The strange spectacle of the constantly morphing Trump administration provides plenty of opportunities to interrogate the nature of chaos in general. Because after all, what in the world is chaos? This is a slippery concept: we assign chaos to processes that we are at a loss to understand, so we try to anticipate them by removing expectation of anticipation. And we can anticipate where we have the time and energy to study and catalog, and even then some organizational frameworks simply break down, until new ones are formed with greater explanatory power.
A shattering vase looks quite chaotic indeed, but the many fragments are bursting in the directions they were supposed to. And what exactly is organized about the vase in the first place, apart from the fact that we formed it in accordance with our needs?
In a very mundane way, the chaos that is my brother's room suits him just fine. I come upon the room and view the planes of discontinuity and fragmentation with a sense of horror and desolation, as the whole of the room speaks to me, whereas he just throws things every which way and then retrieves them when he wants them, without much of a thought to the spacial quality of this discontinuity. Though even the sense of the whole presupposes a certain sensibility.
Chaos looks very different to people with short time horizons that are dominant in the perception. To someone with good short term instincts, chaos is very much a welcome element. Within a constantly shifting environment, the swift enjoy a sort of invisibility to move towards their interests, while the planners, moral proselytizers, and lovers of law sit scratching their heads and rubbing their knuckles.
And of course with chaos comes the dissolution of various organized centers of power which can no longer cope with their surroundings, and the formation of new ones which can. Chaos opens up potentiality, it frees up resources and connections towards new ends.
The Trump administration has caused all sorts of chaos, particularly in respect to the rule of law and their relationships with the media. But the problems that they are setting out to fix in their right wing ways are necessarily solved by transgression, particularly transgression on constitutional law. If you have spent decades simplifying complex social, political, economic problems in the form of a constant assault of propaganda, eventually you're going to have a political class that has to act on the realities generated by that propaganda, especially when cascading crises finally come up to meet it.
This is altogether easier to do because the rule of law has eroded so dramatically in the past couple of decades. A new organizational center of power is forming, after the old frameworks buttressed by law slowly crumble. So you have judges second guessing legal opinions, and law enforcement agencies bumping up against each other and enforcing or not enforcing certain orders. The confusion and chaos is arising through a sort of friction between competing visions of government.
On the other hand, the administration has been heavy-handed with its interactions with a hostile establishment media, though while these media professionals are screaming about the chilling of the First Amendment, it is actually their particular oligarchs whose channels of access are steadily eroding, and the administration is reaching out to smaller media outlets around the country, opening up the space for new entrants. Of course the victors that are selected for in this process are another thing altogether, considering the self-regard of the administration.
And where chaos exists in the face of an organized power that still possesses its faculties, there will exist a repression, a forced order of that chaos, on behalf of organized power. The nature and direction of the repression will be taken from the nature of the organized power itself. Marx noted that the coincidence of an anarchic free market and an autocratic private workplace was not some strange paradox, but a necessary condition for their mutual perpetuation.
With a chaotic and uncertain marketplace, there is the constant pressure of competition and economic warfare, which necessarily situates businesses into an autocratic state of organization, so as to maximize productivity and remain competitive. At the same time, the fearful and power-hungry executives are constantly moving to expand their operations, merge with competitors, and destroy enemies.
The capitalists love their state of anarchy; it feeds their ecstasy, their warlike spirit that pervades economic conquest. But to view this in a finer grain, it is the dominant capitalists that push most vigorously for free markets and deregulation, whereas the losing capitalists find themselves on the side of protectionism and regulation that is somewhat harmless to their bottom lines, and which affects others that they do business with. So you see the telecoms pushing for deregulation of their industry, and the majority of the Silicon Valley firms that use their pipes are pushing for net neutrality regulation.
A centrally-planned marketplace would clear up some of these problems, though we do know now that they will create new ones of their own, chiefly in the form of the dense bureaucracies that grow up around such efforts in order to manage the sheer complexity of the undertaking. But of course, this is a different set of problems that will not necessarily be solved by the capitalists' noble and courageous spirit, a fact that accounts for the viciousness with which "socialist" and "communist" are spit out in public discourse, though few truly know what those things may entail. And even those vile words are regaining favor, a sign of the growing weariness of unchecked private enterprise.
The victorious centers of organized power that arise out of this chaos will be the ones that properly situate themselves to their surroundings. The ongoing hybrid of selective deregulation, cost cutting, upper class tax cutting, protectionism, and military spending will produce an equally selective environment for those looking to rise to the top.
The desires that drive capital accumulation, global integration, and domination have been largely kept in place, while desires for change, national protectionism, and even more intense domination are coming up against them, producing offspring of their own. It is not hard to guess where things are going. Nevertheless, the pockets of potentiality that are opened up may give some more room to activists looking to do some good work.
