Real spooky hours
Dispatches from the second worst airport in London
The format is slightly different. Instead of brief commentary on each peice, I will allow the excerpts I've chosen to speak for themselves in conjunction with a brief summary at the top here.
2 out of the 3 articles were written by the same author: Ian Wright. He is exploring the occult underpinnings of capitalism. Occult in its spooky colloquial meaning - reflected heavily in the imagery used - and in its original meaning of hidden.
He takes Marx's religious analogies seriously and constructs a way of understanding the world that I would say is not too off base.
Think of it as tales from the capitalist's crypt. You can imagine when we transcend this social form, children of the future being scared with stories of the Capitalist Real God, they'll lament the things their forebears bore witness to, unmoved.
Consider the mute compulsion that drives millions every day into the arms of “work”, while they curse its hold on them and yearn for their time away from it, what is that if not a haunting - a possession by some unknown being.
When we speak of the inevitable deaths of despair that are characteristic of our current system, the homeless person aged into an early grave in full view of all, the worker driven to suicide from debt, the masses of the global south razed from the earth due to preventable diseases for which cures are possible but not market-friendly. How different is that from public human sacrifices to the weather gods in hope of good harvest. The similarities are all there. You just need to look closer.
Dark Eucharist of the Real God - Ian Wright
Humanity, in the enchanted worlds of classical antiquity and the middle ages, consorted with spiritual beings. Hence the long history of sacrificial exchanges between peoples and their gods. But capitalism has done away with the gods. In our disenchanted world the unmoved mover is our own human desires, not a hidden spirit. Economics envisions capitalism as a great secular exchange between humanity and itself. We face each other in the market, and nothing stands in between. We are sovereign individuals, free of feudal superstition, and free to buy and sell as we wish.
But free within constraints. We are all subject to the fundamental laws of economics that emerge from our collective behaviour. Resource scarcity cannot be abolished. We must therefore accept that almost everything we do is both enabled and constrained by the quantity of money at our disposal. Because the money in our pockets, we are told, is merely a local representation of this global scarcity. If you have very little, and your life is impoverished, that’s lamentable but not really preventable.
The secular vision of economics is consistent with many aspects of our everyday experience. But shadows loom on the edge of this vision that hint at other realities. The science of economics neglects that emergent laws must be enforced by emergent powers. Capitalism disenchanted the medieval world only by weaving its own new enchantment. But it is a dark enchantment that hides the existence of a great power of enforcement that lurks in the shadows. When we face each other in the market it stands between us, not as mediator of our desires, but as controller of them.
Marx on Capital as a Real God - Ian Wright
So let’s take a moment to note how fantastical commodity exchange actually is.
Only dedicated occultists would dare claim that everything we see around us, all the things and activities in the world, are — despite all appearances — really the same. That 1 kg of caviar is “the same as” 1000 different people clicking on the same internet advert. Or clowning at a children’s party is actually “the same as” 200 rounds of shotgun ammunition. Or that 1 month of computing time on a high-spec machine in the cloud is “the same as” 1 tonne of potatoes. Only highly trained adepts could begin to see the truth of such counter-intuitive and magical affinities.
But we more than see the truth of it. We openly and regularly achieve it. We manifest these magical affinities on a daily basis. We treat quantities of fish eggs, human attention, clowning performances, bullets, computing time, potatoes, and a bewildering array of other things, as “the same” — because, in the marketplace, they all may be exchanged for one another, via the “alien mediator” we call money.
The Capitalist class is not the primary enemy - Izzy Meckler
A lot of socialist rhetoric focuses on framing the capitalist class as the primary enemy of socialists and of the working class. However, the capitalist class itself is not the primary enemy of socialism.
The real enemy is the self-replicating, expanding process called Capital. This is an algorithm which operates in the real world by being encoded in various social relations, institutions, and technologies. You can think of it as an evil AI that is encoded in a complicated, diffuse way in our social-relations, institutions, and technologies, and which has enslaved most of humanity (capitalists and workers alike).