Postcorporate Surrealism

The Surrealist Alternative to Capitalism and Communism

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In certain areas of music writing and criticism, it has been hard to escape the influence of the late Mark Fisher. He was known for being a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) along with Nick Land and Sadie Plant. His k-Punk blog in the early 200s was highly influential, and even though I didn’t read it at the time, I couldn’t escape reading about one of his favorite topics, hauntology, across the music press as it related to albums and projects from various electronic musicians and other creators. As with many other things, I came to his work late, but have found his books to be highly stimulating.
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In particular, his books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and his other book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.

At the same time as I very much enjoyed reading them and found myself nodding along, I also found myself getting irritated by them and wanting to throw them across the room. Perhaps it was the depressive and melancholy aspect that haunted these books, that haunted his own life. I am very sympathetic to those suffering from depression. I’ve had many bouts myself and I know how it can color things. I am also sympathetic to how our own culture continues to suffer from unfulfilled dreams and broken promises of what was to be our future as the myth of progress is shown to really be a myth after all. Fisher was very haunted by these lost futures, the promise of modernity had been stripped bare and its discontents revealed. This was a disappointment, especially as it related to the progress of music, which he believed needed to go on with the steady appearance of new genres. Yet new genres had petered out by the end of the 20th century and had now gone into recycling mode as chronicled by his friend and musical critic colleague Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.

Reynolds work on Retromania also lamented what it saw as a lack of progress among musicians willing to carve out new genres, and how record labels were making lots of money but cashing in on the nostalgia market for super deluxe reissues, and how online culture was making a huge chunk of recorded music available online, accessible with ease. Technology was being used to resurrect the ghosts of the past, instead of transporting us to some glorious artistic future. Now we have the ability to make recombinatorial art from the catalogs of the past with alacrity. Remixing, remaking and recombinig could never be so easy. Oh, the horror!

I think the past should be remixed, remade, recombined. Yet those remixtures should be infused the kind of strange imagination and force of will that brings them to life. Creativity can never be replaced by a tool, but tools can be hacked and détourned to make their use more creative, often through bending them towards failure, but none of it is a substitute for developing an imagination, and machines can’t really do such.
The remixes shouldn’t just be limited to art, literature and music, but to older technologies themselves and ways of doing things. Economic practices and theories that were never tried, tools and inventions that never made it past the patent stage.

Meanwhile, at the same time, as of this writing AI is a massive economic bubble with huge hidden costs. Those costs are causing and the cracks are letting in the light. American investor Michael Burry has also resurrected his warnings about the AI boom. His analysis found nine corporate technology giants to have accumulated around $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments. Sometime the piper of debt is going to want to get paid. Sometime the speculative bubble is going to get to large and regurgitate all over the rest of the economy in ways people probably won’t like, unless you are a barfophiliac.

People talk about nuclear as a possible energy solution, but I don’t want micro soft in charge of Three Mile Island. Just think of what a systems update could do! I’m skeptical of other corporations running nuclear power just to juice data centers. Nuclear power has always subsidized the nuclear arms industry on the one hand, and the long term impacts from mistakes… well, anyone who has read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels should have an inkling of the devastation and future wastelands that might occur.​

Those of us who are already committed to a downwardly mobile lifestyle will be a little more prepared for the shifts ahead. Those of us who already look to the past as a source of inspiration and guidance will find a real trash mine of valuable resources to garbage pick from. As the energy and resource base needed for recombinant machines goes by the wayside, we will have to use our own human powered abilities to perform chance operations once again. Perhaps such operations can be of assistance in creating more surreal futures.

In the meantime I am haunted by another specter that Fisher was very haunted by: the specter of capitalism.

At the same time, I am also haunted by another specter that Fisher remained hopeful for, the specter of communism. To be blunt, I think they both suck, and the fact that anticapitalists still put so much faith in Marx and communism after over a century of failure, shows a major lack of imagination.

​As the old joke goes: Is there a difference between capitalism and communism?
In theory, yes. In capitalism it is man who exploits man. In communism it is the reverse.

There are other ways of playing with archives and chance operations to create new works out of the old that don’t really on such energy intensive methods.

Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism, reverse Maragaret Thatcher’s famous dictum and screed that “There is no alternative” to free markets and capitalist ascendancy, and asked the question is there no alternative? The capitalist system is so depressing, the world seems so broken, everything is run like a business from healthcare to school, to art, that biology is no longer the bottom base line of existence, but the budget sheet. Streaming in the immersive digital cinema of the always-on simulacra has brought us into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of the feelies, while always-on tracking has brought us into George Orwell’s surveillance state.

Fisher laments that people don’t have the gumption anymore for embracing the alternative of socialism and communism. Yet the capitalism and communism axis remain just another binary, forever locked in opposition to what they each hate, and they will always be opposed. The only way to resolve the binary is to move away from them using trinary logic, and create a totally different economic system all together.
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The Democratic Socialists of America are at this time making a big name for themselves and getting into office. These are just the same kind of middle managers and bosses and bureaucrats who like to talk about the “workers” while at the same time mostly doing bong hits and playing video games, i.e., anything they can to avoid being a worker themselves. Whatever is left of the left can do better.

In a failing government and economic system where everyone wants to take a cut and nothing gets done, I propose getting rid of all the middle-men managers, corporate CEO’s, their lackeys and hangers on and instead opting for a system of postcorporate surrealism.

​Let’s dig in a little deeper.

Many critics of capitalism have a knee jerk reaction to its many negative issues and consequences. It’s like when somebody raised in a fundamentalist Christian church hears about the work of Aleister Crowley and becomes a born again Thelemite (something that happened to me as a teenager). Even more suspect is when people reject Christianity to become its polar opposite as Satanists, or belligerent atheists who have as much faith that there is no god as Bible thumpers do in preaching their interpretation of the one true interpretation of the Bible.

So it is with many people who have grown up inside the land mined culture of corporate capitalism. Seeing all that is wrong with it, they flip over to the other side of the spectrum and embrace various variants of Marxism, socialism, and communism. At the same time, writers like Fisher having acknowledged the collapse of the various utopian and communitarian fantasies associated with Marx and co. Yet an alternative to the failure has not been forthcoming, only the bemoaned the failure to imagine anything other alternative hence the cutting critiques in his fascinating book.

Those who would seek to change our problematic economic system are often very good at pinpointing all the things that are wrong with it, and all the damage it has caused. Some of them are also aware of and point out, the failures of those who would create a counterculture, alternate lifestyle or society, and oppose these dominating structures. Many pages and thousands and thousands and thousands of words are devoted to what is wrong. Then, for just a few pages at the end of any given book about the subject, there are small brief and tentative sketches offered as to what actual alternatives there might be.

Many of these thinkers would like to redistribute wealth and the means of production from the hands of the elite, back into the working class. Yet communism as practiced has just as often produced as wicked of outcomes for regular people as has capitalism. They both tend to allow the accumulation of power and resources into the hands of a few and leave the huddled masses to fend for the scraps. The approach is different, but many of the outcomes are the same. One definition of corporation is a “unified body of individuals” according to Merriam-Webster. The bureaucratic state that ends up consolidating power in communist countries could thus be thought of as one type of corporation.

For all the supposed freedoms in a capitalist system, these unified bodies have been given the rights of actual individuals, and tend towards the same accumulation of power, influence, and resources. Communists might use state propaganda, but capitalists will use the might of other corporate bodies, advertising agencies, to sway and control the population.

In that respect a postcorporate surrealism opposes both the capitalist and communist experiments of the recent centuries and casts its eye on actually looking to other alternatives economic possibilities. What situations might we create for new possibilities for arranging our lives, and importantly stripping the vast multinational corporations of their supposed personhood? These impersonal conglomerations should not have the same rights as an actual person, nor should they have a life span that is longer than a person, considering that they aren’t actually a person.
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Yet where to start? We are so entrenched in these systems it is often difficult to imagine alternatives, as Fisher so eloquently wrote about. Yet it is possible to imagine these things. Our imaginations just need to be stretched and exercised in ways they haven’t been in recent decades since the infiltration of the simulacra and spectacle into so many aspects of our lives. These forms of mass media curb the ability of the mind to be able to envision. They captivate our vision and dominate our vision. In the beginning the internet was a place for a more democratic exchange of ideas. A place for free speech. Yet corporations quickly leveraged its power for commerce, and each year it seems to be less of a place for quirky self-expression and exchange of knowledge and ideas between people. These opportunities still exist in dark forest pockets on the internet, small spaces on subslack, forgotten listservs and forums, but the companies that own so much of the digital real estate get to set the controls, and mine the people of data, on the popular social media networks they control. And after a day working as microserf miner slinging binary bits, we come home to another screen where are encouraged to binge watch. Sucked into these twin worlds, its no wonder those with vested interests in keeping people in their place as consumers do what they can to make these things addictive, and keep us entranced.

Pulling away from the spectacle, from the simulacra, gives a person the needed breathing space to start thinking for themselves, and perhaps to even start envisioning what else there might be beyond both capitalism and communism.

That’s what brings us to surrealism because realism hasn’t gotten us very far either. If we are going to imagine new economies, ways of relating, ways of congregating, sharing, working and living together in conviviality, we need to go as far out as we can. Strange ideas need to be encouraged. Weird artists, outsiders and visionaries need to be explored. Those on the fringe need to be looked as examples rather than ostracized. Distant ideas can also come to us from the past, either from traditional lifeways that have stood the test of time (until corporate forces did their best to wipe them out) or from art movements, borderline subcultures, and ideas that were never fully developed or taken up.

Another resource for all this material is the world of dreams. A surrealist economy is in many ways a dream economy. The gift economy is rebirthed through sharing of our nightly gifts from realms beyond the physical, the place in the liminal where mysterious encounters lead humanity back into ourselves and beyond at the same time along paths of creativity.

Part of the problem with both capitalism and communism is a shared materialistic reductionism. That is not to say we need to go back to fundamentalist religion, though certainly many are, and many more will in their search for safety and stability in a chaotic world. This leads us into the inner world, the world of the imaginal, the world of dreams. If we have failed to develop our imaginations it is much in part because we have failed to develop our inner lives. When everything is only lived on the outer, as trivial moments to fill trivial moments in time, we don’t give ourselves the break we need to hear what we are actually thinking ourselves, what isn’t coming from the influencers and talking heads, the media mouthpieces, and government spokesperson, from corporate created entertainment.

To this we can take inspiration from the surrealists, and other art movements in general, that were not afraid to tap into the subtle side of life, to look into their dreams or daydreams. If we want to envision a different way of life, we need visionaries, and eccentric freaks, misfits who aren’t afraid to be on the outside of mainstream society.
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Scientists, experts, managers, all of these people with their degrees and certificates, have become the priests of our time, the ones who say how things should be, the ones the rest of us need to listen to. They want us to get back to work, shut ourselves up, do as we are told, and don’t turn away from the screen in our hands and on the wall, to look at what might be behind the screen of our minds. It is the stifling of the spirit into materialist constraints where nothing happens until you buy something.

Instead of experts, we need to look to the weirdos, the people who didn’t fit in, who didn’t graduate, who went off on their own path, looking to find their own particular joy and groove. People who never even knew there was a box to be outside of because they were so far deep in the forest on their own.

We need alone time ourselves as well, away from other influences, so we can began to hear our own voice again, listen, dream our own dreams and reflect on what they mean.

“Go then, there are other worlds than these,” Jake Chambers said to Roland Deschain and heir to Arthur Eld as he fell into an abyss in Stephen King’s novel The Gunslinger. He did not die. He found himself in another world. It is possible to imagine something other than capitalism. It is also possible to imagine something other than socialism and communism.

​The surrealists offer many tools for bypassing logic and the rational mind all together. The multitudinous surrealist economies of the future can best be explored as we begin to open ourselves up to forces far beyond market forces. It is in those subtle realms where the questions to our supposed are waiting.

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