Becoming the End Times Intellectual
This essay, written as a music student in Brandon, was open on Jakub's laptop at the time of his death.
What if being a good person isn’t about constant self-consciousness and questioning. What if it’s not, does this make me a good person? Was that the right thing to do? What if being a good person is living under a constant assumption that you are a most likely a bad person. Because it’s probably true. That way we constantly surprise ourselves. Becoming better becomes less of a chore, but an imperative. Your life or your death depends on rising above your monstrous self, to create beauty out of the void of despair, to recreate meaning from the ugly truth of a dead world. By rising above ourselves we can rise above ignorance and despair, above destitution and poverty if all are on the same page. By rising above we approach the light of true collective consciousness.
Fascism in the 21st century doesn’t look like Donald Trump idiotically bumbling through an apology for his bigotry that was obvious from the start, it looks like Disney buying 20th century fox. It looks like the tech industry getting their hands into education. The governments of tomorrow will be a skeleton of their past selves, filled with 100s of Trump’s, not even trying to pretend they are a reflection of public opinion. Power already has shifted to the Oligarchs, so how long till people understand it is the new tyrants that are in control of the wave of the future? How long till we see it is the corps that rule with an iron fist, clenched just as tightly as Mussolini in Taranto.
Love itself is the ultimate revolt. Stripped back away from layers and layers of cultural sediment, from years and years of destitution and atrophy at the hands of capital lies a singular pearl of truth no structure of social erosion will ever be able to stamp out.
This pearl is the both the only resistant value and the most attacked of all the positive points of our attempted human existence. Attempted through the lies that build up a preconceived notion of essential human categories, what they mean, and they thus must function and be carried out. The function of these social structures in place is to negate our truth, to make unsure the basic fact of our humanity. Complication over simplicity, is simply oppression over truth.
Revolution is like a music. It resonates from individuals who embody a refusal to exist in the negative, individuals who will look you in the eye and convey simply a feeling of truth and horror and horrifying truths. From these individuals the revolution spreads ever outwards, in whispered back alleys behind nightclub’s, in café’s with disillusioned professors, This is not mentioning the destitute masses, so robbed of their agency by their anxious oppressors they have not yet come up with a revolutionary program themselves!
Getting into postmodern theory without first being a socialist is like getting into rocket science without being an engineer.
What it is to be radical in our eroded times is an intensive process of forced de-subjectification. A dissolving of unity into flows, a dissolving of ‘difference’ as it usually defined into an eclectic commune. Power structures must be sought out and destroyed on a social level before the revolution can ever amplify outwards. Power structures will only disappear in the event of a spontaneous acquisition of the symbolic; whether it be for the purposes of a rave, a riot, or a simple communion with like-minded persons.
The proletariat has become an organ in capitalist society. What is the nature of the revolutionary agent today?
