New World Order’? ‘Globalisation’? A Marxian-Heideggerian Analysis - Wilberg on Wednesday

‘New World Order’? ‘Globalisation? What, in essence, are they? A conspiracy on the part of global elites? The final stage of capitalism? The work of extraterrestrial beings or dark hidden powers lurking in other dimensions - the David Icke phantasy? According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, they are none of these things - and nor are they reducible merely to any type of human conspiracy to create a World Government, army, currency etc. Instead their essence is what Heidegger understood as the hidden essence of technology itself - namely a purely calculative and exploitative mode of thinking of the sort which idealises the total orderability, exploitability, surveillability, controllability, plannability, exploitability, manipulability, commodifiability, and monetisation of all things - including human beings and the earth itself.

In Heidegger’s terms, all things are, through this purely “calculative thinking”, reduced to what he called “standing reserve” (Bestand). Forests become a ‘standing reserve’ for the supply of timber, the sea becomes a standing reserve for the fishing industry, the soil a standing reserve for mechanised agriculture, the earth becomes a standing reserve for the forced extraction of minerals and energy sources, rivers become a standing reserve for hydroelectric power production etc. But in this process man too becomes ‘standing reserve’. Thus the accumulation of technology weapons is not merely a standing reserve for engagement in war - for governments, leaders and armies become, in turn, a standing reserve for the manufacturing of wars which realise the power of such weaponry. Similarly, oil and gas engineers become a standing reserve for the employment of surveying, prospecting, and resource extraction technologies such as drilling and fracking. IT workers become a standing reserve for the creation of ever more advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence. Workers in general become a standing reserve for the production, distribution and sale of technological devices to a standing reserve of consumers. Even capitalist corporations serve as a standing reserve of ‘human resources’ - and this not just for the exploitation of workers but for the unrestricted utilisation of the very technologies they employ. The transformation of human beings into ‘standing reserve’ can be nothing than what Marx saw as the inevitable creation of a globally homogeneous proletarian slave class - but one in which the human being is also reduced to a biological machine - a mere tool-making and tool-using tool of the very technological tools he uses - and in this way their slave rather than their master. In this context, the seemingly radically divergent modes of thinking of Marx and Heidegger actually converge - for Marx also recognised the decisive role of new types of tools and technological developments in generating different modes and relations production - including the capitalist mode of production itself - and all the new forms of social and economic relations that arose with it. Few Marxists, however, recognise that Marx did not associate what he called the ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’ of labour only with the capitalist mode of production, but with the way in which, through the very activity of labour, the product of human labour comes to appear as an object external and alien to the labourer, i.e. as an ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ object or power.

“If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself. Who is this being? The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods… Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object … an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man … The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relationship to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.”

What Marx calls here an “external relation of the worker to nature” corresponds also with the essence of technology as Heidegger saw it - a relation to nature in which it is “challenged forth”, i.e. forced to reveal itself only in the terms that science itself constructs - and forced also to make itself available as “standing reserve” for technological exploitation. In contrast, neither windmills, wave power nor the natural seeding of the soil force nature to reveal herself and become manipulable in the way that leads to the production of GM seeds and foods, fracking, the plundering of the earth and the products of nuclear sciences and technologies.

From both a Heideggerian and a Marxist frame of reference, the distinction between capitalism on the one hand, and the command economy of Soviet-style ‘socialism’ collapses. This is because, irrespective of property relations, both relate to nature and humanity in a purely “external way” - reducing them to a standing reserve for calculative thinking and technological exploitation. Capitalist corporations of course, have always themselves been command economies. The only difference between capitalism and Soviet command economies lay (1) in the nature of the elites whose function it is to act as a dominant and coercive “master of labour”(Marx), and (2) the nature of the cultures and ideologies who maintain the illusion that technology is something that man has complete mastery over. The great paradox of the USSR was that an expanded and enslaved ‘proletariat’ became a mere standing reserve of forced labour to enable a rapid technological industrialisation of the sort thought necessary to prevent the proletariat from being enslaved by capitalism! The official religion of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was also and essentially a soulless, radically atheistic worship of science and industrial technology applied on a giganticist scale. But in almost all respects, conditions for workers and farmers in the ‘socialist’ USSR paralleled those that prevailed during the miserable centuries of capitalist industrialisation in England - not least through the disastrous fall in agricultural production through forced ‘collectivisation’ of the traditional peasant communes that were so much praised by Marx. And in contrast, under Putin, Russia has become the world’s leading exporter of wheat.

Heidegger saw the essential ‘religion’ of both atheistic Soviet-socialism and ‘Christian’ Western-capitalism as science. He saw also that this seemingly secular religion was essentially Judaic - its principle being that man is destined to command nature as God commands man - and as the human ego is commanded in Judaism to rule strictly over the human body and soul. As for today’s ‘liberal’ West, it is now ‘identity politics’ and its worship of superficial cultural ‘diversity’ that is the new religious ‘opium of the masses’ - one which tolerates no politically incorrect ‘enemies of the people’. Paradoxically however, this ideal of identity diversity both serves and conceals (as it did in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union) a complete ideological homogenisation of a slave proletariat. The difference is only that in the West today, individuals can replace an authentic sense of self with any self-identification of their choice - identity as such having been reduced to a cultural or political ‘brand’ and become an exchangeable commodity - whilst the real, concrete individual remains a slave to their own forced capitalist labour. Identity politics therefore does nothing to prevent the individual being reduced to a mere indivisible quantitative unit or ‘atom’ of capitalist production and consumption. It reduces individuals to a homogenous mass bound only by the sacrifice of their individuality to diverse and divisive forms of narrow group or collective identification.

“Liberal society, which puts itself in opposition to the collective societies of socialism and fascism, has itself become a collective, a standardised and stereotypical one. The more an individual aspires to be unique with the liberal paradigm, the more he becomes similar to everyone else.” Dugin

New technologies exercise the same powerful, driving role in this process as they did in the process of industrialisation. To take but one example, social media such as Twitter have become a veritable hive of discrete identity-political echo chambers in which each individual can be fed with bytes of highly selective and filtered ‘information’, all of which - far from genuinely educating people or expanding the horizons of their thought and consciousness - merely echo, confirm and amplify a set of narrowed down opinions and political identities. People think they are expressing themselves freely or even radically - when in fact their thinking is actually and increasingly imprisoned in such technologically created online echo chambers. Symbols, usernames and online ‘profiles’ become empty ‘avatars’ of individuality and a vehicle for purely ‘virtual’ association with others. At the same time, a new type of mass illiteracy has become the norm. For after all, who needs to read books or even be able to write more than a line or two of text when, even if they had the time to do so, all they need to do is tweet some shallow opinionating or retweet a piece of totally decontextualised journalistic ‘news’. But then ‘globalisation’ does not in any way require a broadly or deeply educated proletariat - only a standing reserve of people who are at best ‘trained’ in narrow technological ‘skills’ all of which need only purely calculative forms of thinking - even in medicine and science. The only real job of a proletariat is thus to remain mindless and unthinking wage slaves - whether by performing unskilled or skilled labour, sitting in front of a computer all day in corporate offices, acting as man-machines giving manual assistance to robotic production lines - or just serving and servicing the continued output of coffee machines in Starbucks.