selective Luddism

Anthony Galluzzo:

One through-line that unites [the] tics and splits [of the progressive left] is the enthusiasm for the medical-industrial complex and biotechnological intervention, which is why Illichian critics of the pharmaceutical industry, a long-standing faction on the post-Sixties left, are either politically homeless or now on the right. Think biotechnological Prometheanism. This tendency often takes bizarre and politically suicidal forms: instead of advocating for the expansion of the family model to encompass non-traditional, queer arrangements alongside the traditional sorts, there are various calls for total family abolition by way of artificial fertilization and surrogacy technologies. The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center is an image of utopia for some. Here is a left iteration of the techno-libertarian right’s transhumanism, with its fantasies of secular immortality and bodily enhancement by way of cyborg fusion. Selective Luddism — a truly revolutionary perspective — needs to make a come-back on the left and in the culture as a whole.

Yet it is no surprise that the 2010s holographic left mirrors the techno-libertarian right since another through-line, and commonality, is an embrace of atomized social relations, transactionalism, and individualist self-fashioning as the acme of freedom. This seems odd for a political tendency that identifies as “socialist” or “communist.” Yet, for many of our anime avatar’d social justice homunculi, socialism is more the utilitarian precondition for the achievement of a more perfect techno-consumerist kingdom of monads than an attempt to imagine, then fashion, a different—decommodified and non-alienated—mode of being together, which necessarily involves sacrifice for a common good. The left, like the right, is in this way completely in accord with the imperatives of our catabolic capitalism, as befits a political movement whose politics are conducted entirely within the precincts of Mark Zuckerberg’s participatory panopticon.

You can subscribe to a weekly digest of these posts here.