File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-08.224, message 35


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 ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005