Red Pill by Hari Kunzru - Review

If anyone ever asks me what life was like in the late 2010s, I shall give them a copy of this book and shove it in their face, for if one wanted a crystallisation of the major, abysmall problems and issues facing our society, then one can no worse than picking up and reading this book.

Kunzru's brilliantly executed, superbly crafted, and, most defintely, agonisngly beautifully written book is flanked by three main structures, which bounce back and ripple off one another in various different ways, interacting and cross-fertilising throighout the book as Kunzru (or who we can presume to Kunzru, considering it's written in a first person perspective), like some latter day Dante, plunges deeper and deeper into the inner circles of moder day capitalist hell, peeling back layers and layers, the sum total of assaults against the basic principles of decency and sanity slowly escalating to the final, mad, insane denoument on the barren cliffs of a Scottish island. But more of that later.

1) the first major theme is survelliance. It is everywhere, a constant, recurrent, paranoid terror of a society where everything is being scanned, tracked, itemised, watched, detailed, followed and noted, in increasingly complex forms of survelliance so total in their scope and so subtle in their methods it makes the dystopic nightmared of Orwell's 1984 look like the crude fantasy that it is. This comes in mutliple ways. The first is modern day capitalism's addiction to survelliance as a huge component of its control of the workers. This is specifically a phenomena of the tech industry, which has turned data hoarding of the vast hoardes of information people willingly put onto their social media accounts (of course, only willingly in the same sense a serf willingly worked for the master, in the sense that there is no other choice when it is a monopoly), algorthymically targeted people on a micro-basis (Cambridge Analytica being the most overtly grotesque, bogey-man for the liberal press, but it essentially the business model of tech capitalism at this point) to an artform. But this form of data survelliance and relentless targeting of the indivudals within it, turning them into Skinner Box mice helpless before the scale of the all-absorbative matrix that increasingly infuses itself into all parts of everyday life, is part and parcel of thw wider capitalist structure. This is the phenomena of 'surveliance capitalism', as documented by people like Shoshana Zuboff (but also see Richard Seymour's excellent chapters in his Twittering Machine on this endless survelle-dopamine feedback loop to the social media user), which in the case of Amazon is the primary method of absolutely dictatorial and paranoid spying of their workface, obssessively monitoring the times of their toilet breaks, the scale, pace and speed of their movements inside the slave warehouses, and even introducing the truly nightmarish technology of facial monitoring technology to try and spot attempts at unionising before they have even happened (Amazon is a grotesque fucking monster, in case you did not know). As technologies grows apace in the sheer volume of ways and methods it can spy and track its workers, so too capitalism, addicted to draining every last drop of their workers and utterly anhilating any attempt's of worker's power inside the workplace, will and are using these technologies. The days of Ford sending people to spy on his worker's in their homes seems almost quaint by comparision. Coupled with this growing tendency is the wokefication of capitalism, the nauseating tendency of capitalism with a human face. Bosses who are not bosses, but just friends who can fire you, jobs that are not precarious part time shit jobs, but flexible work that anyone can do for fun (unless of course, as everyone who takes a gig economy does, it is your primary means of survival). Silicon Valley had pioneered the trend of turning workplaces to "workspaces", which beanie bags and water coolers, more a student dorm than a place where surplus value is extracted. And not to mention the endless, constant posturing on idenity issues, every single corporation from Coke to Amazon happily blazing support for Black Lives Matter or Pride Month of their banner headlines (unfourtunately not to keen on giving their black or gay workers safety equipment or stop them getting constantly injured in workplace accidents). In this sense this trend is represented by Kunzry in the form of the Deuter Center he goes to write. A place founded on supposedly vaugely progressive, liberal aspirations, it's cult of constant forced constant public spaces (which act more like the glass houses in Zamayatin's We, exposing everyone in public to ensure maximum conformity, anhilating the space for quiet, private medidiation, which Kunzru, like me, values more than anything), it becomes less like some hippie squat of creatives and more like some creepy, sickly, sacchire, forced smiley face gilded cage. Like some perversion of the old communist goal of collective work by a unified working class, now it is collective, but only in the sense one must always be on show inside the workplace, always accountable to your fellow workers and always watched by the highter ups. The Deuter Center is embelmatic of modern capitalism's approach to workplaces, Bentham's Panopticon crossed with Disneyland. The place is also exhaustively recording all of the people's activities, giving the protagonist daily lists of what he did, when, and criticising for doing one thing over another “Not only was I being watched, I was being gamified” (p. 60). At one point, the protagonist even notices inside the IT support room a camera which is clearly in one of the other guests rooms. Survelliance is everywhere.

It crops up in other ways too. There is a long section, in the middle of the book, dedicated to the story of Moniker, the cleaner. It is one of the saddest things I have ever read, told with breathtaking beauty. A young girl in East Germany, she is hounded and harassed by the Stasi, subjected to their trademark psychological warfare. The paranoid builds as her once happy life in her femenist punk band becomes one of suspcion, unsure as to who might be an informer or not, breaking the possibilty of the one thing needed for collective action amongst comarades - trust. It is only after she is broken as a person, becomes an informer. In the long run this ruins her life, with her collaboration being exposed later on post-Berlin Wall, wrecking any chance she has of salvation. But it also turns out one of her ex-friends, a prominent musician and figure of the anit-GDR movement, was also a stasi agent, she being used a diversion for the real agent they had inside. No one can really be trusted, paranoia is everywhere. ALthough seemingly uniportant to the wider story, this passage is in fact key in two ways. The first is the fact it reflects the view of the all encompassing paranoia one suffers from when one is living under a police state. You can't trust anyone, in the end, the level of doubt incurred upon you is so strong you can't even trust yourself. But under modern capitalism, the techniques of mind fuckery and spying the Stasi employed have become normalised inside the very structures of the workplace and the algorithm. No need to move furniture around a house to make people doubt their sanity, deluge them with fake news and spot their movements in advance with face recognition technology. This connection is made spceific by Kunzru later on, specfically statging the new ways of control will make the ones Monika suffered under look tame (i'll get onto the second signifigance of this chapter later).

A third, more minor terror of survelliance is through social media specifically. Kunzru goes, to use an expression, right down the rabbit hole onto the world of online alt-right, exposing himself to the isane, bizzario alternate reality they have constructed on their message boards and Youtube pages. A world of ancient norse myths, discreted aryan anthropology Thule conspiracies, transhumanism, transgressive online meme culture, bastardised pseudo-Gramsicanisms, race science, race mysticism, free speech neo-New Atheist faux-empiricism, misosgyn, incels, pick up artistry, UFOs, Fully Automated Luxury fascism, nihillistic lulz culture, Nazism and god knows what (for an enlightening entry-point into the mindset of what someone immersed in this culture believes in, see this clip on this article). Encoutering the figure of Anton (more on him), he becomes increasingly obssesed with picking away at finding out who he is, going on insane searches online, convinced he is specifcally leaving Amazon reviews for him. He confronts Anton at a film screening, his picutre plastered onto the internet amongst the Alt-right forums, knowing full well his family will be doxed. Searching a bewildering chain of connections, he eventually stalks Anton, leading to the ending, epic conclusion. On this level then, we see just how much social media is capable of diriving people mad, and just how much this culture of forever onliness is based on an addictive economy of exposure, the elimination of the boundary between private and public, and ever prescent terror of being doxxed, dogpiled, ratioed, slut shamed and cancelled, seemingly on a whim, by millions of people, having crossed one of the uneding invisible laser beams that lurk amongst the twinding mazes of social media. The phrase Anton taunts the protagonist with is "i'll be living in your head rent free". To say he succeeds in doing this would be a quite amazing understatement.

The second main strand of the book is also that of haunting. The Germany of Kunzru's book is less a gepgraphical place and more like some Gnostic playground, a psycho-sphere where the physical nature of the place matters less than the reccurent spectres that roam undettered within it. It is a place infused in every pore with historical memory, imprinted and laced with the endless, unqueit ghouls of the 20th centuries past that refuse to die, and repeatedly pop up in numerous unwelcome ways, sedementing themselves into its makeup like layers of geological rock. This is a place pregnant with the ghosts of history, psychologically imprinted onto the landscape like the scorch-mark of a human created by the nuclear blast in Hiroshima, with all its latent possibilities and terrible legacies bridling beneath the surface. One can clearly see the influence of the psychogeographers on this, but also maybe that of Marxist geography (as represented by David Harvey and Owen Hatherly), in which cities are not just sites, but historical ruins, museum pieces in their own right.

Kunzru’s genius is to defly weave these different historical strands into the main text, and as stated, capable of balancing out these numerous sinews of historical memory and dialectically playing them off one another. The centre is located in Wansee, and overlooking them all is the dreaded villa Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, the place where the Wansee Conference took place, where the Holocuast were planned out. This looming, haunting villa is the site of one of the posts towards the protagonist’s meltdown, as it is there, visiting the museum that has been created inside it’s grim interiors, where Anton and his friend take the mask off, so to speak. They enter into a crypt area, an area used historically by the Nazis for the study of “Nordforschung” or ‘research into the North’, the Aryan ideal of the mythic northern lands that all white people come from. The two Nazis, seeing it as spiritually profound, do a roman salute, and say “I am the Magnus of the North…I have opened the book of secrets” (pp.183-184). The two fascists see this is a spiritual incantation, some kind of deranged symbolic act of fascist mysticism, allowing them to connect their current alt-right, internet-based trolling to the fascist ceremonies of past in some kind of historical umbilical cord. But in essence, that is what Kunzru is doing throughout the book, in, obviously, less ostentatious ways. By picking away at the historical-pyschological infastrcuture of Wansee, he is able to draw the haunting past to our current present, and how the two meet. In this case, the growing paranoia and terror of the protagonist is the rise of fascism. Everywhere. Anton represents this to Kunzru, the hideous New Man that is emerging from the utter wastes of the neoliberal, “post-History” landscape, a deranged Nietzschean nihilist, a social Darwinist, a fascist mystique who wants to open up a new era of blood and power with a smirking selfie on his smart phone and a meme of Pepe the frog laughing at it all. Holocaust for the lulz, race purges enacted for the memes it will produce. Anton to the protagonist is the Ur-Fascist exemplar of the Facebook age, not merely some edgelord douchebag with a TV show, but emblematic of the entire collapse of civillisational values and all forms of basic morality. Dripping in antiquated German esoteric mysticsm with a look of glib self-assurance half visible on his face (as if, to the alt-righter, they have already won, and are just waiting for the pieces of their masterplan to fall into place), as the protagonist stalks Anton to where he hides out supposedly on a Scottish isle, he is transformed in Kunzru's mind into his Moby Dick to his Ahab, something almost beyond rational understanding, a demon needing to be exorcized, a force of history rebirthing itself in the form of a man and attempting to resurrect itself in the modern age, gaining apocalyptic proportions, the canvas of this Scottish isle suddenly turning into one of the planes where the gods have their fights in a Wagerian opera. He goes to the isle with the specific intention of “wanting to destroy Anton and the future that I believed he was bringing about” (p.228). It becomes another psycho-sphere of epic proporitons, a place where, in the feveried and deranged mind of our protagonist, the fate of all men will be decided.

But there are other hauntings too. The chapter with Monika shows that half of Germany was once communist, the lingering inequalities and massive economic underdevelopment of the eastern half lingering long into the 20th century, hence why the AfD (although their vote is a complicated mixture), has such a base in these left behind zones, and why elderly pensioners are nostalgic for the period. There are, however, linger glimpses of further hauntings, the ruins of post-war social democracy. He notes that “on the side of the street facing the water, the buildings were immense. On the other, denied the lake view, they were more modest. In some cases, you could tell that grounds and gardens had been sold to developers, so that low-rise apartment blocs adjoined older, larger strucutees. This denser housing seemed like a relic of a vanishing democratic era, litters of suburban middle-class piglets importunately nuzzling oligarchic sows. Two decades into the twenty-first century and we were back in the imte of the big houses. Soon the apartment blocks would be ebpoight aup and sccraped away, the popular incursion brought to an end”. (p.30). Owen Hatherly has documented this in superb detail, in the way old fashioned modernist architechture, derided by almost everyone now as “eye sores” or “burecratic impositions into working class life”, in many cases were actually the best representation of the aspirational, humanist, social democratic ideal of mass, good quality public housing for the working classes, their derelict ruins now the play things of oligarchs and rentiers (as the case of Grenfell Tower showed so disasterously).

The third strand, if one can call it that, is that of the reccurent figure of Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist becomes the glue that sticks these strands together. The protagonist is trying to write a book on lyrical poetry, and one of his central figures is Kleist. The gravesite where he was buried becomes a reccurent spot where the author walks, again and again, like a form of mental self-harm that he finds himself unable to stop returning to. He is described as a “hysteric, a writer of jharring plays and fragmented stories full of hetic action, battles and earthquakes and psychic shocks” (p.32). On his grave is marked the words “Now, O immortality, you are all mine!” “the scream of someone who has grasped for something and achieved it, who has made a grand gesture – that being, in Kleist’s case, sucidie” (p.33), specifically the suicide pact he made with a woman called Henriette Vogel. That is nowadays his main claim to fame. Kunzru notes that “it was obvious that [Klein] was uncomfortable inside his body. The shoulders were hunched too high, the head held self-consciously” (pp.55-56). He was a man “too violent and hysterical to make it in the world. In his own words he was “absurdly overwrought”. Most commentators seemed to believe that he was what would be now be termed an “incel”, dying a virgin” (p.57). “As I read I began to feel slightly suffocated. That face, born to fail. The reek of his melancholy in my nostrils” (p.57). “One day I was staring at the inscription on the marker, which now read unpleasantly to me, like a phrase from the manifesto of an angry young man on his way to murder people at a Walmart (64).” Kleist suffered a breakdown after reading Kant “the discovery that he was probably not even seeing the world correctly, let alone collecting points towards cosmic gnosis, led him into a deep depression” (77). These latter comments are very important. History haunts the book through Kleist in two other signifigant ways. When watching Blue Lives, a comically violent crypto-fascist nihilist piece of fascist pornography created by Anton, the author notices various quotes spoken on screen, things out of place in a police proceudal drama of the slockiest kinds. One of the characters quotes Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre, “a contemporary of Kleist” (p.81). Later on, at the Wansee villa museum, the look at a photo of the Nazis engaging in a cultural discussion, on the topic of “Kleist and the Nordic spirit of honor” (p.183). Here then, we see how Kleist becomes a recurring totem from which the entire spectacle revolves around. Kleist involves numerous acts of haunting, the haunting nature of his death, a death from total and utter despair, caused by the realisation of the meaningless of life, haunting from the area he stalks in, the cursed Wansee where the Nazis would plan their genocide, and haunted in what he represents, the dangerous but alluring current of German romanticism and idealism, the same tendency which the Nazis would idolise and venerate, full of primal myths of cults of violent masculinity and aggressive will to powers. But Kleist then turns into an even bigger figure in the book, in that in the end, it turns out that Kleist is Kunzru. Kunzru, towards the end of the book, having stared deep into the pit of the new fascism emerging, and having lost any and all sense of hope or ability to even communicate an alternative to Anton’s worldview, effectively loses his mind. He writes vivid, hallucionary, apocalyptic screeds about the coming world “My project was an apocalypse, a revelation of last things, an ancient genre that seemed right for a man who’d crawled away to a desert place to meditate” (226). Here, on this barren Scottish isle, he raves like a latter day Solomon. It deserves to be quoted in full, as it is some of the most powerful, awe-inspriing visions of doom and dread I’ve yet read.

“I wrote about the paradox, how the earth is in flames but we still find it cold and diffiuclt to toutch. How we are not at home. How despite – or perhaps because of – our distance, our inability to experience ourselves as nature, we are in crisis. This “we”, fo course, was really just an “I”, a universaliation of my own panic, but I knenw I was not alone in mu thoughts, even if the conclusions I came to might ne unacceptable, even unitellegible to others. We face, I wrote, a risk that is immersurable, in the sense that it’s impossible to quantify. An externalisty that sooner or later will blot out the sun. I wrote about plauges and melting glaciers and drowned cities and millions of people on the move, a future in which any claim of allegiance to universal human values would be swept away by a cruel tribalism. I wrote about a system that would eventually find itself able to dispendse with public politics althoehter and put it in its place tha rt of the deal: a black box, impossible to oversee, visible only to the counterparties. There would be no checks and balances, no right of appeal agains the decisions of the deal-makers, no “rights” whatsoever, just the raw exercise of power. I wrote about how our sense will begin to fail us. As the odl world of words gives way to thw world of code and the only measurable output of the Antrhopocence earth is fdust and radiant heat, every tehnical advance will make our human intuitions less reliable. Machine vision is not human vision. Nonhuman agents wull have interests and priorities that may not align with ours. With metrication has come a creeping loss of aura, the end of the illusion of exceptionality which is the remnant of the religious belief that we stand partly outside or above the world, that we are endowed with a special essence and deserve recognition or protection because of it. We will carry on trying to make a case for ourselves, for our own specialiness, but we will find that arrayed against us is an inexorable and inhuman power, manic and all-devouring, a powee thiesy for anhilaion of its obvjhect, that object ebing the earth and everyonthing on it, all that exists. I wrote about the pointlessness, the utter ruin of all my projects, the supercession of all that I was or could ever be. I described the reduction of my most cherished mhysteries to simple algorthymic operations, instructions that could be put on a chip, a disenchantment so total that afterwards, after the shift, it would be impossible even to think back to how it was, to imagine what it was to be alvie in the wold qya. My luxurious mental furnishings, my sensibitly and intelligence and taster, all would turn to ashes. And the samew thing would happen to everyone else on Earht. The destruction of culture was only the beginning. Meanig itself would be revealed as an artefact of a period that was slipping away from history. Afterwards, there would only be function. We are, I wrote, just clever apes, incidental to the larger purposes of the univberse, and whether we know it or not, we are in a race against time. Homeostasis is a trap. Anything that isn’t growing exponentially is not growing fast enougj. Something implacable is arricing from the future and our only hope, our lifeboat, is an intelligence explosion, an esacpe from eareth before it is enclosed. But we should not expect the monkeys to esacpe, because most likelt the lifeboat will be intelligence escaping the monkey bodies, slipping out before they are tortured to death by their capricious new robot masters. After that, for the masses left behind it will be shock work and the meat grinder, for the fortunate accelerated few, a great leap forward into the beyond. When the music stops, as humanity splits, leaving on the one hand those well-capitalised in indivudlaity, rich in self, and on the other tbose to whiom nothing is owned, who can be used and sicadreded without coimpunction, what will we remember about the creatures we once were? The augemented selves who can see in the infrared and will never die; the exploited, obnly dimly aware of a world beyond the packages moving towards them on the belt. How will we, thrir ancestors, look to them? Like figures in an architectural drawing, conventionalized, schematic, a little hazy. Just there to give scale to the old buildings.” (226-228).

As one can see, Kunzru is an extradionarily gifted writer, and this entire chapter leaves one breathless, the tension and sense of doom just building and building before exploding into this one insane mass of cathartic nihilism. But something interesting happens to the protagonist. He notes that aspects of Kleist’s writing (phrases like his plan was to “escape into the present, to which I would gladly belong”, or “a spirit sitting peering into the abyss”, or “I rolled the dice and I must accept I have lost”). Kleist, noted Kunzru “was yet again my unwelcome companion” (p.229). Standing on a cliffside, naked before the raw savagery of the violent Scottish sea like some deranged Frankenstein hybrid of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, an existential howling creature stripped to the barest level of its being in a fog-like state of pain and gried and despair, he stands upon the barren cliff and screams “Now O immortality, you are mine!” The transformation is complete. In effect, what has happened is a now literal haunting. The spirit of Kleist has possessed him, taken control of his body, and Kleist’s pitch-black nihilism and apocalypse have merged utterly in the protagonist. If the protagonist, like us all, are “clever apes”, then Kleist’s tombstone is a kind of perverted reverse monolith from 2001, the author the ape on the savannah crawling towards it. And yet by toutching the inscription, the doomed words like some kind of ghastly incantation that unlocks the inner recesses of cosmic horror like a line from H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, instead of gaining enlightenment, as the chimps do, Kleist’s ghost infects Kunzru’s soul, passes through him, and reveal stark naked the truth of this world. And, much like humanity in 2001, the clever ape does pass through to a new stage of human evolution, one above anything we can convieve now. But it is a purely negative, a total and complete realisation of the utter and total nothing of everything ever in existence, and mankind’s worthless, doomed, tormented place within it. Thus, through Klein, all the elements are brought forward. In this sense, Kunzru is copying the Nazis with their oat of Aryan fascism at the Wansee villa, trying to bring back forth the dead spirits of Germany’s history to counter the oncoming techno-dystopic future, for the fascists in the positive sense, in Kunzru’s, a purely and totally despairing sense. The modern day survelliance state, worse than anything the GDR could come up with, the rise of fascism and with it the return of German romantic esoteric mysticsm, of which Kleist was a part of, and with it the conjoined project of fascist dictatorship and techno Matrix-style control, a monstrous form of nightmarish totalitarism brought hand in hand and projected in figures like Anton. Kleist, the misshapen, hysterical, violent, hyper-emotional, nihilistic, proto-Nietzschean, despairing, sucidial virgin is the prefigurative form of all mankind. Kleist is the New Man of the post-human, post-truth, post-history age that beckons before us.

Now, in this vivid, deranged, apocalyptic vision, it is difficult to tell if this is Kunzru telling us what is going to happen, what he believes, or simply the thoughts of the character at that moment, going utterly mad. I have to say, personally, the words wrote on the pages were like looking at a bit of my soul, revealing back to me the deepest, darkest, most despairing visions of the future I’ve had, the ones I dare not entertain again lest it destroy my mental health beyond repair. And yet, the enormous strenghths of the book are also its profound weakness. What is most weak about the book is that for all it’s supposed radicalism, what is remarkable about the book is how apolitical it is. Kunzru, like 90% of the middle class left, is unwilling and unable to come up with any kind of convicing, positive vision of the future. He had no notion of who will be the agent of history, he has no notion of what values will lead it. He does not care to have any broader sense of historical purpose, or vision. This is hardly surpising when one considers the fact Kunzru is an ardent postmodernist, a Foucaulian through and through, with all the accompanying dreary, tedious, miserable anti-political philosophical nihilism that accompanies that. Kleist had a breakdown because he thought reality was some unattainable to the human senses. Kunzru, in his own way, does so too. In what is the stupidiest and most offense section of the entire book, Foucalt’s wretched, poisonous presence rears his head. He writes that “twenty-three is a reasonable age to accept that the world is more complex than whatever map you’ve made of it, and systems, however metaphysical or abstract, are never innocent. They do the dirty work of knowledge, clearing the ground for action, for taking control. The truth is that the savages should always eat the anthropoligst. They should murder the botanist who comes tripping through the jungle looking for the blue flower, because after him will come the geologist and the surveyor and the mining engineer and the soldiers to protect the miners as they work.” (p.78).

What are we to make of such abject stupidity, such contemptuous distain for all human endeavour and achievement? Notice the innately conservative tone, the tired, sighing, whining, defeatist proclamation that reality is too complicated to ever manage to understand anything within a system. One recalls a litany of anti-utopian and anti-socialist thought along these lines, from Burke to Oakenshott. Of course, no one is trying to create a system that encompasses everything in reality. That much would be impossible. But what systemic analysis (and I can’t believe any self respecting leftist would even be distainful of it) can do is give a broad map of the totality of the system, its main points, how it gets power, where it gets it from, its history and formation. This is totalising, and this is good. We need totalising systems to understand our world, otherwise we are totally lost. Marx’s dialectical principle, which he uses in Capital, is sure proof of the success of this method. By focusing on the larger structure of a sytem (capitalism), and by focusing in on certain key features of it (eg the commodity), Marx is able to use the very specific items he discusses to massivel expand the canvass of our reality, moving from the concrete to the abstract. The benefit of the dialect method then is precisely this, it has the capacity to be both universaling and totalisaing while also focusing in on the specifics of history, its movements and flows. Most importantly, it’s contradictions, and therein is the kernel of resistance. Marx’s takes capitalism at its word, then shows it still fails even on those terms (the basis of immanent critique). By showing something in its full nature one can see much easier the gaps and faults in it than microtargeting a miasma of vauge forms and things, as Foucault and the postmodernist charlatans did. But rendering broad complex systems into nothing, mere things floating about, divorced from material structures, class politics, or any historical grand narrative, they made it harder to understand complex systems, not easier. One cannot understand a jigsaw by looking at one or two pieces. You must be able to stand back and look at the whole thing. Not only is structural analysis, I think, simply unavoidable (it’s part of our nature to want to understand things. Only indulging in the laziest and most cretinous anti-intellecutalism can one sincerely suggest trying to understand things is somehow impossible, in which case, why even write on those terms in the first place, if such things are by defauly already mystified?), but also necessary. Because by understanding the full totality of the system, one can specfically idenitfy its weaknesses, and destroy it. That’s the entire point of Marx’s exhaustive analysis of capitalism. The postmodern method by contrast is simply garbage, wretched reactionary conservatism, dreary nihillism, obscuratian mystification tarted up in the most abject pseudo-radical clothes. Unwilling and probably intellectually unable to even be bothered to even think in a structural or systemic way, they simply fall back onto a kind of defeatist quietism. Foucault’s method is most dreadful in this respect, and it’s the one Kunzru is clearly addicted to. Foucault, a commited anti-marxist all his life, tried to destroy the ability of working class people to have any power, and by braindwashing vast reams of the middle class intellegensia, did just that. As Stuart Hall noted, in his review of Poulantaz’ State, Power, Socialism, Foucault’s method was to presume an:

“’absract diagram of power’, present everywhere in the positive face of power, and in the microstructures of all types of social relations, is explicitly counterposed to the concept of power radiating from a complex center. The capitalist state is largely missing from this schema, not inadvertence but by design…Foucault does see knowledge-power…as implied in the very fact of instutionalisation. Every regulation is an exclusion, and every exclusion is an operation of power. No distinction is drawn, as Dew shows, between a ‘politically enforced silence and a silence of absence which is merely the reverse side of the positivity of a given cultural formation’ (p.148). Power, for him, is an ‘abstract machine’, whose action is everywehere, resistance is, ultimately, a concept without a home: there is no theoreticsal reason why it should appear, no accounting for tis apperances, and nothing to check its assignment as just another aspect of the ‘positvity’ of power – ‘coexstensive and contemporary’ with it…His power is dispersed precisely so that it cannot, theoretically, be traced back to any single organizing instance, such as ‘the State’. It voids the question of the economic precisely because it cannot, in his view, be crystallised into any set of global relations – e.g. class relations. Foucault’s implicit ‘anarcho-libertarianism’, with its characteristic oscillations – power/the body; power/resistance – is not, as Poulantzas’ sometimes claims, merely the effect of his ‘second-order epistemological discourse’ (pp.xiv-xv).

This all-encompassing (and ironically, totalising!) view of power, as both everywhere an

d nowhere, buried in every sinew of life, one that people are both victims too and yet helpless to stop (not to mention actively complicit in, as Focualt makes everyone both their jailor and prisoner, a unique form of moral guiltripping) can only lead to political despair and resignation. Because Foucault spent most his life trying to destroy Marx, and behind him, Hegel, he couldn’t come up with any agent of history to destroy oppressive power relations. Why? Because doing so would be to admit all the things he tried to undo, and Marx showed, i.e., an understanding of historical processes within a unified framework, a notion of a structure to be concretely opposed to, a sense of inner ‘species-being’ (Marx’s term) of universal human values that can be called upon to oppose such power systems, and a form and organisation involving hierarchies and discipline that could enact such values into a concrete political programme. All this involves categorisation, analysis, data, stasitics, frameworks, theories, evidence, standards of objectivity to measure something as ‘true’ or ‘untrue’, things which have been jettisoned in Focualt’s framework from the start. Having given up on having any actual theory of power, it is no wonder, as Daniel Zamora and Mitchell Dean have pointed out in rigrious detail, he became a useful idiot for neoliberalism, seeing in James Buchanan-esque destain for welfare states and burecratic socialism a mirror image of his own obsession against “bio-power”, and an equal fixation of change coming from unique, personal “Selfs”, the kind of indivudalist naval-gazing atomisation which has destroyed the power of working people to change their lives. As William Davies too has pointed out, Hayek was arguably the first post-modernist thinker. Hayek repeatedly condemns the possibitly of abstract knowledge, systemisation, categorisation, and trying to gain complete control over an economy. He associates it, like Kunzru, with totalitarian control. Hayek venerates semi-mystic and highly irrational market forces (the abstract “price signals” which supposedly, by magic, control everything). Focualt and Hayek in that regards have almost exactly the same project.

All Foucault’s ranting against knowledge systems does is produce, as Marshall Bellman brilliantly put it, “a cage more airtight than anything Weber dreamed off, into which no life can break.” “Foucault’s totalities swallow up every facet of modern life. He develops his themes with obsessive relentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic flourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialecti into our flesh like a new turn of the screw. Any criticism rings hollow, bedcause the critic himself or herself is “in the pantopric machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism”. (quoted in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p.p.34-35).

To say that systems “do the dirty work of knowledge” is an asinine statement. So what? Knowledge, unsuprisingly, is good, especially if it helps us fight the class enemy. To presume it is “clearing the ground for action, for taking control” is an absurd proposition based on nothing, a ludicrous reduction to the vast field of expertise. Was Amilcal Cabral doing the “dirty work of knowledge” when he made meticulous studies of the agricultural conditions of Guinne-Buissea, using his skills as a agronomist specifically to help him in the revolutionary struggle in his country? Are the Cuban doctors doing so when they use their medical knowledge as part of a free healthcare system to provide world class help to people around the world? (Cuba was one of the few countries on earth to have 0 HIV deaths, unique in that part of the world). Was Marx, for that matter, spending years scurrying away in the British library pouring over the statistics produced by the British authorities on working conditions, helping power when he wrote Capital? If we hope to achieve a Green New Deal, the sheer amount of knowledge this would need, from engineers, technicians, climate scientists, electricians, would surely be a case where knowledge is for good? Surely Kunzru cannot really believe such abject nonsense. Presuming vague, abstract “knowledge” will inevitably lead “to the mining engineer and the soldiers to protect the miners as they work” is a ridiculous non sequier, as if “knowledge”, rather than profit, is what drives mining. Whether knowledge is used for good or bad purposes, to my perhaps naïve, humanist, enlightenment perspective, is dependent on the balance of class forces at any given time and the political instutions in effect. How else can one really seriously confront this world, with all its unbelievable crises, without statistics, facts, knowledge, and a structure to encompass it all?

. There is no distguisation in such broad brush apporaches to "knowledge" either. As i belive David Graber once pointed out (although I forget where), When Foucault was condemning the authoritarian power of knowledge structures, he was in fact not really talking about knowledge at all. The knowledge a boss supposedly has over his workers is in fact, illusionary. The precise reason socialists and communists historically advocated the wholesale worker’s control of their means of production was based precisely on the fact that the workers did indeed have greater and better knowledge over the productive process then the bosses ever good. This is especially the case for skilled work, where the impressive knowledge and education the worker has in operating his machinery and/or workplace is the crucible and crux of the entire labour process. The boss, at best, merely acts a parasite, siphoning off the majority of the profits the worker creates despite contributing the least to the actual commodity. Whatever knowledge a boss has is fairly weak. And if someone like Foucault sincerely believes the knowledge of say, a neoliberal economics professor (and to describe what they do as producing “knowledge” would be a vast overrating of what they actually do, which is little more than glorified theology), and the knowledge skilled workers have in operating their machines from below, then he’s a moron. Secondly, knowledge hardly comes in the form of total control. The knowledge a painter, an artist, a musician has, and teaches his student, is, as David Graber also pointed out, self-defeating authority, for the knowledge imparted onto their student, by definition, means that one other person other than the expert no has that knowledge. They in turn can educate more people, and so on. The role of the revolutionary party is much the same. By committed cadres of revolutionary activists, going into workplaces, talking to workers, hearing their problems, discussing things with them, getting them more incorporated to a broader, more systemic understanding of capitalism and how it operates (broadening it from petty grievances about how shit work is, which everyone has) to actually deciding to change fundamentally its structures, also acts as self-defeating authority. By the most radical sections of the work force propagandising to others, they in turn are educated, and thus can do the work of ideological education to other, less developed, less organised sections of the workforce. The knowledge of say the pope, who claims for himself absolute divine confidence in his pronouncments, says they and they alone know the true meaning of the holy books, they and they alone have a speed dial to god, or that of a political dictator (I know what’s best for everyone, I have total knowledge of society and therefore must rule), is obviously, by definition, authoritarian, as it is a form of knowledge that is claimed exclusively by them, and is incapable of being replicated (obviously, not everyone can be a pope, or a dictator).

But when one has not a single conceptual interest in capitalism, as Kunzru, and through him Focualt, doesn’t, then this is to be expected. In fact, contrary to liars such as Foucault, one of the foundational pillars of modern knowledge, science, contained no such division by high power in the form of knowledge and popular mass politics.

As Mike Davis notes in his "Old Gods, New Enigmas":

"The proliteriat, not the bourgeoisie, is the ultimate "bearer of modern culture". Its enthusiasm for science, in particular confirmed its future as a hegemonic class....In previous social formations, the direct producers had little access to or need for formal learning, usually the preserve of the church or a scribe class but the American and French Revolutions generated an insatiable popular appetite for literacy and education. Industrial workers inherited a rich autodidactic tradition from the artisan-intellectuals in Paris and Lyon who were the pioneers of socialism, and from their English counterparts who adapted classical political economy to the agenda of Chartism....Historians of technology likewise remind us that, until Thomas Edison established the worlds first industrial lavatory in New Jersey I'm 1876, most of the key inventions if the first machine age were the creation of tinkerers, small master craftsmen, and ordinary workers, albeit highly self-educated...Victorian workers flocked to reading rooms, mechanics institutes, cheap libraries, athenaeums, and public lecture halls. In Britain, the mechanics' institutes, inspired by George Bickberks famous 1800-04 lectures to Glasgow artisans, fed the popular hunger to understand the science of the new machines and prime movers...By the 1860s, moreover, the scientifically literate sections of the working classes provided huge audiences for cutting-edge controversies, especially during the culture war that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The London mechanics and craftsmen who flocked to Thomas Huxleys "Lectures to Working Men" were, according to Huxley, "as attentive and as intelligent as the best audiences I have ever lectured too...I have studiously avoided the impertinence of talking down to them." William Liebknecht, the 1848 veteran and founder of the SDP, fondly recalled attending six of these lectures with Karl Marx, then staying up all nigh excitedly discussing Darwin. The whole Marx household, in fact, was caught up in the great debates. (Mrs) Jenny Marx boasted to a Swiss friend of extraordinary popularity of the "Sunday Nights of the People": "...on Sunday evenings...the hall has been full to bursting and the peoples enthusiasm so great that, on the first evenings, when I went there with the girls, 2,000 could not get into the room which was crammed full"". - (pp.113-115).

One will note too how Marx liters Capital with chemical and physical analogies, specifically engaging in the cutting edge science in order to further draw out and legitimise his critique. There is no reductive hatred of knowledge in his work, merely critical application of its techniques, through dialectics, of a critique of capitalism.

We can too cite Andreas Malm, who has shredded into bits the postmodernist distain for objective knowledge beyond repair in his book “The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World”: “In his already classic rebuttal of such (post-modernist) histiography, In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans deploys Auschwitz deploys Auschwitz as an overwhelming master-case…we can expect global warming to be similar used. To paraphrase Evans, global warming is not a text. The excessive temperatures are not a piece of rhetoric…And if it is true of global warming, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.” (p.22)

“In the high postmodernist era, critics of natural science liked to assert that it was oppressive, conservative, tied up and tasked with reproducing the established order. Today, ‘science is not the enemy; suppression of science – by Exxon for example – is the enemy’, with Hamilton, Surviving the warming condition requires full alignment with cutting-edge science. If some of it had served to legitimise the ruling classes, one branch has now delivered perhaps the most damming indictment ever to their rule: it is putting the material foundations for human civilisation in peril. It should therefore come as no surprise that this particular science is the object of so mooch denial in so many different forms, visceral and comatose, woolgathering and venomous” (p.132)

As Malm also notes, it was precisey this separation of knowledge from power, necessarily for any even minially sane revolurionary programme, that was key to the Bolsheviks victory. During the chaos of the civil war and ensuring programme of War Communism, the Bolsheviks had to accept “the authority of ‘bourgeois specialists’ – engineers, technicians, managers – in the workplaces”. This, he points out, will be needed today “Our bourgeois specialists will be recruited from the oil companies and the start-ups” (2020, pp.164-165). Malm specifically cites the example of Climeworks, a company which has invented the miraculous procedure of sucking air out of the atmosphere, capturing the C02 within it, saturating said C02, heated to 100 degrees, and producing pure, concentrated C02, which can then be buried underground. Guess what is being done with said technical marvel? Turning it into gas to be sold in fizzy drinks, or turned into microalgae or liquid fuel, possibly for airplanes. This, therefore, is not a product of some abstract, nebulous “knowledge”, but more the product of capitalism. Capitalism must turn captured C02 into a commodity, not buried underground, as “is no way to accumulate capital. It negates the logic of the commodity, because non-consumption would here be the innermost essence of the operation (2020, pp.140-141).

Look at the startlingly libertarian, paranoid, anti-statism in such a formulation. Is it any wonder that acoyltes of Foucault like Agamben, like taking the ‘bio-political’ hatred of institutional authority to the level he is now a COVID denialist. Such things are not perversions of believing in bio-power, they are its inevitability. Biopower's distain for knowledge creation might seem sexy in a period of total and utter left decline, where the left spends most its time resisting things (the border police control, wars, surveillance states, ID cards) in purely defensive ways. When it comes to actually building things, like the vast welfare and economic systems to provide for the needs of people, it becomes not only politically useless, but actively dangerous (although Benjamin Bratton's work, on a form of positive biopower, looks promising in this regard). Notion the banality of the terms he uses “action” “control”. What action? Where? On whom? Whose doing the control and what are they controlling? How are they controlling? Such answers remain irrelevant to the postmodernist, preferring bland platitudes, stupid generalisations, pitiful reductions, inane abstractions, and a preening cult of fetish for the micro-rebellion and the indivudalised spasmodic act of pitiful mere resistence to any broader class struggle.

The reason then Kunzru’s work ultimately fails then, is because precisely he shares this kind of postmodernist stupidity, he is functionally, literally, unable to give a response to fascism. At one point he even rings up his wife to ask her to defend the concept of human rights, as he no longer has any intellectual capacity to do so in the face of a fascist. How can he? He is a postmodernist, he doesn’t believe in any notion of a human at any rate. Again, postmodernism may have seemed sexy stuffed away in the rotting neoliberal academy, content to denounce all notions of inaliable natural human rights or values, but when confronted with people who also belive the same, fascists, they crumble like a sand castle (it’s not as if there is no one, by the way, working on questions of human nature from a Marxist/leftist perspective. Chomsky has done for years, and specifically called out for Foucault on this. Edward Lukes, Erich Fromm, Samuel Bowels, Norman Geras, Paul Mason, Marshall Berman, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, Amartyta Sen, John Rawls in his own complicated way, and, not to mention, Marx himself, have all produced invaluable work on this front).

Postmodernists are pathetic, and that strain of pathetic whinging, whining cynicsm is unfortunately represented by Kunzru. The problems stem right from Foucault himself. Basing his idol on Nietzsche (a proto-fascist) and Heidgigger (an actual fascist), against Hegel and his entire philosophical project (and thus, also left Hegelians like Marx), means the philosophical traditions of the fascist and the postmodernist end up meeting each other on either side. Both distain rationality, both distain reason, both disbelieve the power of objective history, both distain morality, both distain the notion of universal, historically transcendental claims to human values. Foucault, and his followers like Latour, with their endless bewailing of the impossibility of objectivity and the fetishisation of pure subjectivity (but as Gillian Rose pointed out that “the objectivity of truth really demands the subject. Once cut off from the subject, it becomes the victim of sheer subjectivity” (quoted in Anderson, Perry, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p.54 ft.42) – rendering the postmodern object of knowledge literally incoherent) created, as pointed out by Benhamin Noys and explained by Andreas Malm, an “epistemological nihilism that boils down to a rather vulgar form of Machiavellianism or Nietzscheism: what is right is solely a question of right (Progress of this Storm, p.122)” How can one possibly defend the values of civilisation against a fascist when one is so commited to destroying them in your own philosophy? It says volumes that in the book he starts out as a postmodernist and ends up as a full blown raving nihilist. Unable to defend anything of any worth, he simply gives up, has a meltdown and embraces his inner Kliest. It’s debatable whether any Marxist, or for that matter generally sane Liberal of the early 20th century would have had any trouble refuting a fascist on this point, or even doubting the query. It’s still up for interpretation, in my opinion, whether Kunzru’s whole book is precisely to expose the limitations of such a kind of leftist approach, as at the very end of the book, as the grim 2016 US election results roll in, he says “That’s how they want us. Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone…Sometimes during the night, Nina crawls into the bed and joins us. Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we will have no choice but to let it in” (pp.283-284). Beautiful and stirring stuff, but ultimately unsatisfying. How is this “we” then? How do we “find each other”, and in what form? A glib middle class post-modernist literary theorist is incapable of understanding this. From one perspective, the whole novel could be seen as the personal unravelling of said glib, middle class postmodernist literary theorist when confronted with reality, when confronted with the fact that history, presumed dead by the postmodernists, put into a box marked “the past” and dismissed as an anachronism no longer relevant to our hybrid, deterritorialized, biopolitical, rhizomatic world of fragmented identities and linguistic discourses (“Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water; that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else” (Foucault, quoted in Anderson, Kevin B., Marx at the Margins, p.vii)) suddenly bursts forth into the real world. It could be a huge statement of “get off your arses leftists, we need to be prepared”. But it doesn’t feel that way. Critcisms of postmodernism are dismissed in the straw man character of Edgar, an insufferably pompous arsehole who goes onto to write a book about the evils of leftist anti-free speech people. There’s no sense that the earlier statement of epistelogical nihilism and political quietism needs to be refuted precisely to stop the descent into outright personal nihilism and political fascism in the later, deranged speech. He ends on a bit of wishful, Disney thinking, of being nice to people and trying to reach out to other more, to remember the ones we love as refutation of fascism, which, while sweet, are poltically impotent and practically worthless.

.

What then would the answer be? The lingering absence of the revolutionary, communist tradition is the unspoken gap in Kunzru’s account. At the most it’s represented in the chapter on Monika’s retrospective on her life in the GDR, a dreary landscape of banned music, Stasi agents and monochrome authoritarianism that inevitably came down in the Berlin Wall. The positive aspects of East Germany, such as its commitment to trenchant anti-racist struggles in America and anti-colonial revolts abroad, are not included. For sure, maybe they shouldn’t. It’s a novel, engaging in a limited narrative. But when one is dealing with such demonstratively important political issues throughout it feels strange not to. The shadow of the failed utopia of communism stretches itself across the early 21st century. The collapse of communism was not just the collapse of a series of states across Eastern Europe and Russia, it was the collapse of an entire world. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, an entire field of possibility that had been constructively built by workers from across the globe for over 100 years was turned to ash. The goal of the anti-communists was never the destruction of Communist tyranny, it was the destruction of the imaginative possibility of a better world and the workers movement in general (no matter how left). Communism, for all its strengths and demonstrable weaknesses, its highs and lows, provided a collective chain of struggle stretching back to the 1840s that provided meaning and purpose for millions. Communism was more than a regime or a programme, it was a shared struggle, a code, a language, a shared suffering. Comrade, solidarity, class struggle, these used to be the words men and women died for, they are now little more than punchlines used by sneering liberals.

Communism at its best was not a blueprint, but a canvass which the collective masses of humanity could paint their dreams of a better future on. Communism was not a guidebook to be built like a machine but a lighthouse in the distance, from which a hundred different rowing boats to move towards amongst the chaotic sea of history, buffering and battering them everyway. Its absence has been a catastrophe, morally, politically and economically. Morally, it has destroyed our capacity to defend the human, to defend the notion of a good life and decent living, inviting the beast of nihilistic post-human fascism to enter unchallenged. The human is being destroyed by techno-fascism, and no one much seems to know how to stop it. Politically, the absence of a communist party has left the working classes disillusioned and disorganised, confused as to what they are (the precariat? The cogniteriat? The 99%? The multitude?), bewildered as to who the enemy is (“the elites”, neo-feudalism, semiocapitalism, cognitive capitalism, “the establishment”, globalisation in general, neoliberalism (as defined as market fundamentalism)). It has left them as little more than masses of sporadic, temporary insurrectionists, with no more or little class power than the early bread rioters of the pre-capitalist era, capable of occasionally changing the means by which they are oppressed, but unable to abolish them. The absence of the communist party, with its tradition of comradeship, discipline, organisational unity, at their best gave meaning and purpose to millions, least of all in the global south where it most took off. The revolutionary party, led by an ideologically militant vanguard (a term that produces shudders these days, one need only look at Max Elbaum’s comments on it in his Revolution in the Air to showcase its success and its necessity), was there to turn and crystallise the energy and dynamism of the movement into the form and organisation of a political project. In cases such as Italy, the communist party there was capable of truly becoming a mass party, with a level of outreach and community integration unseen anywhere in Western Europe and a pinnacle of communist organising. In place of that, and in the dissolution of the party form we now have spasms of uncoordinated, worthless revolts unable to turn themselves into a long term campaign for the transformation of society, unable to build and scale up, instead, lurching from one failed fad to another, from alt-globalisation to horizontalism to revived “class war social democracy”, without much success in any. We have endless movements, and no parties. We have power on the streets, but we do not exist anywhere in the actual centres of power. The absence of the communist threat too has allowed capitalism to behave with unbridled savagery and psychopathic behaviour, from which no assault against the working classes is unpermitted, no longer having any binary Other to fight against, no innately antagonistic enemy from which capitalism to forever be checked against, no quintessential counter-power to terrify it into change. Economically, the destruction of the ability of states to control their economies, using some form of centralised planning, with large, vast, capacities to take over whole swathes of industry, coordinate activities amongst society, brutally target the capitalists centres of power, has left us utterly impotent and powerless against the oncoming threats of pandemics, techno-control, and the environmental catastrophe.

The conditions from which people like Eduard Bernstein were able to proclaim the death of the need for revolution were based on the absence of crises. “Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies merely been postponed. But in the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent. Since that moment of bifurcation, catastrophes have been the most inglorious occasions for social democracy. Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. There must be plenty of it. Then one can move slowly towards the good society, step after incremental step, without having to clash head-on with the class enemy and break up its power; it will rather leak away in drips. (pp.119-121)” As one can tell from the climate emergency, such cosy prognostications of ample time are non-existent. What is needed now, as Andreas Malm has written so expertly, is the return of war communism, of Ecological Leninism as he provocatively puts it, that of “First, turning the crisis of symptoms into the crises of the causes…(“the syntax of revolutionary Marxism, present already in the first section of the Communist Manifesto: the fight ends ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’. There can be little doubt as to which of the two outcomes is currently the more likely”)…[second] speed as paramount virtue…Third, ecological Lennism leaps at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction, break with business-as-usual as sharply as required and subject the regions of the economy working towards the catastrophe to direct public control…the mission of ecological Leninists is to raise consciousness in such spontaneous movements and reroute them towards the drivers of catastrophe” (pp.148-151). Malm shows in his brilliant book how the Bolsheviks were able, at breakneck speed and remarkable efficiency, to mobilise resources to combat the immediate, terrible crisis that was upon them, including famines and plagues, including, most remarkably, the use of mass wood burning as a substitute for lack of oil (pp.154-165) (“In this isolated respect, the period from late 1918 to 1920 was the finest hour of the Soviet state. Trotsky riding on a wood-fuelled train, FDR surfing on an ocean of oil: take your pick” (p.160)). Not to mention, Lenin’s pioneering work in conservation, a legacy that still lasts to this day, to the point where the New York Times can say “Lenin’s legacy is preserved and Russia remains the world leader, ahead of Brazil and Australia, in terms of protecting the most land at the highest level” (quoted in Malm, Corona, Climate and the Chronic Emergency, p.170).

Worldwide adaption to climate change…” as Mike Davis has noted, “…would necessarily command a revolution of almost mythic magnitude in the redistribution of wealth and power”, one utterly lacking in any conceptual imagination today. Communism did once provide that, and indeed, in some cases practically showed it, in the case of war communism or war production under the Soviet Union. The nascent ideas of integrating technology into a wider system of worker’s production, under the auspices of a central state, under the ideas of people like Kantorovich and thinkers like Oscar Lange, or something akin to what was attempted in Operation Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile, were aborted by history before they could ever be tried in the case of the latter, and ran up against the technological limitations of the time in the case of the former. Note though that “Thanks to the exponential increase in computing power over the last forty years the requisite information systems, business process re-engineering, managerial dashboards, smart phones, the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and peer production. Global capitalism itself, driven by the requirements of managing international value chains (Walmart) and immense distribution networks (Amazon.com), has subtly transcended the invisble hand in economic calculation” (pp.148-153)…In the field of production planning, for example, a hugely complex problem that would have required eighty-two years of computer time to solve in 1982, by 2003 “could solve in about a minute – an improvement by a factor of around 43 million” (Ford, Rise of the Robots, p.71) (pp.148-153, ft.341). To even begin to adequately address these problems at the level of the most basic reforms would require a herculean effort of class power so extreme that it might as well be a communist revolution. Certainly, capitalism, with its social democrat bumbling sidekicks marching alongside it, will not and cannot do so. Communism is something which no one the left knows what to do with it, yet plainly cannot do without. We still need the communist horizon (as Jodi Dean has brilliantly written about).

Communism then, in almost all areas, would be the only real successful battering ram that could be capable of even mustering a slight fight against the kind of techno-fascism he sees slouching towards him. Does he have any interest into this? Any insight? It is not to be found. In fact, noticeably, he listens to an old radio play in 1968 “when the new discipline of cybernetics, which promised to regulate and mechanize all sorts of messy human activities, seemed to be ushering in a sinister and rather antiseptic future” (p.38). The actual history of cybernetics, as shown above most specifically in the form of Operation Cybersyn, suggests the opposite, that it was in fact the sincere and correct attempt to turn technology towards human needs. In the era of the oncoming Terminator/Matrix dystopia Kunzru is rightly so terrified of, it is precisely this kind of thinking that needs a resurrection, not glib dismissal. But such is the extent of Kunzru’s postmodern libertarian contempt for structures and systems no doubt that won’t do.

This review is really too long. But the main point is that the book is brilliant, amazingly written, profound in scope, fascinating in detail, superbly crafted and genuinely poignant and emotionally gut wrenching in places. But the underlying politics underneath it show the overall limitations of it, it just can’t confront the problems it faces with the politics it needs. Therefore this book, which is undoubtedly a masterpiece, precisely shows in its absences the politics we urgently need, as much as the problems we face.

Books cited:

Anderson, Benedict, (2016), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Expanded Edition), Chicago and London: Chicago University Press

Anderson, Perry, (1983), In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London and New York: Verso

Berman, Marshall, [1970] (2009), The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, London and New York: Verso

- [1982], (2010), All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London and New York: Verso

Bratton, Benjamin, (2021), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, London and New York: Verso

Davis, Mike, (2018), Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory, London and New York: Verso

Dean, Jodi, (2018), The Communist Horizon, London and New York: Verso

- (2018), Crowds and Parties, London and New York: Verso

Dean, Mitchell and Zamora, Daniel, (2021), The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, London and New York: Verso

Elbaum, Max, (2018), Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, London and New York: Verso

Frischmann, Brett and Selinger, Evan, (2018), Re-Engineering Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fromm, Erich, [1947] (2003), Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, London and New York: Routledge

- [1976] (2013), To Have or To Be? , London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic

Geras, Norman, [1983] (2016), Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London and New York: Verso

Hall, Stuart, (1980), “Introduction to the Verso Classics Edition: Nicos Poulantzas: State, Power, Socialism”, in Poulantzas, Nicos, (2014), State, Power, Socialism, London and New York: Verso

Malm, Andreas (2018), The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, London and New York: Verso

- (2020), Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, London and New York: Verso

Mason, Paul, (2019), Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being, London: Allen Lane

Sen, Amartya, (2006), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Difference, London: Penguin

- (2010), The Idea of Justice, London: Penguin

Seymour, Richard, (2019), The Twittering Machine, London: Indigo Press

Zuboff, Shoshana, (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books