Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.
For the Nazis, the movement was the most important thing, and such a thing must be kept dynamic, it must always be in motion. Nazism could never be content with Germany, or with German peoples, the dynamism required could only be found in a global movement2. The Nazis rejected all such notions of pure German-ness along national lines because to do so would confine its territory to that of Germany. Nazism required vague and movable boundaries against which it could push itself in accord with its motion. Jews were only the first of many planned targeted groups by the Nazis, and it is worth noting that had they succeeded there would be no abating in the concentration camps, no slowing down of the industrialized death. Rather, the movement would have simply shifted its categories in its mad scramble for fresh human raw material with which to liberate from life.
Totalitarianism is a form of anti-government, the ideology of the process itself rather than anything concrete or solid. The object of totalitarianism is always in motion, ever moving and ever-shifting. It cannot stop, because the moment it does it ceases to be, it loses its dynamism and it becomes something else. Totalitarianism is a liquid society, the aim of which is to remain liquid at all costs, to resist all attempts at stabilization, to fight against the forces that would consolidate it into solidity.
The Fluid Motion of Totalitarianism
The liquidity of totalitarianism is echoed in Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity and Marshall Berman's experience of modernity. For Berman, modernity is the experience of a continual restlessness, of constant change. No more do we build monuments to last centuries, rather we build up to tear down, and this tearing down is essential to make way for the new, to give room for the flourishing of the upcoming generations (Berman, 1988). Berman uses a quote from the Communist Manifesto: "All that is solid melts into air" throughout and as the title of his book. Already when Marx and Engels were writing, this "dissolving" property of capitalism, the sensation that there was no more solidity to the world, that anything that was built up would be torn down just as quickly, was palpable.
Capitalism started in earnest with the emancipation of labour - when the peasants were evicted from the land and became part of a pool of interchangeable commodities: labour. This break, the severing of bonds between the worker and the land, set in motion the fluid dynamics of capitalism (Arendt, 1998). While proponents of capitalism may try to frame capitalism's goal as the welfare of the human race, the truth is nothing of the sort. Capitalism is concerned with the accumulation of capital, the aim of which is not to improve the human condition (either of select individuals or the multitudes) but merely to serve as the basis for the accumulation of yet more capital. Capitalism is a process that serves that selfsame process, forming a feedback loop that increases in velocity.
For Bauman, liquid modernity refers to the stage of capitalism that other writers have referred to as post-modernism or global capitalism or capitalist realism or any other number of terms. It is the perception of a new phase in the evolution of capitalism as its liquifying effects become apparent to the generation. Marx and Engels' perception of the same effect so much earlier may cast doubt on this being a new phenomenon, but a continuous and dynamic process, one that is constantly liquifying its surroundings as it absorbs them into its system, does not preclude the possibility of many phase changes along the way. Both Marx and Bauman may have experienced a shift from a seemingly solid state to a liquid one when in reality this was merely the phase change from one state of liquid to another yet more highly energetic state.
This much capitalism then shares with totalitarian movements - it is a movement, a dynamic process that must be in motion to be practised; its dynamism compels it toward continual and ceaseless expansion, and its ideology is one of glorifying process far above and beyond any achievement. It was the ferocious appetite of capitalism that led to the era of imperialism, where national powers found that the nation-state was unable to supply sufficient raw material to satiate the demands of the accumulated capital (Arendt, 1979).
However, these attributes capitalism and totalitarianism share with the life process itself which seeks to multiply without end or goal. In a sense, the life process may be thought of as totalitarian, converting non-life into life ceaselessly and senselessly. But this far predates the human world, and totalitarianism is understood as a process that acts over the human world rather than underpinning it. Further totalitarianism is not directed toward life but against it - it is the liberation of the life process from its historical attachment - process is used to dominate and subjugate life into non-life, the reverse of the life process.
Totalitarianism as Anti-Life
Totalitarianism is recognizably directed against life by the outcomes which it produces. It is not simply the cruelty exacted on the living that is sufficient for such a categorization - evolution itself will tolerate endless suffering to the organism provided it will lead to its further propagation. Life diverges and differentiates, it produces near limitless variety upon the rare innovations that are occasionally chanced upon, and it continually breaks with its heritage. Totalitarianism does not produce wildly different outcomes from small environmental variations but instead subsumes diversity into a hierarchical whole, continually purging the human material that cannot be adequately digested into its matrix of conformity.
In the same manner, capitalism acts not to produce diversity but rather conformity. Such an outcome is the inevitable vector of any greatly extended culture across space and time, but capitalism acts above and against culture itself, transforming it into its own image. The great conformity that capitalism produces is in action: in its global mutation, it completely dictates the terms of all human interactions, slowly converting all cultures and ways of thinking into an unspoken and unacknowledged acceptance and internalization of capitalist reality.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the hyper-cybernetic anti-human neoliberal darkness that hangs over global politics and disguises itself as the rhetoric of "non-ideology". Politicians serve merely as the PR front for a global corporate network; a theatrical prop used to bolster legitimacy to an apathetic, distracted, and overburdened public, which, drowning in the multiplying diseases of capitalist domestication - mass depression, maladjustment, drug, porn, and media addiction - is increasingly impotent to act in its self-interests.
This is the ideology that decrees the doctrine of there is no alternative, which speaks of managing and mitigation and never of transformation or re-conceptualization. It is a bureaucratic filtering of grievances that takes complaints on-board only to the extent that they can be twisted in service of the existing system. No moral or ethical concern can ever be permitted to intrude upon the sanctity of a growing economy, and this growth is to be realized through a program of consolidation and austerity and based on an underlying lack of belief in human potential.
There is indeed a difference in spoken beliefs and values, but as a system of manipulation totalitarian capitalism bypasses what we think (or what we think we think) and simply directs our actions3. We are not all free to act as we see fit within a capitalist frame, rather the frame determines and restricts our actions in every possible direction. One is forced into predefined roles which abound in variety but lack the range or depth necessary to suitably encompass human economic activity.
In previous eras, capitalism justified its existence by the table scraps it offered to the arts and especially to scientific research. Yes it is a system of domination and control, went the thinking, but without it, none of these side endeavours would be possible, and they embody the human spirit and make the future possible. But under neoliberalism this excuse has evaporated; funding for true research and development has declined pitifully for decades, investigations into new fields that are not industry-adjacent and sub-domains of existing fields have completely vanished and the overall agenda is one of curtailing excess in non-capitalistic territories. Meanwhile, the most egregious excesses in the superficial and banal are tolerated and encouraged so long as they can be shown to generate profits for vested interests. The standout industries of the neoliberal era are finance and advertising, both entirely parasitical functions that under increasing automation should have decreased in size.
Capitalist Unity and Political Division
The concept of totalitarian capitalism is no stranger to the world of discourse. The works from the Frankfurt School are full of the categorization.
By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.For Marcuse, the defining characteristic of totalitarian capitalism was its one-dimensionality: the absence of dialectical modes of thinking or of actions. Writing before and during the early '60s, Marcuse saw a lack of real alternatives in political discourse and a blind acceptance and conformity permeating consumer society. Given the political division of today, the political cooperation of the early '60s is sometimes seen as halcyon days, with calls for dropping of antagonistic divisions and a return to compromise and "reaching across the aisle". But the apparent bifurcation of politics is merely a façade erected by the system to reinforce itself while containing apparent forces of opposition. The culture war only illustrates the administrative impotence of the political sphere which has abdicated its role in economic policy. While in the early '60s the uniformity of economic decision-making was still largely visible, today it has moved behind back doors4, escaping into non-democratic institutions while politics becomes a circus of continually rearranging the furniture without ever addressing matters of structural concern5.
(Marcuse, 2002, p. 5)
Organisms Under Threat
The ability to keep going at all becomes the justification for the blind continuation of the system, indeed, for its immutability.Totalitarian capitalism encompasses, encases and enmeshes the world in an inescapable and irredeemable matrix. It has utterly transformed the world into a loathsome, putrid, all-consuming body of unimaginable proportion, unrestrained motion, and senseless fluidity. The design is that of a world-spanning fishnet with fractal extensions that seek inward with cold, dispassionate, flesh-seeking hooks. Faced with inescapable liquidation, the only appropriate responses of the organism6 under threat are resignation and depression or utter contempt. As totalitarian capitalism has completely effaced the human and now calls itself the "human world", it is contempt for this human world that is appropriate.
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002, p. 119)
Organisms are encouraged to be authentic: we want you to be your authentic self. However, this is not to be confused with any attempt at cultivating genuine human experience, rather it is an enticement toward self-dissolution. What is desired is not authentic selves but selves that are willing to be completely effaced so that they can be replaced by the values of the system. Hollow selves for a hollow world. It is not enough to be killed; one is made to be an accomplice in one's murder. Only once one has been made authentic can one be authenticated by the system, that is, incorporated.
Agitated and fragmented organisms, sensing that the environment has become hostile, begin to draw inward upon themselves. They enact violence against themselves and against the "other" - fellow organisms to whom they project all the phantom workings of the system itself. Politicians seek to capitalize upon and stoke the burgeoning divides by pointing to illusory enemies to distract while they further entrench the system or by blaming the organisms themselves and calling upon them to undertake more programs of self-improvement - it's up to you to better adapt to a hostile world.
The Door to the Outside
At the end of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the characters of Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to islands for their antisocial activity. The social structure on the islands is never detailed, but it is clear that they are outside of the purview of the World State. The islands serve as a collector for the social rejects from the World State, its bad actors and misfits. Whether they are a libertarian, individualist fantasy utopia or a Lord of the Flies style nightmare, they represent the outside.
At the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy, the machines and the humans come to a truce and end their war. The titular matrix is rebooted, and people remain enslaved within it, however, an important change takes place: those inside the matrix are to be given a conscious choice of whether to remain in the matrix or to be freed and live in the dystopia of the human world. Subterranean, dirty and squalid, the last human city of Zion is bereft of material comfort but it is outside the system of control of the matrix.
In both Brave New World and The Matrix Revolutions, an unromantic alternative is presented to a totalitarian system of domination and subjugation. If you simply can't fit into the World State you can leave, and those who, given the facts, want out of the matrix are let out. Such an alternative is completely absent from our present system of totalitarian capitalism. That the quintessential capitalist fantasy involves an escape from the system should be seen as a damning indictment. Fantasies involve winning the lottery or developing some get-rich-quick scheme (perhaps an app or gimmicky piece of technology) with which one can be freed to pursue one's true interests. The illusion of the possibility of escape is held up as a primary motivator for staying within the system. Despite the illusion, the reality is that there is no egress, no matter how small or miserable, and the system is militant in enforcing its totality. Perhaps it need not be so. Perhaps anti-capitalist islands can be made to stand up in the abominable sea. Not simply spaces where people are momentarily freed from the shackles of capitalism, but spaces where people can live completely unyoked and independent from such bondage. Such a possibility requires space, all of which is presently under totalitarian control.
Addendum I: Upward Mobility
All opportunity is perpetually hidden and reserved only for those in-the-know. Like the secret police of the Soviet Union, cliques form within cliques, building up walls of exclusion and intolerance against any who might be guilty of the original sin of being born on the wrong side of arbitrary social divides. Stale lip-service is paid to notions of merit, but merit is determined by in-groups whose criterion of ability is conformity to group ideology, despite and against any calls for diversity; diversity of thinking is completely out of the question. Further, merit is gated by knowledge, knowledge which is totally absent from all curricula. One must walk a certain way, talk a certain way, network, conceptualize oneself as part of a system, cultivate and then internalize a projected image of oneself. The how of any of these things is never laid out, they are simply set up as obstacles against which to snare the feeble humans who don't understand how we do things. That the system demands socialization while at the same time works tirelessly to negate the possibility of real social interaction is no accident. Isolated and alienated individuals who must be socialized according to a set of false conventionalized norms are the raw material of a totalitarian system.
Addendum II: Totalitarian Capitalism and Religion
Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed.Totalitarianism is not content with isolation and bases itself on loneliness - the experience of not belonging to the world at all (Arendt, 1979). Lonely organisms are collected like krill into the sieve of totalitarianism and transformed into masses where they can be directed against their own interests. Under capitalism, this manifests in the transformation of organisms into consumers/producers. Unlike Bolshevism and Nazism, totalitarian capitalism does not provide for a sense of group identity or the euphoria of ecstatic feeling that may accompany being lost in a cause. The social needs of organisms are unaccounted for - deviations from the model to be brushed aside as inconsequential wherever possible. In the wake of this vacuum, radical ideologies appear to collect those organisms who remain conscious of their agitation and refuse to accept it.
(Arendt, 1979, p. 474)
If religion is the co-conspirator of traditional society, then radical religion is the willing accomplice of totalitarian capitalism. Marx famously described religion as the opiate of the people, and an opiate is a drug that is administered specifically for the numbing of pain. Religion eases the pain and suffering of living under a repressive social order through a practised system of misdirections and finely tuned psychological tricks. Unease, dissatisfaction or rage that might be directed against the system is variously re-targeted or sublimated, defusing its explosive and thereby transformative potentiality. In this way, religion acts as a conservative social force. But totalitarianism is most certainly not conservative: concerned as it is with constant dynamism, any hint of settling into a steady-state is viewed with scorn and disdain.
Only ideologies that are as radical and totalitarian as capitalism itself can hope to survive under its pervasive influence. Religions are pushed to greater and greater extremism, decoupling from their traditional conservative function, becoming first reactionary and then revolutionary forces whose goals are totalitarian: the domination and subjugation of the life-process. Radical religion is compelled to the same goals as totalitarian capitalism even as it decries them, where it finds its difference is in its methods of domination.
Footnotes
1 Such predictability in fact that dictatorships have proven to be the preferred regime of the CIA for foreign governments with populations that would have ample reason to be hostile or ambivalent toward American interests.↩
2 The "Aryan race", the object of counter-fixation of the racist Nazi ideology (the object of fixation being "Jewry"), was characteristically not tied to national boundaries.↩
3 Journalists decry the rise of attention-grabbing (read: clickbait) headlines and sloppy sensational reporting yet become complicit and begrudging participants in the race to the bottom as the pressures of capitalism weigh down on them. The rise of various social media platforms for content creation and sharing has done well to illustrate the influence of the algorithms on said content. Twitter's 280 character limit (formerly 140) does not simply shape what kind of news is shared on the platform, or how that news is shared but it also instrumentally changes what the news is. Changes in YouTube's algorithms have very noticeable impacts on the parameters such as the length of videos that content creators upload. This should alert all observers of the powerful effect that the systems of control have over behaviour.↩
4 This is most visible in the European Union, and a chilling account of the European Central Bank's autonomy from the demands of voters was given by Yanis Varoufakis in an address to the Cambridge Forum (Varoufakis, 2018). Institutions like the International Monetary Fund are perhaps better at keeping a low profile while institutions like the Federal Reserve maintain an air of governmental legitimacy even as their ranks consist of a revolving door of corporate players, the allegiances of whom are continually betrayed in public policy.↩
5 This is not to suggest that cultural issues are of little import or have no impact on people's lives, in fact, they can mean life and death for those who find themselves outside the categories of the privileged. However, how these issues are addressed - incrementally on a grievance by grievance basis through a slow and unending practise of listening to previously unheard voices, making gestures toward reconciliation and then dealing with an inevitable backlash and potential regression - are carefully constructed to avoid the systemic roots of exploitation and oppression. The categories of who is allowed to be privileged or not may shift, but that there is a privileged and an unprivileged is never to be addressed.↩
6 The term organisms is used to more adequately capture the identity of subjects under totalitarian capitalism as opposed to more conventional terms of people, humans, or individuals. For one, these terms are loaded with historical baggage and have traditionally been used as terms of exclusion, where members of the species homo sapiens were denied status as humans, with the term being aspirational and exclusive. Further, these terms no longer seem to apply, with the narrative of the individual revealed as a fiction and now subject to suspicion. Finally, the term organism more properly characterizes the status of individuals in the eyes of the system. While the terms functions or programs might also describe the relation of the individual to the system, these remain ideals to which people do not entirely conform, and this lack of conformity is sometimes acknowledged by the system itself.↩
2 The "Aryan race", the object of counter-fixation of the racist Nazi ideology (the object of fixation being "Jewry"), was characteristically not tied to national boundaries.↩
3 Journalists decry the rise of attention-grabbing (read: clickbait) headlines and sloppy sensational reporting yet become complicit and begrudging participants in the race to the bottom as the pressures of capitalism weigh down on them. The rise of various social media platforms for content creation and sharing has done well to illustrate the influence of the algorithms on said content. Twitter's 280 character limit (formerly 140) does not simply shape what kind of news is shared on the platform, or how that news is shared but it also instrumentally changes what the news is. Changes in YouTube's algorithms have very noticeable impacts on the parameters such as the length of videos that content creators upload. This should alert all observers of the powerful effect that the systems of control have over behaviour.↩
4 This is most visible in the European Union, and a chilling account of the European Central Bank's autonomy from the demands of voters was given by Yanis Varoufakis in an address to the Cambridge Forum (Varoufakis, 2018). Institutions like the International Monetary Fund are perhaps better at keeping a low profile while institutions like the Federal Reserve maintain an air of governmental legitimacy even as their ranks consist of a revolving door of corporate players, the allegiances of whom are continually betrayed in public policy.↩
5 This is not to suggest that cultural issues are of little import or have no impact on people's lives, in fact, they can mean life and death for those who find themselves outside the categories of the privileged. However, how these issues are addressed - incrementally on a grievance by grievance basis through a slow and unending practise of listening to previously unheard voices, making gestures toward reconciliation and then dealing with an inevitable backlash and potential regression - are carefully constructed to avoid the systemic roots of exploitation and oppression. The categories of who is allowed to be privileged or not may shift, but that there is a privileged and an unprivileged is never to be addressed.↩
6 The term organisms is used to more adequately capture the identity of subjects under totalitarian capitalism as opposed to more conventional terms of people, humans, or individuals. For one, these terms are loaded with historical baggage and have traditionally been used as terms of exclusion, where members of the species homo sapiens were denied status as humans, with the term being aspirational and exclusive. Further, these terms no longer seem to apply, with the narrative of the individual revealed as a fiction and now subject to suspicion. Finally, the term organism more properly characterizes the status of individuals in the eyes of the system. While the terms functions or programs might also describe the relation of the individual to the system, these remain ideals to which people do not entirely conform, and this lack of conformity is sometimes acknowledged by the system itself.↩
References
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(2011) Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Translated by Bauman, L. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Berman, M. (1988) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Toronto: Penguin Books. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, 1982.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Winchester: Zero Books.
Huxley, A. (1932) Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Varoufakis, Y. (2018) Is Capitalism Devouring Democracy? [Lecture]. Cambridge Forum. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ (Accessed: 29 August 2018)
