If the failure of presidentialness is less the failure of the inaugurated persuader-in-chief to persuade than of the unpersuaded to be persuadable, presidentialness’s partisans can only pine to dissolve the people and elect another.

[...] The term itself conveys loss but no responsibility for that loss.

Indeed, if salvage conjures Robinson Crusoe salvaging from the wreckage enough to survive, those socialists who came of age ‘in the wilderness’, watching the wreckage of the Old Left wash up on the beach, may see, if not a parallel, perhaps an analogy with our own ways of speaking about politics – and thus of shaping it.

Dare we speak, then, of salvage or even of hope? If we would struggle to keep alive – or resurrect – movements and traditions, revolutionary ways of parsing the world, the wisdom of our forebears and ancestors, in what language should we speak of such slippery things? And if our dialects and our minds, our very perceptions, have been colonised and standardised, making our own speech foreign to us? Twenty-first-century Marxists must be nimble if we are to revive our own idiolect: if its grammatical structure remains one shaped by class, its vocabulary must have enough breadth to encompass multiple and intersecting identities and realities, its nouns and pronouns unrestricted by binary gender. Can we lubricate our tongues with our own voices, our working- class dialects and interethnic inventions and personal pidgins, and create a living, intercultural lexicon to deploy against the forces of imperialism and the capitalist death drive? If Marxism is, as Walter Benjamin would have it, a conversation between the living and the dead, what does it mean when the dead outnumber the living? Can our old languages and our new ones speak us forward?

The Left enthusiasts of Nick Land appear to come from tonier climes. They are often clustered within academia, the tech sector, venture capitalism, or the media. Sometimes calling themselves ‘Left Accelerationists’, they produce political tracts such as the ‘#AltWoke Manifesto’. Keen to harness the disruptive power of technology and global capital, they nonetheless try to superficially distance themselves from Land’s reactionary conclusions. They want to be futurists without being fascists.

Such enthusiasts are dazzled by the shiny new future that Land promises, ignoring the fundamentally ‘Randian’ conception of productivity implied by Futurist thought. Land’s anti-materialism severs productivity from the socially-necessary human labour which actually brings it about. Instead, production is equated with a frictionless ‘creativity’, conjuring up images of the Silicon Valley guru who independently create their miracles ex nihilo. That is why Land’s neo-confederate ideology is not as sanitised as presented to left audiences. For ‘white exit’ (comparable to Ayn Rand’s ‘capital strike’) purposefully ignores the actual human labour which will be required to keep these libertarian ‘utopias’ running. It will be a labour force with ‘no voice’, hardly distinguishable from slavery itself.

To be sure, Leftists may appreciate Dugin and Land for seemingly different reasons; cultural ‘authenticity’ in the former, and techno-futurism in the latter. What they fail to notice, however, is the deep commonality between Dugin and Land’s underlying positions. It is a commonality which precludes the application of their thought to any emancipatory program.

Burn! depicts two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, the moral abyss into which neocolonialism pushes its agents and, on the other, the progressive development of a political consciousness among the ruled people. When Walker meets Dolores, he believes in civilisation and progress, with the illusion that anticolonialism and British trade merge into a common cause. Ten years later - a period condensing the contradictions of a century [...] - he has lost his illusions and his Western culture is reduced to pure instrumental reason: he likes to do his work well and is interested exclusively in 'how', not in 'why', to do it. Dolores, on the contrary, knows he fights for liberation even if he still does not know 'how' to realise his goal. [...]

[...] Like Dionysus in Greek mythology, Lenin could reborn. This is not an announcement of victory; it is a socialist wager, based on the recognition that all has to be rebuilt.

[...] she had retreated into a prison of fear and suffering whereas her sons had chosen the struggle: 'they looked for life, and their reasons were stronger than mine.' They did not look for sacrifice or martyrdom and their political choice was rooted in a vital desire of freedom. 'What survives is desire; they cannot kill this desire. [...]' [...]

[...] Paul Celan distinguished between u-topia and utopia. U-topia, literally 'no-place,' is a nonexisting locus, whereas utopia meas a hope, an expectation, a vision of the future, something not existing yet. According to Ernst Bloch, utopia is a prefiguration, the realm of the 'not yet' (noch nicht). This is also the meaning of Celan's utopia, 'something open and free' to which poetry could give a form. Today, after the collapse of twentieth-century revolutions, utopia does not appear as a 'not yet', but rather as u-topia, a no-longer-existing place, a destroyed utopia that is the object of melancholy art. Realms of memory are places (topoi) created in order to remember hopes turned into no-places, something that no longer exists. The utopias of the twenty-first century still have to be invented.

[...] And, friends
It is rotten, to have had history pull you up and spit you
Out again, for a few good moments, for nothing more
Than debt and waged servitude, all the hours stolen for gas bills,
Their world not built for you, its monstrous incursions
Of spectacular boredom, the sheer misery of getting by,
The mob's grief with a pang, ad now without a mob.
And the pangs ring harder as our bones chill, waiting,
We drink 'til dawn and hope to find something in it,
This city is full of wolves where nothing is plenty for them to eat,
They pull apart the sinews of matter, on which we expend
Ourselves paid down in rent and double rent. It is
The exhaustion, a cloth pressed firmly round the escape pipe,
Troubled air smothering and poisonous, nausea & inertia,
As smoke fills your tear ducts and the tongue dusts,
Two twins holding each of your hands and nailing you
To the floor. And what way to get out when the escape is full
Of rats and the hatches are being smoked out
With putrescent black smoke, all the exits bolted shut.

But the message feels flawed. Maybe because it contains traces of the neoliberal economic discourse according to which migrants should be welcome because we need them to support our aging population and because they boost our economy, as multiple studies show year after year. This argument is too entrenched to rant about with any originality. To justify the presence and use of foreign people on economic grounds is, of course, a slippery slope to denying citizens benefits because they are not morally worthy, or because their productivity does not justify the expense. In other words, the logic of the economic argument is the same logic that leads, at its most extreme, to the extermination and/or excision of those deemed not useful to the reproduction of the ruling and dominant classes.

Aside from this dangerous utilitarian logic, most disturbing about the ‘with and without us’ message is how it implicitly draws borders between UK citizens and migrants, reinforcing a liberal conception of migration and subjectivity. By affirming who is and who is not a citizen, the message draws ideological borders between workers. What is missing in the ‘with and without us’ tactic is a clear and explicit rejection of how the category and process of migrant subjectivity is separated from that of national workers, putting the spotlight on this separation as a mere appearance that obscures certain labour processes and reinforces national constructions. The processes through which people are constructed as migrant subjects imply a constantly shifting set of social, political and economic conditions. The problem is not only that these conditions are erased or forgotten by the unquestioning acceptance of the categories of national citizen and migrant: their acceptance obscures how the creation and reproduction of these categories legitimates specific entitlements to life and resources that are thereby taken as natural and unchangeable.