Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 16:50:12 -0400 (EDT) From: Brian M Ganter <bmganter-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu> Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT 5: CYBERFASCISM ************************************** 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 fasiscm 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 is 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 he 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 narcoisis--a mode of understanding the world that displaces the conceptual with the aestetic 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 the everyday. Henwood's brand of fascism turns the disturbance of business-as- usual bought about through 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 Proyects' deployment in his recent post) both aesteticizes 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.. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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