This post is about organic intellectuals. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that a revolution would have to be led by organic intellectuals, self-aware thinkers who problematize their place in the power structure and their culpability in perpetuating class oppression. Carles, obviously, is an organic intellectual par excellence. The reason organic intellectuals are so integral is that the running dogs of bourgeois capitalism have an easy time discrediting the inchoate revolutionary impulses of thinkers whose dialectics are not so sharpened, those disgruntled dilettantes who long for a more meaningful existence outside capitalism but cannot sacrifice the supercilious comforts of being among its protected and entitled ranks.
Hence the title of this post, which reveals how revolutionary consciousness can be made to seem like nothing but an "impulse purchase", an act of selfish whimsey. Carles can run through the litany of dismissals reactionaries can easily construct to defuse revolution and mock the motives of nascent malcontents. The would-be leaders of the working class are enamored of their own creativity ("Might get this Photoshop tie. Need it 2 prove that I ‘get’ design. Need people to know that these icons are the tools through which I can make anything happen.") They are patronizing ("Might get this shirt that is ‘a clever take’ on that line from the Sixth Sense, and talks about how I feel like I am superior to most people who I encounter during the day.") They are smug, intellectual bullies ("Might get this shirt that also lets people know that I have a higher state of consciousness/self-awareness than they do. Want them to know not to try to have some dumb conversation with me–I don’t have time for that shit.") They are pretentious faux cosmopolitan wannabes ("Might ‘brand myself’ as some creepy, foreign douchebag who probably ‘has too much confidence around women’ and ‘at his job’, and decide to buy a new computer.") They are anarchic nihilists, or -- the same thing -- adroit self-marketers ("Might start an ad agency, and organize a cult’s mass-suicide as a viral marketing campaign for Nike/the company of ur choice.") They are closet racists with a fascistic will to power("This will be part of a global plan/brainwashing scheme to ‘take down the Chinese’ and take back control of being ‘the most relevant country on the Earth.’") They have reduced politics to self-branding consumerism ("Have yall seen n e thing kewl 2 buy lately?")
The lines of attack are familiar, and have been deployed with metronomic consistency since the Red Scare of the 1950s. As a result, organic intellectuals must work in the interstices, speaking through a discourse that seems to trivialize itself, like Carles put-on pseudo-naive texting-derived argot. This prevents it from raising alarms in the wrong political quarters even as it raises consciousness and sharpens dialectics in the breasts of Carles' comrades everywhere. Struggle, Carles, always struggle!
Obviously you write with a jest comparable to Carles'. But HRO is about left-wing as VICE Magazine, which is to say, The American Conservative. Hipsterism, particularly of that brand, is totally reactionary in its post-post-irony: it is not even slightly critical, in philosophical terms, it represents precisely the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche for instance, opposed.
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