Secret Socialism "May God smite him who, himself blinded, seeks to show others the way." - Mulla Nasrudin The revolution is not of this world. It takes place in historical tomes, exotic landscapes, outdated political systems. From an attainable moment, achievable in the near future even by us, it has evolved into a touristic reading/viewing experience designed for consumption only. The unlikeliness of a revolution occurring in Western Europe's museological cities is matched by the unreality of images of street violence, coming from so far away that all they really broadcast is a certainty that the upheaval on display will never reach us. It took the revolution twenty years to develop from future to perishable consumer product. The students of the sixties lost their naive revolutionary joy upon learning in Cuba, Vietnam, and China that revolutions are, by definition, unpleasant for the population at large. Much to their own surprise, this loss of perspective turned out to be a godsend. The activists, who had just come out as hegemonic intellectuals, found they could solidify their identity as independent leftist thinkers (ILTs) through the endless story concerning, and based on, the personal crisis. The preached revival never came about because, like any sermon, its only goal was to bind the flock together. Far from expressing existential questions, the leftist crisis was the success story of a generation that had spent the best years of its life looking for nuance, and became frightened by its own radicalism. This narcissistic attitude led the ILTS to ignore the social changes that continued to unfold elsewhere as they celebrated their cult of dilemma. Then, midway through the eighties, they suddenly found themselves part of an information society governed by speed, efficiency and marketing. As the long institutional march appeared to be in its final stages, the ILTs applied for retraining, only to be told they'd been reading the wrong books for twenty years. The ruthless reorganization of the now underprivileged leftists culminated in a dialectic reversal: re-education for the ideological class war generation! So they were the last of the Europeans to find out that power does not own the media, but that the media own power. Switched on to the screen, they consciously formatted their entire literacy and entered the world of pure topicality. The ILTs cast off their 19th-century conceptual mindset with abandon, hoping to share in the media's permanent revolution. They themselves thought of this dogmatic reaction as a newly acquired flexibility. Instead of restyling themselves as Marxians, the ex-Marxists humbly converted to model democrats, saying of their repentance after the fall of communism that "the right was right." They failed to notice that right-wingers had been spectators just as they had, and by no means welcomed the enemy's surrender. The latest ILT consensus holds that the left no longer exists, and that it's lost touch with the individualized media masses. Modern-day cultural society has disintegrated into a tangle of single issues to the point where the ILTs can no longer blend them into any one state-political scheme. They get the uncomfortable feeling that they're looking at the back of some patchwork quilt, while in front of it, the multicultural public shamelessly wallows in aesthetic fascination with one-dimensional, day-glo items. The cure propagated by the leading thinkers of the backward classes consists of the magic formula that "we have to connect to social changes." In other words, computers, soap operas, fashion, sports and money are cool, while intellectual talk, labor unions, parties and workers are passé. The ILT zines have assumed the rewarding task of transmitting the correct lifestyle instructions. Where socialist perspective once beckoned, we now hear only muzak. Although even the ILTs have long since settled comfortably within "technological culture," they habitually attempt to "influence public debate" with a bit-free jargon that masks self-importance as ironic self-criticism. In this masochistic consumption of personal crisis, all pleasure derives, not from playing with the media, but incorporation in the media. What is not seen is that the media are long past needing any help with their introduction (F3) but instead are on their way out (F7). The history of revolution is characterized by accelerated gyration. The upheavals caused by the prehistoric introduction of fire, mushrooms, writing, grain, cattle, the horse, the wheel and roads have retained their energy for thousands of years since. But with the ancient Greeks, revolution became politics, and hence a brief and fluctuating affair. After that, revolutions became moments of repeated historical revivification. Fire, blood, banners, barricades and improvised weapons, versus helmets and rifles, became part of the arsenal of images in a collective memory that transcends the ages. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, industry caused a revolution whose very goal was to revolve. After this turned the outside world upside down for a century and a half, the 1960s witnessed the beginning of the psychic revolution (along with the less significant sexual one). Here, chemistry and physics so expanded consciousness as to penetrate the outside world through the electronic and digital expansion of the mind: the audiovisual media and the world of computers. The "media" replaced history with the artificial space-time of a satellite- and live connection-induced perpetual omnipresence. But this is even less self-sufficient than (political) history. It feeds on energy invested in its reality or released by it. Everything can be submitted to revolutionary change. Toothpaste, furniture, the brain, the city, love affairs, clothing, the universe, dogs, air planes, perception: If all things are in a state of revolution, then the desire for a radical overthrow of society turns into panic and doubt. And even this doubt can be efficiently marketed as the scientific method of chaos and catastrophe - a paradigm fit for a millenarian age. It was this same doubt that befell the ILTs during the seventies and inspired them to set up camp in the blind alley of historical faith for a decade. A double bind, from which they were released when Fukuyama, the poor man's Baudrillard, introduced them to the end of history. If one thing terrifies them in their new forgetfulness, it's the classical revolutionary images of blood, fire and barricades. When these unfolded on their doorsteps in the early eighties, the ILTs at first still interpreted the new autonomists in the reassuring terms of history ("not another May '68") or anthropology ("ritualism") - thus siding with the law. In the early nineties, the same images were given a medial interpretation: "poor visual presentation." What the ILTs overlook is that the images are now being produced only for the media, and that extra-imaginary reality is elsewhere. ILTs think media are great. With the end lost, the means justify themselves. It is no longer in the streets or in parliament, but only through a "proper relationship to the media" that their "digital socialism" can be brought back on track. Power is what they want, and the road to it passes through the station of "media." The everlasting debates of conference culture have been reduced to short statements that make the news media in uncut format. This roundabout construction results from a poor understanding of the way virtual forces like media function. One seizes power not by sheepishly following the masses, but by bluntly claiming it and dumbfounding the public. There are currently two options to effect a takeover: Either the media are eliminated and one personally becomes the medium, or the media are ambushed and radically jacked in to one's own program. To become an item is lethal ("We don't want more airplay, we want the whole goddamn media"). The first option boils down to neutralizing current media power. This can be accomplished by giving every European, American and Japanese commercial station access to the home. The overload will turn against the satellite giants as it shatters the ratings. The less transnational mediatization is accompanied by criticism and discussion, the less power the media will have. Once the whole of media politics has thus been suspended, there can be room once more for the medium of a socialism based on argumentation and decision-making. The second option strives for hegemonic media power; that is, the maximum exposure of socialist symbolism. The Christian Democrats are a good example. The systematic provocation of scandals, or making of decisions that nobody agrees with, results in prime-time media exposure. The old idea that media power can be either seized or democratized has been increasingly superseded by the spread of understanding of their operation: if the rules of the game are skillfully applied, the reporters will show up automatically. The first option creates a media void where socialism can unfold. In the second, power itself has become void, having surrendered to the media, where the only spectacle left for it to stage is that of its own permanent decomposition. These options, intended to gain absolute parliamentary majorities, consider power as the end to which media are the means. But this is now an outdated view, and is only supported by the ILTs because they obviously don't want power and/or social developments at all, and are plagued by fears that the public will implicate them regardless to get its revenge. The ILTs' fondness for images of political action free of revolutionary connotations comes from their own suppressed history. This further explains why it is impossible for them to realize that the media are already past their prime. The media are overwhelmed by all the topics that present themselves as political action. Too many people have figured it out. The media react defensively to both producers and consumers. Supplements and special sections are initiated to channel the users' pressure on the media. Viewing guidelines are handed out to prevent remote controllers from mixing up all the TV channels or not watching at all. All mutuality between transmitter and receiver is lost. One side is overcome with doubt, the other threatens to succumb to indifference. The media fear their users and wish they could do away with them altogether. They realize that their contribution to the abolition of the world has been marginal, and that their time is up. Any counteractions they launch are by definition medial, and can only serve to accelerate the current trend. The question remains: How to bring socialism any nearer? It is not up to politics to control or direct social developments. The idea that they can be accelerated must be discarded. One cannot overtake the media (the speed of light), but one can let them pass by. Therefore, socialism, if it is to retain its seductive power, needs to slam on the brakes. The only future for socialism is to reject all social change from the start and freeze at the zero point of negativity. Or else it must learn to act in accordance with Bell's theorem, according to which events influence each other over great distances without necessarily bridging the space inbetween, thus leaving the speed of light behind. The medial revolution caused and witnessed by 1980s activists will lead to the autodestruction of the media at our fin de siècle. After posthistory, it is time for the postmedial. In a media-free world, the energy sucked out of reality by the media will radically and gradually break free and start to gyrate. This actually existing revolution is going to hit the ILTs like an unprecedented, unheard-of disaster. Socialism will invade their lives like a truck crashing through the bedroom window. While outside a riotous celebration rages by, they'll heroically cling to their monitors. It is only when the bonfires have erased all their files at once that they will go into audiovisual blackout ("ILTs must exit"). The consequent outburst of panic will be their final hallucination. "Our socialism has no room for socialists." The secret of socialism is that it's a story that has to appear in print. Mao was aware of this. In the strictly imageless, ceremonial universe of a postmedial age, writing can witness its eternal return. Through its initiation to textual life, humanity will enter the extrahistorical vacuum where socialism has resided ever since its conception. The text as object discloses a metahistorical space. That which has been transported as a spurious element from the nineteenth into the twentieth century - namely, the love of books - will soon become a constituant principle of the social order. This is not to say that the ILTs are doomed. It is not their crisis but their past that offers hope. Their previous ritual treatment of the sacred scriptures of, say, Gramsci, Althusser, or young Marx will prove to be a recommendable quality in the cult of writing, whose contents are unimaginable and around which life organizes itself. At present, the best course for the ILTs to follow is to go underground immediately and re-emerge at some future point to serve as scribes for the republic of letters. Their hope lies in the classical observation that while media are perishable, writing will last forever. Those who still wish to render video service or communicate medially had best organize in gangs of pictorial thugs and roam the margins of literal socialism. Already, secret socialism's virtual societies vehemently reject any emerging revolutionary subject, for nowadays no starry-eyed idealist exceeds the medial level. The refusal to implement socialism is the secret socialists' most powerful weapon. They strive to encourage thorough indifference, by announcing we will never arrive at socialism; not today nor tomorrow. Their radical negativity is sensational. Anti in the extreme, yet they do not propagate it. This frustrates the enemy, who is urgently waiting for dialogue. The hidden nature of its program produces a vast social demand which will never be met. Who but the socialist could possibly reverse the implosion of society? Yet the wealth of ready-made solutions remains untouched, never circulated as capital. What does socialism want? ??