Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[Keith Sanborn via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Little to disagree with in either analysis, the painful part for me comes in your final comment, as if a throwaway:

Sure I want Ukraine to escape domination by Russia.
But not in order to reinforce a social order that condemns us all to
repression, war and climate change.

The distance between theory and practice is existential. I think before pursuing a radical remaking of Ukraine, its existence needs to be secured, nation state and part of a neo-liberal order though it may be. This is not a simple reenforcement of the nation state but an extreme example on a mass scale of an attempt to exterminate a people and a culture, a “lighter” form of the genocide in Gaza. I will accept that contradiction if it means fighting fascism at an extreme.  There is a clear difference between the social order of Russia and Ukraine. The idea that Ukraine in any way posed a threat to Russia is pure bullshit. Ukrainian resilience is the proof of the difference. 

> On Aug 3, 2026, at 5:45 PM, Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> I don't know about all of you, but from time to time the US situation
> overcomes me, plunges me into painful depression. Never more intensely than
> in this moment, as crimes against humanity unfold against the background of
> unaddressed ecological breakdown. But you have to engage, you have to work
> with the tools you've got and find new ones.
> 
> I have two convictions about politics. The first is that the ultimate
> political dispute will always be over control of the state. The second is
> that the current figure of the corporate state is not only totally corrupt,
> but worse, it has taken over civil society in an attempt to literally
> program people's thinking and behavior. I think one should withdraw from
> this debased field of really-existing civil society (which is now being
> reduced to AI slop), abandon any shred of belief in the political
> mainstream, and create-sustain-strengthen whatever form of intimate
> conversation is possible. First, to recover the capacity to think and feel,
> and then ideally, use those capacities to act on the threats and potentials
> of the time. People are doing this in many different ways, trying to find
> out who they are or could become when the future is curtailed, yet we live
> on.
> 
> To act is to confront the capitalist state, which never ceases to act on
> you. Analyzing the current figure of authoritarianism and its embrace by
> large numbers is essential. Earlier debates about "whether this is fascism
> or not" may have missed the mark, first by assuming that fascism is
> something known and recognizable from history, second by assuming it is
> essentially different from (neo)liberalism, and third, by underestimating
> the psycho-social damage that the latter has done to everyone, enabling
> social decay. Anton Jaeger's book Hyperpolitics goes some way toward
> characterizing today's atomization and dissociation, but only from an
> objective viewpoint, chiefly with statistics. But that places you at a kind
> of neutral, abstract remove, and it culminates in self-objectification
> (which statistic am I?). Jaeger spurred me to read Alberto Toscano's more
> significant philosophical book, Late Fascism (2024).
> 
> Writing in advance of Trump II, Toscano does something very compelling.
> First, he rehearses the most probing analyses of historical fascisms,
> particularly in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille and Theodor
> Adorno, with a constant movement between their ideas and context and what
> one can see in the present. This is stunning, because if you're like me,
> you read all those authors, but long before these specific aspects of their
> writing became so applicable to the present. Adorno's "Freudian Theory and
> the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," supplemented by Jairus Banaji’s
> analyses of serialized alienation and sectarian violence in India, is the
> most intense read, because it gets at how a hollow simulacrum of belief can
> be performed by its nihilistic adherents, as if in a reality show I'm
> tempted to add, but to the point of bloodshed. Toscano actually minimizes
> the interpretations of Bloch and Bataille, but to me they illuminate
> particular strands - like the Christian longing for some utopian community
> outside the degraded forms of the present, and especially Bataille's idea
> that fascism integrates and channels the unruly violence of people who
> could never be integrated to the smooth, rationalized, law-governed world
> of liberal industrialism.
> 
> After that tour de force, Toscano says there may be a better way to
> understand contemporary authoritarianism - by looking at the concrete and
> steel of the US carceral state, and by reading the analysis that Black
> radicals like George Jackson and Angela Davis produced inside those prisons
> in the 1970s. This is where he gets the notion of a hyperbolic preventative
> fascism that is triggered by the actions of a weak and undeveloped left -
> pretty much exactly what we are looking at in the US, not only because of
> the backlash against the scattered and ineffectual "decade of protest" in
> the 2010s, but also the perceived threat to capital represented by
> half-assed climate-change mitigation strategies or hypocritical DEI
> initiatives in the corporate workplace. From behind bars in the 70s, Black
> prisoners theorized the "anti-state state" that exalts the freedom of
> capital while throwing huge organizational resources into war, policing and
> carceral repression. Toscano delves into Du Bois and other Black radicals -
> George Padmore, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, Ruth Gilmore - to
> substantiate Jackson and Davis. As Toscano writes: "The lived experience of
> state violence of Black political prisoners and its theorisation grounds a
> theory of US fascism and racial capitalism capable of interrupting narrow
> and clichéd images of fascism in mainstream political thought."
> 
> A third chapter - which is as far I've got - develops the notion of the
> "anti-state state" by looking into the mid-twentieth century relations
> between authoritarianism and liberalism in Italy and Germany. This is not
> only about the well-known convergence between Italian and German
> industrialists and their respective authoritarian political parties -
> reduxed today by a vast swathe of US capital - but more incisively, it
> zeros in on the heavily racialized Nazi ideal of freedom, which builds out
> and rationalizes the contradiction between the individual's total
> submission to a leader and his or her simultaneous self-deputization as a
> violent autonomous agent on the ground. If you've had to confront anything
> like the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters, you're gonna recognize that.
> More surprisingly, Toscano quotes a French historian, Johann Chapoutot, who
> unearths a whole Nazi managerialism based on these ideas of racially
> granted freedom. "In the managerial register that, according to Chapoutot,
> was promoted by the Nazi non-state, ‘German freedom’ was defined by a
> performance principle (Leistungsprinzip). The individual SS officer was
> given maximum initiative and flexibility in executing their mission, while
> the community of the people was defined as a Leistungsgemeinschaft, a
> ‘community of achievement’." This is the dark affiliation between Nazism
> and contemporary corporate managerialism, which continually proclaims its
> absolute distinction from authoritarianism while extinguishing human
> self-awareness in the pursuit of meaningless productivism. Toscano
> comments: "The very possibility of a fascist freedom – and the unsettling
> imperative to reflect on the abiding potentialities of white,
> settler-colonial, propertied, masculinist figurations of freedom – is
> excised by the discourse on ‘totalitarianism’." Now, as the leftwing DSA
> surges in the US and Muslim candidates start entering politics, breaking
> the stranglehold of the Israel lobby and the grotesque verbiage about the
> "defense of the free world," we will see whether the totalitarian boogeyman
> can still disguise whatever we call the new authoritarianism, so profoundly
> illuminated by the critiques of the past, yet so refractory to simple
> categorical analysis.
> 
> Late Fascism is a lot better than anything by Timothy Snyder or especially,
> Anne Appelbaum. Anyone who thinks that the structure of liberal democracy
> has not produced the current authoritarianism has apparently missed the
> career of Elon Musk. Sure I want Ukraine to escape domination by Russia.
> But not in order to reinforce a social order that condemns us all to
> repression, war and climate change.
> 
> OK, 'nuff said. Anyone else who wants to comment on or refute this book, or
> raise some other, better interpretation, you have a reader.
> 
> best, Brian
> 
>> On Sun, Aug 2, 2026 at 5:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> folks,
>> 
>> thanks for this interesting discussion. It's good to see that there is a
>> debate about developing a more differentiated understanding of the
>> current political regimes––one that differentiates between the various
>> countries and spheres of relations (and one that recognises that
>> "fascism" is not necessarily the most appropriate term for everything
>> that is going on).
>> 
>> It was curious that after reading Brian's post this morning, I heard a
>> radio interview with the Russian oppositional politician, Yulia
>> Galjamina, who claims that, in her view, it is important to understand
>> that the current Russian regime is not totalitarian, but authoritarian.
>> 
>> 
>> https://share.deutschlandradio.de/dlf-audiothek-audio-teilen.html?audio_id=dira_F9BFDCAA8CC611F17BDEB883034C2FA0
>> 
>> [orig. Russian with German translation; this particular section starts
>> around min 14:00]
>> 
>> 'Galjamina explained that, like any authoritarian regime, the Russian
>> system is based on two pillars: the depoliticisation and atomisation of
>> citizens. That is why every form of collective action and community ties
>> is needed. “Consequently, simply setting up a book club or organising a
>> neighbourhood festival is already a political act,” added the
>> 53-year-old Muscovite.' (DLF editorial)
>> 
>> She also makes the point that people outside of Russia should be
>> thinking of Russia not as a homogeneous block: she says that it is Putin
>> and his regime who are everybody's enemy, and his party now probably has
>> a mere 16% of support in the population.
>> 
>> ... another take on a different kind of hegemonic situation...
>> 
>> best,
>> -a
>> 
>> 
>>> Am 01.08.26 um 20:54 schrieb Brian Holmes via nettime-l:
>>> Hello all -
>>> 
>>> I too noticed that Guardian article, and because of this discussion I
>> just
>>> read the short book in a single sitting. I can see why it is being
>> devoured
>>> by the young British left, because it recounts generational (or really,
>>> decadal) political experiences that are probably almost impossible to
>>> reconstruct for people in their twenties today. If you lived through all
>>> that, however, it makes for a queasy couple hours...
>>> 
>>> There is no new theory here, unfortunately, in a book whose most
>> important
>>> reference is Putnam's Bowling Alone. It is a sober and detailed
>> examination
>>> of political disaffiliation on both left and right, paralleled by the
>> rise
>>> of purely electoral parties that raise money from the corporate/financial
>>> sector to produce simulacral majorities - so if you never understood
>> that,
>>> read it. It does contain the important observation that the conservative
>>> right, in the US at least, has been able to partially revive some of the
>>> old civic forms. But it was published too recently to offer any insight
>>> into the nascent resocialization, particularly of neighborhood life, that
>>> the left has started carrying out in resistance to ICE. And it has
>> nothing
>>> at all to say about the strategies and organizational forms of
>> oligarchical
>>> capital, especially but not only coming out of Silicon Valley, which are
>>> the most astonishing and threatening developments of the last decade.
>>> 
>>> If you want to go further with the understanding of contemporary fascism,
>>> Alberto Toscano has a better theory, which does basically confirm
>> Jaeger's
>>> undeveloped notion of Bonapartism (see
>>> https://communispress.com/vectors-of-fascism). Toscano finds a relative
>>> absence, today, of the mass adherence to the productivist and
>>> redistributive policies that characterized Italian fascism as a national
>>> hegemonic project (I mean, one that convinces large numbers of people
>> with
>>> a relatively coherent ideology). Instead he sees the current repressive
>>> violence in the US as directly generated by the state, raising the
>> specter
>>> of "domination without hegemony." Well, that's not even a specter
>> anymore,
>>> it's a plan. What's fortunately not happening is ideological
>> consolidation
>>> and a willingness of half the country to go out and do what, for a while,
>>> it looked like they might. Namely, go out and shoot at the left in the
>>> streets. That would be real adherence to the extremist ideology that is
>>> being overtly promulgated by the state (NSPM-7 etc). It could still
>> happen
>>> after the next elections, but it looks decreasingly likely.
>>> 
>>> Toscano speaks about a preemptive counter-revolution, giving a lot more
>>> emphasis to the threat to capital that was posed by the 2010's "decade of
>>> protest." That's more realistic and more pertinent than Jaeger's
>>> Baudrilardean portrait of febrile political excitement undergirded by
>>> nothing at all. It's obvious now that there are three solid legs to
>>> Trumpian Bonapartism: old school extractivist militarism, the bid for AI
>>> dominance and the cryptocurrency exit from national economies. All these
>>> things have cost Trump the wobbly fourth leg of populist conservatism,
>>> which is kinda reassuring - except that the whole point of Bonapartism is
>>> to use the populist media and the electoral process as a stepping-stone
>> to
>>> the authoritarian takeover of the state. That's clearly the plan in the
>> US
>>> now.
>>> 
>>> Jaeger is totally right about the disaffiliation. He's also right that
>>> political parties dependent on oligarchical funds for the "big tent"
>>> simulacra of electoral campaigns are too hypocritical to chart any course
>>> for the future. Yet it's strange that he doesn't look into that future -
>>> really not at all. Democratic societies are presently confronted with
>>> enormous threats: domestic polarization, global war, climate change,
>>> frantic movements of distressed populations, the list goes on. Until
>>> recently, these were conveniently solved by denialism. But in the US
>> today,
>>> war and genocide, murderous militias generated directly by the state and
>>> the staggering corporate attempt to ram AI down our throats as the
>> ultimate
>>> tool of subjective fragmentation and perfected mind control have finally
>>> given very concrete present-day features to the broader historical
>> critique
>>> of racialized class society that marked the 2010s and culminated in the
>>> George Floyd uprising. There is both subjective desire and material need
>> to
>>> overcome the Putnam-Baudrillard quandary of hyperindividual withdrawal
>>> agitated by networked passions. Multiple and expanding crises - from
>>> droughts and wildfires to wars and coming food shortages - offer
>> political
>>> opportunities. The only way forward is to use these crisis situations to
>>> break the paralyzing hypocrisy of pseudo mass parties piloted by
>> oligarchs.
>>> Otherwise it's state of emergency and authoritarianism forever.
>>> 
>>> Jaeger's book is not a bad one. It's kind of a primer in recent political
>>> sociology, bravo for that. But it has no analysis of future crossroads,
>> no
>>> vision and therefore no capacity to help generate the new organizational
>>> forms that we desperately need. In short, it's an explainer. And being so
>>> short itself - well, it's another fascinating easy read. Give it two
>> hours
>>> and see what you think.
>>> 
>>> best, Brian
>> 
> --
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org