No More Learning

Isn't the true specter of communism perhaps there in that smile? The one thatfrightenedthe Tsar, the pope . . . and the Lord of Tocqueville? Isn't a glimmer of joy there, making for the specter of liberation? 4
THIS SIGN OF EXHILARATION IS ALREADY QUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE forced smile that we encounter in Tertullian's fantasy of the Day of Judg- ment. In a way, it is part of actual turmoil. It is carried on the surge of events, which reminds us from time to time that everything could turn out to be very different from what the well-fed people of success expect.
Since more recent history takes on the role of judging the old world, it executes in its extreme moments the judgment of the present over the past. For a moment the smiling servant secretly but nevertheless clearly joins the side of those revolting. The guests at the full table had every right to fear the verdicts of the worse-off Later generations do not know whether during this exhilaration it was class hatred or the pleasant anticipation of times of change that were announced through the noise on the streets. Did the maid smile because she was expecting to spend the following nights with one of the warriors? Or did she even believe that soon she would sit at the table herself and that Monsieur Tocqueville would have to serve her? In any case, such a smile no longer needs any apocalyptic pretenses. Actual events allow their interpreters to predict the future out of the rage of the present.
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If revolutionary intentions are transformed into a force of action that has
to prevail throughout significant periods of time, an explicit psychopolitics
of the inner just as much as the outer becomes indispensable. Such a psy-
chopolitics faces the challenge of creating a liquid rage reserve to fend off
the depressive temptations that inevitably follow political backlashes—one
may think for example of Lenin's "emigration blues" and his increasing
nervous neuropathies after the disappointment of his revolutionary hopes
5
in 1905. The correct way seems to consist in working on a secure connec-
tion between exhilaration and militancy. In a letter to Marx dated February 13, 1851, Friedrich Engels articulates a part of the psychopolitical pruden- tial rules intended to allow the revolutionary to survive in the midst of the historical "maelstrom. " Part of it consists in jealously watching over one's own intellectual superiority and material independence "by way of being substantially more revolutionary than the others. " Consequently, any kind of official governmental function has to be avoided, if possible, and every party position as well. A believer in the revolution does not need the formal recognition of holding office, nor any acclamation through "a herd of jack- asses who swear by us because they think we're of the same kidney as they. "6 This means "no seat on committees, etc. , no responsibility for jackasses, merciless criticism of everyone, and, besides, that serenity of which all the conspiracies of blockheads cannot deprive us. "7 This marks the reawaken- ing of the Aristotelian recommendation: "Never hate, but despise often. "
In a letter that Rosa Luxemburg wrote to her friend Mathilde Wurm on December 28,1916, from a prison in Berlin, a letter which has rightly become famous, there are comparable richly orchestrated dynamic figures of affec- tion. They are complemented by a desperately courageous, revolutionary- humanist credo, which has understandably become part of the annals of left militancy. At the beginning of the letter, the prisoner's intense dissatisfac- tion with whimsy in a letter from another friend is discharged:
In the melancholic view, I have been complaining that you people are not marching up to the cannon's mouth. 'Not marching' is a good one! You people do not march; you do not even walk; you creep. It is not simply a difference of degree, but rather of kind. On the whole, you people are a differ- ent zoological species than I, and your grousing, peevish, cowardly and half- hearted nature has never been as alien, as hateful to me, as it is now As for me, although I have never been soft, lately I have grown hard as polished steel, and I will no longer make the smallest concession either in political or
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personal discourse Do you have enough now for a New Year's greeting? Then see that you remain a Menschl. . . And that means to befirm,lucid and cheerful. Yes, cheerful despite everything and anything—since whining is the business of the weak. 8
This singular document makes clear that more than melancholy was prohibited in the stream of victorious bourgeois progress, a fact that was described in 1969 by Wolf Lepenies in his classic study Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Melancholy and society). The bourgeois leaders of the prole- tarian revolutionary movement also issued a prohibition against whining. It was thought that any inclination toward self-pity would deduct energies from the agents of world change, energies that would be lost for the great plan. Against this background it would be interesting to read what Rosa Luxemburg would have written to Jenny Marx. Karl Marx confides to his friend Engels in November 1868 that "my wife has for years. . . lost her spiritual balance. With her lament and crankiness she tortures the children to death. "9
Almost one hundred years later, with the knowledge of the failure of
the Soviet master plan, Antonio Negri attempted to reclaim exhilaration.
This time, he does not attempt it in the name of the industrial proletariat,
which had exhausted its role as historically efficacious rage collective under
a messianic flag. The new subjects of militant exhilaration are from now on
supposed to be the poor, the people at the rim of society, the bohemians
around the world, which Negri once again appeals to as the "multitude. "
He claims to have observed a promising smile on their lips, a "poor smile
of outlaws," which has once and for all emancipated itself from the existing
conditions. His role model is Charlie Chaplin, who in Modern Times sub-
10
THE EPOCHAL PROJECT: AROUSING THE THYMOS OF THE ABJECT
THE ABOVE REMARKS DO MORE THAN PROVIDE EVIDENCE FOR THE frequently documented connection between forced exhilaration and resent- ment. The outspoken words of Friedrich Engels, the vehement confession of Rosa Luxemburg, and finally Antonio Negri's hints of the ghostly smile
versively connected poverty and irrepressible vitality.
bye to the world revolution, what remains for eternal militancy is, it seems, only the laughter of those who do not have anything to laugh about.
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After saying good-
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of the servant and the equally unconditional laughter of the underdog— all of these reveal clearly that such appeals to cheerfulness pursue an aim beyond personal moods. It is not at all the case that these authors want to contribute to an anxiously optimistic attitude toward life, an attitude that is at home in the Christian petit bourgeois juste milieu. In reality, if the call for exhilaration is of any importance, it is exclusively as a demand for a sover- eign attitude. The sovereignty desired by dissidents is, however, not looked for while hovering over the turmoil. The goal is to find it amidst of the bat- tle din of time. It is gained through the deliberate acceptance of a plight that no person capable of rational deliberation would take over. To be sovereign means to vote for that through which one is overburdened.
Militants aim to transform their existence into a center of world-changing rage. They are engaged in a permanent war on two fronts, against happiness and irony. This makes them into inverse romantics who, instead of sinking into world-weariness, want to embody the rage of the world in their per- son. Just as the romantic subject conceives of itself as the gathering point of pain, where surge not only personal grievences but also the sufferings of the world, the militant subject conceives of his life as the gathering point of rage, where all the unpaid bills are registred and stored for future payback. Apart from the reasons for outrage in the present, all of the unatoned-for horrors of past history are recorded. The strong heads of protest are the encyclo- pedists who collect the knowledge concerning the rage of humankind. The immense amounts of injustice are piled up in their occult archives, which leftwing historians characterize as the repositories of class societies. This is the justification for the amalgam of sentimentality and implacability that is typical of revolutionary affectivity. If one does not feel the rage of millenia in oneself, one misunderstands what is from now on at stake.
It becomes apparent that after the death of God, a new carrier of rage was needed. If human beings take over this role, they intimate more or less explicitly that history itself needs to secure the coming and execution of the Day of Judgment. The question, "What needs to be done? " can only be raised once those participating take over the mandate to secularize hell and to relocate the court of judgment into the present. While a believer around 1900 would have wanted prayer, "O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself! " (Psalm 94), he would have to accept anarchists and profes- sional revolutionaries entering his room. The price necessary for the turn to immanence in light of monotheist tradition is that the final horror becomes fully secular, pragmatic, and political. This attitude reached its most expres-
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sive form in the Russian terrorists who destabilized the empire of the czar with countless attacks starting in 1878. This "thirty years' apostolate of blood" is summarized in the words that the accused Kaliayev presented to the court: "I consider my death as a supreme protest against a world of blood and tears. "11
From the perspective of militant activists, the current social conditions— and I am speaking now of a period whose beginning can be dated to the last third of the eighteenth century—provides an outlook lamentable in every respect. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that things are as they are. On the other hand, it is deplorable that things as they stand do not bring forth a much higher degree of outrage. It is obvious that most people lack not only the necessary means to live a humane life but also the rage to revolt against this lack. As soon as one concedes the changeability of the world through human interventions in the natural and social orders, following the bourgeois theoreticians of progress, the second lack inevita- bly becomes the focus of attention. It is a deficit that activists believe can be overcome by their methods. While assuming that material poverty can be abolished through technical progress and a revolutionary redistribu- tion of existing goods—and in the last instance even an emancipatory reorganization of production—the disciples of unconditional militancy announce that from now on they are responsible for the spread of rage and indignation.
Hence, since "society" primarily suffers from an unforgivable lack of manifest rage with regard to its own conditions, the development of a cul- ture of indignation through the methodically exercised excitation of rage becomes the most important psychopolitical task, a task first taken up dur- ing the French Revolution, when the idea of "criticism" entered its triumphal course through the sphere of the existing conditions. The radical habitus of large milieus during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is attributable to the victory of criticism: the abjection of the "establishment" countless contemporaries was an a priori moral date. The militant currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries converged at this point, regardless of whether they followed the anarchistic, communist, international-socialist, or national-socialist rallying cries.
In the more talented militant minds, there is a certain megalothymic sentiment. This sentiment is revealed in the certainty that only generous outrage qualifies one to lead a certain movement. Naturally, militancy is for whatever reason hardly conceivable without a certain dose of thymotic
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irritability. From now on, however, "to militate" means nothing less than attributing a new subject to human history, a subject designed according to the rule of "rage. " To the extent to which militancy connects itself with moral and social intelligence, its agents' complex of rage and pride builds itself up to the level of an authentic megalothymics. The militant human being is not angry only as a result of his own affairs; if necessary, he trans- forms his personal feelings into the resonating ground of a universally sig- nificant upsurge of rage. Whether or not one believes in the ideal gener- alizations of the (for the most part) well-cultivated and well-fed rebels is initially only a question of taste.
At any rate, the militant idealisms that have become the important and even determining factors for serious politics during the last two hundred years remain totally incomprehensible without acknowledgment of the megalothymic, the vulgo and its ambitious and arrogant bearers. They would seem strange even to today's Westerners, members of an age without idea or significant politics. At the same time, they explain why the stron- ger minds of the opposition were for the most part morally sensitive com- moners who, motivated by a mixture of ambition and indignation against the establishment, joined the camp of revolt or the revolution. What Albert Camus said about the birth of the new community out of the spirit of indig- nation is true for all of these people: "I rebel, therefore we exist"—a sen-
12
It is not necessary to explain here in extreme detail why such statements do not fit the taste of the present. They sound like hollow slogans from an almanac for educated losers. For the historian they can serve as proof that the "revolutionary subject" in psychopolitical terms primarily referred to a functioning thymotic collective. Naturally, such a collective could not have presented itself with such a title both because the teachings of thymos had faded during the bourgeois century and also because rage, ambition, and indignation never seemed to be sufficient motives to justify their presenta- tion on the political stage. Only slowly was it understood that the noble superstructure would remain mere fiction without an ignoble foundation. The theme of both Virgil and Freud, in which one must stir up the neth- erworld in order to win over the elevated gods does not just describe trips to Hades; it also points to the political arrangements for setting free those forces that have waited under civilized garments for the opportunity to
tence whose hardly comprehensible pathos clearly belongs to the past. few decades later, Heiner Miiller let his figures exclaim in a kindred spirit, "The home of the slaves is the revolt. "13
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explode, much like Typhon, the hundred-headed monster that Zeus buried beneath Mount Etna.
The rhetoric of the left was from its beginning confronted with the task of translating the affects of the "dangerous classes" into the language of ideals. It was the mission of revolutionary semantics to gain access to the ascendant energies, to transfigure them with Apollonian slogans. In fact, this connection of the higher and the lower created the obsession of moder- nity, the idee fixe of new times: whoever would make history in support of the degraded and humiliated must go beyond mere postulates. She would have to show that this time the historical tendency was in line with morality. The violence of facts, buried in the relationships of production, was sup- posed to be subservient to goodwill. It was supposed to help end an entire age of injustice. From now on, to support the revolution meant to partici- pate in the building of a vehicle to a better world, a vehicle powered by its own rage resources and steered by well-informed, Utopian pilots.
Work on this project had to start with the support of the rage-driven forces. The formula for this endeavor could have been "intellectus quaerens iram" if the doctors of the industrial conflicts were still able to speak Latin. As soon as insight begins its search for rage, it discovers a world of rea- sons to rebel, and this discovery is the drive for the translation of theory into praxis. However, only intellectuals are affected by the embarrassment that, for them, theory precedes praxis. For praxis-oriented people, the sit- uation has always been the opposite. They discover their battle lines and only then look for the fitting justifications. When Bakunin, for example, stated in 1869 with regard to the stupidity of the sentiment of the Russian people: "We have to stir up this ruinous sleep, this dullness, this apathy by all means We want that now only the deed dictates the word,"14 he was actually addressing a future wave of terrorists, who do not feel any need for theories in order to act. For them, assuming that their rage had indeed been directed at something beyond its horizon, the reverse formula was true: "ira quaerens intellectum" On the stage of the real world, rage, indignation, or "the movement" always preceded ideologies. Whatever the fighting heroes brought forward to justify their actions, the justification followed the path that rage was already traversing.
FOR PSYCHOHISTORIANS AND POLITICAL SCIENTISTS IT WOULD BE A rewarding task to retell the history of social movements from the eve of the
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French Revolution until the age of postmodern distractions as the narrative of thymotic collectives. Modern militancy looks back on a long succession of rage corporations in the shape of secret societies, terrorist organizations, revolutionary cells, national and supranational organizations, workers' par- ties, unions of all shades, aid organizations, and artistic associations. All of these are organized according to conditions of membership, rituals, and club activities, as well as their newspapers, journals, and editorial houses. Let us not forget that even for the Russian revolutionaries in exile dur- ing the regime of the czar, the publication and secret distribution of their newspapers—in particular the ominous Iskar—made up most of their activities. However different these forms of organization and media of com- munication might have been, all of these rage associations competed against one another to get the main part in the screenplay of history after 1789: the revolutionary subject who would patiently complete the task of emancipa- tion and, eo ipso, the task of democratizing all privileges, which the bour- geoisie had left only partially completed.
Gatherings of wrath begin almost without exception with an appeal to "the people. " As a reservoir of subversive energy and explosive unhappi- ness, this mythical force was enlisted again and again for the creation of insurgent movements. For over two centuries, the concrete forms of thy- motic collectives emanated from this matrix, from the French clubs of the Jacobins and the enrages of the great days, to the English dissenters and the "poor of Christ" (those Wesleyan Methodists who experienced their sub-
15
Early German communist groups also considered themselves part of the incalculably broad spectrum of politico-thymotic formations during the nineteenth century. Heinrich Heine was terrified by these groups, as he records in Confessions in 1854. In his visionary poem "Vagabond Rats," he writes about their hooligan-like following:
They carry their heads equally shaven, as radical as possible, as bald as a rat.
[Sie tragen die Kopfe geschoren egal Ganz radikal, ganz rattenkahl. ]
jectivization as a calling to become preachers of morality),
of the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Cambodian revolutions and the new social movements of global capitalism. None of these collectives could have gained power without the exuberant belief that in its "people" rage and jus- tice had become one.
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to the activists
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HE WAS SHOCKED THAT WEITLING, THE JOURNEYMAN TAILOR WITH
extravagant Utopian ideas, kept his cap on his head during a surprise meet- ing in a bookstore in Hamburg. With the hysterical immediacy of an actor who likes to show off his pains, Weitling rubbed his ankle on which the chains had rested during his time in prison. Nevertheless, ten years earlier, Heine had honored the psychohistorically important and, in terms of the history of ideas, inevitable nature of these new movements, using a bal- anced prose:
The destruction of the faith in heaven does not only possess a moral, but also a political significance. The masses do not anymore bear their earthly plight with Christian patience, but yearn for happiness on earth. Commu- nism is the natural result of this altered world view. It is spreading across all of Germany.
The strongest contribution to the communist cause comes from the moral unacceptability of contemporary society. Society only defends itself out of sheer need, "without faith in its legitimacy, even without self-respect, just like that older society whose morose structure collapsed when the son of the carpenter arrived. " Regarding the arrival of French communists, Heine remarked in a correspondent's report from 1843 that he enjoys speaking of them because only their movement deserves "a committed attention" insofar as it "is very similar to the Ecclesia pressa of the first century. It is despised and persecuted in the present while still possessing a propa- ganda whose zealousness of faith and dark destructive will also remind of Galilean beginnings. "16
INDIGNATION WITHOUT THEORY; OR, THE MOMENT OF ANARCHY
HEINE DIED A DECADE TOO EARLY TO HAVE PURSUED THE UNFOLDING of the tendencies that he had acknowledged to be inescapable. He had sensitively noticed that the merely "fine" arts had surpassed their zenith and that an age of dark moralisms and a-musical struggles cast its clouds ahead. During the course of events, the iconoclastic forces, which did not respect any form of higher culture, shifted from the communist to the anarchic pole. For the anarchists of the 1860s and 1870s, it seemed politically correct to dismiss any form of culture that was in line with the
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establishment of bourgeois society. The motivation lay in the ever more radically presented hostility against the state and religion, which, nolens volens, drew all phenomena of art and education that were indirectly dependent on the social order into its propaganda of destruction. Early anarchism also did not want to take seriously the culture of subversion: for it the only acceptable infiltration of the established order had to start with the gospel of the bomb.
In The Principles of the Revolution, the explicit manifesto of violence
of 1869, Bakunin laid down his conception of the primacy of destructive
actions. He revealed a remarkable distinction in the discontinuous tem-
poral phases in the entire revolutionary course of events: "With regard
to time, the concept revolution entails two completely different facts: the
beginning, the time of destruction of the existing social norms, and the
end, the construction, i. e. the creation of completely novel forms out of
this amorphism. "17 The success of the coming revolution initially depends,
according to Bakunin, exclusively on the radicalization of social tensions,
through which it is supposed to be possible that increasingly numerous
and extreme acts of violence will be sparked, acts that culminate in the
complete destruction of the old order. It is mainly those who are furious
and raging and, why not, also the criminals and terrorists who dictate the
course of events. At this stage, the occupational image of the revolution-
ary is mapped onto the popular figure of a noble criminal, and Bakunin
dedicated a sentimental hymn to the iconic Russian robbers of the for-
18
It could be argued that this statement regarding the destruction of the enemy "without thinking," a statement that Bakunin wrote down without much reflection, gained vast empirical content during the following century and a half, even though the innocence of the initial thoughtlessness would vanish quickly. It announces the secret of a habitus of destruction, which was the initially rhetorical and later increasingly practical point of orienta- tion for the extremist subcultures on the left, and later also on the right. In light of this fixation, it is necessary to speak of an anarcho-fascism that
as if he wanted to disclaim Hegel's harsh judgment of Schiller's
ests,
The Robbers that "it is still only boys who can be seduced by this rob- ber ideal. "19 According to the doctrine, the ones dominating during this phase are those "persons who cannot manage to suppress the compulsion to destructiveness inside themselves and who, still before the beginning of the universal war, identify and find the enemy and, without thinking, destroy him. "20
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anticipated the decisive character traits of the left and right fascist move- ments in nuce, traits that developed fully only later—an exception is the will to domination of the collapsed feudal and bourgeois state. Wherever the nations of extremism arose during the twentieth century, what was hidden in the anarchistic beginnings was fully revealed.
In 1869 Bakunin expressed his hope that those individual actions that were committed out of anger or fanaticism would grow "so to say, to an epi- demic passion of youth" until the general revolution would be born out of it. "This is the natural way," in what one might call the catechism of revolt. It follows that the revolution needs to be started with spectacular individual deeds, culminating in the "destruction of people of power. " "Furthermore, work is becoming increasingly easier," because from now on it slides down
21
rious word "amorphism": only once the old order is fully dissolved into formless elementary particles is the destructive initial phase of the revolu- tion over. Only then can constructive minds be allowed to get involved in the course of things and start the reconstruction of the world on the basis of egalitarian axioms. What remains decisive is that the reconstruction is made exclusively out of the formless mass of reality particles—without the state, the church, or capital processes. Anyone who thinks too early about recon- struction becomes a traitor to the holy goal of destruction because he is not able to serve it without hesitation. Let me remark in passing that "amor- phism" found a technical support during Bakunin's time in the invention of dynamite. The belief that it would be possible to "explode" entire social orders had its pragmatic paradigm not only in the storm on the Bastille but also in the most recent achievements in the domain of explosive material. It was not accidental that the rather material occupational name "Dinami- tario" was given to an Italian anarchist of the turn of the century. Just as Lenin's communism aimed later to create the synthesis of Soviet power and electrification, anarchism aimed in its time to present the product made out of destructive desires and dynamite.
According to the anarchistic theory ofphases, the first generation of revolt is only committed to its objection against the actual conditions. Because the beginning is autonomous with regard to the end, authentic revolutionaries initially have no right to reflect on "the paradisiacal edifice of future life. " In the present, all power, all rage, and all hatred need to be mobilized for "the initial course of the revolution. "22
the slippery slope of social dissolution.
The goal of the anarchic work of destruction is revealed in the myste-
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Based on the essence of the law of necessity and full justice, we have to dedi- cate ourselves fully to the enduring, irresistible, incessant destruction, which needs to grow like a crescendo as long as there is nothing left to destroy of the existing social forms. . . .
The revolution justifies everything The field has thus been cleared! . . . The victims have been identified by the unconcealed indignation of the people! . . . It will be called terrorism! . . . So what, to us it does not matter Today's generation needs to create by itself a relentlessly crude force and
23
WHAT IS SIGNIFICANT ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT IS THE CONNECTION of rage and the temporal pole of the beginning. 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.