There are those for whom such apophatic Marxist eschatology is dereliction. On the left, some insist that blueprints for a realistic alternative, the more precise the better, will be the most effective mobiliser. [...]

[...] The request that capitalism be replaced with 'something nicer' should be criticised - for its tweeness, its mannered, unthreatening cuteness in place of the fire and salt the moment demands. Its apohasis, however, is by far its best element.

Such unsaying is not evasion but respect, taking seriously the scale of potential, of alterity necessary and possible beyond capitalism, escaping 'realistic', articulable, reformist visions truncated by the real, actually-existing hope. It is thus, to appropriate from the eschatology of the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, a hope against hope. Its horizon, like that he recalls from his youth, 'is a boundary which does not confine but rather invites one to go beyond'.

It is in such unsaying, rather than in anxious left assurance that the world can be said, that true radical Prometheanism inheres.

[...] The final way of solving social catastrophe is ... by the demolition of the mass transit system that ruined everything by literally raised the poor and put them among the rich: travelling together, social-democratic welfarism as opposed to trickle-downism is a nice dream but leads to social collapse, and if left unchecked terrorism that sends transit systems careering through the sky into tall buildings in the middle of New York-style cities—9/11 as caused by the crisis of excessive social solidarity, the arrogance of masses not being sufficiently terrified of their shepherds.

In all a film that says social stratification is necessary to prevent tragedy, and that it should be policed by terrorising the plebeians, for the sake of corporations which if there is a happy ending ... will end up back in the hands of a single enlightened despot, hurrah, to save us from the depredations of consensus.

When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations. The Russians are said to have ‘hacked’ the election, and there is a useful elision in the verb between meaning literal IT interventions (such as the leak of John Podesta’s emails that so outraged Clinton’s supporters because it disclosed certain truths about their candidate, plausibly-enough blamed on hackers with Russian backing), and in a more vague and very urgent sense of tweaking any system towards a desired outcome in some way or other. On the latter, leaving aside the obvious hypocrisy of the outrage (given the US’s long and vigorous history of interference in foreign elections, from Italy in 1948 through the 1970s, Japan in 1951, Germany 1953, via the Philipines, Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Chile in 1964, and on and on – eighty-one times between 1946 and 2000, not counting coups, according to an estimate by political scientist Dov Levin), the paranoid nebulousness of the latter, broader allegation is striking.

At least it is a piece about the world. At least it’s angry. What is this self-flagellating urge to read all the lockdown diaries, all the ‘Not another lockdown diary!’ first lines? These reams of writerly vacuities, column after mot juste-hunting column describing this shape of the day, this view from the window, such-and-such a tree and such, this which is on the desk, this which is in the fridge what with food not being as easy to get these days, these the new modes of going to the shops, this which is the conversation that was had with this friend or child or neighbour, this, now you mention it, which is the newly warm neighbourly discourse, this the recourse to Netflix, this the thing the author had thought they would miss and does not, this the one they weren’t expecting to and do. This the sense that things will never be the same again. Et cetera, repeat to fade. They provoke incredulousness greater than the sky. Who gives a fuck?

In the city, amid the tragedy and trauma, we’re granted a new silence. Distinct. Not total, any more than what we used to think of as London quiet, in the minutes between cars at night, the sound of a distant train part of the silence itself. Now you can hear the wings of a bird you watch. And when a car or van or a delivery driver on a scooter – one of the new heroes – passes by, the interruption startles. Glimpsing home-exercisers through windows you’re overwhelmed with affection for a new sort of community. Mist comes and goes across your vision: your mask sends breath on to your glasses. What would this lockdown be if it were autumn? What if it were winter?

Class rule necessitates violence and its contested, overlapping, jostling ideologies. It justifies, or more, Orgreave in 1984, the armed wing of the state laying down manners on insurgent workers. It insists that waterboarding is not torture and anyway it defends our freedoms. It explains the necessity of the spikes carefully fitted at the bases of new buildings to ensure the homeless can’t sleep there. Rising unevenly from a fundamental necessity to capital – oppression – are brutalities necessary to sustain class rule at home; to sustain imperialism abroad; everyday sadisms so metabolised their cruelties often hide in plain sight.

The drives to such phenomena are hazy-edged, non-identical but inextricable, imbricated, mutually constituting. They’re constant but not static. The parameters and place of violence, repression and sadism change with history. And with them, from the rush of jouissance they tap, inevitably flows their excess – a scandalous, invested sadism, enjoying its own cruelty. A surplus sadism. Baum’s Halloween party.