Spanner R4 Update: Corporatism Is the New Communism (Plus: Chapter 4 Progress)

The article: "The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union" (Alternet)

Back last century, when Soviet Communism ruled a third of the earth, there were some big business types such as Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum who developed an infatuation with Communism, while others (a whole lot of them) fell in with the Soviets' Nazi enemies. And then America spent about 30 years or so locked in cold death struggle against the Russian bear. The Cold War imprinted America, big time.

Now this country's sinking into a big-business knockoff of Soviet tyranny. In fact, it's becoming so indistinguishable from China, another Communist former enemy, that I went so far as to rename China's ruling party "Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited". America's market choice is getting as restrictive as the official Soviet stores, as the above-linked article points out; conversely, China has the largest shopping malls in the world to go with its ever-growing collection of never-occupied new cities (the biggest mall of all, the South China Mall, is still has only 2 stores).

Congratulations, America! You're now the Union of Corporate Socialist Republics! The only difference between Corporatist America and old Communist Russia is that our all-powerful State is owned by private corporations.

The collapse of this system is what I'm documenting in the five volumes of Chaos Angel Spanner. Henry Becket, Chairman and Secretary General of the Conservative Revolutionary Party of America (as of Chapter 16) backed by his hand-picked Central Committee of Business Leaders and ace political operators, is the antagonist or tragic (super)hero trying to singlehandedly save the collapsing American Empire from certain doom by sheer force of personal will. And yet he follows the failed examples of all the "republican" and "socialist" absolute monarchs he used to fight against as a Cold War superhero. He's trying to save the world through a "People's Republic of Tyranny" by the Great American method of the "Privately Owned Society". The Law of Entropy is laughing in his face all the while.

Prepare for The Great Politics Mess-up, act two. Everything that has gone wrong in the Western world since the 1989 Revolution is because America was totally bummed the Red Menace fell. Everything Dictel Corporation has done since 1989 ruined its business, up to and including pulling off the Conservative Revolution of 2012, has been an attempt to bring back the black-and-white pre-'89 world, when America was righteousness itself battling Absolute Evil. It's revolutionary nostalgia, a militant refusal to look any direction but backward, that fuels the Conservative Revolution. The Germans even have their own East German version called "Ostalgie" (ost [east] + Nostalgie). The Cold War can never end until the surviving Evil Empire follows its symbiotic enemy into the trash can of history.

This is the world our heroines are forced to survive.

Chapter 4 Editing Update
After over two weeks of procrastinating, I finally got around to editing Chapter 4. I finished all the remaining new scenes and did a little editing of existing scenes. I'll have to make one final edit, inserting Shira's redheaded three-years-younger niece Elle and her mother Ruby into the meeting at Mudlark House before I turn to the next phase, removing a full thousand words from the first edit to get the final version under my 15,750-word target representing the 65-page maximum episode script length. After that, I'll make one more scan for typos, and then I'll declare it ready to post. Since Chapter 4 had only five sections in Revisions 2 and 3, I'll probably end up using one of the seven sections of Chapter 5 to make up the difference.

Speaking of Chapter 5: I've already cut down some scenes and added new ones. The biggest addition not yet fully written is the climactic chase for serial-killer fake teacher Mark Bernkastel after Team Bremelo interrupt the assassination mission SPEC Chairman Ross gave him and chase him into gang-ridden Dictel Park across the street from Bangor High. My task for tomorrow is to write out the sequence in full and then retcon the rest of the chapter to lead directly up to it.

Classes at Bangor High start in Chapter 6. Let's start with social studies and history, which SPEC management can't seem to distinguish. What's across the Atlantic in 2014? Used to be a lot of countries there. Now there's only the World Caliphate of Al-Assass, the Islamist empire America's at war against, and the Millennial Messianic Christian Empire of Africa, which America's allied with but is no better at all, merely Christian in its fundamentalism. Part of the African Empire is in the Caribbean, making it contiguous to the Imperial American Homeland itself. Now remember the People's Republic of Fernando Poo from the Illuminatus! trilogy? Some Mexican gangster who claims descent from Becket ancestor Robert Putney Drake conquered Equatorial Guinea from a Colombian gang and renamed it "People's Republic of Fernando Poo" (the namesake island's real name is Bioko) only to find himself under assault by the crusading hordes of mainlanders. The reason this is mentioned in class is because there's not enough gangsters in Latin America to defend it, so he's begging Dictel Corporation to send troops. Figures.

Spanner: When Power Corrupts

Lord Acton famously said: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Sure, he was writing to a bishop about the then new Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, but it applies to any organization. If someone gains too much power, they are bound to become corrupt. The famous Peter Principle explains why: In any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. The mechanism is groupthink, or collective narcissism resulting from the leader's delusion that the fact that he is in power makes everything right and his increasing intolerance for negative feedback.

Real-Life Bad Companies: The Empire of the Banks

(Note: The first two "Real-Life Bad Companies" posts were originally written last year. This was written first, but posted after the second entry, on mercenary corporations like Dictel.)

Sooner or later, I'll resume the hard work of editing Bad Company into something resembling a readable novel. Also, I've started drawing again for almost the first time in about 2 years, and I hope to reclaim my skills so I can draw Spanner myself. So I figure now is the time to write another little background entry. It's about "future history" and its history, so to speak. Recently I've noticed how so many "apocalyptic" novels are billed as "historical novels set in the future", and that future is supposed to be inevitable. I don't just mean various science fiction attempts at future histories (and not by the good writers, either). I mean especially the evangelical authors rewriting the same John Nelson Darby scenario. All these people have to support their claim that their scenario is inevitable is sheer blind faith. My advantage is that the events behind Spanner are already happening. My prediction: by the middle of this decade, the US, the EU, and all the other countries of the "Western" "capitalist" world will go bankrupt and get repossessed by the banks they're hopelessly in hock to. Thus the "Corporate Empire" is born, a pure corporatist dictatorship ruled by a tyrannical synarchy of not corporate bosses but of banking institutions led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which inflict their "austerity" on the whole "Western" world. (Synarchy, remember, is Greek for "junta".) Spanner begins when America ends.

Real-Life Bad Companies: The Mercenary Corporations

In the first entry of my "Real-Life Bad Companies" series (Note: "Empire of the Banks", also written last year but not yet posted; I'll revise and post it soon), I introduced you to the thieves: the "bankster" predators who crashed the world economy and are now sucking it dry, vampirically. Now you'll meet the terrorists: the mercenary corporations the banksters intend to use against the nations they're about to repossess. These are the infamous and feared Dictels of the world: Blackwater-Xe, DynCorp, and so on. Right now they have more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than all the NATO governments combined. Eventually, when the banks repossess the nations, they'll privatize all the police agencies and military services under their control and consolidate all the public and private mercenary corporations into the all-powerful fist of Corporatism.

The problem with using national armies as colonial occupation forces serving corporate profit is that they run the danger of running away when the nations' voters turn against the occupation. Mercenaries like to say that government soldiers all too easily lose their will to fight. Duty, therefore, is not a strong enough motivation to oppress foreign nations. There is a force far stronger than duty, one which can drive a man to murder his mother: greed. The profit motive is a much better reason to wage unjust wars than fickle duty.

Our Cyberpunk World: Financial Theocracy and the Coming Fall of the Corporate Empire

The article: "Is There a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?" by Les Leopold, Alternet

Read this entry's linked article, and then you'll better understand my answer to Leopold's question: as a matter of fact, the financial industry is waging a never-ending war against government as such and the people in general. He calls it "financial theocracy"; I call it Corporatism and define it in blunt terms as the synarchy of the banksters. By nuking all the national currencies they can, they're not just trying to bend governments to their will, they're trying to destroy government altogether. It's like in the cyberpunk science fiction canon of 1980-92, in which predatory corporations have entirely replaced government. But the first-generation cyberpunk writers were being either pessimistic or cynical. I consider this hoary cyberpunk convention to be a mistake, and in Spanner I intend to correct it.

Spanner: Scientism and the Mechanists

Relatively few people in the US know about Doctor Who (British and American official sites), the most famous British science fiction series and one of the longest running TV shows in history. Me, I've only seen a few episodes in their entirety, and not a single entire serial, and that was years and years ago; more recently, I've caught fragments of episodes from the Tom Baker era. But no one who has seen the series can forget the series' most iconic villains, the Daleks, whose creator Terry Nation, who grew up during World War II and experienced the terror of the London Blitz, envisioned them as "cosmic Nazis". Now take the Dalek out of its salt-shaker shell and implant it into an anime mech. The result is the "Mechanists" of Spanner. The name designates a faction centering on a cult similar to Warhammer 40,000's Adeptus Mechanicus. This faction holds to an interpretation of the "Law of Social Darwinism" different from that of the ruling Corporate aristocracy: where the Corporates believe corporations to be humanity's successors, the Mechanists insist that posthumanity will be entirely mechanical. They strive to create true cybernetic organisms ("cyborgs" for short) that are superior to mere intelligent carbon-based lifeforms in every way. If the Corporates' religion is, of course, Corporatism (a political ideology transformed into a cult), the religion of the Mechanists is Scientism: the cult of science. The ever escalating strife between the Corporates and Mechanists ultimately helps bring the Corporate Empire down.

Spanner: Corporations On Strike!

In a later scene in Spanner, Major Lt. Commander William Jay Becket, war-hero youngest son of United Corporations chairman Dr. Henry Becket, says, "I'm no economist, but looking at the [unemployment] numbers here, I see no reason why the Cartel wants to undermine its own survival by impoverishing its customer base." Immediately he's mobbed by enraged Corporate leaders screaming that he's a "class traitor" who wants to "sacrifice the best to the worst". Poor Will! He just committed the unforgivable sin of being rational! He won't realize till later that Corporatism is nothing like capitalism, that it's not about profit at all. It's about privilege, and the extremes to which the Corporate aristocracy will go to prevent capitalism, even if it cuts into their profits. The Corporates want power, even at the expense of profit. They're willing to go to extremes, even terrorism (see: Dictel Corporation's invasion of America in Bad Company), to get their way. Their entire ideology is about supremacy, not profit. To bully their way to supremacy and keep themselves in supreme power, the Corporates have gone on permanent strike — against the rest of humanity, the Cartel's intended victims. Every utterance coming out of the Cartel board of directors is an ultimatum. Will should know better; after all, his own father is the chairman!

Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic Part 3: Corporatism as a Fanatic Cult

In previous posts in this series, on "blood" and on corporations as gods, I've been developing an insane theology for the primary villains of Spanner, the Corporates. I was idly plotting issue #2 (partly for the JulNoWriMo novelization) when I hit upon a crucial plot point. Why a Corporate Empire in the first place, why are corporations considered literal gods, and why are the Corporates so obsessed with an insane and unprovable "theory" of eugenics? The answer hit me like a bolt of lightning: in Spanner, "Corporatism" is the name of a cult!

Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism

There's just 31 days remaining till JulNoWriMo begins, and the Spanner story ideas are getting wilder by the minute. In this post, I explained the Corporates' paranoia as the logical result of fanatical belief in an "occult physiology" that would strike anybody who knows anything about how the human body works as completely ludicrous, if not insane. Basically, the "bindu" cult claims that blood, semen, brains, money, gold, and oil are the same substance, not materially but spiritually. This belief, once widespread throughout America and imperial Europe, had some nasty political consequences, up to and including the Holocaust. Well, if blood, semen, and brains are (magically) the same in rich white men, then it follows logically that corporations are actually true posthuman beings whose blood consists (physically) of money and oil. Now, if money is the blood of an actual lifeform called a corporation, then to rob a corporation (such as a bank) is then by definition an act of vampirism. The "political horror" of Bad Company is based on such a notion, that the corporation is a parasitic alien lifeform; in Spanner, this becomes what I've come to call "cyberpunk gothic".