No.491814
(Quote is from the documentary *Remember My Lai*)
> My little boy was playing in my grandmother's front yard, here in Jackson, at his grandmother's house, and there were some teenagers across the street that got into an argument. They were 14 and 15, and one went home and got a gun. Another one just ran in the direction where my little boy was playing, and they shot him in the head. I was in the house, and I came out and picked him up, but he was already dead… he was dying. When I looked at him, his face looked like the same face of the child that I had killed, and I said, "This is the punishment for me killing the people that I killed." And the one picture that I have… they had his funeral. I got back from the funeral that night, that's the way it cracked, and I left it like that. It just cracked.
> Yes, I'm ashamed, I'm sorry, I'm guilty, but I did it. What else can I tell you? It happened, you're looking at someone who did it. It can happen… if you go to war, those are the type of things that will happen and can happen to anyone. After they train you, they program you - it can happen, it happens. That's reality, that's what war is.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines dystopia as "a very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, especially an imaginary society in the future, after something terrible has happened."
War is the ultimate expression of dystopia, for war is what happens when a society has exhausted and foreclosed every possible good or fair path through its own politics. A society that cannot be maintained without the constant presence of such mass suffering is a dystopian society.
Shortly after being drafted into the U.S. army to fight in the Vietnam War, Varnado Simpson was assigned to the task force that would soon be responsible for the My Lai Massacre. Though initially reluctant to follow the order to kill civilians, such that a superior officer threatened to shoot him if he did not comply, he ultimately killed over 20 out of the 350-500 villagers who were massacred on that day, including young children. After returned to the United States, he was somewhat honest but rather terse and detached when recounting the horrors he witnessed and wrought. Over time, this morphed into an overwhelming and relentless sense of shame. The death of his son in a shooting drove him further into despair, and he grew dependent on a growing cocktail of medication to cope with his severe PTSD and paranoia. A few years after his daughter died of meningitis, he committed suicide.
The key takeaway from this tragedy is not some tepid moral lesson about how war brutalizes soldiers as much as civilians by transforming them into brutes. Rather, Simpson's story is a concrete example of what living in a dystopia really looks like. What destroyed him was not the memory of what he did, but his inability to create a narrative of redemption. What his experience shared with the villagers of My Lai and My Khe, radically different though they might have been, is that of dystopia.
But isn't this just an insensitive attempt to explain away an unforgivable evil? Of course the so-called military theorists can utter cheap aphorisms like "war is politics by other means" given their freedom to play God with innocent lives from a good safe distance. Just what does politics really have to do with Simpson's despicable crimes? He caused horrific suffering and so he deserved to suffer, simple as. His suffering wasn't an example of dystopia at all - it was justice, and even then, it wasn't nearly enough. Is that not the *moral* position to take?
But the failure to make analysis *despite* moral judgments is a mistake, for the moral categories which we judge with are politically preconditioned - that is, *not* innately political. In this way, a vulgar desire for justice is ultimately a dystopian desire, because it eclipses the political center that a dystopian society orbits.
In an article for Sublation Magazine criticizing how contemporary leftists have approached the Gaza war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, Chris Cutrone begins by stating that:
> The alternative to extermination is slavery - labor. The only reason for conquerors not to kill the defeated is to put them to work - to make them useful. If they cease to be useful or prove to be more trouble than they are worth, they will be killed. That is the lesson of history.
The blunt coldness of such an opening sets the tone for the rest of the article, in which Cutrone injects a brutal dose of reality into the inflamed veins of the anti-Zionist left. For the socialists who side with the violent misleadership of Hamas and aim to drag others into such conflicts, Cutrone has this to say:
> The Palestinians are a conquered people. Perhaps not for all time, but at least for now. This is not going to change - no amount of protest will change it. This is the reality. The only alternative to extermination is slavery. The only alternative to living with defeat is not living with it: dying from it. But there is an alternative to death: life. Life as a worker - it is actually preferable to death! Every worker knows this.
> It is in fact necessary to surrender to your boss. It is not just, but necessary: necessary to live. Workers are not privileged to do otherwise: they are not bosses; nor do they want to be. They just want to live. Shall we let them? Or do we demand their sacrifice to our crazed ideas? Thankfully, they are not listening.
> Only the bosses are listening: Be careful not to make the workers’ life harder in order to satisfy your own perverse desires and deranged visions. Keep them where they belong: in the monastery or nunnery - get thee there, and stay put in your chosen torture-chamber for the measurement of souls.
Cutrone's point isn't that socialists should stop being political, but that socialists have *already* ceased to be political in a sense. For him, politics is first and foremost a life-or-death struggle for power and freedom, and thus has has little to do with matters of morality and justice, no matter the political justifications such virtues might muster. Therefore, a righteous recasting of politics founded upon rage and ressentiment is actually pseudo-political. Likewise, war is pseudo-political as well, for it quickly devolves into moral blackmail and a perverse desire for justice.
But Cutrone doesn't simply deny the phrase "war is politics by other means," perhaps surprisingly so. In fact, he has directly referenced how Vladimir Lenin quoted Carl von Clausewitz (the originator of the phrase) in a lecture on war and revolution. It's odd enough to find a communist revolutionary quoting a conservative Prussian general, but how isn't this just a contradiction?
In a section titled "The Aim of War Is to Eliminate War" in the essay *Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,* Mao Zedong wrote:
> When human society advances to the point where classes and states are eliminated, there will be no more wars, counter-revolutionary or revolutionary, unjust or just; that will be the era of perpetual peace for mankind.
However, such cannot be separated from Mao's belief that progress can only be realized through revolution, and that revolution can only be realized through war:
> Mankind's era of wars will be brought to an end by our own efforts, and beyond doubt the war we wage is part of the final battle. But also beyond doubt the war we face will be part of the biggest and most ruthless of all wars. The biggest and most ruthless of unjust counter-revolutionary wars is hanging over us, and the vast majority of mankind will be ravaged unless we raise the banner of a just war. The banner of mankind's just war is the banner of mankind's salvation.
What makes Mao's position on revolutionary war odd is that it contrasts with that of Lenin. Though Mao faithfully echoes Lenin in declaring that a socialist revolution will bring an end to capitalist wars, it was in his lecture on war and revolution (where he quoted Clausewitz) that Lenin also said:
> All wars are inseparable from the political systems that engender them. The policy which a given state, a given class within that state, pursued for a long time before the war is inevitably continued by that same class during the war, the form of action alone being changed.
Perhaps Mao is right that revolutionary war might necessary to bring about a socialist revolution, but revolutionary war is not enough even if this is the case, for history has shown us that a successful revolution is by no means guaranteed by a successful revolutionary war. The question of politics remains, and therefore:
War is not merely politics by other means. Rather, *war is the failure of politics* given the means that it provides us. What is embedded within the phrase "war is politics by other means" is the secret that the Enlightenment promises congruent with capitalism - such as the utopian promise of perpetual peace - cannot be delivered to us through the politics of capitalism. Like its predecessors, it can only deliver a perpetual oscillation between slavery and extermination, for it cannot provide us the means to progress beyond the contradictions of capitalism which undermine those promises; and therefore, it will forever be haunted by specter of barbarism - the "other means" that it so often tempts and compels us to pursue.
But this still assumes too much. Another crucial mistake being made is to ignore how revolution is actually a *symptom* of the contradictions of capitalism rather than a solution to them. It's no coincidence that the "Age of Revolution" began during the rise of capitalism, nor that the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant would soon author his own proposal to usher in an era of perpetual peace.
How, then, to overcome dystopia? In the last part of the introduction to Mark Fisher's unfinished book *Acid Communism,* where he talks about the revolutionary demands of some New Left radicals, he wrote:
> … the material conditions for such a revolution are more in place in the twenty-first century than they were in 1977. What has shifted beyond all recognition since then is the existential and emotional atmosphere. Populations are resigned to the sadness of work, even as they are told that automation is making their jobs disappear. We must regain the optimism of that Seventies moment, just as we must carefully analyse all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness-deflation worked is the first step to reversing it.
Unfortunately, the book wasn't finished because he committed suicide shortly after.
Many have diagnosed the compulsion of contemporary socialists to degrade all prospects into futility, ranging widely in expression from "left melancholia" to "nihilist post-modern neo-Marxism" and so on. For Fisher, this is the defeated condition of capitalist realism, where attendance at the funeral of lost futures isn't marked by mourning and reflection, but by an endless weeping and gnashing of teeth that foregoes resolution. But this dystopian resignation is not a moral failing: Even during the era of peak fascism (which is more or less synonymous with dystopia), it was already known to Walter Benjamin that every rise of fascism follows a failed revolution. What this means is, contra the leftist cliche that “fascism is capitalism in decay," the sober truth of our age is that *fascism is socialism in decay.* In other words, if the experience of the contemporary socialists is one of living in a dystopia, then the "something terrible" that caused it is the failure of socialism.
Benjamin's deeper point is that reactionary dystopias (like those run by fascists) thrive by feeding upon the leftovers of scattered utopian energies. It's noteworthy, then, that the earliest forms of modern socialism were later categorized as "utopian socialism" in contrast to the "scientific socialism" that followed. It was Friedrich Engels who first seriously elucidated the meaning of scientific socialism in his work *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,* where he wrote critically of the utopian socialists:
> The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
Therefore, it might seem as though the present dystopia is the outcome of so many failed revolutions lead by "scientific socialists" who weren't true to the name: Unable to shed the utopian fantasies that their socialism was founded upon, their unrealistic visions - cloaked in Marxist mythology - inevitably decayed into the fertile ground for dystopia to take root and grow. But just how much is utopianism to blame? What follows the above quote from Engels is the revelation that there was much more to the utopian socialists than "pure phantasies":
> We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity”. For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
Far from dismissing the utopian socialists, Engels took them seriously and recognized the true value of their efforts. Similar to how science proper had translated the insights of philosophy and practical experimentation into a systematic enterprise founded upon testable hypotheses and methodical lab work, the scientific socialism of Engels emerged out of critical engagement with the theory and practice of utopian socialism as interpreted through the lens of his materialism. Likewise, similar to the "Philistines" who Engels chastised as being blind to the naive brilliance of the utopian socialists, the socialists of today have blinded themselves by refusing to take a bet on the gamble of utopia. In fearing that further failures will inevitably lead to a deepening of dystopia, they are no longer willing to humor any utopian schemes, yet such is ultimately a *preemptive failure of socialism* that ironically leads to dystopia just the same.
But the point isn't that an anti-utopian attitude has turned socialists into self-defeating losers. Rather, it's that *their refusal to seriously engage with utopia is actually utopian.* In other words, by rejecting the utopian core of socialism, they reject the scientific socialism that emerges in response to it, and thus they reject the only realistically possible path to socialism. This apparent paradox was perhaps best explained by Slavoj Žižek, who wrote that:
> The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future, but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how "the world really is," accompanied by a warning that, if we want to change it (too much), only totalitarian horror can ensue.
> … the true “utopia” is not the prospect of radical change, but the state of things as they are continuing indefinitely.
Such is both the cause and consequence of capitalist realism, which is where truly unrealistic afflictions - pseudo-revolutionary bloodlust, complacent reformism, hyper-moralizing activism, sneering quasi-intellectualism, despairing avolition and so on - are able to fester and spread like a delusional disease. Engels was right to state with disdainful superiority that the utopians, despite all of their childish flights of fancy, were in the end still less delusional than their supposedly more realistic, midwit counterparts. Engels was right.
The socialism of Engels was more about *the production of means* than the means of production. For him, the mistake of the utopian socialists was not in their desire to impose some unrealistic vision of society onto reality, but in how that very desire ended up turning their brilliant imaginations into absurd fantasy worlds. For him, the ultimate aim of socialism is to create a society that realizes the freedom to change, not just the freedom to exist.
What is lacking in the contemporary socialists is the drive to recognize and realize the latent potentials buried within the historical wreckage of socialism - to change by creating a living narrative of redemption out of the tragedy, instead of floundering in and eventually succumbing to a miserable existence.
The alternative to dystopia is risk - critically engaging with utopia. The only way for dystopia to continue beyond the defeat of utopia is for utopia to never be seriously considered again - to defeat it before it can even fail. If we can't accept the risk of dystopia arising from of the failure of utopia, then dystopia is sustained by default. That is the lesson of politics.
A healthy dose of rehab will be necessary: The socialists need to get a grip - make themselves useful by moving on to more meaningful things. They can start by stopping their preaching of the nihilistic negation of everything existing or otherwise: they can stop preaching capitalist realism; they must cultivate an environment where it is possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism - which the future cannot actually do without, thank you.
What the future can do without is the dismal dilemma of slavery versus extermination - including the decision to debase the struggle for socialism into such a dystopian dichotomy. Let us not have another defeat of socialism by leaving it to the future generations to wretchedly stumble through it. Let them collaborate wisely to design a future that is more realistic than the one that capitalist realism has to offer. Let them awaken reason from its violent slumber, so that they can be free to do their own dreaming instead.
There is an alternative to dystopia.