Privatize the Presidency

The first week or so of President Trump's administration has produced its share of turbulence in the U.S. and around the world. Indeed, it as if the earth has begun to quake under the whole of the republic, though I could point to plenty of people who have been pointing out the increasing tremors for some time.

There has been a palpable change in the constitution of the nation, in which its hidden demons have been beckoned to the surface by the words and actions of the symbolic representative of the nation. 

The barely concealed forces of white supremacy, patriarchy, and privatization have finally migrated to the place beneath the looking glass, on full display in the office of the presidency. The way in which the president conducts himself, and the policies that his administration sets forth have the effect of crystallizing and amplifying the forces of their origin.

The ever-increasing chaos of the privatizers has entered the public halls of power so to speak, as opposed to lapping at them and influencing them from the fringes, and through revolving doors. Further, privatization needs more repression, as to steal something that is public requires the power to keep the public from taking it back, and more repression begets more privatization: one wishes to leave the body that subverts one's will.

And the privatizers are an opportunistic lot. Trump's allies watch the growing public chaos with trepidation: the chaos was only supposed to be economic and private, so that it could be somewhat controlled and plausibly denied!

The allies watch with glistening eyes; they salivate. Trump's fragmented constellation of political allies is producing enemies by the moment, both within and without. Who will be the first to roll the strongman, and therefore climb to the top of the garbage heap, where a multitude is ready to roll that person in turn? 

The networks of repression have been emboldened, but so too have their mirror opposite: the forces of revolution and the assertion of the oppressed, where excitement accompanies the spying of cracks and fissures.

I'm aware that I'm dumping a lot of different ideas here, some of them only vaguely connected, which will require further working out.

War and Action in General

The phenomenon of war provides a very clear and immediate glimpse into the tensile fields that any kind of action must take place in.

You can't simply jump from a life as a domestic householder to a state of constant warfare. Depending on the culture you are brought up in, you may be accustomed to violence and violent acts, and it may be easier to enter a state of warfare. Especially if you are threatened, the instincts kick in, the body and mind become accostomed to violent acts, and the acts come easier.

In a rich society, where warfare is non-existent inside of its walls, the professional warrior must be developed by a process of breaking them in. Their spirits must be crushed, and they must be subjected to artificial hardship. The warrior has to be forged through a kind of directed trauma and torture. You can't simply take a civilian and pitch them into total warfare, contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe anyway. However it does help the institutions of war to draw from the urban and rural poor, who may already be hardened to an extent.

But then as war becomes regularized, it reproduces itself through cycles of revenge and a will to power. And in peacetime the warrior finds the mundane civilian life tortuous, or the warrior suffers from PTSD and replays the trauma in the psyche. The warrior then must be tranquilized and slowly re-assimilated into a normal life.

It is in this way that action begets itself, and then reinforces itself at a certain critical threshold, until it passes yet another threshold in which it begins to beget its opposite, its antagonistic actions. Or otherwise it peters out and some other dominant state of action re-asserts itself.

Ramble by the River

There was a temporary lull in the storm, which provided for a brief opportunity to go out on the bike. Right away I was greeted with harsh blasts from the southwest: the storm wasn't finished, and the rest of it was coming in from the ocean. I happened to be right in the middle; over the mountains to the northeast the storm was raging on after having passed us.

The nearby gates to the bike trail were locked to keep people away from the storm-waters, but it was easy to get the bike over them and then take a quick hop onto the other side. The "riverbed" surged with filthy rainwater, one of many concrete troughs sloughing the city byproducts out to sea. There is simply too much volume of unfiltered water. Given our collective priorities, it would be uneconomical to install the volume of filtration it would take to keep the water clean. With a city sprawl such as this, and a collective drive towards constant expansion, the polluted water must flow out and free by necessity.

Out in the grasses beyond the wastewater treatment plant, an enormous coyote was foraging, smack in the middle of the drainage system of north Long Beach. It was very beautiful, and looked quite healthy: well-fed and a full and vibrant coat of fur. A symbolic show of force from the wilds, much like the blowing winds of the distant storm. And I get to thinking.

Currently across the nation it appears that the mimetic waves of hope are cresting once again, at least within various activist groups, which do happen to be particularly broad this time around; the spirit of resistance, birthed anew, is testing its movement on unsteady steps, gaining confidence. As a sufferer of bipolar depression, I am overjoyed and humbled by the sight of the reappearing sun. But as much as I dislike the depression - and as much as I savor the mania for that matter - I've learned to distrust the mania even more, as I know where it leads. This is one of the reasons for developing a meditation practice; it contributes to a more even distribution of energy.

Nevertheless, such bursts of mania effect certain transformations in various directions, which change the landscapes within which these patterns arise. A nation, or geopolitics for that matter, is not a person. It is much larger, and it cannot seat itself and meditate. And there is joy to be had in riding waves.

I think somberly of the American police and the other security institutions. When one thinks of democracy theoretically - or at least the self-determination and self-rule of a community - one thinks of conversation and circulation. A mutualism and a sharing of information.

But if one tries to engage an American police officer in conversation - especially after one "breaks" the law, though they're not all like this - one gets nothing but a stern frown, and a "don't argue with me, this is the law" bit. The conversation stops at the officer's discretion, or for that matter, at the club and gun. One "cedes" the conversation to the officer only because one is too afraid to take the conversation further. And this is from the perspective of a relatively privileged white person, no less.

And are we so surprised at the resent? The officers of the nation go about doing the equivalent of whispering into pigeon's ears: "I am the enemy" and then setting them free, systematically, everyday.

In other words, one looks up at authority only to find grey walls of silence. The flow of power is immediately apparent. The individuals making up the police structurally form a band around the body of capital, heating up as their masters produce the turbulence they are tasked with "pacifying."

Much like the metal band around the fire-spout at the top of the disposable lighter. The entire lighter produces the fire as a whole, but it is the retaining band that grows hot and burns the skin.

As a greater device, we have a function of our own. We expand constantly, up and out, expelling waste outward to circulate back up against our walls of silence. We glance out wide-eyed and in surprise as the wild storms grow, and the dispossessed flood back into the city limits, their persons growing stronger and healthier, their coats shinier and fuller. And the police grow angrier and more sullen, unable to see that if they were to leave their iron band, the fire torture would stop.

Well, the sun has become sheathed again, and now the rain pours down once more.

Diverting the Channels of Communication

As social creatures, we are constantly forging and reforging objects of communication, which then become trafficked in and fought over. That is, we tend to follow the path of least resistance when it comes to speech acts.

There are some important consequences to this tendency, but first it would be a good idea to flesh out what this means.

It helps to start with something easy. Terms like "fascism" and "totalitarianism" have taken an enormous amount of intellectual and social labor to fashion. The social organizations behind these terms had to have held for a long and sustained period, so that they could take on the coherence required to forge a label to describe them, which is to gain currency.

The label then has to be intellectually developed, so that it can useful when it is traded in the social sphere. That is, communication objects are forged so that we can navigate the world. We say to each other "fire" so that we can coordinate our responses to the phenomenon of fire, and we say to each other "fascism" and "totalitarianism" so that we can coordinate our responses to those things in turn.

But here is where things get tricky.

Because so much labor has gone into these things, and because these things achieve currency through usage, they now have the power to evoke, and they are instrumentalized for various purposes as a consequence. The terms "fascism" and "totalitarianism" are now widely used because they point to phenomena that are definite and coherent, and which evoke a powerful range of emotions. Liberals and conservatives alike call each other totalitarian and fascist, as part of an ongoing exchange of attack, to evoke the emotions of fear and disgust in whomever is willing to listen and respond sympathetically. Much of humanity's social landscape is a neutral and therefore suggestible medium, with various passionate minorities attempting to divert the medium towards their ends, through these speech acts.

It would take far too much labor to forge something new and entirely on one's own, and then have that thing gain currency. It is much easier to traffic in the same terms that have already been created, and which are currently in currency, which shapes the terms of the debate.

These communication objects are steadily degraded through their repeated usage, which generalizes and spreads and disperses. So labor has to continuously be put into them to maintain them as coherent tools, which can be used to approximate and navigate reality. So we have to continuously explain what fascism and totalitarianism really are.

In the same way, a firearm must be forged out of steel and composites and oils, the bullets out of brass and lead and gunpowder, and all of the tools forging these things have to be forged themselves. Whomever builds the firearm has an intention for it, and then when the firearm passes into circulation, so long as it is maintained, it comes into functions far past the original intent. Warfare takes on a unique shape, due to this path of least resistance. Warfare must now be built around the firearm, due not only to the firearm's power and abilities of material manipulation, but to the sheer amount of labor that goes into the invention, production, and maintenance of the firearm. It generates a channel through which affairs must flow.

So now we can turn once again to the current stages of the "fake news" phenomenon. "Fake news" has steadily caught on as a term of disparagement for several reasons. Much labor has gone into producing the phenomenon that fake news is, which happens to be a socially destructive phenomenon that concerns anyone who gives a smack about approximating reality, and anyone who cares about the destruction of this ability for that matter. And so much social labor has gone into defining and circulating the term "fake news."

Now everyone is calling everyone else's news "fake news." Trump himself has called CNN's coverage "fake news," a move that has liberals bellowing in protest. But how much more "real" than fake news is CNN's news coverage? A couple of degrees? Commercial media started it! For that matter, you could say that commercial news has taught the fake news hucksters everything they know. The practice of manufacturing news sympathetic to various ideologies and sensibilities for profit is no longer the sole property of commercial news media; it has become democratized.

The label itself becomes a focusing point, through which the steady destruction of the body that produces it is carried out. Marx argued in the Grundrisse that though production and consumption appear as binary opposites, they indeed form a unity through their duality. Production is consumption in the sense that it consumes to create, and consumption produces production, by virtue of developing an object of desire to be produced for.

In the same way, we are seeing a form of destruction that is being produced, by virtue of the principle of least resistance. The political and cultural ambiance is all in place: everyone is at each others' throats. And so everyone is desperately glancing around for clubs to beat each other about the head with. Aha! The "fake news" clubs have been produced; now we can get to work.

Here I should point to a lecture on a similar phenomenon at the later stages of the Roman empire. Caution is of course warranted on passing judgments on these complex states of affairs, but nevertheless, the parallels are striking.

Privatization

Privatization often appears in right wing thought as a panacea, a breaking up of the blockages and the restoration of flow and circulation for the market god. And then it appears in left wing thought as a snatch and grab by greedy rentiers, a conversion of public property into private property for profit, which is constantly shattering boundaries and encroaching onto new ground.

It is probably a little bit of both, minus the panacea part, but it is also something much more than an isolated political issue. It represents an ongoing reorientation of our public relations that's progressing at an ever-increasing scale, and this reorientation will determine what happens next. First, an anecdote.

About a year ago, I had a long conversation with a homeless man in Oakland, an activist who was going after the public sleeping laws. He was exhausted and frazzled, but talking excitedly at length, as he was on meth, which he took regularly because he was afraid of being caught out in the open sleeping.

What was so striking about our conversation had to do with the cause of his apprehensiveness. He repeatedly claimed that what terrified him the most was not the local police - which were bad enough - but the new emerging private governments littered throughout San Francisco.

He showed me a weathered brochure for one of them. There was a vigilante quality to the copy, which alluded to a frustration with crime and the inability of local governments to effectively respond. They had a new acronym; I forget what he called them.

Suburban housing associations, gated communities, and incorporated cities like Beverly Hills were early versions of this, but it sounds like these entities are steadily growing more sophisticated and integrated.

The activist's descriptions of these regions were quite chilling, as they had private surveillance and security forces which monitored the neighborhoods very closely. If he got anywhere close to these places he was instantly hassled, and who knows what was in store for him if he were to make trouble.

Because these entities are private, they're opaque in nature and completely unaccountable. And they're concentrating public wealth to create wholly new local governing bodies that are private and exclusive in nature. Which, it should be noted, is nothing new to developing countries.

We see a similar phenomenon at work in the greater economy, exemplified by the secretive private equity sector. Vigilante finance professionals break apart publicly traded companies, concentrating the cannibalized assets within portfolios limited to the control of a few people. The corporate raider phenomenon generalizes, and soon private equity takes over public infrastructure, water services, garbage services, fire services, and other essential public functions, which were initially protected from market forces. On its surface, this is change, a change that temporarily revives the dynamism of society, only to concentrate wealth even further, contributing to an overall stasis and stagnation.

The voracious appetite for public wealth is coupled with a striking social solipsism and self-interest. Many of these people are professed Randians, who believe they are the noble geniuses, and are busying themselves with grabbing the wealth they so rightfully deserve, the looting and parasitic lower class be damned. But perhaps ironically (or not), these are the true marauders, pillagers, and looters. Some of them are doing this quite flippantly, while others are simultaneously preparing very quietly for the social chaos they are helping bring about.
 
One must acknowledge the far-reaching effects of this general privatization. There is a pervasive sense that the center, or a central, cohesive, and binding power is losing its legitimacy, which is best represented by the federal U.S. government, but which is actually composed of a complex interconnection of global entities and interests.

So private money power is not the only interest breaking away, all interests are turning their attentions to local or tribal matters. Liberals once scoffed at the secessionist movements in Texas and the rest of the South, and now they pump their fists when local governments like the state of California openly defy the president-elect's stated intentions. And this shouldn't come as a huge surprise: one looks and sees the future leader as an embodiment of these voracious forces of privatization - the federal government as a force of public cohesion has been swept away. Though was it ever? Who's public did it cohere?

As is the case with many things, there is a continuum here. The process of privatization has been perpetual over the course of centuries. We could say that this process began with the "primitive accumulation" of capital, in which communal lands were appropriated to serve private interest, but then we would have to point back to the coalescing of feudal city states which went through periods of communal cohesion and disintegration into private interest.  

As the falling fragments break off of a dying social order, they will in time coalesce and struggle to assert themselves as governing bodies, each with potentials, pitfalls, and promises of their own. Who will be the owners? Who will exercise the power?

Many of the alt-right factions, the Brexit interests, and the emerging private kingdoms share a similar drive, a desire for public wealth and power which is derived from a social order that is rapidly disintegrating. The same can be said of much of the left as well, for differing reasons. If this desire is to persist, then the objects of this desire will have to be acquired not through a global commerce based on the rule of law - though we can dig further into the nature of this "rule of law" and laugh a bit - but through a rule of plain force. More on this last paragraph later.

Obsessed

An obsession is a great way to concentrate on something. It provides the emotional drive and intensity required to maintain interest in something and dig into it enough to tease out all of its subtleties, which acquire the dimension of multitudes in breadth and depth. This takes time, focus, and energy.

But there is always a danger to this. Because with an obsession, you are tied to a single point, a single position of reference, or a way to perceive. The richer the picture becomes, the more wedded you are to staring only at the picture.

Soon enough, all of your perceptions and judgments are stemming from a single location in thought, with the limited perspective that this implies.

At times this is necessary. For example, a military arms race can be construed as dueling obsessions. If we are bound to the logic of nations, then a threatened nation that wants to survive needs to concentrate research and development and industrial power on its military capabilities. This process transforms the way in which the nation thinks about itself, and the way that it functions.

The larger the mass, and the more intensive the process, the more difficult it is to change course.

There is a reason that the Hopi say: "if you dig things out of the ground, you invite disaster." To dig as a single interest is to transform the landscape from which the interest springs. And it is usually very difficult to stop digging.