Newsletter #98: Conspiracy Theory

Earlier this fall, we published a long awaited interview with Naomi Klein on her new book Doppelganger, which tracks “the far-right conspiracist sweep into power” and the ideas that accompany this new state of affairs. This writing on conspiracy has long been a part of *The Dig’s ongoing efforts to make sense of the world we’re living in — including episodes on the recent history of “child safety sex panics” and right-wing reaction to trans politics. It’ll figure, vaguely, into future episodes too, including an upcoming round with Michael Denning on the brilliant book* Policing the Crisis, which begins with a moral panic around street crime and unwinds it into a thoroughgoing account of the early neoliberal conjuncture, the recomposition of state powers around a new authoritarian strategy, and the broad crisis in working-class organization. Here we pause briefly to reflect on this theme of conspiracy and organization in a little more detail.

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How do you overthrow the Illuminati? If you’ve spent some time in the trenches of community organizing, you’ll recognize that beneath the topsoil of any organizing project with its immediate targets, its proximate causes, and discrete antagonisms, there is often a deeper layer of eluviated conspiracy thinking, a thick deposit of ideology that clumps up into certain ideas of who holds power and to what ends. Spadework can often fail here, where suspicion is a bedrock rather than solidarity, and where a sense of fatalism is terribly hardened. When we try to draw the lines between “us” and ‘them’ in the course of our organizing amid an atmosphere of conspiracy, our antagonist can frequently take a vague and shifting shape. “The conspiracist structure of feeling,” as Kay Gabriel writes, “textures our political reality thoroughly, and not only for the right’s ideological footsoldiers.”

Some say conspiracy is a sort of materialism “refracted through a funhouse mirror of plots,” as Naomi Klein puts it, “a poor man’s cognitive mapping” in the words of the late Fredric Jameson. Conspiracy reaches for a theory of the social world, of domination and the interrelation between different, disparate phenomena whose causes always seem to take place behind our backs. If antisemitism was the socialism of fools, is conspiracism a Marxism for the atomized and disempowered?

This sense of conspiracy reflects and reinforces this sense of powerlessness. As conspiracy sets out to map our conjuncture, it substitutes ambient powers for specific social relationships; it trades the omnipotence of elites for the discrete mechanisms that reproduce domination and exploitation. 

Conspiracy, usually, asks for deliverance from on high. If it points to an exit, it’s through the intervention of another more powerful actor; the swapping of one omnipotent force for another. Because, with conspiracy’s flatter pictures of the social landscape, its one-note ear for the larger symphony of social forces, what other intervention might be possible? As Klein explains a particularly popular variety, “QAnon and really even more vanilla MAGA proposes a comforting morality play: yes, everything is horrible but all we need to do is get the good guys to come in and get rid of the bad guys; then the nightmare will end and we can go back to living the American Dream.” In a strange way, the conspiracist structure of politics bears the traces of a sort of peaceful transfer of power, as a relatively inert citizenry withdraws and redistributes consent for another of the elect. 

Perhaps that’s because ideologies such as these are not mere ideas, but the terrain upon which the institutions and practices of the state are symbolized and represented in an imaginary form. While conspiracies, networked circuits of self-promotion, bizarre online forums, and viral posts on the internet might be thought through the lens of disinformation as a sort of foil to the rationality of the state, we might consider instead that they are a symptom of our state; we might say that the capitalist state, which secures the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist social relations, thereby producing our ignorance, is the material relation that is represented in ideology as conspiracy. Maybe conspiracy is what thinking the state looks like under conditions of disorganization.

Those in the grips of conspiracy, or even those who seem to support a reactionary project against their “interests” are not deluded. Usually, they are hardly dupes. When the powers of collective thought are decomposed and disorganized, the irrationality of conspiracy, or of submission to tyranny, is represented in ideology as an act of personal will. To understand conspiracy, to combat it, we are better off making sense of it instead with reference to a material analysis of institutions and organizations, and the array of powers making and remaking the world, ourselves included. 

It is striking that the best and most popular guides to organizing treat the activity as intrinsically pedagogical. Jane McAlevey has likened the role of an organizer to that of “radical political education” and has described unions as “schools for democracy.” For their differences in emphasis, approach, and the layer of organizer their work is usually aimed at, both she and the workshops from Labor Notes emphasize a robust popular-educational model of workplace mapping and charting, which draws on the workers to think collectively and collaboratively on where power is exercised, and what forces might be brought to bear on a discrete battle between worker and employer. 

McAlevey’s approach, popularized in her books Raising Expectations, No Shortcuts, and Bargaining to Win, underscores the particular importance of mass participation not only in the execution of a campaign, but also in the development of its strategy, which follows from a process of mapping the landscape of power at work and in the community. For McAlevey and others, organizing is a way to think together. In her best-read book, No Shortcuts, she explains that

smart research should augment, not replace, workers as the primary source of leverage against employers. Smart union and social movements’ research departments could shift from staff-only corporate-focused research to worker and staff-led geographic power-structure analysis that involves workers themselves in the research process. With workers as research partners, the strategy of understanding who holds power — how and why, and how to change the balance — can be arrived at for far less money and without recourse to highly paid consultants. And in the process workers can learn about power in their own community and make informed decisions whether in a workplace fight or in the voting booth. . . . The greatest damage to our movements today has been the shift in the agent of change from rank-and-file workers and ordinary people to cape-wearing, sword-wielding, swashbuckling staff.

Not only does the effort of organizations to facilitate collective thinking produce better analysis for the campaigns, it also produces a different kind of worker too. Against the ambience of powers, we have a discrete analysis of ones’ immediate theater of conflict; opposed to the sense of powerlessness is a socialized plan of how we will develop leverage against our antagonist. 

So the royal road to ideology critique is mass organization. To begin to produce a map of our shared world outside one’s silo, drawing in the intelligence of others, and to try and push and pull and tug on it such that the world around you begins to turn — to record not just the possibility, but the actuality of our having changed it — drives out the paranoia that rushes into isolation and replaces it instead with a new knowledge, born of the group efforts at thinking together, that may produce other effects entirely. Leonardo Vilchis, cofounder of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and Union de Vecinos and the coauthor of Abolish Rent, talks about the need to “act your way into new kinds of thinking.” Our organizations, however modestly, are taking the first steps to do just that.