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Jul. 8th, 2022 | 11:06 am
Левачество понемногу просыпается и принимает мои фундаментальные идеи о фордизме.
We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.
With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.
Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.
https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-the-l
We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.
With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.
Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.
https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-the-l