The Solemn Vengefulness of Communism ☭
As you may know, the anarchists were eventually excluded from the International in the 19th century—Mikhail Bakunin lost the fight to Karl Marx, and the latter became the de facto intellectual and political leader of the European radicalized workers.
Unlike Bakunin, Marx thought it necessary to seize real political power, i.e. to keep the state intact during the first steps towards an anticipated classless and stateless society. Utopian socialist ideals such as those of Charles Fourier (one of the great pre-Marxist socialist thinkers, 1772-1837, also credited with coining the word “feminism”) were sidelined to only be found in small “intentional communities”—attempts at rebooting society based on utopian standards, which always collapse and/or go sour after a while.
Real communism, Marx and Engels agreed with Bakunin, would exist only when the state had dissolved. But to begin with, there would be need for an interim dictatorship of the proletariat. [142] This idea of using state power to transform society stuck with the revolutionary communist movements and came to define communism and “real socialism” in the 20th century.
That is why communism, unlike anarchism and Fourierism, became a serious political force, centered in the Soviet Union—the only country of a non-ethnic and non-geographic denomination in the world, a society founded within the imaginary space of world-centric humanism.
Libertarian socialism never materialized beyond small parliamentary representations here and there, and anarchism or libertarian Marxism hardly excised any political power anywhere: These have existed almost entirely in the intellectual realm. As mentioned in Appendix A, the major wielders of power have all been authoritarian communists—following in the footsteps of Lenin’s coup d’état in Russia.
The real leftwing political challenge to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism came from social democracy in the tradition of the philosopher Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) and perhaps the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), who sought a peaceful transition to socialism by democratic means and reforms. Whereas social democracy (and socialist parliamentary reformism) gained wide followership, it has in practice gravitated towards social liberalism—and in late modernity, towards green social liberalism; i.e. towards the attractor point of modern society. In reality, then, social-democratic countries have largely developed along similar lines as other capitalist welfare democracies.
The underlying principle of communism is more radical: to actively and deliberately transform the fundamental structures of society by shocking them with planned strategic actions thought to be in line with the attractors that society’s inherent dynamics point towards. “Normal” society, “capitalist” society, “bourgeois” society—is simply viewed as ethically unacceptable. It’s just not good enough; it’s inhumane.
This —everything—everyday life with all its hierarchies, limitations and banality, is simply not enough. The communist demands more. The communist mind, its kernel of truth, grows from this solemn vengefulness against the injustices and insufficiencies of everyday life and from the determination that comes with it: a moral determination to transform all of society; to act for the sake of the weak and the exploited; to act with the willingness to risk everything—one’s own life, one’s lifetime of commitment, and even perhaps being wrong—to make the decisive move that breaks the boundaries of normal life and lets us come out on the other side. An honest sense of hope, a sincere and embodied sense of tragedy—and enough tempered righteous anger to remedy at least some of that tragedy.
That’s the dangerous dream of communism. It has little to do with drab concrete housing blocks, or polluting Trabant cars, or secret KGB agents, or nuclear warheads, or military marches, or mad dictators, or any of the things we usually associate with communism. We can even detach it from any specific vision about who owns the factories or how the economy is governed.
Real communism, then, in this deeper sense, simply connects to the determination to do what it takes to bring about a post-capitalist society. By definition, a communist society is that which dialectically flows from, and transcends, capitalist society and in which everyday life is governed and coordinated by another logic than economic capital. This logic must be less cruel and more rational, more in line with human needs and higher stages of inner development. It is a holistic, humanized version of modernity. Communism, in this deeper and generalized sense, is holistic post-capitalism—plus the morally driven determination to achieve it.
The communists of the 19th and 20th centuries were wrong about a number of issues concerning the dynamics and attractors of modern societies and their economies. And this led to some terrible mistakes, the worst of which was trying to force institutions into being without corresponding developments of psychology, behavior and culture (see Appendix A and B); leading to jammed information feedback processes, which in turn led to a failing society, and ultimately to Gulag, surveillance, terror and collapse.
But some core aspects of communism were not in themselves false, only premature and out-of-context. Thereby I am not saying that bad consequences should be excused on account of good intentions. I am saying that partial truths should not be discarded on account of guilt-by-association.
What, then, are the communist truths shared by political metamodernism? One such aspect is the uncompromising moral determination to change the nature of everyday life. Another is that there is indeed something that comes after capitalist relations, and that one can align oneself with such an emergence because it rhymes with discernable stages of technological and societal development. A third aspect is that there should be a collectively intelligent form of governance based upon a more radical and deeper form of democracy than representative party politics. A fourth one is that there should be a world-centric party (or meta-party) that takes on a transnational and even transcendental role of transforming society from a global perspective, and that there should be some kind of vanguard who develops and spreads a shared theoretical and organizational basis for such work. And a fifth, and last one, is that such a process-oriented party should rely upon the dialectics inherent to society in order to guide its development and to gain power.
The Nordic ideology is, obviously, not communism. It may be revolutionary, developmental and dialectical—but it is strictly non-violent. It works with other attractor points and it has other goals altogether. It shares the solemn vengefulness of communism, its tempered indignation: the grit, fire and guts to change a society that simply isn’t good enough, to achieve a higher stage of development, and to serve a deeper equality.
The (Partial) Glory of Fascism
It’s difficult to be playful around fascism. It arose in shaky times, gathered absolute power in the hands of fanatic psychopaths who not only oppressed their own populations but also got us the Second World War and the Holocaust. To this day, we have crazy mass-killers swearing allegiance to fascist theories. Naturally, it’s not a joke. [143]
And yet, the understanding of fascism as “pure evil” (and only an existential lie) is simplistic, bordering on incorrect. There are very good reasons to revisit fascism and perform a little psycho-historical archeology to dig up partial truths that may serve political metamodernism and help us see the challenges ahead more clearly.
Here are a few circumstances that put the emergence of fascism in a different light:
The link to (and partial overlap with) the genuinely revolutionizing form of modern art called Italian futurism, starting in 1909 with poet and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who wrote the Futurist Manifesto. Futurism shows a number of signs reminiscent of metamodernism as an art movement as well as a philosophy—emphasizing agency, mobility, totality, acceleration, development, technological transformations, the conquest of other areas of l
ife under the domain of art—as I discuss elsewhere. [144]
The undeniable genius and lasting relevance of fascist and proto-fascist political thinkers such as Carl Schmitt (who coined the insightful definition of a sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” and who went on to be the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich); Georges Sorel (who theorized the importance of myth in people’s lives and developed his own flavor of post-Marxism); Vilfredo Pareto (who is known for the 80/20 principle of income distribution, but also embraced fascism); and the US-born poet Ezra Pound—just to mention a few. These weren’t persons who got stuck in the fascist regimes of dumber people; they were deep thinkers whose oeuvres and lives led them to fascist conclusions.
The relative progressivity of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto (also authored by Marinetti), containing: universal suffrage including women (opposed by most countries at the time), minimum wage, retirement at 55, the expansion of labor union rights and workers represented in boards of companies, and an eight-hour workday.
The undeniable fervor and enthusiasm sparked within literally millions of people in the years during which fascism and nazism emerged. Of course, this ability to unify and inspire does not in itself justify fascism. It does, however, highlight the fact that fascist practices can resonate with profoundly positive and beautiful emotions and coordinate many people’s actions in large and non-capitalist projects (i.e. actions coordinated by other means than monetary exchanges).
The general idea within fascism to view society and the populations as a developmental work of art. If you look at the 1929 novel Michael by Joseph Goebbels (who later became the propaganda minister of the Third Reich), you find the idea that a statesman is an artist:
“Art is an expression of feeling. The artist differs from the non-artist in his ability to express what he feels. In some form or other. One artist does it in a painting, another in clay, a third in words, and a fourth in marble—or even in historical forms. For him, the nation is exactly what the stone is for the sculptor.” [145]
Naturally, this is a dangerous and dumb idea if you fall off the holistic balance and land in totalitarianism. Of course, people aren’t your “marble” to play around with. But the impulse in itself—to view society as a work of (co-created, participatory and democratically shared) art—is shared by political metamodernism. Society can be approached with the mind of an artist who wants to express his innermost depths. Society should not be the result of a cold bureaucratic process, but of passionate creation and love—aiming at the development of the inner qualities of the population.
The revolving door between fascist ideology and the far-left (Mussolini himself being an example, Georges Sorel another, even Goebbels and Hitler learning from Marxist theory and practices) as well as between deep ecology (recurring in Heidegger and many esoteric green fascists) as well as with radical conservatism (notably with the Revolution von rechts idea: “revolution from the right”), including authoritarian conservatism and its link to neoliberalism (via Pinochet’s Chile, which espoused Milton Friedman’s libertarian economics). Basically, you find fascism sneaking in here and there across the classical political spectrum—and even in spiritual and religious thinkers. Modern political thinkers will tend to emphasize the aspects that others share with fascism while denying their own connections, so as to prove one’s moral high ground, being “the farthest from fascism”, its very opposite. But it makes more sense to acknowledge that fascism has certain partial truths that are being denied and disowned, and then to productively own up to these and to include them in one’s own perspective.
It should be apparent, then, that fascism cannot simply be discarded and never related to again. You can say that fascism is the catacombs of the modern ideological metropolis: It constitutes a vast network of secret and forgotten underground tunnels connecting all of the political ideologies. I guess you can say the same about all the ideologies to some extent—they all interconnect—but fascism remains the most denied and least understood.
The political metamodernist must learn to travel these dark tunnels without becoming a creature of the night. You drain the sewers, clean them up, put in proper lighting, make sure the pipes work—you get the picture. As such, political metamodernism is both the ideology that is the closest to fascism and the one most in opposition to it. The catacombs are there, whether we like it or not. The political metamodernist travels them and cleans them up; the liberal innocent denies their existence and sleepwalks in their dirt.
There is, naturally, something exquisitely demonic about fascism. As I argue in another book, [146] this demonic aspect can be understood in terms of relations between “metamemes”: Fascist and nazi thinkers used early postmodern insights (like the mass psychology of Gustave Le Bon and ideas about image control in the media, some pretty advanced psychoanalytical and situational-psychological ideas as well as socialist critiques and the communist art of agitation) to manipulate a distinctly modern society at a moment of crisis in order to wrest control over modernity’s advanced political machinery and economic prowess; to restore what is nominally a postfaustian society (traditional), but in practice amounts to a number of faustian goals and ideals (the conquest of the world, a master race, sheer power for the heck of it, war for the sake of war, the return of esoteric power gods, skulls on the sleeve, and so forth). That’s exactly what the archetype of a demon signifies: a fallen angel, one close to God who uses an elevated and exalted position, an access to rare truths and insights (postmodern), for crude and narrow purposes (faustian).
That’s the essential truth; fascism is so profoundly evil because it is demonic in this primary archetypal sense. A demon is a fallen angel, something profound and beautiful in the service of something base and shallow. Developmental imbalance. And every time you have such glaring developmental imbalances, you can know for sure the hell patrol is coming.
Political metamodernism can only be true to its cause and politically effective if it faces this great demon of modernity—fascism—and asks him for his central truth, for his gem (yes, demons have gems, they love ‘em).
“So, okay then, dear mister get-kids-to-murder-and-torture-innocent-people-in-secret-death-camps, what’s your secret? What could you possibly tell me? What do you have that I, the enlightened and democratic modern mind, lack and secretly desire?”
The green little devil smirks slyly and replies:
“One word, one word. There is a longing inside of you; one that I live out more fully than you, one that you deny, but still haunts the outer rims of your mind as it beckons to the innermost core of your soul. And on the hour of your death, it will grant me victory over you. The word is heroism .”
Yes, everyday life under modernity’s democracy and capitalism denies and suppresses an impulse shared by all of us: the drive for greatness, for superiority, for conquering death, for ascendance. A small part of us knows that we want more, that this life—and our role in it—is too petty, too drab, too trivial, too self-serving, too spiritually impoverished. We know we were meant, in some sense, to take the hero’s journey, but we got caught up in mortgages and deadlines, and we tell ourselves that’s all we ever really wanted.
We hide this side from one another, from ourselves. It embarrasses us immensely. We find ways to subtly and gleefully dismiss the deepest strivings of others as boyish, immature, puerile, distasteful, deluded. We deeply resent the glimmering greatness of one another because it reminds us of the subtle lies we live by. And instead we reenact these longings in movies, in books, in music, in fantasies and historic personae. If someone around us wishes to go down the highway of heroes, we use all the strategies we can to ridicule their effort:
“Hah! They would have themselves be a movie character, a Rambo! They lack humility. But I am mature—I really am—and I will never be a hero. Ever. I don’t even want to; only if fate forced my hand—which I by the way have a feeli
ng might happen anytime soon—would I ever put on display the inner virtues that are uniquely my own! Until then, here’s to keeping an honest job and watching TV. With some bloody dignity.”
But when we utter these words to ourselves, we find our inner voices ringing strangely hollow. The green little devil’s whisper lingers on: We want to be heroes; we know that we really are heroes, and we want to fight the good struggle, and win. We want to conquer mortality. We want to be unleashed as creators beyond our social roles and masks, beyond the trivial confines of everyday life. We want to sacrifice ourselves, as Gilgamesh, for the sake of unity so that we may live forever.
The word “fascism” stems from Italian fascio meaning a bundle of rods, ultimately from the Latin word fasces ; it means to unite into a whole. Not all of us want heroism all the time and in every situation, but all of us do have this inner longing for greatness, for something far beyond ourselves. We like glory. A part of us secretly resents having given up any chance for rising higher—and that same part resents glimmers of the Übermensch in our fellow human beings.
For all its wackiness and evil, for all its developmental imbalances and inherent pathology, fascism is the ideology that most effectively honors this basic existential truth: the longing for heroism, power and transcendence through our deeds.
A reminder of this truth is the recurring role of dominance and submission in sexuality and eroticism. Democracy, fairness, gender equality, peace and deliberation—they all lack something: they lack that “oomph”, zest, lust, that carnal and dark demonic princely power.
At the heart of humanity, there is a sexual beast seeking to be unleashed. For all its moral and practical superiority (even military, as it turned out), democracy is a bland nice guy. Fascism promises us an edgy bad boy and a sublime feminine surrender into uncontrolled explosive orgasms that shake the foundations of the cosmos. Fascism is the opposite of refined democracy: it is pure dominance and submission. It is speed, excitement, violence, blood, iron, autonomy, force, will, power. It is untamed—erotic in the deepest sense of the word.
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