I don’t know how many people caught this video (below) that Jeremy Corbyn put out, made of excerpts from his speech at the Fabian Society earlier in the week. The first half in particular is striking because of its choice of vocabulary: “Stitched up our political system”; “the powerful”; “rigged”; “line the pockets of their friends”; “the truth”; “rigged system”; “break the grip of vested interests”; “fixing the system for an elite few.” What is significant is here is a shift to buzzwords whose origins are in popular conspiracy theories, in a fundamentally occultist view of capitalism. It is a speech that trades on the notion not that the problem of capitalism is not the poverty of the many but the prosperity of the few, and it ultimately points to a critique of *who* gets rich and not *how* they get rich, off the anonymous toil of nearly everyone. If this is what Corbyn’s new populist rebranding amounts to it is a fucking disgrace and people on the radical left should have nothing to do with it. People are all too quick to forget that not all critiques of capitalism are radical ones (and I’m willing to be explicit in saying that a major trend in populist critiques of capitalism in the 20th and 21st century have been conspiracy theories, many of which have been used to justify genocide). To note that society is indeed unfair without discussing the real movements of capitalist violence and exploitation that lead in every instant to the further class divisions, further impoverishment of the many, is frankly useless. Even worse is to diagnose continual impoverishment as the consequence of some hidden rationality of some cabal or clique: because here we lose sight of precisely the *irrationality* of capitalism, the anarchy of the competition of private interests which a society founded on need would seek to rationalise. That’s not to say that there’s no old boys club, no nepotism, no racketeering between the richest private interests – it is not to see the bourgeoisie through rose-tinted glasses – but it is to say that if your critique amounts to only the condemnation of that as immoral you have missed the point. But worse you drag people with you into much murkier territory, raising a politics that hates those who are well off far more than it hates the conditions of generalised penury in capitalist society. Indeed the rise and propagation of the *oldest* conspiracy by the *newest* modes of technological communications – the harnessing of the everyman appearance of Web 2.0 to disseminate arguments previously belonged only to the most far right radio DJs – is behind a lot of the popularity of the Trumps of this world. It is fucking miserable when people who are supposed to be on the left do not understand this or seek to exploit it in the name of a left populism.
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Maybe I can put this more simply: I don’t hate the rich because they have more than I have. I hate them because their fortune is founded on historical violence, and the insurance and endurance of those fortunes will be founded on even worse violence in the present and future.
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And now for the furious and obscurantist footnoting because I know actually no-one gives a shit: this argument, however obvious it might sound, does lead into important questions of Marxist metaphysics. It’s an argument that was most thoroughly fleshed out in Adorno’s critique of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards where he writes that “Events in the sphere of circulation, where competitors are cutting one another’s throats, take the place of the appropriation of surplus value in the sphere of production, but in comparison with the latter, the cattle dealers’ brawls over loot are epiphenomena that could not possibly bring about the great crisis on their own; and the economic events that appear as the machinations of the rapacious dealers are not only childish, as Brecht no doubt wanted them to be, but also unintelligible by any economic logic, no matter how primitive.” – indeed it is characteristic of almost all anti-capitalist conspiracy theories to provide only an ideology-critique of circulation while they eschew the critique of their own fall into ideology. But at the bottom of this is a more important argument about capitalism, use, and need. To the critics of circulation all that is needed for capital to fall into the hands of the many: no argument stands against the brutality of those machines, and of their use that uses up our lives. The critique of the accumulation of surplus value, though, requires a critique of the capitalist use of things, a critique of instrumentality: in bringing about a world in which we collectively produce ourselves in response to the full natural-historical density and complexity of our needs (as opposed to just reproducing ourselves minimally for the next day’s toil) we need a wealth other than the fortunes of the bourgeoisie. Nuff said.