Empty the Villages

“The Khmer Rouge command had ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns to the countryside (an estimated 20,000 people died of snap executions, hunger and disease in the emptying of Phnom Penh alone); the liquidation of anyone who had served the pre-revolutionary government; the abolition of money and markets; and rapid, forced collectivisation”[1].

Lovell’s description of the revolutionary terror brought upon Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge shows the destruction of order of any kind in favour of a brutal militarisation of society, anarchically organised and ideologically coordinated. To empty the cities, a rapacious and indiscriminate violence was enacted. No thought toward national preservation was given. There was a breakpoint, a new era of history demarcated by the blank slate of 1975 and the collectivisation of Cambodia. No autonomy, either from the ideology or from the PRK forces was permissible lest the crime of thought be allowed to fester amongst a brutalised population.

The given ends of revolution were all there: personality cults, blank slatism, overturning of order, unmanageable violence, etc. Similar dynamics played out during the Russian Revolution, the Chinese revolution or the English Civil War. A hurricane of forces that quickly and forcefully determine a new time. War, before the extension of the state, is internalised, extending chaos instead. New enemies are forged and new allies raised.

Dynamics of this kind don’t even have to contain the breakpoint of revolutionary terror. They can play over longer timescales, emerging through series of crises that chip away at the legitimacy of established structures and implant new elites in their place. The aftermath of the revolutions mentioned have still required this longer time horizon. The Chinese revolution is still ongoing as the CCP implants itself as the central organ of Chinese nationalism and a key player in modern geopolitics. The inversions that Mao’s China brought about have been updated, revoked, reinterpreted and reimagined from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. The core of the CCP has and always will remain the new elite.

Rudi Dutschke’s long march through the institutions is an example of this longer revolutionary force, not overtly violent but co-optative of existing structures and systems, bending their ideological wills toward “progressive” forms of thinking. In this, blank-slatism and the overturning of order are paramount prerogatives. The left-wing infection of educational institutions, bureaucracies and cultural organisations is testimony to this power: the normalisation of minoritarian concerns and deviant behaviours, the negrofication of culture (particularly music and history) and the bioleninist turn in elite structures that favour such social detritus.

The state of national identity in Western countries is such that the concept of nativism (the idea that there is such a thing as a native Brit or European) is now beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. Multiculturalism, which in practice is the growth of various minority identities that coalesce into rights groups and racial justice grifters (think BAME or the Global South or irregular migrants, all names for contradictory identity formations whose only link is the desire for reparations and the overturning of White culture), is now the order of the day in the United States, UK, Canada, Germany and others. A vast corpus of corporate funds, trusts, NGOs, charities and educational organisations are dedicated to this cause – the destruction and remaking of national cultures such that they fit a cosmopolitan dynamic. Identity, outside of a minority designation, is about being an ally and supporter of global justice (another term that means absolutely nothing). The nation-state and its definitions of the in-group, if they are to exist, are to be transitory and fluid. Britishness or Americanness are to no have no ethnic or cultural distinctions. So long as you hold a passport from that country (even this is optional for refugees and second-generation illegal migrants) you are of that citizenship.

“The nation-state form as such is now desired only by those at the bottom of the social scale, and no one with an iota of power cares what they think. Worse still, no one with an iota of power even cares who they are, or what nation they do or don’t in principle belong to”[2]. For our current elites, nations are corridors, mainly of cities and airports. Where a concept of nationality is invoked, it is yoked to concepts of human rights and globalism. The defining characteristics of a nation now boil down to being nice to strangers, welcoming to anyone and inclusive of everyone. The modern nation can have no outgroup, thus making it nothing.

Elite positions of this kind are evocative of a growing trend of political discourse that defines the postmodern age – metropolitics. “A metropolitical ethic then emerges as protection of the centre (being a central node in a network) and the maintenance of flows. These centres are interchangeable, as the financial districts of London and Chicago or the business districts of Dubai or Hong Kong attest to. Skyscraper offices and long boulevards, conference centres and shopping parks like the International City, all with a strong security presence and surveillance apparatus”[3]. Metropolitics is the politics of urban flows, of their control and designation. It is for the expansion of cities into a global network, with the hinterlands between a means for transportation or environmental aesthetics (look don’t touch).

Metropolitics entails a new sovereignty brought through the maintenance and control of mobilities and flows (discriminating between good and bad flows i.e. trade vs. disease). Warfare turns into “permanent, open-ended and deterritorialised mobilisations … encompassing notions of public safety”[4]. In other words, the revolutionary inversion of war into internalised chaos, the rooting out of phantom enemies. This securocratic warfare is centred around the urban platform which, as it grows and its infrastructure requirements are increasingly complex and fragile (cities as sites of heat-death and energy sinks[5]), become securitised environments to be protected against the spectres of lone-wolf terrorists, pathogens and unsegmented populations.

Urbanisation as the extremity of globalisation is the encasing of elite privileges in combination with demographic control and the inversion of social hierarchies. Cities present an innate contradiction in that they are the most surveilled entities in the world[6] while also allowing for the anonymisation of cultural identity. Cities are birthplaces of deviant cultures, providing them spaces through which they breed and expand. Migrant networks, minority interests and what Giddens described as a life politics of self-actualisation are key characteristics of the global city. Equally they are the place of crises, the extreme heat of climate change and the concentration of pollution (expanding to their suburbs), targets for terrorism and, in emerging forms of information and infrastructural warfare, the core of military tactics.

The urban platform is now the mechanism for revolutionary change and for the furtherance of the long march. This isn’t simply the city as a geographic structure, but a systemic and ideological array that encompasses the dissolution of nationality, anonymisation of identity and inversion of hierarchy. Cities are IQ shredders and bioleninist[7] reservoirs. “The councils which dominate East London have chosen to house, not the young professionals of the Docklands, but enormous quantities of unemployed and unemployable migrants in what is some of the most valuable real estate in the world. These communities are not historical but artificial”[8].

The promotion and maintenance of social detritus is the desire of cosmopolitanism for the constant othering of societies. Economically, a vast underclass available for cheap labour. Culturally, a repertoire of perspectives that disrupt a prevailing national identity. Major cities are a cornucopia of ethnic and cultural groups with limited national characteristics. The similarities between Paris and London are much greater than similarities with their respective hinterlands. Thus the bioleninism of the modern corporate world and culture industries. They provide an economic outlet in that they create eclectic niches that exploit oversaturated markets. But more importantly they provide a bulwark against meaningful organisation (because their individual demands coalesce into coalitional mishmashes that constructs an endlessly competitive hierarchy of virtues) and allow for disruption as a core cultural component of postmodernity. If the city is to become a non-place, a transit corridor of flows, then culturally it will express itself as a spectrum (gender, sex, minoritarian concerns) irreducible to a homogenising point. There are no national or racial interests (except when race raises minoritarian welfare), only self-actualisation as Giddens terms it. The more extreme or niche such actualisation, the more likely one is to be promoted or looked after in these inverted hierarchies. The native or established populations become abstracted as the white working classes or an urban underclass, to be made artificial and thus countable.

Elites who exploit these situations the most needn’t worry about the consequences as they insulate themselves. The rich are the most likely to segregate themselves in cities[9], creating “vertical gated communities”. “With helicopters and helipads, closed off causeways and lifts, and private, direct-to-suite elevators, the nouveau elite – usually representative of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) industries – can practically live their lives detached from the comings and goings of the underclasses toiling in the spaces beneath”[10]. Cities are incubators for national inequality, cultural exclusivity and IQ shredding (due to limitations on social mobility).

This isn’t an unknown facet, but a known quality that is celebrated. “Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion—New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on”. “To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We’re going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy”[11]. Cities are the centre of the long march, and if you are outside of them you can be ignored and left to rot. The wastelands of Appalachia or the provincial poverty outside of the London-Birmingham-Manchester nexus show that the towns, villages and countryside are to be treated with contempt. And when they lash out in populist outbursts the hatred ramps up. The limits of democracy can be seen the instant the disfavoured find a voice, particularly ones that question the sanctity of the European Union or the American trading regime.

Indeed cities are the antidote to populism. While populists “contend that outsiders threaten the national way of life and that ‘the people’ need to exclude outsiders”, “cities instinctively accommodate difference, disagreement and diversity”[12]. What better way to redefine “the people” than getting rid of the category altogether. Familial and kin relations are replaced by interactions in streets and workplaces. The communal nature of existence is denuded, made into a series of limited, tenuous connections in ersatz forms of community.

15 minutes cities, a resurgently popular form of urban planning, started as a benign concept of bringing the village to the city. Inculcating a sense of community in an otherwise anonymised and vast space of limited interaction through the integration of amenities, businesses and homes within a walkable radius. The current concept (shoehorned into ultra-low emissions zones[13]) is shorn of community, instead being a mechanism of control to limit the pollution of traffic and restrict national mobility. It is integrable with the wider surveillance society and the metropolitical bunker state emerging in the post-neoliberal moment. The time of crises is the time of control, and the urban platform is the most capable method for that control.

“Though several motivations are likely at work, the prevailing purpose is to undermine our sense of place; the feeling that this is mine and this community is ours”[14]. As society sits between a coalescence of the high and the low, anarcho-tyranny prevails in the middle. Cities become increasingly crime-infested while public agencies effectively decriminalise a vast swathe of property crimes and low-level offences. When individuals try to defend themselves or others, the ire of the state is put upon them[15]. The bioleninist inversion means that criminal justice is only directed against the middle and working classes. Underclasses and minorities can terrorise at will, with public agencies deeming these as the rage of the oppressed.

As for the hinterlands, apart from being used as transit corridors between urban centres or the occasional housing project (which most development and planning policies increasingly restrict anyway) they become part of an environmental aesthetic, as picturesque national parks and wildlife refuges whose human footprint is restricted. Rewilding projects are at the forefront of this, turning nature into a hard boundary, distinct and separate from the lived world. Nature is treated as a glass jar experiment, with agricultural practices and rural lifeways bulldozed out in favour of a Jurassic Park-esque view of the wild as a quasi-mystical place that paradoxically can be constructed through scientific technique. Through population reintroduction, breeding programmes and the strict enforcement of park boundaries, mother nature can be healed, while rural immiseration and food production are quietly ignored. For the actual consequences of rewilding, just look at the WWF’s engagement with anti-poaching units in Nepal and Cameroon[16]. It is nothing more than a criminal racket, empowering one group against another while villagers and natives are caught in the crosshairs. The kind words of George Monbiot and Chris Packham with their maniacal smiles[17] supporting the concept of rewilding will always be followed by the barrel of a gun as people are forced off their land.

“The concentration of economic opportunity in a small set of cities and industries bleeds small towns of their populations, mutilates families and shoves people onto awkward educational and career paths. The result is an imbalance between urban and rural settlements and a culture of despair, rage and hedonism. People do not regress into selfishness because of the moral message they get from a tax policy, but because unanchored striving after wealth and status strips them of social support”[18]. When families are stripped of the autonomy of their property and relegated to parts of an urban machine, their cultural identity and nationalism is also lost. “Those who once resided in single family homes will be nudged into dense transit corridors in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, and will eventually reoccupy larger capital ‘smart cities’”[19].

Material degradation and the deprivation and abandoning of rural districts to destitution combined with urban segmentation appears to be the future trajectory. The future of capitalism, or any succeeding economic system, appears to be much less labour-intensive. Even in the so-called revivals of manufacturing and reshoring under Biden, real wages are still stagnant and productivity increases are limited. Capital’s future is increasingly electronic and technocratic, focused on the ordering of flows. What this means for urban futures is a continuation of the trend of extremely unequal landscapes, gated communities in a sea of ghettoes and estates. Short-term employment opportunities mixed into a wider underground economy that increases crime and enforces immiseration.

“To grasp contemporary capitalism’s direction of travel we had better leave behind the exhausted “stimulus vs austerity” diatribe and consider the following deeper indicators: 1. The increasing contraction of the overall mass of (socially necessary) value; 2. The compensatory growth of money-capital as credit without value-substance; 3. The widening of the gap between credit created out of thin air, and surplus-value created through the exploitation of labour; and 4. The global paradigm shift from liberal capitalism to the illiberal, meta-emergency world-system currently in the making”[20].

An economy awash with credit only serves to benefit the established elites, whose control of property and other assets creates a widespread rentier economy. The middle classes become serfs, picking scraps from the remaining administrative and clerical roles left for university graduates. The lower classes become easily-recruited foot soldiers as they are thrown bones from the propertied classes in the form welfare payments and anarcho-tyrannic law which allows them to run a parasitic underground economy. Regimentation is done through a centrally-directed basic income available to anyone inside the city limits. Those outside can face the prospect of opioid addiction and the lawlessness of reservation patrols.

The future is metropolitical. Elites will empty the villages and overturn any existing order. Bioleninist dregs will be at the forefront of political and cultural institutions, directing a slow revolution as the metropolis overtakes the nation-state and the minority dictates its direction.

[1] Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History

[2] https://unherd.com/2023/05/why-the-nation-state-failed/

[3] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2022/12/27/the-evolution-of-metropolitics/

[4] https://www.slideshare.net/sdng1/fronstaging-the-urban-backstage

[5] https://www.itv.com/news/london/2022-07-25/london-narrowly-avoided-power-blackout-as-electricity-prices-surged-in-heatwave

[6] https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20200703150416/https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/

[8] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/16/canary-wharf-a-revolution-betrayed/

[9] https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/area.12784

[10] https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/closures-a-non-linear-sketch-of-the-bunker-state/

[11] https://www.thestranger.com/news/2004/11/11/19813/the-urban-archipelago

[12] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/populism-is-poison-plural-cities-are-the-antidote/