A Conscious Conspiracy

An Interview with Vince Garton (2025)

Note: This interview was conducted on the 20th January, 2025.

L&L: Your book, Aeons Without History, first seemed to be coming out in late 2023, and then much like yourself appeared to vanish without a trace; also, like yourself, it seems to have taken a protracted detour to the East. What can you speak to, without breaking any confidentiality and what not, regarding the book and the development its taken since initial announcement, especially now that China has become such a locus for enthusiastic theoretical investigation?

V. Garton: The original plan for Aeons Without History developed at the end of 2021, at a time when an endless series of restrictions and retrenchments made it seem like the world might be plunging into a state of indefinite stagnation. This explains the projected title of the book: it was motivated by the need to account for a time in which it seemed like no time was really passing - in Hegel’s words a ‘repetition of the same majestic ruin’. Of course this feeling was enhanced by being stuck in Europe and specifically in Britain, where, shall we say, the sentiment hangs thicker than in most of the rest of the world.

The course of empirical events disrupted this original project along several vectors. First came my definitive break with academia. After a period of quiescence during the high pandemic, at the start of 2022 I joined a Singaporean-backed startup based on the concept of predictive social media, eventually - by the middle of the year - assuming oversight of its technical operations as CTO. This is about as different an environment from academia as you can possibly imagine - a place where competing demands for technical agility, rigorous leadership, and complete independence all of a sudden had been thrust into the centre of my life. This, as you might expect, derailed any plans I might have had to work on the book or any other public writing. Though the startup inevitably folded after about 18 months, I was able to parlay the crash course I’d received in engineering into my current posting as a senior software developer in the energy industry - no doubt a far more respectable vocation, in any case a more stable one.

So I resumed work on the book only at the turn of 2024 after a substantial gap, by which time the original project seemed far less relevant.

By that time I had accumulated (beginning during Covid) objectively a fairly enormous online social network in China. I was spending, and now continue to spend, much of my time during the day in conversations with dozens of friends and contacts all across the Chinese social spectrum, with foreign academics, a migrant worker in the suburbs of Shanghai, gaokao candidates in villages in Yunnan and Shanxi; on one occasion an afternoon in heated discussion with a top-level officer of one of the largest Chinese companies. My current job has also finally afforded me the leisure to spend a large part of my time in mainland China in person, travelling, observing, and talking - which I have of course exploited to the fullest extent.

On the other hand, and at the same time, both in social media and now in the energy sector I have had a front-row seat spectating the enormous successes of a clearly innovative and immensely dynamic Chinese industrial economy at a very high level.

Running through all of these encounters was the shattering disconnect between what was in front of my eyes and ears and the grim, repetitive drumbeat of tedious commentary by officially approved China commenters - those law professors, financiers, anthropologists and political actors whose profound ignorance of the West had already been clear to me in my prior life as a student of history of political thought and political economy but whose parochialism and intellectual pathologies could only now resolve into their monstrous full dimensions.

Recognising my obvious inability to ‘explain China’, or to pretend to make worthwhile commentary within the domain of Chinese philosophy itself, the drive to explain the obvious indigestibility of China to the Western mind in the context of the dominant importance of China in the 21st century has moved firmly to the centre of whatever intellectual project I can be said to have.

The second key change to the book project came at a philosophical level - in a happy coincidence with my evolving feelings on China - with my parallel reading of Kojève, who I now firmly believe is the most important intellectual of the last one hundred years and an unknown prophet of our current conjuncture, alongside Xunzi - the heterodox poet-scholar whose work at the junction of classical Confucianism and what is called ‘Legalism’ can be said to have birthed the Chinese empire. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that most of my free time over the last few years has been taken up in an eccentric combination of reading classical Chinese poetry and philosophy and intense study of Kojève’s enormous unfinished history of philosophy along with the Greek, Roman, and modern German thinkers it discusses. Now, where, for Hegel-Kojève, the millennial story of Western philosophy is the abolition of essence that culminates in a revolutionary terror against the concentration of all transcendence in the Kantian thing-in-itself, it struck me all of a sudden while reading Xunzi that the ruin of transcendence is where Chinese philosophy begins.

More serious Sinologists have already noted something like this at a macrohistorical level, that ‘Confucianism’ begins with a rebellion against the failure of the mandate of Heaven, understood as literally an astronomical phenomenon observed at the turning of the Zhou, to manifest in timely fashion on behalf of the prophet-king Confucius. Xunzi draws this out with exacting, dreadful rigour: the constellations may be fallen, he says in the Fu chapter of the Xunzi, time may be out of joint, but it is the responsibility of the Confucian scholar to call the entire cosmos to order. More than this, he draws elsewhere a radical distinction between the ‘Elegant Confucian’ (Ru), one who merely conforms to an inherited system of ritual, and the ‘Great Confucian’ who unites their absolutely self-sufficient will with Heaven not through mere conformity but by transforming reality itself. All of this, for Kojève, is already the very end of philosophy! So if China is the start of history, as Hegel argues, then why would history ever have left? Why is it not the end? This is certainly not a question that Hegel managed to answer, at least if his endless, spiralling attempts at histories of China are any indication.

I should leave any further explanation of all this to the book, but that is broadly where it is now: fundamentally, it is still a book about history and its unfolding or lack of it. But now the encounter with China that once formed only an incidental theme has utterly saturated it - an overwhelming, totally consuming encounter with China - and I am forced to account, reflexively, for that very fact.

L: If China is ‘misunderstood’ by the West, is the West ‘understood’ by China? There’s articles every now and then about an uptick in classics education and European philosophy and that kind of thing over there, but more to the point, in Kojève the end of history is something observed, catalogued, and indexed by this figure of the wise man. He’s the proof of the end of history. Does the figure exist in the Communist Party, in the President?

G: Kojève writes that in the universal and homogeneous state at the end of history only two people are completely and actually satisfied: the Head of State (‘Napoleon’), who acts, and the Sage who comprehends those actions (‘Hegel’ - thus ‘Revelation = Napoleon + Hegel’). But precisely because of the homogeneity of the state, where the Head of State is in fact a cipher of the state as a whole and their concrete person is interchangeable with any other citizen, every member participates in their actions, which are ‘étatique’, actions of the state as such. This is a useful framework for understanding the self-conceptualised role of the Chinese President/General Secretary. The universal state, refracting the limitless ‘vanity’ of ‘Napoleon’ and imposed as a field of force that suppresses and sublates the annihilating background threat of Terror left behind by the collapse of transcendence - in the end that state consumes and overcomes the Head of State’s human reality.

Xi Jinping, more than any other Communist Chinese leader, is a constructed image on precisely these lines: rather than a personality in his own right, he is a signifier that simply concentrates in one place the identity, the simulative capacity, and the embodied knowledge of the Communist Party as permanent conspiracy and as ‘institutional emperor’ - facing the South from the darkness, imposing its measure upon the world and transforming it. We can recall how Xi’s speeches make it seem as though he has fluent command of every science and has read every work of world literature ever written, which speaks precisely to your point - in any case Jiang Shigong argues on similar lines when he says that the Communist Party is the immortal body of the Chinese Head of State in the sense of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’. That total embodied knowledge is the ‘Sagely’ or Hegelian component of the universal state, though clearly I think the contemporary Chinese state is at the moment rather more Napoleonic than Hegelian. Anyway, it is certainly that process of observation and indexing that is the very core of the Communist Party’s activity, which is concretely embodied in its Head of State.

More generally, as Boris Groys remarks, every serious Communist leader must also at least present themselves as a philosopher, and Communist governance is precisely the realisation of the Platonic regime of the Sage. So it is unsurprising that, using the conceptual inventory of Marxism, the Chinese government has funnelled enormous energy into constructing and promoting a synthesis of Chinese and Western philosophy. This is why essentially all interesting philosophical work in China is explicitly aligned in one form or another with the Party, and equally why Chinese liberals who attempt (in fact unsuccessfully) to escape the discursive field of that system tend to end up with a rather weak, indeed self-mutilated grasp of the intellectual history and political economy of the West by comparison.

On the broader question of China’s understanding of the West - and humouring for a moment the concepts of ‘China understanding the West’ and ‘the West understanding China’ which are at one level obviously nonsensical - I think the median Chinese certainly has more knowledge of the West than the other way round, and I’ve been baffled by various attempts that I’ve seen to deny this. It is simply true that the average countryside student in Shanxi has a more sophisticated analysis of the West than the average tenured China expert in Brooklyn does of China. This is, at the very least, an obvious consequence of American cultural dominance - the existence of which it’s frankly puerile to deny, whether in support or defiance of it. But it is also, at a deeper level, a consequence of the deep, intellectually overwhelming trauma of the encounter with the West in China which does not yet have any general inverse counterpart in the West itself.

L: It’s almost a truism nowadays in certain parts of X (and online more generally), shared by both the successors of the old American Libertarian Right and ascendent elements amongst the Marxists / Post-Marxists, that the West is as much economically coordinated, determined, and planned as China is. I find it useful to refer to the old Marxist paradigm of consciousness, that ‘Communism’ in China is merely the conscious articulation of the West’s ‘Capitalism’. Taking into account your comprehension of China, can Western states reorient themselves, become economically and politically ‘conscious’ in this regard? What I’m asking is, how do Western political agents respond to China on a more practical, political level? What would it mean to ‘learn from China’ for those presently smothered by this rather oppressive, sentimental malaise seemingly everywhere in Europe, Britain, North America, etc?

G: Let me start with a tangential point - I have always found the phrase ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which of course has the status of a meme in the West, to be a rather unfortunate translation of the original term 中国特色社会主义. This is because 特色 is far less marked, linguistically, than its rendering ‘with … characteristics’. We would probably not translate 陕西特色美食 as ‘cuisine with Shaanxi characteristics’ unless we were being droll. Something like ‘China’s particular socialism’ or even just ‘China’s socialism’ is more accurate to the implications of the original, that is, we are not talking about a mutation of the head of the noun phrase but rather a specification.

I mention this because the idea that the posthistorical Chinese system is ‘Chinese’ at the level of inherent essence is not correct. It is true that the Communist Party no longer seeks to evangelise its domestic practices in the way it once did under Mao - but it still strives to bend the arc of human development towards its own teleology in a more material fashion through its continued support of globalisation and its industrial policy. Similarly I don’t believe, in contrast perhaps to some Heideggerian analysis we’ve seen recently, that Chinese philosophy is valuable because it is Chinese or because it is different, but rather precisely because its object is the same, and its methods and deductions which are necessarily limited to the argumentative vector field in which human discourse unfolds are also ultimately the same in perhaps different sequence, which indeed makes all the difference. In other words the real difference of Chinese philosophy, viewed from the West, is the course of its development from and to the very grounds of its similarity. Kojève, of course, says that the function and reality of the universal and homogeneous state is the sublation of all particular differences, all Besonderheiten like nation and class and family. Therefore if we want to see what is, dimly, posthistorical in China we need to turn away from any supposed specifically and irreducibly Chinese content.

The idea that Chinese communism is the conscious rearticulation of Western capitalism is excellent I think. This is the goal of the Communist Party as regime: to replace the endlessly successful conspiracy of capital with its own, conscious, therefore philosophical conspiracy, which involves a process of ruthless dialectical identification and contradiction. If Western capital manifests a kind of socialism in more or less mute forms, in its self-constellation in the form of a Metacartel, its subordination to the credit pipework of the central bank, and so forth, in China this process is highly conscious, explicit, and accelerated - that is in effect the central conceit of China’s socialism.

It is hard to say what or how to learn from this exactly. I’ve had many Chinese friends tell me that Britain or the West in general needs its own Communist Party and its own revolution, but any success there is doubtless some way off despite their excitement at seeing videos of Trot demonstrators in Cambridge and the like. Moreover, it is in a sense not important, in the sense that whatever it is Westerners are doing is far less relevant than what happens to the subalterns of the international order - as Palestine has demonstrated - and in comparison to the enormous task of finally undoing the residue of essential reality that forces those contradictions to remain open. From a narrowly political perspective, my hunch is that simply copying the forms and conclusions of Chinese policy is unlikely to do anything good in the West. This ends up in the parody industrial policy that has emerged in the United States, which is obsessed with the mere act of spending enormous sums of money on things like semiconductor chips to placate the fixations of particular sectors of American public life: huge amounts of marketing, less in the way of concrete outcomes. Indeed America’s contribution to the epochal task of managing climate change, and in turn bootstrapping planetary human development as a whole, seems to have essentially collapsed - even as the Chinese energy sector attains escape velocity.

Rather than trying and failing to one-up China at its own ‘game’, which in any case reflects qualities of China’s particular status that will eventually fall away if it is successful - or, worse yet, simply standing athwart history and demanding that China stop - it is probably more productive to think through the role of Western countries in the future world order that is left behind by the Chinese industrial vortex. In fact, at a level of policy, there are some vague intimations in this direction in places like Spain, though they are very fragile. For our part as individuals I think we are best served by rejecting and even humiliating the paranoid-neurotic response to China that became common after 2019, and by learning to adopt the ironic attitude towards the substantiality of reality that Chinese people already have in abundance - by allowing ourselves a certain faculty of daydreaming which can more easily develop into the more serious task of generative simulation. As with ‘China’s socialism’, none of this is ‘essentially’ Chinese, although its presence in China has a civilisational magnitude. And it is then, and only then, that we can apply ourselves to the task of transforming what we have been given.

L: You referred to “certain sectors” of the American public regarding a desire for industrial renewal, however illusory the results. Since BlackRock’s departure from the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, Zuckerberg on Rogan, etc., a lot of the ‘commentators’ have been left quite confused, leftists and rightists both. A man like Alex Jones finds himself caught in bizarre knots defending Trump’s authenticity amidst the ‘de-wokeification’ and integration of Big Tech into MAGA. The apparently masculine turn amongst tech CEOs and asset managers could be as simple as the ideological gloss for a lite-Bonapartism (an attempt, at least), here for a brief stint to develop the necessary energy infrastructure required for further AI development, so all the fluff from the past decade or so gets wiped off for a while. But what do you make of this supposed ‘break’ in the American elite’s ideology and self-image?

G: I also find the rapid decomposition of American liberalism since the election fascinating - meaning the term in the narrow party-political sense. Certainly there is a sense in which Trump’s election victory, much larger than anticipated, has cemented Trumpism as a fixture in the American political landscape and forced the entire country to reorient itself around it. At the same time, the entire period since the epochal Trump–Biden debate has been one long debacle for the Democratic Party, which has sunk now to the worst approval ratings it has ever recorded. I suspect very much that the origins of this immense failure are more than simply bad tactics, though certainly many Democrat actors have proven to be extraordinarily inept tacticians. Perhaps its origins actually lie in the same roots that gave us the rotten fruit of the unlimited slaughter of Gaza and the grim, neurotic crusade against China - all those signature policies and ‘accomplishments’ of the Biden administration - namely the impulse to dress up a brutal, self-justifying claim to hegemony in a threadbare cloak of unlimited universalism.

The peculiarly noxious contradiction between the language of universalism and the enforcement of the claim to masterly status - ‘Yimbys for Harris’ sign-wavers with rainbow flags smirkingly justifying the slaughter of Palestinians all the way to the White House - has no doubt been too much to bear for many young Americans. On the other hand, from what we have seen, Trump’s geopolitics may be brutal, but he does not project this brutality into a cosmic religion as do Sullivan, Biden, and their cohort. In this sense, ironically, he appears friendlier to genuine universalism, less pagan in his outlook, because he sees the United States in more realistic terms as one imperium competing among others, as ‘the best country’ in contingent terms rather than an essential master-state.

That is all something of a digression, but it sets the stage for that process of decomposition you’ve highlighted. The New Year’s sun has dawned over the wreck of the Biden administration; torn by crashing intellectual contradictions and obvious political failures, the mainstream of American liberalism has lost any reason to persist - has in fact completely discredited the corrupt claim to masterliness on which it had come to depend. It makes good sense for anyone not already entirely captured by this clearly malfunctioning intellectual apparatus to hasten away from it. Now, the most natural way to do this is simply to enact a total inversion of norms, rather like the one imputed to Moses by Egyptian and Roman historians, and perhaps thereby to restore the masterliness without the hypocrisy. But that would be impossible without also inverting the social and economic order, that is, without an actual revolution.

The current transformation of American elite ideology may be read as something like an attempt to limit the catharsis, a partial, transformist attempt to forestall a transvaluation of all values by picking the lowest-hanging fruit - by dropping the ‘woke’ signifiers that had become entangled in this intellectually corrupt form of liberalism, most obviously, but also by making a show of devoting themselves to the transformation of reality by grand gestures of industrial policy, sometimes by an unabashed return to brainless, eschatological tech boosterism. I suspect the compact between Trump and the tech sector in particular will have difficulty weathering the despotic force of Trump’s untimely and unpredictable personality over the next years. Perhaps these elites will be forced to transform much further, and in quite different directions, in order to survive - not least also because they will need to cope with ever-escalating psychological China shock…

L: Going back to where we started, you briefly commented on Britain as the most severely afflicted by this stagnation condition the West as a whole suffers. Maybe the lack of a modern revolution, or rather the overwhelming ‘success’ of 1688, has left it crippled, immobile. This is especially ironic, given the complete embarrassment history has dealt to a certain kind of stadialist orthodox Marxism, that Britain had been destined to bear the standard of the future, and usher in the world to come which China, by all sincere accounts, is in fact pursuing. If this is all the prelude to our ‘century of humiliation’, then in a way might we expect an equivalent event to the Chinese on the other side?

G: I suppose this is a variant of the ‘Nairn–Anderson thesis’, that Britain is stagnant because it failed to fully overthrow feudalism. I find David Edgerton’s work on modern British political economy, which in some ways is directed against that thesis, fairly convincing. Edgerton has a very interesting argument: in effect, he says that the modern UK should be understood as another postcolonial (or at least postimperial) state that emerged from the rubble of the British Empire. The initial postcolonial order, which was the high tide of the welfare state, was in place for a few decades until Thatcher, and even more importantly New Labour, which brought in a kind of parodic revival of the imperial political economy. London was flung open to foreign investors and became an open market rather more like what it was in 1920 than in 1970, with the exception that now it was dominated by foreign capital making ventures in Britain rather than British capital making ventures overseas. What this means is that rather than just a vista of stagnation stretching on from 1688, we have something more time-tangled, a constant back and forth as these different tendencies - corresponding to different factions of capital and the British managerial elite - make themselves felt in their various directions. There is an unhealed wound that separates national Britain from the British Empire and holds them in contradiction.

Jiang Shigong - in my opinion the most serious political theoretician of contemporary China - somewhere describes the British Empire as the most perfect political order in human history. This isn’t because he’s been reading too much Douglas Murray: what he means is that the tumult of the 17th century crystallised into the most pure, stable, and constitutionally balanced vehicle of liberal capitalism that has ever existed. This formation was able to dominate the global market, and of course to subjugate, open, and destroy the millennial Chinese empire with nonchalant ease. For Jiang, even the French Revolution itself began as a frustrated reaction to the defeat France suffered in its trade war with the British Empire in the 18th century (a similar thesis, incidentally, has been developed at length by Michael Sonenscher). In that sense, the entire course of the permanent crisis of modern political thought begins not with the Revolution in France, but in London - and American independence, of course, was another consequence of the struggle between those two states.

For Jiang, the shared community of mankind which is the stated objective of China’s international policy constitutes a large-scale, global political order similar to the British Empire. In a sense, it would in fact recuperate the British Empire at a subsequent socialist stage of development: where the British Empire was the preeminent manifestation of liberal capitalism, whose shadow still hangs over the world, the shared community of mankind, or coming world-empire, that is, the universal and homogeneous state, would wholly manifest and balance the posthistorical configuration of political economy. Perhaps the shared community of mankind would then allow Britain to attain that ‘other side’: a redemption of empire in which the roles of master and slave have at last been overcome, an end to the contradiction between Britain’s national and imperial imaginaries.

For now, it is a cliché that Britain struggles to overcome the shadow of the British empire. If Jiang is to be believed, it shares that condition with China. Certainly within the UK now there are many ‘feudal’ holdovers, as anyone who’s investigated the pattern of landholding in London can tell you. But at the same time, all countries everywhere must deal with the dreams and nightmares of their own traditions. To some extent that is no bad thing, since that is the fuel of the engines of simulation that transform dreams into reality and back again - the material of the artificially intelligent universal state. Like I’ve said, we could certainly learn from China how to transform and play with our history.