No More Learning

When Bakunin speaks of revolution, he primarily thinks of the movement that initiates the struggle. This means that the departure for the revolutionary struggle is conceived of as a purely inchoate impulse. This impulse is more than a criminal act of expression because it is located within an incalculable future horizon. The revolutionary is nevertheless supposed to carry out his actions with so much expressive momentum that the people can interpret it as advertising signs of rage against the oppressors. Anarchism openly exposes its origin in the populism of rage. The true social anarchist dreams about the fusion of the rampant fury of destructiveness of individual actors with an immeasurable, latent rage of the people. The anarchist hoped for the manifest explosion of this rage just as the early Christians waited for the return of Christ. It was believed that this return could be brought closer by ever again leading the masses to use violence and terror until these "masses" saw in violence and terror their own tendencies and wishes. This signified the end of the process of exteriorizing horror. Christian "masses," which had for centuries become subdued through their fear of the Lord, would then understand that the time in which they had no other choice but to internalize metaphysical hor- ror had passed. They were transformed from frightened slaves into anarchic masters. Finally, these anarchic masters became the terrifying creators of history. Terror, which had been turned to the outside, is benevolent so long as it provides proof that the age of sacred intimidation is over.
One should not infer from the comparatively marginal political signifi- cance of Bakunin's thinking that it was a mere rhetorical movement, a form of political prelude to surrealism. The aesthetic reception of Bakunin in bohemian circles around 1900 should also not distract from his influence
march the unstoppable way of destruction.
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on the creation of an activist habitus. In reality, the forthright philosophy of destruction of the anarchists is one of the sources of the mobilizing and extremist attitudes that could later be observed in the fascist movements on the left and on the right.
The effects of anarchism are nonetheless more indirect. By far the most important effect can probably be located in the indirect influence that Lenin's thought enjoyed. Even though the leader of the Russian Revolu- tion took over the destructive judgments of Marx concerning Bakunin at least on the level of discourse, not to say at the level of lip service (because it is well known that the International Workers Association, also known as the First International, broke apart in 1876 because of an unbridgeable alienation between Marx and Bakunin), Marx secretly remained faithful to the terroristic voluntarism of Bakunin's understanding of the revolution, however much "voluntarism" was a curse in the dictionary of the Bolshe- vists. In a sense, the October Revolution was a revenge of Bakunin against Marx because Lenin, in the most "unfree" of all possible situations, set up a world-historical monument for Bakunin's doctrine concerning the destruc- tive element of the revolutionary beginning. He then admittedly dedicated himself to the completely un-Bakunian business of the despotic construc- tion of a government.
In February 1875, Bakunin expressed his despair to Elisee Reclus from Lugano, despair about the lack of revolutionary verve among the partially resigned, partially opportunist "masses. " Only a handful of steadfast groups, such as the Jurassier (people from the canton of Jura) and the Belgians, these "last Mohicans of the deceased International," could come up with the energy to continue to fight in the present conditions. Now only the erup- tion of war between the imperial powers of Europe could give wings to the revolutionary cause: "As for myself, my dear friend, I am too old, too sick, and—shall I confess it? —too disillusioned, to participate in this work There remains yet another hope: world w a r . . . . But what a prospect! "24
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE THYMOTIZATION OF THE PROLETARIAT
BY FAR THE MOST INFLUENTIAL CREATION OF A BODY OF RAGE occurred on the left wing of the workers' movement when it increas- ingly came under the influence of Marx's ideas during the last third of the nineteenth century. Retrospectively, it is clear that the strategic successes
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of Marxism rested on its superiority in formulating a sufficiently precise model for the powerful historical rage collective of that age. The leading thymotic group was from now on to be called the "proletariat" or, more specifically, the "industrial proletariat. " Part of its definition was, according to Marx's thought, a systematic concept of being exploited. This conception was supplemented by an ethically sophisticated historical mission centered around the concepts of alienation and reappropriation. Nothing less was at stake with regard to the liberation of the working class than the regenera- tion of the human being. This liberation would correct the deformations resulting from the living conditions of the majorities in class societies.
To understand the thymotic tendencies of the early workers' movements
it is essential to consider, apart from the impulses received from Christian
sects of awakening, Thomas Paine's Human Rights (1791-1792), which he
presented in response to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolu-
tion. The point of this work can be summarized in the demand that a lack
of property is no longer acceptable as a convincing pretense for politi-
cal disenfranchisement. Universally conceived human rights formalize a
claim to dignity, which the British had hitherto expressed in the euphonic
"birthrights. " This word was destined to explode the oligarchic equation
of property with the capability to hold rights, an equation rooted in politi-
25
cal custom.
Cavalry of the Chosen attacked the positions of the obdurate land-owning aristocracy. The attack of the poor majority on the rich minority, which has dominated the course of political and ideological transactions since the dis- covery of "mankind," in fact begins at that moment when the property-less present themselves as the party of human beings and want to be the bearers of equal rights as human beings. The way to speak of rights that belong to human beings as human beings gained its full force during struggles over the position on the economic ladder and the preservation of property of the ambitious middle strata of the society. The sum total of struggles on this front has been called class struggle since the early nineteenth century.
One can hear the echo of the pathos with which Cromwell's
The strength of Marxist doctrine was to substantiate the idealist verve of Paine's declaration of human rights with a firm foundation of materialist and pragmatic arguments. This happened at a time when materialism and pragmatism were about to become the religion of the reasonable. Because of Marx's contribution, the justification of human dignity shifted from the Christian-humanist conception of an order created in God's image to a historical anthropology of work. The essential basis for dignity was now
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of reality meant to think civil war. total war, neutrality was not an option.
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taken to be the demand that human beings—as the creators of their own existence—have a claim to enjoy the results of their activities. As a result, there was a semireligious valuation of concepts such as "work," "labor force," "process of production," and others, which when taken together with the concept of the proletariat—initially only an economic term—resulted in a messianic twist. Who from now on spoke about "work" in a Marx- ist vocabulary did not only meant more than the process of production, which is opposed to "capital" as the exploitable resource for the creation of value. Work thus became at the same time an anthropological, even demi- urgic, quantity. Humankind, civilization, prosperity, and the entire realm of higher values go back to this quantity.
It is thus not surprising that the transformed way of speaking about work turned into a rallying cry for thymotic movements of the working collective. The proletariat was challenged to understand itself—in spite of its often emphasized dehumanization and reification—as the true matrix of humanity in general, with all its future potential. On the other hand, this constellation of concepts showed that the enemy of the workers is at the same time the enemy of humankind and thus deserves to be pushed back to the past. In order to clearly draw the battle lines of a civil war of unprece- dented extent, the only thing that needed to be made plausible now was the position of the capital-owning class, regardless of its sometimes respectable private moral convictions, as the enemy of the workers. The ultimate war was supposed to release unconditional hostility: the capital-owning bour- geoisie, including its well-fed entourage, as the objective brutes, on the one side, and the proletarians, who were the sole producers of value, together with their escort of hungry offspring as the objectively true human beings, on the other side. In this war, the stakes include the true nature of the pro- ducing human being. Because one party, it is said, entertains a merely para- sitical relationship with regard to production, while the other party includes those that produce authentically, the latter has to be rightly and inevitably victorious in the end. From this moment onward, to understand the essence
26
Because this war was conceived of as a
Only in light of this anthropological background is it possible to under- stand the success that the concept of "class consciousness" has enjoyed. It is now easy to comprehend that the emphasis is less on "class" than on "consciousness"; the latter is necessarily a property of psychic systems or individuals. Today the concept of "class consciousness" would be replaced
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by "class communication," provided that the concept of classes can still be
27
used.
according to the pure revolutionary doctrine, only one true human class, the producers, which is confronted by the capitalist class of illusory human beings or value-sucking vampires. The labor force, which is the collective destined to struggle, therefore only needs to be convinced that it embodies, in spite of its empirical misery, true humanity and the future potential of the species. From an increased self-understanding, revolutionary shame would immediately emerge, shame that would in turn breed revolution- ary rage. As soon as the proletariat discovers that it represents humiliated humanity, it will not be able to continue to accept its current condition. In freeing themselves from their misery—what Hegel would have called the negation of the negation of their humanity—the members of the finally conscious class would start a global storm on the Bastille. By completing the final revolution, the class of the true human being would "overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contempt- ible being. "28
Under conditions of a civil society marked by capitalism, there is,
It is evident that the discourse surrounding the class consciousness of the workers referred, in fact, to nothing but the thyzmotization of the pro- letariat. Thymotization signifies the subjective aspect of the preparation for an extensive battle. Class consciousness thus never meant that the industrial worker was supposed to come home after work in order to read Schiller's Maid of Orleans to expand a mind constricted by turmoil and sorrow. The expression certainly never implied that workers were supposed to reflect on their misery in economical terms. Authentic class consciousness means consciousness of civil war. As such, it can only be the result of battles in which the truth of the position of the fighting class is revealed.
This being the case, "true class consciousness" would be light-years away "from the real, psychological thoughts of man about their lives," as Georg
29
Lukacs explained in a mildly threatening tone of voice.
more openly, the same author continued to teach that it is not what the workers thought at the time that was of importance for the future but rather what they were supposed to think according to the objective party doctrine. According to the teaching of the strategists of class struggle, no element of the social totality could escape the challenge to develop a true consciousness of its position and function in the big picture, certainly not the proletariat. Lukacs admits that authentic class consciousness for the bourgeoisie would be tantamount to an insight into the inevitable nature of its coming down-
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Threatening much
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fall. This was, if not a good, at least a sufficient reason that the bourgeoi- sie fled from its tragic knowledge into the domain of the unconscious and unreasonable. The destruction of reason and the bourgeoisie's insistence
30
For the proletariat, on the other hand, the acquisition of class conscious- ness turns into a gay science of its mission to be the "leader of history. " Unfortunately, such a sovereign conception cannot be acquired overnight and is not free. Only by going through the "infinitely painful path of the proletarian revolution with its many reverses" will the future "subject of history" work its way up to the true concept of itself. In addition, there is
31
If class consciousness would fully live up to its mission, it would have to create class knowledge, class pride, and class rage. The first factor was, according to the conviction of the communists as well as anarchists, already given by the life experience of the worker, however much it still required for its completion the experience of war, self-criticism, and dialectical theory. The second factor could be brought out by appealing to arguments concern- ing human rights, the anthropology of labor, and political economy. These were supposed to help the members of the proletariat hold their heads up high, as appropriate for their value-creating role. The third factor needed to be fueled and channeled by means of propaganda: "Right, just as the blaze of fire, now forces itself with power to the surface," the International visual- izes the course of thymotic mobilization. Meaningful eruption only hap- pens after rage has cultivated the proletariat for a long enough time. Com- plete class consciousness presupposes that the sum of pride and knowledge is multiplied by the rage of the thymotic collective. The mature result of the proletarian process of learning can manifest itself only practically, through militant revolutionary activism.
that it has a right to the positions it has lost are one and the same.
are only a few individuals who have the moral power to betray their own class, renounce their origin, and join the "standpoint of the proletariat. " Only from this standpoint would it be possible, it is claimed, to reconcile reason and sustainability for the future.
the burden of self-criticism,
they don't have to carry this burden alone, without the help of the party, which is always right. According to the self-elected masterminds of the working class, this class was sentenced "with historical necessity" to abide by the revolutionary schedule: "the proletariat cannot abdicate its mission. "32 The principles of this self-study culminate in the doctrine that one gets to know war only by waging it.
which needs to be carried by activists. Luckily,
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There
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It is not necessary to explain in detail why the conception of the class of producers as a victorious fighting subject of history could result in nothing but a bad realization of philosophy. The fateful mistake behind its concep- tion goes beyond the adventurous equation of the industrial labor force with humanity. The greater problem is the holistic or organological approach according to which a sufficiently organized association of people would be capable of copying the achievements and qualities of a single human being on a higher level. By way of subscribing to such a misconception, the classi- cal left entered the space of illusions in which the famous substantive collec- tives and the ominous elevated subjectivities were up to mischief. The class of producers, having become self-conscious, would thus be a giant, com- parable to Plato's ideal republic, an organization in which reason, feeling, and will are united to become one monological, dynamic unified self. The craziness of this illusion was instantly recognized by the workers' move- ment, which covered it up by emphasizing that class consciousness is to a high degree connected to the "problem of organization. " The magic word "organization" evoked the leap from the level of "many active individual wills" (Engels) to that of the standardized class will. The unrealizability of an effective homogenization of millions of spontaneous individual wills is, however, already manifested in the superficial belief that the illusion of class cohesion could be upheld through surrogate constructions.
The most far-reaching of these surrogate constructions entered the stage in the form of Lenin's conception of the party. It is immediately clear how the idea of the party and that of class consciousness support each other. Because achieved class consciousness, understood as the proletariat's insight into its position within the social totality, was an impossibility, the party could and had to present itself as the representative of the still empirically premature collectivity. Consequently, the party defended its claim to be the "leader of history. " However, because the avant-garde was cut off from its "basis" as long as there was no hope for the loyalty of the masses, it had to entertain the fiction of the essential constructability of the class conscious- ness of those it was supposed to lead. The practical demand was thus: only the party embodies the legitimate rage collective, insofar as it acts as the representative for the not-yet-mature and operational "masses" in seizing the right to act. The party is consequently the true "I" of the still alien- ated collective of workers. It is not accidental that the party usually likes to adorn itself with the telling title "organon of the entire proletariat," with the term "organon" meaning "brain," "center of the will," or "better self. " For
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Lukacs the party is confronted to take on "the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its historical voca- tion"TM The resolutions of the party are nothing but quotations from the idealized inner monologue of the working class. It is only within the party that rage meets intellect; it is exclusively the party intellect that is allowed to start searching for the rage of the masses.
The history of the workers' movement since the days of the Gotha Con- gress of 1875 documents how rage has found its suitable host within the party. During its long march through modernity, it undeniably managed to make important discoveries. However, the mistakes it has nevertheless committed are revealed in the choice of communist symbols. Foremost there is the official sign of hammer and sickle, which revealed an idiotic antiquarianism already in 1917. The fact that the emblematic tools of con- servative German craftsmanship34 were to appear on the flag of the Soviet Union sufficiently reveals the helplessness of those in charge. A simple act of reflection would have led to objections because industrial workers do not hammer and the proletariat in the countryside has, for the longest time, not touched a sickle. Even more fatal was the choice of symbols by the radical left in Germany, which constituted itself during the final stage of the First World War as the "Spartacus League," using the name of a crucified gladia- tor slave as its advertisement, as if deliberately trying to draw on the analogy of Christianity while unconsciously citing a tradition of defeat. Only the red star of revolutionary Russia was capable of preserving its secret for a longer period of time. It only revealed its apocalyptic origin as a sign of downfall at the end of the Soviet episode.
The party as the "organon" of the proletariat rested on the fiction of a giant. Because it constituted itself as the "more elevated" subject, com- prising individual resolved activists whose synchrony and homogeneity could never be secured (as the constant ideological cleansings showed), it remained dependent on an avant-garde of the avant-garde, which embod- ied the last concentration of class consciousness and thus, in a sense, its true soul. Given the circumstances, this could only refer to the mastermind of revolution. The inner monologues of the party were supposed to be authentically conducted only in his thoughts. He embodied the true self of the workers' movement insofar as he was the ultimate source of its legiti- macy as its center of will and rage. Comparable to the world soul, which Hegel believed he had witnessed from horseback after the battle of Jena and which carried the name of Napoleon, the theoretical and thymotic head
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of the revolutionary organization would be the vital location of the world. The becoming-human of rage is said to have achieved its destiny in that location—initially it was Karl Marx himself. Far from disqualifying himself from accepting the historical position because of his personality, which was marked by hatred and resentment (as the standard ad hominem criticism of the author of Capital has it), he would have been perfectly suited because he was equipped with the necessary qualifications. Not only did he possess the lucidity and the will to power of a born leader, he also possessed suf- ficient rage to enflame everybody who would follow him. Every successor of Marx would have to be measured by whether he or she was capable of being a convincing incarnation of progressive world rage and a focal point of revolutionary knowledge of the revolutionary process as Marx had been. After the premature death of Rosa Luxemburg, there was nobody else dur- ing the early twentieth century who could have contested Lenin's claim to be Marx's successor. He was indeed the man whom God had created out of wrath to be a politician, to apply a characterization of Max Weber concern- ing the poet Ernst Toller to a more suitable recipient.
One might take this reduction of class consciousness to the party and the reduction of the party to its mastermind to be nothing but romantic hubris. And this is understandable. However, such reductions also have the advan- tage of thinking through the speculative exaggerations entailed by the con- cept of classes as well as that of the party. This act of reduction allows one to locate rage and consciousness where they are really situated: in a concrete individual. Such an individual should, of course, not be taken to be an ordi- nary contemporary human being. He is better understood as an exemplary human being who, by thinking and being enraged, concentrates in himself the just distribution of affects of humankind during the age of class soci- ety. In this leader, thymos is animated sufficiently to be able to call for a new world order. Seen from this perspective, Marx would be more than the Philoctetes of modern philosophy—some of his character traits recall the foul-smelling Greek fighter whose unbearable vociferation made him intolerable to his companions, so that they abandoned him together with Achilles' bow on the island of Lemnos. Marx also represented a western mahatma, an encompassing soul, who revealed superhuman greatness even when raging. His radically partisan intelligence functioned as the memory device for the learned dissatisfaction of the age.
In what follows I will show that the political party has been dependent on the ideological figure of a leader-mastermind in a way not fully under-
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standable even for him. The dependence is so extreme that the party itself only functioned as a monological machine in which the soliloquies of the leader were continued on a greater level. The head of the revolutionary movement had to project his knowledge and his will as the theoretical and moral monarch of the party. The goal was to transform the party, or at least the central committee, into a collective monarchic "organon. " The episodes of discussions within communist movements were always only additions to the essentially monological ideal. Earlier I emphasized that the exemplary militant human being transforms his existence into a collection point for accumulating rage during the time of the advent of the revolution. Draw- ing the consequence of this observation, it becomes understandable that the resolute "subject of revolution" had to act like a banker assigned to manage a global financial institute. Only thus could the revolutionary subject believe that she was the chosen center of world affairs: in this bank the accumulated emotions of indignation, memories of suffering, and impulses of rage are stored and united to become an active mass of value and energy. Moreover, the revolutionary quantities are made available for reinvestment in the real world. The future will thus be substantively identical to the return on the intelligently invested sums of rage and indignation.
It is precisely these collecting and reinvesting activities that needed to be represented on an extended scale for the creation of a larger militant body. As soon as the transfer from the radical subjectivity of the leader to the members of the party (and the new secret service agents) is completed, a political organism of a completely new type comes into existence. Thanks to its appearance on the market of passions, collective rage is transformed from a mere aggregate of psychopolitical impulses to a form of capital that calls for its utilization.
ON THE APPEARANCE
OF A NONMONETARY BANKING SYSTEM
I HAVE ARGUED THAT DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THE concept of the anarchist cell of destruction was a reproduction of the para- digm of the popular Russian band of thieves. Naturally this model could not be publicly defended in front of the anarchists. It is thus no surprise that one comes across in Bakunin's writings on the organization of the anar- chist movement para-religious disguises of the criminal business of revolu- tion. This is especially true of the Revolutionary Catechism from 1866 and
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the Program of the International Brotherhood from 1868. When studying these documents, one notices the similarity to the secret societies of the eigh- teenth century and, eo ipso, to Christian orders: here as in movements like Rosicrucianism, members seem to be sworn in with bombs to undertake their historical mission. It was thus not by mere accident that the followers of Bakunin have often been compared to the Jesuits. Because Bakuninism antic- ipated an exclusively destructive revolutionary mission, none of its program- matic writings could tolerate the subtle equation of a coalition of anarchists with a criminal organization. As members of a church of total destruction, Bakunin's followers were released from the task of social reconstruction.
The situation was totally different for the communists who stood up for their faith in the inseparable processual unity of overthrow and reconstruc- tion. Because they aimed for the acquisition of governmental power, anar- chic concessions to the romanticism of criminality or lawless counterculture were intolerable to them. The revolutionary government would retain clear qualities of state power through its communist functionaries. This fact was excluded by the paradigm of the noble robber gang or that of the criminal order. The fighters who were motivated by Lenin's idea called for a model of organization that would be capable of satisfying the demands of a long-term politics of change from above. Under the given circumstances, such a model could only be mapped onto the successful institutions of a semifeudal soci- ety, in particular the army (from which the concept of a hierarchy of com- mand was to be taken to derive the strictest party discipline), as well as the administrative bureaucracy (which was supposed to provide an appealing paradigm for the socialist party machinery because of its quasi-automatic, selfless efficiency). 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.