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    • Tag: liberalism

    • The Torturing Basilisk: Outlines of an Emerging New Form of Government

      The Torturing Basilisk: Outlines of an Emerging New Form of Government

      Basilisk, Bestiary, London, British Library, Royal 12 C XIX, f. 63, circa 1200-1225.

      Between 2016 and 2019, I wrote several essays about the ideology of what was at the time known as the alt-right. “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face” uses Roko’s Basilisk—a thought experiment about a future AI that punishes those who didn’t help create it—as a lens to discuss how Silicon Valley’s tech culture incubated neoreactionary and alt-right movements, with tech workers and investors providing early financial support and ideological breeding grounds for a new fascist ideological formation.

      The Basilisk was an allegory for a process that is now fully coming into view: When labor is no longer the main source of value, the majority of the population, no longer relevant to the primary mode of accumulation, can be disposed of. This, I would contend, is what underlies the ongoing assault on political and civil rights: without incentives to sustain their populations as members of a political community, states will seek to suspend the rights they had previously granted—and this is the stage we are now in.

      The classic social contract assumed wage labor as the primary distribution mechanism for productivity gains. The political enfranchisement of non-property-owners occurred because their labor became systemically critical. AI allows companies to break complex roles into smaller, commoditized micro-tasks—fragmented, remote, or platform-mediated work makes collective action difficult, while also affording AI-driven performance monitoring, algorithmic management, and real-time productivity scoring. When new jobs are created, they may require skills that displaced workers do not have. The horizon of a middle-class life—college degree, entry-level job, steady promotion, retirement—was already fraying; AI may well sever it entirely.

      The Basilisk is a ‘Darwinian Filter’—hinging on a process of violent sorting that separates the worthy from the unworthy—that institutes a fundamental division between the tech-savvy gentry (who devote their lives to the Basilisk) and a vast underclass of the underemployed or precariously employed (who are further degraded by it). This filter is also at work through tech IPOs, the ultimate conduit for spreading private AI losses to public, passively held retirement accounts. Early venture investors who funded the AI labs get to cash out at inflated valuations. When the bubble bursts, pensioners—who have no choice but to hold index funds containing these overvalued stocks—bear the downside. They will thus be tortured by the Basilisk for the remainder of their biological lives, not through digital simulation but through the very real liquidation of their material security.

      Contrary to what proponents of terms like “cyber-feudalism” suggest, current techno-political architectures have not altered the economy in ways that resemble Europe’s medieval feudal system, but in ways that are closer to the system of 176th-century chartered companies—a system where private entities receive state-like powers while operating as profit-seeking corporations. You can call it crypto-mercantilism, but the most important point is this: the stablecoin-AI convergence does not produce digital serfs. It produces “human residue”: humanity as a maintenance cost rather than a productive force. What happens to the redundant is not an economic question. It is an ideological one.

      Trump’s murderous alacrity, his use of maximum brute force with a minimum of justification, violence that is technically precise yet morally illegible, open contempt for international law, and absolute impunity—these are the epiphenomena of this transition. The cruelty is not the point; the cruelty is the affect. The point is to unmake citizens and govern the rightless as wards.

      This is why racial capitalism, rather than cyberfeudalism, is the more useful framework. It forces us to recognize that capitalism does not require homogenizing labor. It can and does maintain differentiated, coerced, and super-exploited labor forms within its global circuits of accumulation. The prison labor camp, the gig economy “independent contractor,” the data-generating “user”—all are forms of value extraction without a wage contract. Even as unemployment rises, the state can allocate scarcity—housing vouchers, food assistance, healthcare, disability benefits. AI-powered welfare administration can automate this discrimination at scale, with policing becoming the primary interface with the state. And it is race that stabilizes this stratification by producing differentiable populations within the same economic system. In the wage-labor era, race served to segment the working class. In the post-wage era, race allocates access to the remaining scarce goods, and—most critically—the distribution of state violence.

      When states abdicate the work of sustaining populations, they leave a void—not only in material provision but in meaning. That void, I argue, must be filled by an ideology capable of naturalizing the notion that neglect is not a breakdown but a restoration of order. Masculinity—understood as an ideological formation—is what performs this ideological work and supplies the moral grammar for the transition. This is where fascism comes in: capitalism can and often does destroy value, but fascism alone knows how to endow this uneconomic dimension with meaning. Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw invites us to visualize this transition as a heightened, almost rapturous frenzy while also unseeing the slow, methodical, infrastructural work of cutting the social body to pieces.

      Taken together, cruelty as affect, masculinity as grammar, the unmaking of citizens as project, and artificial intelligence as infrastructure constitute the ideological and material apparatus of an emerging new mode of governance ––whose coordinates we need to map out.

      The essay “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face: The Afterlife of Fascism and the Digital Frontier,” published in 2019 in Third Text 33 (3), 315–335, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1625638, is hereby made available for free reading.

      Ana Teixeira Pinto_Capitalism with a Transhuman FaceHerunterladen

    • Fascism – normality, not exception

      Alberto Toscano: Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, New York (Verso) 2023.

      That Alberto Toscano has struck a nerve with his book, which was recently translated into German, was evident at the end of June at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The book launch, a conversation between Toscano and prominent guests (Bafta Sarbor, Lama el Khatib, and Quinn Slobodian), took place in the large auditorium, which was nearly sold out. Toscano does not offer a diagnosis of the present à la “this is fascism now”, and he strictly rejects any definition of the term based on a checklist of core characteristics. As a reader seeking orientation, this approach can be frustrating. But you are rewarded for reading on: above all with an invitation to think of fascism not as something spectacular, as a state of emergency, as the radical opposite of freedom and democracy, but as a potential and a process that thrives especially within liberal democracies and is experienced very differently by groups with different positionalities—along lines of race, gender, and sexuality.

      The book is divided into seven chapters, which build on and refer to each other, but can also be read individually depending on your interests. All chapters have in common that Toscano gives the authors who inspired him ample voice and often relates them to each other in surprising ways. I would like to briefly introduce two chapters that I consider particularly important: Chapter 2: “Racial Fascism” and Chapter 3: “Fascist Freedom.” In Chapter 2, drawing on anti-colonial thinkers and scholars/activists of the American Black Radical Tradition of the 1970s, Toscano turns the conventional historical classification of fascism on its head. Following Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. DuBois, and others, he argues that already the brutal colonial rule and the exploitation and violence-based as well as violence-generating capitalist divisions of the US Reconstruction period (1861-1877) should be understood as early forms of fascism. These, he argues, paved the way for and helped shape the regimes of the interwar period in Italy, Germany, Croatia, and elsewhere, which are now regarded as “historical fascism.” In a second step, Toscano takes up the insight that fascism did not end with “historical fascism” and its capitulation in the 1940s—at least not for those who were and are subjected to brutal disenfranchisement and violence even in democracies. He quotes, among others, from the prison writings of Angela Davies and George Jackson and states:

      “Jackson and Davis are profoundly aware of the disanalogies between present forms of domination and historical fascism, but they both assert the epistemologically privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a carceral-judicial system that could fairly be described as a racial state of terror. In distinct ways, they can be seen to relay and recode that foundational gesture of anti-racist and Black radical anti-fascism crystallized in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. As the Martinican poet and politician tells it: ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the Gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’” (Toscano 2023, 32)

      Fascism and fascist processes are persistent and yet often invisible to those who have the privilege of not being directly exposed to the violence and the terror. In the chapter on “Fascist Freedom,” Toscano seeks to clarify the relationship between fascism and neoliberalism. I find this chapter particularly important because the terms fascism and neoliberalism are frustratingly unclear today, while being at the center of diagnoses of the present that see them as competing rather than consider them together. People ask: is this (still) neoliberalism or (already) fascism? For Toscano, this is the wrong question. He shows that the conventional idea that neoliberalism is fundamentally critical of the state, while fascism abolishes all forms of freedom in favor of state power, is neither theoretically nor historically accurate. He quotes from the writings of Mussolini, Reinhard Höhn, Ludwig von Mises, and others to prove that neoliberalism is indeed pro-state, but pro a very specific type of state, namely one that unleashes market forces and defends private property. Fascism, on the other hand, is indeed pro-freedom, but only for very specific freedoms enjoyed by privileged groups. In the Third Reich, too, the regime’s supporters and executors were granted considerable freedoms. According to Toscano, it is a mistake to overlook and dismiss the “spontaneities and enjoyments that fascism offers to its managers, militants or minions” (Toscano 2023, 61). Those who read on to the end are rewarded with tentative attempts at a definition in the short concluding chapter. Toscano identifies “four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism” (Toscano 2023, 156) that he wants to make his readers aware of. In a nutshell, these are: 1) that fascism existed before “historical fascism” and that it has survived it, 2) that fascism is by no means experienced in the same way by everyone, 3) that fascism can be understood as a mode of preventive counter-violence in response to epochal panics (such as the panic of the “Great Replacement”), and 4) that fascism not only demands submission from its supporters and perpetrators, but also offers them certain forms of freedom—such as the freedom to exercise violence and enjoy doing so.

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