I.
The present-day situation shows more than anything else the conflict between the ruling classes and the peoples. On one hand the power-block between financial oligarchy, the bio-digital-robotic capitalists, and the managerial class, and on the other hand the working class, the petty bourgeoisie and the lower professional strata of the managerial class. To the latter classes it has become more and more apparent that the present-day capitalism is incompatible with the rights to rest and leisure, education and work. Commodifying everything that belongs to the necessities of human life, it makes it an arena of profit, power, and control.
II.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 a new bio-digital-robotic industrial capital has made itself ready to enter the scene. Enter the scene of politics, full of promises of an era in which data computing and digitalisation is combined with robotisation, artificial intelligence, and low-cost genetic engineering. Bolstered by financial capital and debt it looks for an economic and political regime ready to promote its interests and adjust the institutions to its desires. In short, a regime ready to adjust itself and open up the markets to an entirely new supply of goods and services emanating from the well-springs of the fourth industrial revolution.
III.
The new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution open the prospects of future reductions of the work time, increases in social investments, and welfare improvements. However, the thrust of the agenda of the fourth industrial revolution is to increase the rate of profit and promote the control-functions of the new production processes. On the political level the transition to this new accumulation regime is nothing but a revolution from above, which at the present stage takes the form of an authoritarian semi-dictatorial pandocracy.
IV.
The control aspect is of course not new: capitalist technologies of production are always designed to function as technologies of control, surveillance, and documentation of the production process. What is novel about the fourth industrial revolution is that it offers technologies capable of controlling the consumption process as well, in particular the consumption of services. From now on consumption will be managed and engineered on its most fundamental level, the level of preferences and choices. Consumers that make “rational” choices in accordance with “sustainable”, “safe”, and “risk-averse” preferences will be rewarded. Budgets of individuals and households will be ironed out and directed to promote sustainable and safe consumer patterns. Moreover, not only budgets but also corporate and state directives may constrain the consumers’ access to goods and services.
V.
Ideologically constrained consumer goods and services will be branded as “luxury consumption”. Such luxury items may not only include private diesel fuelled motor cars and groceries like meat, but also visits to restaurants, pubs, and hotels. The latter means that large parts of the petty bourgeoisie will be wept out and destroyed. The ongoing digitalisation of the retail industry and certain parts of the service industry intensifies.
VI.
Micromanaging the level and structure of the old demand thus goes hand in hand with an effort to stimulate consumer demand for everything that the new bio-digital-robotic capital is ready to supply them with, including everything from gene-therapies to electric cars. Creating a world in which the share of wages can be lowered, without having to reduce the level of consumption and consumer credits –Alas! That is the traditional Achilles heel of capitalism, which the fourth industrial revolution now promises to remove forever.
VII.
In the long run, the fourth industrial revolution even sets its gaze on the very biology and psychology of human needs, desires, and emotions, with the ambition to make them more risk-averse and more malleable to the directions of the corporations and the state. The perfect consumer will not be shaped by propaganda, but rather edited by gene-therapy. No longer a mere producer of the product she consumes, the consumer becomes a supplier of the biological raw-material of this product.
VIII.
The fourth industrial revolution sounds the death-knell of Western mass consumption as we have known it to this day, as a real mass phenomenon and spectacle. The deeper-seated consequences of these transformations are enormous: they mean that the reality of the masses (Ortega y Gasset) comes to an end. Masses in the relevant socio-political sense will no longer exist in physical space, only in the ideal and digital space of the internet. The downfall of the West, what is it other than the downfall of liberal-libertarian mass-consumerism (Clouscard) and its replacement by a new capitalism of control and austerity?
IX.
In the digital space the state will unfold its main directive: to keep the masses separated and individualised in their being as life-less compounds of passive atoms, at a safe distance from the state and the power of the political class and the ruling classes it serves. No populist movements will ever see the light of the day again. Their leader – the populist political buffoon – has been safely absorbed and neutralised within the ranks of the political class and its spectacle. In his place enters the narrow-minded control-freakish elementary-school headmaster, which surveys that everyone follows the latest, daily or hourly state-sanctioned orders of the corporations of the bio-digital-robotic capital.
X.
Part and parcel of the elimination of the masses is the inevitable de-personification of the political representative in favour of the manager. Though managers may be replaced by robots and surveillance software, the events of the last two years (2020-2021) show how strongly they stick to the hope that they will be needed in their capacity as controllers, directors – and ultimately snitchers. The more successful they are, the more hated they will become.
XI.
On the other hand, it must be carefully observed that the destruction of mass consumption marks the beginning of the end of commodity production as we have known it. In a world of 3D-printers the boundaries between the production of commodities and the production of services will be blurred. The opportunity and necessity of new, seemingly utopian forms of human production and exchange within mutual-aid societies of like-minded will not only be possible, but necessary. These societies will live side by side with the capitalist corporations, which will be ready to sell their production plants to the societies at scrap-prices once they stop being profitable. Life-less and fully automatised by robots these production plants only require miniscule inputs of living labour. Labour that will be supplied by these societies in cooperation with the state. Though this opportunity may seem utopian today, it appears so only from our narrow-minded present day point of view.
XII.
The last two years have seen an unprecedented growth in the quantity, quality, and depth of the awareness of the masses of the totalitarian tendencies of the state – which for has been covered by the increasingly lifeless and formal procedures of parliamentary debates and elections. People have learnt more the last two years about the real enemies of freedom, welfare, and human dignity than the last twenty to thirty years.
XIII.
The weapons of the powers to be have all been laid down in the open, to be seen by the masses, by the people. It has become apparent that the mere critique of power is branded as “extreme”, as “right-wing”, as “hateful”, etc. Charges against opponents of EU or migration, etc, are now directed against protesters of vaccine-passports, the use of QR-codes, etc. Dissidents are no longer persons questioning broadly accepted ideologies, policies or bills, but people who defend what previously was thought as the natural right to follow their own personal routines and inclinations. Rule following has become hellish, a matter of fluctuations, no less erratic and volatile than the short-term movements on the currency market.
XIV.
The new bio-digital-robotic capital of the fourth industrial revolution – personified by people like Musk, Bezos, Gates – has been made visible to people. “Capitalism” is no longer part of some abstract, dead terminology from the 19th century or from the communist movement, but starts to make sense as a term denoting something highly real. Capital and capitalist oligarchs are, briefly stated, present everywhere. More often than not, they show themselves immediately, unfiltered by media and independently of the hapless representatives of the governments. This is a fact, and it cannot be denied.
XV.
The possibility of resistance cannot be constructed by any one-sided political or ideological movement, but has to be given as real and spontaneous. This is exactly what has been happening the last year – the year 2021. Exploring this possibility gives a taste of real power or at least an idea of what it means to resist the real power of the state, as an apparatus of the ruling classes. Though we are far from seeing any visible signs of victories and though the protests have been defensive and reactive rather than offensive than proactive – they are important for the time to come.
XVI.
Real victories will have to offer real-world solutions to digital problems, and digital-ideal solutions to real-world problems. Victories that offer new opportunities of life, in communities of mutual work and assistance, opportunities beyond the old abstract pseudo-reality of the old masses. Though these communities might sound utopian and anarchistic, they will become a socially necessary possibility in the course of time.
XVII.
Unlike the stupid and backward conservative, populist and nationalist movements, the national and international representatives of the bio-digital-robotic capital have shown themselves vigilant, proactive, provocative, revolutionary. Their weakness is that their clever revolution moves at a pace even faster than their relatively unprecise gene therapies.
XVIII.
In the long run no victories will be won unless they are offensive and proactive. There is no reason to think that the power-block of the financial oligarchy, the bio-digital capitalists and the managerial class will let go of their power without a fight. In this struggle the atomised, digitalised masses will inevitably lose unless they receive help from strata of the professional class – technicians, coders, biologists, geneticists, medical professionals, etc. – that have an interest in adjusting their techniques to the socio-biological nature of man, rather than the other way around.
XIX.
One of the weakest spots of the new bio-digital-robotic-capital, in its search for a new political regime that adequate and receptive to its interests, is its spontaneous ineptness and blindness to the needs of the state. Not the needs of the nation or even the nation state, but the needs of the state as such. Already the neo-liberal accumulation regime was inherently hostile to the nation state and sought to dissolve it by free-market agreements, national deregulations, supra-national political bodies, currency-unions, end-less chain-migration, etc. However, the pandocracy shows itself disinterested in or even hostile to the very existential conditions of the state: a geographically defined body of power that eradicates the tribes and creates a people in its own image – a politically unified population within the determinate boundaries of a definite geographic location. The pandocracy of the bio-digital-robotic capital knows no geographic boundaries, only malleable domains and subdomains in the world-wide-web of its power.
XX.
NATO is an archaic remain from the cold war. That is how we want to describe it. But below the surface there is something even more disturbing with this organisation. This wryness or anomaly concerns the very form or character of the type of post-liberal political power it represents. Though wrought up in strong authoritarian, partly tyrannical traits it strives to dissolve the very fundament of the state: the territoriality of its exercising of power. Its dependence on the people/s as a political unit within geographic borders. This Faustian immensity is innate to the very nature of NATO as an organisation. Does it understand itself? Beyond the primitive impetus to expand itself and the pandocratic tyranny of the digital-bio-robotic capital?