Spoilers after this paragraph. If you choose to watch ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ (which I recommend you do), then I recommend watching it in a time and place where you have the space to introspect and to let yourself feel fully vulnerable.
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Well that was good. Yeah, maybe in the context of ‘Inside’ it’s a bit fucked to be writing something in response to this, as if I were mining my experiences to produce content for others to consume. The conceited hope is that someone might be able to get something out of it, but who am I kidding. The most good that writing this will do is almost certainly for myself, sorting through my thoughts and representing them back to myself in a way that helps inform my actions.
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To just get into it with the easy stuff, here are the some basic top-of-the-head thoughts. Obviously, I enjoyed Socko and How The World Works. But I think I enjoyed Welcome to the Internet and That Funny Feeling more. But I don’t think there was a bad moment in the whole special.
I recommend watching in a place and time where you have the space to introspect and feel fully vulnerable, and if you want, watching back parts after it’s over. I also wonder about the topicality of the comedy special, and how much of it will still feel relevant after a couple years. It’s coming out at an odd time where the pandemic kind of seems to be lifting. But even if the pandemic does fully go away, which is not guaranteed, everything else socially and politically is still there, and the 2024 election is approaching very quickly. There isn’t going to be an end to this except with a revolution or the total destruction of any hope on the left.
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Okay, now for the more meaningful discussion on pessimism about the possibility of success for the Left.
The most worrying line for me came in Get Your Fucking Hands Up.
You say the ocean’s rising, like I give a shit.
You say the whole world’s ending—Honey, it already did.
You’re not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried.
Got it? Good, now get inside.
It really feels like the world is ending, and that we’re trying (and failing) to stem the gradual increases in efficiency of the exploitation of the proletariat, and the efficiency of the suppression of dissent. Even as technology advances, it doesn’t free us because the circuits of profit and accumulation have quickly adopted that technology to capture our attention, and to create artificial scarcity around capitalist co-optations of short-term natural desires. Any time we discover a new way of analyzing the world that would be helpful, it feels like it is too late and too little to help inform us in a way that can plausibly change the course of the world in time.
It’s easy to be as pessimistic and doomer as that part of Get Your Fucking Hands Up. It might be correct. Is it possible to slow this, let alone stop it? All evidence seems to point to ‘No’. If that sort of pessimism is true, then yeah, what’s the point—might as well give up; stay inside; have mindless, unfulfilling fun; and then shoot myself in the head. But I’m scared of death—at least, of a meaningless death—so I hold out hope that there is a way to benefit the world with my presence, and to find life fulfilling while doing so.
It seems impossible to counter these huge, hyper-objectual systems that create these overwhelming tendencies for accumulation in the hands of a few; tendencies for subtler forms of force, coercion, and ideology which are used to create subservience among the exploited; and the historical tendency of turning people from ‘ends who matter for themselves’ into ‘means to the end of technological advancements for extremizing unequal accumulation for the few’. Yet, these systems only create tendencies, and it’s uncertain that these tendencies don’t also create instabilities and opportunities that have the potential for challenging and overthrowing those very same systems.
The world is continually being created and recreated, and we are a part of that. The world’s systems are ultimately composed of people, and although it’s been highly profitable to destroy any conception of working class unity, it’s always impossible to extinguish the possibility of achieving it. Exploitation depends on the workers—a dead worker is no good to the capitalist, and capitalists depend on us for the creation of the surplus value which they appropriate for themselves. The masses will always hold a key position in society. So long as there is exploitation, they depend on us.
So long as our place in production is not rendered obsolete by automation, and so long as automation cannot achieve the authoritarian’s dream of allowing the elite few to enforce mass obedience without relying on human lackies—then the political potential for the left remains. I nevertheless worry that it might be practically too late for the left to succeed on its own organizing capacity. Automated, centralized, capitalist hegemony has greatly advanced—control is centered in the hands of a few, and those few have been selected and produced by the filters and practice of capitalist success to be true believers in the righteousness of drastic inequality. Revolutions and outbursts in developed capitalism are even strongly warped by insidious capitalist propaganda—contemporary revolutions are fascist, trying to reproduce and make permanent any superficial reminders of the fantastical era of ‘when capitalism was good'; instead of socialist revolutions that progress toward the ‘destruction of capitalism’.
We can only keep fighting, learning, educating, agitating, and building lasting institutions for humanity—and hope that it will be enough, that lasting social truths will compile throughout history, and that we will seize our chances when we can, before capitalism fully co-opts what makes life fulfilling. But even if it is impossible to succeed, this fight for communism is one of the few things that helps compose a truly fulfilling life, and it is worth doing for the sake of itself. Perhaps even fighting a lost cause is no reason to give up and shoot myself in the head, if this cause is just. But just because it is so difficult to thread the needle of communist success, we cannot let ourselves get sloppy, or become individualist extremists. Any sort of communism will necessarily come from organizing the people as to grow an overwhelming capacity for collective action.
I am very pessimistic, but there’s literally nothing else I’ve got except this potential for a better world. We construct it, and I’m not gonna try to beg that people try to be optimistic. I can only do the work and create optimism through the practice and success of that work.