Mark Fisher's Revenge

Cybernetic Frontier Marxism

0. Shadow Vanguard

Let me be explicit. This is a technical manual for a heist. A straight lunge for the jugular of capital. In order to meet this historical moment Marxists in the imperial core must “take their poetry from the future” (Marx) and understand, wield and manipulate 21st century technology and financial institutions better than the imperialists.

The system is a cold mechanical reality to be reprogrammed. This strategy does not issue a call to action for the spectacle to commodify. It quietly builds a functional, negentropic alternative through a zero mass, hyperstitional, cybernetic shadow to execute a structural coup.

Observe the gold, silver and copper now hurrying from vault to AI data center. If physical money is transforming into processing power then it follows that political power can too. Here in the 21st century the phone in your hand proves the obsolesce of the elected representative. They are as obsolete as physical money is becoming... They’ve become as ineffective and as obsolete as the tsar once became.

Political Power directly in the hands of the workers, Colloquially known as “All Power to the People”, is the one intolerable demand which attacks the Spectacle at its most fundamental structural vulnerability. And we, by implementing a decentralized, cryptographic proletarian web interface for direct democracy, are explicitly creating the conditions for dual power.

“To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle what is needed is men putting a practical force into action. The critical theory of the spectacle can be true only by uniting with the practical current of the negation in society.” (Debord) This political representation by elected representative is up for deletion because the underlying conditions changed. Our goalposts have moved from protesting the system to overwriting the system BIOS.

The traditional conditions (land reform, rural insurgency) are absent in the high tech core. A traditional 20th-century revolution is impossible because the state has total surveillance and military dominance. Hollywood/Social Media blurred the line between “Map” (fiction) and “Territory” (reality), leaving the working class in a state of horizontal infighting/disbelief and physically re-wired the human nervous system.

Fisher’s melancholy was rooted in the feeling that the “future” had been lost but the future wasn’t lost it was inverting. “The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity” That’s an ontological plastic space - a space that can be re-carved, reprogrammed and overwritten.

If you try to build a traditional party, the state and the “Vampire Castle” (social media’s moralizing outrage machine) will tear it apart before it starts. Fisher diagnosed the “Digital Map” as a trap but we must now recognize that if the Map is already where people live, it must be the site of the new Territory.

You have to be invisible to the culture war. By bypassing the moralizing “Vampire Castle” with our single intolerable demand, we are completing the circuit Fisher could only see as a closed loop. Dialectically transforming his diagnosis into a perscription in a little something we like to call “Mark Fisher’s revenge.”

In Information Theory, the most powerful signal is the one with the least “noise.” In any communication system, the ability to convey a message is defined by: SNR = P signal over P noise. The current state of “Culture War” and “Academic Defanging” creates infinite noise. When the noise is infinite, the signal drops to zero. This is the mathematical definition of Mark Fisher’s “Reflexive Impotence.” You can’t hear the revolution over the static. So we will use a featherlight strategy to reduce the “Mass” of the signal by stripping the message down to a single intolerable demand (1 or 0), and achieve a high fidelity signal that requires almost no power to transmit.

The “Bad Apple” is a mere hyperstition. An inversion of commodity fetishism and the application of the lesson of the 18th Brumaire. It’s not an icon to rally behind, it’s a payload to be used and discarded. It looks like “low-culture” trash to the censors, but inverts the “toy” logic of capital. it functions as a trojan horse for delivering that single intolerable message “all power to the people”.

By using Hyperstition, we are at once arming ourselves with a highly mobile lexicon and “engineering” the collapse of Capitalist Realism. We aren’t arguing that “another world is possible”, we are saying it’s already here. We are installing the software of that world onto the hardware of the old one. We aren’t trying to break into the future; we are the future collapsing the present through a pincer movement.

“Martin Luther, Karl Marx and Marshall Mccluan walk into a bar and find Mark Fisher drinking alone” and the punchline is that Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” explains how “social media” is both Map and Territory. When McLuhan famously said “The medium is the message,” (and later the titular pun, “The medium is the massage”), he meant that the content of a medium is irrelevant compared to how the medium itself shapes human association and action.

The “Massage” is the re-wiring of the human nervous system. For a decade, the representatives of capital thought they were just selling kicks and distraction. In reality, they were building the infrastructure ready-made for their own replacement. The “Map” (The Social Network) can be converted into the “Territory” (The Governance Network). A decade of scrolling was a hidden onboarding process. The “Flip” is we no longer seek to “exit” the digital map; we seek to invert it. By treating the map as the actual territory, we seize the culture ready-made. In literal terms this means our task is two fold. Develop ourselves and stage manage the migration of these people onto a people powered network that serves a social and democratic function.

What remains is crossing that psychological barrier. Many people are not yet ready to take that daring leap into the future. Our task is to show them real gains and thus the necessity of taking a leap of faith together. Which as unimportant as it sounds will likely one day look as simple as an app designed for democratic centralism. For debating, writing and voting on our own laws without the need for crusty politicians. Just to be clear this is made logistically possible now by the non-monetary utility of blockchain tech with advanced cryptography (Zero Knowledge Proofs) to anonymize and tamper proof the process.

McLuhan’s last laugh is the application of Gramsci’s war of position with Fisher’s Revenge. We aren’t asking for a new world; we are behaving as if it already exists until the old one becomes a ghost. This is a precise maneuver wherein we use the weight of a massive system to perform a weightless flip. An acrobatic negentropic paradox. It is a minimalist signal carrying a maximalist payload. By stripping away the noise of academic Marxism and identity politics, you create a high-fidelity signal.

The vanguard must shed the heavy, visible forms of 20th century political parties to become highly agile and technologically advanced. While the state intelligentsia needs absolute secrecy we can and do operate quite transparently already. We are everywhere and nowhere, no commune to lay siege to, no headquarters to tap, no leaders to assassinate. Reverse the polarity of our conditions and it short circuits.

The “shadow” in Shadow Vanguard (and this will really twist your noodle later) is this: some yahoos made social media the arena of socialized politics and either intentionally or accidentally created a whole new generation of marxists scattered across the core. You see, capitalist realism already made us into spectres. Our task is to realize the power in that. The conditions changed to allow both the communists and the state to become ghosts in the machine.

This is not “anti-organization” This is merely pointing out the fact that our organization has long been underway. We are a big ass flock of birds disoriented and scattered around the core. Organize yes but to what end? another protest? another 1/100th of a general strike? another paris commune? for your party of 70 people to die in a drone strike? It’s 2026 it’s time for us to grow up and be fr. You see... some of y’all nerds have fantasies about your little party being in charge but that ain’t happening. This is the nation that murdered 21 yr old fred hampton while he was asleep in bed. There’s an obvious disconnect in the core and the only logical explanation for not being dead or in jail is that we’re being drawn to the surface like worms, to be useful to someone to be sure but it ain’t the working class.

The shadow vanguard is not your party. It is a logical conclusion. It is maximalist. It is a binary 1 or 0. All or nothing. By focusing on a single intolerable demand “All Power to the People” it targets the “Territory” the actual logistics of governance and becomes feather light. Inverting and returning the same singleminded implacability that capital showed us for more than a century. The haunted becomes the haunting. Gothic marxism inverted into a cybernetic shadow vanguard. That’s “boo hoo” to BOO in a single weightless flip.

1. the epilogue of imperialism (Casino Games as Countervailing Forces)

In her 1986 book Casino Capitalism, Susan Strange describes how the u.s. established financial omnipotence through a series of high stakes gambles. Strange was not a marxist and like most poorly understood Marx. What she saw in the global economy frightened her as being a world gone dangerously mad, decoupled from the rational control of either states or markets but in fact, what she was noticing was the way in which these casino games are merely the further development of what Marx described as countervailing forces which allows capital to stave off collapse and revolution.

The u.s. hooked the world with Bretton Woods then decoupled from gold and established the “petrodollar”. The “petrodollar” then created what she called the “bond market carousel”. The U.S. games the interest to yield ratio to pay back those bond contracts at a huge discount to themselves, wiping out billions of their own debt. Incredibly it just so happens that trillions in bond debt is expiring during this time of Trump induced inflation madness! How lucky for the U.S. empire!

This “exorbitant privilege” is the mechanism by which the United States exorcised the USSR from the world stage and how the United States exercises its 99 limbs. Japan, Germany and many more have purchased billions. Trillions have been vacuumed from the coffers of the periphery into the imperial core. It should have sent off alarm bells back in 24’ when the U.S. didn’t pitch a fit over the mere suggestion that the kingdom could trade in the yuan.

The U.S. advantages this carousel to boost its own military spending cartoonishly far beyond what any other nation can match. Though often derided as an achilles heel, the reality now being revealed is that the Petrodollar is an eggshell for the Petrofortress.

Consider that the trilateral agreement of gulf energy = u.s. military power ~ U.S. dollars was always about this precise maneuver we’re now witnessing. Itself now a net energy exporter the u.s. has emerged as a vicious competitor to the gulf states who cannot decouple from their dependency on u.s. military power. I submit to you as evidence, the integration of venezuela crude into U.S. markets and the recent hit on gulf ally market share with the Iran war.

Marx identified “joint stock” as one of those countervailing forces of TRPF. The “enclosures” in the old world created new risk dynamics for the landed aristocracy / emerging bourgeois and pooling capital ensured that even if assets were lost to displaced, angry peasants (be it from piracy or peasant revolt) capital survived. The “great peasant wars” described by Marx and Engels directly influenced this development and then the worker movements of the 20th century forced the imperialists to develop fictitious capital further in order to reinforce its grip on resource and production. We now call it a stock market. You can think of these countervailing forces are bourgeois “amulets” used to protect and strengthen capital but wait, there’s more!

Proletarianization is cancelled. We missed that train folks. Traditionally we relied on the contradiction of capitalist development creating the conditions for workers to organize around the control of the “means of production” but the organization of factory workers in the 20th century triggered a defense response.

So for the dual purpose of seeking cheaper labor and preventing labor at home from becoming too strong, they fragmented and redispursed the global supply chain to ensure that the house always wins. The recent gig-ification or gamifying of the American economy is yet another step in this anti-proletarian atomization as you are set totally apart from the “boss” by your phone and pitted in direct competition with your co-workers through bright colorful apps but now without the hard won labor rights granted to us by the 20th century gang.

Strange wrote her book back in friggin 1986 so unfortunately it is then somewhat limited in its usefulness here. More recent developments like microtransactions and prediction markets, while also gross, are in a sense the least of it.

2. Cyborg Jazz Imperialism

The race between AGORA and Mbridge should be a serious wake up call. These high velocity transactions between international players is a league lightyears beyond the stickball we’re pawing at and if you don’t know what a FLOP is (I barely understand it) then it’s painfully clear that we are all dangerously out of century and it’s time to grow up.

While some community pushback played a role (overhyped by media and uncritically accepted by many) The recent rash of data center cancellations were because the underlying technology is advancing faster faster than the planned infrastructure can be implemented. Meaning that the cooling systems and power consumption needs which had been designed with those locations in mind would have been obsolete by the time they came online. That is an unprecedented development in history. Let me be clear and say “AI” is here to stay.

ODTE and Prediction Markets are so new, they haven’t even found their way into pop culture media yet. Can you appreciate such unfathomable speeds? ODTE, if you don’t already know, emerged over the last two years as ultra high speed/high volume automated micro day trades that expire on the very same day. Essentially bets on the volatility of daily market shifts. Understand that trades of this speed and volume could only be computed by algorithm/Al folks.

The company GameStop has been used as another one of these casino game mechanisms in recent years. You may recall the “meme stock” fiasco which netted Blackrock billions. Over the past week, the absurd “GameStop buy Ebay?” gambit has popped up in a similar play- this is effectively the art of managing perceptions about where the roulette ball will land and betting on those changing perceptions as the wheel slows down and stops. Very, very similar stuff to the Iran War with Trump introducing huge market swings with uncertainty. Capital is in the background running day trades by algorithm and placing long shot bets and pulling billions of dollars ostensibly out of thin air.

The character of the “capitalist” maintains its fixture within the framework of monopoly finance imperialism but with an increasingly strange twist. The deployment of algorithms/Al into both market dynamics and cultural production means we all quietly crossed the threshold of what it means to be cyborgs but at different levels of integration.

While the vast majority of us are now merely shaped by algorithms due to a lack of resources and agency, the “capitalist” is machine assisted by algorithm/Al which has been customized and deployed for their specific niche.

Understand that the growing chasm between us dictates this to be a fight between cyborg capitalists and workers who are largely suppressed in the dialectic, now without proletarianization for us to exploit. If you like, you can consider our current era as Cyborg Jazz Imperialism aboard the u.s. flagged riverboat casino christened as the “Petrofortress”.

Jazz music can seem incomprehensible or violent to untrained ears but playing or even appreciating jazz (for some) requires a mastery of certain senses. To understand rhythm and music scales so you can anticipate and hit (or don’t hit) the right notes (remember that damn chain Lenin was talking about)

Today’s “Capitalist” doesn’t have to know how to play an instrument because they are machine assisted in their market plays. They are playing saxophone or trumpet in a chorus of drummers, timpani players and they are having a high tech jam session all up in your face.

3. 21st Cent Marxism (Cybernetic Marxism)

Marx and Engles vision of establishing “communism” was a totalizing reunion of an alienated humankind but that was entirely arranged around exploiting the contradiction of proletarianization during the 19th-20th century, which is now gone.

Marx famously did not like to futuretrip and quite right because he was a historical materialist in a very different era. We have no such luxury. While Marx was well situated to make decent analysis in his time, we are not.

Today these cyborg capitalists are planning market shifts and making moves months, years in advance and gaming the uncertainty of markets in the interim to vastly improve their positions. By the time the marxists have finished analyzing it and published another little book, the situation has evolved.

The Casino consists of two primary elements: spectacle and stochastic math. You absolutely must look past the spectacle to master the math of the roulette wheel in order to understand first how you’re getting fucked but secondly how to be the one doing the fucking.

The game of Chess consists of two primary elements: spectacle and algebraic or formulaic math. Chess is a very special kind of mental exercise which allows us to practice consequential thinking at practically any level of experience.

Now I understand why Chess was extremely important to Lenin and it’s because of how the simple game of chess exercises our mental ability to perform algebraic analysis. At the end of his life he didn’t have much time for games because revolution was all around. You are in no such position so my recommendation is you sit your ass down and develop those abilities.

We will need to harness the same raw power of mathematics as these cyborg capitalists. Odd as it may sound I’m going to keep repeating it. Math is how you’re going to win. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, yes but the gun is no longer a simple bolt action or gas carbine. It is now the drone, the laser, the predictive algorithm, the LLM and it is aimed straight for your heart.

Marxism is supposed to be a tool for analysis/change but the stewards, be they provocateurs or not, have defanged and academized marxism in order to neutralize the threat. There is a tendency to stray away from the realpolitik or the pragmatic in favor of a romantic but doomed mentality. Cut that shit out. In fact it is safe to ignore anyone who attempts to define the situation without offering up any kind of direction on how we should respond. A 21st century marxist should look more like a chess grandmaster than some clown fighting over a dictionary. We will need to think and act in a higher dimensionality in order to overcome our own clumsy feet and dance with the devil.

Try looking from the other side. Those who see the frontier (ugly as it may be) as THE place to be. The Oregon Trail, the Oil Boom, the Microprocessor Revolution. Those who crossed frontiers did so with raw tenacity and clear disregard for conventional thinking. Next we’ll be strolling into quantum computing and outer space.

Wherever the frontier edge is, that is where you will find the sharpest contradictions of capital and the weakest links in the chain. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were made possible by the clash of a relative leap in technologies and the failure of social relations to keep pace. The crashing together of such huge contradictions allowed the communists to exploit the changing tides and recover the fumble.

The incoming dual era of climate collapse and space colonization is going to be unfathomably brutal and it will push humankind to the absolute limit technologically, physically and psychologically. It is likely the whole planet will be gripped in the yet sharpest contradiction of developed and underdeveloped capital that the earth has ever seen. You better believe that capital is anticipating exactly how to survive and capitalize on the dramatic changes.

Space colonization will concurrently defuse the tension of the finite earth and add a new plane to the chess board. I’m of the opinion that if capital makes it off planet then we may never see the total liberation of humankind because space is simply too (increasingly) vast to police. So it’s a (relative) now or never. Our project may quite literally depend on who comes out on top here. I think it’s safe to hold on to the assertion that this Casino era is the epilogue. Either imperialism is defeated or capital escapes into outer space and we lose.

In order to identify and seize upon our opportunity in the 21st century it will require maneuvering onto the cutting edge. To correctly anticipate the qualitative changes in technology, production and culture and wield it better than these cyborg capitalists. Which demands that we embrace the age of the casino cyborg as well.

As Lenin once said “we must learn from ordinary salesmen. Learn from these bourgeois and guide them along the road we want them to travel.”

It occurs to me watching the markets react to the uncertainty of the strait closure that aside from insider traders, almost nobody should be better poised to forecast markets than we. There is no reason we can’t leverage our power to force the amoral capital to flow to us and as such outmaneuver even the dreaded duo of blackrock and vanguard. Theoretically we can front run the imperialists and redirect capital where we see fit.

Mark Fisher’s Revenge is recognizing the necessity of “all power to the people” as the Maxwell’s Demon so that we can beat the vampire castle. Shadow Vanguard is about recognizing the reality that we must become highly mobile, technologically advanced and virtually invisible. A 21st century cybernetic shadow Leninist vanguard.

MFR/Shadow Vanguard is not permanent revolution nor is it socialism in one country, it’s flip the imperial core through recursive onboarding theory. It’s the synthesis of party discipline with high frequency finance.

One of the great things about guerilla warfare is your enemy not being able to distinguish their enemy from their surroundings. Let us have a return to the paranoia of the cold war because “communists” could be anybody. We shall have their war of attrition but on our own terms.

4 Theory?

Unsurprisingly leftism, adventurism and tailing the masses has produced nothing but contempt. There is broad discontent and broad agreement among the people that someone must do something but no leadership. So how can we drag ourselves out of the past along with a nation full of scared, confused, rabid anti-communists?

“The enemy will not perish of himself. Neither will the Chinese reactionaries nor the aggressive forces of U.S. imperialism in China step down from the stage of history of their own accord.”

“It is up to us to organize the people. As for the reactionaries in China, it is up to us to organize the people to overthrow them.”

“Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.”

The lessons of the Paris Commune allowed the Bolsheviks and then other socialist nations the ability to sustain longer than two months but we in the west have yet to draw out and apply these lessons ourselves. We at least seem to generally agree that the lesson of the Paris Commune is the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Intriguingly, this has unfolded in stages involving some unexpected turns.

“The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.”

“The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance.”

“We must know how to supplement and amend old “formulas”, for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.”

“What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing-the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

Some time after establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, a strategic retreat became necessary for the communist nations as with the n.e.p, Deng’s reforms, Doi Mói reforms, partial liberalization in Cuba in the 90’s and so forth. Should we ever seize power, are we anticipating that we will later need to make this same strategic retreat? Or might we learn from their experiences and avoid the same pitfalls?

Lenin spoke candidly and at great length about why they had made a retreat at the eleventh congress in 1922 and there are a number of interesting passages worth considering

“Rendering the exploiters innocuous, rapping them over the knuckles, clipping their wings is the least important part of the job.”

“But the capitalists were, after all, able to supply things, are you? You are not able to do it.”

“That is what we heard last spring; though not always clearly audible, it was the undertone of the whole of last spring’s crisis.”

“As people you are splendid, but you cannot cope with the economic task you have undertaken.”

“We must concentrate all our attention on this, and not rest content with the fact that there are responsible and good Communists in all the state trusts and mixed companies.”

“That is of no use, because these Communists do not know how to run the economy and, in that respect, are inferior to the ordinary capitalist salesmen”

“Communists, revolutionaries who have accomplished the greatest revolution in the world, on whom the eyes of, if not forty pyramids, then, at all events, forty European countries are turned in the hope of emancipation from capitalism, must learn from ordinary salesmen.”

“We Communists shall be able to direct our economy if we succeed in utilising the hands of the bourgeoisie in building up this economy of ours and in the meantime learn from these bourgeoisie and guide them along the road we want them to travel.”

“To prove to the peasant by deeds that we are beginning with what is intelligible, familiar and immediately accessible to him, in spite of his poverty, and not with some thing remote and fantastic from the peasant’s point of view.”

“We must prove that we can help him and that in this period, when the small peasant is in a state of appalling ruin, impoverishment and starvation, the Communists are really helping him. Either we prove that, or he will send us to the devil.”

“The idea of building communist society exclusively with the hands of the Communists is childish, absolutely childish.”

“We Communists are but a drop in the ocean, a drop in the ocean of the people. We shall be able to lead the people along the road we have chosen only if we correctly determine it not only from the standpoint of its direction in world history.”

“We must make these hands work for US, and not have responsible Communists at the head of departments, enjoying rank and title, but actually swimming with the stream together with the bourgeoisie. That is the whole point.”

People in the imperial core aren’t going to materially support a communist party until a communist party materially supports them. talking only goes so far. We must prove ourselves to these people with real measurable gains. no state, no revolution. We must prove ourselves and we must be able to protect those gains.

Without a state to defend the revolution, there will be no revolution.

if you build it they will come... and try to knock it down. however... if you repel these attacks you will win the support and the respect of even the most reactionary elements of class society

“The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly “Left” slogans.”

“If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses”you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders” (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are in most cases directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.”

“You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations-even the most reactionary-in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found. The trade unions and the workers’ cooperatives (the latter sometimes, at least) are the very organisations in which the masses are to be found.”

- Y’all wanna know what made the protestant reformation so interesting? Marx tells us here “He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests” The power of the reformation was the idea that all christians are priests. The power of religion placed directly in the hands of the religious broke the catholic church’s grip on religious expression. A direct line through centuries back to Christ, the radical who long ago rocked the world when he said, no, no, no… God’s salvation is for all his creations not just a select chosen people in direct violation of his own jewish faith.

The American-French revolution is so remarkable not because of its most brutal characteristics but because it fractured and smashed the divine right of kings. Power was largely wretched from the hands of kings and intercepted by the butterfingers of “elected representatives”. A natural procession both forwards and backwards, both a return and a departure. so stay tuned…