No More Learning

Enough has been written about Lenin's admiration for the organization of the German mail system. If one wants to immerse one- self into the real socialist philistinism, one should focus on the mechanisms of subordination within the German authoritarian state around 1900. Lenin himself never concealed the fact that he was convinced that the organiza- tion of the Russian "potentials of protest" needed to pursue the same path that had been traveled by the state capitalism of the Germans and by the strict organization of the Prussian war industry after 1914.
Neither the model character and paradigmatic influence of late-feudal and bourgeois forms of organizing the army nor the administration of the development of the Leninist party have ever been seriously called into question. Rosa Luxemburg was thus not wrong when she warned early on against Lenin's Germanophile preference for "ultra-centralism. " However,
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the reference to such role models conceals what was genuinely new in orga- nized communism. As already stated, the specific nature of communism can only be understood according to its effective design, more a banking establishment than a military or bureaucratic entity. To dissolve this appar- ent paradox one needs to dismiss the prejudice that banks exclusively deal with monetary transactions. In reality the function of a bank consists in covering a much broader domain of phenomena. Analogous processes are present wherever cultural and psychopolitical entities such as scientific theories, acts of faith, works of art, political acts of protest, and so on are accumulated. Once a certain degree of accumulation has been reached, they are transformed from mere treasure to capital. If one concedes the exis- tence of a nonmonetary system of banking, it becomes understandable that banks of a different kind, as collection points of affect, can operate with the rage of others just as well as monetary banks operate with the money of their customers. By doing just this, they relieve their clients of the dif- ficulty of having to take their own initiative, while nevertheless promising gains. What in the one case are monetary capital gains are in the other case thymotic premiums.
Such banks generally present themselves as political parties or move- ments, in particular parties on the left of the political spectrum. The trans- formation from raging impulses into "constructive politics" can rightly be seen in each camp as the magnum opus of psychopolitics. (Additionally, it could be argued that Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems and in particular its emphasis on the differentiation of subsystems, such as law, science, art, economy, the health system, religion, pedagogy, and so on, suggest a specific form of regional capitalization as well as a specific cor- responding bank formation. )
Economics defines a bank as a collection point for capital {Kapitalsam- melstelle). Its main task consists in administering the balances of its clients for the sake of the preservation and increase of value. Practically speaking, this means that the deposits of customers, which are fruitless monetary treasures when deposited, are transformed immediately into capital. Con- sequently, they are invested in profit-oriented forms of business. One of the most important functions of a bank consists in providing a risk buffer, which allows clients to partake in successful investments while protecting them whenever possible against disappointments. This arrangement is con-
trolled by the interest rate, which naturally decreases proportionately to the
35
level of risk control.
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In our context it is important to keep in mind that the temporal pro- file of money is transformed in an important respect through the transition from its treasury form to its capital form. The simple treasury is still fully subject to the preservation of value. By keeping together the material results of past yields and plundering, it has a purely conservative function (not to mention, for the moment, the imaginary values connected to the creation of this treasury). It negates the passing of time in order to secure wealth in a permanent present. If one is standing in front of a treasure chest or if one enters a treasure chamber, one literally experiences what is meant by pres- ence. The time form created by the present treasure is thus the duration sustained by the past, the duration as the continuous present of what has been accumulated—sublime boredom is the reflex experienced.
Capital, on the other hand, does not know the dull happiness of accu- mulated presence. Because of its dynamic mode of being, it is sentenced to constant externalization. It can only present itself episodically as a virtu- ally present sum, as, for example, on those days when one's balance is to be determined. Because it is constantly occupied with using itself, there is no point in time when it is in fall possession of itself. The consequence is that it essentially brings about "futurist" effects. It creates a chronic antici- patory excitement for what comes, an excitement that manifests itself on each new level achieved as a renewed expectation of gains. The temporal form of capital is the short and diverting period of accumulation, which constitutes a permanent crisis. It is thus exclusively the dynamic of capital that accomplishes what Trotsky wanted to entrust to a political leadership because of a confusion of concepts: the "permanent revolution" exactly characterizes the modus vivendi of capital, not the actions of a cadre. Its true mission is to make sure that the extended continuation of its own movements is not jeopardized. It takes itself as called upon to overthrow all conditions in which customs, morals, and legislature stand in the way of its victory march. Therefore there is no capitalism without the triumphant expansion of a lack of respect, which cultural critics have been giving the pseudophilosophical title of "nihilism" since the nineteenth century. In reality, the cult of nothingness is simply the necessary side effect of mon- etary monotheism for which all other values are merely idols and illusions. The theology of this cult of nothingness can, by the way, also be devel- oped by drawing on the trinity. What is added to the Father is "money," to the Son "success," and to the Holy Spirit "prominence. " According to the capitalist logic, the banks have the key role in creating a world that
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functions exclusively according to money because only these agencies of permanently productive unrest are able to successfully collect and steer monetary currents.
THE IDEA OF A COLLETING POINT AS SUCH IS OF COURSE MUCH OLDER than that of the bank. As is well known, the bank gained its still recognizable outlines only since the early Italian Renaissance. Its history reaches back to the era of the so-called Neolithic revolutions, during which the transi- tion to the cultivation of grain developed simultaneously with the praxis of storing supplies. There was a long line of technical and mental innovations that corresponded to this transition, innovations like the construction of storehouses as well as the practice of housekeeping with scarce resources in stock. (We should also not forget the invention of wars of conquest as a second harvest by accessing the supplies of others. )
The most important reflex in the history of ideas from early agrarian cultures of supply keeping is revealed in the harvest. The peasant form of life is marked by a habitus that penetrates everything: the annual waiting for the moment of ripeness. The consequence of harvesting is the inven- tion of a supply as the basis of communal life within the circle of the year. The archetype of storage imposes on the intelligence of the first farmers and civil servants the operational model of "saving," "dividing the supplies wisely throughout the year," and "redistributing. " If the scheme of harvest becomes metaphorically available, all forms of treasure can be stockpiled as supplies. In the beginning this happened to weapons and jewelry and extended to include the treasures of healing, the arts, law, and knowledge. With these resources a culture secures its symbolic survival.
Martin Heidegger suggested connecting the philosophical concept of logos, which derives from the Greek verb "legein" to the agrarian schema of "Lese" which means to pick or to select but also to read and interpret. Consequently, the logical understanding of writings and the interpreting of context would in some sense be a symbolic continuation of harvesting. This suggests that the form of the accumulation of supplies is mirrored in the constitution of the domain of knowledge, in which the seeds of tradition are supposed to ripen during subsequent generations so as to be collected again and again during the harvest of knowledge. In these circumstances philoso- phers (who are usually exclusively dependent on urban contexts) could still imagine themselves as hybrid peasants.
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Heidegger's theory of Logos as "Lese des Sinns" a reading or interpre- tation of the meaning, thus remains stuck in a premodern conception of knowledge. By holding on to the ancient and medieval archetype of an accu- mulated supply or treasure, the thinker refused to accept the modernization of the production of knowledge through research. He sensed a fatal disfigu- ration of the "originally grown," pretechnical mode of the being of things through this modernization. In reality, research aims at an organized accu- mulation of knowledge and innovation, notably in scientific academies and modern universities. Contemporary research is thus surprisingly analogous to the unfolding of the banking industry in the more recent financial econ- omy. Scientific academies and modern universities play the role of authen- tic knowledge banks. Traditional banks cooperate as partners and observers of corporations. In the cognitive domain the managerial function is taken over by research institutions. Once the treasury form of knowledge—as it was embodied by pansophist scholars of the Baroque era up until Leibniz— passes over into the form of capital, it may no longer be accumulated as an inactive supply. The educative rule "earn it in order to own it" is suspended for the kind of knowledge that is made dynamic for the purpose of research. It is no longer an acquired possession but serves as the base material for its extended reproduction, like modern money, which, instead of being stored in chests or under the mattress, returns to the sphere of circulation in order to become productive on higher levels.
This change in the form of knowledge is not an innovation of the twen- tieth century, though it was during this age that the research institutions began to use terms such as "economy of knowledge" and "cognitive sci- ence" in order to claim a right to such concepts as the "knowledge society. " The process of knowledge is essentially premised on assumptions analogous to capital production, since the available supply of scientific knowledge has been developed for extended reproduction through organized research. The establishment of scientific academies, which Leibniz wholly supported, is one of the main symptoms of this transition.
For knowledge, research corresponds to investing within the monetary sphere. Research implies the controlled risking of what has already been earned for the chance of future gains. One expects that a graph of such risk operations would depict continuing accumulations in spite of cyclical fluctuations. It is admittedly the case that knowledge capital, just as mon- etary capital, experiences specific crises in which its future productivity is called into question. The solution for such crises usually consists in what
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recent sociologists of knowledge refer to as a "paradigm change. " In the course of development of such paradigm changes, older cognitive values are destroyed, while business continues more intensively than ever before, albeit with different basic conceptual parameters.
ANALOGOUS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT MORE RECENT ART HISTORY ARE possible. Beginning at the latest in the early nineteenth century (its prehis- tory dates back to the fifteenth century), there has been a transition from the treasure form to the capitalist form of accumulation in the domain of artistic creation. This transition can best be observed when studying the his- tory of the museum and its changes of function. We know of these pro- cesses from the flourishing science of museology as well as through the more recent studies surrounding curating. These disciplines established themselves during the last half of the twentieth century as the national and global economies of the art world, even if the praxis of curating only rarely takes into account its modern theoretical foundations. However, just as workers at a bank can do excellent work without mastering the general logic of the banking industry, the curators of the contemporary art world and culture are capable of making themselves useful without reflecting on the larger movements of artistic capital.
It is mainly thanks to the research of Boris Groys that it is possible to reconstruct with precise concepts the endogenous capitalization of the art
36
system.
is important here is not so much the interaction of money and art on the art market. Neither is it the so-called commodity character of the artwork, which had a central position in the now almost extinct form of Marxist art criticism. In reality, the art system has been internally transformed into a structure analogous to the system of capital, including the corresponding forms of interaction of entrepreneurialism and banking functions. In this process, the results of past artistic production constitute a stock of capital from which contemporary artistic producers can borrow in order to use this loan to produce new and sufficiently different works. Groys has referred to the capital stock of accumulated objects of art as an "archive. " However, in contrast to Foucault's use of this term, Groys does not want to focus ironi- cally on the gray, dusty, dead side of the reservoir, but its living, progressive, and decision-guiding tendencies. In the last instance, only the state or the imaginary International of states qualifies for the position of housing this
The endogenous character of these processes emphasizes that what
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"archive" because it is the guarantor of culture, whereas private collections can only assure their relative value in reference to public collections and their virtual synthesis within the archive.
The archive is the intelligent form of the imaginary museum. While Andre Malrauxs well-known coinage stopped at the blunt idea of ever- present global treasure, Groys identifies the archive as the epitome of the modernized high culture, a depository with the function of self-investing capital. Thus Groys identifies the reason the contemporary art world is intelligible only as the participation of artists and managers in the restlessly expanded reproduction of the archive. In reality the archive, which is con- stantly present as background, forces upon the ongoing production of art the necessity constantly bringing about expansions of the definition of art. The results of artistic production are evaluated by the agents of the archive. Whenever there is a sufficient level of differentiation among the stored mate-
37
rial, its results will be absorbed into the collection.
site of art can now enter art's sanctuary. Since this system has penetrated the markets, the popular remark that something has become "fit for the museum" (museumsreif) now means the opposite of what it was intended to mean. Whatever has found its way into the museum or, more generally, into the archive becomes part of the eternal recurrence of the new. However, just like every accumulated stock of value, the archive is also subject to the risk of devaluation or extinction. In particular, the appearance of new artis- tic genres as a consequence of the development of new media sparks crises,
38
which are usually overcome by the archive through a revaluation.
FINALLY, THE CREATION OF A TREASURY, WHICH IS THE THRESHOLD of a formal banking system, can also be identified in the religious domain. What Christians have been calling since the first century of their existence the "ecclesia" is not simply an assemblage of people connected by shared doctrines of faith. From its beginning, the concept of the church also referred to a gathering point for pieces of testimony that provided evidence for the reality of salvation within profane time. The ecclesiastical gathering movement began at the latest during the second century with the collection of gospels and apostolic writings. Their condensation into the canonic New Testament possessed a high polemical value early on because the history of the "true religion" proceeded as a permanent defensive battle against aber- rations. What was added to the evangelical nucleus as part of a continuous
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What was the oppo-
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accumulation were the apostolic stories from the early mission. After- ward, the stories of martyrdom from the era of the "suppressed church" were added. The effects of apocalypticism and the enduring expectation of an immanent return were also responsible for these additions. Since then, church history has always remained in some sense a history of martyrdom. The happy epochs of the church are the empty pages of martyrology. (The Martyrologicum Romanum, a literary ossuary of the entire history of the faith, encompasses in its new edition of 2001 no less than 6,990 entries. It provides a treasury of testimonies to document Christian willingness to sac- rifice from the oldest persecutions through the twentieth century. ) What follows are the vitae of saints, the legends of desert fathers, and the countless life histories of the blessed and exemplary. This edifying collection of Chris- tian exempla is completed by the doctrinal treasure of conciliatory remarks (with the "Denzinger" as the ossuary of dogmatism), receiving its volumi- nous manifestations in the article of the accredited theologians. Finally, the chronicle of bishops and the history of orders and missions add a colorful archive to the glaring treasures of faith.
Apart from the council of the bishops and doctors, authority thus always also means, according to Catholicism, the glamour of the "treasure of the Church. " Thanks to a 2,000-year-old accumulation of ever new exempli- fications, this treasure must bear witness to the "reality of salvation" as it is present in the ecclesia. However, it is questionable whether the Catholic administration of these "realities" is capable of bringing about the effective transition from the treasury to the capital form, because the Church's con- cern for orthodoxy severely inhibits the reinvestment of traditional values in innovative projects. And yet the idea of an expanded reproduction of the salvation treasure is not foreign to contemporary Catholics. John Paul II answered the challenge of modernity in his own way. In the time of the declining success of the company, an important segment of sacred capi- tal, the family of saints, was increased by more than 100 percent. The more than 483 sanctifications (in addition to 1,268 beatifications) during his term of office can only be appropriately understood as part of an encompass- ing offensive aimed at transforming the static salvation treasury into opera- tive salvation capital. Church historians have calculated that John Paul II's canonizations alone are more numerous than those of the entire history of the Church since the Middle Ages. Without a doubt, the significance of this pope will be determined primarily based on his role in mobilizing the Church's treasure.
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The allusion to this treasure of testimonies makes clear that the historic success of Christianity was advanced through more than the construction of a metaphysical revenge bank, which I have discussed in detail in the previ- ous chapter. Its historical success is also attributable to a process that could perhaps best be described as a construction of a treasury of love, perhaps even as the creation of a world bank of salvation. Its results are shared by those worldly people who do not have any interest in the salvation treasures of the Church but are ready to admit that successful "societies" have to carefully regenerate and reinvest their "social capital. " Even non-Christians should be able to understand why the processes that have been laid out here could be interpreted from the internal perspective of the Church as the work of the Holy Spirit. For my purpose it is sufficient to demonstrate the reality of a nonmonetary banking system even in the case of the Church. What is acceptable for works of love should be endorsed for works of rage.
COMINTERN: THE WORLD BANK OF RAGE AND THE FASCIST PEOPLE'S BANKS
THE FOLLOWING OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE INSTALLMENT OF A globally operative rage bank gain more consistency in light of the back- ground of a general phenomenology of "treasure creation" (Schatzbildun- gen) and the transition to regional capital processes. Treasure creation man- ifests itself empirically as an effect of communication and shapes the fund by organizational means. The critical moment for such transitions consists in the transformation of an assembled value and energy into a quantity that can be invested.
A consideration of rage-treasure creation in the main capitalistic coun- tries during the second half of the nineteenth century makes it self-evident why the chronic liaison of economic misery and the political repression of the "masses" under the grip of capitalism were responsible for the abun- dance of raw material for rage and indignation. These amorphous, barely articulate impulses of dissidence were initially in the hands of their individ- ual owners. They were for the most impotent until taken up by interested organizations, which collected and transformed them into the corporate capital of a progressive politics of rage-based opposition.
At this stage of my investigation, it can be seen clearly how the politi- cal alliances and parties of the old left had to accept the role of collection points of dissidence. It is part of the function of leftist parties to organize the
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thymos of the disadvantaged. They provide the liaison between rage capaci- ties and a desire for dignity, and they grant the struggle a pragmatic, medi- ated, and political shape. Their contract is based on a promise to their cli- ents to disburse a thymotic return in the form of increased self-respect and a more powerful grasp on the future, provided that the clients refrain from independent utilization of their rage. The gains are earned through the polit- ical operations of the rage banks, which extend the existential possibilities of their clients in a material as well as symbolic manner. Because collection institutes pursue diverse strategies for investing rage, it initially remains to be seen how the leftist banks will work with the deposits entrusted unto them.
During the last third of the nineteenth century there emerged at least three distinct styles of operating with rage and protest: the anarchic- terrorist, the communist-centralist, and the social-democratic-reformist (and syndicalist) styles. These naturally present themselves in countless compromises, and their intermixture with forms of collection from the right has led to further complications. For all three procedures it was evident that. the initially obligatory regional and national forms of rage collection had a pragmatic and preliminary character. The anticapitalist impulse could maintain the level of its enemy only if it reached the same supranational level as the enemy in terms of organization and operation. This insight led to the internationalist pathos, which has been binding for all authentic parties on the left since the days of the International Workers Association (1864-1876) and the second International (1889-1914; and then again as the Socialist International from 1923 until today).
In historical accounts of the twentieth century, August 1914 was unani- mously depicted as the fateful moment of political modernity, for reasons that are all too obvious. With a similar consensus it was remarked that the entry of the imperial nations of Europe into the First World War resulted in the catastrophe of socialist internationalism because the vast majority of the moderate left parties underwent a conversion toward prioritizing national motivations for war in light of the imminent military confrontation. The infamous remark from Wilhelm Ifs speech on August 4, 1914, from the throne in the Berlin Parliament, that he does not know any parties anymore but only Germans (similar to comments from his second balcony speech in front of the people on July 31) proclaims—and at the same time registers, by focusing on the German example—the complete collapse of transnational solidarities. In fact, there was almost everywhere an integration of primarily social-democratic and accommodated workers' movements in the euphoric
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mobilizations of nationalistic and imperial states. As the sources prove, the approval of the bonds issued to support the war by the Social Democratic Party created a moral shock for many people affiliated with the left.
In my thymotic terms, the fatality of these processes can be described as a form of an inevitable bank crisis. The rage deposits of the "masses" in internationally operating banking houses are put at the disposal of the polemical deals of national political leadership by the managers. By with- drawing decades' worth of accumulated quantities of rage and dissidence from the frontline against the capitalist order and making it available for the war between imperial nations, the leaders of the moderate workers move- ment committed a "white-collar crime" of unparalleled extent. However, they were able to at least partially apologize for the giant misuse of rage capital by pointing toward the war-mongering enthusiasm of their custom- ers. In fact, even after almost a hundred years, the enthusiastic images of August 1914 remain a scandal not only from a political but also from an anthropological point of view.
Seen from a cultural-theoretical perspective, the shift in rage from inter-
nationalism to nationalism means a return to historical formations of polit-
ical stress groups that can shoulder the consequences of war. The Second
International remained too loosely connected to be able to pull together
its members under conditions of real pressure and become an effective war
collective (using the terminology of Heiner Muhlmann, a maximal-stress
39
cooperation).
that could withstand the burdens of war. Under the threat of war, symboli- cally secure Internationalists enlisted almost automatically into the national fronts; for the time being their emotional boundaries were identical with the political collectives for the processing of stress—with the exception of those rare fellows who wore the curse "unpatriotic scoundrel" as a philosophical mark of honor. Since the nineteenth century the capacity for national self- preservation was reinforced through armies of draftees, organized around centers of regular soldiers. By the way, one needed to wait to the begin- ning of the twenty-first century before it was possible to politically organize postnational military units in Europe. The fact that these processes were so cumbersome and so slow gives us insight into the strength of the equation of the nation with the ultimate political unit of survival, an equation that continues to have an effect even today.
It was completely incapable of constituting a political body
The perpetually loose coordination of the national components of the Second International reveal the deep dissatisfaction of the radical wing of
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the workers' movement after August 1914 as a sign of naivete or hypocrisy. After all, one could not seriously expect that the majority of the proletariat of France, England, Germany, and so on could remain distant from their respective national mobilizations in a time of war. But from the events of 1917, it is obvious that the "imperialist war" directly supported the radical position. The hope that there would be a world war as the last chance for revolutionary aspirations, which Bakunin had diagnosed in 1875, was real- ized a little more than forty years later.
For the political processing of popular thymotic impulses, the eruption of war in 1914 constituted a serious break. Its immediate result consisted in the abrupt transformation of the largest portion of anticapitalist rage values into acute national antagonisms. The psychopolitical consequences of this are reflected in the complex of events referred to as the "age of extremes. " This age was, first, determined by the Leninist attempt to violently reac- quire the rage that had been lost. This attempt needs to be seen primarily as a realpolitik of the revolution at all costs. The second feature was the enduring amalgamation of rage with militant national movements, which stirred up the political scene in Europe after World War I. The struggle for the betrayed rage of the proletariat helped to position the two formations of extremist militancy. Their match constituted the heavyweight confronta- tion of world politics between 1917 and 1945.
The primary adversary on the left, a Third International dominated by Leninism, seemed for the first time capable of presenting itself with a legiti- mate claim to become a world rage bank. Bolstered by the victory of the October Revolution, the board of directors and supervisors of this company thought that they could take command of a new organ of collective rage. It would become a unified organization of globally dispersed potentials of dis- sidence, a unified antibourgeois, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist politics with high dividends calculated for the activated "masses. "
The tragedy of this new collection began during the first days of the Rus- sian Revolution, when it became clear that Lenin's dispassionate sense of reality morally demystified the radical left. More than one generation was necessary to accept this demystification. Already during the fall of 1918, workers in Petrograd were called on to commit massacres against Russian social democrats: "Comrades, fight the right-wing social revolutionaries without grace, without pity. Court procedures and tribunals are not nec- essary. The rage of workers will ravage Wipe the enemies out physi- cally. "40 During the defeat of the sailors, the most loyal followers of Lenin
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demanded the rule of councils against the monopolization of the revolution through the Bolshevist leadership. It was consequently obvious where the revolutionary journey was headed. The fact that the organizer of the Red Army and the subsequent great hope of anti-Stalinist illusions, Leo Trotsky, excelled in the slaughter of the Kronstadt opposition reveals the slippery slope that the cause of the left in Russia had entered onto. Another sign for its misdirection was the fact that Lenin himself did not feel embarrassed to denounce the large majority of bona-fide socialist insurgents as petit bour- geois counterrevolutionaries during the tenth convention of the Commu- nist Party, which took place at the same time as the slaughter of the sailors.
Lenin had already committed himself publicly to the dogma that the struggle against barbarism ought not to refrain from using barbarous methods. With that turn of phrase he included the anarchistic externaliza- tion of horror in communism. The man who in the moment of coming to power had written, "history will not forgive us, if we do not assume power now" and "procrastination is becoming positively criminal,"41 was obviously not willing to give up the opportunity, even if the crude means of conquest and the monopolization of power were in stark contrast to the noble goals of the overall project. It could have already been anticipated that the revolu- tion had become a constant putsch, which required an ever-more grotesque effort in order to pretend fidelity to the program. By postulating mass terror as the recipe for success for the revolutionary state, Leninism exploded the dynamic liaison of indignation and idealism, which had been the politico- Utopian privilege of the left until 1917.
This had far-reaching consequences for what was later referred to as the "political suspension of morality.
" Every contemporary was able to under- stand in 1917 that an epoch of states of exceptions had just started. What was also certain was that in times of convulsive beginnings, the indignation of beautiful souls over unfortunate circumstances was no longer sufficient. At the same time, no one was prepared for the culmination of revolutionary exterminism, which almost from the first day of battle entered the scene in full armor. According to Lenin, it was the first duty of the revolutionary to get his hands dirty. Based on an obvious intuition concerning the new con- ditions, the Bolshevists announced their program in their mouthpiece, the newspaper Pravda, on August 31,1918, with the following words: "The hymn of the working class will from now on be the song of hatred and of revenge! " Explicitly canceling the fifth commandment, "Thou shall not kill," Lenin's teaching led from the necessity of revolutionary brutality to an open break
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(although it was still presented as provisional) with the Judeo-Christian and civil moral tradition of old Europe. Revealing the consistency of a fanatic convert, Georg Lukacs already by 1920 proposed rethinking these new rules for murdering in the name of the Good from the perspective of a "second ethics. "42 The "second" was supposed to mean in this context that although one still remembers the first ethics, that is, the ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is against killing, one suspends it deliberately in order to enter the stage of revolutionary action without any reservations. The abso- lute idealism of revolutionary engagement unleashed total instrumentalism in the elimination of obstacles hindering the new. For both Lenin and Lukacs it was clear that the revolution was assigned a purgatorial mission. From the logic of the intermediary domain in between class society and communism necessarily resulted the pattern of "cleansing. " Because world history had become the world court of judgment, the true revolutionary had to show all the necessary strength against the residues of the past. It is not accidental that the motto of Russian avant-gardism was, "Time is always right. " When the future knocks on the door, it enters through the gate of horror.
In less subtle contexts, this political suspension of morality or, more sim-
ply, the duty to commit crimes, referred to a simple quantitative reflection:
in order to save the lives of millions of human beings, one had to accept
that a few thousand people would have to be sacrificed. No person with
the power of judgment, it was claimed, could deny this argument. Only a
short time later, one could witness how millions were sacrificed so that a
few thousand, and ultimately only a few dozen, could stay in power, while
being led by a suspicious philosopher-king. The few continued to claim, of
course, that they exercised their power in the interest of the most sublime
hopes of humanity. The paradox of egalitarianism had never been exagger-
ated more convincingly than during the heyday of Bolshevism: the alpha
dogs of classlessness achieved their plan to accumulate all of the power in
43
on. In Lenin's immediate proximity one could hear theses such as, "When it comes to such a numerically rich people such as the Russians, one may sacrifice one-tenth without much ado, if it would be possible to continue to collaborate with the rest. "44 Lenin's closest collaborator, Zinoviev, the author of these class-genocidal fantasies, certainly would have never expressed these theses if he could not have been assured that the leader of the revolution would have approved of them. Since 1918, the archetype of
their hands.
In addition to these tragic calculations, cruder ones were voiced early
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decimation haunted the decrees of the party leader: if one would eliminate every tenth person here and there, the rest would be almost automatically
45
transformed into a malleable mass.
while a commander of the Red Army he used even the most insignificant occasion to let every tenth soldier be executed. Lenin's remark that repres- sion would only be necessary during the period of transition from capital- ism to communism was never much more than a slogan to suffocate moral concerns. The occasionally added argument that this time it was a sup- pression of the minority through the majority, which was said to present a promising novelty and was appropriate to the fighting style of "socialist humanism," turned out to be a conciliatory phrase. It was supposed to save the activists from understanding the fatal drift of their project. In hindsight, everyone who does not have reasons for not wanting to know can clearly see why communism, once in power, remained from the first to the last a
46
transfer the energy of the war socialisms into the life-forms of postwar
society, it is impossible to deny the following: Lenin's directives from the
late fall of 1917 onward initiated the first authentic fascist initiatives of the
twentieth century. Mussolini and his clones could only react as epigones to
47
The characteristic features of the new political style Lenin introduced, which never concealed its origin in the realism of the First World War, were distinctly revealed in the left-fascist original of this myth. The following fac- tors need to be mentioned here: the latent or manifest monological concep- tion of the relationship between leader and followers; the mobilizing of a constant agitation of "society"; the transference of the military habitus to economic production; the rigorous centralism of the executive staff; the cult of militancy as a form of life; ascetic collectivism; hatred for liberal manners of conduct; compulsive enthusiasm for the sake of the revolutionary cause; the monopolization ofpublic space through party propaganda; total rejection of the bourgeois culture of civility; submission of the sciences to partisan- ship; disdain for pacifist ideals; mistrust of individualism, cosmopolitanism,
transition from the bad to worse.
If one agrees that "fascism" was, during its initial phase, an attempt to
these initiatives.
example, the Action Francaise, present little more than light-handed brico- lages made out of the widely available socialist and nationalist copies. Even Georges Sorel's appeals to the fighting proletariat were only some of the more successful among the commonplace hymns to violence as a remedy for the liberal "culture of cowardice. "
We know about Trotsky as well that
The approaches of the older militant right before 1914, for
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and pluralism; constant spying on one's own following; the determinis- tic mode of dealing with the political enemy; and, finally, the temptation, which had been inherited from Jacobin Terror, to give the enemy short shrift, a trial process in which the accusation already entails the sentence.
On the top of the list of characteristics typical for fascism is the explicit abrogation of the fifth commandment, even if only for the duration of a "time of transition. " This time of transition lasts until the class enemy (ini- tially referred to as the "enemy of the people") has been eradicated. Excep- tions to the prohibition on killing from the Old Testament had long been granted to Jewish fighters and Christian soldiers, but this time the beneficia- ries belonged to a semi-civil elite that did not have to abide by moral laws because it was the avant-garde that practiced revenge in the name of human- ity. The expression "professional revolutionaries," which Lenin invented, marked the transition to a praxis of morally motivated amoralism. Albert Camus noted in his clever summary of Hegel's amoralizing influence on the thought of revolutionaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centu- ries that "all of morality becomes provisional. "48 This reveals the increasing alienation of revolutionary activism from its idealist origins. The pragmatic reasons for the becoming provisional of morality in times of permanent struggles were revealed in the modus operandi of the Russian Revolution, when murder for the Good took on chronic, professional, and institutional traits. After a short period of time, practices of killing became habit, sys- tematized and bureaucratized, without ever losing their erratic character. Because no one was capable of saying whether the moral state of exception would ever come to an end, it is not surprising that after a while there was a lack of voices of protest, which more or less directly recommended a moral- ity that would be appropriate for perpetual war.
The activists were convinced that killing in the service of the great cause meant a tragic surrender of virtue. Some saw in it a sacrifice of their per- sonal morality for the sake of the goddess of revolution. Among the com- missionaires the ability to kill was celebrated like a sacred competence that
49
The subsequent fascist movements from a nationalist wing were not at all in danger of being too sensitive. They only needed to exchange the
distinguished the revolutionary from the bourgeois.
kill was, in the eyes of the activists, the most obvious sign of a continuing bourgeois indolence. We know that part of the legend of Lenin includes a grain of kitsch, and the paradigm of such kitsch was presented by Gorki's hymns of praise for the revolutionary leader too sensitive for his mission.
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The unwillingness to
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declaration of war on the class enemy for the declaration of war on the enemy of the people and the race in order to apply Lenin's model to nation- alist movements in middle and southern Europe. Their fury was undeni- ably not simply imitative. The genuine contributions of the German, Ital- ian, Romanian, Croatian, and other radical nationalist parties for the entire complex of exterminist movements in Europe are, after all, large enough, should one take stock. It suffices to say that common morality is overbur- dened by the task of evaluating macro-criminal complexes. The statistics reveal that we have to assume that for every execution in the name of race during the twentieth century, there were two or three in the name of class.
The so-called fascist movements in Italy and elsewhere emerged from
the antibourgeois models of militant nationalism, which one could also call
socialism. These movements can best be characterized, in the context of
this investigation, as peoples' banks of rage. Their basic function also made
them into collection points of protest that clearly reveal functional similari-
ties with parties on the left while accentuating folk, regional, and nationalist
ideals. Their display of anticapitalism always remained a mere facade. The
widely noticed similarities between the communist and fascist movements
become easily understandable after a psychopolitical analysis: in both cases,
there are accumulations of rage that reach the dimension of large banks.
Fascism is socialism in one country, without the intention of internationalist
additions. Focusing on the collectivism of the front and the egalitarianism
of production, it needs to be noted that fascism is socialism without a prole-
50
or egalitarianism with a folk basis. Its modus operandi is the melting
tariat,
of the population into one thymotically mobilized pack, which takes itself to be unified in its claim to the greatness of the national collective.
The national banks of rage accumulation enjoyed the psychopolitical advantage of being able to work directly with the impulses of patriotic thy- mos without having to take a detour through universalistic ideas or other exhausting fictions. This had a decisive effect on the success of the militant movements of resentment in the countries defeated in World War I. The effects on Germany were the most significant because the demand for the transformation of humiliation into self-affirmation was understandably the strongest there. Considering that postwar periods have always played a key function in the cultural reorientation of combat collectives, it is possible to understand the fatal drift that took hold of the German right after 1918, when it refused to accept its assigned lesson. Italy also did not take on the task of readjusting the body of rules governing its own culture in the light
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of its war experience. By opening the door to the Italians to join the win-
ning side in the last minute, the Allied forces allowed them the possibility of
skipping the labor of stressful revision and escaping into a feeling of heroic
51
two major enterprises in the area of the political economy of rage identified each other as competitors. Soon each declared the struggle against the other party its primary reason of existence. The anti-Bolshevism of the fascist movements and the anti-fascism of the Comintern underwent an almost a priori process of entanglement. The so-called fascisms presented their business goals from the beginning in an anti-Bolshevik register because of the temporal as well as substantive priority of communist phenomena: the radicals on the right had the example of the left rival in mind when begin- ning to copy its formulas for success. What remained troubling for fascist leaders was that their Eastern rival was ahead with regard to the most cru- cial dimension of the new politics: mass murder. Communism, on the other hand, waited a while before recognizing its chance to mobilize all its forces for the struggle against its competitors from the right.
Actually, Stalin's directives against the radical movements on the right in
Europe exerted almost irresistible moral constraints. By presenting himself
in front of the world as the guarantor of resistance against Nazi Germany,
the leader of the Bolshevists forced upon all enemies of Hitler of whatever
orientation "antifascism" as the sole morally justifiable option of the age. In
this way he immunized the Soviet Union against its critics from within and
52
Be that as it may, let's take a step back to observe the formation of revo- lutionary thymos during one of its early stages. Since Lenin's "decrees con- cerning the red terror" from September 5,1918, the taking of hostages and mass executions of "antirevolutionary elements" became acts of revolu- tionary duty. In 1919 alone there are supposed to have been half a million executions. Terror had already reached a massive scale in the year before. The Cheka especially enjoyed publishing the lists of those who had been executed in order to indoctrinate the population according to the general tendency of the new measures. The transition from a revolt against the old
self-elevation.
What needed to happen did indeed happen. It was inevitable that the
without.
as soon as they raised the slightest objection to Stalin's politics. The pro- paganda, which Stalin was responsible for, showed how justified this worry was. It mentioned Trotsky and Hitler in the same breath in order to identify the personified dangers for the fatherland of the world proletariat.
These critics had to be afraid of being denounced as profascist
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rule to terror against one's own people and subsequently also against one's own half-hearted following created a climate that approached the kind of "amorphism" that Bakunin had called for. In August 1918, Lenin, quickened by the activist fever, sent telegrams to the entire country in which he called for mass hangings of reluctant farmers—"do it in such a way that the people will see it from afar and shiver. "53 In the same spirit, Krylenko, the people's commissioner for the judiciary, demanded from his subordinates that they should liquidate obvious innocents. Only such a practice would sufficiently impress the "masses. "
The strategy that led to this remark by the commissionaire did not suffer from a lack of depth: would it not one day be necessary to conclude from the quantity of excesses that the project was one of justice for which these kinds of sacrifices were necessary? The Polish poet Alexander Wat revealed the logic of cold-blooded fury in his conversations with Czeslaw Milosz: "But blood in the abstract, blood you don't see, blood on the other side of the wall. . . blood spilled on the other side of the river. How pure and great must be the cause for which so much blood is spilled, innocent blood. That was terribly attractive. "54 Where everything revealed a tendency to be excessive and voluptuous, similar proportions were easy to choose when it came to the destruction of enemies. Osip Mandelstam understood already in 1922 that the Soviet Union was about to transform itself into an oriental despotism. "Perhaps we really are Assyrians. Is this why we can look on with such indifference at mass reprisals against slaves, captives, hostages and her- etics. "55 The statistics on executions that historians have come up with pro- vide us with the information that during one week under the rule of Lenin, more people were summarily executed than during the entire previous cen- tury under the czar's regime after due process.
These are the parameters for the ambivalent space in which countless compagnons de route of real communism became lost. The concept of com- panionship, it could be argued, is the political form of what Heidegger referred to from the perspective of fundamental ontology as "errance" (die Irre). Whenever people "err" they move within an intermediary zone situ- ated in between wilderness and route. Heidegger himself was an eminent witness of this, as a matter of fact, because of his periodic preference for the Nazis. Because errance signals a middle course between passage and drift, the travelers will inevitably get to a place that is different from where they wanted to go at the beginning of their journey. "Wayfaring" (das Gehen) with communism turned into an odyssey of comrades because it presup-
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posed what should have never been assumed: that the communist actors were pursuing a more or less civilized road to destinations that could be reached. In reality, they supported a developing dictatorship that used excessive, idealistic, and exaggerated violence to bring about what a liberal state could have achieved in less time in a more spontaneous, more effec- tive, and, to a large extent, bloodless manner.
It was because of the chronological course of events that Lenin failed to learn to use the jargon of antifascism. When Mussolini organized the "march on Rome" in October 1922 (his party had been in the Italian parlia- ment for only one year), Lenin had just returned to his desk after suffering two strokes. When "il Duce" elevated himself to dictator of Italy, the leader of the revolution had already died after suffering a third stroke. Stalin's pro- paganda machine, on the other hand, discovered in due course its epochal chance in the proclamation of antifascism. In reality, both "fascism" and "National Socialism" were for the early Comintern not of primary concern. During the 1920s they were overshadowed by the caricature of the socialist or social-democratic rival in the West. The communist movement had spe- cialized in denouncing this rival through derogatory labels such as "social chauvinism. " Furthermore, they attempted to accuse and thus smash it as being "half-hearted, mendacious, and rotten. "56
This was only possible because hatred of the moderate left had turned into an obsession. In the midst of the chaos of the fall of 1918, Lenin took the time to write an almost hundred-page-long tirade. Writing in a professorial style against the "renegade Kautsky," the head of the parliamentary Euro- pean left, Lenin voiced the famous accusation that Kautsky aimed for a "rev- olution without revolution. " This clearly shows that, already, Lenin equated
57
practical overthrow with the unlimited exercise of violence.
who publicly committed to the duty of fighting social democracy as the pri- mary enemy could become members of the Third International, which was constituted in March 1919. Only after the time for effective defensive alli- ances against the victorious national revolutionary movements had run out did the communist leadership in Moscow change its point of focus to the rage accumulation in national socialisms. At this point, social democrats and communists were already crowded together in concentration camps.
Reflexes of the struggle for the thymos monopoly also entered the thoughts of the more subtle minds of the West. In his reflections "On the Concept of History," written in 1940, Walter Benjamin criticized social democracy for believing that future generations should profit one day from
155
Only those
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improved living conditions. Orientation to future successes, he objected, cuts "the sinews of [the working class's] greatest strength" because by being educated to practice evolutionary patience it forgets its "hatred and its spirit of sacrifice. "58 With arguments of such a quality, the author of the histori- cal-messianic theses wanted to uplift class hatred, which was cherished by the communists. To understand the power of the left-fascist seduction— and the discreet charm of the theological overinterpretation of past events {geschehener Geschichte)—it is necessary to acknowledge that even an author of Benjamin's stature could be won over to such philo-Soviet remarks and the sanctification of violence.
However, the consequences of overinterpretation cheerfully transcend- ing the threshold of indolence are plain beginning in the 1920s, in particu- lar among political theologians. Paul Tillich, for example, took himself to be sufficiently inspired to dare to announce that the decision for socialism would, in a specific period, become equivalent to the decision for the king- dom of God. The "specific period" was for Tillich identical with the era after Lenin's death. In the year 1932 the resolute German protestant himself felt called upon to understand and affirm Stalin's kairos.
It has been well documented by the history of religion that when the Holy Spirit blows through, it occasionally reaches high wind speeds. The front man Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy had the honor of demonstrating how it can provide for ordained hurricanes when he told the history of Europe, without further ado, as the epic of the Holy Spirit become creative through revolutions. In the year 1931, this phosphorescent lay-theologian thought that it was appropriate to lecture on the Soviet Union: "We will be recre- ated and revolutionized by Russia, because the story of the creation of the human being is continued there In Moscow there are the new dogmatic popes who decide about the salvation of our lives. "59 Such remarks can only be made plausible by illuminated interpreters insisting on their right even under the most difficult of circumstances to interpret world history to the last detail as a history of salvation. Profane observers of such victories over probability reach the conclusion that theology and acrobatics must have one and the same root.
THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL, WHICH WAS FOUNDED IN 1919, PRESENTED itself from the beginning as the executive organ of Leninism, which asserted that its aim was "to connect the truly revolutionary parties of the world
156
THE RAGE REVOLUTION
proletariat. " The Third International proclaimed that it would use its coun- cils to create "its own apparatus," which would be capable of replacing the bourgeois state. Hereby nothing less than a system of proletarian Catholi- cism entered the world stage. The relationship between the party and the councils was unequivocally modeled on the Roman Church and its local parishes. However, what became clear after a few yeas was that nothing but the promise that the battles would be continued remained from the spar- kling promises of the Manifesto of the Communist International to the Global Proletariat, dated March 6,1919. Even the concept of an army of councils, which had been proclaimed in the manifesto, quickly gave way to a conven- tional military machinery in the hands of a monological party leadership.
By presenting itself as the "International of action," the Comintern under- lined its claim to accumulate the dispersed dissidence potentials of the pro- letarian "masses" in a world rage bank. It promised its customers it would invest their thymotic capital in revolutionary projects in order to use it for the purpose of a global, literally catholic project, which was justified in the interest of "the totality. " The successes of this bank would have consisted in the creation of a proud proletariat and in the global improvement of its con- ditions of living—insofar as effective returns from the thymotic investments of the "masses" express themselves in the transformation of vengeful inclina- tions to pride and self-affirmations. Why this did not come about does not need to be laid out in detail. It is well known that Lenin assumed that the Russian Revolution would soon function as a trigger for world-revolutionary upheavals, in particular with regard to the German proletariat, which had been assigned a key role by Lenin. This assessment was plausible: there was indeed large potential for protest in the Western hemisphere. Moreover, the German question was without a doubt the most essential one. However, the dissident energies took on the shape of national-revolutionary accumulation movements, in particular in Mussolini's Italy and among the political spec- trum on the right in the unfortunate Weimar Republic—and the reasons for this become clear in light of psychopolitical analysis.
The early terrorist turn of the Russian events makes one thing unmistak- ably clear from the beginning: the new central bank could at no time be satis- fied with the real investments of its clients. Because the effective rage depos- its of the Soviet proletarians were much too small for the intended project, the necessary assets had to be raised by force from the huge "masses" of the country's farmers. However, nothing suggested that this potential would have accrued to the communist fund because the interests of the rural poor
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hardly had a common denominator with the marginal Marxist working force, not to mention with the dictating commissionaires.
In this situation the directorship of the massively undercapitalized world bank of rage resorted to the strategy of blackmailing the reluctant "masses" of farmers to deposit their thymotic savings. The managerial secret of the Russian Revolution consisted in procuring the missing quantities of rage in the form of mandatory credit loans. Consequently, the Soviets created enor- mous amounts of exploitable anxiety, which was connected to the extorted willingness to feign support for the projects of the revolutionary rage bank. With regard to this point, the analogies between the Catholic politics of redemption and the communist version of the gospel are impressive.
The greatest success of the Russian Revolution was probably its ability to enforce a broad current of simulated assent. It is thanks to this that it was discovered that class hatred, which is the precondition for legitimizing revo- lutionary politics, does not necessarily need to be present—as little as insti- tutionalized religion always presupposes true faith. The affect could just as much be brought about by artificial means, whether by agitation and mea- sures for the sake of mobilization or through the enforcement of applause for the projects of the party. Instead of basing his theory of the simulacrum on contemporary cultural life, Jean Baudrillard could have derived it just as well from investigating communist power.
Because the extortion of assent by way of instilling fear was by itself not able to support the Soviet developmental dictatorship, it was necessary to create a catalogue with positive images into which those that had initially only been passively affected by the revolution could invest their own ambi- tions and fantasies. This task was taken up by the directors of Bolshevik psychopolitics not without a sense for thymotic realities. In order to create the necessary degree of collective pride, they activated some of the most powerful mythic models of modernity—the Prometheus complex ranked first, which has always been characteristic for the technophile disposition of bourgeois modernity, then pride in the great achievements of Soviet technology and its urban development—think of the cult surrounding the Moscow subway—and finally the figure of the athlete who defends the honor of the collective through his achievements. The turning of industrial achievements into sport went so far in Soviet ideology that in the case of the famous Sakharov workers, thoseintense athletes of plan fulfillment, the figure of the proletarian was equated to a winner of an athletic competition in a stadium. And nevertheless it was impossible for the artificially ignited
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rage of the Komsomolets, the members of the youth organization who had been sworn into Stalinism and who deliberately signed up for the battle of production, to let one forget about the shabbiness of the conditions. The vulnerability of the functionaries to the slightest bit of critique betrayed the instability of the situation. At times a seemingly harmless and substan- tively fitting remark, such as the statement that Soviet shoes would be of an inferior quality, sufficed to have its author confined to one of the countless prison camps.
The decisive characteristic of the new affective economy consisted in restraining the clients to the institute of accumulation. Because of the abol- ishment of any opposition, they could no longer take out their rage assets from the party to deposit them in a different corporation. If the bank had paid back the loans of fear to thus allow their clients to make a free decision, the Soviet investors would have withdrawn their assets from the Commu- nist institutions in order to invest them in less despotic projects. Because the situation was as it was, closing one's account would have meant break- ing with the party—and suffering the consequences. This coercive manipu- lation of investors through the revolutionary system of restraining custom- ers has received the not unfitting, although otherwise questionable, name "totalitarianism. " "Totalitarian" refers to the retransformation of the cus- tomer into a slave of the corporation.
All this explains why the red terror was never simply a necessary bad feature of a "time of transition"—independent of whether this period was conceived of as an episode or as an epoch. The Soviet regime was in prin- ciple dependent on the steady regeneration of horror. Without the confis- cation of thymotic potentials of large strata of society, the Bolshevist cad- res would have been able to remain in power for barely half a year. One should therefore certainly not make Lenin's stubborn character exclusively responsible for the success of the rigid line, however often the abnormal intolerance of the party and revolutionary leader has been documented by its witnesses and victims. The suppression of any form of opposition was in reality a simple business necessity if the party did not want to give up its claim to be the sole representative for the thymotic energies of the "masses. " This is why the collapse of the Communist system was imminent when its universal autohypnosis faded away. As long as it stayed in power, it had to confiscate all means of expressing self-respect. Since there is an evident connection between property and self-respect, the destruction of property was the most secure way of humiliating the comrades of the Soviet empire.
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If the system was supposed to rule successfully, no non-Bolshevik nucleus
for thymos articulations was allowed in the country. In order to implement
the monopoly of communism with regard to rage, pride, and the dissidence
assets of the populations it covered, it was absolutely necessary to cut off
the individual as well as groups from any access to alternative sources of
60
atmospherically present in the post-communist universe, even today after
decades of thaw and de-Sovietization. Because of a despotism to which
the rage expropriation, the breaking of pride, and the destruction of the
opposition over many generations were endemic, a climate of deeply
destructive humiliation was created in the reigns of Lenin and Stalin, a
climate that recalls Oswald Spengler's dark diagnoses about the fellahs
emerging from devastated civilizations. Its common reality was popular
resignation. The political regime was tolerated as a vicious addition of
destiny to the terrible Russian winters. If one wanted to trace back the
Soviet climate to individual contributions of actors, one would discover,
among other things, a civil servant such as Lazar Kaganovich, one of the
most monstrous creatures of Stalin, who demanded from revolutionaries
with a solemn tone of voice that they surrender their self-respect and their
61
self-respect.
The long-term consequences of these psychic expropriations are still
sensibility.
a collectivity of passive mystics for whom the state made it easier to aban- don themselves. The artist Ilya Kabakov evoked the general attitude of the Russian "society" before and after Stalin's death in an autobiographical conversation with Boris Groys: "The Soviet Union was accepted as one accepts a snow storm or a climate catastrophe. " "In spite of the nightmare of the life back then we had the sweet feeling that everyone was living this way. "62
In this atmosphere the Russian people were transformed into
The re-thymotization of post-Soviet "society" turns out to be a pro-
tracted endeavor because of the scarcity of psychic and moral resources.
Initially it could only get under way via nationalism—a rather novel idea for
63
Russia.
Russian "society" does not currently indulge itself in consumerism without limitations, as one might expect, but that it is committed to a daily helium omnium contra omnes. The return to self-affirmative lifestyles happens in the form of a generalized mobbing. This diagnosis allows for a promising prediction. In a country in which everybody had lost respect for everybody else because everybody witnessed everybody else in situations that were
People who know about the contemporary situation observe that
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humiliating, the flourishing of a meanness of all against all could resemble a sign of recovery.
ACQUIRING RAGE THROUGH WAR BONDS
THE ABOVE CONSIDERATIONS HAVE ELUCIDATED WHY LENIN'S PROJECT of revolution was marked by a severe lack of thymotic capital.