In a discussion with Glasgow-area labour organizer Julie Sherry on the Covid-19 Pandemic and far-right conspiracy responses, we brought up rather quickly the reality of social alienation. I’ll return to this later in a full piece as it’s rather important. But suffice it to say, the pandemic’s primary toll was brought out through the negative side of social distancing. Pandemics tend to bring out the prevalent fabric of society organization (which they must take some pride in flaunting), and in our society Covid is said to isolate people from the basic sensibility of existence. It doesn’t make sense, this invisible disease sweeping through the world. Moreover, the Tory government’s profit-over-people response has been explicitly desensitized to lived experiences of people already struggling against austerity impacts and rising costs of living.

For Sherry, of course, life was alienated before—but it has now reached an unbearable tenor. She argued that far right anti-vax theories are coping mechanisms for widespread alienations from realities of a highly interconnected world—although she caught heat during the Q/A from a self-described ‘very liberal black man who refuses the vaccine.’ Could Julie Sherry have perhaps been implying, however inadvertently, that all those who resisted the vaccine tend towards the right? Her argument recalls Jameson’s point that conspiracies respond to people’s inability to understand the world or rationally exert agency.[1] On the whole, the class-based analysis Sherry advanced was rather precinct in its focus on the widespread embrace of conspiracies amongst working-class demographics. Again, this implies a real sense of wholeness that will surely come from proper education and diffusion of class consciousness (which, curiously, was not mentioned by name). It is the establishment narrative, she proclaimed, rather than the networked nature of a furiously mutating virus which the greatest scientific experts have struggled to understand, that constitutes the true threat to a genuine working class consensus grounded in a closeness to reality. Such closeness, no doubt, is that which is identical to solidarity, which naturally expresses love and empathy, that will resist that siren-call of theories riddled with exclusive, racist overtones.

Characterizing the working class this way provides a necessary set-up for the main directive argument of socialist theodicy that you see printed unironically on t-shirts the world over: seize the means of production. Reclaim the means of production from upper class oppressors who, by obscuring the truth and mishandling their charge of public service, force the working classes to embrace theoretical falsehoods! Purpose and punchline, Sherry maintains, are the central logic to dismantling capitalist falsehoods and ruling class power. It’s that incisive scalpel that scientific socialism wields, which will ultimately hold down far more simple systems of social consensus.

But her absent focus on the means of circulation was, to me, rather looming. Why focus on the means of production here when it is diffusion of a different product—the quasi-commodity of information—that matters? (mis)Information, in its protean capacity to challenging both truth values and the traditional concepts of the proletariat centered on alienation from their productive power and their nature, invites us to consider: why does no one speak of the means of circulation? Let us instead seize the means of circulation from what we too often imply to be a democratic process and platform of diffusion!

I have never considered Marx an adequate theorist of culture or of commodity circulation. Moreover, Orthodox Marxism preached by political activists has failed to account for the problems of cultural autonomy beyond its highly reductive base-superstructure model. And any lessons Marx does impart to us in later works do not theorize circulation through a model of informational adaptation. You’re wrong, an older Scottish man said to me after I made this point in the Q/A: Marx is highly attentive to problems of informational diffusion in volumes two and three of Capital. But he does not response to a particular version of 21^st century information technology, that which Jodi Dean calls Communicative Capitalism: the mistaken belief that in simply making our voices heard, our extraordinary ability to communicate will change the world. Have we somehow forgotten that social media is hostile territory, monopoly space? Do we trust again in the New York Times to tell it like it is: even if people bother to read anymore? Steven Shaviro’s call for a McLuhanite Marxism in his unpublished book The Age of Aesthetics is an instructive theoretical response.[2] Shaviro reminds us that in Castells’ network society the analysis of power follows how commodities travel, not how they are produced. This resembles the transition from Foucaultist disciplinary society of Deleuzian society of control: any analysis of political economy must recognize the move from Fordist production (and traditional Marxist thought) to flexible, just in time realities that shrinks space and time. This insight is not to invalidate Marxist models, nor to ignore the abiding significance of commodity production, but rather to establish the evaluation of circulation as central to any theory of postmodern capital.

Sherry reprised an important lesson that Latour taught us in the mid 90’s: left- and right-wing dissidents have lost faith in the viability of the establishment and use (markedly similar) critical tendencies to critique it. But what she didn’t mention was their incomparable levels of success! Much as Sherry and others will cry wolf about ruling-class conspiratorial behavior it is China-Virus narratives, anti-Fauci rants, and anti-Semitic agitation that defines the nature of disbelief. The problem for the Left is that right-wing internet users have managed to undermine the little remaining faith in the institution through their viral conspiracy theories. They happen to share the Leftist belief that the center cannot hold, that we must take matters into our own hands to discover the truth. But the right has undermined mainstream media credibility only to create its own sources of authoritative preponderance (let the irony of that one sink in). The Daily Wire is the best example: who could have imagined that rather marginal players from Breitbart and InfoWars would boast nearly 890,000 paid subscribers as of June 2022 on a multimedia platform that produces everything from repackaged conservative journalism to action films?

This failure (or success, depending on who you are) is another reminder of the Left’s abysmal discomfort with informational networking and with technological comfort at large. But moreover it’s a weakness in the trust in prefigurative communities of the ‘working class’ that don’t exist as they’d like them to. Despite her best efforts, Sherry was unable to tackle the problem of poor people’s great trust in conspiracies. We just have to convince them what’s right, she said. 

We do, but we need intelligent diffusions of constructive, collaborative opinions linked with new leftist institution, not with the hackneyed parlance of ‘the means of production.’

1 July 2022

  [1] Fredric Jameson in Carey Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Hampshire and London, MacMillan Education: 1998), p. 356

[2] Steven Shaviro, The Age of Aesthetics: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?cat=11