Moloch Theory

‘Moloch Theory’ offers tools for understanding how power works in our strange situation.

We live in a corpse-world birthed by the brutal alliance between global financial capital and the biopolitical state — capital (M-C-M’) continuously accelerates its own reproduction, converting humans into both its zealous servants and machinic components, all while the biopolitical state gradually tightens its tender loving embrace in response to our increasingly hysterical demands to be cared for — to be loved. How can we theorize our situation?

Any vital response to our moment (and one which prepares us for the next) must include a critique of both prongs, maintaining an awareness that Daddy Capital and Mommy State are constantly playing us against each other (even while they’re doing it behind the scenes). Daddy demands more work, while Mommy demands more of you. At the end of the day, you’re expected to trust the experts and get back to work. There will be punishments for any back talk.

The contemporary Left has fallen into a trap of its own success (cowardly failure?) by becoming entrenched in powerful institutions. They sought to capture the halls of power in order to change things, but it was those very halls which captured them instead. Addicted to material comfort and psychological rewards, they have accepted a largely performative role which grows increasingly disconnected from the reality of the middle and lower classes.

However, while the contemporary Right’s outsider status has delivered it the mandate of the people and a platform for drawing attention to the contradictions and hypocrisy which drive and uphold the current uni-party system, the actually-existing organs of Rightist politics have been captured by shadow money, social media shysters, and an aching nostalgia for a fantastical past. Even as populism is ascendant, many leaders on the Right have not relinquished their life long fealty to tax cuts, deregulation, big business, and endless wars.

At Moloch Theory, I turn to a lineage of oddball political theorists who don’t fit on the Left or the Right — Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich, James Burnham, David Graeber, and others. These thinkers are critical of the technology of bureaucracy and its core fantasies, but they also use imagination and experimentation to devise new forms of concrete human freedom.

Check out these videos where I explore key themes in Moloch Theory: