Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Note: this was written prior to Biden dropping.

There is only one significant political question: which side are you on?

Trump and Biden are made-up. Trump parasites the rage of white dispossession, a time worm rotting in the head cavity of America. A soulless hydra, Trump is puppeted by a new ruling class, the credit class, the virtual expression of rentier capital, capital loosed from property. In response, Biden limps along, the walking corpse of managerial capitalism. The Democratic Party is a worthless organ of professional politicos, a bureaucrat class intoxicated on the game of social organization. The managers took over in the wake of WW2, the duopoly of competing capitals vampirically absorbing the machinery of fascism, responding to colonialism’s necrosis in the heart of Empire with the neo-colonial apparatus of debt. Released from a commodity medium in the abolition of the gold standard, capital re-realizes itself in floating accumulation, power’s ghosting of material violence in immaterial discipline. Starvation is naturalized.

What Trump and Biden enflesh is the breaking-apart of the End of History, the unipolar world of American capital. Liberal democracy can no longer accumulate fast enough; the Time-Machine needs fuel, hurling itself off the cliff of constant capital. Variable capital in the core disappears and its function is re-routed through the colonies, bubbling up a multipolar world of patchwork capitals competing for virtuality. Sensing the decay of the old order, the patchwork terrorizes the earth, laying claim to a dying regime, to the accumulation of material power in constant capital and the simulacric absorption of attention in variable capital. The managerial class shifts-about to avoid Trump, but he roars into history, the horrorchild of multipolar nationalism and the capital tetris of the American Empire. American Capital separates itself from the liberal order and lays claim to its imperial mission – to use the reawakening body of fascism to fashion a new history, a new sequence of accumulation, multipolar war machines vying for the last scraps of variable capital as constant capital eclipses labor-power. The surplus is now the whole; the president is a warlord.

Trump is a performer, not an idiot. He toetaps the late stage republic, the mirage of democratic participation fading into the monarchic terror of reaction, MAGA Bonaparting the new elite into power. Reagan was the farce of America’s tragedy, Trump its tragicomedy. The Founding Fathers cloak themselves in Greco-Roman splendor, slave traders occupying the constant capital of land, the degenerated virus of Rome spreading across Turtle Island. Reagan re-thumps the heart of America through the phantasm of the cowboy, an occupier occupying an occupied role, suturing capital to the myth of its past, the lebensraum of the frontier. Trump is the summation of both, a celebrity Caesar, the hollow, paper-thin self-story of American capital, necrotic imperial violence smiling underneath the spectacle of wealth worship, the Prosperity Gospel materialized in the state. Trump is a Sears catalogue Hammurabi, law as something to be bought and sold, the state re-entering the circulation of capital as privatized injustice.

Patriotism is gang loyalty. Violence is leveled against the homo sacer, the non-citizen, whether migrant, criminal, foreigner, or terrorist. The old regime obscured war by naming it a police action; in the new order, the multipolar cartels un-name their victims and wield genocide by naming it as self-defense. The homo sacer are those who the gang does not offer protection, or for whom that protection has been revoked. Citizenship is contingent on loyalty, and it is citizenship that determines whether one is mourned. Lives lost become numbers passively referenced on the New York Times front page, a barely-whispered acknowledgment of the terror at the heart of capital. Gaza is the blueprint for the communities of the homo sacer, for any colony internal or external that seeks to break away. Capital builds concentration camps that cover entire cities, entire nations, while un-naming them – detention centers, migrant processing camps, occupied territories, prisons, institutions, ghettos, reservations, and black sites interlinked across the world. In this present-future, the land of the free expands to the whole of capital, freedom being not- homo sacer. To be free is to be worthy of mourning.

Gang politics requires gang politics. Schmitt understood that politics is rooted in us vs. them, friend and enemy; however, he mythed friend and enemy by localizing them in blood and territory, by sewing them to the state and a fascist worldview. Friendship, however, is alliance, and alliance births community. In the class struggle, the enemy is capital itself, the force of accumulation that terrorizes being. Life is our friend, the joy of being-together, of Uniques unfolding in the Gemeinwesen, the community-of-communities. The ruling class, cycling through its many forms, each a historical simulacrum obscuring capital, allies itself with the death machine, populating Tartarus with devils. But even here they are turning-against their essence, the common-being that thumps restless in the heart of humanity. Homo sapiens revolt against death in expanding the us to all, realizing liberation in allying across lines of struggle, a decentered network of resistance against Leviathan. Pan emerges from the mass strike and the black bloc, from Uniques working together to defeat Moloch, to re-enchant the world through abolishing capital, through friendship.

The enemy of accumulation is all held in common; the enemy of capital is the community-of-communities.

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. – Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Image: Message from a Desert Star by Mark Tobey (1972)