The Iron Became Hot
Where did MAGA fit within the development of this discrepancy, between what appears to be a revolutionary consciousness online, and banal, offline conformity? How is it possible, given the latter, to speak of MAGA’s objective disruption within conventional American politics?
What we can properly call the people’s history of the present revolution itself has bizarre, eclectic origins. Following the consolidation of neoliberalism during the Reagan era, all manner of spontaneous, eclectic, bizarre anti-system forms of consciousness began to develop. It would be difficult to call these spontaneous in the classical sense, given how comprehensive, methodical, and systematic they can become in the construction of unique, totalizing forms of consciousness. More embarrassingly, a sizable portion of these confused, jumbled, etc. tendencies are post-Marxist. Among the founders of the American militia movement are figures like Mike Vanderboegh, who had formerly been a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. The favorite fascination of millennial-leftists — Lyndon LaRouche — had previously been a rather prolific and active Marxist economic theorist. Such figures replaced the systematic, comprehensive worldview of Marxism with their own eclectic, confused, yet equally systematic and comprehensive ideas.
These conspiratorial tendencies — ranging from David Icke to Alex Jones, all the way to far-right ideas about white replacement, Jewish question, etc. — were not simply outbursts of rhetoric. They took on the form of comprehensive theories of history, politics, economics, etc. But their rational kernel lied in recognizing something that actually did observably consolidate during the so-called ‘Reagan Revolution’ and the rise of neoliberalism. This something can be best epitomized by the words of John Carpenter regarding the political commentary implicit in his film, They Live:
The picture’s premise is that the ‘Reagan Revolution’ is run by aliens from another galaxy. Free enterprisers from outer space have taken over the world, and are exploiting Earth as if it’s a third world planet. As soon as they exhaust all our resources, they’ll move on to another world…
One of the precisely distinguishing characteristics of neoliberalism was precisely the peripheralization of hitherto ‘first world’ ‘welfare states.’ The subjugation of all spheres of production, and even the state itself, to comprehensive rentier financial colonization was an unavoidable fact. The regime increasingly openly took on the appearance of a foreign occupier. The people of all nations became increasingly Palestinianized, where before they had only been proletarianized. People were not only alienated from their means of production, they were alienated, in every respect, from their own patterns of consumption, and their living existence more generally: Their homes, their neighborhoods, and even immediate, everyday experiences. All the phenomenal determinations within the world had become, and in part, really were, comprehensively artificial.
Nothing seemed real anymore — every aspect of life appeared to be marked by the stamp of intentionality. Ironically, this was the fullest realization of Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno’s nightmare, the complete elimination of all spontaneity from human existence. Adorno simultaneously became the subject of various spontaneous conspiracy theories which attributed to him responsibility for the system of control itself. (Ee was, of course, a bastard who deserves mockery and derision from the Marxist standpoint precisely because he was a reactionary, but he was certainly no architect of history.) People’s ways of life became prototypical forms of big data to feed into marketing industries (the central theme of They Live). The majority of living habitats were structured and treated with all the precision degree of intentionality Real Estate could afford (and then some, just ask Trump, who was many times indebted). The rise of mass consumer mortgage industries and financial derivatives gave everything in existence at every scale (from consumer goods to entire industries) a quality of ephemerality, dynamism, infinite liquidity, and plasticity.
The CCRU identified this with a total, comprehensive decoding and deterritorializing of all reality by “Capital.” Of course, they had no theory or notion of the political (and that is aptly how we may simplify the inherent theoretical limitations of that peculiar school of thought). They failed to comprehend that in addition to this ‘rhizomatic’ reconstruction of reality by ‘Capital,’ corresponded to the construction of total, comprehensive, and absolute mass surveillance states. The state machine had become a seemingly insurmountable and all-powerful force. The development of sophisticated information and cybernetic technologies by the US Military-Industrial complex, arising as a consequence of complex yet highly effective systems of research and development, was the real source of ‘acceleration’ of society, and not ‘Capital.’ Behind the veneer of constitutional governments emerged overbearing, ever-present, unavoidable, and hostile foreign occupation entities.
For nothing was as fake and artificial as politics and so-called “democracy” itself. As today’s Epstein files prove, nearly everything about the American political system is directly controlled and managed in a — yes, conspiratorial, secret manner. The bourgeoisie has acquired its own analogous, hideously deformed version of the ‘proletarian dictatorship.’ For the bourgeois dictatorship always really did correspond to the constitutional and Republican form of politics (precisely the point was that it entailed the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie within civil society). The development of the imperialist hegemony identified by Lenin culminated in a form of statecraft and politics which, in many ways, appropriated the quality once thought to be unique to proletarian dictatorships: The exclusive, planned, and intentional dictatorship of the state machine by an exclusive and particular society — not a Party (which rules openly and disdains to conceal itself), but unique, exclusive, privileged elite networks and systems. Such an observation was so redundant that it could be reflected seamlessly in films like Eyes Wide Shut.
The CCRU identified a radically autonomous, impersonal, and runaway cybernetic principle accelerating the fundamental transformation of society. This was not incorrect. They were wrong to identify this principle with Capital. For at the highest levels, Capital itself was being structured, organized, and even assimilated by something far more alien. As it turns out, Hideo Kojima demonstrated a far better understanding of what had been happening than Nick Land or Sadie Plant. The inception of this runaway, all-pervasive, all-encompassing tendency did not arise seamlessly from civil society as ‘capital’, but from the complex system of planning, massively scaled organization and control pioneered by the joint-coordination of massive imperialist cartels, intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex. On the one hand, this was the logical consequence of imperialist monopoly-capitalism: The scale of direct ownership of the entire economy (and thus society) by a handful of Rockefellers, Morgans, etc. meant forces of production driven not by the ‘anarchy of the market’ but by rational planning.
The leading imperialist-monopolists had comprehensive, all-encompassing visions for the total transformation of society into something rationally managed, planned, and engineered: This was but a logical consequence of a perspective accompanying the sheer scale of centralization and all-pervasiveness by the monopolies commanded by them. On the other hand, the “Cold War” instilled a logic of direct competition with the comparatively (with respect to ‘liberal democracy’) sophisticated and intentional proletarian dictatorships, who John F. Kennedy gave the following description of:
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly-knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
This was how the ‘capitalist’ world viewed the systemic logic of the proletarian dictatorship. The limited extent of their ability to understand this systemic logic defined the content of what was precisely appropriated by them, making Kennedy’s description a clear-cut case of projection: The accusation was a confession. For even up to this point, Military-Industrial lobbyists (today, Palantir) continually make reference to the bogeyman of China or Russia as a pretext to adopt methodologies, paradigms, and systems which would otherwise be incompatible with ‘democracy,’ but are necessary for the purposes of ‘defeating the communists’ or the ‘hostile authoritarian regimes.’
Thus the two principal factors which accelerated the development of this newer, mysterious, alien principle were: the full consolidation of state and civil society by imperialist monopolies and the competitive pressure induced by the systemic logic of proletarian dictatorship during the Cold War.
The chief limitation of ‘conspiracy theories’ is their methodological individualism: The presumption that a single, or even united, expression of individual human will could possibly be at the helm or in command of the system. Even with respect to the political logic of proletarian dictatorship, this is not the case. How a system could be both planned ‘rationally,’ marked with the stamp of intentionality, while also being impersonal and beyond the control of any one individual is what the spontaneous ‘conspiracy theorist’ precisely cannot fathom.
The systems designed deliberately by the planners, controllers, researchers, and developers during the Cold War — meant to organize great masses of people, encompass the simultaneous coordination of activity, systematize, departmentalize, standardize, and ‘rationalize’ first the military itself as an institution, and then logically all society itself at scale — took on lives of their own. They became radically autonomous, self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing principles of organization, capable of developing tendencies misaligned with the original intentions behind their design. That is the real story, after all, behind Metal Gear Solid. They could be commanded, let alone comprehended, only by equally impersonal principles or information-systems. An institution is of course the most primitive kind of information-system. Institutions have constitutional, enumerated purposes and missions — their success or failure is measured internally according to the fulfillment of this purpose.
But the real development of information technologies (ARPANET, etc.) led to the emergence of information-systems that were far more effective, efficient, and capable of commanding the organization and activity of society than institutions were. They also had fundamentally rogue tendencies (‘glitches’ in the Matrix). These information-systems took hold of society at the expense of institutions first as mass media (speaking of the inception of the proletarian dictatorship: It was precisely also by means of mass media that the Bolsheviks broke the parliamentary, ‘democratic’ form of government), creating intensive feedback loops between the production of information, the captivation of attention by audiences, and economic industries via marketing. Crucially, this also fully ‘colonized’ the dimension of politics itself and the ability for the regime to measure or induce consensus with respect to its various, systemically induced goals.
These inceptual information-systems also began to assimilate capital itself. Information about markets acquired total dominance over the reality of markets themselves, even when they were acutely at odds. The form of the financial derivative is in fact determined entirely by information rather than any strictly tangible use-value. Information itself is (with qualified exception) a passive receptacle of social tendencies, goals, intentions, etc. Already, the entire economy had been re-organized, methodically re-structured etc. according to the standardizing and ‘rational’ corporate-institutional principles of monopolistic cartels in conjunction with government. This inadvertently prepared all the forces of production of society to be systemically aligned on one ‘grid,’ so to speak, ripe for comprehensive colonization by newborn information-systems. The self-perpetuating and self-referential systematic logic of bureaucracy had itself and continues to itself give way to command by information-systems.
No one was truly and really in ‘control’ of any of this. For certain, there are the various monopolistic ruling capitalist cartels, their special elite networks and societies based on kinship and mutual interest. These form a fundamental, structuring bedrock of all aspects of our superstructure. For certain, they absolutely manipulate the system from within. But they do not and cannot control it in its totality. And the extent of their manipulation and control is only to the extent which they can corrupt institutions directly, via bribery, intimidation, blackmail, etc. These institutions themselves are vestigial — there are then actors within institutions simply ‘following orders’ and ‘doing their job.’ But the aforementioned history is really one of impersonal principles and tendencies assuming control over systems at the expense of institutions (both the capitalists corrupting them and those working within them). This is what made ‘metaphysics’ an effective and functional politico-military reality and constitutes one of the fundamental materialist kernels underlying the thinking of Aleksandr Dugin (with his understanding of logos as the preeminent, impersonal principles that structure civilizations, states, etc.).
Control, or sovereignty in the last instance, could no longer be comprehended as the prevalence of one will over others (Hobbes Leviathan) but the prevalence of one impersonal, systematizing or cybernetic principle over another. The hijacking of society by impersonal cybernetic principles is in fact the revolutionary thing. It is what has hollowed out society comprehensively, up until this point with the release of the Epstein files, nakedly revealing the morbid, rotten corruption behind so-called ‘democratic institutions.’ Popularly-induced runaway feedback tendencies within media and elsewhere have discovered an arbitrary limit in the Epstein class and its corruption (the atmosphere of silence, culpability, mystery, etc. surrounding it), which they now implicitly regard as an arbitrary barrier to the forthcoming revolution. The overthrow of the monopoly-capitalist cartels, called in popular language the Epstein Class, is now the will of heaven, made necessary by the development of the productive forces themselves.
The recent history of the maturing, developing revolutionary consciousness of the American people is not a consequence of ideology or theory. It is a direct consequence precisely of the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Up until this point, it has developed blindly and without any guidance by philistine so-called ‘Marxists.’ Thus its history does not begin with a theoretically correct revolutionary consciousness but by a consciousness fundamentally victimized by displacement: a displacement effected by the emergence of intentions where before there appeared spontaneity; plans, where before appeared anarchy; logos where before appeared chaos. It has thus far been incomprehensible to grasp that this intentionality, ‘rationality,’ and logos are not the effect of any given individual will but of autonomous social principles and tendencies unleashed by the productive forces.
And so the inception of revolutionary consciousness is the inception of schizophrenia, where the basic intelligibility of reality has completely broken down; everything had become radically displaced. So-called ‘Marxism’ in the West, of course, provided no guidance amidst these new conditions, though it easily could have, had the ‘Marxists’ themselves not been such passive, cowardly philistines. They had become no more privileged agents of history than a raving schizophrenic on the street. In fact, they had less agency, having been fully domesticated and subordinated to academic institutions.
From this, a thousand conspiracy-theories, sects, cults, etc. bloomed — each equally ineffective and impotent in posing any real challenge to the system, each systematically wiped out with little difficulty by the regime. They all went down like Waco did.
Would-be revolutionary theoreticians, faced with this fact, had to resort to a complete deference to the horizontal, rhizomatic, anarchistic, ‘organic’ agency of the masses. This includes a broad array of thinkers like Hardt, Negri, Laclau, etc. whose zeitgeist within the American context really was the 1999 WTO-Seattle protests.
There was, of course, third-party electoralism, which included figures such as Ross Perot & Ralph Nader. These, in the eyes of the American public and ‘history,’ definitively discredited the possibility of third-party electoralism within what everyone recognized as a systematically and deliberately consolidated two-party system.
Subsequently, the Bush era saw sporadic forms of resistance by the population in the anti-war movement, the continued proliferation and accentuation of ‘conspiracy theories’ (Alex Jones, etc.), and the phenomena surrounding Ron Paul (one can include in the latter the sovereign citizen, etc. movements, which, at minimum, represented the minimal acknowledgement of how the neoliberal state overthrew the constitutional form of the Republic). A great deal of popular dissatisfaction with the regime was invested in the electoral campaign of Barack Obama, who himself would later symbolize the epitome of the regime (as exposed by Assange, Snowden, etc.). Obama deserves, here, to be mentioned as, ironically, the first iteration of the introduction of memeology into politics through information technology (additionally, everyone loves to forget that it was Obama who represented the ‘dynamism and youthful rise’ of Silicon Valley).
Gigi later makes a point of mentioning the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2015 which, we would be remiss not to include in the people’s history of the United States. But the only historical significance of that campaign lied in the way in which it proved politics and ‘democracy’ was fundamentally rigged, a demonstration that effectively lent credibility to the MAGA movement.
MAGA represented everything wrong with America. Both ‘I’m with her’ liberals and early MAGA supporters would probably agree on that point. Whereas Bernie sought to give continuity to the original, Obama-era optimism, MAGA was plain acquiescence to and acknowledgement of the fact that there was something deeply fucked up about the state of America.
MAGA was the first real political symptom of the contradiction that now condemns the United States to civil war and reconstitution. The sporadic and dispersed tendencies which epitomized the contradictions within the system could, before, be dismissed or absorbed by hegemonic narratives. “Crazy conspiracy theorists,” “cults,” “losers,” “deplorables,” “lunatics,” “extremists.” They were either marginal or did not disrupt politics in any unavoidable way (Bernie, for example, was precisely avoidable. It simply sufficed to rig the primaries against him, and he would shut up like the cuckold he is).
It is precisely a dialectical irony that, the various sporadic forms of spontaneous revolutionary consciousness, themselves arising in reaction to the ascendent information-age, coalesced around what was really the final colonization of politics by it. Hence the kernel of truth in the common ‘redpill:’ That the real conspiracy was the rise of Trump itself. But even so, MAGA did absorb genuine, if even spontaneous, eclectic, and confused, revolutionary aspirations latent within the American people. It was the banner around which those in America with unqualified rage and hatred against the status quo rallied around. They didn’t know they were being ‘taken for a ride,’ yet probably didn’t even care. MAGA for many, functionally, meant the triumph of a radically autonomous, self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating cybernetic principle (meme), over the elite-institutional networks (‘special interests’) that ruled the American state. The triumph of this meme, for them, at least felt like real emancipation from the regime, which they knew to have faces, methodical, cunning, and intentional personalities (crooked Hillary). The meme was a receptacle of all their deepest aspirations, a space cleared for the emergence of a new signifier.
This is why, fundamental to the story of MAGA, is the story of the real revolutionary history of US politics that had, all this time, been developing in its background and which fundamentally predates it. The final chapter in the story of MAGA consisted in the release of the Epstein files and the rise of both national and worldwide solidarity with the Palestinian cause, with whom everyone who is not a paid shill spontaneously, intuitively, and immediately recognized as their own. Trump ceased to be a meme and began to acquire the quality of an actor, with intentions, personality, and agency — namely to the precise extent that he was regarded as a regime operative. Under Biden, the Gaza genocide fundamentally established a new, worldwide, and national axis of polarization: It revealed nakedly and in a manner far more profound than Trump’s trolling of the national media, the degree to which Americans live under a dictatorship nowhere enumerated in their constitution.
The Palestinian people, since October 7th and in the global context of the rise of a multi-polar world, have become a symbol of the existential predicament of all mankind. A new generation of young militants colonized by debt and fundamentally deprived of any opportunity or future, have long began to coalesce with what had before been the disaffected, blue-collar MAGA base (since Biden). The Palestinian people have a unique symbolic status in our cybernetic, information age: They represent the living, indiscriminate principles around which masses form without ‘rational’ mediation: For Palestinian identity cannot be reduced to an institution, organization, or ideology — it is an objective, continually reemerging and revitalizing tendency of resistance amidst occupation: Its seamless inevitability. The genocide of Gaza is a declaration of war against all mankind, including the American people themselves, to whatever extent they can articulate any degree of autonomy from the worldwide hostile occupation entities established by the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The victory of Trump in 2024 inadvertently opened the floodgates: Having finally debased the authority and sanctity of the United States government (subordinating it under ‘memeological’ constructs) — an authority and sanctity Biden tried desperately and violently (through state crackdowns, mass censorship, etc.) but failed to restore. Nothing can save it from the verdict of an increasingly awakened American population, in the form of a now emerging anti-Epstein popular momentum. A revolution cannot be completed half-way. The Disney-fied veneer of neoliberal democracy has been completely shattered, and now the faces of Jeffrey Epstein and Netanyahu openly, nakedly, and grotesquely show themselves, where before they hid behind the respectable media, politicians, etc. For they have been flushed out. MAGA has become superfluous — it inadvertently and accidentally uncovered deeper systemic realities it was incapable of confronting.
MAGA hollowed out American politics as such, fully assimilated every semblance of popular recognition invested in it into its own peculiar, cybernetic form. And what it left was something fundamentally raw, grotesque, unassailable, un-memeable (although, Trump today, along with ‘Israel,’ desperately try, along with their troupe of prostituted influencers). This process has flatly, finally opened up the dimension of reality within politics (beyond mere memeological constructs, self-reinforcing narratives, etc.). This was the true historical mission of MAGA, and the mission is now complete.
In our post-MAGA age, Marxists may finally recognize that the aforementioned artificialization of reality, the complete colonization of life by financial capital, the emergence of hostile, foreign occupation regimes. These epitomize the acuity of a fundamental contradiction between the forces and relations of production, a contradiction that is destined to acquire decisive political fruition in the form of a second American civil war and world revolution.
The majority of Americans are conformists in practice. But the structures they conform to, had increasingly bent and twisted in unpredictable, wild ways by virtue of the objective contradictions underlying them. The mundane, habitual reality of political practice has not yet caught up to the extremism of (online) consciousness, but this gap is closing very fast and it is the former which is catching up to the latter. The mundane dimension of politics is in disarray because on a systematic and structural level, its bluff had been called: The Epstein files have been released, and the internal logic underlying ‘real politics’ has itself broken down and is itself in disarray.
The mundane, everyday, habitual reality (which contradicts the consciousness of the nation) has become unavoidably decrepit and rotten. It can no longer survive through inertia alone. When the now rotting dam finally breaks, a new world will flood the old, abruptly, suddenly, and catastrophically.