Field Notes: Long Time Coming
Blog Content
The War on Sharing: When Everything Falls Apart
As you may have noted, the above quote isn’t my writing and instead comes to you from Antonio Gramsci; a Marxist philosopher and the founder of the Italian Communist Party. A brilliant thinker, Gramsci wrote the above passage while imprisoned by Mussolini and his fascist government, where he ultimately died at age forty-six; you can read the appropriately titled “Selections from the Prison Notebooks” by clicking here.
If this quote seems simultaneously familiar, and yet off somehow to you, that’s probably because you’ve heard a mistranslation offered by (highly questionable) philosopher Slavoj Žižek. That wording typically goes “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” While both of these quotes relate well to what I’m writing about here today, I went with the Gramsci original as a headliner because I feel some kindred nature with the author; which is certainly not something I’d say about Žižek.
So why does Gramsci’s quote speak to me on this chilly October morning? Because although he could not have intended it, our author has nevertheless spoken what I perceive to be an undeniable truth about our present, and at times, terrifying moment in human history. We too live in a moment when the old, a capitalist liberal democratic order in the Pig Empire, is dying. We too are trapped inside a birthing moment, where the new socio-political and perhaps economic order that will replace it is unclear. More importantly, our society is being artificially rooted inside this old and dying order by powerful forces capable of delaying this transition; but only at great cost, and only for a time.
This is without question a frightening time to be alive. It’s not an accident that fascism is rising, the real wage economy is imploding, the neoliberal foreign policy consensus lies in tatters, life in free market capitalist societies has become a Cyberpunk-esque libertarian dystopia, and the oceans are literally boiling; all at once.
These are all merely the visible symptoms of the same problem; we’ve run out of planet, and it’s either the end of capitalism, or the end of a human habitat that can support several billion people. I’m not telling you this to frighten you, I’m telling you this so that you will understand why everything around you seems to be falling apart at the same time. Knowledge is power; it’s the difference between knowing what to do, and dying because some rich fascist has got you locked in a lie and working against your own class interests.
The plain truth of the matter is that rich people mean you harm; which is why I can’t just disregard Žižek’s translation of this quote entirely. These billionaires, in-pocket politicians, and their pet propagandists are monsters, and right now they have unfathomable power over our society. Given the choice of saving the planet, or continuing capitalism, the ruling capitalist order has more or less en masse chosen capitalism – bodies be damned.
Furthermore, in this frozen moment between the death of the old, and the birth of the new, the laws and social mores of the Pig Empire make truly fighting back almost impossible (or at least highly dangerous) for those of us who don’t intend to go quietly into that good night so oil companies and rich nazi futurists can keep the grand game going for another generation at most. For now.
And so it is that we all must continue to come together on websites, at protests, in discussion groups. Watching, waiting, teaching the truths, ideas, and theories that will carry humanity forward when no amount of money and violence can maintain the dead corpse of the old, in the rightful place of the new. If you’re out there reading this someplace dark and lonely, take heart; the fall of a rigged neoliberal democratic order doesn’t mean the death of democracy, and just because the fascists seize the levers of power doesn’t mean we have to obey.
It is undeniably a time of monsters, but the simple peasant folk still have answers even when the laws of our lords and masters forbid it. Patience is a virtue, and revenge is a dish best served cold – preferably from a height of roughly three feet.
- nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook.
Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.
Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites
Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!
“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
Nina Bytes: Fascism is on the Docket
Hello friends; long time no see. My life has been pretty terrible for the past several months, but it’s better now, and I’d rather not waste a lot of time going over the gory details. Please bear with me while I work myself back into shape; writing is way harder than emo trash-posting on Twitter.
In today’s post I’d like to provide some evidentiary examples for a thesis I published over on Instagram called “Fascism is a Legalist Doctrine.” As I mentioned, two major reactionary arguments designed to dismantle what passes for American democracy are making their way before a pro-fascist Supreme Court in America. Let’s take a closer look at both of those cases:
The Supreme Court Is On The Verge Of Killing The Voting Rights Act
First of all I’d like to note that I chose this rather bloodless October 3rd, 2022 article by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux over at Five-Thirty-Eight on purpose because I need the “very serious” liberals in my life to understand that the fascist judicial assault on American democracy is very real, not even remotely abstract, and definitely not some far left political theory. The article revolves around the pivotal Alabama map-rigging case currently before a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS in America; Merrill v. Milligan.
Now on the surface, this might look like just another crooked gerrymandering case in a very long line of crooked gerrymandering cases in the United States. Once one delves a little deeper into the fascist argument being presented, and likely to be accepted by the court however, the horrifying implications become more clear:
“Up until now, the court has taken the perspective that, in order to comply with the act, states are in some situations required to take race into consideration as the primary factor in the redistricting process. Alabama Republicans are now arguing that it’s discriminatory to prioritize race over other traditional redistricting techniques, such as having compact districts, contiguous boundaries or avoiding crossing county or town boundaries. Several experts, including Pildes, told FiveThirtyEight that a ruling that sides with Alabama would be a radical departure from previous interpretations of the law and would likely free states to draw congressional or state legislative maps where minority voters have less political power relative to their numbers.
In that sense, the outcome of this case could be very similar to a 2013 ruling in which the Roberts court gutted another section of the Voting Rights Act, freeing a group of states with histories of discrimination against minority voters to change their election laws without federal approval. In the years afterward, those states shuttered thousands of polling places, intensified their voter purges and changed voting laws in other ways that disproportionately affect minority voters.”
Yes folks, you read that correctly; fascist lawyers and the Alabama GOP are arguing (more or less) that being forced to draw voting districts in such a way as to accurately reflect minority voting populations and protect their constitutional rights, are actually discriminatory against white Republicans. In short, Tucker Carlson’s reverse racism propaganda from Fox News is about to become a fundamental plank of election law; to the advantage of fascists and the disadvantage of anyone who doesn’t like being ruled by fascists.
Astoundingly enough however, Merrill v. Milligan isn’t even the most serious threat to American democracy about to appear before an objectively far right and reactionary Supreme Court:
How the Supreme Court could make it legal to steal the next presidential election
Whelp, that’s pretty bleak my friends. In this July 11th opinion piece over on MSNBC, law professor Jessica Levinson lays out the terrifying implications in another upcoming case, Moore v. Harper.
Although understanding this case does involved wading into the weeds a bit, the fascist argument here broadly stipulates that state lawmakers more or less have the right to conduct elections any way they want (including rigging them,) without oversight from anyone except federal courts, and even then only narrowly. This is literally a green light for Republican controlled states to not only rig their own elections, but award their state delegates to whichever presidential candidate they want; and if that sounds familiar to you, it probably should:
“Even more significantly, this doctrine, taken to its catastrophic and logical conclusion, could allow state lawmakers to legally steal presidential elections. Let’s imagine that in 2024, Florida residents vote to re-elect President Joe Biden. This has always meant Florida’s 30 Electoral College votes would go to Biden. But maybe the lawmakers there would want the Republican challenger to win. The lawmakers could decide not to certify the election results and instead submit their own slate of electors to the Electoral College who would vote for that Republican. By pure luck and coincidence, this is pretty damn close to the plan espoused by former President Donald Trump and his supporters in their attempt pilfer the 2020 election.”
Naturally of course, we can’t know how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule in Moore v. Harper. but given the court’s current composition, and the fact that four reactionary judges on the court have already indicated they support the “independent state legislature doctrine,” it’s probably not that hard to guess.
All of which of course leads me back to the point I was trying to make on Instagram; it does no good for liberals to rail away against fascist street gangs and open neo-nazis, while patently refusing to resist the judicial branch of fascism that is actively working to end what passes for American democracy, once and for all. Biden can walk out on stage and warn us all about the “semi-fascists” until he’s blue in the face, but until Democrat lawmakers are prepared to abolish the filibuster and secure voting rights for all, the fascists are going to keep winning these fights in the halls of power, and telling folks to “vote harder” is a sick joke.
That doesn’t mean society has to accept fascist rule, but if the Democratic Party isn’t even prepared to fight fascism to preserve its own existence at the ballot box, what good are they to anyone who isn’t a fascist, at all?
- nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook.
Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.
Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites
Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!
“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
