Capitalists, masochists and Mar-A-Lago

Hello friends. I can’t seem to find the time to write an essay, but I have fragments streaming through my head all day, so I’ll be offering them in bullet form for the time being. Today’s bullets are pretty theoretical, harking back to my undergraduate days. I hope they’re clarifying in some way. Here it goes….

• The immolation of the American Empire by the Trump regime has no modern precedent. The rapid dismantling of the intelligence bureaucracies, multilateral trade agreements, security partnerships with allied capitalist states and debt finance systems that fed American corporate hegemony pushes the “capitalism and schizophrenia” thesis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to its limit. Not only have the working classes come to desire their own oppression, but American capitalists themselves have become masochists, accomplices in the destruction of the system of power that enriched them.

• Many dynamics, some aligned, others contradictory, underlie the self-immolation: the patrimonial and kleptocratic tendencies of the Trump family; the nihilism or “end days fascism” of the ascendant tech oligarchs explicated in the recent piece by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, driven by declining prospects for capital in the era of climate crisis; the idiocy and incompetence of the Mar-A-Lago circuit of capital, enabled by parochial systems of race, gender and class privilege; the hyper-extraction of the neo-liberal era, which treated the industrial working class as disposable and permanently stranded; an ultra-Zionist faction within the Trump regime seeking to exact retribution against critics of the Netanyahu genocide above all else; and the desperation of techno-fascist oligarchs over-invested in failing crypto and AI schemes.

• The Trump arsonists have implemented no new industrial policy or political economic structure to replace the neo-liberal regime. Nothing is left in its place, except for the patrimonial and kleptocratic whims of the Trump family.

• The techno-fascist libertarian movement (NRx) led by Peter Thiel is driven by a masochistic epi-phenomenon: the techno-fascist libertarian hatred of the universities and public R & D institutions which spawned them. (The Internet, as a grand achievement of university and Federal collaboration, is erased from the neo-medievalist reading of history pushed by Thiel and his house philosopher Yarvin.)

• The Mar-A-Lago idiot capitalists and Bay Area/Austin techno-fascists are united by white nationalism and the fear/hatred of post-George Floyd social consciousness. The “anti-wokism” central to the Trump capitalist coalition is, in part, a response to challenges to white male supremacy voiced by employees of tech and other industrial corporations in the post-George Floyd era. In this way, the immolation of the American empire by its owners can be seen as a grand, protracted episode of white male rage.

• The self-immolation is not easily reversed. As the Times reports today, applying a neo-liberal frame:

“The world moves on,” Mr. Goldin said. Supply chains will be rearranged, new partnerships will be struck, and foreign students, researchers and tech talent will find other places to migrate. “The U.S. is not going to quickly restore its economic position,” he said.