No More Learning

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
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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. The unavoid- ability of this lack resulted from the historical situation. True, there was not a lack of affect against czarism around 1917. Furthermore, it can be assumed that there was a large reservoir of aspirations for democracy, self- administration, permissiveness, and the redistribution of land. However, these tendencies, which could be aroused and increased easily, were far from harmonized with the coercive capitalist conceptions of development that were characteristic of Leninist theory during the period of transition. In the language of revolutionary insiders, these features were verified by pointing to the still missing "class consciousness. " Of course these circumstances could not have remained unknown to Lenin. In order to keep his visions coherent, he was thus dependent on the expectation of an imminent proletarian revo- lution in Germany, from which he expected an increase in the insufficient Russian capital base. When this revolution failed to materialize and when its weak beginnings fully collapsed after the execution of its leaders, the need for alternative mobilizations of thymos in Russia became urgent.
I have already referred to the constitutive role that terror plays in acquir- ing common consent to the goals of revolution. Not long after the terror was established, a cultural-revolutionary front was added to it: the mass production of desired attitudes through the most intensive forms of pro- paganda, in combination with the monopolization of education (thanks to teachers and curricula), both of which were indoctrinated with Bolshevist ideology. The height of the Russian artistic avant-garde coincided with these campaigns. It was only with the new, rigidified cultural politics after Stalin's coming into power that this was put to an end. Yet more influential was the creation of combat-stress collectives, which brought about the desired state of thymotic homogenization by way of a shared perception of enemies.
Within the framework of psycho-political logic, one can claim without exaggeration that the Russian Revolution was rescued during its first years by the counterrevolution, just as the Chinese Revolution owed its triumph ultimately to the Japanese, who, following the invasion of China from 1937 to 1947, created the conditions under which the weak communist
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reserves were enforced by the massive influx of patriotic emotions. After the victory of his troops, Mao Zedong did not create a mystery surround- ing the fact that Chinese communism would have been a lost endeavor without the Japanese attack—he was humorous enough to explain to his Japanese visitors that China owed their country eternal gratitude for the invasion.
Observations such as these confirm the suspicion that thymotic realpo- litik follows completely different laws. The directors of the new world bank were condemned by stress biology and cultural dynamics to look for sup- port where it could be most easily discovered: in the sources of pride, rage, and self-assertion of the nationally synthesized combat communities. From the beginning it was thus necessary to widen the capital basis of the world bank of rage—apart from anxiety bonds from terror—through the mobi- lization of a patriotic thymotics. It was not accidental that Lenin liked to conjure up the image of Russia as a "besieged stronghold. " Although the Soviet experiment was conducted in a postnational horizon, the conception of a threatened fatherland was an indispensable matrix for the renewal of combative energies. At least the concept of the fatherland was always also interpreted from international perspectives because the Soviet Union, the "home of all workers," was a hybrid body, encompassing at the same time a territory and an idea. The ominous concept of "socialism in one country" did more than provide an emergency solution (Notlosung) in light of the persistent deferral of the world revolution. It entailed the concession that the desperately needed thymotic reserves could only be drawn from a seri- ously threatened combat-stress collective.
The war against the national enemy, to be sure, has always possessed the advantage of high plausibility. No one knew this better than Karl Marx, who sternly commented on the political adventures of the Paris communists of 1871 (who attempted their coup against the bourgeois government of France in the middle of the war against Prussia): "Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knock- ing at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workmen must perform their duty as citizens. "64 A civil war can also provide extreme motivation if the front against the enemies within has been clearly morally demarcated. Because the Bolshevists no longer had a sufficiently external enemy at their disposal after the end of the civil war in 1921, they had to internally refinance their thymotic war bonds and open a new front out of the spirit of pure mobilization.
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With this operation the darkest chapter of the tainted history of revolu- tionary rage transactions began: the intentional redirection of "mass rage" against the affluent farmers of the Soviet Union, in particular those of the Ukraine, who gained notoriety under the name of "kulaks. " They are still the largest collective of genocide victims in the history of humanity—at the same time, they constitute the group of victims that can do the least to struggle against the forgetting of the injustice committed against them.
According to Marxist teaching, the Soviet leadership should have regarded the peasantry of the country as a productive class that was, to a certain extent, analogous to the proletariat. Because it belonged to a prein- dustrial universe, however, it formed a category of producers of the wrong kind, producers condemned to fall. Thus the peasants of Russia and the other Soviet states entered the radar screen of the revolution in a twofold sense—on the one hand, they embodied a shocking backwardness, which could only be eradicated by means of forced modernization; on the other hand, they were the producers of the food that the revolutionary elements claimed for themselves from the first day of the riots. Lenin himself deter- mined the rough tone of the politics concerning the kulaks by consistently situating the independent farmers in the first row of those "classes" to be executed, next to the bourgeoisie, the clergy ("the more representatives of reactionary clergy we can shoot the better"), and the Menshevik reformers. It was only after a return to financing compromises (in the context of the new economic politics after 1921) that most of these groups were allowed to breathe a sigh of relief.
This was finally finished when Stalin around 1930 turned back the wheel to an exclusive command economy. From that point onward, the "destruc- tion of peasantry as a class" became the main priority on the revolutionary agenda. Because there was no arrangement in regular Marxism for using repressive measures against the peasantry as such, Stalin picked up Lenin's directives and had to extend the schema of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat to such an extent that it now included a class struggle that had not been predicted: between the poorer and the less poor, sometimes even affluent strata of the rural population. The latter suddenly enjoyed the questionable honor of being declared a substitute for the exterminated bourgeoisie—even straightaway becoming a representative of "agricultural capitalism. " Consequently, the new mobilization was directed against those farmers who were still able to continue with their business in a relatively successful way in the midst of the general economic disaster (from 1917 until
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1921 the number of deaths from starvation in Lenin's empire climbed to more than 5 million).
It is understandable that these "big farmers" were not excited when the functionaries of the revolutionary countries seized their harvests. Their hesitation in having to deliver their means of subsistence was identified as sabotage and was punished accordingly. The ominous col- lectivization of agriculture under Stalin pursued the goal of simplifying the confiscation of yields by starting with the production.
The "de-kulaking" during the early 1930s, which led to up to 8 million starvation deaths during the harsh winter of 1932-33, meant a psycho- political caesura in the business conduct of the rage bank management. From 1930 onward in Stalin's politics with regard to the kulaks, the dark aspects of popular thymos prevailed as the essential driving forces in the rev- olutionary rules of business: resentment, envy, the need to humiliate those who were allegedly or truly better off.
If it is appropriate to describe the history of events in the Soviet Union as a drama of the lost innocence of the revolution, the application of hatred against larger farmers—and after 1934 also against so-called midsized farm- ers (those who owned up to two cows)—marked the transition of the Stalinist U. S. S. R. to an open psychopolitics of dirty energies. In its course, the "class" of those semi-starved was sent into battle against the "class" of those barely able to survive—with the pretense that this would be the most contemporary form of revolutionary struggle in the fatherland of the world proletariat. Stalin himself provided the justification by contributing a new "class analysis" from the vantage point of somebody who was riding on the witch's broom of solitary illumination: according to this justification, it was legitimate to call for a "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in the name of the Marxist classics. A kulak or "great farmer" was identified as somebody who produced enough in order to provide for his own family and a few laborers—with an occasional surplus sold at markets or in the city. This injustice against the working masses was not in the future allowed to remain unpunished. To avenge it, a demonstration was needed to show what "ter-
65
ing of the concept of "class struggle. " Suddenly it was no longer mentioned that the bourgeois epoch had "simplified" class oppositions in terms of a clear opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat, as the Communist Manifesto stated. After Stalin had elevated the kulaks to the rank of a "class," and by calling them "counterrevolutionary," this class was ordered to be liquidated
rorism in one country" was capable of achieving.
The reason behind the events was concealed in the random broaden-
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overnight in substitution for the barely existing and quickly extinguished bourgeoisie. From that point on, it was evident for everybody who wanted to know that every form of "class analysis" entails the demarcation of fronts at which the executioners confront those to be executed. Mao Zedong also came up with a new "class analysis" when inciting the Chinese youth against the "class" of the old during the great Cultural Revolution.
It is important to realize that we are not merely talking about termino- logical finesse here. If one continues to speak about classes after Stalin and Mao, one makes an assertion concerning the perpetrators and the victims in a potential or actual (class) genocide. As smarter Marxists have always known, "class" is a descriptive sociological term only at the surface level. In reality, it is primarily strategic in nature because its content materializes only through the formation of a combat collective (a confessional or ideo-
67
What lends disturbing significance to the processes initiated by Stalin's improvisations is the ease with which the leaders of the Soviet Commu- nist Party were able to induce in countless participants the intoxication of a resentment that unites its bearers to serve as accomplices in extinguishing devalued "classes. " Research has provided vast information on the motives of Hitler's willing executioners; Stalin's armies of helpers remain hidden in the catacombs of history. What genocidal excesses in the name of class in fact reveal is the extent to which what sociologists refer to as "social ties" are also always woven out of a hatred that binds the disadvantaged to the seem- ingly or actually advantaged. When envy dons the gown of social justice, there arises a pleasure in belittling others, a pleasure that is already halfway to destruction.
The Bolshevist system would never have recovered from this defilement—which could hardly have been exceeded even by the Moscow trials—if Stalinism had not been rescued by the war that Hitler carried into the Soviet Union. The fury of idealizing, which its agents and sympathiz- ers shared, would never have sufficed to compensate for these darkenings (Verdunkelungen) of the Soviet experiment as a whole, if there had been an appropriate and timely enlightenment concerning the events in the coun- try. The anti-Hitler imperative of those years was responsible for the fact
66
matively and, eo ipso, performatively, one makes an assertion stating who is
logically formed maximum-stress-cooperation unit).
justified to extinguish whom under which kind of pretense.
ing ranks far above race thinking when it comes to the release of genocidal energies in the twentieth century.
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If one uses it affir-
Class think-
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that interest in not perceiving overshadowed the horrors of Stalinism, in particular for Western party supporters and sympathizers, who insisted on their high-minded immunity to the facts. For countless members of the New Left in the Western world, the phase of wishful blindness was to last until the Solzhenitsyn shock of 1974. Only with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago and the works of the nouveaux philosophes was it possible for a modified perspective to come about, although some spokesmen of the eternal militancy were still then content with modernizing their protection of ignorance.
After July 22,1941, it was once more proven in the battle of the Russians against the German invaders that it is possible to set free the most powerful cooperative energies in a collective through provoking the national thymos, even if this collective had just suffered the most severe humiliations on the internal front—perhaps precisely then because the war between nations can bring about a certain recovery from ideological infamy. It was thus ini- tially consistent that Stalin's propaganda referred to the war against Hitler's armies as the great patriotic war—in deliberate analogy to the "patriotic war" of the Russians against Napoleon in 1812. The bitter irony of history was only revealed when the heroism and willingness of the Russian people and its allies to suffer entered into the books of "antifascism" after the battle was won.
As Boris Groys has demonstrated, communism constituted itself as a
68
mobilizing power exclusively within the medium of language.
not surprising that its successes consisted mainly in the enforcement of a strategic codification of language (Sprachregelung). For good reasons, these successes went far beyond the sphere of Soviet dictates. In the entire sphere of influence of Stalinism and beyond it in the New Left, the ingenious self- depiction of left fascism as antifascism became the dominant language game of the postwar era. This had long-term effects that can be traced to the present in dissident subcultures of the West, most importantly in France and Italy. It is not an exaggeration to identify the flight of the radical left to "antifascism" as the most successful maneuver of language politics in the twentieth century. That it remained, and remains to this day, the source for highly desired confusions follows from its premises.
The continuation of the game by the Western left after 1945 happened primarily because of the need for an encompassing self-amnesty. The so- called attempts to work through the past to search out the "sources" of fas- cism remained subordinate to this imperative—whereas the tracing back
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It is thus
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to Lenin's initial contribution remained blocked through a prohibition on thinking. It can be easily explained why the left needed this act of amnesty. Considering the devastating results of Stalinism, they needed to cover up, justify, and relativize an excess of mistakes, failed opportunities, and illu- sions. Well-meaning companions knew what they did not want to know— and did not hear anything during the critical times. (Sartre, for example, knew about the 10 million prisoners in Soviet camps and remained silent in order not to break with the front of antifascists. ) Their always problematic cooperation with the manipulators from Moscow, their acting blindly with regard to the first signs and the true extent of red terror, their one-eyed sympathizing with a communist cause that had been deeply compromised in theory and praxis long ago—all of this strongly called for understanding, romanticizing, and forgiveness. The left's absolution necessarily had to be granted by its own people and from its own fundus because independent instances, which could have pardoned them, were not available.
It is not correct to say that the far left in Europe after the Second World War concealed its emotions from itself. By perpetually raising its antifas- cist convictions, it proclaimed for itself that, apart from its basic historical legitimacy, it had intended grandiose plans and possessed the right to con- tinue where the revolutionaries before Stalin had stopped. A higher moral mathematics was invented according to which someone has to be taken to be innocent if he can prove that someone else was even more criminal. It was thanks to such strategic reflections that for many Hitler served as the savior of conscience. In order to distract oneself from the affinities of one's own engagement with the ideological premises of the most extensive acts of murder in the history of humanity, historical mock trials were staged, mock trials in which everything pointed towards the private first class of the war, to the person who completes the history of the West. Thanks to totaliz- ing forms of cultural criticism—for example, the tracing back of Auschwitz to Luther and Plato, or the criminalization of occidental civilization as a whole—it was attempted to cover how closely the West was affiliated with a class-genocidal system.
The smart redistribution of shame did not miss the intended effect. In fact, a point was reached in which almost every form of critique against communism was denounced as "anticommunism," which, in turn, was denounced as a continuation of fascism by liberal means. Although after 1945 there really were no publicly committed fascists anymore, there was an abundance of paleo-Stalinists, former communists, alternative communists,
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and radical innocents from the most extreme wings, who held their heads as high as if the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, and other communist leaders had been committed on planet Pluto. The thy- motic analysis makes it possible to understand these phenomena. The same human beings, who have convincing reasons to be too proud to engage with reality—"on a raison de se revolter"—sometimes, for less convincing rea- sons, are too proud for the truth.
MAOISM: ON THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF PURE FURY
IF ONE BELIEVES THAT THE CONTROL OF THYMOTIC ENERGIES through the Stalinist management of rage reached the ultimate degree of realpolitik cold-bloodedness, one is disabused of this belief in a twofold manner by Maoism. The first lesson consists in the invention of a new kind of guerilla warfare that Mao Zedong advanced as China was confronted with a major challenge during the time of civil wars between 1927 and 1945; this kind of guerilla warfare later served as a source of inspiration for the many "liberation armies" of the Third World. The second lesson can be learned from the notorious cultural revolution of the 1960s. We have to remind ourselves that the struggle between social classes was replaced by the unleashing of the hatred of stoned adolescents against the older generation of tradition bearers. Here as well problems of rage management were at the heart of the matter. Mao's politics was from the outset characterized by a methodical substitution of collective fury for missing revolutionary ener- gies, which was provoked by the military-political leadership.
Mao Zedong's fame is primarily connected to his astounding achieve- ments as the strategic head of the civil war, which lasted twenty-five years. What was at stake in the struggle was the question of who was to have power in postfeudal China. The protagonists of this epic battle, the Kuomintang and the communists, initially cooperated from 1924 until 1927, then again from 1937 until 1945, first against the warlords in the provinces of the coun- try, and later against the Japanese invaders. Between 1927 and 1936, and between 1945 and 1949, they confronted each other, at times seemingly and at other times in reality, as fierce adversaries. Mao's military apprentice- ship began with the resistance of the communist troops against the dicta- torship of the national-revolutionary general Chiang Kai-shek, who seized complete power after his notorious strike in Shanghai against the (until then) allied communists. Andre Malraux chose as the background plot for
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his 1933 novel La condition humaine the attack of the Kuomintang fighters against the communists of Shanghai to depict a scene that was permeated by hatred and active despair. In light of this background, the idea of an absolute engagement gained focus, an idea that was about to cast its shadow over the European intelligentsia in its Sartrean variety after 1945.
Mao Zedong's strategic intuitions started with the assumption that the diffuse antifeudal rage of the Chinese "masses" of peasants constituted an insufficient basis for the mobilization of the ascetic-heroic troops he required. Because for Mao the organization of an industrial-proletarian movement was never an option—China was in this respect even more underdeveloped than Russia in 1917—he was faced early on with the prob- lem of how to create an efficient machinery of war from only agrarian ener- gies. The solution consisted in the conception of a guerilla doctrine designed for the war of small mobile troops against the massive units of the govern- ment. It rested on the easy, albeit effective principle that uses the superiority of the adversary as leverage to increase one's own forces. Mao observed that the brutality of the official military apparatus, which was led by Chiang Kai- shek, created enough despair in the agitated mass of the rural population that with appropriate guidance they could be prompted to defend them- selves against armed invaders on their own ground.
By drawing the ultimate consequences from this, Mao understood that for the weak, total mobilization was the key to success. He preached that this could not, of course, come about through a "revolutionary agrarian war" alone. A national war, he taught, was much more capable of bring- ing about the desired great mobilization—for which the Japanese invasion of 1937 was supposed to provide the desired conditions. Sebastian Haffher has explained that in the history of the war, the significant turn was the invention of the "total guerilla," which was a clear reference to Goebbels's hysteric proclamation of a "total war. " Mao proved nothing short of the fact that guerilla warfare can be taken to its specific extreme.
In a lucid commentary on Mao Zedong's writings about the theory of war, Sebastian Haffher exposes the exploitation of national war for the pur- poses of strengthening the revolutionary guerilla as Mao's epochal innova- tion. Its basic principle is the integral mobilization of radicalized fighters who confront a superior power of only moderately motivated troops. What makes the difference is the resolution of the leaders to cut off every possibil- ity of escape for their own troops in battle in order to expose them to a situ- ation of absolute stress. In this way, the war was supposed to be projected
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onto the molecular level. Even the smallest village that had been involved in the war had to transform itself according to the will of the commander into a reactor of despair, willing to sacrifice itself. Mao's apposite slogan is "China's strength lies in her very poverty. "69 The revolutionary war of the people wanted to be a daily plebiscite for excess.
While war, according to Clausewitz, is "an act of violence" in order to "force an enemy to fulfill what we wish for," Mao starts with the axiom that war is nothing but the procedure "to preserve oneself and to destroy the enemy. " This is the definition of war of the biopolitical age, which sees the world stage as inhabited solely with competing life complexes. In this connection competition is not understood as an appeal to the judgment of the market about what is the most suitable product but as the contest of destruction on the battle ground of vitalities. Thanks to this intensifica- tion, a way was discovered to overcome the amateurish traits of the terror transactions of Bakunin's revolutionaries and replace them with a resolute exterminism—as one otherwise only knows from Hitler's conception of race struggle and its realization through the fascist state (or else from Len- in's and Zinoviev's hardly concealed imperatives, for the sake of the global decimation of populations).
A conception of "growth" is connected to Mao's total guerilla warfare,
which enables initially weak fighting cells to corrupt the body of the enemy
only bit by bit and secretly, steadily multiplying themselves at his cost. One
could call it a model of war constructed according to the paradigm of can-
cer. Mao's strategy thus possesses great similarity to political oncology.
To use Sebastian Haffher's words, "The essence of Maos's warfare" "is to
overgrow the enemy, to overgrow him to death. "70 Mao's bizarre prefer-
ence for an unpopular "protracted war" was rooted in the insight that revo-
lutionary cells required substantial time for their destructive growth in a
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in his career been a Marxist, however much he attempted to keep up the
appearance of revolutionary correctness by drawing on Leninist rhetoric.
With his belief in the possibility of the great leap of China out of feudal-
ism to communism, he rather resembled a conceptual artist who wanted to
fill the empty space of his country with a grandiose installation. Hereby he
added an East Asian counterpart to the "Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin" of whom
large country.
These few pieces of evidence make it clear: Mao Zedong had at no point
72 Mao emerged as a mystic voluntarist whose convictions were rooted more
Boris Groys has spoken in his recontextualization of Soviet avant-gardism.
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in a primitive ontology of continuing struggle than in a developmental the- ory of a Western sort. The basic assumptions of the Chinese revolutionary leader could best be described as a frugal form of natural philosophy in which the theme of bipolarity sets the tone. The peasant Mao was, typo- logically speaking, a neo-pre-Socratic of the Eastern school. He translated conventional Taoist intuitions into the jargon of political economy with which, it has to be noted, he engaged only on a superficial level. He knew almost nothing about property, industry, the banking system, or city cul- ture. About peasants he taught that there were large, middle-sized, and small ones and that the latter constituted the large majority, which was why one needed to seize control of this group. One can understand partially why this mixture of Marx and Lao-tzu left a deep impression on many observers and visitors. Some Western enthusiasts such as the young Phillippe Sollers, who never felt ashamed of his misjudgment, thought that Mao was the Chi- nese embodiment of Hegel. With a little bit of distance one sees, however, that he was a crossbreed of two kinds of platitude that could only be united in a man of greatness.
The Moscow branch of the world bank of rage needed to become aware of the activist Mao Zedong rather early. At a time when the world revolu- tion in the industrialized countries did not advance a single step forward, news of other battlefronts was followed meticulously, including those in feudal and agrarian China, which had been ravaged by chaos and promised to become more of a burden than a pillar of support for the Comintern. It was more because of speculative reasons than sympathy that Mao's initia- tives were strongly supported by the Comintern, which also supported the activities of Chiang Kai-shek because Moscow's society enjoyed seeing itself pulling the strings of competing puppets. Nevertheless, Mao remained for Moscow an embarrassing partner because his successes exposed the secret of combatant voluntarism, which had also been the driving force behind Lenin's initiatives. If one took Mao seriously, one understood sooner or later that the October Revolution was only a coup d'etat that wanted to retrospectively prove itself to be a revolution. Mao, on the other hand, was the dramatic advisor of an unprecedented peasant war that cumulated in the acquisition of power by a peasant general.
After the victory of the Chinese Red Army, Mao's mobilizing psycho- technology had reached its limits because the creation of a state and a mod- ern economy, whether hierarchical and state-directed or property-based and entrepreneurial, follows completely different laws than those with
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which it is possible to drive thymotically distinguished combatant commu- nities into a state of fury that promises victory. The story of the statesman Mao Zedong, it follows, needs to be recorded in the form of a report of the failures of an excessive mobilizer. The strategist Mao remained con- vinced even after 1949 that the principles of total guerilla warfare could be applied more or less unchanged to the swift creation of a Chinese industry. This fallacy led to the sequence of events from the ominous "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1961) to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969, and de facto until Mao's death in 1976), and finally to the polite marginalization of the Great Steersman.
As the leader of the national bank of revolutionary affect, Mao was con- vinced after the creation of the People's Republic that he would be able to regulate infinite credit if he could succeed in amalgamating rage, despair, and revolutionary pride, the mixture that had supported him in the most surprising ways during the civil-war era. In order to advance the industri- alization of China, he announced the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958. Every independent observer could interpret it as nothing less than the deliberate psychotization of the entire country. However, what characterized China already back then was the liquidation of every form of internal independent observation, so that Mao's attitudes and statements meant law and eternal truth to 600 million people.
Under these circumstances, the biggest prank of human economic his- tory could be presented as the outflow of an elevated politics of genius: a huge propaganda apparatus advertised for years the idea that China's wel- fare and the glorious revolution would succeed if—together with the forced collectivization of agriculture—the production of iron was relocated from the cities into the villages. Hundreds of millions of clueless, astonished, and reluctant farmers were forced together in unfamiliar cooperatives. As a result, their motivation and ability to work weakened abruptly. At the same time, they saw themselves confronted with the task of constructing primi- tive furnaces in order to increase steel production in the country overnight using only local methods. At the time, this was one of the most important indicators of economic ability. The officially proclaimed goal was to surpass the per capita production of England within fifteen years. The results of these frenetic activities, which quickly turned out to be useless, were put into remote dumps and piled in steel mountains. Should there ever be a de-Maoicization in China, one would have to declare these hidden surre- alist mountains of rust world cultural heritage sites. (A de-Maoicization
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of China is, of course, an implausible hypothesis: politically, because Mao Zedong's icon is an indispensable means of integration for the current and future leadership of the country; culturally, because the persisting Sino- centrism almost categorically denies an enlightenment of the Chinese about
73
In spite of the complete senselessness of this form of production, a senselessness soon recognized by the leaders, the mobilization of the work- ers continued incessantly. Movie images of that time show countless rural Chinese workers in front of a limitless horizon, chasing here and there in a hectic ballet between the smoking chimneys. The neglect of agriculture was accepted by Mao and his followers as an inevitable side effect of this new adjustment of priorities. The burlesque of the Great Leap cost, according to current estimates, between 35 and 43 million lives (or, according to more conservative estimates, approximately 30 million); in some provinces, 40 percent of the population died from starvation and exhaustion. This is the only mass destruction of human beings through work that did not require camps. The fact that the Chinese leadership also insisted on the creation of its own gulag confirms the rule that no fascism, once it has seized power, passes up the chance to be gratified by cracking down its enemies through the dehumanizing act of crowding them together.
Several years were needed before the party leadership was ready to con- cede that its campaign had failed—until the end it was impossible to find anyone willing to risk telling Mao about his mistakes. The only exceptions were Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had personally attacked Mao at the con- ference of Lushun in the summer of 1959 because of the obvious debacle (and disappeared immediately after that), and some journalists, who suf- fered harsh repressions as an immediate consequence. The other members of the cadre were silent or withdrew into diplomatic illnesses in order to keep out of Mao's way at the crucial conferences. Mao himself, when being discreetly reminded about the high toll of his directives, is said to have stated that the corpses could also be useful because they would fertilize Chinese soil.
The culmination of Mao Zedong's mobilizing technology was reached between 1966 and 1969 when the leader, in the meantime marginalized, wanted to seize power again by discovering a new, easily activated rage
their own history by better-informed foreign Chinese or non-Chinese. Then again, a formal de-Maoicization is no longer on the agenda because China, with its new economic politics, has for a long time turned its back on the dreams and nightmares of Mao's epoch. )
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capital. Similar to Stalin, who staged a false class struggle between the poor- est and the less poor among the peasant population of the Soviet Union by tapping into vast resentment reserves, Mao discovered in his empire a new "class position"— between the young and the old, or between the living elements of the movement and those that were in a state of bureaucratic torpidity. The deliberate intensification of this "opposition" was supposed to help Mao draw once again on his conception of total guerrilla warfare. Apparently his quasi-natural-philosophical doctrine of an eternal war of oppositions was suited to transform any structurally caused social differ- ence into a starting point for a civil war that could be declared as a class struggle. Hereby the great director proved himself to be, until the bitter end of the Cultural Revolution, what he had been from the beginning—a nationalistically minded warlord with left-fascist principles and imperial ambitions. He stayed the man who constantly required new combative pre- tenses in order to remain in power. He also stayed the man who dismissed all such pretenses without hesitation as soon as the circumstances required, or allowed for, such measures.
For Mao it was sufficient to identify a random new resentment collective in order to set it on its designated enemy—this was enough to present the conflict as the contemporary form of "class struggle. " The apposite "class" comes into being only in the context of the fight Mao sought in order to destroy the apparatus of the party around Liu Shaotsi, who had dared to push him to the side after the debacle of the Great Leap. In the Chinese teaching of prudential strategies, the method Mao chose is called "killing the enemy with a foreign knife. "74 Mao discovered his instrument in a flood of infuriated adolescents who, following the call of their leader, left their schools and universities in order to spread physical and psychological ter- ror across the entire country. The catchphrase for this deployment of rebel- lious youth into villages was once again referred to as the unity of theory and praxis.
In Mao's famous Beijing encounters with more than a million euphoric students and Red Guards from all provinces, he explained the assaults that he expected from them. Is it not always the point of such gatherings that the people are given the opportunity to read the mind of the ruler? The public humiliations of scholars, who were chased around market squares wearing hoods of shame, who were beaten and forced to accuse themselves and, in countless cases, even murdered, belong to the memorable scenes of the Cul- tural Revolution. Even today one discovers ceramic sculptures in Beijing
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flea markets that reveal the social-realist style of that age. They depict a pro- fessor who kneels beneath the boot of a red guardsman with a sign around his neck saying, "I am a stinking number nine," an intellectual.
THE NIGHTMARISH RIOTS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION WHICH were trivialized by Western observers as upheavals—happened almost simultaneously with the student movements in Berkeley, Paris, and Berlin. In these cities, there were engaged groups that took the little information that they had about the events in China and its causes as a sufficient reason to present themselves as Maoists. Some coquettish admirers of Mao from back then, who have since forgiven themselves as if nothing happened, have continued to be active political moralists. Having reached the age to write memoirs, they depict, not without justification, Western Maoism and their
75
of the treacherous Deng) and allowed "restoration" determine the future. In 1968 Paris seemed to be firmly in the grip of the radical arts and cul- ture sections of newspapers (feuilletons). President Pompidou, a man of the center-right, was depicted as embodying the empowerment of right-wing radicalism. The culture sections did not conceal their sympathies with the events in China, the country of wall newspapers, the Mao bible, and the slaughter of scholars. Once again, the mal francais sparked the division of the world into revolution and restoration, a global epidemic, even though it was primarily limited to academic circles. When, after the political thaw of 1972, an American president visited the People's Republic of China for the first time, many members of the New Left in Europe and America were hor- rified to think that a being of light such as Mao Zedong could shake hands with a villain like Richard Nixon. In the same year, Andre Glucksmann expressed his conviction that France would become a fascist dictatorship in Les temps modemes.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a master in the sublime art of not being willing to learn. For a long time he transformed his previous sympathy for revo- lutionary violence into a self-tormenting exercise. And yet he was also an eminent representative of a generation of fakers, tormenting themselves on bed of nails, downplaying themselves in order to pay for belonging to the
participation in its performances as a sad late form of surrealism.
think that it is beneath them to forgive themselves and continue to announce that they are convinced that they were and are right—only the course of events, they claim, has taken a wrong turn (especially after the "Thermidor"
76
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bourgeoisie. Even today, it hurts Europeans with a remainder of historical tact to see again images from 1970 of one of the greatest intellectuals of the century, the author of Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialec- tical Reason, serving as a street vendor for a radically confused tabloid of the Maoist gauche proletarienne in order to step in for, as it was called, the threatened freedom of the dissidents of France.
Such snapshots belong to the final phase of a learning cycle that spanned two centuries. In its course, the European left, fatigued and indefatigable, searched for procedures to lend a voice to the rage of the disadvantaged, a language that was supposed to lead to appropriate political action. The more grotesque the images, the better they helped to illustrate how deep is the abyss that separates rage from the incompatible principle of appro- priateness. Looking at these principles reveals the paradox of revolutionary politics in general. Revolutionary politics has always devoted itself to the task of determining the right measure for something that, by itself, strives for what is "without measure. "
THE MESSAGE OF MONTE CRISTO
THREE YEARS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1848, the French public was infected by a novel that occupied its atten- tion for almost a year and a half. From August 1844 until January 1846, The Count ofMonte Cristo, the greatest rage fable of world literature, was unrav- eled in front of the eyes of an enchanted and insatiable audience. Alexan- dre Dumas's continuing narrative appeared in episodes in the Journal des Debuts, and the book version of 1846 was more than 1,500 pages long. Hegel had declared that the appearance of a hero whose travels in the world are recorded by an epic is no longer possible in the modern "world condi- tion. " But here that very situation was presented, even if in the less artisti- cally respectable genre of the light novel. Mass culture made possible what high culture had not been allowed to do for a long time—a modern Iliad, the hero of which, the young sailor from Marseille Edmond Dantes, was denounced by enviers and careerists and innocently imprisoned in the dun- geons of the ocean-pounded rock Chateau dTf in order to spend the time after his escape fulfilling his pledge of revenge. His martyrdom had started during Napoleon's exile to Elba in 1814—after a decade of regenerative retreats, voyages, and preparations for revenge, the path of the resurrected led to Paris in 1838, at the height of the July monarchy, when the financial
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world of the upper-middle class had once and for all taken over the power from the old aristocracy.
The title and the plot of the novel did not leave any doubt that Dumas wanted to tell the story of a messiah who returned to practice revenge. It is not accidental that the work of Edmond Dantes's spiritual mentor and prison companion, Abbe Faria, which the hero discovers at the end of his campaign in his former prison cell, is prefaced with the motto "You will pull the dragon's teeth and trample the lions underfoot, said the Lord. "77 In line with this oath, the mysterious count wants to demonstrate "how much, nowadays, with a fortune of thirteen or fourteen millions, a man could do in the way of harm to his enemies. "78
As a master of mass entertainment, Dumas understood that nothing has such an intense effect on the public as a profane story of salvation. Perhaps Dumas was the first to see the mission of mass culture in displacing the myth of the eternal recurrence from heaven back to earth. The wrath of God was to become human rage—and waiting for transcendent retribu- tion was to become an immanent praxis, which was to be sufficiently cold- blooded in order to prudently reach its goal but also heated enough in order not to let go even a little bit of the call for retributive gratification. Here rage was explicitly described in terms of its thymotic nature—the elimination of the unbearable lack of suffering, which rules in a world full of injustice without atonement.
Seen from this perspective, Edmond Dantes embodies the world soul of
the bourgeois era.