Bad As The Apolitical — Or Worse
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
Occupy Wall Street takeovers were basically revolutionary acts crushed by the police state. The Dakota Access Pipeline attacks against lethal fossil fuel infrastructure were revolutionary and also crushed by the police state and deemed terrorist by official ideology and law.
In publishing of imaginative writing, even when the most radical aesthetics or seemingly cutting edge content is taken up by the establishment, novels feel overwhelmingly not merely nonrevolutionary but arevolutionary — disengaged from wholesale direct and explicit conception of revolution against the plutocracy and its state of military-police enforcement.
One must leave the so-called most serious literature, realist or social realist, to find indirect versions of revolution in speculative and fantastical literature — typically metaphorical, abstract, or vague. In society today, in this terminal time — in this seemingly magical internet space age of incredible scientific and technological achievement and massive wealth — the revolutionary can be and must be written in stories that at least approach the realistic and social realist, if humanity has any hope to survive this terminal age of genocide, ecocide, and anthropocide, aka omnicide.
Nothing should be conceived of today as more realistic than the revolutionary, because it’s revolution or death now, revolution in human and social practices in this increasingly terminal time.
Imaginative writing and publishing today is arevolutionary, outside of the fantastical, having little or no relation to explicit revolution — as if the idea of actual revolution is and must be absent from thinkable and existing worldviews.
Meanwhile the conception and instances of realistic revolutionary writing are smeared as subjective, partisan, nonobjective, biased, non-scholarly, unpopular, unserious, unrealistic, terroristic, or wishful and irresponsible thinking and acts. Arevolutionary writing and society is the goal of the police state plutocracy and its ideologues and systems that fight the emergence of a human rights based democracy and culture. It’s a lobotomized and brainwashed, repulsive and vicious state of being. And oh so normal(ized).
Several centuries ago, the word “antirevolutionary” was first created and used to describe opposition to the new Enlightenment political thinking and intellectual ecology — the new ideas on natural rights, a social contract, and government by consent, and a growing cross-borders “Republic of Letters” connecting an ever-expanding network of thinkers, creators, and activists.
Here’s a brief historical timeline of the apparent first use of terms mainly contra revolution and revolutionary:
1694 — revolutionary — supporter of change from the tyranny of monarchy to the rule of parliamentarian constitutional democracy, via the English Revolution of 1688 (the date is from OED)
1716 — antirevolutionary — actively against revolution — opposing revolutionary Enlightenment ideas (the date is from multiple sources)
1791 — counterrevolutionary — organized resistance to revolution — opposing the Enlightenment-based French Revolution (the approximate date is from multiple sources)
1867 — nonrevolutionary — political but not radically so — apparently describing federal “Reconstruction” efforts on behalf of African-Americans in the South post American Civil War (the date is from multiple sources)
1919 — apolitical — disengaged from all politics, often falsely so — coincides with the rise of the capitalist public relations industry, post World War One — the professionalization of societal deceit (1919 is from Merriam-Webster, while OED has 1952 as the earliest use)
1974 — unrevolutionary — bland, unradical — apparently describing a diminishment of social change goals in the aftermath of the American Civil Rights and antiwar movements (1974 is from Merriam-Webster; OED has 1830 as the earliest use)
2025 (today) — arevolutionary — complete disengagement from revolutionary frameworks — coincides with last-stage triumph of the plutocracy in a terminal age, negating the rise of needed revolutionary ideologies and actions
Today, an arevolutionary culture is even worse than an apolitical culture in an age when genocide, ecocide, and omnicide are all-consumptive and entirely terminal, lacking revolution. The reigning plutocracy and its ever-spawning and ravaging military-police state must be overthrown. Out with the kings and the kings’ guards and up with the People and the popular forces of resistance and revolution, in a rolling wave of progressive formation.
We live in a time, a day and age, and a society that is conquered and brainwashed by the plutocracy and the police state but that is also in active resistance and new formation, with an incipient culture that is Most Revolutionary, in desperate struggle against the predatory, pillaging, profiteering police and plutocrat death cult of the arevolutionary.
Meanwhile, it’s not migrants and the “deep state” destroying health care and everything else, as the plutocrat front led by the Republicans have caused half the country to believe. It’s the plutocracy and the police state that is killing and impoverishing people, democracy, and the world. The People are owned, ruled, and gutted by the financial elite — the plutocracy. A state of affairs enforced by the plutocracy’s bought and sold military police state.
No one can necessarily know exactly who or what the “deep state” is. The plutocrat front likes it that way, because out-of-control shadow actors are actually convenient fall-guys and mucky-mucks who do the bidding of the plutocracy and the official militants of the police state.
Ostensibly gutting the “deep state” is an excuse for Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck to actually destroy public jobs, services, and protections, including often good and badly needed federal jobs, to further enrich the plutocracy — themselves and other militant pillaging profiteers — not to benefit the People.
The plutocracy openly rules now with all the financial and military weapons of its high finance police state. The plutocracy continues to shadow-rule as well, through lawless “deep state” mechanisms and otherwise, but off-the-books, out of control state-related criminality has always been adjacent and minor compared to the plutocracy’s creation and capture, control and criminalization of the official political system.
Gutting the plutocracy is what is needed, and that’s what so-called right-wing populists like President Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck cannot pretend to do because they are the plutocracy. They are the ones with the grotesque and bloody power and privileges who must be overthrown, by ceaseless progressive populist uprisings and power.
The financial and militant elite and their mucky-mucks scream whenever they are constrained, let alone stopped, in their predatory, profiteering pillaging for the plutocracy. The plutocracy screams the loudest because they can, holding the biggest megaphones. They holler nonstop, even when there is little or nothing to holler about.
Right-wing populists like Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck opposing the Deep State is a ruse used by the forces of right-wing populism. The “deep state” is a recently invented term (1990s, in Turkey) of very limited scope and used now in America to deflect from the real and epic sources of mayhem and global disaster — caused by the plutocracy. In fact, the right wing in America has historically cobbled together deep state type networks specifically to subvert democracy and to terrorize against it — Iran Contra, the invasion of Cuba, “death squads” in Latin America and elsewhere, and probably the assassination of President Kennedy, among many other acts of “extra-legal” criminality. Now the right wing — and the whole plutocrat front — pretends to attack the “deep state,” as ongoing PR and a trick to crush democracy and popular government, to accrue more power and wealth to itself and its vicious military-police state.
It’s the plutocracy that constantly crushes democracy, every chance it gets, by any means necessary. A notion of some shadowy deep state is a distraction from the real villains, and used freely, because who can ever say if a “deep state” is being rooted out or not. There’s no accountability possible for what the right-wing actually intends, which is to continue growing and using shadowy actors and masked thugs to terrorize and control the population, beating it into submission, directing it to their will, to the will of the rich predator class.
Meanwhile, pretending there is an intellectual and liberal elite and shadowy “deep state” as enemy is perfect for the bullshit rhetoric of billionaires like Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck to go wild against the People. When the mask comes off the face of plutocrats who rule, the masks go on the faces of the plutocrat’s most frontline shock troops. Such vile thuggery cannot bear the scrutiny of the smartphone camera — which may indicate that the depraved rule of the plutocrats may be nearing an end of sorts, finally. Time to haul the plutocrats before a tribunal and try them for their crimes, then let them choose between walking free after being stripped of their criminal wealth or being condemned and put away as the deranged plutocrats that they are.
It’s the brazen and often highly visible Military Police State — not the Deep State — that mainly does the bidding of the pillaging and profiteering plutocracy. Sure there are nasty things done in the shadows by hidden malevolent “deep state” bureaucrats and their operatives, as noted, but the vast majority of that sort of thing, and ultimately nearly all of it, is done on behalf of the pillaging and predatory financial elite and their systems of military police state rule.
Progressive populists need to and do focus on the real villains doing most of the damage, so often now in broad daylight, face-to-face, whether masked or not, the vile and brutal attacks of the plutocrats and their shock troop venal monsters as mercenaries. Lots of macho sickos are willing to attack with a gun for a buck in an utterly debased society, and lots of plutocrat sickos are willing to pay them to do so, for the same reason.
The great social commentator Caitlin Johnstone notes that
It has long been obvious to anyone with half a brain that Donald Trump is just another Republican swamp monster playing on public discontent with the status quo to win votes and support, but it is genuinely surprising how completely he has stopped pretending to care about fighting the deep state and sticking up for ordinary Americans as soon as he got back into office. He’s just dropped the populist schtick entirely and is giving the finger to anyone who complains.
The “deep state” notion is used by right-wing “populists” as a scare word and a ruse to pretend to attack a bad guy enemy and to avoid accountability while destroying and blocking democracy and popular government programs that benefit the people. It’s the new anti-government line. The deep state rhetoric is meant to win elections, and Trump knows by law he cannot be re-elected again, so why use it now, but he very much did and continues to do so, especially with Ecrap Muck hacking away at public institutions. Whenever the need arises Con Don Trump will resort to such fakery again. The plutocracy remains counterrevolutionary, let alone arevolutionary.
To the extent that there is a “deep state,” Con Don Trump is part of it — not least in being a former tight buddy with the sex-trafficking plutocrat spy and extremely predatory financier Jeffrey Epstein. Of course Con Don Trump is not going to out himself as part of any such deep state. Best for Con Don to pretend that Epstein killed himself rather than being murdered by the clandestine elements of the actually existing deep state — “a covert alliance of military, intelligence, political, and criminal elements operating outside the bounds of democratic control” as in Turkey in the 1990s — derin devlet — from where the term “deep state” was first coined, then applied for mainly right-wing use in America. Traditionally the libertarian socialist and anarchist left are the ones who most strongly oppose not merely the criminality in the shadows but the legalized criminality of the plutocrats’ military police state.
The plutocrats have created militant rogue nations and terror states, of which America is the preeminent leader, as it has been through much of its imperial existence. Of course the real nature of such states are deeply propagandized and constantly lied about — a “deep state” of brainwashing and imperial control if there ever was one. The American Congress is by-and-large a supremacist institution, true to its bigoted Constitutional history and structure, as is the American Presidency. But revolutionaries can occupy these positions and change all that. Progressive populists like Bernie and AOC and Rashida Tlaib are leading the charge in this nationally. And now Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And Kshama Sawant in Seattle. Among others.
In fact, progressive populists, let alone revolutionaries, threaten to break this cycle of criminal oppression and aggression. Progressive populists are incipient revolutionaries. They may or may not claim to be antirevolutionary or nonrevolutionary, and may or may not be, but the police state plutocracy does not react to them as if they are arevolutionary. Progressive populists are fought but not feared for their proposed reforms. They are feared because their proposed reforms may well lead to thoroughgoing revolutionary change — the revolutionary change that anyone with a brain should be able to see is wholly possible and badly needed, powerfully appealing and imperative.
No American novelist was more arevolutionary than the establishment-vaunted, late Victorian, early modernist author Henry James. He came from an endlessly wealthy family in upstate New York and wrote from the point of view of an arch-plutocrat. The American literary establishment embraced James deeply and weaponized his work against populist lit and populist authors. See Henry James and the Jacobites by the great liberal-then-progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar for a People’s view of the fiction of Henry James.
And see how two of the high priests of the mid-century hot and cold war corporate state, William vanden Heuval and Irving Kristol — the former an arch Liberal, the latter an arch Conservative — ended Geismar’s critical career on national TV over his criticism of Henry James. Kristol and vanden Heuval’s son and daughter Bill and Katrina remain significant political and literary figures still today — avowedly arevolutionary, at best.
Geismar was a mid-century victim of plutocrat establishment cancel culture, which has always been the most powerful and destructive form of cancel culture — the opposite impression given by the anti-woke.
The fiction of James, as Geismar revealed, often retreats from reality into aestheticism, is emblematic of a culture that is elitist and reactionary — supremacist — lacks moral courage and democratic spirit, of which the literary establishment is complicit, and generally weakens American literature, and literature in general. Geismar notes that Henry James and his advocates “amounted to the bankruptcy of our national literature.”
If you can set all that aside, or not see it in the first place, you may be able to enjoy the many careful intricacies of James’ prose, though “Poor Henry!” his renowned intellectual brother William noted, “chewed more than he can bite off.”
Some people genuinely enjoy the fastidious pointillist writing of Henry James. It’s possible to admire what people do while despising what they are — if James is even that consequential, or accomplished — like a fascist who builds electric cars. That said, a lot people are now loathe to drive a Tesla.
Serious fiction, sometimes known as literary fiction, has always been with us. These are works of imaginative writing that explore and expand consciousness, including conscience, and newly express and reveal the human condition in its ever-changing private and public realms — biological, psychological, and societal.
Some such fiction is written for highly literate readers, and some is written for the masses, for everyone. Such so-called serious fiction may be written in all genres, including the comedic, which may seem unserious superficially, but is often written toward serious ends.
A lot of factors affect market forces that can make or break the popularity of various books and types of books, not least the fact that public opinion for at least a century has been massively shaped and controlled by the PR industry to conform to the ideological demands of the plutocrat owner class and their thuggish rule.
The rise of the people’s media, which is social media at its best, has pushed back on plutocrat ideology and control somewhat, but the heavy hand of the plutocracy still exerts a lot of deadening control over publishing and distribution, visibility and mindsets, including over social media, which is what the most lively and liberatory lit struggles to fend off, escape, and overcome.
There is a constant struggle for human realization both within literature and without, and thus a real need for what might be thought of as resistance literature, let alone revolutionary literature, to fight against the mountains of dreck, vacuous, and retrograde lit — to fight against and dispel the arevolutionary.
We need to make our literature and our lives new and liberatory, rather than merely rehash what we already know and suffer from. Our stories, like our lives, should resist, transcend, and overcome ideally. We need to create an increasingly liberatory culture to vanquish the existing conquered, brainwashed, and destructive terminal one. Out with the arevolutionary. Up with the revolutionary in lit and life.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 