thoughts and theories of the past few centuries are recycled, rehearsed, repurposed, and recuperated within an ever-growing totalitarian territory of capital colonisation – already exists, and it has a name, and that name is
postmodernity. Or "metamodernity". Or "supermodernity". Or "hypermodernity". Or "postpostmodernity". Or whatever "new" recursion reforms from the former to rehearse the next text contextualisation in this hearse hellworld we are condemned to keep repeating until it finally finishes road and finds itself at the graveyard beyond the cliff.