I think I'm gonna kill myself, cause a little suicide.
Stick around for a couple days, what a scandal if I died.
Content Warning: This is worse.
I work so much that I don't feel like I have free time anymore, I have recovery time. I don't live at home, I live at work. Vapors of daytime fatigue choke me. My thought itself is atrophying. The only thing my brain can muster are staggered sentences unconnected by any throughline. The caffeine pills don't help anymore. Every waking moment I am tired. Reading has been harder and harder. I want everything to end. What joy is there in a life without thinking or reading? What's the point of being awake if I only want to sleep? I wish my mother aborted me.
Naturally, living in an imperialist core country, my job isn't that difficult. But, I work 9 hour shifts and I'm only paid for 8 since one of the hours of the day is taken out as part of our break
that we may or may not take depending on how busy the day is. My commute is an hour of driving every day. In total, about 50 hours a week feels like a black hole, and I still can't even comfortably afford my own apartment. I get home, rest for maybe 3 or 4 hours, and sleep. The sleep never feels like it ever fully recovers me. On my days off, I want to read, or draw, or write, but halfway through the day I end up falling asleep. Unlike many others, I'm able to generate meager savings from my wage, but more than likely any extra money I make will end up going to my piece of shit car to keep me going back and forth in this endless pestilent cycle. I don't really have the money or the means to go back to college so every day I feel doomed to working shitty jobs for the rest of my life until I kill myself or the world ends in apocalyptic fire. Half of my diet is frozen pizza. I don't dream of ever owning my own home. In fact, I dream of one day being pulled out of my home and dismembered in a flash of ethnic violence stoked by whatever fascist power ends up controlling Washington, while they laugh as I piss myself during my last gasps of breath. At last, death would embrace me and create another corpse in the slaughterbench of history. Unremarkable.
Hegel was unable to make a phenomenologist out of me. Rather, I've taken to thanatology by mentally cataloging every potential death I could face. One I think about often is being stabbed to death in prison. Another, starving with my family during a period of intense drought. One I assume everyone has thought about at some point, developing some kind of terminal illness and choosing to slowly die instead of leaving my family with unpayable medical bills. I would then be cremated. Car accident is easy to think of, with American car dependence. At no point have I imagined dying peacefully, instead I imagine freezing stiff during a particularly bad winter storm. Maybe I'll get shot in the throat with a rubber bullet during a food or water riot. In the future, I see my limp body resting over someone else's in an unmarked mass grave. Perhaps naked. Some I find much less likely, like a return of crucifixion or the breaking wheel, or worse, the oubliette. Although, similarly medieval, I could see my head on a pike. My eyes could open to see only a blindfold, and I would be shot either standing or on my knees. I could be beaten to a writhing pulp by armored police. The only thought that horrifies is me is having my death recorded in any way so it could be relived endlessly by anyone willing to watch. I can already hear the gloating. I can already read the comment section.
Even when looking at the future, I see the past, and the return of old horrors. I am a funeral. Through this fog I wander, and instead of men, I only see babbling ghosts. We are in Hell.—Lately, despite what I've been reading, there have been two simple modes of my thinking, which I classify as a paranoid variety of thanatology, ruminating over my own death, or eschatology, ruminating over the apocalyptic deaths of others. Neither of these modes of my thinking correspond to reality exactly, hence, I consider them reflections of a broader context of pitch black fatalism that I don't feel entirely alone within. This infinite matrix of deaths are certainly all possible, but none of them are immediately apparent, for now. Nonetheless, I believe these numerous examples allude to reality, and that over time they get closer and closer to reality as our economic conditions progressively deteriorate. My many imagined deaths have their basis within our social reality, and could only have sprung out from this context. At best, my ruminations keep me alert to disturbing political developments, at worst, they paralyze me.
To return to business as usual, I've been taking more notes on my reading. Althusser is a worthy companion. On one of my days off, I went to the local library for the first time since I've moved here and took a couple of pages of notes on his essay, On the Materialist Dialectic.
For Marx as a whole I now consider one of my favorite essay collections in the whole canon of Marxist thought. When I was younger I spent a considerable amount of time obsessing over the place of Marx's early manuscripts, and although I don't think Althusser is absolutely right about everything, his writings on the Young Marx and Feuerbach I think were a necessary corrective for that strange obsession of mine. He's right to point out that it's never Marxists that bring up the Paris Manuscripts. In his collection Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays I came across Althusser's Preface to the first volume of Capital. Very conveniently, he offers practical advice for a reading of Capital along with an order one should read the chapters. But, I will continue with my plan to read Fundamentals of Political Economy edited by George. C Wang before I decide to read Capital for the first time. The work, divided into two volumes, covers both capitalist political economy and socialist political economy as it was understood during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which leads me to my next tangent.
I think part of my inherent pessimism stems from an incapacity to think outside of the capitalist imaginary. As much as I have enjoyed these CCRU writings, it's impossible for me to ignore the fact that these are writings by people, much like myself, with a limited capacity for thinking socialism or anything outside of capitalism as the so-called End of History, and should be treated as such. Now, there's a couple of things I've done in an attempt to break free from these limits, but I haven't done nearly enough. First, I watched Breaking With Old Ideas, a film about education reform during the Cultural Revolution. Second, I've watched One Man's China with Felix Greene, although I've only been able to find the first part of two. One Man's China provides a rather splendid overview of socialist China during the early 1970's and provides some insight as to how their society actually functioned. One of the most interesting aspects I came across was the concept of the People's Communes, which would be further subdivided into Production Brigades and Production Teams. The People's Commune seems to be an administrative locality roughly analogous to what we could call a state, like Idaho or Ohio, while a Production Team could be a single village. I've been meaning to watch How Yukong Moved the Mountains as it's a series of 12 documentaries on various aspects of socialism in China, I've watched the first film set in a small fishing village, but I've yet to properly make time for the rest.
I still intend to finish the CCRU writings that I've been reading, along with a collection of Nick Land's essays, but it's difficult for me to fully identify with them, there's still chasms between me and these texts that I'd like to understand and work through (I plan to bridge some of that chasm with Badiou's writings on Deleuze, as I feel that's where problems begin). There's plenty of other books and information I've been able to find about China during its period of socialist transition, all of which can be found here conveniently collected together. There's also a few novels written by those who fought for the cause of socialism that I'd like to read, Wall of Bronze and The Builders both look excellent, as well as Volokolamsk Highway. Part of me would also like to make time for this selection of writings from Gramsci's prison notebooks that I received in the mail. Althusser's been pushing me towards The German Ideology. In the future I'll have to return with my findings. For all my ruminations on my own death, it's yet to frighten me from continuing to pursue a rigorous study of our social reality, as well as ways out of it, wherever they are.
One thing I continue to struggle with is the fact that I often feel incredibly alone in my interest in uncovering socialist history, I don't really know anyone else that's willing to undertake these kinds of studies with me. But, that's okay, because more than anything, as I think I've clarified, I struggle the most against myself.