I

The Egocrat – Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Ii Sung – is not an accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a personification of the relations of the existing social order.

IV

The Egocrat finds “community” and “communication,” not by smashing the elements of the spectacle in his reach, but by surrounding himself with like-minded individuals, other Egos, who reflect the Golden Thought to each other and confirm each other’s validity as possessors of it. Chosen People. At this point the Thought, if it is to remain golden, must evermore remain the same: unsullied and uncompromised; criticism and revision are synonyms of betrayal, “Thus it can only exist as a polemic with reality. It refutes everything. It can survive only by freezing, by becoming increasingly totalitarian.” (Camatte) Therefore, in order to continue to reflect and confirm the Thought, the individual must stop thinking.

X

The Egocrat’s project is superfluous. The capitalist media of production and communication already reduce human beings to mute and powerless spectators, passive victims continually subjected to the existing order’s “laudatory monologue.” The anti-totalitarian revolution requires, not another medium, but the liquidation of all media, “the liquidation of their entire present structure, functional as well as technical, of their operational form so to speak, which everywhere reflects their social form. At the limit, obviously, it is the very concept of medium which disappears and must disappear: the exchanged word, reciprocal and symbolic exchange, negates the notion and function of medium, of intermediary… Reciprocity comes about by way of the destruction of the medium.” (Baudrillard)

Primal Primers are offered for entertainment and enlightenment purposes only. This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/