Fascist Realism

Tragedy strikes on the evening news. A man was stabbed, penetrated by a knife and stricken to bleed out on boiling concrete in a hot Florida afternoon. Camera vulture in on the body, filming and commenting. Guilt and pain pool out from the two bodies that locked in congress with the blade. Vultures feast on footage that’s recut and reinterpreted in ceaseless debate, said debate leading the one left standing to a concrete box. Words are said and built upon each other as cameras turn into an overgrowth, yet for what end? No matter how many, or how firmly they win against other cameras, the third parties will never be anything except that. Words bloom spectral in a Heaven of self-replication yet flesh and metal are still all that-is of the original case. The facts of the case are the blade as-is, the flesh as-is, with even the motivations and reactions internal to those involved being as secondary, an imaginary third added before and after the fact, as the camera vultures now debating the floating “ethics” of the matter, above and beyond the matter as-is.

Philosophy of ethics or morality is countlessly unable to reconcile this as to do so would force self-abrogation. In the opposite turn, Mark Fisher has made the interesting move of throwing out the question completely. Mark Fisher proclaims that the concept of the end-utopia of communism has become so occluded by capitalist ideology, that it has become ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Such a statement is correct, but relies upon a partial-truth. To say that capitalism is not the world would be an outright lie. Capitalism is the world as-is and never, has there existed a socialist society which didn’t exist with capitalism at its core. True existing socialism becomes an impossible goal as Mark Fisher somewhat acknowledges it, and as Marx’s command against utopianism tacitly agrees, as to annihilate capitalism would require the annihilation of the world as an entropic place.

What is capitalism here? Capitalism takes the place of evil in Marxian theodicy and as all concepts of evil, its being is always present. The flesh will always desire as the abrahamic fears, and so continuous revolutions are needed to root out the evil-within, that of desire. It’s flesh, from where the harming of flesh emerges, and it’s this harming that becomes known as capitalism. Marxian thought makes the move to construct capitalism by externalizing a pure humanity from a form of sin, capitalism here substituting for Satan as the fetishized source of all evil alien to the foundationally good nature of the being underneath. What truly distinguishes capitalism, what is there in capitalism that is separate from any other economic system, modernist, hypothetical, or previous? Is the exploitation of human bodies, the violent coercion of lower classes, the brutal struggle for fitness-to-environment of systems of power, different in anything except quantity than previous? Capitalism as a concept is only constructed by externalizing these things from the self in order to build a utopian system of negation beyond it, in order to construct the paradise of is-not against the world as-is.

It’s here that Fisher becomes genius in his defense of the Camera Vultures from the stabbing. The end of the world is the end of capitalism, as both are one in the same, capitalism being the sins of the flesh and the world as-is, while the end of capitalism being the dream of revelation. Fisher performs a fully christian move here, to contemplate the world as being possibly cleansed, to truly believe in a God-the-son, in an Unfolding to bring purity upon the world.

The archetypal socialist in these words is Raiden in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The bosses proclaim through the entire game, their philosophy of fitness, of nihilism, of war as foundation, as Raiden cuts through spewing words of truth and justice that become more and more hollow as he slaughters thousands and ultimately vindicates their own words by winning through being the strongest and most fit for the discourse at hand. Raiden at no point awakens to the reality of what he was practicing, though this reality often awakens wherever a “higher cause” is attempted to guide the ways of the as-is. Violence will affect its victims and perpetrators sufficiently to annihilate occlusions of morality by its caustic flow. Colonel Kurtz traveled through the ways of the great empires of Liberalism and Socialism and came out with this lesson, the lesson of the world. Philosophy when attempted to be practiced is abrogated by its very practice, as spiritual things are when they began to copulate with the material. To annihilate philosophy is only to ignore it, to deal with the as-is, to meditate, to close one’s monologue and breathe.